I have weathered many rumblings— this house reverberating through the years with yells I have weathered many rumblings— this house reverberating through the years with yells Imdad Barbhuyan, To Hold and To Let Go (2024). Digital photograph. Artist LOCATION AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 23 Oct 2010 rd · FICTION & POETRY REPORTAGE · LOCATION Ghostmother I stare at you on the swing sweater over your sari, smile like my mother’s—teeth straight as a mare’s You summon the wind: forward, back forward, back Tendrils of hair frame your face, my mother's cursive brushes letters forward, back forward, back your ashen hand reaches through the photograph, grabs my wrist आओ— my flesh twists in your grip you insist, pull me forward, आओ— I open my eyes, find you pregnant Feel, you command in Nepali my selective ear translates on impact you guide my hand to your belly Is this her? I ask, anticipating a kick below my palm Yes, you smile at the gift of a future girl तिम्रो आमा (this we know) I follow you through the house not-yet-destroyed you never saw the earthquake relief cushions my voice Oh छोरी, your head tilts in pity I have weathered many rumblings— this house reverberating through the years with yells I hold back explaining how earthquake is different I wonder at the Nepali word for reverberate uncles fill narrow hallways, tall and lithe in school uniforms they do not see me I am your shadow swollen with your pregnant belly.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags 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 People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized." COMMUNITY Indentured Labor & Guyanese Politics "The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized." Gaiutra Bahadur The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized. RECOMMENDED: Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur. The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized. RECOMMENDED: Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Guyana 2020 Guyanese Election People's Progressive Party Cold War Politics Black-Indian Tensions in Guyana Cheddi Jagan Black Solidarities Forbes Burnham Coolitude Fictional Essay Khal Torabully Avant-Garde Destabilizing History Irfaan Ali David Granger Ethnically Divided Politics Indentured Labor Labor Indo-Caribbean Georgetown Gaiutra Bahadur is an essayist, critic, and journalist. She is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture , which was shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize, the British literary prize for artful political writing. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, Dissent, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Ms. Magazine, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post and The Griffith Review . She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at Rutgers University in Newark. 11 Oct 2020 Interview Guyana 11th Oct 2020 Chats Ep. 8 · On Migrations in Global History Neilesh Bose 4th May Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy Chaitali Sen 17th Dec FLUX · Poetry Reading by Rajiv Mohabir with Marginalia Rajiv Mohabir 5th Dec Romantic Literature and Colonialism Mani Samriti Chander 13th Nov Six Poems Rajiv Mohabir 31st Oct On That Note:

In this letter, Ustad Mohammad Ali Talpur responds to Hazaran Baloch, tracing the moral and political stakes of remembrance and resistance in the Baloch struggle. He foregrounds the legacy of the Baloch nation, where mourning and honoring martyrs binds generations, and encourages his pupil to trust in the unflinching nature and will of the Baloch people—traits that have triumphed in the face of 77 years of injustice. THE VERTICAL Letter to History (II) AUTHOR In this letter, Ustad Mohammad Ali Talpur responds to Hazaran Baloch, tracing the moral and political stakes of remembrance and resistance in the Baloch struggle. He foregrounds the legacy of the Baloch nation, where mourning and honoring martyrs binds generations, and encourages his pupil to trust in the unflinching nature and will of the Baloch people—traits that have triumphed in the face of 77 years of injustice. My Dearest Daughter, Hazaran, Your anguished letter made me cry tears of rage, anger, and sadness. They cut deeper into the scars that remain on my soul after witnessing the suffering of our people for over half a century. Having lost so many of my friends and former students, I wonder if these wounds will ever heal. I remember Lawang Khan , seventy years old, who died defending his village in 1973. I remember Ali Mohammad Mengal , a veteran from 1960. I remember Safar Khan Zarakzai who, when surrounded and asked to surrender, replied: This is my land; I will defend it with my life. He died fighting. Etched on my soul are the enforced disappearances of my dearest friends, Duleep Dass “Dali” and Sher Ali Marri, in the spring of 1976. Dali nursed me back to health when I lay injured in the mountains. Etched, too, is the suffering of Baloch families I witnessed living as refugees in Afghanistan—only to be identified as terrorists upon their return. So many unsung heroes, so many disappeared without a trace, so many lives uprooted. They found no peace, neither in exile, nor upon return. My spiritual association with the Baloch struggle began on 15 July 1960, when Nawab Nauroz Khan’s son, Batay Khan, along with six companions––Sabzal Khan Zehri, Bahawal Khan Musiyani, Wali Muhammad Zarakzai, Ghulam Rasool Nichari, Masti Khan Musiyani, and Jamal Khan Zehri—were executed after the state broke its promise of amnesty. Four were hanged in Hyderabad Jail. Three, including Batay Khan, in Sukkur Jail. It was my uncle, Mir Rasool Bakhsh Talpur, who claimed their bodies, performed the funeral rites, and brought them to Kalat. On 21 October 1971, I left home and joined the armed struggle in the Marri hills. I was fuelled by rage. You ask what bullets sound like when they tear through our bodies. I thought of the twenty-seven fired into Sangat Sana , the three that pierced Jalil Reki ’s heart, the one that struck Ali Sher Kurd ’s forehead. Those martyrs may not have heard them, but those sounds echo in the soul of every Baloch who loves the motherland. You mention the screeching chains as they dragged my precious Mahrang away, shamelessly calling it arrest; her sarri/سری/chador trampled by those abducting her. You ask me about the thunder that must have shaken the heavens when my dearest Sammi’s سری was snatched from her head to dehumanize and humiliate her. All this and more is forever seared into me. Let me tell you what a sarri means to the Baloch. Fights cease when our women, with sarris in hand, come in-between. The Baloch say: the sarri is sacred. Our poet Atta Shad said that in return for a bowl of water, we give a hundred years of loyalty. I wish he had also said that the desecration of the sarri is never forgiven. Not in a thousand generations. It was difficult when I first joined the struggle. Despite the pain, however, there was also the belief that eventual victory would come. I, too, closed the door of hopelessness because I knew we were sowing seeds that would one day grow into trees—providing shade and fruit to all. When Banuk Karima was taken from us, it left the nation mourning. Her death created a void which seemed impossible to fill. Then came Mahrang, Sammi, Sabiha, Beebow, and hundreds more. Karima lit a fire in the hearts of Baloch women to participate in the national struggle––she embodied the wisdom and courage I see in all of you. When asked what Banuk Karima meant to Balochistan and its struggle, I replied: Karima is the conscience and the consciousness of the Baloch Nation . You ask me about little Kambar, Zahid’s son, who has lost another father this cursed March. I cannot send him words of consolation; they would be meaningless. But I want him to know that this isn’t his injustice to bear alone. The Baloch Nation will remember. You ask me about the state’s inhumanity toward Bebarg, who lives his life as a paraplegic. Why does the state fear a person who is unable to walk? It fears his voice. That is how the state maintains control: by repressing Baloch voices. My dearest child, it is of utmost importance to understand the essence of this state. It is by nature predatory and extractive––it cannot expand without exploiting us and our words, which refuse to submit to its evil design. We should not expect humanity or compassion from political parties integral to the establishment. They work for each other and protect their own interests. All pillars of the state are complicit. And in general, the silence of society is deafening too. The state will continue repressing us. What we do in response is our responsibility. Our only avenue is resistance. If we give it up, repression will be manifold, as docile people are an easier target. You rightly stated that Mahrang and Sammi taught the Baloch that they must stop being forever mourners, forever betrayed—and for that, they are considered the greatest threat and have been jailed. You are rightly worried about the fact that the new voices of our movement are now in jail cells, and that the state is trying to terrify young girls from treading the path that Karima, Mahrang, and Sammi chose. I feel it is important to understand how our Baloch Nation has responded to this unending crisis. Today, on the streets of Balochistan, girls—some as young as five years old—are carrying pictures of Karima, Mahrang, and Sammi. They are not merely holding their images; they picture themselves as these icons, and that is where our hope lies. For tomorrow, there will be Karimas, Mahrangs, Sammis, Sabihas, and Beebows in the millions. No power on earth will be able to stop them. I am not waiting for that tomorrow—it has already begun. The bastions of tyranny are crumbling, and that is why repression has multiplied and spread. That is why Mahrang and Sammi have been imprisoned. And while this violence will continue, it cannot subdue our spirits. “ Pakistan Zindabad ” was knifed onto the bodies of those Baloch who were extrajudicially killed. Their eyes gouged, their bodies drilled. Did the resistance vaporize and vanish? No. During the 2013 Long March by Mama Qadeer Baloch, Farzana Majeed, and others, faces were covered to avoid recognition. Today, thousands come out fearlessly to protest. The Baloch Nation has become fearless. The only history with a limited shelf life is that of the oppressor. Our history is ineradicable and can only flourish—for victory is our destiny. You ask if writing is futile. No, my dearest daughter, writing is our weapon. And it is a weapon that terrifies the oppressor because the word of freedom is sacred—it enlightens and motivates. Why do they seize books Baloch put up at book fairs? Writing challenges their phony and misleading discourse. Keep writing. You are empowering the Baloch narrative and preserving the history of Baloch resistance—a history long subjected to suppression. Writing strikes fear into the hearts and minds of oppressors in a way that no other weapon can. While other weapons bring only death and destruction, writing gives life—and that is why they fear words so deeply. Future generations will thank you and honor you for your words. You also ask, “Who will stand with us?’ and “Is it possible that the other oppressed nations of this land will stand with us in defiance of a shared oppressor?” My respected daughter, I believe that unity arises from two sources: either from the pain people share, or from a collective consciousness shaped by shared aspirations, history, and naturally, pain. Expecting support from those who believe in the narratives taught in Pakistan Studies is futile. And yes, do not expect the world to come to our aid—it has allowed Israel to do whatever it pleases to the Palestinians. The people may raise their voices, but governments will remain silent—because speaking up would endanger the very systems of brutality and exploitation they rely on. Merely being oppressed does not automatically give someone the consciousness to feel the pain of others or to support them. There are millions of oppressed people here, but support cannot be expected from them in the same way it can be from those who share our collective pain. To obstruct the path of collective consciousness, the state abducts students, blocks book fairs, and systematically neglects the education sector—ensuring that not many Baloch become educated. This denial of education is a key part of a calculated policy of erasure. Through their indiscriminate repression, however, they are unknowingly forging our collective consciousness. This will be the very reason for their downfall. You have talked about our mourning and grief over the years and how it continues. Yes, when there is death, there is grief and mourning—but it has not only been that. When my dearest friend Raza Jehangir was killed on 14 August 2013 by the state, we honored his death. His brave mother led the funeral and they sang a lullaby: Raza jan is little (child) and innocent, joyfully asleep in the decorated cradle. Joyfully asleep in the decorated cradle, sapient (learned men) are his forefathers. Then there is the incredible picture of the wife of Banzay Pirdadani Marri, who stands at the graves of her two sons, Mohammad Khan and Mohammad Nabi, draped in the flag that symbolizes a free Balochistan. They were killed on the same day and their bodies thrown on the roadside. I treated the two boys once, when they were very young and sick. When they grew up, I taught them at the school I managed for our refugee children in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan. How could my soul feel peace after their death? Yet I know that despite the depth of pain caused by the loss and disappearance of loved ones, the Baloch have mourned with grace and dignity. They cannot be accused of selling their grief. Those in power have offered compensation to the families of the disappeared, but these offers have always been firmly rejected. In the end, you ask, “Tell me, Baba Jan, are we destined to be forever caught in this storm, forever erased, forever replaced?” This storm—or the ones that came before—could not erase us, nor replace us, and neither will the ones that may come in the future. Why do I say this? Because the storm that came on 27 March 1948 could not erase us. Then came another in October 1958 , which led to the resistance of Nawab Nauroz Khan. He was promised amnesty on the oath of the Quran, yet on a single day—15 July 1960—six of his companions and one of his sons were hanged. Some believed it was the end of the resistance. But did it end? No. Babu Sher Mohammad Marri and Ali Mohammad Mengal stood their ground and kept the resistance alive. Peace was made in 1970, but provocations remained. So emerged the 1973–1977 insurgency to resist repression. In September 1974 , when some Marris in Chamaling surrendered under assault by gunships, the state claimed that the core of the resistance had been broken. But had it? No—because the fighting continued until 1977. That was not the end. The Marris who took refuge in Afghanistan did not return when the Zia regime offered them amnesty . Despite the hardships of life as refugees, they stayed. Khair Bakhsh Marri joined them in 1982. He remained there for nearly a decade. That act of defiance kept the spirit of the resistance alive back home. A period of apparent dormancy followed, from 1993 to 2000. But beneath the surface, resentment simmered and political awareness grew. Matters came to a head when Khair Bakhsh Marri was arrested on fabricated charges in 2000 and kept in jail for two years. That moment reignited the resistance. Then came a turning point: the killing of Akbar Bugti on 26 August 2006. Like the 1973–1977 insurgency, the fight spread across Balochistan—it has not ended. Since 2000, the Baloch have faced the severest repression. Every brutal tool at the state's disposal has been used. Our academics, such as Saba Dashtyari and Zahid Askani , have been killed; our political activists have been murdered or disappeared; our journalists have been silenced; our poets have been targeted; and our students have been abducted. And now, even our women have been incarcerated. Yet, the resistance lives on—it refuses to die. It survives because it is an expression of the people's most cherished dream. The Baloch are a resilient nation and do not give up what they hold dear—and what they hold dearest are dignity and freedom. It is no coincidence that the Baloch call their motherland Gul Zameen—Land of Flowers. As they say, Waye watan hushkain dar —I love my land even if it is like a withered twig. There is something vital that must be said. Something that has long been the bane of the Baloch Nation. Those soul-selling Baloch who have collaborated with the establishment, aiding in the suppression of Baloch rights and enabling crimes against their own people. There is an indigenous Native American fable: the birds complained of being killed by arrows, and the response was, “Were it not for the feathers of birds in the arrows, you would be safe.” Our suffering, too, would have been less had some Baloch not provided the feathers for those arrows. Let me tell you something: if brutal crackdowns and military operations could suppress a people's desire for national, political, social, and economic rights, then Algeria would still be a French colony. The French were ruthless and unforgiving. They picked people up, held them in custody, and tortured them for as long as they pleased. Yet in the end, they had to pack up and leave. The resistance, and the will of the people, could not be broken. It is said the French “won” the Battle of Algiers in 1957 by crushing the FLN in the city, but they lost the war in 1960 when the Algerian people rose up together, showing the futility of repression. Repression eventually breeds fearlessness. It compels people to abandon concern for their own safety. And here, they haven’t even won the Battle of Quetta—yet they have already lost Balochistan by irreversibly alienating the Baloch Nation. We can—and must—learn from the Palestinians, who, like us, have endured physical, economic, cultural, and geographic assaults—a systematic genocide since 1948. Yet they have never surrendered. Especially in Gaza, where since October 2023 , genocide has reached a brutal peak. Gaza has been flattened. Hospitals bombed, medical staff killed, famine imposed through a blockade of food and water. Over 60,000 people—seventy percent of them women and children—have been killed . And yet, the people of Gaza have not broken. Gaza may be a narrow strip of land, but despite the backing of powerful Western nations, Israel has failed to crush the spirit of the Gazans. Balochistan is vast. If Gaza has not been broken, then neither can we. In the end, my very precious child, I will say this: Tum maroge, hum niklenge —you will kill us, we will rise. This is not an empty phrase. It is how the Baloch have faced oppression for generations. If it were hollow, the resistance would not have persisted and grown stronger over the past seventy-seven years. It is true that a terrible price has been paid—in blood, in tears, in lost generations. But it is also the reason we have survived. We endure as a dignified nation, seeking a life of freedom and honor, and our will to resist not only endures—it flourishes. Today, I see you all protesting against state oppression, as bravely and wisely as Karima did, and I know this is why hopelessness is not an option for us. Hope is the fruit of the seeds Banuk Karima and other Baloch revolutionaries sowed in the soil of Balochistan. And so, with the accumulation of grief in adulthood, we also inherit seventy-seven years of the history of Baloch resistance, which, in spite of its traumatic chapters, is an inheritance of revolutionary hope for a free Balochistan. Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur Hyderabad 5 April 2025 ∎ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Iman Iftikhar Talpur Sahab (2025) Digital Illustration SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 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. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

Jamil Jan Kochai reads and discusses "A Premonition; Recollected," a short story published by SAAG that reads like a single, long-drawn breath. The story subsequently appeared in Kochai's acclaimed collection "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories." INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 1 · On A Premonition; Recollected Jamil Jan Kochai reads and discusses "A Premonition; Recollected," a short story published by SAAG that reads like a single, long-drawn breath. The story subsequently appeared in Kochai's acclaimed collection "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories." Jamil Jan Kochai In November 2020, SAAG Chats kicked off with an Instagram Live reading and discussion of "A Premonition; Recollected" between its author, Jamil Jan Kochai, and Fiction Editor Hananah Zaheer. The story was originally published in SAAG Volume 1. Subsequently, the story appeared in Jamil Jan Kochai's acclaimed collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories , a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award, and winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize. Here, Jamil Jan Kochai and Hananah Zaheer discuss the balance between brevity and density in the story, and its inspiration both from the nature of memory and the War on Terror in Afghanistan. In November 2020, SAAG Chats kicked off with an Instagram Live reading and discussion of "A Premonition; Recollected" between its author, Jamil Jan Kochai, and Fiction Editor Hananah Zaheer. The story was originally published in SAAG Volume 1. Subsequently, the story appeared in Jamil Jan Kochai's acclaimed collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories , a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award, and winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize. Here, Jamil Jan Kochai and Hananah Zaheer discuss the balance between brevity and density in the story, and its inspiration both from the nature of memory and the War on Terror in Afghanistan. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Live Afghanistan Short Story SAAG Chats The Haunting of Hajji Hotak Language Disaster & Language Disaster & Faith Flash Fiction Fiction National Book Award Peshawar Logar War on Terror Memory Discourses of War Allegiance Pashto Farsi Narrators War Crimes Militarism Short Stories JAMIL JAN KOCHAI is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking, 2022) was shortlisted for the National Book Award. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories . His essays have been published at The New York Times  and the Los Angeles Times . Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. 13 Nov 2020 Live Afghanistan 13th Nov 2020 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

“We're not post-colonial. We're post-colonized...Even if purportedly colonialism ended, it didn't end for the languages we speak, for the passports we hold, for the laws that govern our lives. To claim post-coloniality is a mirage.” COMMUNITY Inventing South Asia “We're not post-colonial. We're post-colonized...Even if purportedly colonialism ended, it didn't end for the languages we speak, for the passports we hold, for the laws that govern our lives. To claim post-coloniality is a mirage.” Manan Ahmed Asif We're not post-colonial. We're post-colonized...Even if purportedly colonialism ended, it didn't end for the languages we speak, for the passports we hold, for the laws that govern our lives. To claim post-coloniality is a mirage. RECOMMENDED: The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India by Manan Ahmed Asif (Harvard University Press, 2020). We're not post-colonial. We're post-colonized...Even if purportedly colonialism ended, it didn't end for the languages we speak, for the passports we hold, for the laws that govern our lives. To claim post-coloniality is a mirage. RECOMMENDED: The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India by Manan Ahmed Asif (Harvard University Press, 2020). SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Karachi The Loss of Hindustan Intellectual History South Asia as a Term Experimental Methods Language Postcolonialism Karachi University Chachnama KK Aziz Michel-Rolph Trouillot Nationalism Postcolonialism as Myth South Asian Studies Columbia University Partition Manan Ahmed is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. He is a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE. He is the author of four books, including The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India, and Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore . 2 Sept 2020 Interview Karachi 2nd Sep 2020 Chats Ep. 8 · On Migrations in Global History Neilesh Bose 4th May Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy Chaitali Sen 17th Dec Bengali Nationalism & the Chittagong Hill Tracts Kabita Chakma 9th Dec Four Lives Aamer Hussein 25th Nov Romantic Literature and Colonialism Mani Samriti Chander 13th Nov On That Note:

Since this performance, Lal has been prolific: aside from his collaborations with Rajna Swaminathan, Ganavya, and others, he released raga shorts “Shuddha Sarang” in 2021 and “Bhairav” in 2024, as well as the EP “Raga Bhimpalasi” this August. INTERACTIVE Between Notes: An Improvisational Set AUTHOR Since this performance, Lal has been prolific: aside from his collaborations with Rajna Swaminathan, Ganavya, and others, he released raga shorts “Shuddha Sarang” in 2021 and “Bhairav” in 2024, as well as the EP “Raga Bhimpalasi” this August. As part of SAAG's live event In Grief, In Solidarity on June 5th, 2021, the raga and jazz pianist and composer Utsav Lal performed a set that kicked off the proceedings. With his quick-fingered approach, glimmering with deep pauses leading to swift digressions that slide through and between notes, Lal—who has been called “ the Phil Coulter of raga ” —began the event by offering a set that was at once meditative and immersive. Lal has performed solo at the Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre, Kennedy Center, and Steinway Hall, among others, and has been honored as a Young Steinway Artist, amongst others. He has seven solo records, including a historic world’s first album on the microtonal Fluid Piano (2016). In 2023, Lal performed for SAAG's Volume 2 launch event as part of the “ Vagabonds Trio, ” which includes himself, Rajna Swaminathan, and Ganavya Doraiswamy. The performance heralded both a new volume of SAAG and Rajna Swaminathan's latest album, Apertures . Buy Lal's latest release, Raga Bhimpalasi: Indian Classical Music on the Piano, here . ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 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. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

"There was no one else in the four-berth compartment. I was comfortable. Somewhere near the Andhra-Orissa border I woke up and found everything dark. The train wasn’t moving either. Pitch dark. You couldn’t see anything out of the window." FICTION & POETRY Two Stories "There was no one else in the four-berth compartment. I was comfortable. Somewhere near the Andhra-Orissa border I woke up and found everything dark. The train wasn’t moving either. Pitch dark. You couldn’t see anything out of the window." Nabarun Bhattacharya Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha Cold Fire I WILL bring you the brochure and some other reading material. But if you simply watch this video, it’s about ten minutes long, it’ll be clear once you’ve watched the whole thing… this model of Akai VCR that you’ve got is my favourite too. This is the one we normally use at work. Yes, coffee, please… I was up very late last night… a new kind of elevated furnace is being used in village crematoriums these days, primarily through NGOs… the body’s put on a slightly raised surface like a stretcher and then placed on the iron furnace along with the wood… the ash that gathers beneath is a sort of bonus. People collect that stuff… I’ve seen it happen in Labhpur, close to Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s home. They offer training in Gujarat on this sort of thing. The concept is fine up to the village level. I’m switching on the VCR then sir. Some snow on the screen to begin with. Then the name—‘Cold Fire… which you have been waiting for. You had to wait eighty-four years for the fall of Communism. And in just six years you’re getting Cold Fire, whose elegance, whose exclusive company, only you or others like you deserve.’ Mr. K.C. Sarkar, owner of three tea estates, watched Cold Fire at work. Dressed in a dhoti and kurta, with sandalwood marks on the forehead, the body was laid on a coffin-like box. The lids opened, drawing the body in. The lids closed. The digital lights glowed. ‘Ten minutes later.’ The lights had been red all this while. Now the blue lights glowed instead. At the bottom, near the feet, a door opened, and two gleaming urns emerged. One was labelled ‘Ashes’, and the other, ‘Navel’. The lids opened. There was nothing inside. It was just like before. Polished, spick-and-span. Nagarwalla had told Mr. Sarkar about it at the club last evening. - I’m sending a young man to you tomorrow, KC. Fascinating! I’ve gone and booked it for myself. A lethal name too—Cold Fire! - I tried a vodka from Czechoslovakia once. Back in the Communist era—now of course the Czechs and Slovaks are different nations. That vodka was named Liquid Fire. Is this some kind of new liquor? - No sir. This is the ultimate spirit—it’ll make you a spirit. - Send him to me then. - I’ve ordered some chilled beer. Would you like some? - Beer after sundown? He was a pretty bright young man. His cologned cheek was permanently dimpled in an engaging smile. - How did you people come up with such a novel product? What prompted you? He began to stir a spoonful of sugar into his coffee. - I’ll explain, sir. Look, in the post-Communist world, the difference between the upper and the lower strata of society has taken on an absurd dimension. Every aspect of life—be it education, be it childbirth, be it transport—is different for them. For instance, if an affluent senior citizen like you needed to go on a vacation today, if you wanted to go to a coastal resort, your choice, even if you wanted to go somewhere close by, would be the Maldives or Seychelles, not Puri or Digha. If you have a vision problem, obviously Geneva would be preferable. But this form of existence that you enjoy, this free, superior, and magnificent lifestyle, is completely inconsistent with your funeral. For that, it’ll be the same filthy crematorium that everyone else goes to—Keoratala or Nimtala or Kashi Mitra or Siriti… horror of horrors! Have you had to visit a crematorium recently, sir? - Not exactly recently. Last year, when my father-in-law’s brother… - If you were to go now, you’d find it even more horrifying. For example, we have to visit the crematorium quite often on official work. Just the other day, about a week ago, what a horrible sight we saw at Keoratala. Three furnaces blazing. The area where they burn the bodies on wooden pyres had no corpses. A gang of criminals drinking and smoking grass. Meanwhile, six bodies were waiting upstairs for the furnaces. Four more downstairs, outside. And on top of all this, it was raining off and on. A hoard of ruffians with each of the bodies. You can’t imagine. - Practically hell, you’re saying. - I haven’t seen hell, sir. But I can’t imagine anything more hellish. One of the bodies was of a drowned man—decomposed. One was a BSF jawan shot dead by the ULFA. The rest were all old men and women from slums or lower-middle class homes, one was middle-aged, seemed to be a political goon, a group of people were shouting those typical Communist slogans, and in the middle of all this—chanting priests, all the paraphernalia of cremation, flowers—a couple of yards away the cot, mattress and quilts blazing—a bunch of urchins on the prowl, dogs, drunks, people weeping, body fluids oozing out from corpses, incense, prayers… - Oh my god, even your description is making me queasy. - Naturally. But whatever you may say, whether you book a Cold Fire or not, that’s your decision, I cannot imagine you amidst all this. Excuse me sir, I’m probably getting a little emotional… - Oh no, you are absolutely right. Since everything in my life is exclusive, why shouldn’t my funeral be that way too? If this frail body must burn just once, let it burn in style, don’t you think? Moreover, this can’t be thought of as a mere gadget. It’s a family asset if you come to think of it. - Right sir. People can buy Cold Fire for business reasons too. The very concept of cremation and funerals will change. - Have you read the Gita? - Yes sir, we had to take special training on thanatology. We had to read the Gita and the Tibetan Book of the Dead as part of theory. May I say something, sir? - Of course you may. Go ahead. - Do you believe in rebirth, sir? - I don’t exactly know, but this Cold Fire makes me think redeath might be a better idea. - This observation of yours is very philosophical, sir. Should I book one for you then, sir? - Of course. Wait, let me get my cheque-book. I think I can get hold of at least half a dozen other clients for you. - Thank you sir. I don’t have words for my gratitude. A large vehicle delivered Cold Fire to Mr. Sarkar’s residence the very next day. Family, friends, and relatives all showed up to take a look. It was certainly something to marvel at. Just that Mr. Sarkar’s ancient gardener and servant quit their jobs. The rare feat of being the first person in Calcutta to be cremated by Cold Fire was achieved by the famous gynaecologist Chandramadhab aka Chandu Chatterjee. Just the previous night he had hosted a lavish party at the Taj Bengal to celebrate his grandson’s first birthday. Scotch had flowed like water. The very next day stunned and grieving friends watched as Cold Fire was switched on at precisely eleven o’ clock in the morning, and the blue lights glowed at ten past eleven. The door near the feet opened and two gleaming urns emerged. One containing the ashes. The other, the navel. The whole thing was captured on video. Two hundred and thirty units of Cold Fire have been sold in Calcutta so far. ∎ The Gift of Death SOME people’s lives are so dreary that in the process of putting up with the tedium they don’t even realise when they just die. When you think about it, they seem to be under a cloud of doubt even after death. In that respect, few people are born as lucky as me. Whenever I get fed up of things, something inevitably happens to revive my spirits. But you can’t say this to too many people. Friends and relations all assume I’m grinding out an existence just like them. Hand-to-mouth. Brainless sheep, the whole lot. But then it’s best for them to think this way. Else they’ll be jealous. They’ll look at me strangely. I don’t know how to cope with envy. I’m afraid of the evil eye too. Good and evil—that’s what makes the world go round. The first thing I have going for me is my amazing contact with lunatics at regular intervals. Chance or fate, it just happens. An example or two will help me explain without creating problems on the business side. But it’s best not to tell the psychiatrist my wife took me to. Suppose she changes my pills? Just the other day this man—gaunt, half-dead, looks like one of those people who can fly—got hold of me. Had two terrific schemes, he said. He’d sent the details to every world leader. Two of them had replied so far. Both Thatcher and Gorbachev had praised his ideas. He’d be talking to both of them soon. He was flying out next month. I sat down to hear of his schemes. The first one was to build a projection jutting out from the balcony of every apartment in all the high-rise buildings coming up these days. Something like a diving board at a swimming pool. He would make a couple of prototypes to begin with. Once the government had approved enthusiastically, it would be added to the building plan, without having to be added on later. Apparently it was essential for people to have such high spots nowadays to stand or sit on. Without railings, not very large. It was for those who wanted to be by themselves. People were chased by thousands of things these days. He was being chased by the chief minister, by scientists, by the prime minister. The police commissioner too. Also by the Special Branch, the Criminal Investigations Department, and the Research & Analysis Wing. That was when the plan struck him. A slice of space—but outside the building. Speaking for myself, the idea appealed to me too. Entirely possible. But because I lived in a single-storied house inherited from my father, I didn’t give it too much thought. His second scheme was not exactly a plan—it was more of an adventurous proposal or proposition, though it was closely connected to the first scheme. He would stand as well as walk on the wings of a mid-air aircraft. He wanted to demonstrate this practically. Today’s youth would regain their courage if they saw him. The youth needed dreams, for the alternatives were drugs, cinema, and HIV. He wanted to perform this feat on an Indian Air Force plane. He had written it all down in detail. There were diagrams too. All of it gathered in a thin plastic folder. He kept these documents in a file tied up with a string. He wanted to know if I could help him with the second idea in. Whether I knew an Air Marshal, for instance. When I said I wouldn’t be able to help him, he requested me to pay for a cup of tea and a cigarette at least. I did. I have met several such insane people, in different shapes and sizes and with different behaviours. I have seen people who have gone mad with sudden grief. I’ve encountered not a few suicides too. Before killing themselves, some people develop a half-mad detachment. I’ve come across such people too. But then I’ve also run into not one but two cases where there wasn’t a whiff of insanity. Both of them used to spend time with mystics. One of them used to go to Tarapith, that den of mystics, every Sunday. The other was embroiled deeply in office politics. Both hanged themselves. All of these incidents are true. The age of making stories up has ended—why should people believe me, and why should I bother to make them up, either? Some of the lunatics and suicides I’ve seen were tragedies of love. But this isn’t the time for stories about women. Although the first person whom I told the story that I have eventually decided to recount here was my wife. A woman, in other words. And this was what led to all the quarrels and demands. For what? That I must see a psychiatrist. I was an able-bodied man—why should I abandon the business I ran and go see a doctor for the insane? She paid no attention. Her brothers came. Collectively they forced me to see a woman psychiatrist. What an enormous fuss they made. But it turned out to be a good idea. Very pretty. Western looks. And matching conversation. Very cordial. I liked her so much that I told her the story too. For years altogether now I’ve been taking the tiny white pills she gave me, thrice a day. Sometimes I take a blue one too. It gets wearisome. I get annoyed. But I like the woman so much that I can’t help trusting her. I try to tell myself that I’ve recovered from an illness. Not that I’m ill. The story that all this preamble leads up to is not about lunatics or suicides, however. In fact, it’s been three whole years. I was returning home by train from Madras. I have to travel indiscriminately on business. To save money I travel second class on the way out, but on the way back I give in to my longing for luxury and inevitably buy a first-class ticket. There was no one else in the four-berth compartment. I was comfortable. Somewhere near the Andhra-Orissa border I woke up and found everything dark. The train wasn’t moving either. Pitch dark. You couldn’t see anything out of the window. Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness I realised that the train was standing at a small station somewhere. A deep indigo night sky. Hints of low black hills. A few lonely stars. People moving about. The glow of torches. Getting off the train, I heard that a goods train had been in an accident. It would have to be moved and the line, repaired. Only then would our train resume its journey. Almost without warning, the lights came back on. I went back to my compartment. At once I discovered that someone else had entered in the darkness. The man was—not probably, but almost certainly—not a South Indian. His appearance and way of talking made that obvious. In his forties. Fair, well-dressed, handsome. Slightly greying hair. His fine shirt and trousers, gleaming shoes and the tie around his neck gave him the appearance of a successful salesman of a multinational company. I wasn’t entirely wrong, but I still don’t know the name of the company or how big it was. So big that it was almost mysterious and obscure. After some small talk both of us lit our cigarettes. He was the one to offer his expensive cigarettes. When I asked him whether he wouldn’t mind a little whiskey, he said he didn’t drink. So I drank by myself. There was no sign of the train leaving. Neither of us spoke for a while. Almost startling me, the man suddenly said: Keep this business card of ours. Might come in useful. The card was black, made of some kind of paper with the feel of velvet. On it, an address in an unsettling shade of bright yellow. Nothing else. A Waltair address. Nothing else on either side of the card. Neither the name of a company, nor a phone number. - That’s not our actual address, mind you. You have to take a roundabout route to reach us. But when you write to us add your address with all details. Our people will certainly get in touch with you. It may take a little time. But they will definitely meet you. - What exactly is this business of yours? Seems to be some sort of secret, illegal affair... But then you’ve got business cards too—strange! - Look, our company doesn’t have a name. No name. We help people die—you could say we gift them death. Of course, it isn’t legal, but... - You mean you murder them. - Absolutely not! Murder! How awful, we aren’t killers. It will be done with your full consent. Different kinds of death, in different ways. You will choose your method, and pay accordingly. You want to die like a king? We can do it for you. We will fulfil whatever death wish you might have, no matter how unusual. You’ll get exactly what you want, just the way you want it. But yes, you have to pay. I had a long conversation with the man thereafter. I’m recounting as much of it as I can recollect. As much of the strangeness as actually penetrated my whiskey-soaked brain in the anonymous darkness of the station. As much as I’ve been able to retain three years later. His position was that, for a variety of reasons, each of us harbours a unique death wish within ourselves. That is to say, a pet notion—and desire—of how we’d like to die. Like a romantic, someone might want to leap from a mountain into a bottomless ravine on a cold, misty evening. Others want their bodies to be riddled by bullets. Yet others, to be charred to death in a fire. Someone else wants poison in their bloodstream, so they they begin with a slight warm daze and bow out as cold as ice. Some want to be conscious at the moment of death, while others prefer to be halfway to oblivion. One person wants to be strangled to death. Another is keen on being stabbed. Some people wish for death in a holy place, the sound of sacred chants ringing in their ears. But wishing doesn’t guarantee fulfilment. No matter what, the majority of deaths are uninteresting, drab, and dull. This company meets the demand for such deaths, fulfilling its clients’ death wishes. I remember some parts of the salesman’s pitch verbatim. - There’s a theoretical side to this too. Our R&D is extremely strong. You’ll find non-stop research underway, not only on the practical side of death, but also on other aspects, covering data from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Thanatos Syndrome, Indian thoughts on death, Abhedananda, and Jiddu Krishnamoorthy to the latest forms of murder, suicide and clinical death. Forget about India, no one in the world is engaged in this sort of business. It wouldn’t even occur to anyone. We’ve been told of a few small-scale attempts in Japan, but this isn’t a matter of automobiles or electronics, after all. They may have their Toyota and Mitsubishi, but those poor fellows still can’t think beyond hara-kiri. All those bamboo or steel knives—so primitive. Not at all enterprising. Incidentally, do you know which country has the most suicides in the world? - Must be us. - No sir, it’s Hungary. Magyars are incredibly suicide-prone. They offered access to all kinds of death. They would fulfill even the most intricate and virtually impossible proposals. A man from Delhi had always imagined dying when his jeep skidded on an icy mountain road. It was organised. If you wanted to die of a specific disease, their medical team would check on its feasibility. But they would not engineer someone else’s death on your request. You could only arrange for your own death through their services. I learnt a great deal from the conversation. Apparently, many people lived such bewildered lives that even though they had a vague idea of how they’d like to die, they could not express it clearly. The company had a choice of pre-set programmes for such clients. The most regal of these was the ‘record player’. A gigantic record player was set in the ocean at a distance. A huge black disc was set in it, the disc of death, turning at thirty-three and one third revolutions per minute. The record player was placed on a rig similar to an offshore oil-drilling platform. You had to get there on a speedboat. The fortunate man desiring death was made to sit on a chair over the spoke, shaped like a bullet or a lipstick, reaching upwards through the hole at the centre of the record. The record-player played an impossibly tragic melody—Western or Indian. ’s Aisle of Death, or the wistful strains of a sarengi, as you wished. Several thousand watts of sound enveloped the client in a trance. Revolving on the surface of the ocean along with the record, he was also transported to a place beyond the real and the unreal. When the music ended, the stylus entered the glittering space in the middle of the record with the sound of a storm, striking the man a mighty blow that ensured his death even before his body hit the water. His head was either torn off his body or pulverised. As soon as the corpse fell into the sea, hundreds of sharks swam up at the scent of blood. This was a very expensive affair. Very few people could afford it. Till date, not more than two or three people had heard the symphony of death. - Who are they? - Excuse me, but clients are more important to us than even god. We cannot possibly divulge their identities. Although we are practically friends now, you and I. Do you remember how Mr. ____ died? You should. - How could I not remember. Such a horrible plane crash! - It was a plane crash all right, but that was what he wanted. - But what about the other passengers? Surely they didn’t want it. - Sorry. It’s prohibitively expensive. Because there are other victims. - But they were innocent. - Innocent! My foot! In any case, there’s nothing we can do about it. None of them told us to kill them. But if they insist on taking the same flight, what are we supposed to do? Moreover, this was his choice. Yes, choice. We made all the arrangements to fulfil his request, using the money he paid us. - But. Why did he do this? - He had got rid of Mr. ____ the same way. Not through us, of course. Lots of innocent people had died on that occasion too. So he wanted a similar death. - How many more such cases have you handled? - Numerous. But why should we tell you about all of them? Can all such cases be talked about? Should they even be talked about? We offer many services. We sell suicide projects, for instance. Not as expensive. Lots more. Let me just tell you this, all the famous people who have died recently—from the Bombay mafia leader being gunned down to the Calcutta film star who committed suicide with the phone in his hand and forty sleeping pills in his stomach—it was all our doing. And then there are always the political leaders. It’s very easy to help them—all of them prefer a heart attack. - So you people help only the famous? Give them the gift of death, that is. - We’re still trying to consolidate our business, you see. The company’s a long way from breaking even. But yes, pride in our performance is our major capital at present. Later, of course, we’ll have to think of the economically weaker classes too. To tell you the truth, poor people are much more trouble. The bastards aren’t even sure whether they’re alive in the first place, how can they be expected to think of death? And besides, they’re unbelievably crude. - What about those even lower down—miles below the poverty line—beggars? - Impossible! Last year our R&D people studied the death wishes of beggars in three metropolitan cities—Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Their findings were—how shall I put it—silly and delightful. Childish demands. - Such as? - In most cases the image involves eating. For instance, some of them want their limbs, heads, and bodies to be stuffed with meat, fish, butter and alcohol till they explode. They desperately want liquor. Then again, some of them wanted god to take them in his arms at the centre of Flora Fountain in Bombay. Infantile, and so naive. - But you have to say they’re imaginative. - That’s true. They’re bound to, since they’re human beings. But yes, we get a lot of valuable ideas from children. Just the other day our R&D unearthed a fascinating story from an American newspaper. - Tell me, please. - A boy, you know. About twelve. Somewhere near Chicago. The fellow had dressed up as Batman. He was Batman constantly, jumping from roof to roof with a pair of wings clipped on. No one took him seriously. Even the girls used to laugh at him. Child psychology, you see. So none of you can recognise Batman, he said. One day he was found in a deep freezer, frozen after several days in there. You’d be astounded at the kind of cases there are. Batman! Actually it’s not like I don’t drink. Pour me a strong whiskey, will you? What’s this whiskey called? Glender! Oh, it’s Scotch. I’ve never heard of this brand. I had poured a few whiskeys. For the salesman. And for myself too. After I had poured several, he had left like Batman, swinging and weaving. I had weaved my way to bed too. The train had started moving. I could still hear his voice ringing in my ears... - But yes, there’s a grand surprise in death, especially in accidental death—a thrill that we never deprive our clients of. Say someone has booked a death to be run over by a car. But not all his efforts will allow him to guess when, where, or on which road he will die. The virgin charm of sudden death will always remain. Who was this man? What company did he represent, for that matter? The gift of death—the idea couldn’t exactly be dismissed out of hand. Despite my best efforts, I hadn’t been able to do it for three years. Secondly, don’t we have our own visions of death, after all? Would it be fulfilled in this one life, in this life? For instance, I have a specific sort of death wish of my own too. But then the death by record player is very expensive. Naturally. I live with doubts and misgiving like these. These things lie low when I take my pills regularly. When they raise their heads, I visit the psychiatrist. She changes the medicine. Blue pills instead of white. In the darkness of power-cuts I pull that man’s black business card out for a look. The disturbing yellow letters are probably printed in fluorescent ink. They glow in the darkness. I don’t mind showing the card to anyone who gets in touch with me. You can check for yourself by writing to them. It might take a little time but their people will certainly get in touch. You can be sure about this. They will definitely meet you. ∎ Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha Cold Fire I WILL bring you the brochure and some other reading material. But if you simply watch this video, it’s about ten minutes long, it’ll be clear once you’ve watched the whole thing… this model of Akai VCR that you’ve got is my favourite too. This is the one we normally use at work. Yes, coffee, please… I was up very late last night… a new kind of elevated furnace is being used in village crematoriums these days, primarily through NGOs… the body’s put on a slightly raised surface like a stretcher and then placed on the iron furnace along with the wood… the ash that gathers beneath is a sort of bonus. People collect that stuff… I’ve seen it happen in Labhpur, close to Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s home. They offer training in Gujarat on this sort of thing. The concept is fine up to the village level. I’m switching on the VCR then sir. Some snow on the screen to begin with. Then the name—‘Cold Fire… which you have been waiting for. You had to wait eighty-four years for the fall of Communism. And in just six years you’re getting Cold Fire, whose elegance, whose exclusive company, only you or others like you deserve.’ Mr. K.C. Sarkar, owner of three tea estates, watched Cold Fire at work. Dressed in a dhoti and kurta, with sandalwood marks on the forehead, the body was laid on a coffin-like box. The lids opened, drawing the body in. The lids closed. The digital lights glowed. ‘Ten minutes later.’ The lights had been red all this while. Now the blue lights glowed instead. At the bottom, near the feet, a door opened, and two gleaming urns emerged. One was labelled ‘Ashes’, and the other, ‘Navel’. The lids opened. There was nothing inside. It was just like before. Polished, spick-and-span. Nagarwalla had told Mr. Sarkar about it at the club last evening. - I’m sending a young man to you tomorrow, KC. Fascinating! I’ve gone and booked it for myself. A lethal name too—Cold Fire! - I tried a vodka from Czechoslovakia once. Back in the Communist era—now of course the Czechs and Slovaks are different nations. That vodka was named Liquid Fire. Is this some kind of new liquor? - No sir. This is the ultimate spirit—it’ll make you a spirit. - Send him to me then. - I’ve ordered some chilled beer. Would you like some? - Beer after sundown? He was a pretty bright young man. His cologned cheek was permanently dimpled in an engaging smile. - How did you people come up with such a novel product? What prompted you? He began to stir a spoonful of sugar into his coffee. - I’ll explain, sir. Look, in the post-Communist world, the difference between the upper and the lower strata of society has taken on an absurd dimension. Every aspect of life—be it education, be it childbirth, be it transport—is different for them. For instance, if an affluent senior citizen like you needed to go on a vacation today, if you wanted to go to a coastal resort, your choice, even if you wanted to go somewhere close by, would be the Maldives or Seychelles, not Puri or Digha. If you have a vision problem, obviously Geneva would be preferable. But this form of existence that you enjoy, this free, superior, and magnificent lifestyle, is completely inconsistent with your funeral. For that, it’ll be the same filthy crematorium that everyone else goes to—Keoratala or Nimtala or Kashi Mitra or Siriti… horror of horrors! Have you had to visit a crematorium recently, sir? - Not exactly recently. Last year, when my father-in-law’s brother… - If you were to go now, you’d find it even more horrifying. For example, we have to visit the crematorium quite often on official work. Just the other day, about a week ago, what a horrible sight we saw at Keoratala. Three furnaces blazing. The area where they burn the bodies on wooden pyres had no corpses. A gang of criminals drinking and smoking grass. Meanwhile, six bodies were waiting upstairs for the furnaces. Four more downstairs, outside. And on top of all this, it was raining off and on. A hoard of ruffians with each of the bodies. You can’t imagine. - Practically hell, you’re saying. - I haven’t seen hell, sir. But I can’t imagine anything more hellish. One of the bodies was of a drowned man—decomposed. One was a BSF jawan shot dead by the ULFA. The rest were all old men and women from slums or lower-middle class homes, one was middle-aged, seemed to be a political goon, a group of people were shouting those typical Communist slogans, and in the middle of all this—chanting priests, all the paraphernalia of cremation, flowers—a couple of yards away the cot, mattress and quilts blazing—a bunch of urchins on the prowl, dogs, drunks, people weeping, body fluids oozing out from corpses, incense, prayers… - Oh my god, even your description is making me queasy. - Naturally. But whatever you may say, whether you book a Cold Fire or not, that’s your decision, I cannot imagine you amidst all this. Excuse me sir, I’m probably getting a little emotional… - Oh no, you are absolutely right. Since everything in my life is exclusive, why shouldn’t my funeral be that way too? If this frail body must burn just once, let it burn in style, don’t you think? Moreover, this can’t be thought of as a mere gadget. It’s a family asset if you come to think of it. - Right sir. People can buy Cold Fire for business reasons too. The very concept of cremation and funerals will change. - Have you read the Gita? - Yes sir, we had to take special training on thanatology. We had to read the Gita and the Tibetan Book of the Dead as part of theory. May I say something, sir? - Of course you may. Go ahead. - Do you believe in rebirth, sir? - I don’t exactly know, but this Cold Fire makes me think redeath might be a better idea. - This observation of yours is very philosophical, sir. Should I book one for you then, sir? - Of course. Wait, let me get my cheque-book. I think I can get hold of at least half a dozen other clients for you. - Thank you sir. I don’t have words for my gratitude. A large vehicle delivered Cold Fire to Mr. Sarkar’s residence the very next day. Family, friends, and relatives all showed up to take a look. It was certainly something to marvel at. Just that Mr. Sarkar’s ancient gardener and servant quit their jobs. The rare feat of being the first person in Calcutta to be cremated by Cold Fire was achieved by the famous gynaecologist Chandramadhab aka Chandu Chatterjee. Just the previous night he had hosted a lavish party at the Taj Bengal to celebrate his grandson’s first birthday. Scotch had flowed like water. The very next day stunned and grieving friends watched as Cold Fire was switched on at precisely eleven o’ clock in the morning, and the blue lights glowed at ten past eleven. The door near the feet opened and two gleaming urns emerged. One containing the ashes. The other, the navel. The whole thing was captured on video. Two hundred and thirty units of Cold Fire have been sold in Calcutta so far. ∎ The Gift of Death SOME people’s lives are so dreary that in the process of putting up with the tedium they don’t even realise when they just die. When you think about it, they seem to be under a cloud of doubt even after death. In that respect, few people are born as lucky as me. Whenever I get fed up of things, something inevitably happens to revive my spirits. But you can’t say this to too many people. Friends and relations all assume I’m grinding out an existence just like them. Hand-to-mouth. Brainless sheep, the whole lot. But then it’s best for them to think this way. Else they’ll be jealous. They’ll look at me strangely. I don’t know how to cope with envy. I’m afraid of the evil eye too. Good and evil—that’s what makes the world go round. The first thing I have going for me is my amazing contact with lunatics at regular intervals. Chance or fate, it just happens. An example or two will help me explain without creating problems on the business side. But it’s best not to tell the psychiatrist my wife took me to. Suppose she changes my pills? Just the other day this man—gaunt, half-dead, looks like one of those people who can fly—got hold of me. Had two terrific schemes, he said. He’d sent the details to every world leader. Two of them had replied so far. Both Thatcher and Gorbachev had praised his ideas. He’d be talking to both of them soon. He was flying out next month. I sat down to hear of his schemes. The first one was to build a projection jutting out from the balcony of every apartment in all the high-rise buildings coming up these days. Something like a diving board at a swimming pool. He would make a couple of prototypes to begin with. Once the government had approved enthusiastically, it would be added to the building plan, without having to be added on later. Apparently it was essential for people to have such high spots nowadays to stand or sit on. Without railings, not very large. It was for those who wanted to be by themselves. People were chased by thousands of things these days. He was being chased by the chief minister, by scientists, by the prime minister. The police commissioner too. Also by the Special Branch, the Criminal Investigations Department, and the Research & Analysis Wing. That was when the plan struck him. A slice of space—but outside the building. Speaking for myself, the idea appealed to me too. Entirely possible. But because I lived in a single-storied house inherited from my father, I didn’t give it too much thought. His second scheme was not exactly a plan—it was more of an adventurous proposal or proposition, though it was closely connected to the first scheme. He would stand as well as walk on the wings of a mid-air aircraft. He wanted to demonstrate this practically. Today’s youth would regain their courage if they saw him. The youth needed dreams, for the alternatives were drugs, cinema, and HIV. He wanted to perform this feat on an Indian Air Force plane. He had written it all down in detail. There were diagrams too. All of it gathered in a thin plastic folder. He kept these documents in a file tied up with a string. He wanted to know if I could help him with the second idea in. Whether I knew an Air Marshal, for instance. When I said I wouldn’t be able to help him, he requested me to pay for a cup of tea and a cigarette at least. I did. I have met several such insane people, in different shapes and sizes and with different behaviours. I have seen people who have gone mad with sudden grief. I’ve encountered not a few suicides too. Before killing themselves, some people develop a half-mad detachment. I’ve come across such people too. But then I’ve also run into not one but two cases where there wasn’t a whiff of insanity. Both of them used to spend time with mystics. One of them used to go to Tarapith, that den of mystics, every Sunday. The other was embroiled deeply in office politics. Both hanged themselves. All of these incidents are true. The age of making stories up has ended—why should people believe me, and why should I bother to make them up, either? Some of the lunatics and suicides I’ve seen were tragedies of love. But this isn’t the time for stories about women. Although the first person whom I told the story that I have eventually decided to recount here was my wife. A woman, in other words. And this was what led to all the quarrels and demands. For what? That I must see a psychiatrist. I was an able-bodied man—why should I abandon the business I ran and go see a doctor for the insane? She paid no attention. Her brothers came. Collectively they forced me to see a woman psychiatrist. What an enormous fuss they made. But it turned out to be a good idea. Very pretty. Western looks. And matching conversation. Very cordial. I liked her so much that I told her the story too. For years altogether now I’ve been taking the tiny white pills she gave me, thrice a day. Sometimes I take a blue one too. It gets wearisome. I get annoyed. But I like the woman so much that I can’t help trusting her. I try to tell myself that I’ve recovered from an illness. Not that I’m ill. The story that all this preamble leads up to is not about lunatics or suicides, however. In fact, it’s been three whole years. I was returning home by train from Madras. I have to travel indiscriminately on business. To save money I travel second class on the way out, but on the way back I give in to my longing for luxury and inevitably buy a first-class ticket. There was no one else in the four-berth compartment. I was comfortable. Somewhere near the Andhra-Orissa border I woke up and found everything dark. The train wasn’t moving either. Pitch dark. You couldn’t see anything out of the window. Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness I realised that the train was standing at a small station somewhere. A deep indigo night sky. Hints of low black hills. A few lonely stars. People moving about. The glow of torches. Getting off the train, I heard that a goods train had been in an accident. It would have to be moved and the line, repaired. Only then would our train resume its journey. Almost without warning, the lights came back on. I went back to my compartment. At once I discovered that someone else had entered in the darkness. The man was—not probably, but almost certainly—not a South Indian. His appearance and way of talking made that obvious. In his forties. Fair, well-dressed, handsome. Slightly greying hair. His fine shirt and trousers, gleaming shoes and the tie around his neck gave him the appearance of a successful salesman of a multinational company. I wasn’t entirely wrong, but I still don’t know the name of the company or how big it was. So big that it was almost mysterious and obscure. After some small talk both of us lit our cigarettes. He was the one to offer his expensive cigarettes. When I asked him whether he wouldn’t mind a little whiskey, he said he didn’t drink. So I drank by myself. There was no sign of the train leaving. Neither of us spoke for a while. Almost startling me, the man suddenly said: Keep this business card of ours. Might come in useful. The card was black, made of some kind of paper with the feel of velvet. On it, an address in an unsettling shade of bright yellow. Nothing else. A Waltair address. Nothing else on either side of the card. Neither the name of a company, nor a phone number. - That’s not our actual address, mind you. You have to take a roundabout route to reach us. But when you write to us add your address with all details. Our people will certainly get in touch with you. It may take a little time. But they will definitely meet you. - What exactly is this business of yours? Seems to be some sort of secret, illegal affair... But then you’ve got business cards too—strange! - Look, our company doesn’t have a name. No name. We help people die—you could say we gift them death. Of course, it isn’t legal, but... - You mean you murder them. - Absolutely not! Murder! How awful, we aren’t killers. It will be done with your full consent. Different kinds of death, in different ways. You will choose your method, and pay accordingly. You want to die like a king? We can do it for you. We will fulfil whatever death wish you might have, no matter how unusual. You’ll get exactly what you want, just the way you want it. But yes, you have to pay. I had a long conversation with the man thereafter. I’m recounting as much of it as I can recollect. As much of the strangeness as actually penetrated my whiskey-soaked brain in the anonymous darkness of the station. As much as I’ve been able to retain three years later. His position was that, for a variety of reasons, each of us harbours a unique death wish within ourselves. That is to say, a pet notion—and desire—of how we’d like to die. Like a romantic, someone might want to leap from a mountain into a bottomless ravine on a cold, misty evening. Others want their bodies to be riddled by bullets. Yet others, to be charred to death in a fire. Someone else wants poison in their bloodstream, so they they begin with a slight warm daze and bow out as cold as ice. Some want to be conscious at the moment of death, while others prefer to be halfway to oblivion. One person wants to be strangled to death. Another is keen on being stabbed. Some people wish for death in a holy place, the sound of sacred chants ringing in their ears. But wishing doesn’t guarantee fulfilment. No matter what, the majority of deaths are uninteresting, drab, and dull. This company meets the demand for such deaths, fulfilling its clients’ death wishes. I remember some parts of the salesman’s pitch verbatim. - There’s a theoretical side to this too. Our R&D is extremely strong. You’ll find non-stop research underway, not only on the practical side of death, but also on other aspects, covering data from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Thanatos Syndrome, Indian thoughts on death, Abhedananda, and Jiddu Krishnamoorthy to the latest forms of murder, suicide and clinical death. Forget about India, no one in the world is engaged in this sort of business. It wouldn’t even occur to anyone. We’ve been told of a few small-scale attempts in Japan, but this isn’t a matter of automobiles or electronics, after all. They may have their Toyota and Mitsubishi, but those poor fellows still can’t think beyond hara-kiri. All those bamboo or steel knives—so primitive. Not at all enterprising. Incidentally, do you know which country has the most suicides in the world? - Must be us. - No sir, it’s Hungary. Magyars are incredibly suicide-prone. They offered access to all kinds of death. They would fulfill even the most intricate and virtually impossible proposals. A man from Delhi had always imagined dying when his jeep skidded on an icy mountain road. It was organised. If you wanted to die of a specific disease, their medical team would check on its feasibility. But they would not engineer someone else’s death on your request. You could only arrange for your own death through their services. I learnt a great deal from the conversation. Apparently, many people lived such bewildered lives that even though they had a vague idea of how they’d like to die, they could not express it clearly. The company had a choice of pre-set programmes for such clients. The most regal of these was the ‘record player’. A gigantic record player was set in the ocean at a distance. A huge black disc was set in it, the disc of death, turning at thirty-three and one third revolutions per minute. The record player was placed on a rig similar to an offshore oil-drilling platform. You had to get there on a speedboat. The fortunate man desiring death was made to sit on a chair over the spoke, shaped like a bullet or a lipstick, reaching upwards through the hole at the centre of the record. The record-player played an impossibly tragic melody—Western or Indian. ’s Aisle of Death, or the wistful strains of a sarengi, as you wished. Several thousand watts of sound enveloped the client in a trance. Revolving on the surface of the ocean along with the record, he was also transported to a place beyond the real and the unreal. When the music ended, the stylus entered the glittering space in the middle of the record with the sound of a storm, striking the man a mighty blow that ensured his death even before his body hit the water. His head was either torn off his body or pulverised. As soon as the corpse fell into the sea, hundreds of sharks swam up at the scent of blood. This was a very expensive affair. Very few people could afford it. Till date, not more than two or three people had heard the symphony of death. - Who are they? - Excuse me, but clients are more important to us than even god. We cannot possibly divulge their identities. Although we are practically friends now, you and I. Do you remember how Mr. ____ died? You should. - How could I not remember. Such a horrible plane crash! - It was a plane crash all right, but that was what he wanted. - But what about the other passengers? Surely they didn’t want it. - Sorry. It’s prohibitively expensive. Because there are other victims. - But they were innocent. - Innocent! My foot! In any case, there’s nothing we can do about it. None of them told us to kill them. But if they insist on taking the same flight, what are we supposed to do? Moreover, this was his choice. Yes, choice. We made all the arrangements to fulfil his request, using the money he paid us. - But. Why did he do this? - He had got rid of Mr. ____ the same way. Not through us, of course. Lots of innocent people had died on that occasion too. So he wanted a similar death. - How many more such cases have you handled? - Numerous. But why should we tell you about all of them? Can all such cases be talked about? Should they even be talked about? We offer many services. We sell suicide projects, for instance. Not as expensive. Lots more. Let me just tell you this, all the famous people who have died recently—from the Bombay mafia leader being gunned down to the Calcutta film star who committed suicide with the phone in his hand and forty sleeping pills in his stomach—it was all our doing. And then there are always the political leaders. It’s very easy to help them—all of them prefer a heart attack. - So you people help only the famous? Give them the gift of death, that is. - We’re still trying to consolidate our business, you see. The company’s a long way from breaking even. But yes, pride in our performance is our major capital at present. Later, of course, we’ll have to think of the economically weaker classes too. To tell you the truth, poor people are much more trouble. The bastards aren’t even sure whether they’re alive in the first place, how can they be expected to think of death? And besides, they’re unbelievably crude. - What about those even lower down—miles below the poverty line—beggars? - Impossible! Last year our R&D people studied the death wishes of beggars in three metropolitan cities—Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Their findings were—how shall I put it—silly and delightful. Childish demands. - Such as? - In most cases the image involves eating. For instance, some of them want their limbs, heads, and bodies to be stuffed with meat, fish, butter and alcohol till they explode. They desperately want liquor. Then again, some of them wanted god to take them in his arms at the centre of Flora Fountain in Bombay. Infantile, and so naive. - But you have to say they’re imaginative. - That’s true. They’re bound to, since they’re human beings. But yes, we get a lot of valuable ideas from children. Just the other day our R&D unearthed a fascinating story from an American newspaper. - Tell me, please. - A boy, you know. About twelve. Somewhere near Chicago. The fellow had dressed up as Batman. He was Batman constantly, jumping from roof to roof with a pair of wings clipped on. No one took him seriously. Even the girls used to laugh at him. Child psychology, you see. So none of you can recognise Batman, he said. One day he was found in a deep freezer, frozen after several days in there. You’d be astounded at the kind of cases there are. Batman! Actually it’s not like I don’t drink. Pour me a strong whiskey, will you? What’s this whiskey called? Glender! Oh, it’s Scotch. I’ve never heard of this brand. I had poured a few whiskeys. For the salesman. And for myself too. After I had poured several, he had left like Batman, swinging and weaving. I had weaved my way to bed too. The train had started moving. I could still hear his voice ringing in my ears... - But yes, there’s a grand surprise in death, especially in accidental death—a thrill that we never deprive our clients of. Say someone has booked a death to be run over by a car. But not all his efforts will allow him to guess when, where, or on which road he will die. The virgin charm of sudden death will always remain. Who was this man? What company did he represent, for that matter? The gift of death—the idea couldn’t exactly be dismissed out of hand. Despite my best efforts, I hadn’t been able to do it for three years. Secondly, don’t we have our own visions of death, after all? Would it be fulfilled in this one life, in this life? For instance, I have a specific sort of death wish of my own too. But then the death by record player is very expensive. Naturally. I live with doubts and misgiving like these. These things lie low when I take my pills regularly. When they raise their heads, I visit the psychiatrist. She changes the medicine. Blue pills instead of white. In the darkness of power-cuts I pull that man’s black business card out for a look. The disturbing yellow letters are probably printed in fluorescent ink. They glow in the darkness. I don’t mind showing the card to anyone who gets in touch with me. You can check for yourself by writing to them. It might take a little time but their people will certainly get in touch. You can be sure about this. They will definitely meet you. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Artwork by Ibrahim Rayintakath for SAAG. Mixed media. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Short Story Translation Bengali Posthumous Stories in Dialogue Anarchist Writing Fyataru Magical Realism Working-Class Stories Language Violence Communist Slogans Banality Andhra-Orissa Border Class Rebirth Philosophical Fiction Philosophy Criminal Investigations Department Research & Analysis Wing BSF Crime Choosing Death Suicide Tibetan Book of the Dead Rachmaninoff Mafia Metropolitan Bombay Calcutta Madras Delhi NABARUN BHATTACHARYA (1948-2014) was a poet, short-story writer and novelist. Harbart , his first novel, won him the Narasimha Das award, Bankim Puraskar, and Sahitya Akademi Award. He published over 15 works of fiction, three volumes of poetry, and several collections of prose. The only child of the renowned writer Mahasweta Devi and theatre personality Bijon Bhattacharya, he lived and wrote in Kolkata. 6 Oct 2020 Short Story Translation 6th Oct 2020 IBRAHIM RAYINTAKATH is an illustrator from and art director from Kerala, intrigued by all forms of visual communication. His clients include The New Yorker, the New York Times, NPR, Harper Collins, and more. He is currently based in Bangalore. ARUNAVA SINHA translates fiction, poetry and non-fiction from Bangla to English. Sixty of his translations have been published so far, with 12 of them having won or been shortlisted or longlisted for translation prizes in India and abroad. He is an associate professor of practice in the Creative Writing department at Ashoka University, and Co-Director of the Ashoka Centre of Translation. He is based in Delhi. Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy Chaitali Sen 17th Dec Chats Ep. 4 · On Qurratulain Hyder's sci-fi story “Roshni ki Raftaar” Zuneera Shah · Nur Nasreen Ibrahim 30th Nov Four Lives Aamer Hussein 25th Nov Chats Ep. 1 · On A Premonition; Recollected Jamil Jan Kochai 13th Nov The Cuckoo Keeps Calling Mashiul Alam 23rd Sep On That Note:

Interpreting Rossana Rossanda & Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba to answer: what allows emancipatory politics to start, and what prevents it? BOOKS & ARTS Exhaustion & Emancipation Interpreting Rossana Rossanda & Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba to answer: what allows emancipatory politics to start, and what prevents it? Asad Haider CONSIDER THE militant who wakes up exhausted. Every day and night in the streets, perhaps marching back and forth with painful restraint, perhaps building barricades in spontaneous moments of affinity with those whose rapid “learning processes” have demonstrated the rationality of slowing and obstructing the police. Sore muscles the next day arguing in meetings and studying the classics for guidance. Despair at the emptying of the streets, the guilty capitulation to apathy, and the devastating disintegration of the organization. Consider what intervenes between politics as event: the knocking of doors, the apocalyptically slow process of persuasion, the daily strain to survive one’s own declining fortunes, the sheer emotional intensity of attempting to maintain fidelity and hope in the empty and seemingly endless interval. We know such exhaustions. Alongside these exhaustions which punctuate the lives of those who have dedicated themselves to politics at an everyday, grassroots level, the residents of the United States as a whole seem to have entered a state of exhaustion. It is in no small part provoked by the series of drastic political shifts that are marked by the fluctuating fortunes of the parliamentary system and its parties, parallel to the ebb and flow of social movements outside state boundaries. This exhaustion seems to be a broad phenomenon—caused by an affective investment in the outcomes of elections and the trajectory of social movements. But in fact, we must think of exhaustion in a different, highly specific way if we are to understand its contemporary political centrality. Exhaustion, in fact, has something like the status of a historical condition, a status that is a consequence of the termination of emancipatory politics. In this sense, exhaustion shifts from the moment which marks the termination of a political sequence to what appears to be the very impossibility of politics. Contrary to the popular opinion which dictates that “everything is political,” politics is not always taking place—politics, by which I mean specifically emancipatory politics, is an exceptional phenomenon. It does not happen with frequency. Just as it has to appear, it also fades away. Exhaustion shifts from the moment which marks the termination of a political sequence to what appears to be the very impossibility of politics. Of course, to understand any of this, we have to specify what politics means in the first place. In embarking on this task for the present moment, I want to pay tribute to two comrades who left us last year: the Congolese philosopher Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, and the Italian Communist Rossana Rossanda. Together they help think through the questions the militant faces in every moment of political action, even in what seem to be unremarkable and everyday practices: what is an emancipatory politics? What allows it to take place—and equally, what prevents it? The problem of emancipation animates the whole history of politics and political thought—but somehow, its place in our thinking and its relationship to social analysis often remains obscure. This slipperiness of emancipation presents a crisis for political thinking today. It is not difficult to see that a resurgence of authoritarian populism, the breakdown of the existing political system, and the approach of ecological apocalypse, all require concerted and creative theoretical efforts. But alongside the catastrophe of the present is the parallel emergence and disappearance of unexpected social movements—like those that recently peaked in the extraordinary mobilizations against racism and police violence. Our capacity to theorize our reality will be limited by our ability to formulate a vantage point of emancipation. This vantage point is not one which we could step out of history to assume, but rather is one which appears in particular moments, and ultimately recedes. We also cannot simply take contingent aspects of any particular social movement to represent the intrinsic characteristics of emancipation. Horizontalist forms of organization, for example, though there is certainly no reason to dismiss them out of hand, nevertheless do not automatically guarantee a movement’s emancipatory character. It is possible for such organizational practices to foster broad and egalitarian popular participation, in a way that appears to “prefigure” an emancipated society. But it is just as possible that they will devolve into proceduralism, endless meetings, debilitating indecision, and the reassertion of the same old hierarchies and stratifications that characterize existing society. In this sense, perhaps counterintuitively, instead of embracing specific forms of movement democracy as good in themselves—which, more often than not, brings us back to abstract and ahistorical norms—we have to situate them within political sequences. It is within these sequences, and only within these sequences, that they take on a political meaning. Our capacity to theorize our reality will be limited by our ability to formulate a vantage point of emancipation. Such a vantage point of emancipation is different from any social analysis that serves as a guarantee for a particular political program. In my book, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump , I declined, much to the chagrin of certain critics, to explain the relation between the categories, now so frequently paired, of “race and class.” It seemed to me that to describe the relationship between two abstractions—which are only articulated in concrete and specific historical circumstances—would be a logical error. Instead, I concerned myself with the articulation of struggles against racial domination and class exploitation in emancipatory social movements. I briefly alluded to the vast literature on the social and historical construction of race, and at the same time, in archival work on the history of the 19th and 20th century workers’ movements for Viewpoint Magazine , I attempted to describe the social and historical construction of class, by reviving the method of “class composition.” At the time, it seemed to me that the erasure of class in “identity politics” had neutralized the revolutionary character of movements against racial domination. Since then I have been reminded that struggles founded on class can also be neutralized, as the history of the workers’ movement makes clear. It seems to me now that emancipation is foreclosed by any foundation, whether “identitarian” or “materialist,” and that the axes of political struggle cannot be aligned by an empiricist social analysis, but only from the vantage point of emancipation. I have further been led to understand that my description of the depoliticized moment of the present requires further explanation. I do not mean neutralization as the search for an already neutral domain, or the evasion of conflict, as in the canonical account of Carl Schmitt. His diagnosis of “the age of neutralizations and depoliticizations” is grounded in a general theory of “the political,” while I am concerned with the singular events of “politics.” My theory ends up diametrically opposite to the jurist. What I mean by neutralization is a force which renders opposition ineffective. It is distinct from the potentially moralistic idea of co-optation, which presumes some authentic belonging of the object. Opposition is neutralized not through appropriation, but through the formulation of an effective reactant and the transformation of each element into a new compound. Neutralization is restricted, while depoliticization is expansive. Neutralization comes from the top. It contains and redirects opposition into the harmonious diversity of the system. Exhaustion, then, is part of a constellation that includes neutralization and depoliticization. In order to distinguish this theory from preceding accounts of neutralization and depoliticization, it will be at the center of our inquiry. Emancipation Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba’s work is not widely known in the “West,” despite the important influence he had at University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa in Senegal. His writings form part of an essential global dialogue on emancipatory politics. Wamba offers an indispensable statement on emancipation in his discussion of Lenin’s proposition that politics happens “under condition”: The political attitude is not accommodating; the state of affairs in the world does not have to remain so because it is so. People may live differently than they live. Politics is not expressed through the spontaneous consciousness. It is an active prescriptive relationship with reality and not a reflection or representation in consciousness of invariant structures (economic structure or level of development or the state). Politics is a creative invention. Let us do something about the situation! characterizes a political attitude. And so Wamba beautifully condenses a number of points on which to elaborate. Wamba emphasizes, drawing on Sylvain Lazarus, that “people think,” and that without this point of departure we inevitably end up in an elitist politics. Consequently there is a sense in which politics is thought—but thought is not, in some dualist framework, separate from reality. People’s thought is part of reality, and this is a materialist and egalitarian proposition. It rejects the idealist and elitist notions that “theory” is disconnected from people’s thought, and that only the party or the state can think. Emancipatory politics, then, based as it is on the “active prescriptive relationship with reality,” is not the expression of a social foundation. And because it starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics—not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.” Because emancipatory politics starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics. Not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.” But even once we have affirmed that people think, we are forced to reckon with the fact that something is not always being done about the situation. In other words: is politics always happening? Wamba notes that the existence of a social movement does not automatically imply the existence of politics; the latter requires a “subjective break,” the development of an antagonism to the whole political order which “is revealed through militant forms of thought… and not through the movement of history.” Thus Wamba argues: Emancipative politics does not always exist; when it does, it exists under conditions. It is, thus, precarious, and sequential: it unfolds until its conditions of subjective break disappear. When people lose the consciousness of subjective break by ceasing to be involved in political processes, emancipative politics disappears. The completion of a sequence of progressive politics does not lead automatically to another. In the absence of emancipative politics, the state problematic or the imperialist influence prevails in the treatment of matters of politics. To reduce every political capacity to a state capacity is to abscond from politics. Politics is not the political order of institutions. This much is already determined by the affirmation of people’s thought. But just as significantly, it does not always exist. When it does, it appears in sequences with a beginning and an end, and advances categories specific to its situation. But there are also modes of politics which are not emancipatory: the single-party, party-state model of state socialism, and the multi-party parliamentary mode. Let us put the term “democracy” in suspension for the moment, because the equation of democracy with multi-partyism and parliamentarianism naturally absorbs it into the state. “The multiparty system is a form of the state and not independent of or antagonistic to it,” Wamba writes. “Legal and constitutional dimensions, separation of powers, recognition of freedoms of association, expression, religion, etc., are structural traits of the state. They do not identify a mode of politics which has to be grasped through its subjective dimension.” Politics is not the political order of institutions. This much is already determined by the affirmation of people’s thought. But just as significantly, it does not always exist. In other words, politics in parliamentarism is reduced to voting. But it is only from the viewpoint of mass organization, Wamba proposes, that it is possible to speak of movements for democracy in Africa. The imposition of Western models of liberal democracy continues a fundamentally colonial relation which does not reflect the capacity of African people to constitute their own politics. “What are the conditions in Africa,” Wamba asks, “for emancipatory politics to exist?” He adds: Our starting point must be: in Africa too, people think and this is the sole material basis of politics. We must investigate the internal content of what they actually think. It is through an analysis of these forms of consciousness that we will grasp the forms of political consciousness characterizing the antagonism with the existing overall socio-political order. To fail in this task would be to “abscond from politics, reducing politics to a state capacity.” This, then, is our basic framework for understanding depoliticization. In line with Wamba’s reasoning, Michael Neocosmos provides important developments in his aptly named Thinking Freedom in Africa . Depoliticization is “the inability to maintain an affirmation of purely subjective politics” when “state politics reassert themselves because of the gradual linking of politics to social categories.” This problem, Neocosmos elaborates, is tangled up with the rare and sequential character of politics. How do we understand a political sequence? Along these lines, Neocosmos proposes, the end of the national liberation sequence in Africa 1960-75 need not be understood in terms of the “failure of nationalism” but as “the saturation of the politics of national liberation and their gradual exhaustion as pure politics.” Conventional wisdom on historical revolutionary sequences of the 20th century revolves around a fundamental, flawed dichotomy: either the beautiful soul which remains unsullied by their dark side, or the sensible pragmatist who understands that every attempt to change the world ends in disaster. But one can both reject the nihilistic conclusion that no politics ever took place in a completed political sequence, and understand the consequences of the end of the sequence in terms of the risk of depoliticization. This is a pervasive problem which we encounter with the exhaustion of the great political sequences of the 20th century, even of the great socialist revolutions. This is how exhaustion becomes a historical condition and results in what we described above as the seeming impossibility of politics. The sequence of revolution which stretched across Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 20th century proposed not only the overturning of the existing societies but also the transitional processes of socialist construction which would yield an entirely new kind of world beyond capitalism. But now we are in no such historical phase—and the affective experience of exhaustion is tied to this condition. Nowadays, everywhere, there are attempts to disavow histories of the attempts to construct societies beyond capitalism—often with the easy narrative of “totalitarianism.” Such views simply repeat a traditional kind of fear of the masses which sees every collective body as a threat of mob conformism. This worldview seeks to defend representative, but essentially oligarchic institutions in which the educated elite protects a formal democracy which conceals the real dictatorship of capital. Anti-democratic views of this kind are in fact at the center of the dominant “democratic” ideologies which accuse every attempt to change the world of being fundamentally “totalitarian.” Theories of the political mired in this oligarchic sensibility, even if they appear on the left—such as it exists today—ultimately rely on teleological conceptions of history. Unable to comprehend the novel political declarations and actions which gave rise to the historical revolutionary sequences, they also cannot allow for the rare and exceptional emergence of politics in the present. Exhaustion, in this sense, is understood through what Lazarus has called the “method of saturation”: affirming that politics “took place,” while also noting that its existing categories and sites, which constituted a “historical mode of politics” have come to an end. In particular, we have to grapple with the saturation of the long sequence of the 20th century revolutions which revolved around the revolutionary working-class party seizing the state. Exhaustion, in this sense, is... affirming that politics “took place,” while also noting that its existing categories and sites, which constituted a “historical mode of politics” have come to an end. These are the conditions of depoliticization. But one need not lay blame on the historical figures who frequently reached a scale of human achievement unimaginable to us, to simply recognize that emancipatory politics is precarious and sequential. Exhaustion How does the condition of exhaustion operate on the concrete level of movements and the state? Here we can follow our second departed comrade, Rossana Rossanda of il manifesto , the dissident group pushed out of the Italian Communist Party in 1969. In 1983, reflecting on the long, turbulent sequence of political upheaval in Italy of at least the preceding two decades Rossanda identified two fundamental political problems: the dissipation of social movements outside the state, and the consequences of left-wing parties attempting to enter the state. Of course, the situation in Italy, characterized by perpetual strikes and a mass Communist Party approaching the seat of power, is not the same as the ones we know in the United States. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of the rise and fall of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the mass protests against police violence demonstrates the ongoing salience of Rossanda’s reflections. The Sanders campaign, of course, attempted to pursue a social-democratic program within the parameters of the bourgeois state— subsequently followed by the eruption of social movements outside the state. This dynamic, even if in a drastically different form and context, sheds light on the problem of the relationship between party and movement—or to put it another way, between the political (parliamentary) forms of the existing state and the social (extraparliamentary) basis of autonomous mobilization. For Rossanda, in the aftermath of the crest of the European workers’ movement the very form of the party, manifested in the Communist Parties, was in crisis. Already in 1968, from Paris to Beijing “the party-form was put into question” in no small part by the independent initiatives of workers. This occurred without the guidance of parties and unions, and alongside an unprecedented level of protest by youth and students which had an uneven but frequently fecund relationship with factory struggles. This crisis of the party-form was a critique of its fundamental political model; it was, Rossanda wrote, “the refusal of any delegation of power, whether it be a party or state, henceforth treated as ‘other’ in relation to the new subjectivity of these social agents.” During this particular crisis, the working class was engaged in the “refusal of work” rather than following the lead of unions in pursuing a minimal program of delegating the negotiation of new contracts to the labor bureaucracy. The student movements, meanwhile, helped realize the potential of the workers’ movement to pursue an independent path by advocating for autonomy and cultural transformation. The process of getting these votes within the limits of the existing political system determines the party’s framework and ideology, and this takes priority over the political demands of its working-class political base. But while the “new social movements” outside the party provided a vitality to the independent movements of the workers, they also relied on the mass organization of the working class that was inextricable from the political party, even if the latter operated as a force of containment. This contradictory relationship, also witnessed in the May 1968 revolt in France, was exacerbated when the parties confronted the implications, throughout the 1970s, of actually entering into the capitalist state. What could they achieve within the very bourgeois form not only of the political party itself, but parliamentary politics as a whole? Rossanda pointed to the simple fact that in Western societies representative democracy is a structure within which parties must attempt to get votes. The process of getting these votes within the limits of the existing political system determines the party’s framework and ideology, and this takes priority over the demands of its working-class political base. For this reason, whatever tactical potential there might have been in participating in elections, it was nevertheless the case that a very different kind of working-class political power would have to emerge in order to overturn class society. Within this structure, contemporary socialists have aspired to reproduce the history of the mass working-class political parties: garnering votes, aspiring to enter the state. In short, despite the fact that the very notion of a Communist Party entering the state seems unimaginable, when and if they succeed, contemporary socialists will eventually confront the problem of the form of political power that will be required for structural transformation. It wasn’t just the party that was in crisis. Extraparliamentary social movements had a prospect of overcoming bureaucratic ossification and reorienting the parties in a revolutionary direction. But movements were also in crisis. Movements leave an “active sedimentation” in society and its institutions “at the molecular level,” as Rossanda put it. They are that part of society which “transforms itself, calls for change, assembles and gathers people together.” Yet the movement, Rossanda reminds us, “does not last”; its “dramatic and destructive ebbs are as important as the sedimentations it creates.” Movements leave an “active sedimentation” in society and its institutions “at the molecular level,” as Rossanda put it. They are that part of society which “transforms itself, calls for change, assembles and gathers people together.” Yet the movement, Rossanda reminds us, “does not last”. There were, furthermore, important historical shifts at work as Rossanda was writing. Until the mid-twentieth century, Rossanda argued, movements “arose from sudden bursts from the margins of society” but were then “predisposed to become a party or merge with an existing party.” In this sense they provoked a transformation in the state which also generally represented their absorption into the existing institutions. Yet the new movements of the 1970s did not operate according to this logic. They “tended to express subjects and needs that the dominant social bloc, namely the parties and the state, could no longer absorb in a timely manner without abnegating itself.” The movements did not institutionalize themselves, either by building new institutions or by entering existing ones, either because they were not capable of achieving this or simply did not aspire to, and without articulating a project or alternative, they “withered,” and the existing power structures solidified in response. In Italy the parties were incorporated into the increasingly repressive state—the Italian Communist Party itself playing a leading role in repression of autonomous movements—and capital succeeded, by the late ‘70s, in breaking the power of labor. Even if the parties and unions had operated as a force of containment and absorption into bourgeois parliamentarianism, their mass membership also functioned as a political anchor, so their crisis was also the crisis of the movements. As they went on the retreat, movements fell prey to a general social anomie and atomization. Here I must beg your patience in referring to a dense and lengthy passage which provides the key formulation: A diffuse politicization remains, skeptical in regards to the left if not openly hostile, as does an intense depoliticization, a kind of active negation. The “movements” are no longer “movements” (which would suggest that they are only movements insofar as they retain the implicit hope for a way out or transfer to other “forms of politics,” or a certain trust in the permeability of the institutional network which has disappeared today). They are becoming fevers, “latencies,” partial cultures or subcultures, acting creatively but molecularly, contradictorily. Rossanda is pointing us here to the molecular level of depoliticization: not the macroscopic, historical scale that is the condition resulting from the end of a historical mode of politics, but the immediate, on-the-ground level of practical activity of the movement’s participants. What she calls the “diffuse politicization” of the movements is oppositional to the existing society. But in their fragmentation, the movements no longer move from the margins into the institutions. As Rossanda had argued of movements in the first half of the 20th century, this shift into the institutions had a dual character: the existing institutions neutralized these oppositional bursts from the margins, while at the same time also necessarily being transformed by them. While the autonomy of the emerging movements may have circumvented this neutralization, they also did not find a new way to compel the institutions to resolve the problems raised by their revolt, refusal, and demands. Now the movements came to exist as latencies alongside the sturdiness of the institutional order, and this order appeared to take on a despotic permanence. Rossanda’s insight into the complex relations between class and party, party and movement, remain crucial for socialists today who ask themselves: how should we organize? Endings & Beginnings In this essay, I have meant exhaustion in three senses. The first, at the level of the immediate practical activity of the militant, is the waning of the political capacity for commitment or the devolution into factionalism. The second, at the level of the political sequences within which militants act, is when an existing historical mode of politics comes to an end and a new one is not yet apparent. The third, at the level of history, is the condition which results from the seeming impossibility of political sequences of a scale and depth comparable to the 20th century revolutions. Does exhaustion constitute a period of history, an “age”? Periodization is tricky. All periodizations are schematic. It is extremely complicated to determine how the logical relationship between categories is aligned with a certain period of time, especially for events so tumultuous that they constantly defy interpretation. Though this may seem counterintuitive, periodization at its best does not exactly identify periods, within which every phenomenon expresses the totality in a particular stage of development. Rather, it provides specific and distinct descriptions of uneven and structurally interrelated processes, which have moments of rupture and discontinuity. There are thus interwoven threads throughout these periods, untimely divisions and amalgamations. Those of us living through a period between sequences which announce shared reference points for a global political subjectivity can choose between being faithful to the emancipatory project and the various forms of capitulation to exhaustion. In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us: the closure of revolutionary history, the unavailability of the forms, resources, and means which might be utilized in its continuation, an unhealthy relationship to past failures. With this we are all exhausted. What we are left with are simply various forms of pseudo-politics. In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us: the closure of revolutionary history, the unavailability of the forms, resources, and means which might be utilized in its continuation, an unhealthy relationship to past failures. There are three such pseudo-political sensibilities: adjustment, which claims to advocate for adjusting the existing reality, but actually enjoins us to adjust ourselves to it, on the basis of convenient normative principles (democracy, even socialism); personalization, the reduction of politics to individual behavior and identity, determined by a range of categories to which a person might be said to belong; and pragmatism, which dictates that since it will not get better, you must unencumber yourself of principles. In the interval the choice is not easy. Perhaps more dangerous than resignation in the face of exhaustion is to perform the rituals of depoliticization. Consider how these sensibilities are practiced. First, adjustment appears in the condescending rejection of any organizational process which does not have the state as its object. It generally means that an aspiring bureaucracy closes ranks and insists that all other political practices should be dropped every few years when, as Marx put it long ago, the people are permitted to decide which member of the ruling class will misrepresent them in parliament. Experiments, necessary for any process of organizational invention, are ridiculed and dismissed in comparison to an ideal model which exists nowhere in reality, but which we are assured is the only practical solution. The stubborn repetition of norms, both political and social, guarantees the despotism of the model. Walter Benjamin recounted what he called a Hasidic saying (but which he actually heard from his friend Gershom Scholem), that when the messiah comes, the world will be just as it is now, “only a little bit different.” From the perspective of adjustment, it will not be even a little bit different. Second, personalization operates the reduction of politics to interpersonal relations, resulting in factionalism and conformism. Factionalism and conformism are not unusual in the history of politics, even emancipatory politics, but today they happen without the processes of total social upheaval that framed them historically. As a result, individuals and groups act like states without achieving any substantive change, enforcing unwritten laws with informal social punishments. In the place of the aspiration for structural transformation there is the centering of politics on the person, on the person of the adversary, whose offensive proclamations and style of speaking may provide the opportunity for a self-satisfied disgust, insofar as our experiences and self-designations are seen as spontaneously political rather than themselves the construction of political procedures. Third, pragmatism is the most widespread sensibility among intellectuals, from the media to the academy, who adopt political language but drain it of any idea, and laugh at those who have the courage to believe that a truly political idea is worth defending. As Alain Badiou puts it, the imperative of capitalism, “get rich!,” today translates into: “Live without an Idea!” Even in the pages of our most traditional newspapers, no less than in what Byung-Chul Han calls the “shitstorms” of social media, we can read condemnations of oppression and privilege, we can see debates over the abolition of our society’s most violent institutions, we can rejoice at the toppling of the latest petty tyrant with the misfortune of being randomly exposed. Yet if we were to don the fabled sunglasses of They Live! , we would read, in bold and colossal type: “Live without an Idea!” These sensibilities correspond in certain respects to different political tendencies, but they also fuse and intermingle in various ways. In social movements, forms of organization, whether they are bureaucratic or horizontalist, frequently revolve around the persons who lead or represent the movement. Competitions between factions, the decisions about which persons will occupy the positions of leadership, displace debates over strategy and program; activists are required to perform lengthy confessions of their privilege instead of recruiting new members (who are almost universally repelled, entirely justly, by such religious procedures); and purges and expulsions are performed to cleanse and redeem the community, instead of fostering environments which encourage free and open discussion. If we were to don the fabled sunglasses of They Live! , we would read, in bold and colossal type: “Live without an Idea!” All depoliticization leads back to the state, and its rituals, no matter how molecular, only enforce its hegemony. In periods of the intensification of opinion, of the back and forth which is not genuinely political, the greatest temptation is withdrawal—to maintain the conviction that a genuinely emancipatory politics is necessary, to recognize that it has taken place in the past, but then to conclude that it will not take place again. It is difficult to dictate to others whether it is better to enter the fray of opinion or withdraw into the isolation of one’s bunker. And indeed, I have no political prescription to make. I am unable to conclude with a clarion call, to rally new energies to a resurgence of politics. But this is not because I view emancipation as illusory, inherently flawed, or doomed to failure. In reality, it has been exhausted, in a way that perhaps we are still unable to fully comprehend. In the absence of events which inaugurate a thorough break with the existing order, I can only try to remain faithful, to the extent that my energies allow, to the emancipatory statements that Wamba articulated: that people think, that they may live differently than they do, and that politics is the creative invention which says: let us do something about the situation! And the questions which immediately follow these statements are: what are the conditions for emancipatory politics to exist? What are the militant forms of thought which make it possible for masses of people to make a subjective break from the existing state of things? What are the sites of politics which allow us to take a distance from the state, and how do we prevent politics from being reduced to the state when a political sequence comes to an end? The energies for fidelity, however, do not remain stable in our turbulent reality. A kind of ordinary steadiness, perhaps, can be drawn from Rossanda’s analysis of the organizational processes underlying these conditions. If depoliticization overwhelms us, it is not a matter of historical necessity, but of everyday relations, of the way we organize our relations to each other in the process of organizing politically. From the working class to the new social movements, from unions to assemblies, there is the patient work of building collectivities that last and the sober analysis of the exigencies of organization. And once again, many questions: what will fill the empty space left in history by the party? How can movements avoid neutralization while still compelling the transformation of existing institutions? What can prevent movements from being consigned to the margins, where they watch power solidify and harden? I remain convinced by these insights, but it would be a mistake to pretend that we have answers to the questions that follow. False certainties do not result in correct actions, and we gain little from arranging our ideas in such a way as to give ourselves the gift of optimism. Exhaustion, perhaps, is not eternal; we have no evidence to conclude that it is. But as capitalism, in its automatic and impersonal nihilism, accelerates its exhaustion of the planet, and the rituals of depoliticization foreclose the declaration of any political idea, there appears almost to be a nobility in withdrawal. And yet, this appearance is illusory, because one of the few truly meaningful questions in an otherwise meaningless and mediocre existence is this: what can we do about the situation? Answering that question means reckoning seriously, and disturbingly, with exhaustion. Time will tell—but not too much time—if we are up to the task. ∎ CONSIDER THE militant who wakes up exhausted. Every day and night in the streets, perhaps marching back and forth with painful restraint, perhaps building barricades in spontaneous moments of affinity with those whose rapid “learning processes” have demonstrated the rationality of slowing and obstructing the police. Sore muscles the next day arguing in meetings and studying the classics for guidance. Despair at the emptying of the streets, the guilty capitulation to apathy, and the devastating disintegration of the organization. Consider what intervenes between politics as event: the knocking of doors, the apocalyptically slow process of persuasion, the daily strain to survive one’s own declining fortunes, the sheer emotional intensity of attempting to maintain fidelity and hope in the empty and seemingly endless interval. We know such exhaustions. Alongside these exhaustions which punctuate the lives of those who have dedicated themselves to politics at an everyday, grassroots level, the residents of the United States as a whole seem to have entered a state of exhaustion. It is in no small part provoked by the series of drastic political shifts that are marked by the fluctuating fortunes of the parliamentary system and its parties, parallel to the ebb and flow of social movements outside state boundaries. This exhaustion seems to be a broad phenomenon—caused by an affective investment in the outcomes of elections and the trajectory of social movements. But in fact, we must think of exhaustion in a different, highly specific way if we are to understand its contemporary political centrality. Exhaustion, in fact, has something like the status of a historical condition, a status that is a consequence of the termination of emancipatory politics. In this sense, exhaustion shifts from the moment which marks the termination of a political sequence to what appears to be the very impossibility of politics. Contrary to the popular opinion which dictates that “everything is political,” politics is not always taking place—politics, by which I mean specifically emancipatory politics, is an exceptional phenomenon. It does not happen with frequency. Just as it has to appear, it also fades away. Exhaustion shifts from the moment which marks the termination of a political sequence to what appears to be the very impossibility of politics. Of course, to understand any of this, we have to specify what politics means in the first place. In embarking on this task for the present moment, I want to pay tribute to two comrades who left us last year: the Congolese philosopher Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, and the Italian Communist Rossana Rossanda. Together they help think through the questions the militant faces in every moment of political action, even in what seem to be unremarkable and everyday practices: what is an emancipatory politics? What allows it to take place—and equally, what prevents it? The problem of emancipation animates the whole history of politics and political thought—but somehow, its place in our thinking and its relationship to social analysis often remains obscure. This slipperiness of emancipation presents a crisis for political thinking today. It is not difficult to see that a resurgence of authoritarian populism, the breakdown of the existing political system, and the approach of ecological apocalypse, all require concerted and creative theoretical efforts. But alongside the catastrophe of the present is the parallel emergence and disappearance of unexpected social movements—like those that recently peaked in the extraordinary mobilizations against racism and police violence. Our capacity to theorize our reality will be limited by our ability to formulate a vantage point of emancipation. This vantage point is not one which we could step out of history to assume, but rather is one which appears in particular moments, and ultimately recedes. We also cannot simply take contingent aspects of any particular social movement to represent the intrinsic characteristics of emancipation. Horizontalist forms of organization, for example, though there is certainly no reason to dismiss them out of hand, nevertheless do not automatically guarantee a movement’s emancipatory character. It is possible for such organizational practices to foster broad and egalitarian popular participation, in a way that appears to “prefigure” an emancipated society. But it is just as possible that they will devolve into proceduralism, endless meetings, debilitating indecision, and the reassertion of the same old hierarchies and stratifications that characterize existing society. In this sense, perhaps counterintuitively, instead of embracing specific forms of movement democracy as good in themselves—which, more often than not, brings us back to abstract and ahistorical norms—we have to situate them within political sequences. It is within these sequences, and only within these sequences, that they take on a political meaning. Our capacity to theorize our reality will be limited by our ability to formulate a vantage point of emancipation. Such a vantage point of emancipation is different from any social analysis that serves as a guarantee for a particular political program. In my book, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump , I declined, much to the chagrin of certain critics, to explain the relation between the categories, now so frequently paired, of “race and class.” It seemed to me that to describe the relationship between two abstractions—which are only articulated in concrete and specific historical circumstances—would be a logical error. Instead, I concerned myself with the articulation of struggles against racial domination and class exploitation in emancipatory social movements. I briefly alluded to the vast literature on the social and historical construction of race, and at the same time, in archival work on the history of the 19th and 20th century workers’ movements for Viewpoint Magazine , I attempted to describe the social and historical construction of class, by reviving the method of “class composition.” At the time, it seemed to me that the erasure of class in “identity politics” had neutralized the revolutionary character of movements against racial domination. Since then I have been reminded that struggles founded on class can also be neutralized, as the history of the workers’ movement makes clear. It seems to me now that emancipation is foreclosed by any foundation, whether “identitarian” or “materialist,” and that the axes of political struggle cannot be aligned by an empiricist social analysis, but only from the vantage point of emancipation. I have further been led to understand that my description of the depoliticized moment of the present requires further explanation. I do not mean neutralization as the search for an already neutral domain, or the evasion of conflict, as in the canonical account of Carl Schmitt. His diagnosis of “the age of neutralizations and depoliticizations” is grounded in a general theory of “the political,” while I am concerned with the singular events of “politics.” My theory ends up diametrically opposite to the jurist. What I mean by neutralization is a force which renders opposition ineffective. It is distinct from the potentially moralistic idea of co-optation, which presumes some authentic belonging of the object. Opposition is neutralized not through appropriation, but through the formulation of an effective reactant and the transformation of each element into a new compound. Neutralization is restricted, while depoliticization is expansive. Neutralization comes from the top. It contains and redirects opposition into the harmonious diversity of the system. Exhaustion, then, is part of a constellation that includes neutralization and depoliticization. In order to distinguish this theory from preceding accounts of neutralization and depoliticization, it will be at the center of our inquiry. Emancipation Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba’s work is not widely known in the “West,” despite the important influence he had at University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa in Senegal. His writings form part of an essential global dialogue on emancipatory politics. Wamba offers an indispensable statement on emancipation in his discussion of Lenin’s proposition that politics happens “under condition”: The political attitude is not accommodating; the state of affairs in the world does not have to remain so because it is so. People may live differently than they live. Politics is not expressed through the spontaneous consciousness. It is an active prescriptive relationship with reality and not a reflection or representation in consciousness of invariant structures (economic structure or level of development or the state). Politics is a creative invention. Let us do something about the situation! characterizes a political attitude. And so Wamba beautifully condenses a number of points on which to elaborate. Wamba emphasizes, drawing on Sylvain Lazarus, that “people think,” and that without this point of departure we inevitably end up in an elitist politics. Consequently there is a sense in which politics is thought—but thought is not, in some dualist framework, separate from reality. People’s thought is part of reality, and this is a materialist and egalitarian proposition. It rejects the idealist and elitist notions that “theory” is disconnected from people’s thought, and that only the party or the state can think. Emancipatory politics, then, based as it is on the “active prescriptive relationship with reality,” is not the expression of a social foundation. And because it starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics—not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.” Because emancipatory politics starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics. Not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.” But even once we have affirmed that people think, we are forced to reckon with the fact that something is not always being done about the situation. In other words: is politics always happening? Wamba notes that the existence of a social movement does not automatically imply the existence of politics; the latter requires a “subjective break,” the development of an antagonism to the whole political order which “is revealed through militant forms of thought… and not through the movement of history.” Thus Wamba argues: Emancipative politics does not always exist; when it does, it exists under conditions. It is, thus, precarious, and sequential: it unfolds until its conditions of subjective break disappear. When people lose the consciousness of subjective break by ceasing to be involved in political processes, emancipative politics disappears. The completion of a sequence of progressive politics does not lead automatically to another. In the absence of emancipative politics, the state problematic or the imperialist influence prevails in the treatment of matters of politics. To reduce every political capacity to a state capacity is to abscond from politics. Politics is not the political order of institutions. This much is already determined by the affirmation of people’s thought. But just as significantly, it does not always exist. When it does, it appears in sequences with a beginning and an end, and advances categories specific to its situation. But there are also modes of politics which are not emancipatory: the single-party, party-state model of state socialism, and the multi-party parliamentary mode. Let us put the term “democracy” in suspension for the moment, because the equation of democracy with multi-partyism and parliamentarianism naturally absorbs it into the state. “The multiparty system is a form of the state and not independent of or antagonistic to it,” Wamba writes. “Legal and constitutional dimensions, separation of powers, recognition of freedoms of association, expression, religion, etc., are structural traits of the state. They do not identify a mode of politics which has to be grasped through its subjective dimension.” Politics is not the political order of institutions. This much is already determined by the affirmation of people’s thought. But just as significantly, it does not always exist. In other words, politics in parliamentarism is reduced to voting. But it is only from the viewpoint of mass organization, Wamba proposes, that it is possible to speak of movements for democracy in Africa. The imposition of Western models of liberal democracy continues a fundamentally colonial relation which does not reflect the capacity of African people to constitute their own politics. “What are the conditions in Africa,” Wamba asks, “for emancipatory politics to exist?” He adds: Our starting point must be: in Africa too, people think and this is the sole material basis of politics. We must investigate the internal content of what they actually think. It is through an analysis of these forms of consciousness that we will grasp the forms of political consciousness characterizing the antagonism with the existing overall socio-political order. To fail in this task would be to “abscond from politics, reducing politics to a state capacity.” This, then, is our basic framework for understanding depoliticization. In line with Wamba’s reasoning, Michael Neocosmos provides important developments in his aptly named Thinking Freedom in Africa . Depoliticization is “the inability to maintain an affirmation of purely subjective politics” when “state politics reassert themselves because of the gradual linking of politics to social categories.” This problem, Neocosmos elaborates, is tangled up with the rare and sequential character of politics. How do we understand a political sequence? Along these lines, Neocosmos proposes, the end of the national liberation sequence in Africa 1960-75 need not be understood in terms of the “failure of nationalism” but as “the saturation of the politics of national liberation and their gradual exhaustion as pure politics.” Conventional wisdom on historical revolutionary sequences of the 20th century revolves around a fundamental, flawed dichotomy: either the beautiful soul which remains unsullied by their dark side, or the sensible pragmatist who understands that every attempt to change the world ends in disaster. But one can both reject the nihilistic conclusion that no politics ever took place in a completed political sequence, and understand the consequences of the end of the sequence in terms of the risk of depoliticization. This is a pervasive problem which we encounter with the exhaustion of the great political sequences of the 20th century, even of the great socialist revolutions. This is how exhaustion becomes a historical condition and results in what we described above as the seeming impossibility of politics. The sequence of revolution which stretched across Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 20th century proposed not only the overturning of the existing societies but also the transitional processes of socialist construction which would yield an entirely new kind of world beyond capitalism. But now we are in no such historical phase—and the affective experience of exhaustion is tied to this condition. Nowadays, everywhere, there are attempts to disavow histories of the attempts to construct societies beyond capitalism—often with the easy narrative of “totalitarianism.” Such views simply repeat a traditional kind of fear of the masses which sees every collective body as a threat of mob conformism. This worldview seeks to defend representative, but essentially oligarchic institutions in which the educated elite protects a formal democracy which conceals the real dictatorship of capital. Anti-democratic views of this kind are in fact at the center of the dominant “democratic” ideologies which accuse every attempt to change the world of being fundamentally “totalitarian.” Theories of the political mired in this oligarchic sensibility, even if they appear on the left—such as it exists today—ultimately rely on teleological conceptions of history. Unable to comprehend the novel political declarations and actions which gave rise to the historical revolutionary sequences, they also cannot allow for the rare and exceptional emergence of politics in the present. Exhaustion, in this sense, is understood through what Lazarus has called the “method of saturation”: affirming that politics “took place,” while also noting that its existing categories and sites, which constituted a “historical mode of politics” have come to an end. In particular, we have to grapple with the saturation of the long sequence of the 20th century revolutions which revolved around the revolutionary working-class party seizing the state. Exhaustion, in this sense, is... affirming that politics “took place,” while also noting that its existing categories and sites, which constituted a “historical mode of politics” have come to an end. These are the conditions of depoliticization. But one need not lay blame on the historical figures who frequently reached a scale of human achievement unimaginable to us, to simply recognize that emancipatory politics is precarious and sequential. Exhaustion How does the condition of exhaustion operate on the concrete level of movements and the state? Here we can follow our second departed comrade, Rossana Rossanda of il manifesto , the dissident group pushed out of the Italian Communist Party in 1969. In 1983, reflecting on the long, turbulent sequence of political upheaval in Italy of at least the preceding two decades Rossanda identified two fundamental political problems: the dissipation of social movements outside the state, and the consequences of left-wing parties attempting to enter the state. Of course, the situation in Italy, characterized by perpetual strikes and a mass Communist Party approaching the seat of power, is not the same as the ones we know in the United States. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of the rise and fall of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the mass protests against police violence demonstrates the ongoing salience of Rossanda’s reflections. The Sanders campaign, of course, attempted to pursue a social-democratic program within the parameters of the bourgeois state— subsequently followed by the eruption of social movements outside the state. This dynamic, even if in a drastically different form and context, sheds light on the problem of the relationship between party and movement—or to put it another way, between the political (parliamentary) forms of the existing state and the social (extraparliamentary) basis of autonomous mobilization. For Rossanda, in the aftermath of the crest of the European workers’ movement the very form of the party, manifested in the Communist Parties, was in crisis. Already in 1968, from Paris to Beijing “the party-form was put into question” in no small part by the independent initiatives of workers. This occurred without the guidance of parties and unions, and alongside an unprecedented level of protest by youth and students which had an uneven but frequently fecund relationship with factory struggles. This crisis of the party-form was a critique of its fundamental political model; it was, Rossanda wrote, “the refusal of any delegation of power, whether it be a party or state, henceforth treated as ‘other’ in relation to the new subjectivity of these social agents.” During this particular crisis, the working class was engaged in the “refusal of work” rather than following the lead of unions in pursuing a minimal program of delegating the negotiation of new contracts to the labor bureaucracy. The student movements, meanwhile, helped realize the potential of the workers’ movement to pursue an independent path by advocating for autonomy and cultural transformation. The process of getting these votes within the limits of the existing political system determines the party’s framework and ideology, and this takes priority over the political demands of its working-class political base. But while the “new social movements” outside the party provided a vitality to the independent movements of the workers, they also relied on the mass organization of the working class that was inextricable from the political party, even if the latter operated as a force of containment. This contradictory relationship, also witnessed in the May 1968 revolt in France, was exacerbated when the parties confronted the implications, throughout the 1970s, of actually entering into the capitalist state. What could they achieve within the very bourgeois form not only of the political party itself, but parliamentary politics as a whole? Rossanda pointed to the simple fact that in Western societies representative democracy is a structure within which parties must attempt to get votes. The process of getting these votes within the limits of the existing political system determines the party’s framework and ideology, and this takes priority over the demands of its working-class political base. For this reason, whatever tactical potential there might have been in participating in elections, it was nevertheless the case that a very different kind of working-class political power would have to emerge in order to overturn class society. Within this structure, contemporary socialists have aspired to reproduce the history of the mass working-class political parties: garnering votes, aspiring to enter the state. In short, despite the fact that the very notion of a Communist Party entering the state seems unimaginable, when and if they succeed, contemporary socialists will eventually confront the problem of the form of political power that will be required for structural transformation. It wasn’t just the party that was in crisis. Extraparliamentary social movements had a prospect of overcoming bureaucratic ossification and reorienting the parties in a revolutionary direction. But movements were also in crisis. Movements leave an “active sedimentation” in society and its institutions “at the molecular level,” as Rossanda put it. They are that part of society which “transforms itself, calls for change, assembles and gathers people together.” Yet the movement, Rossanda reminds us, “does not last”; its “dramatic and destructive ebbs are as important as the sedimentations it creates.” Movements leave an “active sedimentation” in society and its institutions “at the molecular level,” as Rossanda put it. They are that part of society which “transforms itself, calls for change, assembles and gathers people together.” Yet the movement, Rossanda reminds us, “does not last”. There were, furthermore, important historical shifts at work as Rossanda was writing. Until the mid-twentieth century, Rossanda argued, movements “arose from sudden bursts from the margins of society” but were then “predisposed to become a party or merge with an existing party.” In this sense they provoked a transformation in the state which also generally represented their absorption into the existing institutions. Yet the new movements of the 1970s did not operate according to this logic. They “tended to express subjects and needs that the dominant social bloc, namely the parties and the state, could no longer absorb in a timely manner without abnegating itself.” The movements did not institutionalize themselves, either by building new institutions or by entering existing ones, either because they were not capable of achieving this or simply did not aspire to, and without articulating a project or alternative, they “withered,” and the existing power structures solidified in response. In Italy the parties were incorporated into the increasingly repressive state—the Italian Communist Party itself playing a leading role in repression of autonomous movements—and capital succeeded, by the late ‘70s, in breaking the power of labor. Even if the parties and unions had operated as a force of containment and absorption into bourgeois parliamentarianism, their mass membership also functioned as a political anchor, so their crisis was also the crisis of the movements. As they went on the retreat, movements fell prey to a general social anomie and atomization. Here I must beg your patience in referring to a dense and lengthy passage which provides the key formulation: A diffuse politicization remains, skeptical in regards to the left if not openly hostile, as does an intense depoliticization, a kind of active negation. The “movements” are no longer “movements” (which would suggest that they are only movements insofar as they retain the implicit hope for a way out or transfer to other “forms of politics,” or a certain trust in the permeability of the institutional network which has disappeared today). They are becoming fevers, “latencies,” partial cultures or subcultures, acting creatively but molecularly, contradictorily. Rossanda is pointing us here to the molecular level of depoliticization: not the macroscopic, historical scale that is the condition resulting from the end of a historical mode of politics, but the immediate, on-the-ground level of practical activity of the movement’s participants. What she calls the “diffuse politicization” of the movements is oppositional to the existing society. But in their fragmentation, the movements no longer move from the margins into the institutions. As Rossanda had argued of movements in the first half of the 20th century, this shift into the institutions had a dual character: the existing institutions neutralized these oppositional bursts from the margins, while at the same time also necessarily being transformed by them. While the autonomy of the emerging movements may have circumvented this neutralization, they also did not find a new way to compel the institutions to resolve the problems raised by their revolt, refusal, and demands. Now the movements came to exist as latencies alongside the sturdiness of the institutional order, and this order appeared to take on a despotic permanence. Rossanda’s insight into the complex relations between class and party, party and movement, remain crucial for socialists today who ask themselves: how should we organize? Endings & Beginnings In this essay, I have meant exhaustion in three senses. The first, at the level of the immediate practical activity of the militant, is the waning of the political capacity for commitment or the devolution into factionalism. The second, at the level of the political sequences within which militants act, is when an existing historical mode of politics comes to an end and a new one is not yet apparent. The third, at the level of history, is the condition which results from the seeming impossibility of political sequences of a scale and depth comparable to the 20th century revolutions. Does exhaustion constitute a period of history, an “age”? Periodization is tricky. All periodizations are schematic. It is extremely complicated to determine how the logical relationship between categories is aligned with a certain period of time, especially for events so tumultuous that they constantly defy interpretation. Though this may seem counterintuitive, periodization at its best does not exactly identify periods, within which every phenomenon expresses the totality in a particular stage of development. Rather, it provides specific and distinct descriptions of uneven and structurally interrelated processes, which have moments of rupture and discontinuity. There are thus interwoven threads throughout these periods, untimely divisions and amalgamations. Those of us living through a period between sequences which announce shared reference points for a global political subjectivity can choose between being faithful to the emancipatory project and the various forms of capitulation to exhaustion. In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us: the closure of revolutionary history, the unavailability of the forms, resources, and means which might be utilized in its continuation, an unhealthy relationship to past failures. With this we are all exhausted. What we are left with are simply various forms of pseudo-politics. In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us: the closure of revolutionary history, the unavailability of the forms, resources, and means which might be utilized in its continuation, an unhealthy relationship to past failures. There are three such pseudo-political sensibilities: adjustment, which claims to advocate for adjusting the existing reality, but actually enjoins us to adjust ourselves to it, on the basis of convenient normative principles (democracy, even socialism); personalization, the reduction of politics to individual behavior and identity, determined by a range of categories to which a person might be said to belong; and pragmatism, which dictates that since it will not get better, you must unencumber yourself of principles. In the interval the choice is not easy. Perhaps more dangerous than resignation in the face of exhaustion is to perform the rituals of depoliticization. Consider how these sensibilities are practiced. First, adjustment appears in the condescending rejection of any organizational process which does not have the state as its object. It generally means that an aspiring bureaucracy closes ranks and insists that all other political practices should be dropped every few years when, as Marx put it long ago, the people are permitted to decide which member of the ruling class will misrepresent them in parliament. Experiments, necessary for any process of organizational invention, are ridiculed and dismissed in comparison to an ideal model which exists nowhere in reality, but which we are assured is the only practical solution. The stubborn repetition of norms, both political and social, guarantees the despotism of the model. Walter Benjamin recounted what he called a Hasidic saying (but which he actually heard from his friend Gershom Scholem), that when the messiah comes, the world will be just as it is now, “only a little bit different.” From the perspective of adjustment, it will not be even a little bit different. Second, personalization operates the reduction of politics to interpersonal relations, resulting in factionalism and conformism. Factionalism and conformism are not unusual in the history of politics, even emancipatory politics, but today they happen without the processes of total social upheaval that framed them historically. As a result, individuals and groups act like states without achieving any substantive change, enforcing unwritten laws with informal social punishments. In the place of the aspiration for structural transformation there is the centering of politics on the person, on the person of the adversary, whose offensive proclamations and style of speaking may provide the opportunity for a self-satisfied disgust, insofar as our experiences and self-designations are seen as spontaneously political rather than themselves the construction of political procedures. Third, pragmatism is the most widespread sensibility among intellectuals, from the media to the academy, who adopt political language but drain it of any idea, and laugh at those who have the courage to believe that a truly political idea is worth defending. As Alain Badiou puts it, the imperative of capitalism, “get rich!,” today translates into: “Live without an Idea!” Even in the pages of our most traditional newspapers, no less than in what Byung-Chul Han calls the “shitstorms” of social media, we can read condemnations of oppression and privilege, we can see debates over the abolition of our society’s most violent institutions, we can rejoice at the toppling of the latest petty tyrant with the misfortune of being randomly exposed. Yet if we were to don the fabled sunglasses of They Live! , we would read, in bold and colossal type: “Live without an Idea!” These sensibilities correspond in certain respects to different political tendencies, but they also fuse and intermingle in various ways. In social movements, forms of organization, whether they are bureaucratic or horizontalist, frequently revolve around the persons who lead or represent the movement. Competitions between factions, the decisions about which persons will occupy the positions of leadership, displace debates over strategy and program; activists are required to perform lengthy confessions of their privilege instead of recruiting new members (who are almost universally repelled, entirely justly, by such religious procedures); and purges and expulsions are performed to cleanse and redeem the community, instead of fostering environments which encourage free and open discussion. If we were to don the fabled sunglasses of They Live! , we would read, in bold and colossal type: “Live without an Idea!” All depoliticization leads back to the state, and its rituals, no matter how molecular, only enforce its hegemony. In periods of the intensification of opinion, of the back and forth which is not genuinely political, the greatest temptation is withdrawal—to maintain the conviction that a genuinely emancipatory politics is necessary, to recognize that it has taken place in the past, but then to conclude that it will not take place again. It is difficult to dictate to others whether it is better to enter the fray of opinion or withdraw into the isolation of one’s bunker. And indeed, I have no political prescription to make. I am unable to conclude with a clarion call, to rally new energies to a resurgence of politics. But this is not because I view emancipation as illusory, inherently flawed, or doomed to failure. In reality, it has been exhausted, in a way that perhaps we are still unable to fully comprehend. In the absence of events which inaugurate a thorough break with the existing order, I can only try to remain faithful, to the extent that my energies allow, to the emancipatory statements that Wamba articulated: that people think, that they may live differently than they do, and that politics is the creative invention which says: let us do something about the situation! And the questions which immediately follow these statements are: what are the conditions for emancipatory politics to exist? What are the militant forms of thought which make it possible for masses of people to make a subjective break from the existing state of things? What are the sites of politics which allow us to take a distance from the state, and how do we prevent politics from being reduced to the state when a political sequence comes to an end? The energies for fidelity, however, do not remain stable in our turbulent reality. A kind of ordinary steadiness, perhaps, can be drawn from Rossanda’s analysis of the organizational processes underlying these conditions. If depoliticization overwhelms us, it is not a matter of historical necessity, but of everyday relations, of the way we organize our relations to each other in the process of organizing politically. From the working class to the new social movements, from unions to assemblies, there is the patient work of building collectivities that last and the sober analysis of the exigencies of organization. And once again, many questions: what will fill the empty space left in history by the party? How can movements avoid neutralization while still compelling the transformation of existing institutions? What can prevent movements from being consigned to the margins, where they watch power solidify and harden? I remain convinced by these insights, but it would be a mistake to pretend that we have answers to the questions that follow. False certainties do not result in correct actions, and we gain little from arranging our ideas in such a way as to give ourselves the gift of optimism. Exhaustion, perhaps, is not eternal; we have no evidence to conclude that it is. But as capitalism, in its automatic and impersonal nihilism, accelerates its exhaustion of the planet, and the rituals of depoliticization foreclose the declaration of any political idea, there appears almost to be a nobility in withdrawal. And yet, this appearance is illusory, because one of the few truly meaningful questions in an otherwise meaningless and mediocre existence is this: what can we do about the situation? Answering that question means reckoning seriously, and disturbingly, with exhaustion. Time will tell—but not too much time—if we are up to the task. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Artwork by Mon M for SAAG. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Essay Political Theory Emancipatory Politics Rossana Rossanda Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba Congo Italian Communist Party Tanzania Senegal Carl Schmitt Lenin Sylvain Lazarus Marxist Theory Michael Neocosmos Il Manifesto Bernie Sanders 1968 Workers Movements Depoliticization Affect Historical materialism Walter Benjamin Movement Organization Movement Strategy Revolution Histories of Revolutionary Politics Temporality ASAD HAIDER is a founding Editor of Viewpoint Magazine , an investigative journal of contemporary politics. He is the author of Mistaken Identity and a co-editor for The Black Radical Tradition (forthcoming). His writing can be found in The Baffler , n+1 , The Point , Salon , and elsewhere. 10 Mar 2021 Essay Political Theory 10th Mar 2021 MON M is an organizer, writer, and illustrator from Bangalore, India currently organizing around surveillance, ending jail expansion, and prisoner support programs in Lenapehoking/New York City. Her work focuses on undoing the reformist creep of progressive criminal justice institutions and policies, as well as on abolitionist feminist strategies for ending the carceral state, and anti-caste solidarity within the South Asian diaspora, as a Savarna individual. She is a co-author of 8 to Abolition , as well as a founding co-organizer of the National No New Jails Network , and Free Them All for Public Health . Into the Disaster-Verse Kamil Ahsan 12th Mar Whose Footfall is Loudest? Thawda Aye Lei 24th Feb Chats Ep. 8 · On Migrations in Global History Neilesh Bose 4th May Chats Ep. 7 · Karti Dharti, Gender & India's Farmers Movement Sangeet Toor 29th Apr Discourses on Kashmir Huma Dar · Hilal Mir · Ather Zia 24th Oct On That Note:

Bangalore-based Reliable Copy is an intentionally designed independent publishing collective reshaping the landscape of contemporary art distribution and curation in South Asia. Rooted in friendship, knowledge-building, and a redefinition of what sustainability in art book publishing looks and feels like, their practice bridges transnational modernisms to turn the ‘lull’ in visual art into a space of possibility, where language, community, and curiosity meet at their respective limits to sketch new worlds. FEATURES Beyond the Lull Bangalore-based Reliable Copy is an intentionally designed independent publishing collective reshaping the landscape of contemporary art distribution and curation in South Asia. Rooted in friendship, knowledge-building, and a redefinition of what sustainability in art book publishing looks and feels like, their practice bridges transnational modernisms to turn the ‘lull’ in visual art into a space of possibility, where language, community, and curiosity meet at their respective limits to sketch new worlds. Pramodha Weerasekera In The Significance and Relevance of Early Modern Indian Painters to the Contemporary Indian Art (1971) by Nilima Sheikh , a Fine Arts dissertation published by Reliable Copy, the artist speaks of a “lull” in terms of Modernist painting in India. She reflects on how the Modernist movement emerged out of a reckoning with Mughal artistic traditions, as well as influences from British art. In the conclusion of the dissertation, Sheikh writes: “The task of the individual painter in India is perhaps more difficult because he has to start from scratch and question the basic premises; there is no concerted movement to whose ideologies he can subscribe or even reject as the reference for his own work.” Cover page of The Significance and Relevance of Early Modern Indian Painters to the Contemporary Indian Art (1971) by Nilima Sheikh, published by Reliable Copy in 2023. Image courtesy Reliable Copy. This ‘lull’ still continues to push artistic practices in South Asia to innovate and find unique solutions in order to create meaningful and thought-provoking works. Reliable Copy, a publishing house founded and led by artist duo Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian in 2018, is an example of an initiative that has embraced this ‘lull’ as a challenge. In 2021, while helping plan an online conference for emerging arts professionals in South Asia, I kept hearing about Nihaal and Sarasija’s work—my colleagues based in India loved them. At the time, I was working at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka in Colombo, under the guidance of art historian and curator Sharmini Pereira , aiming to start my own writing and publishing practice. At the museum, I was exposed to her immense experience in publishing and the peripheral work of building the publishing house Raking Leaves, with a predominant focus on South Asian artistic practices. When I finally met Nihaal and Sarasija, it was both a revelation and a relief to know that people of my own generation were passionate about independent publishing just like I was and were excited to share more with me. Independent publishing, such as Reliable Copy’s practice, transcends one-off zines and DIY publication models, as well as the nefarious art-world entity of the biographical coffee-table book that is merely aesthetically pleasing. Reliable Copy’s practice prioritises substance, critical thinking, knowledge-building, deliberation, and intentional decision-making. They are currently engaged in two main publication series. The Fine Art(s) Dissertation Series highlights (un)published dissertations from the prominent Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda as a pedagogical tool. The Wiggle Room is a playful take on contemporary art from an international standpoint, bringing together artistic practices that aim for freedom or seek to “wiggle” out of conventionalities. A common thread emerges in how they have positioned one book after another since 2018. “As the publishing practice has evolved, we have been attempting more and more to play the role of positioning the artist, the book, and their contexts,” says Sarasija. This essay unveils different ways in which I have encountered this common thread in Reliable Copy’s work during my years as a fellow dreamer of an independent publishing practice. The Surroundings of the Practice At my first meeting with Nihaal and Sarasija, I was surrounded by a host of books on a busy, traffic-filled day in Bangalore. Our meeting exposed me to the extensive labour that goes into the publication of a book. Each book’s design identity, layout, paper, fonts, and printing technology had been well thought through. I was gifted several books published by them, including Mochu’s Nervous Fossils – Syndromes of the Synthetic Nether , The 1Shanthiroad Cookbook , edited by Suresh Jayaram, and Sculptor’s Notebook by Pushpamala N. Nihaal; Sarasija said they wanted the books to travel far. Flexing Muscles (2019) by Ravikumar Kashi caught my attention due to the artist’s detailed treatment of flex banners in Bangalore. The book includes an essay in both Kannada and English, accompanied by photographs. Kashi’s in-depth artistic analysis, of a subject that I had encountered yet ignored during my visits to Bangalore, was a unique way to re-experience that city from my desk in Colombo. Mochu’s book was of a completely different tenor yet felt similar—the artist’s rich imaginarium was salient in the big blue typography, almost-dystopian imagery, and the bright yellow cover. Despite a personal aversion to speculative theory and related fiction, I held onto this book as a reminder to myself of what books can do to their readers: intrigue, move, tell stories, and impart new knowledge and perspectives. In December 2023, I, too, took a leap and published a book with three artists. Sarasija spent hours with me, the designer, and one of the artists to ensure consistency in terms of colours, fonts, paper, and printing options in India (the book was to be mainly distributed in Delhi). This level of friendship-building and support is rare, at least in the phase of the career I am in, as a writer trying to be independent. When they recently sent me a copy of the newly minted publication Supporting Role by Jason Hirata from the Wiggle Room series, I realised that for Reliable Copy, friendship is the core. They began the series in 2023 with the publication High Entertainment by David Robbins, an artist they had developed a strong connection with during their At The Kitchen Table exhibition in 2021. Hirata’s Supporting Role has emerged from the same premise, extending a close relationship with another artist who was present in At The Kitchen Table . The Wiggle Room series’ conceptualisation is immersed in the contemporary and the emerging. Each publication interrogates the meaning of “art,” particularly in relation to contemporary technologies, digital platforms, and the artist’s evolving role within broader socio-cultural and economic structures. Art is never for art’s sake. Cover page of Sculptor’s Notebook (1985) by Pushpamala N, published by Reliable Copy in 2022. Image courtesy Reliable Copy. Beyond the Limits of Language Supporting Role’ s editor’s note refers to Marcel Duchamp ’s thinking about aesthetics, language, and fine art: “What [Duchamp] makes abundantly clear is that language serves a purpose, is essential and inevitable, but that it also comes with certain limits. Sometimes as soon as one’s language is carefully delineated, it starts to impose itself, it becomes an obstacle.” Duchamp, as an art historical example, helps contextualise Hirata’s practice as presented in the book. The book is an extension of Duchamp’s idea, which continues to hold true for most linguistic endeavours. While we encounter many labels and descriptors of visual artworks, the publication never presents what might be considered a conventionally ‘visual’ artwork. We do encounter two works by him: A Storied Past (Il sogno di una cosa) (2022) and the series Grave Fatura (2023–24), but they are not conventional paintings, prints, photographs, or sculptures. The book is composed of an edited selection of texts developed by Hirata to accompany his artworks: labels for the wall, invitations to exhibitions, essays, scripts, press releases, checklists, invoices, curricula vitae, and other paraphernalia he has preserved while working in contemporary art production and display in Berlin. These roles—often performed by those around the artist, such as partners, friends, and family—are frequently overlooked. Hirata’s book documents these contributions across his career, mainly through language-based materials. They are primarily text-based artworks with two qualities innate to books—mobility and reproducibility on paper—enabling sustained engagement beyond the confines of a white cube space. While Duchamp’s critique of language remains relevant to Hirata and the visual arts today, Nihaal and Sarasija push language to its limits. Many of us, myself included, forget its role in and around contemporary art. Though we may begin with the intention to explain and contextualise, the specialised vocabulary often alienates unfamiliar audiences. Supporting Role invites us to see language not as a mere support, but as an artwork in itself. Before Wiggle Room , Reliable Copy had already facilitated unexpected transitions through time and space with language and ephemera surrounding artmaking. Their curatorial project at the kitchen table , first exhibited in 2021 at 1Shanthiroad Studio/Gallery in Bangalore, travelled to the Ark Foundation for the Arts in Baroda in 2023–24. The project considers how publishing practices could inform exhibition-making and curatorial processes. “Through this introduction of artworks as records and documents—as secondary material—and together with cookbooks and videos, at the kitchen table spills its premise across the exhibition and its documentation, the library and the gallery, and the event and its eventual publication,” the catalogue states. The display explored food, with particular attention to the channels and platforms through which food travels, inscribed with material, trace, memory, and cultural politics. It included cookbooks, menus, anthologies of recipes from literary fiction, family archives of ‘secret’ recipes, historical records, and visual and textual references to the feasts held for occasions such as birthdays, funerals, or festivals. The moving image works were particularly compelling, with some questioning, mimicking, or parodying the performative format of instructional cooking shows. Carolyn Lazard’s A Recipe for Disaster (2018) incorporates footage from Julia Child’s The French Chef (1972), which used open captions and images for the deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences. Reflecting on this in the twenty-first century, Lazard foregrounds accessibility as a necessary aspect of social infrastructure, especially in mainstream media. The Community of the Practice During my visit to Bangalore in July 2024, Reliable Copy had just moved into a new studio. We were in the midst of a long-planned book exchange between Reliable Copy, Raking Leaves, Mumbai-based Editions JoJo, and myself. Nihaal, Sarasija, and I spoke at length about how independent publishing had evolved for Reliable Copy after their residency at Amant Art and their debut at Printed Matter’s Art Book Fair in New York earlier that year. This is when I began to consider Reliable Copy as a curatorial practice that exceeded the scope of independent publishing. By their fourteenth publication in late 2024, their carefully chosen collaborations had culminated in a new focus: actively strategising how to disseminate their books or how, as artists might say, to put the work “out there.” Nihaal spoke animatedly about a new project they had initiated: Total Runtime , a curated moving image programme that activates Reliable Copy’s publications. Featuring moving image works by artists previously published by the press, Total Runtime is mobile, flexible, and an answer to the ‘lull’. Its first iteration in New York brought together nine films, two book trailers, seven artists, and one publishing house. The participating artists included BV Suresh, David Robbins, Kiran Subbaiah , Mariam Suhail, Mario Santanilla , Mochu, and Pushpamala N. The next iteration, at Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Fair, showcased films by David Robbins and Jason Hirata, celebrating the latter’s new publication Supporting Role with Reliable Copy. In late 2023, they also launched Press Works, their own distribution platform, making publications by renowned international independent art book publishers accessible to local audiences. These included Primary Information and New Documents (United States), Kayfa-ta (Gulf), kyklàda.press (Aegean archipelago), Editions JoJo (India), and numerous self-published titles. The curation of this platform is deliberate and thoughtful, drawing on a network of publishers they regard as models of interest. Participation in international art book fairs continues to expand their network and deepen engagement with the global independent publishing community. Each trip to a fair introduces Reliable Copy to new publishers and, in turn, allows them to introduce readers like myself to these practices. Guided by their own interests as readers, Nihaal and Sarasija explore the wider practices behind the books and aim to offer Indian audiences not just individual titles but an understanding of broader publishing patterns. A notable example of this curatorial pattern is the Los Angeles-based New Documents , recommended to me by Sarasija. The Halifax Conference (2019) presents a transcript of a 1970 conference held at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, capturing a cacophony of voices and opinions typical of such events. Intrigued by this, I was particularly drawn to New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness (2023), a collection of transcripts and pamphlets by medical scientist Carl Julius Salomonsen , who argued in 1919–20 that Modernist art constituted a kind of “contagious mental illness.” The book offers a fascinating view of Modernism as something misunderstood, even pathological, in its own time. Its format, resembling a legal document, evoked, for me, a history of ownership and transmission. Until then, my knowledge of modernism had been shaped largely by the Sri Lankan context, due to my museum work on Sri Lankan modern and contemporary art. This book allowed me to see how Europe perceived the movement as it unfolded: not from a scholarly perspective, but through the lens of a medical professional. It felt as though Nihaal and Sarasija had noted my interest in modernist art and fed it back to me through their recommendations, often sent via WhatsApp or email, regardless of distance. These messages and emails lead me to one of the most enduring aspects of Reliable Copy: its ethic of community and friendship. Jason Hirata and Sarasija Subramanian with Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. Photograph by Nihaal Faizal. Image courtesy Reliable Copy. Friendship and Publishing I first met Nihaal and Sarasija in Bangalore, during a conference organised almost serendipitously by a mutual friend. Although we have never shared a formal panel as colleagues, I have attended nearly every talk the duo has given, not out of professional obligation, but out of friendship. I have always approached their practice not as a peer, but as a friend and fellow dreamer. At a particularly difficult moment, I wrote them a long, disillusioned email, venting about the challenges of starting my own publishing practice. I spoke of the scarcity of funding and the exhaustion that comes with trying to be creative in an industry already strained by lack, especially in South Asia. Their response was generous and clear-eyed. We discussed pragmatic paths forward, and their questions led me to reconsider what sustainability might truly mean—for work, and for myself. What they offered was not false assurance, but something more lasting: the reminder that while financial stability may always remain elusive, what must persist is commitment—uncompromising, careful, and rooted in a sense of purpose. At the time, I was still grappling with what exactly my priorities were as an independent writer and curator (I still am). They reminded me that patience was not a waiting room, but a form of practice. “Once the light comes on,” they said, “you will not be able to turn it off.” Community is the spine of independent art book publishing, as Nihaal and Sarasija have told me, and as I have come to understand it myself. This community is made up of artists willing to experiment with form and failure, designers who treat legibility and beauty as twin priorities, distributors who care as much about access as they do about profit margins, and a readership that reads not out of habit but out of care. Sustainability, then, cannot be reduced to financial viability alone. It rests on the presence of a community that cares enough to read, respond, and stay. Sarasija and Nihaal have observed a growing interest in the Indian market among international publishers, mainly because there are no dedicated art bookshops or art book fairs in South Asia, and no traditional infrastructure for these books to circulate. My siblings and friends who attend such fairs in the global North have noticed this firsthand. My sister’s visit to Forma’s Art Book Fair in London resulted in a video call from the fair and a parcel of discounted books mailed to me in Sri Lanka. Similarly, for Nihaal and Sarasija, there is a community of publishers that reduces their prices for the Indian market, allowing their books to circulate more widely. There is, for Reliable Copy, a network of publishers who lower their prices for Indian readers; not as charity, but as a gesture of circulation. This atmosphere, shaped by generosity rather than competition, stands in stark contrast to the saturated and often exclusionary contemporary art market. Independent publishing here is marked by specificity and thematic intention. People are not just selling books, but also exchanging ideas, paying attention, and bringing each other’s work home. For Nihaal and Sarasija, the warmth of printed matter is not abstract. It is embedded in the everyday ethic of this community. I remain hopeful about art book publishing, not only as an industry but as a practice shaped by care. My engagement with Reliable Copy has deepened my conviction. The so-called lull of independent publishing is passing. A new generation is ready to learn from it, and to begin again, as every serious artistic movement once did.∎ In The Significance and Relevance of Early Modern Indian Painters to the Contemporary Indian Art (1971) by Nilima Sheikh , a Fine Arts dissertation published by Reliable Copy, the artist speaks of a “lull” in terms of Modernist painting in India. She reflects on how the Modernist movement emerged out of a reckoning with Mughal artistic traditions, as well as influences from British art. In the conclusion of the dissertation, Sheikh writes: “The task of the individual painter in India is perhaps more difficult because he has to start from scratch and question the basic premises; there is no concerted movement to whose ideologies he can subscribe or even reject as the reference for his own work.” Cover page of The Significance and Relevance of Early Modern Indian Painters to the Contemporary Indian Art (1971) by Nilima Sheikh, published by Reliable Copy in 2023. Image courtesy Reliable Copy. This ‘lull’ still continues to push artistic practices in South Asia to innovate and find unique solutions in order to create meaningful and thought-provoking works. Reliable Copy, a publishing house founded and led by artist duo Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian in 2018, is an example of an initiative that has embraced this ‘lull’ as a challenge. In 2021, while helping plan an online conference for emerging arts professionals in South Asia, I kept hearing about Nihaal and Sarasija’s work—my colleagues based in India loved them. At the time, I was working at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka in Colombo, under the guidance of art historian and curator Sharmini Pereira , aiming to start my own writing and publishing practice. At the museum, I was exposed to her immense experience in publishing and the peripheral work of building the publishing house Raking Leaves, with a predominant focus on South Asian artistic practices. When I finally met Nihaal and Sarasija, it was both a revelation and a relief to know that people of my own generation were passionate about independent publishing just like I was and were excited to share more with me. Independent publishing, such as Reliable Copy’s practice, transcends one-off zines and DIY publication models, as well as the nefarious art-world entity of the biographical coffee-table book that is merely aesthetically pleasing. Reliable Copy’s practice prioritises substance, critical thinking, knowledge-building, deliberation, and intentional decision-making. They are currently engaged in two main publication series. The Fine Art(s) Dissertation Series highlights (un)published dissertations from the prominent Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda as a pedagogical tool. The Wiggle Room is a playful take on contemporary art from an international standpoint, bringing together artistic practices that aim for freedom or seek to “wiggle” out of conventionalities. A common thread emerges in how they have positioned one book after another since 2018. “As the publishing practice has evolved, we have been attempting more and more to play the role of positioning the artist, the book, and their contexts,” says Sarasija. This essay unveils different ways in which I have encountered this common thread in Reliable Copy’s work during my years as a fellow dreamer of an independent publishing practice. The Surroundings of the Practice At my first meeting with Nihaal and Sarasija, I was surrounded by a host of books on a busy, traffic-filled day in Bangalore. Our meeting exposed me to the extensive labour that goes into the publication of a book. Each book’s design identity, layout, paper, fonts, and printing technology had been well thought through. I was gifted several books published by them, including Mochu’s Nervous Fossils – Syndromes of the Synthetic Nether , The 1Shanthiroad Cookbook , edited by Suresh Jayaram, and Sculptor’s Notebook by Pushpamala N. Nihaal; Sarasija said they wanted the books to travel far. Flexing Muscles (2019) by Ravikumar Kashi caught my attention due to the artist’s detailed treatment of flex banners in Bangalore. The book includes an essay in both Kannada and English, accompanied by photographs. Kashi’s in-depth artistic analysis, of a subject that I had encountered yet ignored during my visits to Bangalore, was a unique way to re-experience that city from my desk in Colombo. Mochu’s book was of a completely different tenor yet felt similar—the artist’s rich imaginarium was salient in the big blue typography, almost-dystopian imagery, and the bright yellow cover. Despite a personal aversion to speculative theory and related fiction, I held onto this book as a reminder to myself of what books can do to their readers: intrigue, move, tell stories, and impart new knowledge and perspectives. In December 2023, I, too, took a leap and published a book with three artists. Sarasija spent hours with me, the designer, and one of the artists to ensure consistency in terms of colours, fonts, paper, and printing options in India (the book was to be mainly distributed in Delhi). This level of friendship-building and support is rare, at least in the phase of the career I am in, as a writer trying to be independent. When they recently sent me a copy of the newly minted publication Supporting Role by Jason Hirata from the Wiggle Room series, I realised that for Reliable Copy, friendship is the core. They began the series in 2023 with the publication High Entertainment by David Robbins, an artist they had developed a strong connection with during their At The Kitchen Table exhibition in 2021. Hirata’s Supporting Role has emerged from the same premise, extending a close relationship with another artist who was present in At The Kitchen Table . The Wiggle Room series’ conceptualisation is immersed in the contemporary and the emerging. Each publication interrogates the meaning of “art,” particularly in relation to contemporary technologies, digital platforms, and the artist’s evolving role within broader socio-cultural and economic structures. Art is never for art’s sake. Cover page of Sculptor’s Notebook (1985) by Pushpamala N, published by Reliable Copy in 2022. Image courtesy Reliable Copy. Beyond the Limits of Language Supporting Role’ s editor’s note refers to Marcel Duchamp ’s thinking about aesthetics, language, and fine art: “What [Duchamp] makes abundantly clear is that language serves a purpose, is essential and inevitable, but that it also comes with certain limits. Sometimes as soon as one’s language is carefully delineated, it starts to impose itself, it becomes an obstacle.” Duchamp, as an art historical example, helps contextualise Hirata’s practice as presented in the book. The book is an extension of Duchamp’s idea, which continues to hold true for most linguistic endeavours. While we encounter many labels and descriptors of visual artworks, the publication never presents what might be considered a conventionally ‘visual’ artwork. We do encounter two works by him: A Storied Past (Il sogno di una cosa) (2022) and the series Grave Fatura (2023–24), but they are not conventional paintings, prints, photographs, or sculptures. The book is composed of an edited selection of texts developed by Hirata to accompany his artworks: labels for the wall, invitations to exhibitions, essays, scripts, press releases, checklists, invoices, curricula vitae, and other paraphernalia he has preserved while working in contemporary art production and display in Berlin. These roles—often performed by those around the artist, such as partners, friends, and family—are frequently overlooked. Hirata’s book documents these contributions across his career, mainly through language-based materials. They are primarily text-based artworks with two qualities innate to books—mobility and reproducibility on paper—enabling sustained engagement beyond the confines of a white cube space. While Duchamp’s critique of language remains relevant to Hirata and the visual arts today, Nihaal and Sarasija push language to its limits. Many of us, myself included, forget its role in and around contemporary art. Though we may begin with the intention to explain and contextualise, the specialised vocabulary often alienates unfamiliar audiences. Supporting Role invites us to see language not as a mere support, but as an artwork in itself. Before Wiggle Room , Reliable Copy had already facilitated unexpected transitions through time and space with language and ephemera surrounding artmaking. Their curatorial project at the kitchen table , first exhibited in 2021 at 1Shanthiroad Studio/Gallery in Bangalore, travelled to the Ark Foundation for the Arts in Baroda in 2023–24. The project considers how publishing practices could inform exhibition-making and curatorial processes. “Through this introduction of artworks as records and documents—as secondary material—and together with cookbooks and videos, at the kitchen table spills its premise across the exhibition and its documentation, the library and the gallery, and the event and its eventual publication,” the catalogue states. The display explored food, with particular attention to the channels and platforms through which food travels, inscribed with material, trace, memory, and cultural politics. It included cookbooks, menus, anthologies of recipes from literary fiction, family archives of ‘secret’ recipes, historical records, and visual and textual references to the feasts held for occasions such as birthdays, funerals, or festivals. The moving image works were particularly compelling, with some questioning, mimicking, or parodying the performative format of instructional cooking shows. Carolyn Lazard’s A Recipe for Disaster (2018) incorporates footage from Julia Child’s The French Chef (1972), which used open captions and images for the deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences. Reflecting on this in the twenty-first century, Lazard foregrounds accessibility as a necessary aspect of social infrastructure, especially in mainstream media. The Community of the Practice During my visit to Bangalore in July 2024, Reliable Copy had just moved into a new studio. We were in the midst of a long-planned book exchange between Reliable Copy, Raking Leaves, Mumbai-based Editions JoJo, and myself. Nihaal, Sarasija, and I spoke at length about how independent publishing had evolved for Reliable Copy after their residency at Amant Art and their debut at Printed Matter’s Art Book Fair in New York earlier that year. This is when I began to consider Reliable Copy as a curatorial practice that exceeded the scope of independent publishing. By their fourteenth publication in late 2024, their carefully chosen collaborations had culminated in a new focus: actively strategising how to disseminate their books or how, as artists might say, to put the work “out there.” Nihaal spoke animatedly about a new project they had initiated: Total Runtime , a curated moving image programme that activates Reliable Copy’s publications. Featuring moving image works by artists previously published by the press, Total Runtime is mobile, flexible, and an answer to the ‘lull’. Its first iteration in New York brought together nine films, two book trailers, seven artists, and one publishing house. The participating artists included BV Suresh, David Robbins, Kiran Subbaiah , Mariam Suhail, Mario Santanilla , Mochu, and Pushpamala N. The next iteration, at Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Fair, showcased films by David Robbins and Jason Hirata, celebrating the latter’s new publication Supporting Role with Reliable Copy. In late 2023, they also launched Press Works, their own distribution platform, making publications by renowned international independent art book publishers accessible to local audiences. These included Primary Information and New Documents (United States), Kayfa-ta (Gulf), kyklàda.press (Aegean archipelago), Editions JoJo (India), and numerous self-published titles. The curation of this platform is deliberate and thoughtful, drawing on a network of publishers they regard as models of interest. Participation in international art book fairs continues to expand their network and deepen engagement with the global independent publishing community. Each trip to a fair introduces Reliable Copy to new publishers and, in turn, allows them to introduce readers like myself to these practices. Guided by their own interests as readers, Nihaal and Sarasija explore the wider practices behind the books and aim to offer Indian audiences not just individual titles but an understanding of broader publishing patterns. A notable example of this curatorial pattern is the Los Angeles-based New Documents , recommended to me by Sarasija. The Halifax Conference (2019) presents a transcript of a 1970 conference held at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, capturing a cacophony of voices and opinions typical of such events. Intrigued by this, I was particularly drawn to New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness (2023), a collection of transcripts and pamphlets by medical scientist Carl Julius Salomonsen , who argued in 1919–20 that Modernist art constituted a kind of “contagious mental illness.” The book offers a fascinating view of Modernism as something misunderstood, even pathological, in its own time. Its format, resembling a legal document, evoked, for me, a history of ownership and transmission. Until then, my knowledge of modernism had been shaped largely by the Sri Lankan context, due to my museum work on Sri Lankan modern and contemporary art. This book allowed me to see how Europe perceived the movement as it unfolded: not from a scholarly perspective, but through the lens of a medical professional. It felt as though Nihaal and Sarasija had noted my interest in modernist art and fed it back to me through their recommendations, often sent via WhatsApp or email, regardless of distance. These messages and emails lead me to one of the most enduring aspects of Reliable Copy: its ethic of community and friendship. Jason Hirata and Sarasija Subramanian with Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. Photograph by Nihaal Faizal. Image courtesy Reliable Copy. Friendship and Publishing I first met Nihaal and Sarasija in Bangalore, during a conference organised almost serendipitously by a mutual friend. Although we have never shared a formal panel as colleagues, I have attended nearly every talk the duo has given, not out of professional obligation, but out of friendship. I have always approached their practice not as a peer, but as a friend and fellow dreamer. At a particularly difficult moment, I wrote them a long, disillusioned email, venting about the challenges of starting my own publishing practice. I spoke of the scarcity of funding and the exhaustion that comes with trying to be creative in an industry already strained by lack, especially in South Asia. Their response was generous and clear-eyed. We discussed pragmatic paths forward, and their questions led me to reconsider what sustainability might truly mean—for work, and for myself. What they offered was not false assurance, but something more lasting: the reminder that while financial stability may always remain elusive, what must persist is commitment—uncompromising, careful, and rooted in a sense of purpose. At the time, I was still grappling with what exactly my priorities were as an independent writer and curator (I still am). They reminded me that patience was not a waiting room, but a form of practice. “Once the light comes on,” they said, “you will not be able to turn it off.” Community is the spine of independent art book publishing, as Nihaal and Sarasija have told me, and as I have come to understand it myself. This community is made up of artists willing to experiment with form and failure, designers who treat legibility and beauty as twin priorities, distributors who care as much about access as they do about profit margins, and a readership that reads not out of habit but out of care. Sustainability, then, cannot be reduced to financial viability alone. It rests on the presence of a community that cares enough to read, respond, and stay. Sarasija and Nihaal have observed a growing interest in the Indian market among international publishers, mainly because there are no dedicated art bookshops or art book fairs in South Asia, and no traditional infrastructure for these books to circulate. My siblings and friends who attend such fairs in the global North have noticed this firsthand. My sister’s visit to Forma’s Art Book Fair in London resulted in a video call from the fair and a parcel of discounted books mailed to me in Sri Lanka. Similarly, for Nihaal and Sarasija, there is a community of publishers that reduces their prices for the Indian market, allowing their books to circulate more widely. There is, for Reliable Copy, a network of publishers who lower their prices for Indian readers; not as charity, but as a gesture of circulation. This atmosphere, shaped by generosity rather than competition, stands in stark contrast to the saturated and often exclusionary contemporary art market. Independent publishing here is marked by specificity and thematic intention. People are not just selling books, but also exchanging ideas, paying attention, and bringing each other’s work home. For Nihaal and Sarasija, the warmth of printed matter is not abstract. It is embedded in the everyday ethic of this community. I remain hopeful about art book publishing, not only as an industry but as a practice shaped by care. My engagement with Reliable Copy has deepened my conviction. The so-called lull of independent publishing is passing. A new generation is ready to learn from it, and to begin again, as every serious artistic movement once did.∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Mukhtar Kazi, Untitled (2025). Part of The Sea and the Sahel series. Acrylic on raw linen. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Essay Bangalore Reliable Copy Art History Art Institutions Contemporary Art Publishing Design Visual Art Installation Book Publishing Curiosity Language Community Nilima Sheikh Fine Arts Modernist Painting India Mughal British South Asia Nihaal Faizal Sarasija Subramanian Lull Sri Lanka Colombo Curation Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sharmini Pereira Publishing House Raking Leaves Independent Publishing Zines DIY Dissertation Education Knowledge Pedagogy Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda Art practice Suresh Jayaram Pushpamala N. Nihaal Ravikumar Kashi Kannada Mochu Color Theory Jason Hirata David Robbins Marcel Duchamp Aesthetics Production Friendship PRAMODHA WEERASEKERA is an art writer and curator based in Sri Lanka. She writes regularly about feminist artistic practices and occasionally about art books from South Asia. Her writing has appeared in e-flux , Art Review, Hyperallergic , BOMB , and several exhibition publications. Her curatorial projects have been presented at the Khoj International Artists Association in New Delhi, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sri Lanka, and the Ceylon Literary and Arts Festival in Colombo. She is the Assistant Curator of Edition 9 of Colomboscope. 2 May 2025 Essay Bangalore 2nd May 2025 MUKHTAR KAZI is a self-taught artist based in Thane, Maharashtra. His work engages light through abstract forms. His work The Sea and the Sahel was exhibited with Stranger’s House Gallery at the 15th edition of the Dakar Biennale, or Dak’Art - Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain, in Senegal. 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:

· BOOKS & ARTS REPORTAGE · LOCATION Provocations on Empathy Aruna D’Souza’s latest book, Imperfect Solidarities, asserts that despite alliances, relations, or understanding, solidarity can remain imperfect and imbalanced; however, if pursued collectively, it’s worth fighting for. "Rug" (2018), Silkscreen printing and unraveling on silk, courtesy of Areen. Near the end of Imperfect Solidarities (Floating Opera Press, 2024), Aruna D’Souza quotes her child’s frank question: “How can you not end up loving something that you have to take care of?” In D’Souza’s latest book, presented as a collection of essays on art and literature, the writer and art historian contemplates these prescient and recurring questions through formal and contextual analysis. Reflecting on the now and fairly recent past, she navigates the reader through buzzwords and emotional sinkholes while offering reflections “developed from looking.” Almost journal-like, this collection halts, pokes, and condemns as much as it seeks, weeps, and oscillates. D’Souza calls forth iterations of solidarity found in the work of artists including Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Stephanie Syjuco, as well as writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Dylan Robinson, and Édouard Glissant. She further positions contemporary instances of conflict, specifically her remote witnessing of the genocide in Gaza, as impetus for critical engagement, grounding it in her practice of art critique. Is it possible, today, to not consume and be consumed by the fraught tensions playing out on almost every continent? Beneath a fingertip lies a deluge of information, horror, so-called “debate”, and virtue signalling. While Palestine's ongoing oppression has long been and continues to be discussed, the events since 7 October 2023 rightly encourage renewed thinking. When newsfeeds are ceaselessly refreshing and every new story hangs like a heavy shadow, D’Souza articulates the stuffy stagnation of being on this side of witnessing. Yet, with her text, she encourages recognition and reckoning. In the face of overwhelm, she motivates critique as a strategy of response: “My horror gives way to analysis, not only of the geopolitical situation itself, but of the way ordinary people are responding to what is unfolding.” Imperfect Solidarities is, as she offers, “a tentative gesture” towards how global solidarities can be invoked to compel care and action, however imperfectly. But how could anyone write, now ? What more can be said? Why isn’t what has been said enough? In the collection’s first essay, “Grief, Fear, and Palestine, or Why Now?”, D'Souza condemns complacency as a byproduct of familiarity. Outlining the co-dependence of the US and Israel, she acknowledges, “as a US taxpayer, I am funding the atrocities happening in Gaza every day.” By this admission, to invoke solidarity must, therefore, definitively be enacted despite and because of this entanglement. If silence is taken as implicit acceptance, then surely it is to actively encourage, too. To take time, to write, and to analyze, becomes D’Souza’s method of engagement. Sitting with her pages, the familiar formula of visual analysis and exhibition reviewing is strangely comforting. Using examples in art and literature, she outlines strategies for refusal found in creative output, exploring how others have contemplated empathy through conflict. Through this structure, she is able to draw out parallels that highlight how art(work) can model different strategies of solidarity. This focus is significant to Gaza, because, as historian and critic TJ Demos points out, “by targeting the cultural infrastructure of Palestinian identity, this violence [by Israel], which could be termed aestheticide, destroys collective ways of knowing and feeling, breaks connections between generations, history, and nationhood, and thus contributes to Israel’s genocidal project of complete erasure.” Teju Cole, attempting to contend with this loss after his visit to Palestine in 2014, also draws throughlines back to creation: “Photography cannot capture this sorrow, but it can perhaps relay back the facts on the ground. It can make visible graves, olive trees, refuse, roofs, concrete, barricades, and the bodies of people. And what is described by the camera can be an opening to what else this ground has endured, and to what its situation demands.” Although neither Gaza’s artists nor its cultural histories are the core focus of the book, the titular motif of an imperfect solidarity is often returned to with Gaza implied. Thinking in dialogue, D’Souza uses other, perhaps more familiar, examples for readers to find a cultural grounding around her core thesis of solidarity across conflicts. While loss spirals and genocidal powers contort themselves in new ways to evade complicity, she encourages the reader not to turn inwards to the point of inaction, but to continue, perhaps also creatively—despite imperfections or imbalanced alliances. “I dream of a world in which we act not from love,” she declares, “but from something much more difficult: an obligation to care for each other whether or not we empathize with them.” The essay “Mistranslation and Revolution” invites reflection on language as a site of resistance. While D’Souza acknowledges that “sitting with incomprehension is an uncomfortable act”, she offers obfuscation as a methodology for solidarity, levity, and perhaps solace. Incorporating an analysis of Amitav Ghosh’s vast novel Sea of Poppies (2008) — a historical saga on colonial resistance in India—she notes how language is employed in establishing power through (mis)translation and (mis)understanding. This is particularly evident in how character relationships are set out. Language is central to the navigation of relating between characters, so much so that Ghosh describes, through his narrator, how new dialects are evolved through use and how understanding transcends commonality. Showing her reader exactly how Ghosh achieves this, she quotes the book’s narrator, who describes: “a motley tongue, spoken nowhere but on the water, whose words were as varied as the port’s traffic, an anarchic medley of Portuguese calaluzes and Kerala pattimars, Arab booms and Bengal paunch-ways, Malay proas and Tamil catamarans, Hindusthani pulwars and English snows—yet beneath the surface of this farrago of sound, meaning flowed as freely as the currents beneath the crowded press of boats.” In the gaps and improvisations resulting from (mis)communication, Ghosh demonstrates a freedom in the space which finding (un)commonality creates. Thinking through the construction of language through its structures, D’Souza acknowledges its leakiness, and how comprehension and connection often require transcending direct translation. In her analysis of Ghosh’s text, she draws on how language can be an imperfect access point or even a protective barrier across differences. Pushing this point home, she offers: “Communication through the thicket of mistranslation is an act of generosity.” And yet, I pause on certain words D’Souza uses—‘siege’, ‘negligence’, ‘allies’, ‘incomprehension’, ‘unruliness’—and struggle to get beyond how language has still felt so futile as of late. In an article titled “ Acts of Language ”, author Isabella Hammad discusses the weaponizing of words through the increasingly contentious topic of ‘free speech’ in the USA . Warning against essentialism, she reminds us that: “Bombs were not made of language, and they certainly were not metaphors.” Yet, what of language that is weaponized, where certain realities are overruled, classified away, filed, and manoeuvred around within documents, as in the case of the numerous ICJ rulings or green card removals? What of legal terminologies and judicial standards that are warped and bent to persecute a manufactured villain? Focusing on the difficult and thorny work of comprehending the ‘now’, personal interpretation is central to the work of this book. By incorporating Ghosh’s strategies for communication across and in spite of differences, D’Souza reminds the reader of the fallibility of language. Invoking its futility, she encourages that “to be able to act together without full comprehension, is to be able to float on the seas of change.” Similarly instructive is artist and writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s essay “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide”, where he acknowledges the importance of writing as a way to make sense of traumatic events. Despite being in “the long middle of revolution”, writing becomes a tool for action; a way to witness and begin the process of comprehension. Courtesy of the author. Although Imperfect Solidarities offers a broad focus on art too, decidedly few illustrations are presented alongside the text . As a result, D’Souza makes room for thinking about imagery without a continuous re-posting of images. One artwork included is a still from Stephanie Syjuco’s video work, Block Out the Sun (Shield) (2019). The work is captioned as a photographic intervention and included in the essay ‘Connecting through Opacity’, in which D’Souza summons Glissant’s seminal text ‘On Opacity’ from his book Poetics of Relation (1990). In this text, Glissant makes a case for abstraction and the opaque as a mode of engagement. D’Souza applies this concept to artworks where artists refuse to make themselves, or their work, understandable to the hegemonic (white) gaze. D’Souza’s reading of Syjuco’s work emphasizes how disrupting colonial documentation can be an act of care. The work connects Western tropes of looking-as-learning with an expectation of access—like textbook botanical drawings, anatomy models, and the extremes of restitution debates on human remains trapped in European museum vaults. The included still from Syjuco’s five-minute video shows an archival black-and-white group portrait, covered by the artist’s hands. The photograph follows a typical format of colonial documenting: an assembly of people posed stiffly before a foreign gaze. While enough of the figures can be seen, locating the image as ethnographic objectification, Syjuco’s hands perform a critical intervention of care. The artist challenges the use of photography to dehumanise—a technique Teju Cole neatly articulates as ‘weaponized’—through colonial methods of recording, categorizing, and labeling. By discussing this work in relation to opacity, D’Souza links Syjuco’s intervention as creating a reparative barrier. Through contextual analysis, D’Souza further examines how Syjuco affirms opacity through masking, in the present, against archival record. By covering “unwilling subjects’ faces and bodies, [Syjuco is] shielding them from our prying looks.” Bringing the act of repair into the present, D’Souza emphasizes the implication of complicity ( our looking), and the act of interception as shielding or abstraction. She shows how Syjuco’s work is a visual recalibration—where critical analysis can draw out space to think through new solidarities across past and present interactions. D’Souza brings in two more creative works which specifically utilize what she terms ‘ungraspable’—intentionally obscuring direct comprehension using abstraction—to explore opacity as resistance. The first is Felix Gonzales-Torres’ quietly heart-wrenching, replenishable installations from the 1994 exhibition Travelling , created as the artist was nearing the end of his life in his battle with AIDs. Visitors were allowed to both consume and even take the works in this exhibition, activating the cycle of loss and return through objects acting as metaphor. The restraint and simplicity of these pieces encompass the methods of opaque meaning-making Gonzales-Torres is so cherished for. The second work is Dylan Robinson’s text Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies , in which Robinson instructs “the non-Indigenous, settler, ally, or xwelítem readers to stop reading” at precise points, in order to retain Indigenous sovereignty and sanctity of ritual. Noting a number of devices that reinforce opacity in Robinson’s work, D’Souza highlights that even with the text’s title, “Robinson positions settler forms of listening, too, as a kind of voracious demand for transparency”. Both Gonzales-Torres’ and Robinson’s productions of opacity exemplify a mode of refusal—for Gonzales-Torres, using objects as symbolic placeholders, and for Robinson, using instructional writing to challenge entitlement and expectation. D’Souza includes opacity as a proposition for solidarity without the expectation of empathy, wondering “what sort of solidarities and alliances we might form on the basis of such mutual respect, one in which we acknowledge our right not to translate ourselves into terms that another may understand.” Through engaging artworks, she weaves in questions of agency, autonomy, and perspective in self-presentation for a public gaze. Syjuco’s and Robinson’s works invoke opacity through restriction, which D’Souza then uses to discuss who can engage, how engagement is possible, and who works should be for. D’Souza explores a number of other artworks in the book, ranging across themes of revolution, whiteness, connection, and difference. Her discussions centre creativity and its resulting forms—novels, video art, installation, exhibition curation—to explore different manifestations or strategies of empathy and solidarity. In doing so, she invites readers to view the creative act as a method to temper anxieties.. Reading Imperfect Solidarities in dialogue with Tbakhi’s ‘long middle’ situates it within the now. When D’Souza asks, “Are there ways to sit with the unknowability?”, she continually embeds encouragement for collective thought, to work through provocations on knowledge and access. She further highlights the potential for new interpretations of them by re-looking through the lens of seeking solidarity. Especially today, while it may often feel easier to fall into overwhelm, this collection is a reminder of the critical work which exists, and many ongoing, bolstering conversations that can be revisited. By gathering work for analysis in Imperfect Solidarities , the book seeks out strategies for ongoing engagement—from finding playful gaps in language to creating protective opacities. In ‘Coda’, D’Souza returns finally to the question of care. Taking a cue from her child—who learns to ‘care’ through the repeated actions required of looking after their pet (feeding, cleaning, playing)—she asserts that by caring, love can be fostered in time. But, she states: “care must come before love.” Cautioning against idealism, she reminds us that “care is [still] infinitely harder than love, because it often requires us to act in spite of our empathy, rather than because of it”. This is a deliberate and telling final note. Imperfect Solidarities ultimately asserts that despite our alliances, relations or understandings of and with each other, solidarity will always remain somewhat imperfect and imbalanced. But, if it is continued to be sought collectively, it’s worth fighting for.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags 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. 23rd Oct 2010 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

What is the utility of global history? In recent years, new approaches of global history have emerged. Whether as a challenge or companion to area studies, and specific and local histories within academia, global history has often aimed to become more inclusive of histories of migration, diasporas, labor, legal regimes within colonial and postcolonial chronologies from Guyana to China to South Africa. INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 8 · On Migrations in Global History AUTHOR What is the utility of global history? In recent years, new approaches of global history have emerged. Whether as a challenge or companion to area studies, and specific and local histories within academia, global history has often aimed to become more inclusive of histories of migration, diasporas, labor, legal regimes within colonial and postcolonial chronologies from Guyana to China to South Africa. Drama Editor Neilesh Bose, also the editor of the recent volume South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labour, Law, and Wayward Lives (Bloomsbury, 2020) discussed the genesis of the project & new ways of telling history with Kamil Ahsan on Instagram Live in May 2021. The edited volume began at a workshop at the University of Victoria. It explores how South Asian migrations in modern history have shaped key aspects of globalization since the 1830s, using global history to cast many contemporary dynamics and geographies into sharper relief. Including original research from colonial India, Fiji, Mexico, South Africa, North America and the Middle East, the essays explore indentured labour and its legacies, law as a site of regulation and historical biography. It includes recent scholarship on the legacy of issues such as consent, sovereignty and skilled/unskilled labour distinctions from the history of indentured labour migrations, and brings together a range of historical changes that can only be understood by studying South Asian migrants within a globalized world system. Here, Bose discussed the nature of global history, the approach taken at the workshop and beyond, and the many scholarly contributions to the volume. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 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. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

“Those first days in April was when I think I started to grasp the enormity of the crisis. People were live-tweeting themselves in death. I just stopped working. I was doing medical resources at the time, which meant I was calling to make sure if oxygen tanks and hospital beds were available.” INTERACTIVE The Assessment of Veracity: COVID-19 Mutual Aid Organizing AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “Those first days in April was when I think I started to grasp the enormity of the crisis. People were live-tweeting themselves in death. I just stopped working. I was doing medical resources at the time, which meant I was calling to make sure if oxygen tanks and hospital beds were available.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Tags Tags 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 Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Journalist and organizer Riddhi Dastidar worked tirelessly throughout 2020 and 2021 for pandemic relief in Delhi. In our event In Grief, In Solidarity , Dastidar recounts their experience of being in Delhi as a reporter in April 2020, when the enormity of the situation truly hit home. Amidst the many dead, dying, and a severe shortage of hospital beds, Dastidar was making urgent calls for oxygen tanks and hospital beds. Here, with Art Director Priyanka Kumar, Dastidar explained how the grief and devastation motivated Mutual Aid India —an act of confusion and desperation as much as urgency. "If I compile a list of campaigns that are working on grassroots relief, would you be willing to volunteer?" they remember asking, imagining it would be a relatively small thing to begin. The pandemic, of course, exacerbated the divisions and marginalization within Indian society. As Dastidar explains, how grassroots organizations seemed to assess the "veracity" of need seemed ignorant of what lived reality was like. Dastidar later discusses, citing Kaveh Akbar, that this was the sort of time when art and poetry were simply not activism. Only organizing was. Their refusal of a conflation is, in itself, an act of demonstrating veracity. Kumar, in turn, asked: How does somebody involved in both investigative journalism and mutual aid organizing also make sure to attend to one's own grief? 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: