INTERACTIVE FLUX · Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval on US Left Electoralism & COVID-19 FLUX: An Evening in Dissent FLUX was held at a peculiar time. In December 2020, there was both during a raging pandemic and following exciting victories by progressive candidates in state elections in the US, including Nikil Saval, former co-editor of n+1 , to PA State Senate. Tisya Mavuram and Kamil Ahsan convened with Sen. Nikil Saval and longtime socialist Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant to talk about the future of left politics, relations with the Democratic Party, and the pandemic. In Philadelphia, on the actual city budget level, the [Defund the police] movement's ability to win the cuts it demanded did not succeed, as it didn't in many other cities. But what did happen, it is important to highlight, was a protest encampment of the unhoused on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway which is very near to the Art Museum, a symbolic institution of the city. It's one of the richest and most subsidized areas of the city. It's rich because it has been made to be rich. So to have this encampment protesting for housing was a physical challenge to the housing in the city, including the shelter system, which is in shambles. Despite attempts by elected officials, the encampments were able to secure the transfer of city-owned property to a community land trust. This was unprecedented in Philadelphia history. It doesn't meet the actual need, but it begins to pioneer how movements can work with officials on the left in city government, coming from an abolitionist impulse. Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading Jaishri Abichandani's Art Studio Tour Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Bhavik Lathia & Jaya Sundaresh: A panel on the US Left & its relationship with media in the wake of Bernie Sanders' loss. Rajiv Mohabir: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors DJ Kiran: A Celebratory Set ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the event in full in on IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Event Panel COVID-19 Recall Efforts Democratic Party Progressive Politics Electoral Politics Accommodationism Bernie Sanders Socialist Alternative State Senate Local Politics Local vs. National Politics Washington Pennsylvania City Council Races State Senate Races Centrism Right-Wing Assault Amazon Gentrification Criminal Negligence Fighting the Two-Party System Migrant Workers Stimulus Package Legitimacy of the Capitalist System Demographics The Guise of Bipartisanship Capitalist Class Reactionary Democratic Elites Nancy Pelosi Chuck Schumer Insider Negotiation Standards of Living Minimum Wage Democratic Establishment Post-George Floyd Moment George Floyd Anti-Racism Mass Protests Amazon Tax Corporation Taxation Labor Movement Racial Justice Tax Cuts for the Rich Primarying Centrist Democrats Defund the Police Abolitionism Minneapolis Police Departments Mayoralties Pledges to Defund Police Career Politicians Budget Votes Movement Organization Movement Strategy Seattle Activist Politics Black Lives Matter Democratic Socialists of America Ballot Initiative Housing Municipal Politics Shelter System Encampments of the Unhoused Negotiating Directly with Philadelphia City City-Owned Properties Land Trusts Leftist Media Magazine Culture n+1 Hospitality Workers Growth of Left Media FLUX Philadelphia Seattle City Councils Labor SENATOR NIKIL SAVAL is a father, husband, writer, and organizer. Saval’s organizing is deeply rooted in the labor movement. From 2009 to 2013, he was a volunteer labor organizer with UNITE HERE. In 2016, he was a leader in U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. He went on to co-found Reclaim Philadelphia, in 2018, he was elected as Leader of Philadelphia’s Democratic Second Ward. Saval was the first Asian American to hold the position of Ward Leader in Philadelphia. He previously served as co-editor of the literary journal n+1 and still serves on its board of directors. He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times and a contributing writer for The New Yorker , covering architecture, design, and housing. His is the author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (2014). KSHAMA SAWANT is a socialist activist, organizer, a member of Socialist Alternative, in solidarity with the Committee for a Workers' International. A visible presence in the Occupy Movement, and American Federation of Teachers Local 1789. She has been in office since 2014 when she was elected to the Seattle City Council on a platform of a $15/hr minimum wage, rent control and taxing the super-rich to fund mass transit and education. In 2014, she became the first socialist elected in a major US city in decades. Event Panel 5th Dec 2020 Nikil Saval · Kshama Sawant Where do radical movements stand in the US? In December 2020, Kshama Sawant and Nikil Saval took stock of the response to the COVID-19 crisis at the federal, state, and city levels and discussed the many failures of two-party politics. But the movements for housing, defunding the police, and taxing corporations in Seattle & Philadelphia are also deploying innovative and unprecedented organizing strategies, most obviously at the local level, that have ramifications for movements across the country. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

FEATURES COVID-19 and Faith in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh In the immediate wake of the COVID-19 crisis, disaster and religion became intertwined for many Rohingya refugees in the camps of Cox's Bazaar, allowing spurious claims to sway a vulnerable population. VOL. 2 ISSUE 1 REPORTAGE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Photograph courtesy of Abu Yousuf Shazid, depicting Dhaka Ahsania Mission (DAM) hand washing station. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Photograph courtesy of Abu Yousuf Shazid, depicting Dhaka Ahsania Mission (DAM) hand washing station. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Reportage Cox's Bazar 27th Feb 2023 Reportage Cox's Bazar Rohingya Refugee Crisis Bangladesh COVID-19 Religion Faith Leaders Intimate Partner Violence Disaster & Faith International Law NGOs Internationalist Perspective Humanitarian Crisis Human Language Longform Literacy 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. COVID-19 IS directly impacting the most vulnerable section of society in Bangladesh—its Rohingya refugees—a community which narrowly survived genocide in their native Myanmar, now subjected to mass displacement in the region. Combined with the impact of Cyclone Amphan and Cyclone Yaas in 2020 and 2021 respectively, Bangladesh’s constant battle with the climate crisis is well-documented. The mass displacement and persecution, however, continue to impact the largely overlooked refugee population. Approximately 1.2 million Rohingya refugees have been living in the 27 camps in two sub-districts of Cox’s Bazar district since 2017. Late last year, there were state-led actions that alarmed both humanitarian and human rights groups. The Government of Bangladesh, in December 2020, began moving Rohingya refugees from Cox’s Bazar to Bhasan Char, a secluded island without adequate healthcare infrastructure or protection against extreme weather events like severe cyclones and tidal surges. So far, more than 20,000 people have been moved, out of the planned 100,000 refugees to the low-lying silt island. Grappling with the effects of double displacement, initially from their home country and now being forcibly shifted from refugee camp to camp, coupled with the uncertainties about their legal status and insecurity over their future in their host country, the plight of the Rohingyas is a humanitarian crisis that shames humanity. Faith and Health of the Rohingya Refugees In 2020, several months of lockdown measures, put in place by the Government of Bangladesh to protect against COVID-19, led to a severe loss of livelihood for many of the country’s vulnerable and poor. In Cox’s Bazar, women-headed households, persons with disability, and elderly people have resorted to strategies that affect their health and well-being. Women and children are eating less nutritious foods and fewer meals in a day, reducing the quantities they eat. These harmful dietary practices are a result of their socio-economic conditions, especially loss of livelihoods and limited food relief during the COVID-19 crisis. It speaks of people on the brink, left to their own devices, and at the mercy of their faith. The Rohingya people are predominantly Muslim. Their community leaders are usually imams and muezzins leading prayers at mosques. As witnessed the world over, several COVID-19 conspiracies were at play. This emerged as the case with both Rohingya and Bengali communities, who turned to faith in trying and testing circumstances and in the face of uncertainty and scant information. These are usually the circumstances in which people who have lost all hope resort to religion. Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar too believed that COVID-19 was a punishment and a test of their faith. Disease and health, thus, became entwined with spirituality, religion, and other spheres of life, including financial struggle. For this article, we interviewed imams, muezzins, women faith actors, and local NGOs who were instrumental in raising awareness on COVID-19 preventive strategies, surveying 100 households from both the Bangladeshi host populations and Rohingya refugees in Camps 15 and 19 in Cox’s Bazar. At the inception of the pandemic, in the throes of fear and insecurity on the ground, there were numerous conspiracies about the government in Bangladesh, just like anywhere else in the world. During Jummah prayers, religious leaders who initially supported fatalistic notions about COVID-19 virus were encouraging people to wash their hands to maintain cleanliness, and to wear masks. In the face of uncertainty and scant information in the pandemic, both Rohingya and Bengali communities turned to their faith in trying and testing circumstances. In 2020, Dhaka Ahsania Mission (DAM) set up a health outpost in Camp 19, and provided basic health services to the people living in the camps. The health staff assisted people with COVID-19-related measures and treatments. The DAM facility had referred 26 suspected cases—22 Rohingya members and 4 villagers—to the nearest hospital, where two positive cases were found amongst the Bengali villagers. The health outpost provided screenings for COVID-19 symptoms and referred them to the hospitals, while for the non-COVID-19 cases they provided treatments. As per the data provided to us by DAM, over 400 patients were treated, consisting of both Rohingya refugees and host community members. An official from DAM mentioned the following about the caseload: "As per health data, there were 367 positive cases and 10 deaths amongst Rohingyas across 32 camps. Within Camp 19, there were five positive cases in refugees and three hospital staff tested positive. Approximately 5,000 positive cases in the host community." This must be viewed within the larger context of limited facilities for testing within the camps in Cox’s Bazar. A medical doctor noted that only 25,000 had been tested so far out of 1.2 million people as of January 2021. Specifically in Camps 15 and 19, there are no sentinel sites. Inside a Rohingya Refugee Camp (RRC) Masjid. Courtesy of Abu Yousuf Shazid Another NGO, Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK), undertook an initiative for public health messaging, generating awareness and providing timely information and discussions with around 700 Rohingya community members. They employed an interesting approach of using public speakers and microphones in the mosques, as well as door-to-door campaigns for providing information on COVID-19 preventive measures. They provided training to community and faith leaders, dispelling some of the rumours and misinformation that were rampantly spreading in these communities. With the collision of science and faith, there were interesting ways in which Rohingyas resisted and adapted to the new circumstances. From an outsider's perspective, it appeared that faith leaders were fatalistic, which percolated amongst other community members participating in our group discussions. Rohingya men and women were concerned that the elderly were susceptible because they did not remain “clean,” presumably concerning their personal hygiene. Many people shared that initially they had lots of misinformation and misbeliefs, believing COVID-19 was an act of God to punish the non-religious. Depending on who their community leaders were, such views would be either contested or encouraged, especially during prayertime. While there is a strong feeling that the pandemic is religiously ordained, a significant proportion of the people still believe it to be as a response to their sins; or nature's response to man's cruelty, or even due to a lack of belief in Islam. There were strong associations between cleanliness and the disease. Several rumours emerged about what causes COVID-19, just as it was commonly observed in countries in the Global South as well as Global North. Qualitative data indicates people received COVID-19 information through social media, public spaces like tea stalls, religious gatherings, and meetings at mosques. While there is a strong feeling that the pandemic is religiously ordained, a significant proportion of the people still believe it to be a response to their sins; or as nature's response to man's cruelty, or even due to a lack of belief in Islam . It is essential to note that these fatalist attitudes were the result of a combination of misinformation, manipulation, and inappropriate channels of information that the Rohingyas had limited access to. In the absence of large-scale humanitarian support, abandoned by their host and persecuted by their native country, the Rohingyas largely relied on their faith to tide over challenging circumstances. Hearing their stories about the painful and arduous journey from Rakhine state to Bangladesh, it is remarkable that these communities continue to thrive and survive in the face of challenging and dire circumstances. They relied on their community leaders, unelected Rohingya called “majhis,” for information and guidance to not only make this journey to Bangladesh but also manoeuvre the flailing political, administrative, and governance structures in the camps. Religious actors & women leaders With the merging of faith and public health, a key group of actors emerged as powerful and influential in changing beliefs and attitudes about COVID-19. Imams and muezzins played a crucial role in promoting healthcare in the Rohingya community, and several humanitarian NGOs relied on these religious leaders to promote preventive messages on COVID-19. Within the Bangladeshi community, the imam is a leader of the community revered for their exemplary adherence to faith. Imams in the Rohingya community play a similar role, and thus it is widely accepted that an imam’s verdict and messages about COVID-19 are sincere and trustworthy. Majhi, although originally a term used to refer to the leader who helped Rohingya refugees flee from Myanmar to Bangladesh, was also the name of the camp in-charge in Cox’s Bazar. The majhi system was initially established by the Bangladeshi authorities to manage the influx of refugees in 2017, but over the years it became an administrative position elected without participation and representation of the Rohingya communities. In effect, majhi were no longer the traditional leaders or elders of the Rohingya communities, and they neither reflected nor represented the voices, needs, and aspirations of these displaced groups. Several NGOs trained and addressed misconceptions held by the imams and muezzins and enlisted their support in delivering COVID-19 messaging during prayers. Interestingly, some imams married scientific facts with religious edicts. A Rohingya teacher said: "Lots of people live here and it is difficult to manage them. If any message and information are needed to deliver to the people, the leaders act as the main role. For NGOs and other officials, it is not possible to reach all people. The leaders also discuss different issues with the officials." Religious gatherings, especially jummah/Friday sermons called by the imam, appear to be the best source of information for the masses. A woman leader, who actively participated in the DSK NGO’s training programmes, noted that every Friday at the time of prayer, the imam discussed how we could be safe from the coronavirus. However, since women do not usually go to the mosques, those who attended the training from DSK would share what they learnt with other women near their homes. She also shared that since schools were closed due to lockdown measures in 2020, they lost out on a vital and reliable source of information. They had to pay approximately 100 takas ($1) per month for school, hence many could not afford going to school. A COVID-19 DSK awareness poster in a refugee camp. Courtesy of Abu Yousuf Shazid There were other information sources that were reported as the highly trusted and least trusted information sources for COVID-19: radios, television, posters, billboards, social media channels, and websites. People relied on social actors from both health and religious institutions, such as community health workers, majhis, imams, madrassa teachers, traditional healers, and members of the Tablighi Jamaat. Some depended on their friends, neighbours, and community health events for health-related information. Of these, community health workers and faith leaders such as majhis, imams, and madrassa teachers emerged as the top three sources of information as reported. Imams and muezzins were considered as trustworthy by the community members. The majhi system was initially established by the Bangladeshi authorities to manage the influx of refugees in 2017 but over the years it became an administrative position elected without participation and representation of the Rohingya communities. In effect, majhi were no longer the traditional leaders or elders of the Rohingya communities, and they neither reflected nor represented the voices and aspirations of these displaced groups. Rohingya members were skeptical about messages received from posters and radio as these did not explain much of the instructions they had to follow. Many times, these were in languages—English or Bengali—they were not able to read or comprehend easily. The lack of educational and literacy programmes for Rohingya refugees is pivotal to understanding Rohingya communities. Rohingya refugees are not allowed to read and write in the local Bengali language. There are no integration programmes available for refugees in Bangladesh, particularly for the Rohingyas. Although the Rohingya language, Ruáingga, has some affinity to the Chittagonian dialect spoken in Cox’s Bazar, many refugees are unable to read and write in Bengali. The refugee members have poor literacy rates due to systemic persecution and lack educational opportunities in Myanmar, and continued negligence in Bangladesh. The access to and continuation of education for Rohingya girls is very limited. Parental attitudes towards education for girls reportedly shift once girls turn ten years old as societal norms may allow girl children to be married. With limited economic means young girls are not enrolled into education programmes run by NGOs in the camps. Their educational attainment levels are well below average after having fled genocide and war in Myanmar, a symptom of the abject exclusion of the Rohingyas from education in both host and home countries. Male teachers provided a different perspective on how religion was limited in its capacity to counter the global coronavirus pandemic. One of the teachers who was interviewed clarified that there is nothing related to COVID-19 in the Quran or Hadith, although Islam asks everyone to stay clean. He went on to reflect how teachers were “trying” to unlearn misinformation that they gathered through various mediums like social media or others. The madrassa teachers also had a role to play in the COVID-19 response. Firstly, teachers from schools or madrassas are very respected people in Rohingya society, an intellectual privilege that allows them an ease in delivering their messages. Rohingya exclusion from society, education, and other opportunities has fed into cynicism over science and outsiders, and they heavily rely on local actors and leaders whom they trust rather than external social workers. While the teachers are involved in the faith-based committee, they also have access to mobile phones which means they can access updated information. Their involvement in the training and awareness programmes has helped NGOs to build trust with refugee community members. This process has been capitalized to deliver COVID-19 preventive messages to the people, through teachers who have a unique way of perceiving and explaining scientific ideas with religion to counter misinformation amongst the people. Rohingya refugees are not allowed to read and write in the local Bengali language. There are no integration programmes available for refugees in Bangladesh particularly for the Rohingyas. Although the Rohingya language, Ruáingga, has some affinity to the Chittagonian dialect spoken in Cox’s Bazar, many refugees are unable to read and write in Bengali. Despite religious leaders being male figures, there were local women leaders who actively participated in religious activities. Although women leaders have lesser authority than their traditional male counterparts, Rohingya women can reach out to women leaders easily. Imams and muezzins did not interact directly with women and children because their religious responsibilities were largely centred around the mosque. An Arabic teaching room in an RRC Masjid. Courtesy of Abu Yousuf Shazid Since women did not have access to religious and educational spaces, they were more likely to have untested misbeliefs and attitudes towards COVID-19. Some women leaders in the Rohingya communities were included in NGO training and were enlisted for house-to-house visits and providing information on COVID-19 preventive steps. However, their numbers are few—most women leaders continue to believe and share their misinformation about COVID-19. For instance, a 35-year-old female leader (name withheld) explained her understanding about the cause of COVID-19 as being an “order from God,” and that we need to keep ourselves “neat and clean” in order to prevent ourselves from being infected. They have little access to information, with limited to no educational opportunities, and are unable to voice their opinions and apprehensions in relief and awareness programmes. Such misinformation is, of course, not limited to Rohingya or Bangladeshi women. In order to stop the flow, the government, humanitarian actors, and media will have to take steps to rule out every possible rumor with scientific fact. This should be accessible and available in several languages, written and orally presented widely. This reveals the fact that women are less considered for group and organized meetings; they remain as passive receptors of information passed onto them by their husbands. This provides fertile ground for the spread of misinformation and misconceptions, often used to suppress women further in such isolating circumstances. There were physical and social barriers that determined the uptake of COVID-19 preventive messages, such as low literacy levels, cultural and linguistic differences between host and refugee communities, and no access to basic health, educational, and livelihood opportunities. Local faith and community leaders can play a vital role in addressing vaccine hesitancy and cultural biases related to vaccine uptake amongst both Bangladeshi and Rohingya communities. Since women did not have access to religious and educational spaces, they were more likely to have untested misbeliefs and attitudes towards COVID-19. Some women leaders in the Rohingya communities were included in NGO training and were enlisted for house-to-house visits and providing information on COVID-19 preventive steps. However, their numbers are few. Gender experts are also alarmed at the increased rates of domestic violence during the pandemic. There have been numerous cases of intimate partner violence against women isolated with abusive partners. Women’s responsibilities and workload were overburdened as men were barred from going out during lockdown. COVID-19 has had a huge impact on women’s rights and their access to justice. There are strict restrictions imposed on them, which became stricter during the pandemic: limited movement outside the home and adherence to follow instructions. Several rumours reported by Rohingyas were shared by a senior official from DAM NGO during a telephone interview. "Rohingya people were scared. They used to say: 'If we go to the health post, we will be sent to Bishan Char island, or we may go missing. We may even be killed.” The official interpreted these rumours as symbolic of a genuine mistrust between the health system and refugee populations. However, they reflect the harsh realities of the Rohingyas who have no one to turn to and who fear further persecution from authorities, constantly coming across government initiatives that push them further into destitution. The Future of Humanitarianism in Cox’s Bazar No country was prepared to face such a pandemic, and yet, for persecuted communities like the Rohingyas, these uncertainties and health emergencies are symptomatic of a larger phenomenon that isolates, negates, and further reproduces the injustice and unfair conflict that they have faced not only with the government authorities. Misinformation and mistrust is not a unique phenomenon to the Rohingyas but it is important to unpack why people are peddling conspiracy theories instead—lack of information, spread of disinformation campaigns on social media and the Internet, and politicians and society leaders questioning the severity of the pandemic while silencing the needs and voices of Rohingya refugees. On September 29, 2021, Mohibullah, 46, chair of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH), was shot and killed by unidentified gunmen in Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Several human rights and NGO workers have criticized this killing as not only silencing Rohingya voices, but also refusing to have a dialogue with the refugees for their safe future, either in Bangladesh or in a safe return to Myanmar. Many believe that the non-state actor Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), an armed group present in the camp, is responsible for this violent and gruesome murder. With disarray in camps and limited resources from humanitarian actors, violence has become rampant, resulting in murders and abductions. It is the responsibility of government authorities to ensure the protection of people in the camps, including refugees, activists, and humanitarian workers from both the Rohingya and local community, many of whom have shared concerns about their safety. Any humanitarian effort should build on an understanding of the underlying drivers of conflict, violence, and issues affecting social cohesion within the local Bangladeshi communities in Cox’s Bazar. Social cohesion factors such as a sense of social or group identity, sense of community, and attachment to place can be important adaptation drivers when considering how populations respond to public health and other crises. These factors, together with community-based leadership, including faith-based leadership, can play an important role in the development and increasing social bonds central to Rohingya capacities when confronting COVID-19 and a range of other hazards. Mapping out power relations and structures within and beyond the Rohingya community could help meaningfully engage with the persecuted minority. The battle for citizenship and statehood for Rohingyas is long and dates to colonial history and negligence by Burmese authorities. While these groups await their uncertain future, it is the responsibility and mandate of neighbouring countries like India and Bangladesh to be proactive and participatory in their approaches to the needs of this population. While the humanitarian world debates whether Myanmar is culpable for the genocide of the Rohingyas, their day-to-day needs and lived realities can no longer be brushed under the carpet or silenced through more violence. ∎ 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

Jaishri Abichandani JAISHRI ABICHANDANI has intertwined studio and social practice, art and activism in her career, founding the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) in New York (1997) and London (2004). Abichandani has exhibited internationally including at P.S.1/MoMA, the Queens Museum of Art, and Asia Society in New York, 798 Beijing Biennial and Guangzhou Triennial in China, IVAM in Valencia, Spain, and the House of World Cultures in Berlin. She served as the founding Director of Public Events and Projects from 2003-06 at the Queens Museum of Art, where she organized Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now, Queens International 2006: Everything All at Once , and curated Her Stories: Fifteen Years of SAWCC . In 2017, Abichandani engineered a collaboration between the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Asia Society and the Queens Museum to organize a three-day national convening of South Asian American artists, academics and curators; along with the exhibition Lucid Dreams and Distant Visions , in which she was a co-curator and a participating artist. In 2019, Abichandani organized a trilogy of exhibitions to inaugurate the Ford Foundation Gallery: Perilous Bodies, Radical Love, and Utopian Imagination centered the visions of BIPOC artists. Abichandani’s work is in the Burger Collection, Asia Art Archive Collection, and Saatchi Collection. She has been a resident of LMCC’s Process Space residency and an honoree of the Brooklyn Arts Council and ASHA for Women. She was awarded grants by the FST Studio Projects fund and the Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2021. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Iman Iftikhar Iman Iftikhar is a student historian, artist and educator. Currently she manages Kitab Ghar and is an editor for Folio Books. She is based in New Haven and Lahore. ASSOCIATE EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

THE VERTICAL The Cost of Risk in Bombay’s Film Industry Since Manto's time, screenwriters have been battling studios that prioritise commercial interests, political imperatives, and profits over original, meaningful storytelling. SWA, the trade union for screenwriters, is at the frontlines of screenwriters chafing against the inequalities and wage theft that stifle artistic expression in Bombay's film industry. Nihira Saadat Hassan Manto, a luminary of Urdu literature, once embarked on a hunger strike. It was the early 1940s, and the writer was working for one hundred rupees a month under the Bombay-based film director and producer Nanubhai Desai . Manto asked Desai for pending wages and additional money to rent out a flat for his new bride and himself. Desai refused, and Manto resigned. In an essay on the film critic Baburao Patel, Manto wrote about the beginning of his hunger strike on the steps of Desai’s production studio. Later, with Patel’s help, he recovered a little more than half of his pending dues. The pay seemed too meagre for too little in return, with many of Manto’s scripts never even making it to production because of their radical nature. This isn’t just a story from a time when critics had enough muscle in the industry to wrestle producers into paying writers. It is also a story of precarity. It depicts the tenuous relationship between screenwriters and the screens they write for, neither of which are unique to Manto’s career nor an artefact of the past. This disempowerment is the reason why contemporary films feel ill-equipped to respond to urgent questions. Current industry conditions resemble that of the 1940s: financial backing for subversive cinematic concepts is hard to come by, especially without a major star. In a decidedly censorial political climate and hostile communal environment, writers increasingly face complicated legal and social backlash. Creativity is not incentivised. It’s a liability. The lack of creativity present in Bombay talkies during Manto’s tenure did not go unnoticed. Around the time of his hunger strike, the leading film magazine FilmIndia published a hit piece on the standardised format of Bombay cinema. It denounced “Indian screenwriters” as carrying “little originality” and producers as lacking “imagination completely.” An article edited by Baburao Patel declared that producers “imitate others too often.” For example, the “sensational success” of Pukar (1939) gave way to period dramas and historical fiction, and the popularity of Leila Majnu (1945) enabled the “rise of an epidemic of new love themes.” If a particular genre worked, the industry would churn out movies of the same cut until the fad petered out and a new concept supplanted it. Creative risks were scarce and, at best, sporadic. One could say the same of Bollywood today. With Dabangg (2010), a blockbuster peddling nationalist police propaganda, came a flurry of others like Singham (2011) and Simmba (2018). Hit sports biographical films like Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013) encouraged movies like Mary Kom (2014) and Dangal (2016). But what FilmIndia failed to highlight, like many other critics at the time, was the seeming inability of screenwriters to write meaningful scripts. Critics failed to connect Manto’s hunger strike to writers’ limitations in exploring their creativity. Production pressures, the absence of collective bargaining, and precarious working conditions kept writing stagnant. One organisation is gradually rebuilding collective strength despite entrenched resistance from the film industry’s top brass. The Screenwriters Association (SWA) , a formally registered trade union since 1960, represents more than 57,000 Indian screenwriters who work throughout the film industry. The union handles copyright protection, legal disputes about fair compensation, and more. Though it may not have been a vehicle for collective bargaining in the past, SWA may finally become a force to be reckoned with. Apart from its ongoing struggle for labour protections, the union has strived to become a space for mentorship. Public script labs, for instance, nurture new relationships that address inadequate diversity—especially caste—when it comes to who is allowed to write the films that make it to the floor. Anjum Rajabali, SWA’s Executive Committee Member and the renowned screenwriter of The Legend of Shaheed Bhagat Singh (2002) and Raajneeti (2010), is a major driving force for the union’s efforts. According to screenwriter Darab Farooqui, screenwriters “are all following his lead.” Rajabali is generous with his time, accepting interview requests from airports amidst ongoing health issues. His commitment to building the union is clear. The intensifying struggle for screenwriters’ protections resulted in the Minimum Basic Contract, which raised questions about whether screenwriters can be recognized as workers and the rights that should be afforded to them. Though film industries are subject to intense content regulation, they lag far behind in enforcing labour mandates. SWA’s proposed contract highlights the asymmetric dynamic between writers and production studios and pushes for major changes. In 1951, India’s first Film Enquiry Committee published a searing investigation into the conditions of cinema industries across the country. The report largely agreed with FilmIndia that “the creative activity of production” is too dependent on commercial requirements and lamented that writers end up “unknown even if they are competent.” An unnamed producer admitted to the committee that “we are trying to sell to the public something in a package.” The committee proposed separating financial investments from innovation but it was never implemented. Bombay studios continued to prioritise profit and loss, a calculation in which screenwriters had little to gain. The industry remains dominated by those who want to sell movies and those who can mobilise significant funds for its package deals. Bollywood’s highest-grossing productions released last year shored up combined investments of nearly 2,000 crore Indian rupees. Yet, a new survey has brought to light the intensity of wage depression felt by screenwriters. The 2,000 crore cake cuts only the thinnest sliver for the storytellers who bring in its base ingredients. Saiwyn Quadras, an SWA member and the writer who helmed films like the Priyanka Chopra-starring Mary Kom , shares that “non-payment of dues is a big thing. It happens to me even now.” Seasoned screenwriter and director Hitesh Kewalya says: “When you come to a city like Bombay as a young writer, you have to earn a livelihood. So, you take up two to three projects at the same time. Out of those, only one might actually happen. Even then, you might not get paid fully. It becomes a vicious cycle, and you end up exhausted.” Kewalya, with more than 25 years of industry experience and two hits to his name, including Shubh Mangal Savdhaan— one of the first explicitly queer Bollywood rom-coms—says the industry doesn’t encourage creativity. “It's like running on a treadmill, and if you're lucky enough, you might manage to pay your bills.” One key tactic deployed by studios is the percentage model. Scripts are evaluated on a per-draft basis, with pending dues for works in progress. This means huge portions of a writer’s income are dependent on producers’ approval of unfinished screenplays. As with film industries elsewhere but arguably at a larger scale, producers gauge scripts based on their perception of the content’s potential popularity and arbitrary predictions on the return on investment it would generate. It does not, however, provide any guarantee for writers’ wages. “You won’t know if a story works until you write it, and many times you don’t get to write the whole story,” Rajabali shares. How can a writer take risks with a script if their dues are tied up in its incomplete versions? If a script is rejected before completion, the writer may receive up to a third of their owed wages regardless of their efforts—which are not always translated onto the page. The work of writers is treated as disposable. Far more scripts get shelved than made. As a result, the union has demanded a minimum compensation of 12 lakh rupees for the delivery of the story, screenplay, and dialogue, along with mandatory credits for any screenwriter who has written at least a third of a script. These problems exist even in contracts with multinational corporations like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, which together constitute a 35% audience share amongst OTT platforms active in the subcontinent. Quadras says that international entities, much like their domestic counterparts, view Indian writers as a “source for cheap labour.” Thus, the SWA’s call for work stoppage on American projects during the WGA strike was more than a show of solidarity. It signalled a pressing need to transform screenwriters’ relations with Indian subsidiaries of global streaming services and production studios like Lionsgate India and Disney+ Hotstar. According to Rajabali, contracts with foreign and domestic studios often come with a clause prohibiting screenwriters from consulting with or approaching the union. These clear attempts at union-busting mirror those of Hollywood’s Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The material connections between working conditions and labour resistance internationally, and the possibilities both engender for domestic cinema workers, are rife. There is little information on how WGA’s win could impact foreign subsidiaries held by AMPTP-associated companies. But the SWA believes at least a precedent has been set, and its proposed Minimum Basic Contract is geared towards leveraging this historic moment. Even the wrong colour can mean the death of a film in the current Indian context. Where some film workers believed streaming studios to be a window of freedom, recent Central regulations have pulled the blinds on that. Netflix’s cancellation of Dev Patel’s Monkey Man (2024) and the film’s removal of saffron, a colour popularly associated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi, has not improved the film’s chances of being released in the country. The Tamil film Annapoorni (2023) elicited legal cases from two right-wing outfits based in Bombay for “hurting religious sentiments of Hindus” and led to its removal from Netflix’s India catalogue. The list of films officially and unofficially banned from being shown in cinema halls in different Indian states at the behest of right-wing political and vigilante outfits is even longer. There is justified fear, then, that government regulation could come to be a double-edged sword. It could work towards alleviating unfair labour practices, but it could also expand the broader pattern of state-sponsored Hindutva agendas. SWA is drawing contingency plans through the Minimum Basic Contract for these overtly political acts. Their proposal demands the removal of contract clauses that shift the responsibility away from producers and onto writers. Currently, producers are guarded against legal, political, and religious backlash, while writers are provided little to no protection from their employers. “Let’s say there’s a scene that shows a fight outside a temple. The studio’s lawyers will tell you to change it. Contractually, the writer is either obliged to change it or risk bearing the consequences on their own head. This is a clause we have to fight,” says Quadras. “And for that, we need collective negotiating power.” But most mainstream Hindi films today happily toe the government line, much as they did in another era of censorship: the Emergency. In June 1975, as a response to increasing worker agitations, internal problems in the Congress party, and legal challenges against her election, India’s two-time Prime Minister Indira Gandhi enacted a state of Emergency. State and national elections were suspended, dissidents were arrested, and trade union actions were brutally repressed. People trapped in poverty were forcibly sterilised. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Bombay cinema, amongst other industries, was unabashedly censored. Scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha notes that conditional investments made by the Film Finance Corporation (now known as National Film Development Corporation ) during the early ‘70s petered out immediately after the Emergency. The state deepened its interests in media apparatuses and pursued a policy of highly restrictive censorship, impeding new-wave efforts like Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome . In Bombay, creative risk fell to the wayside and narratives critical of the public and private nexus vanished. The angry, young man, especially as personified by Indian actor Amitabh Bachhan, represented a specific kind of radical, working-class man, was retired from films. Instead, characters like the fantasy shape-shifting woman-cobra in Naagin (1976) and mythological warriors like those in Dharam Veer (1977) appeared in its place. Gandhi’s government bureaucratically chopped political satires or outrightly banned certain movies . Half a century later, the pattern repeats, albeit this time with a distinctly communal spin. The bulk of Hindi films released today consist primarily of majoritarian propaganda , safe’ biographical , mythological, or period movies . Creative and political risk has been rendered almost non-existent, but making choices that could be seen as either adhering to or being silent on the Hindutva narratives have not protected Bollywood from conservative calls for boycotts. Adipurush (2023), a film on the epic Ramayana , created by the self-proclaimed Hindu nationalist screenwriter Manoj Muntashir, elicited right-wing criticism and flopped upon release. Similarly, actress turned BJP politician Kangana Ranaut’s Hindi language film, Tejas, and Tamil language film, Chandramukhi 2 , did not muster enough to balance their budgets. Hindutva’s poster boy Akshay Kumar was also unable to bring supremacists to purchase tickets for Ram Setu (2022), an archaeological action film seeking to prove the existence of Ramayana , which prolific film critic Namrata Joshi has labelled as “a show of Hindu victimhood.” The race to appease Hindutva groups seems to be an unwinnable one. Still, some in the industry refuse to abandon the race. Despite the overwhelming web of financial and political struggles, screenwriters like Rajabali, Kewalya, and Quadras march on, and younger aspirants continue to join their ranks. “I am a storyteller. I don’t know how to do anything else,” says Kewalya. What can a screenwriter do? Where can their stories go? If such forces continue to helm decision-making, what becomes of creative integrity and freedom? Is the Hindi film industry doomed to creating “products” or “packages”? Can it transcend its confines? Can it deliver necessary stories—ones with substance, original voices, and honesty? The SWA might be slow-paced, but it is determined. It does not shy away from challenging the power dynamics that currently exist—on and off-screen—and it might just be the most hopeful response to the industry’s continued prioritisation of profit over people. Manto’s creative descendants have come a long way from striking at the steps of a studio. But they have an even longer way ahead of them. ∎ Saadat Hassan Manto, a luminary of Urdu literature, once embarked on a hunger strike. It was the early 1940s, and the writer was working for one hundred rupees a month under the Bombay-based film director and producer Nanubhai Desai . Manto asked Desai for pending wages and additional money to rent out a flat for his new bride and himself. Desai refused, and Manto resigned. In an essay on the film critic Baburao Patel, Manto wrote about the beginning of his hunger strike on the steps of Desai’s production studio. Later, with Patel’s help, he recovered a little more than half of his pending dues. The pay seemed too meagre for too little in return, with many of Manto’s scripts never even making it to production because of their radical nature. This isn’t just a story from a time when critics had enough muscle in the industry to wrestle producers into paying writers. It is also a story of precarity. It depicts the tenuous relationship between screenwriters and the screens they write for, neither of which are unique to Manto’s career nor an artefact of the past. This disempowerment is the reason why contemporary films feel ill-equipped to respond to urgent questions. Current industry conditions resemble that of the 1940s: financial backing for subversive cinematic concepts is hard to come by, especially without a major star. In a decidedly censorial political climate and hostile communal environment, writers increasingly face complicated legal and social backlash. Creativity is not incentivised. It’s a liability. The lack of creativity present in Bombay talkies during Manto’s tenure did not go unnoticed. Around the time of his hunger strike, the leading film magazine FilmIndia published a hit piece on the standardised format of Bombay cinema. It denounced “Indian screenwriters” as carrying “little originality” and producers as lacking “imagination completely.” An article edited by Baburao Patel declared that producers “imitate others too often.” For example, the “sensational success” of Pukar (1939) gave way to period dramas and historical fiction, and the popularity of Leila Majnu (1945) enabled the “rise of an epidemic of new love themes.” If a particular genre worked, the industry would churn out movies of the same cut until the fad petered out and a new concept supplanted it. Creative risks were scarce and, at best, sporadic. One could say the same of Bollywood today. With Dabangg (2010), a blockbuster peddling nationalist police propaganda, came a flurry of others like Singham (2011) and Simmba (2018). Hit sports biographical films like Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013) encouraged movies like Mary Kom (2014) and Dangal (2016). But what FilmIndia failed to highlight, like many other critics at the time, was the seeming inability of screenwriters to write meaningful scripts. Critics failed to connect Manto’s hunger strike to writers’ limitations in exploring their creativity. Production pressures, the absence of collective bargaining, and precarious working conditions kept writing stagnant. One organisation is gradually rebuilding collective strength despite entrenched resistance from the film industry’s top brass. The Screenwriters Association (SWA) , a formally registered trade union since 1960, represents more than 57,000 Indian screenwriters who work throughout the film industry. The union handles copyright protection, legal disputes about fair compensation, and more. Though it may not have been a vehicle for collective bargaining in the past, SWA may finally become a force to be reckoned with. Apart from its ongoing struggle for labour protections, the union has strived to become a space for mentorship. Public script labs, for instance, nurture new relationships that address inadequate diversity—especially caste—when it comes to who is allowed to write the films that make it to the floor. Anjum Rajabali, SWA’s Executive Committee Member and the renowned screenwriter of The Legend of Shaheed Bhagat Singh (2002) and Raajneeti (2010), is a major driving force for the union’s efforts. According to screenwriter Darab Farooqui, screenwriters “are all following his lead.” Rajabali is generous with his time, accepting interview requests from airports amidst ongoing health issues. His commitment to building the union is clear. The intensifying struggle for screenwriters’ protections resulted in the Minimum Basic Contract, which raised questions about whether screenwriters can be recognized as workers and the rights that should be afforded to them. Though film industries are subject to intense content regulation, they lag far behind in enforcing labour mandates. SWA’s proposed contract highlights the asymmetric dynamic between writers and production studios and pushes for major changes. In 1951, India’s first Film Enquiry Committee published a searing investigation into the conditions of cinema industries across the country. The report largely agreed with FilmIndia that “the creative activity of production” is too dependent on commercial requirements and lamented that writers end up “unknown even if they are competent.” An unnamed producer admitted to the committee that “we are trying to sell to the public something in a package.” The committee proposed separating financial investments from innovation but it was never implemented. Bombay studios continued to prioritise profit and loss, a calculation in which screenwriters had little to gain. The industry remains dominated by those who want to sell movies and those who can mobilise significant funds for its package deals. Bollywood’s highest-grossing productions released last year shored up combined investments of nearly 2,000 crore Indian rupees. Yet, a new survey has brought to light the intensity of wage depression felt by screenwriters. The 2,000 crore cake cuts only the thinnest sliver for the storytellers who bring in its base ingredients. Saiwyn Quadras, an SWA member and the writer who helmed films like the Priyanka Chopra-starring Mary Kom , shares that “non-payment of dues is a big thing. It happens to me even now.” Seasoned screenwriter and director Hitesh Kewalya says: “When you come to a city like Bombay as a young writer, you have to earn a livelihood. So, you take up two to three projects at the same time. Out of those, only one might actually happen. Even then, you might not get paid fully. It becomes a vicious cycle, and you end up exhausted.” Kewalya, with more than 25 years of industry experience and two hits to his name, including Shubh Mangal Savdhaan— one of the first explicitly queer Bollywood rom-coms—says the industry doesn’t encourage creativity. “It's like running on a treadmill, and if you're lucky enough, you might manage to pay your bills.” One key tactic deployed by studios is the percentage model. Scripts are evaluated on a per-draft basis, with pending dues for works in progress. This means huge portions of a writer’s income are dependent on producers’ approval of unfinished screenplays. As with film industries elsewhere but arguably at a larger scale, producers gauge scripts based on their perception of the content’s potential popularity and arbitrary predictions on the return on investment it would generate. It does not, however, provide any guarantee for writers’ wages. “You won’t know if a story works until you write it, and many times you don’t get to write the whole story,” Rajabali shares. How can a writer take risks with a script if their dues are tied up in its incomplete versions? If a script is rejected before completion, the writer may receive up to a third of their owed wages regardless of their efforts—which are not always translated onto the page. The work of writers is treated as disposable. Far more scripts get shelved than made. As a result, the union has demanded a minimum compensation of 12 lakh rupees for the delivery of the story, screenplay, and dialogue, along with mandatory credits for any screenwriter who has written at least a third of a script. These problems exist even in contracts with multinational corporations like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, which together constitute a 35% audience share amongst OTT platforms active in the subcontinent. Quadras says that international entities, much like their domestic counterparts, view Indian writers as a “source for cheap labour.” Thus, the SWA’s call for work stoppage on American projects during the WGA strike was more than a show of solidarity. It signalled a pressing need to transform screenwriters’ relations with Indian subsidiaries of global streaming services and production studios like Lionsgate India and Disney+ Hotstar. According to Rajabali, contracts with foreign and domestic studios often come with a clause prohibiting screenwriters from consulting with or approaching the union. These clear attempts at union-busting mirror those of Hollywood’s Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The material connections between working conditions and labour resistance internationally, and the possibilities both engender for domestic cinema workers, are rife. There is little information on how WGA’s win could impact foreign subsidiaries held by AMPTP-associated companies. But the SWA believes at least a precedent has been set, and its proposed Minimum Basic Contract is geared towards leveraging this historic moment. Even the wrong colour can mean the death of a film in the current Indian context. Where some film workers believed streaming studios to be a window of freedom, recent Central regulations have pulled the blinds on that. Netflix’s cancellation of Dev Patel’s Monkey Man (2024) and the film’s removal of saffron, a colour popularly associated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi, has not improved the film’s chances of being released in the country. The Tamil film Annapoorni (2023) elicited legal cases from two right-wing outfits based in Bombay for “hurting religious sentiments of Hindus” and led to its removal from Netflix’s India catalogue. The list of films officially and unofficially banned from being shown in cinema halls in different Indian states at the behest of right-wing political and vigilante outfits is even longer. There is justified fear, then, that government regulation could come to be a double-edged sword. It could work towards alleviating unfair labour practices, but it could also expand the broader pattern of state-sponsored Hindutva agendas. SWA is drawing contingency plans through the Minimum Basic Contract for these overtly political acts. Their proposal demands the removal of contract clauses that shift the responsibility away from producers and onto writers. Currently, producers are guarded against legal, political, and religious backlash, while writers are provided little to no protection from their employers. “Let’s say there’s a scene that shows a fight outside a temple. The studio’s lawyers will tell you to change it. Contractually, the writer is either obliged to change it or risk bearing the consequences on their own head. This is a clause we have to fight,” says Quadras. “And for that, we need collective negotiating power.” But most mainstream Hindi films today happily toe the government line, much as they did in another era of censorship: the Emergency. In June 1975, as a response to increasing worker agitations, internal problems in the Congress party, and legal challenges against her election, India’s two-time Prime Minister Indira Gandhi enacted a state of Emergency. State and national elections were suspended, dissidents were arrested, and trade union actions were brutally repressed. People trapped in poverty were forcibly sterilised. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Bombay cinema, amongst other industries, was unabashedly censored. Scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha notes that conditional investments made by the Film Finance Corporation (now known as National Film Development Corporation ) during the early ‘70s petered out immediately after the Emergency. The state deepened its interests in media apparatuses and pursued a policy of highly restrictive censorship, impeding new-wave efforts like Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome . In Bombay, creative risk fell to the wayside and narratives critical of the public and private nexus vanished. The angry, young man, especially as personified by Indian actor Amitabh Bachhan, represented a specific kind of radical, working-class man, was retired from films. Instead, characters like the fantasy shape-shifting woman-cobra in Naagin (1976) and mythological warriors like those in Dharam Veer (1977) appeared in its place. Gandhi’s government bureaucratically chopped political satires or outrightly banned certain movies . Half a century later, the pattern repeats, albeit this time with a distinctly communal spin. The bulk of Hindi films released today consist primarily of majoritarian propaganda , safe’ biographical , mythological, or period movies . Creative and political risk has been rendered almost non-existent, but making choices that could be seen as either adhering to or being silent on the Hindutva narratives have not protected Bollywood from conservative calls for boycotts. Adipurush (2023), a film on the epic Ramayana , created by the self-proclaimed Hindu nationalist screenwriter Manoj Muntashir, elicited right-wing criticism and flopped upon release. Similarly, actress turned BJP politician Kangana Ranaut’s Hindi language film, Tejas, and Tamil language film, Chandramukhi 2 , did not muster enough to balance their budgets. Hindutva’s poster boy Akshay Kumar was also unable to bring supremacists to purchase tickets for Ram Setu (2022), an archaeological action film seeking to prove the existence of Ramayana , which prolific film critic Namrata Joshi has labelled as “a show of Hindu victimhood.” The race to appease Hindutva groups seems to be an unwinnable one. Still, some in the industry refuse to abandon the race. Despite the overwhelming web of financial and political struggles, screenwriters like Rajabali, Kewalya, and Quadras march on, and younger aspirants continue to join their ranks. “I am a storyteller. I don’t know how to do anything else,” says Kewalya. What can a screenwriter do? Where can their stories go? If such forces continue to helm decision-making, what becomes of creative integrity and freedom? Is the Hindi film industry doomed to creating “products” or “packages”? Can it transcend its confines? Can it deliver necessary stories—ones with substance, original voices, and honesty? The SWA might be slow-paced, but it is determined. It does not shy away from challenging the power dynamics that currently exist—on and off-screen—and it might just be the most hopeful response to the industry’s continued prioritisation of profit over people. Manto’s creative descendants have come a long way from striking at the steps of a studio. But they have an even longer way ahead of them. ∎ SUB-HEAD ​ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Jamil Jan Kochai A Premonition; Recollected Courtesy of Tara Anand (2021) SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Essay Bombay Screenwriters Association SWA Films Film-Making Labor Rights Trade Unions Directors Film Studios Radical Writers Saadat Hassan Manto Hindutva Minimum Wage Minimum Basic Contract The Legend of Shaheed Bhagat Singh Working Conditions Baburao Patel Nanubhai Desai FilmIndia Creative Labor Pukar Leila Majnu Genre Dabangg Singham Simmba Mary Kom Dangal Fair Compensation Copyright Protection Raajneeti Anjum Rajabali Film Enquiry Committee Bollywood Wage Depression Wage Theft Hitesh Kewalya Shubh Mangal Savdhaan Rom-Coms Police Films Action Films Sports Biographies Amazon Prime Netflix Lionsgate OTT Disney+ Saiwyn Quadras AMPTP Writers Strike WGA Monkey Man BJP Annapoorni Saffron 1975 Emergency Censorship Kangana Ranaut Tejas Ram Setu Namrata Joshi Labor Labor Movement NIHIRA is a freelance writer based in India. She is interested in South Asian media histories, particularly relating to labour and caste. 5 Aug 2024 Essay Bombay 5th Aug 2024 TARA ANAND is an illustrator and visual artist from Bombay, currently based in New York. 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 The Aahvaan Project · Performance The Aahvaan Project was founded in 2016 based on the nirgun philosophy of love and the works of sufi saints such as kabir, lal ded and lalon fakir. A folk and storytelling collective, founded by Vedi Sinha in 2016, their music is avowedly political and inclusive. Here, Sinha utilizes vocals and the ektara. Vedi Sinha The Aahvaan Project was founded by Vedi Sinha in 2016 as a collective “ journey and an experience, an attempt to understand Nirgun—the mystic idea of love spoken about in various time periods by philosophers through the lived experience of saints and sufis. ” They perform across communities, educational institutions, and art spaces. For our event In Grief, In Solidarity in 2021, Vedi Sinha, who founded the folk music & storytelling collective and does not often perform alone, joined us for a beautiful performance of new songs. The Aahvaan Project was founded by Vedi Sinha in 2016 as a collective “ journey and an experience, an attempt to understand Nirgun—the mystic idea of love spoken about in various time periods by philosophers through the lived experience of saints and sufis. ” They perform across communities, educational institutions, and art spaces. For our event In Grief, In Solidarity in 2021, Vedi Sinha, who founded the folk music & storytelling collective and does not often perform alone, joined us for a beautiful performance of new songs. SUB-HEAD ​ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Jamil Jan Kochai A Premonition; Recollected Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Live Delhi Music Performance Folk Storytelling Narratives Nirgun Sufism Sufi Saints Kabir Lal Ded Lalon Fakir Community Building Contemporary Music Love Prahlad Tipaniya Compassion Pyaar National Institute of Design Ahmedabad Folk Music Rajasthan Kabir Yatra In Grief In Solidarity VEDI SINHA is a musician and performer based in Delhi. She founded The Aahvaan Project in 2016. 5 Jun 2021 Live Delhi 5th Jun 2021 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

THE VERTICAL Swat Youth Vanguards AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR With the rise of militant insurgencies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Pakistani state now finds itself in a double bind. Following brutal crackdowns on the PTM at the hands of the state, it is not state-supported groups but Ulusi Pasuns that have emerged at the vanguard of resistance against militancy. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Reportage Swat Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Pakistan Pashtun Tahafuz Movement PTM Manzoor Ahmad Pashteen Pashtun Nationalism Kabul Chowk Swat Public Uprising Swat Ulusi Pasun Aftab Khan Yousafazai Taliban Militancy Insurgency Police Action Community Building Internet Platforms Social Media State Violence Peaceful Resistance State & Media Student Movements Student Protests 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 Reportage Swat 24th Feb 2024 On August 2, 2022, Aftab Khan Yousafazai, a young software engineer from Khwazakhela, a village in Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, returned home. For the young engineer, who grew up during possibly the bloodiest recent chapter of militancy-driven conflict in northwestern Pakistan, the return could not have come at a more inauspicious time. Yousafzai had been away studying software engineering in Abbottabad, another district in the mountainous North. Having finished his degree, he planned to spend leisure time with his family and friends while awaiting his results. The retreat proved to be short-lived, however. Less than a week after his arrival, on August 9, 2022, grainy videos of an injured police officer and other people in the captivity of Taliban in the mountains of Upper Swat surfaced on the internet. The videos triggered fear and panic in the region, as well as the rest of the country, where memories of a brutal insurgency in the scenic district were still fresh. Having seen bloodshed as a child—the district descended into chaos under the Taliban’s reign of terror from 2007-2009—Yousafzai was no stranger to militancy. At its peak, the crisis displaced two million people from the district during a huge military operation to quash the insurgency. The resurgence of militants was unnerving for someone already traumatised by the horrors of Taliban rule. His family and friends were equally distressed, exchanging feverish voice notes and messages with Yousafzai regarding the best course of action. Like many of his ethnic Pashtun peers, who had come of age in the wake of the War on Terror amidst a conflict that shattered—and continues to do so—lives and livelihoods in the border region of Pakistan, Yousafzai had latched for hope onto the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) in his varsity days. The PTM and its outspoken leader, Manzoor Ahmad Pashteen, represented the collective anguish of a population caught up between militant insurgencies, military operations, and their bloody aftermath. The young Pashteen took centre-stage in Pashtun nationalism and delivered a scathing critique of Pakistani state policies in the Northwest. He had an immediate, widespread appeal among the youth of the region whose sentiments found a vociferous advocate in him. The Pakistani state came down hard on the PTM, and as a result, it became a common umbrella for all those who had had enough of the state’s oppressive tactics in the name of security. Yousafzai and his friends kept their distance from the movement despite vowing support for it to avoid arrests and controversies attached to the PTM. With the resurgent Taliban threatening peace in his valley once again, however, the time for indecision ended for him. The young men felt the need to demand an immediate response to such dire circumstances. It was in this state of mind that Yousafzai shared a Facebook post calling for the public to attend a protest in Kabul Chowk against the return of the Taliban. On August 12, 2022, locals turned up at the venue in decent numbers. A few days later, Yousafzai and his friends named their nascent movement Swat Ulusi Pasun or Swat Public Uprising. “We want to have nothing to do with either the military or the militants. Only the masses are suffering in this war,” Yousafzai told me in an interview recently. What started as sporadic militant attacks in the summer of 2022, soon surged into a pattern that suggested a second militant uprising in Swat, as the district witnessed kidnapping for ransoms, murders and roadside bomb attacks throughout September. Swat Ulusi Pasun ’s largest gathering congregated on October 11, 2022, when thousands of people returned its call to protest in Nishat Chowk of Mingora, the largest city in Swat. Among those in attendance were the PTM chief Manzoor Ahmed Pashteen, as well as leaders of several mainstream political parties. Since then, the Swat Ulusi Pasun- inspired peaceful protests have been sweeping large parts of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or the Pakistani Taliban, are carrying out attacks with renewed vigour. Motivated by the PTM’s peaceful opposition to militancy and military operations, large gatherings of tech-savvy youths have travelled across large swathes of territory in the province and its restive tribal belt. Wherever there is a major militant attack, youths take to the street in protest and, most of the time, pillory the military and its leadership for the resurgence of the Taliban with provocative slogans. “No one could fight back a peaceful public resistance,” said Yousafzai. Soon after their inception, these protests began to include individuals from institutions such as the police—they, too, were threatened by the Taliban’s activity. In January 2023, a massive suicide blast at the mosque inside the heavily-guarded compound of Peshawar Police Headquarters killed more than 80 and injured 250 others. This attack prompted members of the police force to protest as they, too, blamed the state for its failure to provide security to people. On February 1, several police personnel gathered outside the Peshawar Press Club to protest the militancy and even went to the extent of chanting slogans against the military for its alleged double dealings with the militants. Such protests have happened in the wake of terrorist attacks in Swat, Lower Dir, Bajaur, Khyber, Waziristan, and Peshawar—districts in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province—where large numbers of residents took to the streets to raise their voices against growing incidents of militancy. The rising tide of peaceful resistance in northwestern Pakistan is yet another chapter in the battle against terrorism in the region. In the initial phases of Taliban militancy, Pakistani authorities forced local elders to raise militias or lashkars to combat the onslaught of militancy in their villages and towns. One morning in October 2008, reporters in Peshawar were called to the Badaber police station in Peshawar city’s outskirts for an unusual press conference. We were made to sit inside the cramped building of the police station, waiting for the arrival of Abdul Malik, Mayor or Nazim of the Adezai Union Council. He was detained earlier in August on suspicions of having links with the Taliban after an attack on a police patrol in his village. Mr. Malik was to renounce his links with the Taliban in the press conference upon his release. The wait for Mr. Malik’s arrival took many hours as police personnel tried to reassure the anxious reporters that he was not in their custody and would be presented as soon as an intelligence agency handed him over to them. It was only around noon when Mr. Malik was brought to the police station in an unmarked car. A bulky man with a salt and pepper beard, Mr Malik briefly chatted with reporters and denied having any links with the Taliban but did not open up about his detention. The press conference ended abruptly as Mr Malik left the building surrounded by police security. A few weeks later, he set up the Adezai Aman Lashkar , or Adezai Peace Militia, to combat militancy in the area. Soon after, another lashkar was set up in Bazidkhel village by a local elder Muhammad Faheem, who was engaged in a deadly war in the Khyber agency—a tribal area bordering Afghanistan—with the militant outfit Lashkar-e-Islam . A similar pattern of arming the locals to fight militants was used across entire swathes of the tribal belt and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. However, militants’ retribution against the lashkars was harsh. Abdul Malik was killed in a suicide attack in 2009, while bullet-riddled bodies of Mr. Faheem and some of his close associates were recovered from a vehicle in June 2012 in mysterious conditions. The peace militias in other parts of the tribal belt and the rest of the province also did not fare well. Hundreds of tribal elders associated with these anti-Taliban militias were eliminated in ruthless, targeted killings, IEDs, and suicide attacks. The severity of militant rage against lashkars could be gauged from the fact that barely a month after Yousafzai and his comrades set up the Swat Ulusi Pasun, on September 12, 2022, militants killed Idrees Khan in a remote-controlled bomb blast. He was the former head of a peace committee in Swat. On September 16, another former peace committee member was shot dead in Charbagh Tehsil. This was the situation that gave rise to several avatars of Ulusi Pasuns or Public Rising. Youths like Yousafzai had not only witnessed the horrors of militancy but also seen the militants exacting brutal revenge on those who sided with the state. Besides the nonstop violence, however, they had also seen a massive public outpouring of support for PTM’s anti-war rhetoric across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This is what inspired them to pursue peaceful resistance. Amidst the state’s crackdown against the PTM, arresting its workers and leaders, and the attendant media blackout of its protests, the emergence of Ulusi Pasuns have provided alternate platforms for people to raise their voices against Talibanization. They are PTM multiplied, local platforms for disgruntled youths—armed with mobile phones and using social media for mobilisation—to rally around their resistance to oppression at the hands of militants and the state. For Yousafzai, this journey for public mobilisation has been full of twists and turns. Unlike most educated youths who try to land a government job soon after graduation, he found himself centre-stage in the biggest youth uprising against systematic violence in Pakistan. Before sending that Facebook post calling for a protest against the Taliban in his native Swat, he had applied for two government jobs, expecting calls for interviews. This seemed unlikely now. One night in August, he was detained for several hours and released after a public outcry against his detention. Soon again, he was arrested a second time, spending 16 days behind bars on charges of disturbing public peace and bailed out by a local court. Yousafzai recalls receiving threatening calls from the Taliban labelling him as a stooge of the Pakistani intelligence. “I argued with the caller on the phone saying the Ulasi Pasuns have nothing to do with intelligence and after all, we are only demanding a peaceful life, right to education and work for our children.” Yousafzai is currently heading the Swat Ulusi Pasun and coordinates activities of similar volunteer organisations, which he has helped organise at the tehsil level. He coordinates these activities through WhatsApp groups, with an eye on the direction that Taliban militancy may take. However, his political activities have also created ripples in his own family life. His father, currently in the United States, is not happy with Yousafzai’s political campaigning and wants him to give up his advocacy and return to a normal life. Despite opposition and pressure from his family to return to “normalcy,” Yousafzai remains steadfast in his commitment to finishing what he has started. ∎ 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:

COMMUNITY Humor & Kindness in Radical Art “We’re very mundane and silly. It’s okay for racialized people to have mundane, silly stories.” VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview in YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview in YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Art Practice 19th Sep 2020 Interview Art Practice Centering the Silly FrizzKid Affirmation Art Body Politics Politics of Art Vulnerability Kindness as Politics Affect Characterization Criticism Capitalism Absurdity Illustration Comics Queerness 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. RECOMMENDED: Small, Broke, and Kind of Dirty: Affirmations for the Real World (2020) by Hana Shafi. 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

FICTION & POETRY The Cuckoo Keeps Calling AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR "So Modhu traveled beyond Kalai, Mokamtala, Bogra, Sirajganj, across the Jamuna Bridge, to the city of Dhaka, two hundred miles away. There he pulls a rickshaw, earns a hundred takas a day, counts that money each night, again and again, can’t settle on one place where he can hide this money." SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Short Story Translation Bengali Bangladesh 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 Short Story Translation 23rd Sep 2020 Translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya MODHU wakes up at dawn and says to his wife, “Say goodbye.” Modina clasps her husband’s hand and says, “Not today. Go tomorrow.” The cuckoo trills from the branches of the koroi tree. Modhu doesn’t know what it means when the cuckoo calls during a spring dawn. He lies back again. Now comfortable, he goes back to sleep. The next day at dawn, Modhu again asks his wife to bid him farewell. Again, his wife says, “Not today, tomorrow.” Modhu again lies down like a good boy. Sleeps comfortably. The cuckoo calls from the tree. Modhu doesn’t hear. He is sound asleep. The cuckoo grows increasingly desperate. Coo. Coo-oo. Coo-oo-oo. Modhu sleeps, he doesn’t hear. His wife Modina lies awake; she doesn’t hear either. But Mafiz hears the cuckoo trilling in this spring dawn. He is not unromantic. He breaks into song: Oh, why do you call to me so early in the morning, oh, little cuckoo of my life? Modina doesn’t hear Mafiz’s song. Mafiz exits his home and gazes at the three-way intersection, the road that people take to reach town. Mafiz doesn’t see anybody taking that road. He walks. He places his foot on the threshold of Modina’s yard and, in a muted voice, calls out, “Brother, Modhu, have you gone to Dhaka?” Modina shoos cows. “Hyat! Hyat, hyat!” “Hey, girl, why are you shooing me?” Modina picks up a wooden stool and throws it at Mafiz. Mafiz sniggers like a jackal and leaves. As he goes, he says to himself, “No matter how many times you cut me, or hit me…” Modhu wakes up hungry. Modina serves him rice and eats as well. Not freshly cooked, steaming rice. Old rice, with water added. As he eats, Modhu asks, “Isn’t there anymore panta-rice left?” Modina bites her tongue in shame. Which means that there is no more panta-rice left. No more, meaning that in Modina’s judgment, because she herself has eaten too much, the panta has been finished before her man’s hunger has abated. Hence, Modina’s shame, hence, her biting of the tongue. “Now I need to go to Dhaka.” Modhu needs to go to Dhaka for pertinent reasons. Modina asks, “Isn’t it hard to drive a rickshaw?” Modhu knows that this is Modina being tender. Modina knows that driving a rickshaw in Dhaka city is grueling. But working the fields was hellish torment, and the wages were poor—merely sixty takas a day. One day in the month of Joishthya, Modhu had almost died while weeding the jute fields belonging to the Mondals. There was no water in the fields, there were no clouds in the sky, Modhu’s back was burning to ashes from the sun, his throat was parched wood, he was desperately thirsty, he was running for water, the solitary plains had become the deserts of Karbala, in the distance, Bacchu Mondal’s new tin shed glinted in the sunlight, there was a new tube-well near the outer yard of the house, Modhu was running towards it, stumbling on the clods of earth in the hoed field, shouting “A drop of water for me, please!” But before he had reached the tube-well, Modhu had tumbled onto the ground, his eyes had rolled back into his head, he foamed at the mouth. Modhu almost died that day. No more, meaning that in Modina’s judgment, because she herself has eaten too much, the panta has been finished before her man’s hunger has abated. Hence, Modina’s shame, hence, her biting of the tongue. So Modhu traveled beyond Kalai, Mokamtala, Bogra, Sirajganj, across the Jamuna Bridge, to the city of Dhaka, two hundred miles away. There he pulls a rickshaw, earns a hundred takas a day, counts that money each night, again and again, can’t settle on one place where he can hide this money. This is how, day after day, for fifteen straight days, Modhu drives a rickshaw. In Kawran Bazar, twelve of these drivers live in a windowless room; with them live twelve thousand mosquitoes; the mosquitoes sing, suck the blood of all the Modhus, and the Modhus all sleep like the dead. At the crack of dawn, when the tired mosquitoes are each an immobile drop of blood, the Modhus wake up; nature calls them. They not only feel the thunderclouds rumbling in their bellies, they hear them as well. They go out in a group, pull the tabans covering their asses over their heads, and they show their naked dark asses in a row as they hunker down at the edge of the Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue, or some of them in front of the Hotel Sonargaon gate. They wipe their asses with newspapers because there is no water; not only is there a lack of water to clean themselves, the Modhus don’t have water to bathe. For fifteen days straight, Modhu doesn’t wash himself; sometimes the odor of his own body makes him want to vomit, especially when the sun is strong and Dhaka’s skies and air cease to be. This is how it is, day after day, night after night. But what happiness, what success! When Modhu returns to Modina after fifteen straight days, there is at least fifteen hundred takas in his waist pouch. Which means that for at least a month, he neither thinks of Dhaka nor speaks of it. Modhu goes to Dhaka city. The watered rice is finished, there is no more rice left in the house, Modina sits emptyhanded by the derelict stove. A cuckoo trills in a tree; Modina doesn’t hear it, but Mafiz does. It has never happened that a cuckoo sings and Mafiz hasn’t heard it. When Modhu crosses the three-way intersection of the highway and goes towards the upazila town, Mafiz peeks from behind the house. He spots Modina sitting by the stove doing nothing and he begins to joke around. “Brother, Modhu, are you off to Dhaka?” Modina turns her head. Joyous, Mafiz says, “What’s up, Modina?” “What’s your deal?” Modina scolds Mafiz in a solemn manner. “You’re hankering for a beating?” “If you beat me with your own hands,” Mafiz says as he grins with all his teeth and comes forward fearlessly, “my life would be a treasure.” “Go home.” Modina is even more serious. “Do you want a job, Modina?” Mafiz coaxes her. Modina isn’t willing to listen to anything. She threatens Mafiz, “I’m telling you, go.” Mafiz tries to get angry and says, “I’m here to do you a favor without being asked, and you want to shoo me off like a cow?” Modina asks in a serious manner, “What favor?” Mafiz responds with mystery. “You’ll get money, wheat. Want a job?” “What job?” “Shooing goats,” Mafiz says and chuckles. Although he hadn’t intended to laugh. Modina is furious. “Go away, you bastard. You can’t find someone else to joke with?” Mafiz moves fast to try to control the damage and speaks in a very businesslike manner. “Not a joke, Modina, for real! No actual work involved, just shooing cows and goats.” “Explain clearly, what sort of job is this then?” Mafiz explains it clearly. “Haven’t you seen those trees planted on either side of the highway? Those trees need to be guarded so that cows and goats don’t chew them up. That’s the job. They’ll pay cash, they’ll also pay with wheat. You sell the wheat to buy rice. And with the money, you buy beef, tilapia…!” “Stop, stop.” Modina stops Mafiz and suspicion rolls across her eyes and face. She narrows her eyes, creases her forehead, and interrogates him. “Why would anyone give me this job when there are so many people around?” “Why, I’ll arrange it for you. I’ll grab the Chairman’s hands and feet and I’ll beg…” Mafiz pauses for no reason. He can’t find anything else to say. But his plan and his words are quite clear. Still, Modina wants to hear more about this job guarding trees and the means to getting it even more clearly. “Go on, why did you stop?” Mafiz laughs and says, “I will grab the Chairman’s hands and feet and beg: Uncle, give this job to Modina, you won’t find a girl as nice as Modina even if you look and look…” Modina howls with laughter. A cool breeze wafts across the ditch and disappears. From the branches of the koroi tree, a cuckoo calls. Mafiz glances towards the tree and looks at the cuckoo. Then he gazes at Modina’s face and says in a melancholy manner, “Do you know what the cuckoo is saying? Mafiz says, “The cuckoo is crying. It’s crying and asking, Where did my own little cuckoo bird go?” “What?” There is a smile on Modina’s face; she knows what Mafiz is about to say. Mafiz says, “The cuckoo is crying. It’s crying and asking, Where did my own little cuckoo bird go?” Modina laughs again. Her laughter enrages the cuckoo in the koroi tree. Mafiz speaks the cuckoo’s mind, “Why do you laugh like that Modina?” “What is it to you if I laugh?” Modina asks cocking her eyebrow like a flirt. “My ribs shatter to bits and my soul wants to fly away,” Mafiz says. Modina laughs, shimmying her whole body. Mafiz looks at the tree but the cuckoo is gone. It has been raining all day in Dhaka; as he pedals his rickshaw Modhu is pretty much taking a shower. After getting drenched all day, all the warmth had left his body. Modhu cannot fathom where his body is finding so much heat in the evening. He feels cold, his head hurts, and soon he begins to shiver. He rolls around on the floor in the dark room, and like a child, he moans, calling out to his mother. It isn’t raining in the village of Modhupur; the moon is visible in the sky and a cuckoo is singing in the branches of the koroi tree. Mafiz stands by Modina’s window, grasping the grill and whispering, “Modina! Oh, Modina!” Scared, Modina scrambles into a sitting position, and spits on her own chest to dissipate her fear, and Mafiz whistles in the air saying, “It’s me, Mafiz!” The power has gone out in Dhaka city. In the box-like room where Modhu rolls on the ground by himself, shivering and moaning, the darkness of hell has descended: Modhu thinks he is dying. In the village of Modhupur, through the gaps in the branches of the koroi tree, slivers of moonlight land on Modina’s window; outside stands Mafiz, like a ghost, and inside is Modina. Modina’s teeth can be seen white in the shadow of moonlight, her eyes are shining, and she is pretending to be angry with Mafiz, telling him she was going to complain to Modhu when he came back, and Modhu would grind Mafiz’s bones into powder and apply it to his body. Modina purses her lips in laughter as she talks, and Mafiz says that Modhu wasn’t coming back to Modhupur anymore, he was going to die in Dhaka. Mafiz tells Modina, “Our fortunes were written together. You have no choice but me, Modina.” Modina slides her arm through the window grill and shoves Mafiz in the chest. “Go home, you stray cow.” Mafiz grabs Modina’s hand in the blink of an eye and says, “You don’t know this, but I know it for sure, Modina. I have you written in my fate and you have me.” Modina feels that Mafiz has lost his head. As Mafiz goes back to his own house, he dreams that Modhu has died in Dhaka. “He’s dead, that bastard Modhu is dead,” says Mafiz, willing Modina’s husband to die as he walks home. Right then, in Kawran Bazar, Dhaka, Modhu is freezing and shivering, and he is calling out to Allah, saying, “Don’t take my life, Khoda. Let me live this time around. I’ll never come back to Dhaka in this lifetime.” The next morning Modhu recovers from his fever; he sees that there is no more rain, the sky is a shining blue, and the buildings are all smiling. Modhu forgets his promise to Allah, and that very afternoon he goes out again with his rickshaw. He recalls the bone-shaking fever from the night before and laughs to himself. That morning, Mafiz places his foot on the threshold of Modhu’s yard and calls out in a low voice, “Brother, Modhu, are you back from Dhaka?” But Mafiz knows very well that if Modhu is supposed to be back fifteen days later, there are still three more days to go. Two days before the day that Modhu is supposed to return to Modhupur, he drops off a passenger in the inner side of Gulshan-2 and goes to grab a cup of tea at a roadside stall. He takes two sips of his tea and turns around to find his rickshaw gone. At first, Modhu doesn’t believe it. He thinks maybe someone has hidden his rickshaw nearby as a prank. But no, it isn’t that simple. The rickshaw has disappeared, meaning seriously disappeared. Modhu goes to the rickshaw owner and describes the situation. The owner points towards Modhu and orders his people, “Tie up that fool.” Before the ones under order had begun the work, the owner himself landed a kick in Modhu’s belly. “You fucking nobody, where’s my rickshaw?” A grunt emerges from Modhu’s mouth, he doubles over and grabs his mouth with one hand. One of the owner’s followers runs over and, almost astride Modhu’s shoulders, he grabs Modhu’s hair, shaking his head and demands, “Say it, you son of a bitch, to which of your fathers did you sell off the boss’s rickshaw?” The boss screams, “First, do him over real good.” Modhu is made over almost into a corpse, and thirteen hundred and twenty five takas, meaning all his earnings, are taken away from him before he is handed over to the police. The police take Modhu to the station and hit him some more in the hope of getting some money, but they quickly realize that not only will no one show up with any money for his release, the owner and his men had already beat him so much that he might very well die in the police station. In which case, the newspapers will start writing about death in police custody, and all those poor-loving human rights organization folks will drum up a furor. The police think about all this hassle and push Modhu out of the station. Modhu can’t walk; he falls onto the street in front of the police station and moans. The police feel inconvenienced and annoyed at this; they load Modhu into the back of a pickup truck, and drive around the city, along this street and that, and they focus their flashlights here and there looking for a convenient spot in which to dump him. As they search, one of them has an idea. “Well, then,” he says to his colleagues, “whose fault is it that we’re going through all this trouble?” They drive the pickup truck with Modhu in the back to the Begunbari house-cum-garage of the rickshaw owner and roar at him, “You, pal, have murdered the suspect before handing him over to the police!” The rickshaw owner doesn’t seem perturbed by the roaring police; he goes inside and quickly returns with ten thousand takas. He tucks it into the hand of one of the policemen and says, “There’s no more cash in the house, saar. Just manage the thing, please.” One of the policemen grows angry. “Is this a joke!” The rickshaw owner doesn’t quite understand what his anger means; still, out of habit, he goes back inside and returns with another ten thousand takas. Then he gets a louder scolding, and a policeman even utters the words, “under arrest.” Therefore, the rickshaw owner goes back inside again, and when he is late in coming back out, the policemen look at each other with suspicion. But before they lose their patience, the rickshaw owner reemerges with a page from his check book. He says, “Saars, an accident just happened. It is my fault, but I don’t want the guy to die. Here, I’ve written out one hundred thousand.” The policeman stops him midway and says, “Pal, you want to survive, then show up at the station tomorrow morning with five hundred thousand in cash. We don’t do checks-fecks.” The rickshaw owner says, “What arrangements for the body?” A policeman answers, “That’s the big trouble right now. What to do with this dead body, we’ve been going around all night…pal, that five hundred thousand won’t cut it. We’ll have to take care of the journalists; we’ll have to take care of the human rights people. Make it six lakhs and be at the station by nine a.m.” But Modhu isn’t a dead body yet. On the floor in the back of the pickup truck, he lies flat on his back with his neck at an angle, peering at them like a weak, sick kitten. There is still a spark of life in his dying eyes. It was the end of night when Modhu was carefully laid down behind a bush in a corner of the Suhrawardy Gardens, from the police pickup truck. Silence descended once the mechanical noise of the pickup truck disappeared in the distance. The silence reigned for a few moments; then suddenly, someone blew on the mosque microphone, and in a voice deep like thunder, began the chant of Allahu Akbar. When the quivering notes of the azaan floated to Modhu’s nearly numb ears, his eyes opened slightly. In the distance, he saw a light tremble. He tried to move one of his hands but couldn’t. He tried to move his legs but couldn’t. Modhu tried to make a noise with his mouth; he forced himself to say, Allah! But Modhu’s voice didn’t echo in the wind. Modhu would die and Mafiz would have Modina forever—this is what is written in Modina and Mafiz’s destinies. Modina doesn’t believe it but Mafiz’s faith doesn’t have an ounce of doubt. But why Mafiz counts the days till Modhu’s return is something only he knows. Two days before Modhu is supposed to come back, which was fifteen days after his departure, Mafiz, once again, stands by Modina’s window and says that Modhu will not return. He is going to die in Dhaka; and because when poor people die that far away, their bodies never make it back, Modina will never see Modhu again. When Mafiz is telling Modina all this, Modhu is rolling back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness on the floor of the pickup truck in the streets of Dhaka. Modina protests the ill-omened, cruel words from Mafiz by scratching his chest and neck until he bleeds. But when Mafiz groans in pain, she covers his mouth with her hand and says, “Oh, does it burn?” When Mafiz sulks and wants to leave, Modina grabs his shoulder again and says, “Come tomorrow! The day after, he’ll be back home!” The next night, before the cuckoo sings in the koroi tree, three ghosts come to Modina’s house. They had whispered to each other as they came down the road that Modhu was gone. “Let’s go and eat Modhu’s wife.” These ghosts only eat people of the female gender; from age eight to fifty-eight, wherever they find a woman at an opportune moment, they eat her. These famous ghosts live in the upazila town; they came to the village of Modhupur after verifying and ascertaining the information that Modhu is absent, and truly they find Modina by herself in Modhu’s house, and when they find her, they begin to eat her. They take turns in eating Modina. After the first ghost, the second ghost, then the third ghost, then the first ghost again. While they eat Modina in turns, at some point, Mafiz shows up. Modina sees Mafiz and whimpers in the hope of getting some help, but one of the ghosts grabs hold of her nose and mouth so hard that not only any noise, even her breath cannot emerge from her. In addition, another ghost grasps her throat with five and five, ten fingers; Modina thrashes around, groans, her tongue lolls out, her eyes want to bug out. Seeing which, Mafiz, a single person, attacks the three ghosts; two of whom pick him up and slam him down on the ground; a grunt emerges from Mafiz’s throat, his eyes go dark; one ghost picks up a half-brick and smashes it down on Mafiz’s head; his skull opens up with a crack, and this encourages the ghost, so he begins smashing the brick down into Mafiz’s skull again and again. Right then, the cuckoo trills in the koroi tree. Ghosts don’t know what it means when a cuckoo sings in a spring evening. ∎ 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:

INTERACTIVE New Dubai's Capital Accumulation: The Story of Karama AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “Not only has the neighborhood lost much of its middle-class transnational identity, but it is also being erased in the media and from the collective memory of Dubai. The livelihoods and lifestyles of Karama’s former inhabitants are threatened as the space for economic participation diminishes with the establishment of more exclusive, privatized, and upper-class modes of living and leisure in the area.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Live Dubai Event In Grief In Solidarity Development Gentrification Karama Jadaliyya Nationalism UAE Street Art Old Dubai New Dubai Dubai Creek Dubai frame Tourism Luxury Tourism Working-Class Spaces Property Rent Gap State-Sponsored Privatization Burj Al Arab Dubai Roads and Transport Abu Dhabi Middle East Capital Capital Expansion Production of Space Wasl Hub Housing Crisis Brand Dubai Deira Enrichment Project Legal Regimes Lack of Legal Recourse The Denial of Citizenship Nationality-based Hierarchies Immigrant Neighborhoods Employment State Modernization Narratives 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 Live Dubai 5th Jun 2021 “ Karama: An Immigrant Neighborhood Transformed ” is an essay by writer Bhoomika Ghaghada, published in Jadaliyya . Karama is where Ghaghada grew up. It is a place where Bollywood music was part of the background soundscape, where one could hear people speaking “ in Hindi, Urdu, and Tagalog. ” Of course, that was in the early 2000s—well before the gentrification of Karama began. Flanked by the Dubai frame were “ Old Dubai ” and “ New Dubai, ” signifiers for tourists who wished to see what “ historical ” neighborhoods looked like. Once a trading port and an affordable haven for South Asian immigrants, Karama has convulsed with massive change, what with the expulsion of many of its former residents as part of Dubai's vision of itself: a glitzy, skyscraper-dominated, upper-class, and rarefied space. As part of our online event In Grief, In Solidarity in 2021, Ghaghada—introduced by editor Vamika Sinha—read her poignant and incisive essay, one which is all the more important because of the dearth of writing on and from the large South Asian diaspora in the UAE. This rent gap became apparent and significant enough in 2014, soon after Dubai won the bid to host Expo2020. There was plenty of vacant land in Dubai, but two factors made building in undeveloped areas less attractive. First, Dubai was hit hard by the 2008 global financial recession. A bulk of real estate projects were put on hold and many were canceled. With the help of its neighbor city, Abu Dhabi , the Dubai real estate market would recover over the next five years. Second, developing new areas on the outskirts of the city was a relatively costly endeavor with a slower return on investment. It involved greater planning, land preparation, and setting up comprehensive infrastructure—inner roads from existing arteries, metro lines, and water and power lines. This financial reality made Karama an attractive site for redevelopment and capital expansion. 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:

BOOKS & ARTS Fictions of Unknowability IN HER verse novel Autobiography of Red , Anne Carson writes, “Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.” The sentence signals a turn in the protagonist Geryon’s coming-of-age storyline. Caught between adolescence and young adulthood, Geryon falls in love with the art of photography and a young man who “knows a lot/about art.” It causes his mother to complain, “I hardly know you anymore.” Geryon’s own vision develops against his lover’s ways of seeing, like images forming on transparent films exposed to light. But consider how Geryon’s access to his lover’s perceptions must be limited by his own perspective, his own frames of reference. Geryon, and us readers, would be mistaken to think that a picture and its framework can be clearly told apart. Autobiography of Red tracks how both love and art are so often bounded up with problems of perception. When Geryon’s mother asks him what he loves about the young man he is seeing, Geryon hesitates and finesses. He then becomes preoccupied with other thoughts like, “‘How does distance look?’ is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless / within to the edge / of what can be loved. It depends on light.” Geryon is reflecting on photography and philosophy when he should be talking about the man he loves. Or, he is thinking of the man he loves and scaffolding his thoughts with analogies and abstractions. After all, love, like photography, organizes the flux of experiences, gives our memories and perceptions a certain slant, and creates the semblance of intimacy out of distance. In Autobiography of Red , Carson adapts the myth about the slaying of the monster Geryon by Hercules into a contemporary coming-of-age tale and love story, told from the point of view of Geryon. From the winged monster’s perspective, the celebrated Greek hero is a figure worthy of love. What Geryon does not know is that this love will wreck his life. Throughout, Carson depicts the anxiety stemming from the desire to see other people and things as they are in themselves— ding an sich , as Kant would put it—and the impossibility to do so. “Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition” is not a truism. It conveys the longing for clarity—the kind of clarity one hopes to find in a definition. However, love and deftly crafted art confound rather than offer clarity. The best fictions I have read, the ones that have moved me to try my own hand at writing, accomplish a tricky task. In them, language gives uncertainty the glaze of clarity. Shimmering sentences entice me into assuming I have arrived at something—something like “meaning”—when the journey may have only just begun. Do writers need to worry at all about the ethical implications of choices in narrators, characters, and their quandaries of knowledge? The lack of clarity is an epistemological problem: it is a problem of knowing, or more precisely, a problem of unknowing. This problem forms the basis of fictions as varied as Anton Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog (trans. by Ivy Litvinov), Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf (trans. as The Quilt by Syeda Hameed), Clarice Lispector’s Amor (trans. Katrina Dodson), and the 2022 Caine Prize shortlisted story Collector of Memories by Joshua Chizoma. Literary historical arguments have been made for the dominance of the problem of knowing and unknowing—i.e. epistemological problems—in early twentieth-century fictions, including works of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Henry James. Proust, Woolf, Joyce, and James depend on the language of light and sight, perhaps inspired by photography, an emerging technology at the time, to construct their characters’ and narrators’ perceptual problems. In Joyce’s Araby , for instance, the narrator becomes infatuated with a girl he sees at dusk, “her figure defined by light.” The boy falls in love with a silhouette. Whom he cannot quite see becomes the very image of divinity. Anne Carson, WG Sebald, and Aleksandar Hemon, all writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, are “new” modernists in this sense (well, “metamodernists” if you care for trendy academic terms). But if we step outside the constraints of literary historical arguments, founded on corpuses carved out of the chaos of everything written and published in a period of time—on figures cut out of the shapeless ground––then we see how the problem of knowing is the wellspring of fiction. Sometimes in a self-aware way, at other times inadvertently, writers make craft choices that animate the difficulty of knowing anyone or anything. Writers elaborate upon the problem, magnify or atomize it, even if they cannot solve it. There are two aspects related to this issue that I wish to address here: how and why unknowability can be built into stories, and the ethical implications of such design. The question of ethical orientation arises in response to a cliché that circulates in public discourses about the function of literature: literature cultivates empathy. We know the Other and learn to love this Other, or at least care for them while reading their stories. Fiction can make the Other relatable. So it goes. Reading is thus construed as a virtuous undertaking. To not violate such an ethical contract, what can the good writer do? The writer can make the world a little more knowable. That, however, is a restricted and restricting view of literature. In fact, I believe writers—particularly, writers of fiction—often move us and absorb us without making the worlds and the characters that inhabit these worlds fully knowable. The Nature of Blindspots in “Lihaf” The narrator of Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf is neither Begum Jan nor her masseuse Rabbo. It is not even Begum Jan’s husband, the Nawab who is busy philandering with young boys. The story is told by Begum Jan’s adopted niece who has a dreadfully inadequate understanding of and insufficient language for what she sees. The narrator was a small girl when she lived with Begum Jan. Years later, Begum Jan’s erotic relationship with Rabbo lingers as a “terrifying shadow” in her mind. When the narrator sees Begum Jan initially, the woman appears to be the “very picture of royalty.” What follows is a description of Begum Jan—her eyes, hair, skin—from some distance. Between light and shade, day and night, something happens. This “something” becomes a story worth telling precisely because the narrator, even as an adult, does not fully recognize what she saw, and has little understanding of Begum Jan’s experiences. Recounting the past, the narrator, an adult at this point, says (in Syeda Hameed’s translation): "Rabbo had no other household duties. Perched on the four-poster bed she was always massaging Begum Jan's head, feet or some other part of her anatomy. If someone other than Begum Jan received such a quantity of human touching, what would the consequences be? Speaking for myself, I can say that if someone touched me continuously like this, I would certainly rot." Reading this, in the aftermath of the profuse commentary Lihaaf has generated for depicting homosexuality, we smile knowingly. We know what the narrator does not. But, I think, Lihaaf endures as a story because we still do not decisively grasp all its internal movements. For example, the narrator remembers her own “adoring gaze” on Begum Jan that transformed the older woman’s face into that of “a young boy,” which is intriguing given the Nawab’s (Begum’s husband) dalliances with young boys in the same house. The narrator also offers to take Rabbo’s place—to comfort Begum Jan, “scratch her itch”—without seemingly understanding Rabbo’s role in Begum Jan’s life. Soon after, Begum Jan “lies down” with the narrator and transforms into a “terrifying entity.” Lihaaf sustains both under- and overreading into its elliptical narration. What exactly happens after Begum Jan offers to “count” the narrator’s ribs? Why can the narrator no longer look at Begum Jan without feeling a sense of terror as though the older woman would engulf her? Was it because she began to project her fear of same-sex relationships onto her harmless physical intimacy with Begum Jan and therefore started “feeling nauseated against her warm body”? Or was the narrator—a child at the time—molested by Begum Jan but did not have the language to process the experience? In Carson’s Autobiography of Red , when a young Geryon is molested by his elder brother, he too cannot name what has happened to him. The verses tell us Geryon “let his brother do what he liked” and himself tried to disengage from the bodily experience by taking refuge in imaginative thinking. Lihaaf ’s narrator may be similarly scaffolding her actual suffering by inventing the image of monstrous shadows cast on the walls of Begum Jan’s house. The consensus is that Chughtai used a naïve narrator to recount a tumultuous relationship witnessed in childhood to veil the story’s focus on homosexuality. The narrator is a tool that allowed Chughtai to tackle what was taboo at the time. But without the narrator and her blind spots, we do not have much more than a scandalous tale of a clandestine affair here. Characters whose perceptions are inhibited for any number of reasons are commonplace in fiction precisely because their points of view generate tension, humor, and conflict. And when these characters serve as narrators, as in Lihaaf , we get the (in)famous unreliable narrator. Some unreliable narrators lie, but others misrepresent and misinterpret experiences because they do not know any better. There are also instances of narrative unreliability wherein the narrator is not a fully dramatized character but seems close to one or more of the characters in the story, as is the case with Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog and Lispector’s Amor . I will discuss another such story shortly, but before we get there, let’s pause for a moment to reflect on the supposed unreliability of narrators in fiction. To claim a made-up story’s narrator is unreliable or to read a character’s perception as limited is to also suggest that there are greater truths, more reliable versions of the incidents out there—somewhere beyond this particular character’s and/or the narrator’s horizon of understanding. Against that greater truth, unreliability takes a certain definition, but how do we access this truth? Is the truth something readers carry with them to the fictional world? Is Lolita’s Humbert Humbert unreliable because common sense and our own ethical values say so? If the answer is an unequivocal yes, then we must accept that had our common sense and ethical values been any different, Humbert Humbert could be read as a reliable narrator. In other words, unreliability would not be a feature of the story but a matter of the reader’s perception. I can decide whether a narrator is reliable or not. Who can stop me? This is in line with the conventional idea that says our response to fiction (and art in general) is subjective. However, I don’t believe the reader has that much liberty entering the fictional world. What is more, I would go a step further to say that the best writers find crafty ways to limit the reader’s freedom, so the reader cannot escape the burden of uncertainty, casting aside the problem of unknowing by appealing to absolute relativism (“my truth is as good as yours”). Fiction offers an interpretive latitude or flexibility—an unsettling openness but not exactly autonomy. Unreliability, like unknowability, can be traced to craft decisions. Now we are back to where we started. What or where is the knowledge in a story against which we measure characters’ and/or narrators’ perceptual limitations? What is the basis for our judgment? I would suggest—drawing upon the narrative theorist James Phelan—that this broader horizon of knowledge is conveyed through the overall structure of the narrative. It is a function of certain textual patterns. To claim a made-up story’s narrator is unreliable or to read a character’s perception as limited is to also suggest that there are greater truths, more reliable versions of the incidents out there—somewhere beyond this particular character’s and/or the narrator’s horizon of understanding. Against that greater truth, unreliability takes a certain definition, but how do we access this truth? Is the truth something readers carry with them to the fictional world? Phelan distinguishes between various possible ethical positions elicited in fiction. Relations among tellers (author, narrators), characters, and audiences shapeshift over the course of a narrative’s unfolding. Characters behave a certain way, which leads to certain consequences. The narrator tells the story a certain way—stands somewhere in space, time, and ideologies, in relation to the events constituting the story. This, too, has an ethical dimension. And then the entire story, built out of specific narrative strategies, emanates an attitude toward the narrator as well as the characters. And of course, readers also bring their values to bear upon the story. Unreliability results from the misalignment of these various ethical axes. The misalignment is carefully constructed through a series of choices. Of course, craft choices can’t fully account for readers’ values, especially given that stories are read across cultures and historical periods, but many of the other variables contributing to unreliability are amenable to shaping. Take, for instance, Street of the Moon , a short story by Attia Hosain that was first published in The Atlantic in 1952 and later anthologized in her collection Phoenix Fled (1953). In Street of the Moon , the narrator seems to see the world through the eyes of Kalloo the cook and yet manages to distinguish the story’s attitude toward everything, especially women, from that of Kalloo’s. How does Hosain accomplish this? In the rest of this essay, I offer some answers. Ethical Conundrums in “Street of the Moon” Attia Hosain is a writer with a peculiar legacy. Every few decades her books are re-issued and then, apparently, go out of print. I suppose her refusal to identify with either India or Pakistan post-Partition made her an uneasy presence in the emergent national literary canons. But that is not all. Her stylistic inclinations diverge from those of her South Asian contemporaries like, say, Mulk Raj Anand. Introducing an edition of Hosain’s Phoenix Fled in 1988, Anita Desai notes, “Not for her the stripped and bare simplicity of modern prose—that would not be in keeping with the period—which might make it difficult for the modern reader not as at home as she with the older literary style, but it is in harmony with the material.” Hosain’s “material” is the pre-Independence feudal society of Lucknow. While I agree with Desai about Hosain’s style—it is different from “stripped” modern prose—I don’t think Hosain upholds an older literary style either. Did writers of an earlier era combine psychological and emotional realism (a hallmark of “modern prose” if there was one) with rich social drama in Hosain’s vein? I don’t think so. I assume what Desai means by “older” is that Hosain’s storytelling owes something to not only the English literature of her time but also longstanding Urdu literary and cultural traditions. Desai further states that Hosain’s short stories in Phoenix Fled are “truly interesting” for "[The] reconstruction of a feudal society and its depiction from the point of view of the idealized, benevolent aristocrat who feels a sense of duty and responsibility towards his dependents—women as well as servants. This character is something of a stock-in-trade with writers about the Indian scene of that period, but in Attia Hosain’s work he—or she—fades into the anonymous figure of the narrator, and the interest is focused upon the lively world of servants and their families…" Desai is suggesting there is a class difference between the narrators and the central characters of Hosain’s stories, which makes them interesting. If we read Street of the Moon with Desai’s comment in mind, then any misalignment in the ethical axes of the telling (the attitude of the anonymous third-person narrator) and the told (the central characters) would be chalked up to class differences. And it is not impossible to find fiction in which difference in ethics is simply a function of class-caste-gender distinctions, sometimes to rather patronizing effect. However, Street of the Moon is not such a story. And it is a problem if we conflate the self-effacing and non-characterized narrator speaking in the third-person with the strawman figure of “the idealized, benevolent aristocrat.” Hosain’s novel Sunlight on the Broken Column does have an aristocrat for a narrator (Laila, the rebellious daughter of a feudal family) but I find no clear reason as to why we must read Hosain’s short stories as though they were told by a similar figure, unless the story specifies so. I think the fact that we cannot fully pin down the narrator of Street of the Moon , that their values and beliefs keep shifting, makes the story a scathing and disturbing social portrait rather than a cautionary tale directed at men and women. Here's the beginning of Street of the Moon : "Kalloo the cook had worked for the family for more years than he could remember. He had started as the cook’s help, washing dishes, grinding the spices and running errands. When the old cook died of an overdose of opium Kalloo inherited both his job and his taste for opium. His inherent laziness fed by the enervating influence of the drug kept him working for his inadequate pay, because he lacked the energy and the courage to give notice and look for work elsewhere. Moreover, his emotions had grown roots through the years, and he was emotionally attached to the family. He had watched with affectionate interest the birth, childhood, youth and manhood of the sons of the house and felt he was an elder brother." Of his own age he was uncertain but felt young enough when opium-inspired. Eyes outlined with powdered soorma, tiny attar-soaked bit of cotton hidden in his ear his cotton embroidered cap set isn't angle, he went off and evening to the Street of the Moon. The morning after he would be slower of movement than usual, and when he weighed the flower, the lentils, the rice and fat for the day his hands would shake and Mughlani, who had charge of the stores, would shake her grey head and wheeze asthmatically: “You men, you are all animals even when your feet hang in their grave. What you need, Kalloo Mian is a wife to keep you at home.” “What I need is someone to help me in the kitchen it is hard work that makes my hands shake and my head grow heavy,” he would grumble. But the repeated suggestion took root in his mind and he brooded over the need to find himself a wife." Street of the Moon aids my thinking about perspectival blind spots as bases for fiction of unknowability (even when we do not have a naïve first-person narrator) because the events making up the story don’t seem to be particularly remarkable in themselves. E.M Forster maintained, “ Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.” But I feel like I know what happens next in Street of the Moon —it is the portrait of a society where possibilities are finite if you are of a marginal class and gender. So, while reading, what holds my attention is not so much the chain of events but the angle from which Hosain’s narrator approaches them. As we see from the excerpt, the opening shines the lights on Kalloo, and the lights are harsh. The first sentence establishes what Kalloo does not know for certain (how long he’s been working for the family) and thereby sets up a pattern. We quickly learn Kalloo is addicted to a perception-altering substance. The habit has allowed him to develop a self-image—he feels a sense of kinship with the family he serves, though we are also prompted to suspect that this might be a convenient justification for him to avoid looking for work elsewhere. At any rate, his sense of kinship is not reciprocated—the family offers him “inadequate pay.” If the narrator remarks upon Kalloo’s laziness as an upper-class employer would, the narrator also remains forthcoming about his unacceptable working conditions that Kalloo’s employers would refuse to acknowledge. A little later, Kalloo’s son from his first wife (who is dead) highlights this in dialogue: “What great fortune have you piled up? I know the Collector Sahib’s khansama who gets sixty rupees a month, and has a help, you get twenty rupees like a plain barvarchi .” The design of the opening is such that both Kalloo and the family he works for are held culpable for keeping intact a suspect order for several years. In the second paragraph, we learn more about Kalloo’s distorted self-image. He imagines himself young (when he is not) and takes care of his appearance when he visits brothels. Here is a man, who is then dependent, and perhaps dangerously so, on seeing himself in a certain light to make it through a life that is hard and unjust, a life meant to be spent “in the smoke and heat of the kitchen.” The first character to explicitly judge Kalloo, besides the narrator, is Mughlani. Her voice reaches us through dialogue. She scolds Kalloo for acting against the norms of social respectability. Mughlani, like the narrator, perhaps also sees Kalloo as lazy, but then Mughlani also imagines there could be a cure for Kalloo’s maladies. Why Mughlani imagines a wife would mend Kalloo can be chalked up to social beliefs—a man with a wife would behave more responsibly (really?!). However, when we learn that the old gray-haired Mughlani is out of breath from dealing with Kalloo (“wheeze asthmatically”), we can speculate that Kalloo’s having a wife could ease some of Mughlani’s troubles. Probably Kalloo’s slacking off doubles the woman’s responsibilities. Her advice to Kalloo is thus not simply a nod to codes of social propriety, but also a ploy that could potentially relieve her. It is not impossible to find fiction in which difference in ethics is simply a function of class-caste-gender distinctions, sometimes to rather patronizing effect. However, Street of the Moon , is not such a story. And it is a problem if we conflate the self-effacing and non-characterized narrator speaking in the third-person with the strawman figure of “the idealized, benevolent aristocrat.” The two characters—Mughlani and Kalloo—are pitted against each other, and the collocation makes both slightly more vivid. While reporting both their behaviors and Kalloo’s thoughts, the narrator does not fully align with either. There is a distance between the nondescript, non-localizable anonymous narrator and these other characters, especially Kalloo, who begins at the very edge of what can be love, and over the course of the story gets pushed further away. The distance between the narrator and the characters accounts for the tone (choice of the verb “inherited” for both Kalloo’s job and addiction, for example), the comments on Kalloo’s “inherent laziness”, and other unsavory behavior. This distance is manifested in how Kalloo intends to develop a flattering self-portrait—hardworking, loyal, agile servant of a family that treats him like an elder brother—and how the narrator exposes the dubious mechanics (opium) developing the picture. Hosain’s narratorial tactics are similar to Carson’s here, though the thrust is different. In Carson’s verse novel, Geryon has internalized a monstrous self-image—he thinks he is “stupid,” “ugly,” and exists at the edge of lovability—but the narrator places his behavior alongside those of other characters, including his brother and his lover, to expose how these people manipulate Geryon into developing an abhorrent self-image so they can exploit him. Just when Kalloo wishes he had a wife, a suitable candidate appears. The widow working as Mughlani’s help goes to her village and returns with her beautiful daughter Hasina. The narrator tells us no one thought of the widow as “a living woman” before she brought Hasina; the widow was “a humble ugly shadow” in everyone’s eyes. It is her daughter’s presence that brings her to life. Once again, two characters seem to give form to each other. Kalloo, the narrator nudges us to notice, registers the girl’s presence. He is unhappy that he must cook for another person, but he empathizes with the widow when she says, “I am growing old, and need someone to care for me.” Mughlani is keen to discipline the girl who apparently “Sit[s] all day admiring herself.” Kalloo agrees with Mughlani. His empathy for Hasina’s mother and appreciation for Mughlani’s scheme of disciplining the young girl is related to his dissatisfaction with his own son. What is common to Hasina and Kalloo’s son is that they are young, and people like Kalloo and Mughlani gather that they will disturb the existing social order. One noteworthy detail here is that while Kalloo’s son is quoted as mocking his father, Hasina has not said anything at all in the story so far. However, soon after the exchange with Mughlani, Kalloo decides “Hasina’s eyes mocked him.” Kalloo is projecting the image of his own son onto Hasina. The narrator has not described anything specific Hasina has said or done that can reasonably be understood as mockery. In fact, half the girl’s face is hidden: “She was hiding her mouth with her ‘dupatta’…” In this encounter between Kalloo and the girl, we do not know what the girl is thinking or doing. However, a third character present on the scene suggests that Kalloo is under the influence of opium. Under influence, Kalloo assumes he knows Hasina. The narrator, however, has left her unknowable. Kalloo, much like the narrator of Lihaaf , believes he understands what he does not—that is all we need to know to mistrust him. Soon, Kalloo begins to be haunted by Hasina’s eyes—the liveliness in them and the “angry hate” in them upset him. The narrator charts how from Kalloo’s point of view, Hasina’s eyes and nose ring dance. It is all too much to bear for a man used to numbing his senses with opium. The narrator’s distance from Kalloo widens as more and more voices enter the story through dialogue. The polyphonic surface unsettles Kalloo’s gaze on Hasina, even though none of them protest Kalloo’s beliefs about her. In fact, the others often mirror Kalloo’s viewpoints as far as Hasina is concerned. However, they question Kalloo’s perceptions on other counts. Mughlani, for instance, points out that the feudal family does not fire Kalloo because he is ready to work for too-little pay and not because he is “family” to them. Just as the characters contest Kalloo’s beliefs, they also contest each other’s claims. When Mughlani says, “In my days we didn’t leave the room for forty days [before a wedding],” Hasina’s mother says, “Not so many surely.” The structure of Hosain’s narrative whereby each character contests and undercuts others’ views on various subjects causes us—readers—to doubt their perception of Hasina. Ten pages into the thirty-two-page story, we do not know Hasina beyond what these other characters believe about her, but the narrator has not given us reasons to fully trust the other characters. Indeed, they do not trust each other. Mughlani takes the lead in arranging Kalloo’s wedding with Hasina. The wedding is entertainment for the bored aristocrats and an occasion for the other servants to celebrate and assert their authority. Kalloo’s great desire for Hasina on the eve of their wedding is suspect. What makes his desire suspect is not the present-day readers’ values alone: twenty-first-century readers may find Kalloo’s and Hasina’s vast asymmetries in age and power fraught, but that is almost beside the point. Kalloo’s desire is suspect because he is the same man who had instigated Hasina’s mother to beat her and projected his son’s insolence onto the girl. The first unfiltered glimpse we get of Hasina’s interiority establishes her naivety. With her, the problem of knowing and unknowing assumes the form of innocence. She is excited about wedding gifts, and she imagines she can do as she pleases after she is married because her mother tells her so. We know Kalloo relatively more than Hasina does, and, of course, we have some sense of how he perceives her. Sure enough, as soon as the ceremonial garbs are shed, Kalloo is once again haunted by “Hasina’s cruel mockery,” only made harsher by the fact she is now his wife. The sexual encounters between Kalloo and Hasina, though not described in a lot of detail, record his disregard for her wishes. Anecdotally I can add that my students, too, hold characters in fiction to oddly specific ethical standards. Some express resentment for the narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body because the narrator is avoidant and noncommittal. Others don’t like Zadie Smith’s narrator in Swing Time because the narrator takes a lifetime to “see” how a dance performance she enjoyed as a child was performed in blackface and still admits to enjoying the dance. Her married life requires Hasina to find her own pain-numbing drugs: she takes pleasure in adorning herself, looking at her mirror image, admiring her new possessions. But even these are snatched from her, and it is not long before “her eyes lost their mischievous sparkle.” However, the sparkling eyes return, only for a short time, and everyone suspects this must be on account of her illicit relation with Kalloo’s son who is closer in age to her. Kalloo becomes vigilant and takes “very little opium” to make sure he does not lose his wife to his son. As it turns out, Kalloo’s suspicions are not misguided, and this is where the story’s ethical orientation becomes intriguing. If Kalloo was simply suspecting Hasina and nothing had happened between Hasina and Kalloo’s son, it would be one thing—we don’t trust Kalloo anyway—but that would make for a much simpler and weaker story. In Hosain’s story, Hasina has cheated on Kalloo. And when Kalloo sends his son away, Hasina continues to cheat—she begins to enjoy the attention of another servant. Hasina also loves touching luxurious items in the landlady’s room and steals some of them. She then elopes with the other servant who supposedly finds work for her, but given the story’s final scene it seems he sold her to a brothel. Hosain does not resolve the issue of conflicting perceptions. When we think we know a character, the character transforms ever so slightly under our gaze. This pattern replicates a similar pattern within the world of the story. And the pattern’s origin can be traced to the creative process. Fictions of unknowability succeed when the writer has risked going from a spaceless nook within to the very edge of what they know and love. Even though Kalloo’s suspicions about Hasina materialize, the story does not make him out to be a righteous figure, of course. Towards the end of the story, he sees her image (innocent, gay, mischievous) in his opium dreams. Then, apparently, he sees her “powdered face pallid in the harsh light” in the “Street of the Moon”—the red-light district. He runs away the moment he spots her because her reality threatens to obliterate the idealized portrait of her that he now cherishes. The cherished portrait conjures a subjectivity that he may have destroyed, but also, we remain uncertain about what Hasina was prior to being dragged into Kalloo’s world. Was she ever the idealized child Kalloo imagines her to be in the end? We do not know but we do know that Kalloo runs away from knowledge. That is the kind of person he is. There are a variety of things Kalloo does not remember and does not want to see. He cherishes oblivion. His perspective comes across as distorted not necessarily because we have a clearer view of the truth than him, but we have a clearer sense that his perceptions are excessively muddled. Is Hasina better off—happier—in the “Street of the Moon” than she was in the control of her obnoxious husband? Has her situation changed for better or worse? She was betrayed by a lover and ended up there. We don’t know much more than that. In the end, she is once more screened from our view—her interiority is inaccessible. We have been left with Kalloo, who carries on as he always has. Untrustworthy characters with dubious ethics like Kalloo, who neither reform nor face punishment, throw off balance the view of fiction (and literature more generally) as wholesome and instructive. Readers seem to worry a great deal about such unethical conduct on the part of authors. If Goodreads reviews are anything to go by, readers are disappointed when a story does not punish, kill, or “shut up” a character they cannot love. A reader asks, “Will someone tell me if any likable characters show up?” in a review of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov . Having taught literature and creative writing for some years now, anecdotally I can add that my students, too, hold characters in fiction to oddly specific ethical standards. Some express resentment for the narrator of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body because the narrator is avoidant and noncommittal. Others don’t like Zadie Smith’s narrator in Swing Time because the narrator takes a lifetime to “see” how a dance performance she enjoyed as a child was performed in blackface and still admits to enjoying the dance. Can writers never write about decent (“relatable”) people whose merits outweigh their flaws? My practiced move as a teacher is to ask students why they crave decency in fiction in this way. What sort of ethics prompts them/us to first see some “good” in people (well, characters) before caring for them? But for now, let me take the desire to find the “good” in Street of the Moon . Does Hosain’s story intend for the reader to empathize with Kalloo, to see some good in him? Or are we to feel for Hasina, though she does not remain decent (cheats, steals, elopes)? Who—which of these Others—have we learned to love in reading Street of the Moon ? These questions become subsumed in another question that has to do with craft decisions: with whom does the anonymous narrator’s allegiance lie in the story? In the strictest sense: neither Kalloo nor Hasina. What’s clear is that though the story closely tracks Kalloo’s point of view, the narrator does not fully align with him. And I think that is enough to make the story a complex fictional rendering of social life, rather than one that catalogs the evils of men like Kalloo or predicaments of women like Hasina. A story need not explicitly define its stance on subjects (women, misogyny, marriages). Instead, it may choose to shine the lights on everything it intends to negate: in this case, Kalloo’s gaze, his values. A narrative punishing Kalloo would be righteous but, in my opinion, quite pointless. Righteous narrators of fiction leave readers with a sense of comfort—we get to pretend we always knew right from wrong. But we really don’t. Not clearly anyhow. This is also why even in Carson’s Autobiography and Chughtai’s Lihaaf , characters who are ethically suspect do not face any radical consequences. Geryon’s untrustworthy lover does not grapple with chastising. Geryon’s failing—if it can be called a failing—seems to be his inability to extricate himself from those who abuse him. Towards the end of Autobiography , he accompanies his unrepentant lover to see an installation art piece resembling a volcano and concludes, “We are amazing beings.” In Chughtai’s story, the narrator who has recounted in some detail her peculiar childhood experiences comes to an incongruous conclusion: she will never tell anyone what she saw under Begum Jan’s quilt even if she was offered a large sum of money. These endings play with the readers’ concern for truth and their desire to see characters and events as they are in themselves while remaining unable to do so. Do writers need to worry at all about the ethical implications of choices in narrators, characters, and their quandaries of knowledge? From a writer’s point of view, I can see how ethics (often confused with socially defined morality) can be constraining. And should great art not fight constraints? But when writers talk of dispensing with ethics in their stories, they are usually talking of dispensing with moral (“good”) characters. The important thing to recognize is that ethics does not mean “good.” Ethics also does not mean a singular, well-defined position vis-à-vis a subject. To say stories have an ethical orientation is not to suggest that stories prescribe an easily digested pill to help enact social good. It is also not to say that stories’ ethical orientation would be the same as the orientation of any one or all of the characters. To say stories have an ethical orientation is to admit that craft decisions are never disinterested in ethics, though memorable stories, I think, have a hesitant ethics and this hesitancy is in their structure. In Street of the Moon , the pairing of characters, the contrasts Hosain works out in perceptions and points of view, the use of dialogue, and the slipperiness of the narratorial position on the unfolding events, contributes to the feeling of hesitancy. It is a story about the ways we obstruct knowledge and numb perceptions to bear what we must. ∎ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Artwork "Wonderland 2" by Priyanka D'Souza. Watercolour on paper (2015) SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Essay Criticism Ismat Chughtai Modernism Anne Carson Quilt Autobiography of Red Geryon Aleksandar Hemon Clarice Lispector Craft Epistemology Attia Hosain Street of the Moon Ethics Characterization Longform Knowledge Lihaaf Dostoyevsky Narrators Ethical Standards for Fictional Characters Zadie Smith Swing Time Jeannette Winterson Written on the Body Goodreads The Brothers Karamazov Short Stories Translation Short Story Fiction Irreverence Affect Alienation Rhetoric Sensuality Queerness Sadness Absurdity Composition Pedagogy Authenticity Verisimilitude TORSA GHOSAL is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Bustle , and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, and a host of the Narrative for Social Justice podcast. Essay Criticism 28th Feb 2023 PRIYANKA D'SOUZA is an artist, writer, and art historian whose primary areas of research and inspiration are Mughal painting and natural history in early modern Europe. She is part of the artistic duo Resting Museum and winner of the 2022 Emerging Artist Award from the Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art (FICA). Torsa Ghosal Anne Carson and Ismat Chughtai's narrative devices exemplify unreliable and ethically dubious characters that go "to the edge of what can be loved." It is an epistemic approach that rightly repudiates the commonplace idea that the purpose of fiction is to make the Other relatable. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 4 · On Qurratulain Hyder's sci-fi story “Roshni ki Raftaar” Time traveling from 1960s India to early modern Egypt with the acclaimed Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder and her story “Roshni ki Raftaar.” Zuneera Shah · Nur Nasreen Ibrahim A reading and discussion of the late Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder and her short story “Roshni ki Raftaar” by editors Nur Nasreen Ibrahim and Zuneera Shah. Feat.: time travel, women in science, sci-fi traditions in Urdu compared to those in English, and much more. Must-watch: Nur and Zuneera's thoughts on the ending, speculations on whether Hyder intended for a sequel, what she might think of criticisms, how the tonal shift affects the story, and how humor functions in the story. More importantly: why do we expect or want character growth? Is there a fundamental difference with regard to character growth between the Anglophone literary tradition and the non-Anglophone one? Qurratulain Hyder is amongst the most acclaimed and influential Urdu writers of the 20th century, perhaps even the most popular alongside contemporaries like Ismat Chughtai (with whom she had a testy relationship). Best known for her magnum opus “Aag ka Durya” or “River of Fire,” Hyder was also a deeply expansive writer. Here, Nur and Zuneera discuss her use of fantasy and sci-fi framings, the manner of her world-building, and comparisons to contemporary films and TV shows in the most fun and audience-engaging SAAG Chats episode to date. A reading and discussion of the late Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder and her short story “Roshni ki Raftaar” by editors Nur Nasreen Ibrahim and Zuneera Shah. Feat.: time travel, women in science, sci-fi traditions in Urdu compared to those in English, and much more. Must-watch: Nur and Zuneera's thoughts on the ending, speculations on whether Hyder intended for a sequel, what she might think of criticisms, how the tonal shift affects the story, and how humor functions in the story. More importantly: why do we expect or want character growth? Is there a fundamental difference with regard to character growth between the Anglophone literary tradition and the non-Anglophone one? Qurratulain Hyder is amongst the most acclaimed and influential Urdu writers of the 20th century, perhaps even the most popular alongside contemporaries like Ismat Chughtai (with whom she had a testy relationship). Best known for her magnum opus “Aag ka Durya” or “River of Fire,” Hyder was also a deeply expansive writer. Here, Nur and Zuneera discuss her use of fantasy and sci-fi framings, the manner of her world-building, and comparisons to contemporary films and TV shows in the most fun and audience-engaging SAAG Chats episode to date. SUB-HEAD ​ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Jamil Jan Kochai A Premonition; Recollected Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Live Urdu Fiction Posthumous Qurratulain Hyder Science Fiction Time Travel Urdu Criticism Language SAAG Chats Genre Genre Tropes Speculative Fiction Fantasy Philosophical Fiction Syncretism River of Fire Roshni ki Raftaar Sahitya Akademi Genre Fluidity Difficult Reading Esoterica Time & Space Suez Canal Crisis Narrators Petty Bureaucracy Everyday Life Indian Bureaucracy Aligarh Science Characterization Ethical Standards for Fictional Characters Sci-Fi Rockets Romance Bitterness Scientist Characters Surprise Endings Gender Tonal Shifts Humor Short Story Naiyer Masud Zuneera Shah is a gender & development professional and writer based in Lahore. Nur Nasreen Ibrahim is a journalist and writer currently a Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop, and a television producer formerly at Al-Jazeera and Patriot Act . She is based in Brooklyn. 30 Nov 2020 Live Urdu Fiction 30th Nov 2020 Chats Ep. 10 · On Ambition, Immigration, Class in “Gold Diggers” Sanjena Sathian 21st Jun Chats Ep. 1 · On A Premonition; Recollected Jamil Jan Kochai 13th Nov Fictions of Unknowability Torsa Ghosal 28th Feb Two Stories Nabarun Bhattacharya 6th Oct Chats Ep. 5 · Tamil translation & Perumal Murugan's “Poonachi” N Kalyan Raman 7th Dec On That Note: