Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. Ephemeral III (2025), watercolour on acid-free paper, courtesy of Sonali Sonam. Artist Kolkata AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 12 Mar 2026 th · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Ritwik's Trees I always put it down to coincidence, the easiest way to explain things. Ritwik Ghatak and I were born on the same day, though half a century apart, and plant life would come to frame the way we both experience the world. I am fifty years old now, exactly the age Ritwik died at. Writing this essay with that awareness—strange as it is confusing—takes my thoughts in directions they might not have otherwise. There’s a tree in Sahaj Path , the first tree I ever saw. That can’t be true, of course, because I would have been about three then, in my first year at school. It is in the generic nature of trees to not be remembered, but this is slightly different. It’s not a blob of green that I remember as a tree; it’s black, black as soot, like burnt tree trunks. The tree, though, is not burnt—it is alive; a human sits inside it, as dark as the tree and its foliage, as dark as its shade. Sounds a bit childish, I know, but no other living form had enchanted me like this. I say ‘living’ with caution and affection, for I would discover a living likeness of the soot-black tree soon. On a bus from Siliguri’s Court More to Bagdogra, where my father’s sister lived—a journey we made no more than twice a year, in spite of the short distance, for the lack of availability of transport and time—I would see it. The bus was moving slowly, its speed curtailed by the rush of workers emerging from the Chandmoni Tea Estate. There it was, outside the window to our left—it hadn’t moved since the last time I’d seen it. A tree exactly like Nandalal Bose’s. Ritwik would have seen that tree in Sahaj Path . It is with such a tree that Meghe Dhaka Tara begins, its branches spread wide, without shyness or self-consciousness, as if to expose its leaves to all the light it could get. It is to the right of the screen, Nita walks out of its shadow. I could also rephrase this: the tree releases Nita into the world after protecting it from the glare of the world, perhaps of life. It is tempting to see the tree as analogous to the protective womb, after which the human is left on its own. For the first forty seconds of the film, the camera looks at things that don’t move—the trees. The camera shows no interest in looking for a human, such is its initial indifference to the centrality of the human figure in art. A woman in white emerges out of the shade and shadow of the trees, a black-and-white contrast emphasised in a black-and-white film; so similar to Nandalal’s linocut. The canvas begins to move. A train passes by. A man is singing, aa aa aa aa . His back is to the audience. The camera isn’t interested in his face. It takes in the vegetation by the riverbank. Sharp, tall grass pierces the top half of the frame; it pokes the sky. From looking for punctures in the sky, we are dragged downwards to the earth, to a torn slipper on a human foot. The camera has become plant-like—it is moving like trees do, in the north–south axis; like plants, it has become indifferent to the human face. After the restoration of attention to human affairs, to the crises of poverty, particularly new poverty (surely there must be a term equivalent to nouveau riche for those suddenly rendered poor by catastrophic circumstances), the camera seems to long for a sighting of the plant world again. Only four minutes have passed. It’s enough to give us a sense of the family whose life we will be following; it’s also enough to tell us that human lives will be complemented and annotated by the histories of their changing neighbours, plant life. ‘Nabin Sangha’ enters the frame. Humans, tall and small, chew the foreground, but it’s only as much real estate as the mouth occupies on the face. Behind them is the sky, made jagged by the uneven height of trees. It is not just an assemblage of different species of trees that we see, but a more urgent history of settlement, of planting. Pollinators, mostly two-footed ones like those in the foreground, are responsible for their settlement on this land. Ritwik is giving us a history of dislocation, of people as much as of plants. The name of the neighbourhood club, common in Bengal and other spaces that came to accommodate Bengalis evicted by the forces of history, is telling—the plants are as ‘nabin’, new, as the humans here; they might soon be propagated to other places, near and far. In Ritwik’s films, we see a new kind of horticultural unit, one that emerged so naturally that it hasn’t been recorded in our architectural or ecological history. Neither garden nor forest, it is as domesticated as it is wild. In Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, we find both an admiration for the beauty of the garden and an instinctive rejection of it as a unit foreign to landscapes and geographical formations such as ours. In practice, both he and his son Rathindranath—who would adopt favourite characteristics of Japanese, Italian, French and Mughal gardens into Santiniketan’s Uttarayan, the cluster of four houses that Rabindranath would design and live in—were internationalists, welcoming of travelling flora from other continents. As a concept, though, Rabindranath seemed to be suspicious of the garden, the way the unit had come to be imported from outside the Indian subcontinent, particularly Europe. The controlling impulse necessary to design and execute gardens would have challenged his ethics and aesthetics. They would have been too neat, too premeditated. ‘Bon’ over ‘bagan’ for him, the forest over the garden, though he would have been thinking of the jungle more than the forest, a space then still outside human intentionality. Satyajit Ray, in his foreword to Ritwik’s book Cinema and I , writes about the latter’s lifelong preoccupation with the Partition, how it shaped his films, gave them their subject and energy. What hasn’t been noticed is how the post-Partition Bengali family is seen through the concomitant new ordering of plant life. Land had been divided; how could the creatures of land, humans and plants, live in older units anymore? ‘Unit’, after all, is the root word for ‘unity’, and, with that gone, how were we to find plants except in fragmented and foraged units? This is what Ritwik—like John Clare, who was disoriented by the Enclosure Act of 1809, the privatisation and fencing of shared land—records in these scenes: broken sentences, broken song, broken land, its broken vegetation. Orchards, forests, gardens, fields, they are units of unbrokenness, a way of looking at the world where looking becomes equivalent to owning. The ambition of the zamindar was to own as far as his eyes could see. The philosophical idea of the plantation must owe to this, the idea of unbroken rows of the same plant, as well as the ownership that comes from this manner of control and ordering. The people in Ritwik’s films do not have the luxury of such a ‘vision’; time limits their lives as much as space does. They live from day to day, and, in Meghe Dhaka Tara , from month to month, salary day to salary day. In this, they are like trees, they who live outside capitalism, outside mortgages and pensions and EMIs. In these films is the ‘bagan’, garden. But the architecture of Ritwik’s gardens is arbitrary, its scope and ambition limited by space and poverty. What can the gardens of a homeless people look like? Indifferent to expectations of geometry and species that had given form and beauty to gardens in Japan and Italy, for instance, these borrowed spaces became an archive of their ad hoc living. Grammatical gardens are a record of ambition and purpose, the gardens in Ritwik’s films are a record of foraging and found plants, found and functional art. The trees are not here to add beauty, just as human faces and bodies do not exist to draw attention to the beauty of their anatomical form. They are just there—like the sky is, or like shadows are, because they are. Our eyes meet them like they do relatives of our own species, without formality or introductions. Yes, they are relatives, for they live alongside humans in residential spaces, by the well and by a stream, bringing shade to a tin-roofed house, fruit to a half-starved family, outliving the human who brought them here. My heart bustles in recognition when I see them, for I grew up in such a neighbourhood myself. In Siliguri’s Ashrampara, my neighbours, families whose memories and eating and living habits were formed by the agricultural produce and rivers of Bangladesh before they, like seeds, were flung into spaces unfamiliar to their ancestors, created such gardens. Chilli plants by a streetside water drain, pumpkin and bottle gourd vines climbing on to tin roofs of kachcha toilets, unseasonal marigold flowers from a leftover garland used to worship a goddess, fresh coriander from seeds scattered near the well, where they grew beside ghritakumari, and there, often, a banana plant offering fruit, flower or stem, and always, always, an assembly of kochu leaves, waiting to be devoured. Roses became fences, valued more for their thorns than their flowers, to keep strangers away more than to attract; the tulsi that would, every Saturday, bring together a congregation hungry for the airy sweetness of batasha, thrown up into the air, Hari-r loot, then gathered from the earth and put urgently inside mouths; shandhya malati and nayantara, that flowered better when neglected; and greens, so many kinds of shak that it seemed the Bengali had evolved from the cow. Every morning, flower thieves, with a lanky bamboo pole in their hands, collecting flowers for their gods, never missing an opportunity to break a branch from a tree to plant in their garden—finding and foraging, planting and pollinating. From the ‘sangha’ to ‘sansar’, the club to the room, Ritwik makes this migration through song: ‘ Ghorete bhromor elo gunguniye ’. The bee’s come singing into the room. Where there is bee, there must be flower? What we have instead of the glamour of flowers—and I’m struggling to remember whether the camera ever pays attention to flowers at all—is bamboo. The strips of bamboo and the stripes of the saree that the women wear mirror each other all through his films until he’s established, almost naturally, that the refugees of his world are like bamboo: this is their habitat, they will stick to each other to form clusters, they will be chopped off from time to time, used, repurposed, taken away from their family, but the roots will allow growth again, life and height, length and the seeking of light, until they are dismembered again. The stripes in the women’s sarees run parallel to each other, like the strips of bamboo in the walls of the room do—the ends of both, saree and fence, have to be cut abruptly. Sometimes they continue on to men’s bodies, to the stripes of their lungi. Perhaps no other filmmaker has documented the culture of everyday bamboo design in eastern India with such an artist’s homely attention as Ritwik. These moments of distraction from the thoroughfare of human traffic are almost akin to a tendril looking for support, for something to hold. The varying rhombuses of bamboo fences give the eye this hold, this pause. The ninth minute of Meghe Dhaka Tara is long, the eye spans and embalms the frame, it takes in details of the weave of the bamboo before it moves to something that Ritwik’s camera turns into its relative: hair, hair on the heads of women, Nita’s in a bun, Gita’s left open, the craft and compulsion of human hands on bamboo visible, as it is in the bun; the freedom of the bamboo groves, alive and loose, as in Gita’s open hair. Nita’s name bears the etymological impress of ethics and morality, a human-brokered life; Gita’s name derives from song, it is freer, as much as music is free, or freer than morality. Ritwik’s eyes look for echoes, they find it—echoes of bamboo in the sarees, particularly those that Gita wears, where the shadow-and-light serve-and-volley dims and glows. About a quarter of an hour has passed. Ritwik returns the trees of the first scene to us, we now see more of them, more of their bodies; we see more of the river, too, which pushes the trees out of the frame slightly, gently. What takes up space are the shadows of these large-bodied trees, their girth a visible birth certificate, a mark of fixity, perhaps even of constancy, who can tell, in contrast to the river whose water moves, like the people in the film. The brother—played by Anil Chatterjee, in one of the most unforgettable characters in cinematic history—sings, his accompanists are birds, they cry, though I don’t know why the English language calls their tongue ‘bird cries’. Like a musician uses caesura, Ritwik uses music: for a break between stanzas. In the film’s first scene, Nita emerges from the trees, not exactly like Venus from the sea in Botticelli, but the shared lineage of human and the elements, plant and person, is established right away. A little more than a quarter of an hour later, she walks from the right to the left of the screen. Her brother sits under a tree, rehearsing. Ritwik ensures that we see him as part of the tree trunk, the bodies of humans assimilated by the camera’s angle as once was possible in mythology; Nita, too, is part of this gift of the gaze: she, her brother’s lone audience, melds with the aerial branches of the tree. She, provider, sister, daughter, girlfriend, has to become more than one species. This is why Nita moves out of her Krishnachura- and Radhachura-like body to become bamboo soon after, the transition happening as soon as she gives some money to her brother. It’s Nita’s birthday. A Jagaddhatri Pujo will take place. Ritwik has decided to abandon subtlety. Jagaddhatri, as her name indicates, is a goddess of the earth; according to the Kena Upanishad, she asks the elements, Agni and Varuna and Vayu, to move a blade of grass. Ritwik takes Nita, her father and brother to something like grass. Coconut and betelnut trees, tall, and taller than the hills in the background. They walk on the unlaid road, through marshland and paddy fields, the stalks ankle-deep in water. Other species crop up on the screen: boatman, shaluk, lotus. ‘Poetry of the earth is never dead,’ one of the characters says. Jagaddhatri; the plants. Ritwik doesn’t leave it there—like Bibhutibhushan in Pather Panchali , he emphasises the beauty that can be had by those without money, like Apu’s sister Durga in the novel, like Nita’s singer-brother in this film. ‘Dhanyo khetra’, the blessed land, the land of such agricultural bounty is a phrase central to Ritwik’s vision. For the Bengali audience, there would also be the cultural conditioning of ‘ Dhono dhanye pushpe bhora ’ of D.L. Roy’s song, the celebration, in spite of Partition, of the plentiful plant life that made Jibanananda’s ‘Rupashi Bangla’. Children run out of a small school a few scenes later. As if to frame this freedom, Ghatak allows a branch to graze the frame from the left. To him, the plant world is a metaphor that emphasises, by contrast, the unfreedom of social life. ‘How do you all stay indoors in the evening? I find it difficult to breathe,’ says Gita, to which Sanat, still undecided between the two women, ‘music’ and ‘morality’, offers to take Nita out for a walk. Their house is framed by trees, their father by an umbrella, the heads of both mirroring each other, as it is possible only in a drawing book. Sanat complains about Nita being chained down by responsibilities, to which she offers a stronger metaphor for the loss of freedom: ‘Besh toh, make a glass frame and put me inside it, like a wax doll.’ And, almost immediately, two opposites are offered: marshland and meadow, there is freedom in both, even if there is stickiness. For when Nita stands up to go, leaves stick to her saree. Over and over again, Ritwik turns her into a tree, a giving tree. A job has been found, she requests her brother to drop her off at Sealdah. The landscape changes; it’s thornier, wilder. The tree is different—it is no longer on the right side of the screen but the left; it has more branches than leaves, it is less spread out, some of its branches even amputated. Soon, the camera is on the brother. He’s singing, entering the world of plants, whose bodies are flecked by light and shade; wild grass waits nearby in every frame. Nita, though, was doing the opposite, emerging from the trees. The camera refuses to move; it has become the tree. Nita passes by, he asks her for twenty-five paise, to shave, and the camera begins moving. The brother runs after her, his shadow slightly thinner than the older, time-fed trees. The branches offer shade, they also stand rooted while humans are rendered homeless. The camera, momentarily happy to be a tree, now begins running—it, too, is scared of becoming homeless. Catching up with her, he realises that it is not his sister, only someone in the same generic white saree with a slim border. The unknown woman smiles. Her eyes are downcast, instead of the goddess’ halo, her bust-sized image: the white saree with the border running like a train line whose other track has been eaten by time or water; the echo of that thin horizontal line in the vertical strap of her handbag, a marker of her working woman status, a new self in a new land. Not halo but branches of trees crowd the frame. She is of the trees, even if she has a face, even if she is human. The woman smiles. The brother laughs. He begins singing. Another tree appears. Now it’s to the right of the screen. He is standing under it and singing. The camera moves with him as he walks. His shadow moves. The shadows of the branches remain still. He moves from right to left, a bit like the Urdu script at first, and then like musical notation, the arohan and abarohan, travelling to and fro, to and fro, the return to the ‘sama’, the home. But where is home? Do shadows return to the trees at night? Ritwik changes the composition of the halo that announces a goddess’ status. The branches of trees a little while ago, now it’s smoke from the mother’s cooking that frames her face, so that the halo is diffused, a blur, in spite of the branches of the trees right behind, as distant as cloud. Another woman enters—her hair is open, her saree is striped, the bamboo seems to be emerging out of her body, she goes out for a walk by the lake. It is Gita, with Sanat. Nita is walking back home. Irregular dots of darkness fill the screen—blobs of tree heads, their fraternal twins lying as shadows on the ground, more restful. Nita’s face is dark, light falls on a portion of her hips. Books clutched to her chest, she walks; her sister and boyfriend are sitting by the water, singing. Nita looks, then looks away, and walks past the scene. The camera moves to the sister and her new audience. Her shoulder-length hair has been left open. For a moment, they look like branches of the tree behind her—both move. The camera moves too. Gita is laughing after her flirtatious sermon to Sanat about staring at her with his mouth open. Nandalal’s tree, from Sahaj Path , is behind her. Its many branches make her look like a many-armed Durga; the man is made to look like Mahishasur. She jumps, he follows. We are inside stripes again: bamboo walls, fences, light and darkness. The composition is of an afterlife of the plant world—wooden windows with sticks inside them that keep animals away and divide the sky and the view. The sister in the striped saree enters through the gate; all is bamboo and wood, even the sister. Ritwik takes care to emphasise their form and texture, a continuation of their life, a life made possible by a new host and a new environment, like the refugees of Partition have had to adapt to. Bamboo and smoke, different as they are in behaviour, move in various patterns and orientations, making the walls of the house look like a happy museum of the afterlife of trees themselves. From inside the house, various kinds of plant life emerge, among them, paisleys trapped inside diamond-shaped cages on Gita’s blouse. Things change, Sanat and Gita are married, living in a flat in the city: the bamboo patterns, Nita’s saree, now in a dark colour. Instead of a house scavenged and salvaged from bodies of plants, we see a skylight in iron frames. The soft stripes of bamboo and clotheslines and sarees have given way to the stern lines of glass and steel, staircases and doorframes, ventilators and windows. Nita’s bag is now a pattern of checks. The door curtain, in all likelihood a Manipuri weave not uncommon at that time, has diamond-shaped rhombuses. As soon as the door opens, the camera moves to the solid lines of the threshold. These lines are bureaucratic, they keep apartments sturdy, they want to serve ambitions of permanence; how different they are from bamboo, in whose DNA it is to be ad hoc. Smoke cruises up here, too, but it’s not the smoke of Nita’s mother’s kitchen; not clay oven but ashtray. Ritwik is showing us the props of culture: a Bankura clay elephant stands beside truncated shadows of window bars, tuberoses in a vase on the table, puppets on the wooden cupboard, nature is being diminished here, everywhere. But the camera is restless for the lines in Nita’s home, its stripes: clothes, clotheslines, serrated tin roofs, bamboo nailed together, diagonally falling shadows. These are informal lines and rhombuses that derive from the grace of the natural world. It is the freedom of this informality that allows shadows to enter frames before human figures, shadows picking clothes from ropes and wires, slightly ghost-like, more like trees. Ritwik relies on the light-and-shadow opera to highlight the human drama through the eaters of light, the trees. After the light and night of ‘ Je raate mor duwarguli bhanglo jhore ’, of ‘ shob je hoye gyalo kalo ’, of everything turned dark, the camera moves like a plant, like the eye, searching for light. And then it moves like writing in the Devanagari script: trees and houses, conical tops, roofs, tin, concrete, all of these in a rush, so that it seems like the camera wants to escape from homes and the homeless for now, till it rests and waits, on foliage, on plants, to the ad hoc gardens that connect inside our eyes to indulge the sense of what is now called ‘social forestry’. The father, leaning against a tree for support, speaks to a doctor about Nita. One displacement happens after another—Nita, first rendered homeless by history, now moves out of the house to a bamboo room nearby, her equivalent of a temporary tent, her ‘nirbandhobpuri’, a town without friends; then she has to leave home for Reid Chest Hospital, another instalment of displacement. Ritwik begins making her more tree-like with greater urgency, as if that could protect her. After the audience’s discovery of her tuberculosis, we meet the trees—they take over the screen, Nita’s head now a blob emerging from the lower bottom of the screen. She’s being displaced from the screen too, history repeating itself over and over again. In a darker saree now, she’s the colour of tree trunks and branches, until she merges with the tree trunk in a scene. Ritwik is cutting out something else simultaneously—shade and shadow. By the ninetieth minute, the shade of trees is gone. There’s just bare land, the shadows of the trees far away are like birds whose shadows don’t reach the earth. A train cuts the screen. She, like the trees, doesn’t move. A couple of minutes later, she opens her umbrella standing under a tree, a double umbrella as it were. Every now and then, Ritwik’s camera surveys the land: palms of various kinds, a leafless plumeria, after the news of Gita’s pregnancy. In the foreboding of both birth and death, Ritwik turns to plants. After the camera shows us Nita’s blood-stained handkerchief, we see trees moving wildly in a storm, and her curly hair, as if they were relatives. The vegetation around Reid Chest Hospital is different—a coniferous-looking tree stands to the left of the frame, it offers no shade, only the fur of fog and the skin of the sky. Nita is sitting, her brother comes with news about Gita’s son, their two-storeyed house, until she breaks into one of the most famous dialogues in Bangla cinema: ‘ Dada, aami kintu bachte cheyechhilam ’, Dada, I did want to live … The camera loses balance as it were and surveys the trees. That’s how the film ends—with tree and tree and tree, almost like how it began, except for the woman who has gone missing from life, from the screen. Fifteen seconds into Subarnarekha , no image has been given to us, nothing except the auditory, ‘Vande Mataram’. The first visual: trees, slim, unrevealing of age, a bamboo in the middle, another an arc; the cohabitation of various sizes, even shapes. The Indian flag goes up on the bamboo pole; another bamboo, bent, serves as trellis over a gate. In bamboo as flag pole, Ritwik is hoping for the new Indian nation to have the tensile strength of bamboo, to be flexible, supportive and all-purpose, for all its citizens to make whatever they can of it. For the moment, though, there’s chaos and uncertainty, differences more than unity—a teacher in a new school teaches English and history, another Bengali and Sanskrit, history and historiography available only to those living in English; Dhaka versus Pabna; caste divisions. A child’s mother is lost. The word ‘udbastu’, refugee, floats around. Gandhi’s assassination emerges as newsprint in a newspaper office. Nabajibon Colony, the new settlement for those without homes, is constructed almost entirely of bamboo, as if the new (‘naba’) life (‘jibon’) must have the plant’s resilience. Ritwik draws the opposition between the old and new through metaphor. Both the sarod and the ektara are musical instruments that derive from plant life, but he gives us classical music before a Baul’s song. Hence bamboo—for the people, like the people; the roofs, doors, windows and walls of the houses in Nabajibon Colony, the Baul’s musical instrument. In the first ten minutes of the film named after a river, we see bamboo being split and cut everywhere. Partition, people, plants. A bamboo republic. Ghatshila’s plants enter the census of our imagination: bamboo, banana, papaya, species that grow easily, often on their own, without care, like these people must. When the little girl Sita asks her brother whether Abhiram, the boy who has lost his mother, will come with them to the new place, we are given no answer, only a sign, almost Buddha-like—she plucks a flower and leaves. The mill, where her brother has found work, is beside a sal forest. After reaching Ghatshila, the first thing Sita says is, ‘Dadamoni, come and see how beautiful the garden is …’. The little boy Abhi is still crying. An oleander—poisonous oleander—stands behind him. Rabindranath’s song sprouts: ‘ Aaj dhaner khete roudrochhayay lukochuri khyala re bhai, lukochuri khyala ’. Sunlight and shade are playing hide-and-seek on the paddy fields … What grass was to Jibanananda Das, paddy is to Ritwik. It’s to the paddy fields that his homeless want to return. Paddy and bamboo, related sub-families. We see a barren landscape from time to time, stony, bare-branched trees, but in their forms is still the intimation of being alive—unlike the ruins of the aircraft from World War II, with its exposed steel rods, weeds around it, the camera making it look like a foreigner, a UFO, the runway unfriendly, trees pushed to its corners, like eyelashes in the eyes. Sita and Abhi run through a place with different kinds of plant life: the bare and low, spiky and tender leaves. Some of these are inside the ruins of the airfield’s buildings; no roof or inhabitants, no windows, no doors, only frames, like the leafless trees. Ritwik is intentional. The little girl is called Sita for a reason, the story of her name from the Ramayana is abridged for us in a dialogue—how the Sita of the epic was found in an agricultural field, her link with ploughing cultures, and, though we are not told this yet, how Sita returns to the earth after her test by fire, a premonition of what is to happen to the Sita of this film. ‘Sita is the daughter of the earth …’ We are shown that earth: of rocks, river, bark, stone and trees with tiny heads, and tiny human heads half-hidden among large rocks. Outside their house are lonely species: a few palms, shrubs, skinny young trees, standing without discipline or order. They are at home. Abhi returns from the city, educated and eager to finish writing his novel based in Ghatshila, for which he has found a ‘big publisher’. Both he and Sita are surprised to find each other grown up, their bodies longer, their hearts in longing, they walk through the sal forest. The trees are tall, very tall—the camera, so long habituated to a sparser population of trees, goes a bit mad, it begins moving from left to right, taking in the trees one by one, until it is overwhelmed. This is Ritwik’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance’—the uncountability of this unit of plant life, its impress, its freedom and rush, its nurturing and caging. The sense of time—and space—in the forest, where one can’t tell when the first tree was planted, that this is a history very different from those that have been written about human lives, allows Abhi to begin talking about his novel. It might have been classified as autofiction today. He begins narrating the story of his life, third person to himself. Walking towards the trees, he raises his arms—they become branches, and he a tree for a moment. The camera then moves to the back of his head, so that he, like the other citizens of the forest, becomes part of this republic of faceless beings, the trees. He asks her a question, to which she says ‘no’. Light and its opposite fall on her face, and the camera integrates her into the blur of trees behind. How long has she felt like this, this ‘love’, Abhi asks Sita, without using the word. ‘A long time,’ she replies. The camera goes berserk in trying to capture this sense of Time—Ritwik does a few 360 degrees, all we see are the trees of this forest, long trunks, and then the river. Abhi and Sita return to bamboo, to home, to the vines that are growing on bamboo trellises, to the houseplants. Occasionally, we spot oleander, a palm or two, overgrown green in the pilot’s clubhouse, or a flower vase on a table when someone says ‘caste is everything’. When Abhi’s mother dies and he recognizes her from memory, Ritwik takes us to the child Abhi and where is he? Swinging from a tree, like only a little boy can. Twenty seconds later, after the graceful undulations of the roots from which the little boy was hanging, and the shade of the banyan, both unquantifiable and amorphous, we see the sternness of electric poles in a railway station. Their relationship is shown through plant metaphors: trees skirt the agricultural fields as they talk, while the tanpura, made from a gourd, is strung; when the wedding is fixed against her wishes, a dry palm leaf scratches the frame; when Abhi leaves and Sita asks whom she should share her sorrow with, the camera shows treetops far away. The wedding day arrives. The alpana of paddy stalks, grain and leaves sit on the floor, leading our eyes to Sita, whose face is painted with stylised designs from the agricultural world. And suddenly she’s gone. A woman says that she was scribbling something. The camera focuses on the alpana, its details, leaf and leaf and stalk and leaf, and the plant alpana grows and glows towards light. Years pass, trees and peace have disappeared from their lives in the cramped city. Listening to her sing, the little son asks, ‘Ma, what do the dhaaner khet, the paddy fields, look like?’ The song will return at the end of the film, but, before that, there are other plants. Haraprasad, having lost everything that he valued, returns to Iswar and tells him that he’s a ‘baajey-pora taal gaachh’, a blasted palm tree. The landscape turns barren gradually. In the end, though, the little boy Binu, orphaned, stands with Iswar, his newly found maternal uncle, under a tree. They have just got off the train, Iswar has been asked to vacate his residential quarters. Homeless once again, the camera turns to a tree. And then to song and soil, to the wave on the paddy fields—the literal and the figurative find a home: ‘ Dhaaner khete dheu …’ The film ends as it had begun—by resting on plants. Water in instalments, river, rain, ripple, inside boat, on plant, on tree. Water and sand, mother and child, river and bank. Trees by the river, like ripples of heads. Three minutes of this survey of life by the river Titas, and our eyes rest on an old tree at last—we meet its relatives, not on land, but their reflections on water. Soon more, not alive but their afterlife: boats, trees now travelling on water, unimaginable during their life on land; bamboo, fence, wall, house, basket, where grain is being winnowed, thatched homes. They come alive again, rounded trees and dancing papaya plants. They return to water, to boat, its wood, but mostly its bamboo, arcs and shelter, fish caught and put in baskets, covered with a flat woven bamboo piece. To land again, where the tree’s roots are, where they provide the shade necessary for dance and home, for celebration under trees. The canopy—tree branches become Ritwik’s sky; two tree branches connect two corners of the screen, like a ceiling connects walls; men fight with them too, with bamboo. Ritwik begins to make us see, again, the optical osmosis between plant and person ... ... an unconscious woman in a man’s arms, horizontal, is like the tree branches in the following scene; the floral patterns on the bride’s forehead, the wedding garlands, the eating and rejection of light, darkness and luminosity, how Ritwik’s camera catches light falling on the flowers in the garden and those on the wedding saree, the shola kadam flower on the topor, the groom’s crown. These are echoed visually by the houses of bamboo and straw, as if they too were topor-like, and the palm tree behind the small temple. At the moment of leaving her parents’, the bride weeps holding a plant—the holy basil in the tulsi mancha—and her butterfly tiara makes her plant-like. There is no getting away from this way of seeing. Ritwik shows us the boatman’s katha, its stylised botanical patterns; he warns the husband about his wife’s beauty gathering attention with a proverb borrowed from—what else?—the plant world: ‘ Lau er opor najar lagau na kintu ’, be careful that the bottle gourd doesn’t catch attention. A close-up of the woman’s middle-parted hair is turned into a relative of the sugarcane leaf’s long midrib; shadows of leaves dance on the bodies of women so that their bodies and limbs become branches. Ram’s aged, scraggly beard is not very different from the straw hanging from the roof. There’s the stamp of the botanical everywhere: flowers on dhaak, diamond patterns of bamboo designs in kitchens, straight lines of jute sticks, bow and arrow; a galaxy of water hyacinth amidst which sit planets of boats, boats of potatoes. Tree shadows lick the water everywhere, old trees snuggle up to their shortened noon shadows, the dheki moves up and down and up and down, avoiding the hand that feeds it grain, crushing grain. Men and women erupt in anger, the violence of the plant idiom: ‘ Tomarey kauwa ja, oi dhaan khete giye kauwao ta ’, telling you something is like telling the paddy field … The little boy’s name is Ananta. Infinite. He runs through the paddy fields blowing a paper horn. Nabajibon, paddy, bamboo, it is to this that Ritwik returns, this is how history is reborn. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Column Kolkata Ritwik Ghatak East India West Bengal Arboreal Cinema 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:

Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. Ephemeral III (2025), watercolour on acid-free paper, courtesy of Sonali Sonam. Artist · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Ritwik's Trees LOCATION Sumana Roy . 12 Mar 2026 th . Letter from our columnist . I always put it down to coincidence, the easiest way to explain things. Ritwik Ghatak and I were born on the same day, though half a century apart, and plant life would come to frame the way we both experience the world. I am fifty years old now, exactly the age Ritwik died at. Writing this essay with that awareness—strange as it is confusing—takes my thoughts in directions they might not have otherwise. There’s a tree in Sahaj Path , the first tree I ever saw. That can’t be true, of course, because I would have been about three then, in my first year at school. It is in the generic nature of trees to not be remembered, but this is slightly different. It’s not a blob of green that I remember as a tree; it’s black, black as soot, like burnt tree trunks. The tree, though, is not burnt—it is alive; a human sits inside it, as dark as the tree and its foliage, as dark as its shade. Sounds a bit childish, I know, but no other living form had enchanted me like this. I say ‘living’ with caution and affection, for I would discover a living likeness of the soot-black tree soon. On a bus from Siliguri’s Court More to Bagdogra, where my father’s sister lived—a journey we made no more than twice a year, in spite of the short distance, for the lack of availability of transport and time—I would see it. The bus was moving slowly, its speed curtailed by the rush of workers emerging from the Chandmoni Tea Estate. There it was, outside the window to our left—it hadn’t moved since the last time I’d seen it. A tree exactly like Nandalal Bose’s. Ritwik would have seen that tree in Sahaj Path . It is with such a tree that Meghe Dhaka Tara begins, its branches spread wide, without shyness or self-consciousness, as if to expose its leaves to all the light it could get. It is to the right of the screen, Nita walks out of its shadow. I could also rephrase this: the tree releases Nita into the world after protecting it from the glare of the world, perhaps of life. It is tempting to see the tree as analogous to the protective womb, after which the human is left on its own. For the first forty seconds of the film, the camera looks at things that don’t move—the trees. The camera shows no interest in looking for a human, such is its initial indifference to the centrality of the human figure in art. A woman in white emerges out of the shade and shadow of the trees, a black-and-white contrast emphasised in a black-and-white film; so similar to Nandalal’s linocut. The canvas begins to move. A train passes by. A man is singing, aa aa aa aa . His back is to the audience. The camera isn’t interested in his face. It takes in the vegetation by the riverbank. Sharp, tall grass pierces the top half of the frame; it pokes the sky. From looking for punctures in the sky, we are dragged downwards to the earth, to a torn slipper on a human foot. The camera has become plant-like—it is moving like trees do, in the north–south axis; like plants, it has become indifferent to the human face. After the restoration of attention to human affairs, to the crises of poverty, particularly new poverty (surely there must be a term equivalent to nouveau riche for those suddenly rendered poor by catastrophic circumstances), the camera seems to long for a sighting of the plant world again. Only four minutes have passed. It’s enough to give us a sense of the family whose life we will be following; it’s also enough to tell us that human lives will be complemented and annotated by the histories of their changing neighbours, plant life. ‘Nabin Sangha’ enters the frame. Humans, tall and small, chew the foreground, but it’s only as much real estate as the mouth occupies on the face. Behind them is the sky, made jagged by the uneven height of trees. It is not just an assemblage of different species of trees that we see, but a more urgent history of settlement, of planting. Pollinators, mostly two-footed ones like those in the foreground, are responsible for their settlement on this land. Ritwik is giving us a history of dislocation, of people as much as of plants. The name of the neighbourhood club, common in Bengal and other spaces that came to accommodate Bengalis evicted by the forces of history, is telling—the plants are as ‘nabin’, new, as the humans here; they might soon be propagated to other places, near and far. In Ritwik’s films, we see a new kind of horticultural unit, one that emerged so naturally that it hasn’t been recorded in our architectural or ecological history. Neither garden nor forest, it is as domesticated as it is wild. In Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, we find both an admiration for the beauty of the garden and an instinctive rejection of it as a unit foreign to landscapes and geographical formations such as ours. In practice, both he and his son Rathindranath—who would adopt favourite characteristics of Japanese, Italian, French and Mughal gardens into Santiniketan’s Uttarayan, the cluster of four houses that Rabindranath would design and live in—were internationalists, welcoming of travelling flora from other continents. As a concept, though, Rabindranath seemed to be suspicious of the garden, the way the unit had come to be imported from outside the Indian subcontinent, particularly Europe. The controlling impulse necessary to design and execute gardens would have challenged his ethics and aesthetics. They would have been too neat, too premeditated. ‘Bon’ over ‘bagan’ for him, the forest over the garden, though he would have been thinking of the jungle more than the forest, a space then still outside human intentionality. Satyajit Ray, in his foreword to Ritwik’s book Cinema and I , writes about the latter’s lifelong preoccupation with the Partition, how it shaped his films, gave them their subject and energy. What hasn’t been noticed is how the post-Partition Bengali family is seen through the concomitant new ordering of plant life. Land had been divided; how could the creatures of land, humans and plants, live in older units anymore? ‘Unit’, after all, is the root word for ‘unity’, and, with that gone, how were we to find plants except in fragmented and foraged units? This is what Ritwik—like John Clare, who was disoriented by the Enclosure Act of 1809, the privatisation and fencing of shared land—records in these scenes: broken sentences, broken song, broken land, its broken vegetation. Orchards, forests, gardens, fields, they are units of unbrokenness, a way of looking at the world where looking becomes equivalent to owning. The ambition of the zamindar was to own as far as his eyes could see. The philosophical idea of the plantation must owe to this, the idea of unbroken rows of the same plant, as well as the ownership that comes from this manner of control and ordering. The people in Ritwik’s films do not have the luxury of such a ‘vision’; time limits their lives as much as space does. They live from day to day, and, in Meghe Dhaka Tara , from month to month, salary day to salary day. In this, they are like trees, they who live outside capitalism, outside mortgages and pensions and EMIs. In these films is the ‘bagan’, garden. But the architecture of Ritwik’s gardens is arbitrary, its scope and ambition limited by space and poverty. What can the gardens of a homeless people look like? Indifferent to expectations of geometry and species that had given form and beauty to gardens in Japan and Italy, for instance, these borrowed spaces became an archive of their ad hoc living. Grammatical gardens are a record of ambition and purpose, the gardens in Ritwik’s films are a record of foraging and found plants, found and functional art. The trees are not here to add beauty, just as human faces and bodies do not exist to draw attention to the beauty of their anatomical form. They are just there—like the sky is, or like shadows are, because they are. Our eyes meet them like they do relatives of our own species, without formality or introductions. Yes, they are relatives, for they live alongside humans in residential spaces, by the well and by a stream, bringing shade to a tin-roofed house, fruit to a half-starved family, outliving the human who brought them here. My heart bustles in recognition when I see them, for I grew up in such a neighbourhood myself. In Siliguri’s Ashrampara, my neighbours, families whose memories and eating and living habits were formed by the agricultural produce and rivers of Bangladesh before they, like seeds, were flung into spaces unfamiliar to their ancestors, created such gardens. Chilli plants by a streetside water drain, pumpkin and bottle gourd vines climbing on to tin roofs of kachcha toilets, unseasonal marigold flowers from a leftover garland used to worship a goddess, fresh coriander from seeds scattered near the well, where they grew beside ghritakumari, and there, often, a banana plant offering fruit, flower or stem, and always, always, an assembly of kochu leaves, waiting to be devoured. Roses became fences, valued more for their thorns than their flowers, to keep strangers away more than to attract; the tulsi that would, every Saturday, bring together a congregation hungry for the airy sweetness of batasha, thrown up into the air, Hari-r loot, then gathered from the earth and put urgently inside mouths; shandhya malati and nayantara, that flowered better when neglected; and greens, so many kinds of shak that it seemed the Bengali had evolved from the cow. Every morning, flower thieves, with a lanky bamboo pole in their hands, collecting flowers for their gods, never missing an opportunity to break a branch from a tree to plant in their garden—finding and foraging, planting and pollinating. From the ‘sangha’ to ‘sansar’, the club to the room, Ritwik makes this migration through song: ‘ Ghorete bhromor elo gunguniye ’. The bee’s come singing into the room. Where there is bee, there must be flower? What we have instead of the glamour of flowers—and I’m struggling to remember whether the camera ever pays attention to flowers at all—is bamboo. The strips of bamboo and the stripes of the saree that the women wear mirror each other all through his films until he’s established, almost naturally, that the refugees of his world are like bamboo: this is their habitat, they will stick to each other to form clusters, they will be chopped off from time to time, used, repurposed, taken away from their family, but the roots will allow growth again, life and height, length and the seeking of light, until they are dismembered again. The stripes in the women’s sarees run parallel to each other, like the strips of bamboo in the walls of the room do—the ends of both, saree and fence, have to be cut abruptly. Sometimes they continue on to men’s bodies, to the stripes of their lungi. Perhaps no other filmmaker has documented the culture of everyday bamboo design in eastern India with such an artist’s homely attention as Ritwik. These moments of distraction from the thoroughfare of human traffic are almost akin to a tendril looking for support, for something to hold. The varying rhombuses of bamboo fences give the eye this hold, this pause. The ninth minute of Meghe Dhaka Tara is long, the eye spans and embalms the frame, it takes in details of the weave of the bamboo before it moves to something that Ritwik’s camera turns into its relative: hair, hair on the heads of women, Nita’s in a bun, Gita’s left open, the craft and compulsion of human hands on bamboo visible, as it is in the bun; the freedom of the bamboo groves, alive and loose, as in Gita’s open hair. Nita’s name bears the etymological impress of ethics and morality, a human-brokered life; Gita’s name derives from song, it is freer, as much as music is free, or freer than morality. Ritwik’s eyes look for echoes, they find it—echoes of bamboo in the sarees, particularly those that Gita wears, where the shadow-and-light serve-and-volley dims and glows. About a quarter of an hour has passed. Ritwik returns the trees of the first scene to us, we now see more of them, more of their bodies; we see more of the river, too, which pushes the trees out of the frame slightly, gently. What takes up space are the shadows of these large-bodied trees, their girth a visible birth certificate, a mark of fixity, perhaps even of constancy, who can tell, in contrast to the river whose water moves, like the people in the film. The brother—played by Anil Chatterjee, in one of the most unforgettable characters in cinematic history—sings, his accompanists are birds, they cry, though I don’t know why the English language calls their tongue ‘bird cries’. Like a musician uses caesura, Ritwik uses music: for a break between stanzas. In the film’s first scene, Nita emerges from the trees, not exactly like Venus from the sea in Botticelli, but the shared lineage of human and the elements, plant and person, is established right away. A little more than a quarter of an hour later, she walks from the right to the left of the screen. Her brother sits under a tree, rehearsing. Ritwik ensures that we see him as part of the tree trunk, the bodies of humans assimilated by the camera’s angle as once was possible in mythology; Nita, too, is part of this gift of the gaze: she, her brother’s lone audience, melds with the aerial branches of the tree. She, provider, sister, daughter, girlfriend, has to become more than one species. This is why Nita moves out of her Krishnachura- and Radhachura-like body to become bamboo soon after, the transition happening as soon as she gives some money to her brother. It’s Nita’s birthday. A Jagaddhatri Pujo will take place. Ritwik has decided to abandon subtlety. Jagaddhatri, as her name indicates, is a goddess of the earth; according to the Kena Upanishad, she asks the elements, Agni and Varuna and Vayu, to move a blade of grass. Ritwik takes Nita, her father and brother to something like grass. Coconut and betelnut trees, tall, and taller than the hills in the background. They walk on the unlaid road, through marshland and paddy fields, the stalks ankle-deep in water. Other species crop up on the screen: boatman, shaluk, lotus. ‘Poetry of the earth is never dead,’ one of the characters says. Jagaddhatri; the plants. Ritwik doesn’t leave it there—like Bibhutibhushan in Pather Panchali , he emphasises the beauty that can be had by those without money, like Apu’s sister Durga in the novel, like Nita’s singer-brother in this film. ‘Dhanyo khetra’, the blessed land, the land of such agricultural bounty is a phrase central to Ritwik’s vision. For the Bengali audience, there would also be the cultural conditioning of ‘ Dhono dhanye pushpe bhora ’ of D.L. Roy’s song, the celebration, in spite of Partition, of the plentiful plant life that made Jibanananda’s ‘Rupashi Bangla’. Children run out of a small school a few scenes later. As if to frame this freedom, Ghatak allows a branch to graze the frame from the left. To him, the plant world is a metaphor that emphasises, by contrast, the unfreedom of social life. ‘How do you all stay indoors in the evening? I find it difficult to breathe,’ says Gita, to which Sanat, still undecided between the two women, ‘music’ and ‘morality’, offers to take Nita out for a walk. Their house is framed by trees, their father by an umbrella, the heads of both mirroring each other, as it is possible only in a drawing book. Sanat complains about Nita being chained down by responsibilities, to which she offers a stronger metaphor for the loss of freedom: ‘Besh toh, make a glass frame and put me inside it, like a wax doll.’ And, almost immediately, two opposites are offered: marshland and meadow, there is freedom in both, even if there is stickiness. For when Nita stands up to go, leaves stick to her saree. Over and over again, Ritwik turns her into a tree, a giving tree. A job has been found, she requests her brother to drop her off at Sealdah. The landscape changes; it’s thornier, wilder. The tree is different—it is no longer on the right side of the screen but the left; it has more branches than leaves, it is less spread out, some of its branches even amputated. Soon, the camera is on the brother. He’s singing, entering the world of plants, whose bodies are flecked by light and shade; wild grass waits nearby in every frame. Nita, though, was doing the opposite, emerging from the trees. The camera refuses to move; it has become the tree. Nita passes by, he asks her for twenty-five paise, to shave, and the camera begins moving. The brother runs after her, his shadow slightly thinner than the older, time-fed trees. The branches offer shade, they also stand rooted while humans are rendered homeless. The camera, momentarily happy to be a tree, now begins running—it, too, is scared of becoming homeless. Catching up with her, he realises that it is not his sister, only someone in the same generic white saree with a slim border. The unknown woman smiles. Her eyes are downcast, instead of the goddess’ halo, her bust-sized image: the white saree with the border running like a train line whose other track has been eaten by time or water; the echo of that thin horizontal line in the vertical strap of her handbag, a marker of her working woman status, a new self in a new land. Not halo but branches of trees crowd the frame. She is of the trees, even if she has a face, even if she is human. The woman smiles. The brother laughs. He begins singing. Another tree appears. Now it’s to the right of the screen. He is standing under it and singing. The camera moves with him as he walks. His shadow moves. The shadows of the branches remain still. He moves from right to left, a bit like the Urdu script at first, and then like musical notation, the arohan and abarohan, travelling to and fro, to and fro, the return to the ‘sama’, the home. But where is home? Do shadows return to the trees at night? Ritwik changes the composition of the halo that announces a goddess’ status. The branches of trees a little while ago, now it’s smoke from the mother’s cooking that frames her face, so that the halo is diffused, a blur, in spite of the branches of the trees right behind, as distant as cloud. Another woman enters—her hair is open, her saree is striped, the bamboo seems to be emerging out of her body, she goes out for a walk by the lake. It is Gita, with Sanat. Nita is walking back home. Irregular dots of darkness fill the screen—blobs of tree heads, their fraternal twins lying as shadows on the ground, more restful. Nita’s face is dark, light falls on a portion of her hips. Books clutched to her chest, she walks; her sister and boyfriend are sitting by the water, singing. Nita looks, then looks away, and walks past the scene. The camera moves to the sister and her new audience. Her shoulder-length hair has been left open. For a moment, they look like branches of the tree behind her—both move. The camera moves too. Gita is laughing after her flirtatious sermon to Sanat about staring at her with his mouth open. Nandalal’s tree, from Sahaj Path , is behind her. Its many branches make her look like a many-armed Durga; the man is made to look like Mahishasur. She jumps, he follows. We are inside stripes again: bamboo walls, fences, light and darkness. The composition is of an afterlife of the plant world—wooden windows with sticks inside them that keep animals away and divide the sky and the view. The sister in the striped saree enters through the gate; all is bamboo and wood, even the sister. Ritwik takes care to emphasise their form and texture, a continuation of their life, a life made possible by a new host and a new environment, like the refugees of Partition have had to adapt to. Bamboo and smoke, different as they are in behaviour, move in various patterns and orientations, making the walls of the house look like a happy museum of the afterlife of trees themselves. From inside the house, various kinds of plant life emerge, among them, paisleys trapped inside diamond-shaped cages on Gita’s blouse. Things change, Sanat and Gita are married, living in a flat in the city: the bamboo patterns, Nita’s saree, now in a dark colour. Instead of a house scavenged and salvaged from bodies of plants, we see a skylight in iron frames. The soft stripes of bamboo and clotheslines and sarees have given way to the stern lines of glass and steel, staircases and doorframes, ventilators and windows. Nita’s bag is now a pattern of checks. The door curtain, in all likelihood a Manipuri weave not uncommon at that time, has diamond-shaped rhombuses. As soon as the door opens, the camera moves to the solid lines of the threshold. These lines are bureaucratic, they keep apartments sturdy, they want to serve ambitions of permanence; how different they are from bamboo, in whose DNA it is to be ad hoc. Smoke cruises up here, too, but it’s not the smoke of Nita’s mother’s kitchen; not clay oven but ashtray. Ritwik is showing us the props of culture: a Bankura clay elephant stands beside truncated shadows of window bars, tuberoses in a vase on the table, puppets on the wooden cupboard, nature is being diminished here, everywhere. But the camera is restless for the lines in Nita’s home, its stripes: clothes, clotheslines, serrated tin roofs, bamboo nailed together, diagonally falling shadows. These are informal lines and rhombuses that derive from the grace of the natural world. It is the freedom of this informality that allows shadows to enter frames before human figures, shadows picking clothes from ropes and wires, slightly ghost-like, more like trees. Ritwik relies on the light-and-shadow opera to highlight the human drama through the eaters of light, the trees. After the light and night of ‘ Je raate mor duwarguli bhanglo jhore ’, of ‘ shob je hoye gyalo kalo ’, of everything turned dark, the camera moves like a plant, like the eye, searching for light. And then it moves like writing in the Devanagari script: trees and houses, conical tops, roofs, tin, concrete, all of these in a rush, so that it seems like the camera wants to escape from homes and the homeless for now, till it rests and waits, on foliage, on plants, to the ad hoc gardens that connect inside our eyes to indulge the sense of what is now called ‘social forestry’. The father, leaning against a tree for support, speaks to a doctor about Nita. One displacement happens after another—Nita, first rendered homeless by history, now moves out of the house to a bamboo room nearby, her equivalent of a temporary tent, her ‘nirbandhobpuri’, a town without friends; then she has to leave home for Reid Chest Hospital, another instalment of displacement. Ritwik begins making her more tree-like with greater urgency, as if that could protect her. After the audience’s discovery of her tuberculosis, we meet the trees—they take over the screen, Nita’s head now a blob emerging from the lower bottom of the screen. She’s being displaced from the screen too, history repeating itself over and over again. In a darker saree now, she’s the colour of tree trunks and branches, until she merges with the tree trunk in a scene. Ritwik is cutting out something else simultaneously—shade and shadow. By the ninetieth minute, the shade of trees is gone. There’s just bare land, the shadows of the trees far away are like birds whose shadows don’t reach the earth. A train cuts the screen. She, like the trees, doesn’t move. A couple of minutes later, she opens her umbrella standing under a tree, a double umbrella as it were. Every now and then, Ritwik’s camera surveys the land: palms of various kinds, a leafless plumeria, after the news of Gita’s pregnancy. In the foreboding of both birth and death, Ritwik turns to plants. After the camera shows us Nita’s blood-stained handkerchief, we see trees moving wildly in a storm, and her curly hair, as if they were relatives. The vegetation around Reid Chest Hospital is different—a coniferous-looking tree stands to the left of the frame, it offers no shade, only the fur of fog and the skin of the sky. Nita is sitting, her brother comes with news about Gita’s son, their two-storeyed house, until she breaks into one of the most famous dialogues in Bangla cinema: ‘ Dada, aami kintu bachte cheyechhilam ’, Dada, I did want to live … The camera loses balance as it were and surveys the trees. That’s how the film ends—with tree and tree and tree, almost like how it began, except for the woman who has gone missing from life, from the screen. Fifteen seconds into Subarnarekha , no image has been given to us, nothing except the auditory, ‘Vande Mataram’. The first visual: trees, slim, unrevealing of age, a bamboo in the middle, another an arc; the cohabitation of various sizes, even shapes. The Indian flag goes up on the bamboo pole; another bamboo, bent, serves as trellis over a gate. In bamboo as flag pole, Ritwik is hoping for the new Indian nation to have the tensile strength of bamboo, to be flexible, supportive and all-purpose, for all its citizens to make whatever they can of it. For the moment, though, there’s chaos and uncertainty, differences more than unity—a teacher in a new school teaches English and history, another Bengali and Sanskrit, history and historiography available only to those living in English; Dhaka versus Pabna; caste divisions. A child’s mother is lost. The word ‘udbastu’, refugee, floats around. Gandhi’s assassination emerges as newsprint in a newspaper office. Nabajibon Colony, the new settlement for those without homes, is constructed almost entirely of bamboo, as if the new (‘naba’) life (‘jibon’) must have the plant’s resilience. Ritwik draws the opposition between the old and new through metaphor. Both the sarod and the ektara are musical instruments that derive from plant life, but he gives us classical music before a Baul’s song. Hence bamboo—for the people, like the people; the roofs, doors, windows and walls of the houses in Nabajibon Colony, the Baul’s musical instrument. In the first ten minutes of the film named after a river, we see bamboo being split and cut everywhere. Partition, people, plants. A bamboo republic. Ghatshila’s plants enter the census of our imagination: bamboo, banana, papaya, species that grow easily, often on their own, without care, like these people must. When the little girl Sita asks her brother whether Abhiram, the boy who has lost his mother, will come with them to the new place, we are given no answer, only a sign, almost Buddha-like—she plucks a flower and leaves. The mill, where her brother has found work, is beside a sal forest. After reaching Ghatshila, the first thing Sita says is, ‘Dadamoni, come and see how beautiful the garden is …’. The little boy Abhi is still crying. An oleander—poisonous oleander—stands behind him. Rabindranath’s song sprouts: ‘ Aaj dhaner khete roudrochhayay lukochuri khyala re bhai, lukochuri khyala ’. Sunlight and shade are playing hide-and-seek on the paddy fields … What grass was to Jibanananda Das, paddy is to Ritwik. It’s to the paddy fields that his homeless want to return. Paddy and bamboo, related sub-families. We see a barren landscape from time to time, stony, bare-branched trees, but in their forms is still the intimation of being alive—unlike the ruins of the aircraft from World War II, with its exposed steel rods, weeds around it, the camera making it look like a foreigner, a UFO, the runway unfriendly, trees pushed to its corners, like eyelashes in the eyes. Sita and Abhi run through a place with different kinds of plant life: the bare and low, spiky and tender leaves. Some of these are inside the ruins of the airfield’s buildings; no roof or inhabitants, no windows, no doors, only frames, like the leafless trees. Ritwik is intentional. The little girl is called Sita for a reason, the story of her name from the Ramayana is abridged for us in a dialogue—how the Sita of the epic was found in an agricultural field, her link with ploughing cultures, and, though we are not told this yet, how Sita returns to the earth after her test by fire, a premonition of what is to happen to the Sita of this film. ‘Sita is the daughter of the earth …’ We are shown that earth: of rocks, river, bark, stone and trees with tiny heads, and tiny human heads half-hidden among large rocks. Outside their house are lonely species: a few palms, shrubs, skinny young trees, standing without discipline or order. They are at home. Abhi returns from the city, educated and eager to finish writing his novel based in Ghatshila, for which he has found a ‘big publisher’. Both he and Sita are surprised to find each other grown up, their bodies longer, their hearts in longing, they walk through the sal forest. The trees are tall, very tall—the camera, so long habituated to a sparser population of trees, goes a bit mad, it begins moving from left to right, taking in the trees one by one, until it is overwhelmed. This is Ritwik’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance’—the uncountability of this unit of plant life, its impress, its freedom and rush, its nurturing and caging. The sense of time—and space—in the forest, where one can’t tell when the first tree was planted, that this is a history very different from those that have been written about human lives, allows Abhi to begin talking about his novel. It might have been classified as autofiction today. He begins narrating the story of his life, third person to himself. Walking towards the trees, he raises his arms—they become branches, and he a tree for a moment. The camera then moves to the back of his head, so that he, like the other citizens of the forest, becomes part of this republic of faceless beings, the trees. He asks her a question, to which she says ‘no’. Light and its opposite fall on her face, and the camera integrates her into the blur of trees behind. How long has she felt like this, this ‘love’, Abhi asks Sita, without using the word. ‘A long time,’ she replies. The camera goes berserk in trying to capture this sense of Time—Ritwik does a few 360 degrees, all we see are the trees of this forest, long trunks, and then the river. Abhi and Sita return to bamboo, to home, to the vines that are growing on bamboo trellises, to the houseplants. Occasionally, we spot oleander, a palm or two, overgrown green in the pilot’s clubhouse, or a flower vase on a table when someone says ‘caste is everything’. When Abhi’s mother dies and he recognizes her from memory, Ritwik takes us to the child Abhi and where is he? Swinging from a tree, like only a little boy can. Twenty seconds later, after the graceful undulations of the roots from which the little boy was hanging, and the shade of the banyan, both unquantifiable and amorphous, we see the sternness of electric poles in a railway station. Their relationship is shown through plant metaphors: trees skirt the agricultural fields as they talk, while the tanpura, made from a gourd, is strung; when the wedding is fixed against her wishes, a dry palm leaf scratches the frame; when Abhi leaves and Sita asks whom she should share her sorrow with, the camera shows treetops far away. The wedding day arrives. The alpana of paddy stalks, grain and leaves sit on the floor, leading our eyes to Sita, whose face is painted with stylised designs from the agricultural world. And suddenly she’s gone. A woman says that she was scribbling something. The camera focuses on the alpana, its details, leaf and leaf and stalk and leaf, and the plant alpana grows and glows towards light. Years pass, trees and peace have disappeared from their lives in the cramped city. Listening to her sing, the little son asks, ‘Ma, what do the dhaaner khet, the paddy fields, look like?’ The song will return at the end of the film, but, before that, there are other plants. Haraprasad, having lost everything that he valued, returns to Iswar and tells him that he’s a ‘baajey-pora taal gaachh’, a blasted palm tree. The landscape turns barren gradually. In the end, though, the little boy Binu, orphaned, stands with Iswar, his newly found maternal uncle, under a tree. They have just got off the train, Iswar has been asked to vacate his residential quarters. Homeless once again, the camera turns to a tree. And then to song and soil, to the wave on the paddy fields—the literal and the figurative find a home: ‘ Dhaaner khete dheu …’ The film ends as it had begun—by resting on plants. Water in instalments, river, rain, ripple, inside boat, on plant, on tree. Water and sand, mother and child, river and bank. Trees by the river, like ripples of heads. Three minutes of this survey of life by the river Titas, and our eyes rest on an old tree at last—we meet its relatives, not on land, but their reflections on water. Soon more, not alive but their afterlife: boats, trees now travelling on water, unimaginable during their life on land; bamboo, fence, wall, house, basket, where grain is being winnowed, thatched homes. They come alive again, rounded trees and dancing papaya plants. They return to water, to boat, its wood, but mostly its bamboo, arcs and shelter, fish caught and put in baskets, covered with a flat woven bamboo piece. To land again, where the tree’s roots are, where they provide the shade necessary for dance and home, for celebration under trees. The canopy—tree branches become Ritwik’s sky; two tree branches connect two corners of the screen, like a ceiling connects walls; men fight with them too, with bamboo. Ritwik begins to make us see, again, the optical osmosis between plant and person ... ... an unconscious woman in a man’s arms, horizontal, is like the tree branches in the following scene; the floral patterns on the bride’s forehead, the wedding garlands, the eating and rejection of light, darkness and luminosity, how Ritwik’s camera catches light falling on the flowers in the garden and those on the wedding saree, the shola kadam flower on the topor, the groom’s crown. These are echoed visually by the houses of bamboo and straw, as if they too were topor-like, and the palm tree behind the small temple. At the moment of leaving her parents’, the bride weeps holding a plant—the holy basil in the tulsi mancha—and her butterfly tiara makes her plant-like. There is no getting away from this way of seeing. Ritwik shows us the boatman’s katha, its stylised botanical patterns; he warns the husband about his wife’s beauty gathering attention with a proverb borrowed from—what else?—the plant world: ‘ Lau er opor najar lagau na kintu ’, be careful that the bottle gourd doesn’t catch attention. A close-up of the woman’s middle-parted hair is turned into a relative of the sugarcane leaf’s long midrib; shadows of leaves dance on the bodies of women so that their bodies and limbs become branches. Ram’s aged, scraggly beard is not very different from the straw hanging from the roof. There’s the stamp of the botanical everywhere: flowers on dhaak, diamond patterns of bamboo designs in kitchens, straight lines of jute sticks, bow and arrow; a galaxy of water hyacinth amidst which sit planets of boats, boats of potatoes. Tree shadows lick the water everywhere, old trees snuggle up to their shortened noon shadows, the dheki moves up and down and up and down, avoiding the hand that feeds it grain, crushing grain. Men and women erupt in anger, the violence of the plant idiom: ‘ Tomarey kauwa ja, oi dhaan khete giye kauwao ta ’, telling you something is like telling the paddy field … The little boy’s name is Ananta. Infinite. He runs through the paddy fields blowing a paper horn. Nabajibon, paddy, bamboo, it is to this that Ritwik returns, this is how history is reborn. ∎ 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 Sumana Roy is the author of How I became a Tree , Missing: A Novel , Out of Syllabus: Poems , My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories , among others. Her newest book is entitled Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. SONALI SONAM (b. 1995, Bihar) is a visual artist whose practice draws from the discipline and visual language of miniature painting while engaging with contemporary experiences of space, memory, and perception. She studied Painting at Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, and later completed her Master’s degree at the College of Art, New Delhi. Column Kolkata Ritwik Ghatak East India West Bengal Arboreal Cinema A Man's World Nidhil Vohra 2nd Mar Sinking the Body Politic Dipanjan Sinha 24th Aug Saffronizing Bollywood Kaashif Hajee 15th Apr On That Note:

"There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution." "There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution." Artist Essay Miriyam Ilavenil 5 Feb 2026 th · REPORTAGE · LOCATION A Poetics of Banality: Karen Chase’s Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and Zundel State Karen Chase’s Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState is a mediocre, counter-revolutionary poetic text on historicism, or rather, anti-historicism, veiled through the subjectivised genre of love. The book contains two stories: the first is Jamali Kamali , a homoerotic narrative poem about the 16th-century Sufi court poet and saint, Jamali, and his speculated lover, Kamali, now published for the first time in the USA. The second, titled ZundelState , is a novella in verse about Joe and Marianna, two lovers from a dystopian future where both history and dreaming have been outlawed. In both works, the inertia of American liberal poetics weakens against the rhizome of love, history, and imagination. Oscillating within orthodoxy, her unimaginative writing guts historicism from political reality, bleeding the soul out of these love stories. Jamali is resurrected from history, in selective memory, disfigured from his legacies of poetry, mysticism, autonomy, all for Chase to bury him within the hollowness of her subjectivity. The genre of homoeroticism bears the sexual dialectics of spirit and matter , neither of which is meaningfully expressed in Chase’s Jamali Kamali , in an aesthetic nor analytic sense. Jamali and Kamali’s bodies, interpreted in their most shallow, spineless, and severed forms, are the only aspect that concerns Chase’s poetics. The theology of Sufism, the politics of feudal Delhi and the theoretical limitations of “queerness” (the constraints of imperial socio-lingualistics against the cosmology of sexualities) are absent in her text, and in her subtext. The material world that both Jamali and Kamali exist in, and its umbilical cord with the present, is ruptured by Chase’s own one-dimensional narrative consciousness, intruding on this bloodline of history. Exiled from the dialectics of time, Chase insulates their memory into her imperial imagination. She desolates not only Jamali’s personhood, through his poetry and mysticism, from feudal Delhi, but along with it, his living memory, the reconstructions of it by “queer” Indians, from neocolonial Delhi. Her self-serving and stylistically superficial poetics messily drags Jamali and Kamali from the womb of history into her neocolonial text, as stillborns. There is no viable sexual desire between Chase’s Jamali and Kamali because they are described without bodies, nor minds, to think, to feel, to carnalise. Their erotics is castrated from the sexual materiality of Delhi. Their intimacy is made impotent by Chase’s voyeuristic gaze. Her poetic consciousness fails to actualise itself, outside of herself. Ironically, it is only towards the end of the poem, when Kamali mourns the death of Jamali, and the narrative subsumes Jamali’s materiality (what little of it), that her poem gains a form of life. In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-rupturing Dictee , a more poetically critical expression of historicism is shared. Where Chase’s Jamali Kamali is an ahistorical homoerotic imagination of speculated history from feudal Delhi, Cha’s Dictee is a reconstruction of the dialectical sentience of Korea that has been (and continues to be) silenced, severed and made seditious by counter-revolutionaries, through the memories of multiple generations of subjugated Korean women. The conflict of Korean consciousness is poeticised not just through abstractions but through the anchored historicism. She does not incarcerate Korea in a single moment of history, like Chase does with Delhi, but expresses lyrically and liturgically, Korean consciousness through the chasm of time and space, through exiles and emancipations, through Japanese imperialism, American imperialism, and the South Korean puppet regime. Although Cha's poetry too, at moments, is stunted by subjectivity, it is still ultimately rooted in materiality, unlike Chase’s work which mystifies materiality through neocolonial abstractions. Cha’s Americaness, a product of imperialist forced migration, is implicated in her narrative. She complicates her place in her poetics, even when Korean history belongs to her. Her personal consciousness is never interruptive of her poeticism; rather, her presence bleeds into the collective bloodshed of Korea, as one ocean of violence and resistance. Chase’s Americaness, on the other hand, is made ambiguous in her first-person narrative, which speaks through the corpse of Jamali, violently embedding herself into this history. Liberal escapism is the thesis Chase constructs against the reactionary dictatorship of the ZundelState. Her fictional ZundelState feels far more material compared to the immateriality of Jamali Kamali . Her ZundelState is authoritarian; it has annihilated dreaming, history, and self-expression. While Chase’s narrative expresses the ZundelState as a form of fascist anti-historicism, her poetry is the embodiment of liberal anti-historicism. She too, like the ZundelState , is seemingly uninterested in the truth:where fascism denies thought, her liberalism is full of thoughts, regardless of the truth. The liberal consciousness placed against the fascist structure of the ZundelState does not contradict it but instead becomes complacent with it. The lovers in the narrative are Joe, who hates the ZundelState and scavenges for remnants of state-destroyed histories, and Marianna, an artist and an agent of the ZundelState who is conflicted by her complicity to the regime. In Joe’s scavenging, and through his and Mariana’s dreamings, fragments of history resurface. The narrative is particularly fixated on exploring the nuclear devastation of Nagasaki , Einstein's theory of relativity, and the history of World War II. Evading the violent imperial politics of the war, Chase’s apolitical poetics mutates Nagasaki into a detached spectacle, Einstein’s theory into an immaterial phantasm and the entire war into uncritical absurdism. Warfare is objectified as an empty eclectic ambience all for Chase’s imaginary liberal romance. A compelling love story should contend with the complexity of reality. There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution. Where Chase’s Jamali and Kamali are stillborn because she annihilates them from the womb of Delhi, Joe and Marianna’s love decomposes the very flesh of historicism into a mere rhetorical backdrop for their romance. ZundelState , even in its attempt at being a distant dystopia, is framed through American politics, Americanised characters and American liberalism. The narrative is ambivalent of its own Americanness, even referencing the American Dream, an ahistorical ideology, negated by any political criticism or even narrative consciousness of its savagery. There can be no reckoning with historicism in this text without contending with Americanism. Poetically perpetuating Americanism is counter-insurgency against historicism, poeticism, and creativity itself. Chase’s poetics, explained in the ‘A Note’ section of this book, is rooted in, as she states, what is unknown to her . She theorises that writing about what one does not know leads to infinite exploration as opposed to the confined space of writing about what one knows. Yet, her poetry negates her theory, for her ignorant imagination regresses literary evolution. All the “boundlessness” she poetises, through abstract dreams, subjective subconsciousness and bourgeois fictionalism, only ever regurgitates the monotony of American liberalism. Through her writing, her imperialist liberalism, against the goliath of historicism, exists without criticisms and without consciousness. While Chase uses the excuse of Joe’s ignorance (inflicted upon him by Chase’s ZundelState ) to explore known (Western) histories superficially, she is seemingly unequipped to contend with the unknown (Subcontinental) history in Jamali Kamali . Her writing reveals a neocolonial primitiveness that prevents her from weaponising creative and intellectual dialectics to confront the complex historical politics of the unknown. Her poetry emulates the figure of the European observer described by Glauber Rocha in his critical essay The Aesthetics of Hunger; where he articulates that Europeans are only ever artistically interested in the third world so far as it satisfies their nostalgia for primitivism. Chase’s poetry, as poetry, as literature, is made vapid, useless, and boring because of her own reluctance to know . Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's experimental film, The Hour of the Furnaces alarms us of how neocolonial cultural production decapitates history. Chase’s poeticism in these texts is part of this beheading. She is of this neocolonial class yet she evades responsibility for it. Her poetry postures as if neocolonial Delhi is not shackled by American imperialism, as if the horrors of Nagasaki have passed us, as if the heirloom of history isn't reaped from its oppressed descendants. Other than curiosity and ambiguous liberation, Chase’s Joe and her narrative have no other necessity for historicism. In contrast, Cha’s Dictee is resolute on scavenging history so as to not repeat it into oblivion, to not annihilate Korea in another imperialist war. Where Cha writes of history with an objective, Chase objectifies history itself. She is not interested in understanding the difference between fiction and history because she bears no political urgency to do so. Unsurprisingly, her class position inspires within her some political compulsion to obstruct historicism and propagate anti-historicism as poetics. Chase’s poetry blunts the weapon of history, negating the revolutionary function of art, rendering historicism useless in the war of politics, and fashioning both art and history as passive neocolonised ornaments. In times when fascism continues to rise and the imperial enslaved world teeters on the brink of annihilating wars, literature must not poetically apathise itself from political struggle. Books like Chase’s are a vital reminder that literature must not give precedence to self-involved imaginations over the collective struggle for material truth and emancipation. Literature, poeticism, and creative dialecticism are the nerves of humanity’s marrow. They must not allow the mind to be drowned by apolitical dreamings but instead catalyse the consciousness to revolt.∎ 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 Miriyam Ilavenil is a journalist and a descendant of displaced Tamil Dalit indentured labourers who is interested in understanding the politics and histories of South and Southeast Asia. Column Essay 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:

"There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution." · Column · Essay "There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution." A Poetics of Banality: Karen Chase’s Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and Zundel State Karen Chase’s Two Tales: Jamali Kamali and ZundelState is a mediocre, counter-revolutionary poetic text on historicism, or rather, anti-historicism, veiled through the subjectivised genre of love. The book contains two stories: the first is Jamali Kamali , a homoerotic narrative poem about the 16th-century Sufi court poet and saint, Jamali, and his speculated lover, Kamali, now published for the first time in the USA. The second, titled ZundelState , is a novella in verse about Joe and Marianna, two lovers from a dystopian future where both history and dreaming have been outlawed. In both works, the inertia of American liberal poetics weakens against the rhizome of love, history, and imagination. Oscillating within orthodoxy, her unimaginative writing guts historicism from political reality, bleeding the soul out of these love stories. Jamali is resurrected from history, in selective memory, disfigured from his legacies of poetry, mysticism, autonomy, all for Chase to bury him within the hollowness of her subjectivity. The genre of homoeroticism bears the sexual dialectics of spirit and matter , neither of which is meaningfully expressed in Chase’s Jamali Kamali , in an aesthetic nor analytic sense. Jamali and Kamali’s bodies, interpreted in their most shallow, spineless, and severed forms, are the only aspect that concerns Chase’s poetics. The theology of Sufism, the politics of feudal Delhi and the theoretical limitations of “queerness” (the constraints of imperial socio-lingualistics against the cosmology of sexualities) are absent in her text, and in her subtext. The material world that both Jamali and Kamali exist in, and its umbilical cord with the present, is ruptured by Chase’s own one-dimensional narrative consciousness, intruding on this bloodline of history. Exiled from the dialectics of time, Chase insulates their memory into her imperial imagination. She desolates not only Jamali’s personhood, through his poetry and mysticism, from feudal Delhi, but along with it, his living memory, the reconstructions of it by “queer” Indians, from neocolonial Delhi. Her self-serving and stylistically superficial poetics messily drags Jamali and Kamali from the womb of history into her neocolonial text, as stillborns. There is no viable sexual desire between Chase’s Jamali and Kamali because they are described without bodies, nor minds, to think, to feel, to carnalise. Their erotics is castrated from the sexual materiality of Delhi. Their intimacy is made impotent by Chase’s voyeuristic gaze. Her poetic consciousness fails to actualise itself, outside of herself. Ironically, it is only towards the end of the poem, when Kamali mourns the death of Jamali, and the narrative subsumes Jamali’s materiality (what little of it), that her poem gains a form of life. In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-rupturing Dictee , a more poetically critical expression of historicism is shared. Where Chase’s Jamali Kamali is an ahistorical homoerotic imagination of speculated history from feudal Delhi, Cha’s Dictee is a reconstruction of the dialectical sentience of Korea that has been (and continues to be) silenced, severed and made seditious by counter-revolutionaries, through the memories of multiple generations of subjugated Korean women. The conflict of Korean consciousness is poeticised not just through abstractions but through the anchored historicism. She does not incarcerate Korea in a single moment of history, like Chase does with Delhi, but expresses lyrically and liturgically, Korean consciousness through the chasm of time and space, through exiles and emancipations, through Japanese imperialism, American imperialism, and the South Korean puppet regime. Although Cha's poetry too, at moments, is stunted by subjectivity, it is still ultimately rooted in materiality, unlike Chase’s work which mystifies materiality through neocolonial abstractions. Cha’s Americaness, a product of imperialist forced migration, is implicated in her narrative. She complicates her place in her poetics, even when Korean history belongs to her. Her personal consciousness is never interruptive of her poeticism; rather, her presence bleeds into the collective bloodshed of Korea, as one ocean of violence and resistance. Chase’s Americaness, on the other hand, is made ambiguous in her first-person narrative, which speaks through the corpse of Jamali, violently embedding herself into this history. Liberal escapism is the thesis Chase constructs against the reactionary dictatorship of the ZundelState. Her fictional ZundelState feels far more material compared to the immateriality of Jamali Kamali . Her ZundelState is authoritarian; it has annihilated dreaming, history, and self-expression. While Chase’s narrative expresses the ZundelState as a form of fascist anti-historicism, her poetry is the embodiment of liberal anti-historicism. She too, like the ZundelState , is seemingly uninterested in the truth:where fascism denies thought, her liberalism is full of thoughts, regardless of the truth. The liberal consciousness placed against the fascist structure of the ZundelState does not contradict it but instead becomes complacent with it. The lovers in the narrative are Joe, who hates the ZundelState and scavenges for remnants of state-destroyed histories, and Marianna, an artist and an agent of the ZundelState who is conflicted by her complicity to the regime. In Joe’s scavenging, and through his and Mariana’s dreamings, fragments of history resurface. The narrative is particularly fixated on exploring the nuclear devastation of Nagasaki , Einstein's theory of relativity, and the history of World War II. Evading the violent imperial politics of the war, Chase’s apolitical poetics mutates Nagasaki into a detached spectacle, Einstein’s theory into an immaterial phantasm and the entire war into uncritical absurdism. Warfare is objectified as an empty eclectic ambience all for Chase’s imaginary liberal romance. A compelling love story should contend with the complexity of reality. There can be no apolitical ahistorical love story—the sentience of love and the stimulus of lust is always shaped by political reality, by blood, by gender, by caste, by religion, by genocide, by fascism, by struggle, by revolution. Where Chase’s Jamali and Kamali are stillborn because she annihilates them from the womb of Delhi, Joe and Marianna’s love decomposes the very flesh of historicism into a mere rhetorical backdrop for their romance. ZundelState , even in its attempt at being a distant dystopia, is framed through American politics, Americanised characters and American liberalism. The narrative is ambivalent of its own Americanness, even referencing the American Dream, an ahistorical ideology, negated by any political criticism or even narrative consciousness of its savagery. There can be no reckoning with historicism in this text without contending with Americanism. Poetically perpetuating Americanism is counter-insurgency against historicism, poeticism, and creativity itself. Chase’s poetics, explained in the ‘A Note’ section of this book, is rooted in, as she states, what is unknown to her . She theorises that writing about what one does not know leads to infinite exploration as opposed to the confined space of writing about what one knows. Yet, her poetry negates her theory, for her ignorant imagination regresses literary evolution. All the “boundlessness” she poetises, through abstract dreams, subjective subconsciousness and bourgeois fictionalism, only ever regurgitates the monotony of American liberalism. Through her writing, her imperialist liberalism, against the goliath of historicism, exists without criticisms and without consciousness. While Chase uses the excuse of Joe’s ignorance (inflicted upon him by Chase’s ZundelState ) to explore known (Western) histories superficially, she is seemingly unequipped to contend with the unknown (Subcontinental) history in Jamali Kamali . Her writing reveals a neocolonial primitiveness that prevents her from weaponising creative and intellectual dialectics to confront the complex historical politics of the unknown. Her poetry emulates the figure of the European observer described by Glauber Rocha in his critical essay The Aesthetics of Hunger; where he articulates that Europeans are only ever artistically interested in the third world so far as it satisfies their nostalgia for primitivism. Chase’s poetry, as poetry, as literature, is made vapid, useless, and boring because of her own reluctance to know . Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's experimental film, The Hour of the Furnaces alarms us of how neocolonial cultural production decapitates history. Chase’s poeticism in these texts is part of this beheading. She is of this neocolonial class yet she evades responsibility for it. Her poetry postures as if neocolonial Delhi is not shackled by American imperialism, as if the horrors of Nagasaki have passed us, as if the heirloom of history isn't reaped from its oppressed descendants. Other than curiosity and ambiguous liberation, Chase’s Joe and her narrative have no other necessity for historicism. In contrast, Cha’s Dictee is resolute on scavenging history so as to not repeat it into oblivion, to not annihilate Korea in another imperialist war. Where Cha writes of history with an objective, Chase objectifies history itself. She is not interested in understanding the difference between fiction and history because she bears no political urgency to do so. Unsurprisingly, her class position inspires within her some political compulsion to obstruct historicism and propagate anti-historicism as poetics. Chase’s poetry blunts the weapon of history, negating the revolutionary function of art, rendering historicism useless in the war of politics, and fashioning both art and history as passive neocolonised ornaments. In times when fascism continues to rise and the imperial enslaved world teeters on the brink of annihilating wars, literature must not poetically apathise itself from political struggle. Books like Chase’s are a vital reminder that literature must not give precedence to self-involved imaginations over the collective struggle for material truth and emancipation. Literature, poeticism, and creative dialecticism are the nerves of humanity’s marrow. They must not allow the mind to be drowned by apolitical dreamings but instead catalyse the consciousness to revolt.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Column Essay Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 5th Feb 2026 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

“The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Sea Mai Ishizawa · Polly Barton “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. How should we carry with us the memories of those who had disappeared to the other side of time? Was it a case of endlessly tracing their contours in our memories, until their names were eventually rubbed away, forgotten? The sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (New Directions, March 2025). Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Essay Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Polly Barton Survivors Earthquakes Memory Trauma Sensory Identity Seascapes Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Fiction Ecology Environmental Disaster Gottingen's Scale Solar System Iconography Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Fiction Poetry Akutagawa Prize MAI ISHIZAWA a was born in 1980 in Sendai City, Japan, and currently lives in Germany. Her debut novel, The Place of Shells , won the Akutagawa Prize. POLLY BARTON is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. Her translations include Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are , Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job , and Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden . In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for her debut book Fifty Sounds . Her second book, Porn: An Oral History , is forthcoming. Essay Japan 19th Apr 2025 On That Note: Who is Next? 5th MAR Chats Ep. 10 · On Ambition, Immigration, Class in “Gold Diggers” 21st JUN The Craft of Writing in Occupied Kashmir 24th JAN

“The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Sea “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” Mai Ishizawa · Polly Barton It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. How should we carry with us the memories of those who had disappeared to the other side of time? Was it a case of endlessly tracing their contours in our memories, until their names were eventually rubbed away, forgotten? The sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. How should we carry with us the memories of those who had disappeared to the other side of time? Was it a case of endlessly tracing their contours in our memories, until their names were eventually rubbed away, forgotten? The sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (New Directions, March 2025). Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Essay Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Polly Barton Survivors Earthquakes Memory Trauma Sensory Identity Seascapes Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Fiction Ecology Environmental Disaster Gottingen's Scale Solar System Iconography Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Fiction Poetry Akutagawa Prize MAI ISHIZAWA a was born in 1980 in Sendai City, Japan, and currently lives in Germany. Her debut novel, The Place of Shells , won the Akutagawa Prize. POLLY BARTON is a writer and Japanese translator based in Bristol. Her translations include Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are , Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job , and Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden . In 2019, she won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for her debut book Fifty Sounds . Her second book, Porn: An Oral History , is forthcoming. 19 Apr 2025 Essay Japan 19th Apr 2025 Ghostmother Aria Pahari 10th Apr Who is Next? Noor Bakhsh · Qasum Faraz · Sajid Hussain 5th Mar Dukkha Sumana Roy 4th Jul Chats Ep. 10 · On Ambition, Immigration, Class in “Gold Diggers” Sanjena Sathian 21st Jun The Craft of Writing in Occupied Kashmir Huzaifa Pandit 24th Jan On That Note:

· BOOKS & ARTS Essay · Japan Into the Sea “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (New Directions, March 2025). Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. How should we carry with us the memories of those who had disappeared to the other side of time? Was it a case of endlessly tracing their contours in our memories, until their names were eventually rubbed away, forgotten? The sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Polly Barton Survivors Earthquakes Memory Trauma Sensory Identity Seascapes Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Fiction Ecology Environmental Disaster Gottingen's Scale Solar System Iconography Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Fiction Poetry Akutagawa Prize 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. 19th Apr 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

“The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Sea “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” GENERAL ESSAY AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (New Directions, March 2025). Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa (New Directions, March 2025). Cover design and illustration by Janet Hansen. Image Courtesy StudioM1. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Essay Japan 19th Apr 2025 Essay Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Polly Barton Survivors Earthquakes Memory Trauma Sensory Identity Seascapes Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Fiction Ecology Environmental Disaster Gottingen's Scale Solar System Iconography Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Fiction Poetry Akutagawa Prize 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. It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. How should we carry with us the memories of those who had disappeared to the other side of time? Was it a case of endlessly tracing their contours in our memories, until their names were eventually rubbed away, forgotten? The sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). 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

“The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” BOOKS & ARTS Into the Sea AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Essay Japan Japanese Literature Translation Debut Novel Mai Ishizawa Polly Barton Survivors Earthquakes Memory Trauma Sensory Identity Seascapes Seam Contemporary Literature Melancholy Tender Imagery Fiction Ecology Environmental Disaster Gottingen's Scale Solar System Iconography Time & Space Magical Realism Literary Fiction Poetry Akutagawa Prize 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 Essay Japan 19th Apr 2025 It isn’t just images that become memories. Different parts of my body stored up memories, which they silently retained. Those afterimages carried that way in the body would most likely never be erased. Skin cells regenerate periodically, becoming new, but the time that passed after the earthquake and sensations from that period seemed to linger on, as a transparent layer on my skin. And yet, when I tried to pass beyond my memories, all I could see was a two-dimensional whiteness. Connecting together all my physical memories only left me with a dense accumulation of fragments—I never managed to summon up a complete picture of that day. The attributes of the memories held by each part of my body may have been a part of me, but I couldn’t combine them into any self-identifying symbols, like those of the saints. Being in a place so far away from the sea and nuclear power plants had loosened my grip on my memories of that day, obscuring my connection to them. Eventually, this sea inside me was overlayed by images of numerous paintings, which yielded new impressions. My connotations with the sea came to include those folds of pale green out of which Botticelli’s Venus rose; Caspar David Friedrich’s desolate icy sea, with the blue-black shape of the wanderer gazing out mutely at it; the sea as rendered by the impressionists, with its musical depiction of the particles of light and color dancing there; Canaletto’s sea inextricably bound to his crisp renditions of Venice; and then the peaceful blue gaze of the sea meeting the sky in Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus. This final version merged with the sea as Nomiya had described it. The peaceful times before dawn, or after sunset. The dialogues in blue that one witnessed there. Even as it served as a giant mirror reflecting the sky through which the colors flowed and passed, the powerful force of its current eddied and whirled around beneath. Yet the impressions making up this stratum had been swallowed up by the sea that March, and had vanished. None of my own memories of water were violent. I was one of those who’d watched those video clips of the sea as it destroyed everything—those scenes of destruction shown repeatedly on TV and online. That weighty gray, white and black mass surging through the town, growing heavier with the things it acquired along the way, forming new masses, encroaching still further. Watching these videos, my eyes superimposed on Nomiya’s final moments, which they’d never actually seen. Those scenes of agony that my eyes took in, the spatial and temporal holes gaping wide open in a way that could never be depicted in a painting, covering over all my other connotations. What I saw in those photos and videos hadn’t integrated with the impressions of the sea that lived inside me. Now, there wasn’t so much as a trace remaining of the pool I’d visited as a child. The pine forest, too, had been irrevocably damaged by the sea’s violence. Since seeing the destruction, the places that I’d visited had been ripped apart into tiny fragments, which returned my gaze in inert silence. This was the silence of words that had been stewing for too long. The severed words of the dead, the words of the survivors which now had no place to go—these lay soaking endlessly inside me alongside the voices in my memories. As I looked at the city, the place I’d once lived would quietly flicker past, a pale shadow. There, memories of the sea’s violence assumed particular shapes: monuments attesting to the dangers of tsunamis, the remains of a school where many people had lost their lives. How should we carry with us the memories of those who had disappeared to the other side of time? Was it a case of endlessly tracing their contours in our memories, until their names were eventually rubbed away, forgotten? The sea, which contained so many like Nomiya who’d never returned, didn’t bear their names—it was always people’s memories that did so. Nine years later, they continued searching, quietly yet unceasingly, to bring home the dead who had vanished into the sea. Even knowing that the city of Göttingen contained dark, bitter elements to its memories, like the rings of a tree, I was still enticed by the impression it left on me—the twisting alleys and dead-ends that my feet traced, the lush greenery spilling forth, the movement of all kinds of shadow patterns woven by the sun. Wandering around someplace, without any particular focal point, letting my eyes roam across the scenery in front of me, I would find a portrait of the city, of that particular location rising up before me. When I saw a new face of this kind that I couldn’t comprehend except through my feet, my eyes would do their best to understand how it had shifted over time. The multiple faces buried within the strata comprising numerous eras and memories would merge, then peel apart. The city reflected those different faces in flashes, like the blinking of an eye—including the face from that time when it had been known by those three characters, 月沈原. Tracing the portraits from various times with my eyes, my feet kept on pushing forward, until I reached a white plastered building with a red wooden frame creating a geometric pattern. This was the Junkernschänke—squires’ tavern—which dated back to the fifteenth century. The building had changed expression through the decades depending on its owner: from private accommodation to a vacant house, from a hardware business to a wine dealership. Its traditional wooden structure had sustained considerable damage in the March 1945 air raid, but over time, repairs had restored it to its original form. The walls were decorated with pictures rendered in multicolored wood, a number of faces peering out from small circular portraits. The sets of eyes peering out from those portholes onto a distant time belonged to seven astrological gods: those for the planets from Mercury through to Saturn—excluding Earth—plus those of the Sun and the Moon. Coincidentally enough, the seven planets as they were classified at the time of the geocentric system were preserved here, right inside the old town. The swords, scepters, bows, and other objects that the gods bore so carefully were drawn according to traditional symbolism. Here, too, their attributes protected them from anonymity, bringing their names into relief.∎ Excerpted from The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa, translated by Polly Barton (New Directions, March 2025). 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:

These reflections do not aim to present a neat list of 2024’s "best" books or "essential reads." Instead, they are fragments of what stayed with us; works that lingered and called us back. · BOOKS & ARTS Editorial · Global These reflections do not aim to present a neat list of 2024’s "best" books or "essential reads." Instead, they are fragments of what stayed with us; works that lingered and called us back. Digital Illustration by Iman Iftikhar. SAAG’s 2024 In Reading Reading in 2024 often felt like fumbling for grounding amidst relentless upheaval. At times, it offered escape and solace. At others, it demanded grappling, interrogation, and a necessary confrontation. Whether through poetry, history, fiction, or essays, our reading this year insisted on engagement: on seeing, feeling, and remembering to live, even when it felt unbearable. These reflections do not aim to present a neat list of 2024’s "best" books or "essential reads." Instead, they are fragments of what stayed with us: works that lingered and called us back. Our favorites include a novel set in Baltimore tracing the lives of the Palestinian diaspora, texts that provide much needed clarity on revolutionary politics, a quiet yet searing study of sound and space, some comfort reads, and much more. These books held mirrors to the year and world we lived through, compelling us to look even closer when we could not look away. Here, in the voices of those who read and felt with these works, we share not only our most loved reads of the year but the struggles they opened up for us, allowing us to see anew. #1 I have an enduring love for novels that are political yet rise above preachiness or self-absorption to deliver an actual narrative. This year, I needed something visceral to help process the anger I carried: at the personally testing situations I faced over the past year, at myself, at politics everywhere, and at the state of the world we inhabit. My mind feels oversaturated by the relentless stream of online clickbaity content, which so often tells you how to feel rather than inviting you to actually think. My two favourite novels from my year in reading are Chain-Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel . Fiction, though it might seem an escape from reality on the surface, teaches imagination and heart like nothing else. Reading about people in combat—be it dystopian televised death matches among the incarcerated or teenage girl boxers—transported me this year to worlds where I could quietly take stock of do-or-die battles: from the expansive and deadly to the taut and fleeting. — Zoya Rehman, Associate Editor #2 Although I had a thinner reading year in general, I waited quite excitedly for the release of Poor Artists , a hybrid work of fiction and non-fiction by art writing duo The White Pube (Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente). It follows a young brown artist in the UK named Quest Talukdar and includes anonymous material from real art world figures. The book is so refreshing, lucid, and plainly radical. As a young person working in the arts in the UK right now, it simultaneously felt crazy and comforting to imagine other ways of being creative under capitalism, with mutual care at the forefront. In short: I am so glad this book exists in published form. — Vamika Sinha, Senior Editor #3 How many ways are there to write histories of a language, or more specifically, histories of a script? In Scripts of Power: Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India , Prachi Deshpande outlines at least two methods, weaving a fascinating history of Modi writing, a cursive Marathi script that has, since the early 20th century, fallen into disuse. There’s a cherished dogma among some South Asians who see the subcontinental patchwork of regional linguistic blocs as somehow more organic an entity than the bloc of nation-states that we have today. The book makes one wonder how true that is. My second pick, Thomas S. Mullaney’s book on the Chinese computer , is a direct descendent of his earlier work on the Chinese typewriter (which carries one of my favorite acknowledgments of any academic monograph; it begins: “What is your problem?”). This one asks how different generations of engineers, enthusiasts, eccentrics, and entrepreneurs tried to solve the fundamental problem of computing in Chinese: how does one input a language with no alphabet into a digital computer? Lastly, I chose Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals by Ronnie Grinberg , partly because it is about a bunch of people who read, wrote for, and edited longform, literary-political magazines based out of New York (much like SAAG), and were interested in engaging with the world through argument. And partly because I have a weakness for anything having to do with the midcentury, Partisan Review-Commentary-Encounter crowd. Grinberg’s book, thankfully, is a refreshing departure from the exhausted genre that is the lament for the decline of (often New York-based) public intellectuals. — Shubhanga Pandey, Senior Editor #4 This year, every book I read felt like a knock-out including: Animal by Dorothea Lasky , Yellowface by R.F. Kuang , Letters to a Writer of Color edited by Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro , Fling Diction by Frances Canon , Riambel by Priya Hein , Dumb Luck and Other Poems by Christine Kitano , Letter to the Father by Franz Kafka , Another Word for Love by Carvell Wallace , Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen , A Fish Growing Lungs by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn , and The Psychology of Supremacy by Dwight Turner , among many others. Each book I read challenged and changed my approach to creative writing craft, human psychology, how we process social trauma, and what we can learn from community, as well as demanding systemic change. One poetry collection that showed me how form could explode on the page and how polyvocality and the acknowledgment of our ancestors could be conveyed was JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies . The collection plays with the idea of “Master of Ceremonies” as someone who both entertains and has authority over the stage. With his stutter, Ellis has difficulty pronouncing “master” (which then becomes “aster” in his work). Throughout the collection, Ellis interrogates the notion of the master, both as the figurehead who controls the lives of others, often under authoritarian or tyrannical rule, and as a symbol of accomplishment and the mastery of craft. — Rita Banerjee, Fiction Editor #5 2024 has been a difficult reading year for me because of the state of the world. I often relied on comfort reads, including contemporary romances and "romantasies," but even within these genres, I encountered books that were surprising, thoughtful, and heartbreaking. A series I became hooked on was Wolfsong by TJ Klune (Green Creek, #1), which was both difficult and troubling to read (many trigger warnings), yet its writing wore its heart on its sleeve—it was raw, unabashed, and unrestrained. That's why I appreciate love stories—they give the reader permission to feel all the uncomfortable, awkward, dramatic, and unrestrained emotions. Ali Hazelwood was my favorite go-to read in contemporary romances. Another kind of comfort came from revisiting decades-old books. I read older Kazuo Ishiguro books and re-read Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet , drawn by their effortless, soothing prose, even when the novels explored difficult situations. Two books stood out to me this year. First, Minor Detail by Adania Shibli . The novel begins in 1949, through the perspective of an Israeli soldier. As the story unfolds, small, seemingly "minor" details catch his eye, details that take on deeper meaning as the novel shifts to the perspective of a Palestinian woman in the present day. The sense of dread builds slowly but relentlessly. It is a difficult read; many trigger warnings for rape, violence, and sexual assault. I also loved The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley . This year, while leaning into lighthearted romances for a mental health break, this novel struck the perfect balance—lighthearted in moments, but deeply moving and beautifully written. The story follows a bureaucrat hired to work in a study and keep an eye on an "expat" that the government has brought from history: Graham Gore, who originally died on a doomed Arctic expedition in the 1800s. The novel broke my heart, transformed me, made me laugh, and gasp. I could not put it down. — Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, Senior Editor #6 2024 wasn’t a year for pleasure reading; it was a year for intentional reading. Scrambling to decide what to read, compounded by the weight of world events, brought into focus all the things I knew I didn’t know. This year, I actively sought out new sources of information, embracing a practical and necessary discomfort. That commitment began with the search for knowledge about a region my research focuses on: Central Asia. I happened upon one of the best reads of the year, The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road by Xin Wen . This 300-page deep dive into the history and culture of the Silk Road examines ancient trade and cultural exchanges during a distinctive age of exploration. Wen argues that diplomacy–unlike how we see or use it today–was central to fostering dialogue, trade, and mutual respect, all while navigating conflict without resorting to war. If you love history, travel, economics, or international relations, this one's for you. The idea of traversing conflict without resorting to war was also the focus of a graduate course I completed just two days ago. Another favorite read of the year, spurred by our course discussions, was Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work by Laura Robson . I kept returning to this book all throughout term; every time I opened it, there was a new thread to follow. In this 250-page work, Robson examines how capital is often prioritised over human dignity, showing how economic forces undermine individual security and lead to physical, emotional, and psychological dislocation. And what kind of reading year would it be without a novel? In The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai , I was confronted with despair, power, and the fragility of society. This atmospheric novel taught me how to confront the eerie wonders of the world while living under the looming shadow of societal collapse. — Nazish Chunara, Associate Editor #7 I loved Border and Rule by Harsha Walia . With microscopic clarity, and a postcolonial lens, Walia’s book is an indictment of the smoke-and-mirrors narratives used by states to obfuscate the horrible realities of displacement, forced migration, and statelessness. These realities, Walia argues, are hardwired into today’s capitalist and insidiously racist border control systems of Western capitals. The book further demonstrates how these practices, benefiting a few while exploiting those on the move, are being deployed by Middle Powers in the so-called Global South—such as the UAE, India, and Brazil—against the backdrop of rising populism and the widening gulf between rich and poor. — Mushfiq Mohamed, Senior Editor #8 As South Asians, we are all acutely familiar with the India-Pakistan hegemony on the intellectual discourse in the region (language, caste, class, ethnicity, and gender, of course, further complicate who from within these regions gets to speak, if at all). Particularly, as a Pakistani woman, rarely have I had an opportunity to concertedly engage with literature by Bengali, Nepalese, Tamil, or Malayali (to name a few) writers from beyond the Hindu/Urdu-speaking world. In 2024, I sought to change this and read translated writing from across the South Asian diaspora. In particular, I would like to recommend Hospital by Sanya Rushdi –a short yet powerful novel exploring the psychosis experienced by a young Bangladeshi woman in a psychiatric facility in Melbourne. I also loved Ten Days of The Strike by Sandipan Chattopadhyay , with the titular essay serving as a powerful reminder of the politics of shitting. In general, a Bengali translation by Arunava Sinha , I realised, will never disappoint a reader. Honorary mentions among my SA reading list include: Password and Other Stories by Appadurai Muttulingam , and the award-winning Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshanathan . — Iman Iftikhar, Associate Editor #9 More than any other year, 2024 left me feeling like I don't know anything about my world. More often than not, I didn't have the vocabulary and, more disturbingly, the emotional-spiritual bandwidth to articulate or sit with what was/is happening in the world and how it can/could/should impact how I move through life. I learned a lot from reading Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv, Human Acts by Han Kang , Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, and the poetry and writing Shripad Sinnakaar shared on social media. These writers gave me words, feelings, and narrative clarity to sustain my engagement with the world and not shut it out in the face of incomprehension. — Esthappen S., Drama Editor #10 I’ve been reflecting a lot on sound and space this year. Live Audio Essays by Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a collection of transcribed and edited texts from the performances and films he has written and compiled. Moving through excerpt-like recounts, it situates sound through text, blending anecdote with punctuated investigations. It’s a fascinating push to think more deeply about how sound is interpreted and engaged with in different contexts, from the power of sumud to police tip-offs to studying the biological effects of noise pollution. Over the summer, I visited Autograph in London to see Ernest Cole: A Lens in Exile , curated by Mark Sealy . This remarkable exhibition presented images from Cole’s time in New York and his travels around the USA during his exile from South Africa in the 1960s. I also appreciated the catalogue-style book accompanying the exhibition, The True America: Photographs by Ernest Cole , and Raoul Peck’s documentary, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found . While working in Paris, I attended Offprint . I had sternly instructed myself to just look and not buy more books(!), but then a small, palm-sized, monotone blue book caught my eye. Hold the Sound: Notes on Auditories , edited by Justine Stella Knuchel and Jan Steinbach, is a compilation of texts by artists and researchers attempting to encapsulate descriptions of sound. The book gathers words by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, John Cage, Mosab Abu Toha, Sun Ra, and many others. On my way out I squealed embarrassingly—like an auntie remarking on how much I’ve grown—when I saw Luvuyo Nyawose’s eBhish’ . — Clare Patrick, Art Editor #11 This year, I read in the hour or so I had while our one-year-old slept and I could still keep my eyes open. Reading was both urgent, pressurized by the devastating plight of Palestinians, and a moment to breathe: a space for contemplation, and to feel. I read history, horror, and grief, grief, grief. Rarely is political analysis as exhilarating as in my first favourite read of 2024: The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad , edited by Carollee Bengelsoorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani . From revolutionary movements to “pathologies of power” to Palestine, the Cold War, and Pakistan-India, Ahmad’s insights are crystal clear, provocative, moral, and startlingly prescient. I want to emphasize the clarity of his writing, perhaps owed to his pedagogy as a teacher. I meant to read the selections but ended up reading it straight through. My second pick is The Singularity by Balsam Karam (translated by Saskia Vogel) . In an unnamed coastal city, a refugee woman searches for her daughter until, in despair, she leaps to her death, an act witnessed by another woman who narrates this aching, fragmentary testimony of grief–for children, for home. Lastly, [...] by Fady Joudah : what we read this year, we read through a genocide. Fady’s scathing poems left no brutality or complicity unnamed while speaking with tender sorrow to the dead and wounded. If nothing else, listen to Fady read Dedication here . — Ahsan Butt, Fiction Editor #12 I would like to offer Behind You Is the Sea , a novel by Susan Muaddi Darraj. Released in January 2024, just months after the events of October 7, Darraj’s novel follows three Palestinian American families in Baltimore. Its tender, nuanced characterizations of women and men, young and old, navigating their place in a city burdened by legacies of racial, economic, and legal apartheid, offer an honest exploration of immigrant life in America. Although written before the current conflict in Gaza and Occupied Palestine, it reminds us of the generational trauma and resilience that all Palestinians in the diaspora carry with them. — Aditya Desai, Advisory Editor #13 This year, I loved Sahar Romani’s poetry chapbook, The Opening , a beautiful, tender collage of poems on family, love, and coming into yourself, and into the world. For fiction, I recommend two very different books. When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is a speculative fiction novella by Hugo Award-winning author Nghi Vo. It’s wildly inventive, lyrically written, menacing, beautiful, and queer. Also, on the novella tip, Berlin-based Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail stunned me. Written in clear, marching prose, its focus on minor details, set against the backdrop of occupation, sexual violence, death, and exile, is a portrait and a protest. In nonfiction, I loved: 1) Inciting Joy , a book of essays by Ross Gay, each one luminous with generosity, perceptiveness, and yes, joy. 2) Come Together by sex researcher Emily Nagoski, about sex in long-term relationships, though my biggest takeaway came from two chapters on the gender mirage (women as givers, men as winners) and how this construct within our patriarchal society undermines and destroys heterosexual relationships. 3) Poverty by America is sociologist Matthew Desmond’s heartbreaking follow-up to his even sadder book, Eviction . I grew up middle class, and it was infuriating and eye-opening–I’d recommend it to anyone, especially if you didn’t grow up poor. 4) Sex with a Brain Injury by Annie Liontas was another revelation, giving me enormous empathy for those with acute brain injuries (more common than you know!) and all their attendant furies. 5) Last but certainly not least, I listened to All About Love by African American legend bell hooks, twice, back to back, as the American election season came to a terrifying close. In 2025, I want to internalize hooks’ commitment to love as an ethic—in the family, in friendships, in the workplace, and in politics. — Abeer Hoque, Senior Editor With love, gratitude, and in solidarity — The Editors SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Editorial Global Fiction Non-fiction Poetry 2024 in Reading Chain-Gang All Stars Poor Artists Write Like a Man Yellowface Scripts of Power Aster of Ceremonies Wolfsong The Melancholy of Resistance Border & Rule Literature Literature & Liberation Marathi Ten Days of The Strike Strangers to Ourselves Ernest Cole Lawrence Abu Hamdan The Singularity Fady Joudah Palestine Palestine Diaspora Behind You Is the Sea When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain Sex with a Brain Injury From the Editors Arts Academia Accessibility Creativity Under Capitalism Art Criticism The White Pube Rita Bullwinkel Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Prachi Deshpande Cultural History History Chinese Technology Thomas S. Mullaney Ronnie Grinberg Dorothea Laskey R.F. Kuang Deepa Anappara Taymour Soomro Frances Canon Priya Hein Kafka Christine Kitano Carvell Wallace Kenzie Allen Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn Dwight Turner JJJJJerome Ellis Polyvocality New York Public Intellectuals Kazuo Ishiguro TJ Clune Ali Hazelwood Adania Shibli Kaliane Bradley Human Capital Xin Wen Laura Robson László Krasznahorkai Harsha Walia Sanya Rushdi Sandipan Chattopadhyay Bengali V.V. Ganeshanathan Appadurai Muttulingam Hospital Brotherless Night Arunava Sinha Ten Days of the Strike Border and Rule Han Kang Rachel Aviv Shripad Sinnakaar Human Acts Mark Sealy Raoul Peck Live Audio Essays Offprint Apichatpong Weerasethakul Sun Ra Justine Stella Knuchel Hold the Sound: Notes on Auditories Justine Steinbach Balsam Karam Saskia Vogel Luvuyo Nyawose Susan Muaddi Darraj Sahar Romani Chapbook Nghi Vo Ross Gay Emily Nagoski Annie Liontas bell hooks 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 Dec 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 2 · On Teen Drama On teenage trauma, teen drama TV shows as a genre and their personal impact, and the absence of age as a fundamental analytic in theorizing human behavior as they pertain to an in-progress essay. Kamil Ahsan A live reading & discussion of an unpublished essay by Kamil Ahsan called “Teen Drama”, with Ahsan Butt. A live reading & discussion of an unpublished essay by Kamil Ahsan called “Teen Drama”, with Ahsan Butt. SUB-HEAD ​ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Live Lahore In-Progress Trauma Teenagers TV Drama Genre Genre Tropes Teenagehood and Death Skins Gossip Girl The OC Broadcast Television Age Essayistic Practice Essay Form Theoretical Analytics Theory Advertising Agency Ambition Identity Banality 1990s Nineties Kids Class Concepts Contradiction Suicide Centering the Silly Characterization Defiance Depictions of Grief Despair Kamil Ahsan is an environmental historian at Yale, a Franke Fellow in Science and the Humanities, and the founder of SAAG. He is also an essayist and critic currently based in New Haven, Lahore, and New York. 20 Nov 2020 Live Lahore 20th Nov 2020 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 2 · On Teen Drama Kamil Ahsan On teenage trauma, teen drama TV shows as a genre and their personal impact, and the absence of age as a fundamental analytic in theorizing human behavior as they pertain to an in-progress essay. A live reading & discussion of an unpublished essay by Kamil Ahsan called “Teen Drama”, with Ahsan Butt. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Live Lahore In-Progress Trauma Teenagers TV Drama Genre Genre Tropes Teenagehood and Death Skins Gossip Girl The OC Broadcast Television Age Essayistic Practice Essay Form Theoretical Analytics Theory Advertising Agency Ambition Identity Banality 1990s Nineties Kids Class Concepts Contradiction Suicide Centering the Silly Characterization Defiance Depictions of Grief Despair Kamil Ahsan is an environmental historian at Yale, a Franke Fellow in Science and the Humanities, and the founder of SAAG. He is also an essayist and critic currently based in New Haven, Lahore, and New York. Live Lahore 20th Nov 2020 On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct