· INTERACTIVE Live · Brooklyn Between Notes: An Improvisational Set 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. Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. 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 . SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Live Brooklyn Raga Jazz Piano Music Performance Live Performance Improvisation Rajna Swaminathan Ganavya Carnegie Hall Fluid Piano Vagabonds Trio Raga Bhimpalasi Classical Music Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 5th Jun 2021 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:

A live performance for the launch of SAAG's Volume 2, also celebrating the release of Rajna Swaminathan's new record “Apertures” at the Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn. Swaminathan (mrudangam/vocals) performed as part of the Vagabonds trio with Ganavya (vocals) and Utsav Lal (piano). COMMUNITY “Apertures” with the Vagabonds Trio A live performance for the launch of SAAG's Volume 2, also celebrating the release of Rajna Swaminathan's new record “Apertures” at the Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn. Swaminathan (mrudangam/vocals) performed as part of the Vagabonds trio with Ganavya (vocals) and Utsav Lal (piano). Rajna Swaminathan · Utsav Lal · Ganavya On May 12th, 2023, SAAG hosted a launch event for Vol. 2 at the Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn, for which we were delighted to present the experimental and deeply moving musical compositions of the Vagabonds Trio: Rajna Swaminathan (mrudangam/voice), Ganavya (voice), and Utsav Lal (piano) who we had the pleasure of collaborating with a second time after his opening performance for In Grief, In Solidarity . They were joined partway by Miles Okazaki (guitar). To showcase musicians with such incredible musical range, a commitment to radicalism and social justice as expressed in the lyricism and melodies, and a deep rigor and discipline with their craft, was a true honor. We hope you enjoy the recording of the live event and the improvisational way it shifted from the respective discographies of each member of the trio, shifting seamlessly from several languages, including Tamil, English, Urdu, and more. Most of all, the performance celebrates the release of Rajna Swaminathan's new album Apertures (Ropeadope, Apr 28th), available to buy or stream now . On May 12th, 2023, SAAG hosted a launch event for Vol. 2 at the Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn, for which we were delighted to present the experimental and deeply moving musical compositions of the Vagabonds Trio: Rajna Swaminathan (mrudangam/voice), Ganavya (voice), and Utsav Lal (piano) who we had the pleasure of collaborating with a second time after his opening performance for In Grief, In Solidarity . They were joined partway by Miles Okazaki (guitar). To showcase musicians with such incredible musical range, a commitment to radicalism and social justice as expressed in the lyricism and melodies, and a deep rigor and discipline with their craft, was a true honor. We hope you enjoy the recording of the live event and the improvisational way it shifted from the respective discographies of each member of the trio, shifting seamlessly from several languages, including Tamil, English, Urdu, and more. Most of all, the performance celebrates the release of Rajna Swaminathan's new album Apertures (Ropeadope, Apr 28th), available to buy or stream now . SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making A live performance by experimental Rajna Swaminathan, Ganavya & Utsav Lal. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Live Brooklyn Experimental Music Jazz mrudangam Rajna Swaminathan Apertures Ganavya Utsav Lal Launch Event Contemporary Music Ropeadope Miles Okazaki Event RAJNA SWAMINATHAN is an acclaimed mrudangam artist, composer, and scholar. One of only a few women who play the mrudangam professionally, Rajna has extensive experience performing in the Karnatik music, bharatanatyam, and New York's jazz music scenes, developing experimental approaches to improvising on the mrudangam, piano, and voice. Her ensemble RAJAS has been received with much critical acclaim on both Of Agency and Abstraction (Biophilia Records, 2019) and Apertures (Ropeadope, 2023). Rajna has composed for the JACK Quartet, Del Sol Quartet, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and played with Amir ElSaffar, Vijay Iyer, among many others. Rajna is an Assistant Professor of Music at UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts. She holds a PhD in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry from the Department of Music at Harvard. UTSAV LAL is an Indian-American pianist-composer often known as the "Raga Pianist". Hailed by numerous media outlets as a ground-breaking performer, Lal has performed solo at the Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre, Kennedy Center, Steinway Hall, among others, and honored as a Young Steinway Artist, amongst others. He has collaborated with Martin Hayes, Dennis Cahill, Winifred Horan, Australian Contemporary Circus Theatre CIRCA, Talvin Singh, George Brooks, Rajna Swaminathan, and has 7 solo records, including a historic world’s first album on the microtonal Fluid Piano (2016). Lal holds degrees in Contemporary Improvisation from the New England Conservatory of Music, and Jazz from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. GANAVYA DORAISWAMY is a critically-acclaimed vocalist, composer, and multidisciplinary scholar at the nexus of South Indian vocal styles & jazz/contemporary music. She is a co-founder of the We Have Voice Collective . Her recent works include composition and vocals for the film this body is so impermanent... (2021, dir. Peter Sellars); a 64-hour piece titled Atlas Unlimited: Acts VII - X (2019) continuously generated from the narrative of Zakaria Almoutlak, a Syrian with refugee status; Daughter of a Temple (2019), a 56’51” composed piece that drew from Alice Coltrane-Turiyasangitananda’s Monument Eternal ; composition and vocals for Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra Chapter 7: The Goddess (2019, dir. Peter Sellars); collaborations with Wayne Shorter & Esperanza Spalding for the opera Iphigenia ; and How To Cure A Ghost: The Album , songs made from Fariha Roisin’s poetry. She holds graduate degrees in ethnomusicology from UCLA, and Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry from Harvard. Her most recent album is Sister Idea (Ropeadope, 2023) with bassist and composer Munir Hossn. 19 May 2023 Live Brooklyn 19th May 2023 Quintet Priya Darshini · Max ZT · Shahzad Ismaily · Moto Fukushima · Chris Sholar 25th Apr Between Notes: An Improvisational Set Utsav Lal 5th Jun FLUX · Natasha Noorani Unplugged: "Choro" Natasha Noorani 5th Dec FLUX · A Celebratory Set by DJ Kiran Darakshan Raja 5th Dec FLUX · Jaishri Abichandani's Guided Studio Tour Jaishri Abichandani 5th Dec On That Note:

· BOOKS & ARTS Review · Jaipur Spiritually Chic Over nearly two decades, the opulence of the Jaipur Literature Festival has only grown and the prestige of attendance has attained unparalleled heights. Yet Torsa Ghosal, of Kaya Press’s imprint Kulhar Books, returned in 2025 with critical realizations about JLF’s core agenda. Reflecting not only on the nationalistic undertones celebrated but also on what was conspicuously absent, Ghosal points to the festival’s failure to meaningfully represent Muslim and Arab voices, and to a troubling insincerity in engaging with the moral crises of our time. "Year of the Snake" (2020), digital drawing by Chaaya Prabhat. Since launching in 2006, Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) has been repeatedly called the “Kumbh Mela” of literature festivals. Kumbh Mela is a Hindu religious event held every six to twelve years at the confluence of the three rivers: Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati, where devotees convene in numbers unmatched by any other religious gathering in the world. The Kumbh analogy signals JLF’s massive scale and popularity. Indeed, the book festival is a mela, a social spectacle, that brings anywhere between three to five hundred speakers to Jaipur, shuttles them between the venue and the various four- and five-star hotels lodging them, and swishes them off to party in the city’s gorgeous palaces and forts. 400,000 visitors and around 4000 vendors thronged the festival grounds in 2024 according to estimates. Until recently, the staunch religious underpinnings of Kumbh had no direct equivalent in a festival that branded itself as an international “literary show,” and that has hosted a diverse assortment of luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, Orhan Pamuk, Kamila Shamsie, Oprah Winfrey, and the Dalai Lama. But over the last few decades, Hindu religious identity has increasingly defined national belonging and nationalist policies in India. This year’s Maha Kumbh Mela was attended by 4 times as many people as the previous iteration of the event, blazing proof of the upthrust in religious fervour among Indians and diasporic Hindus. JLF’s programming was not immune to the pulls of religious nationalism. The festival kept the crowds sated on pageantry and celebrations which often obscured the ways in which panels and talks questioned the nationalist agenda. Supported by a SALT travel grant , I was at JLF to scout authors in my role as an acquiring editor for Kaya Press’s brand new South Asian imprint, Kulhar Books . Working with Kaya’s managing editor Neelanjana Banerjee and the rest of the Kaya team, Kulhar editors—Rajiv Mohabir, Jhani Randhawa, and I—aspire to publish stylistically and politically imaginative literature; works that unsettle formulaic expectations caging and sanitizing South Asian literary expressions in America. Courtesy of the author. My first afternoon at JLF I heard the British author Sheena Patel speak about her desire for “the now to be captured” in her writing rather than telling a “timeless story,” and in a similar vein, my intention was to get a sense of “the now” of the literary-cultural scene in South Asia, intuiting that the festival would offer some—even if narrow—opening into the ideas and themes dominating the space. Flipping through the festival program, I tried to locate sessions on literary writings from and about South Asia with a focus on contemporary translated literature and newer voices, a task that proved to be somewhat at odds with JLF’s broad-ranging, political establishment- and celebrity-friendly slate of events, a host of which staged flaccid conversations on Hindu mythology, Hindu national and political identities, excitement about the potentials of AI and digital technology, corporate and startup success, even wellness practices. The festival has a “flashy, dazzling quality,” notes Mrinalina Chakravarty in her 2014 book, In Stereotype , which examines the hackneyed tropes found in literary representations of South Asia. At this year’s edition, social media influencers, Bollywood celebrities, and politicians predictably clinched the largest platform—the front lawn. Educator-philanthropist-billionaire Sudha Murthy’s talk in the lawn was attended by her son-in-law, U.K.’s former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Sunak went viral for greeting the lawn’s audience with folded hands in a “namaste,” obeying the nudges of an elderly woman whom Indian media variously identified as his mother and aunt-in-law. A forty-five-minute session on the same stage was allocated to politician and author Shashi Tharoor unpacking the experience of living as Shashi Tharoor. Influencer Prajakta Koli blurted unprompted that her rom com novel contains “discrepancies” that she hoped readers would not pick up. JLF is often “a theatre of the absurd,” as Chakravarty observes, and the “incongruous juxtapositions of the bizarre and serious” raise questions about whether the festival coheres. JLF does not cohere— purposefully so. Vendors selling gorgeous brass jhumkas, wooden handicrafts, linen quilts and clothes form the backdrop of high-spirited debates and book launches. It is a carnival, almost in the Bakhtinian sense, a heteroglossia boasting of eclectic interests and priorities, but without the revolutionary zing Bakhtin associates with carnivalesque entertainment. JLF makes no pretence of renouncing hierarchies among speakers, vendors, volunteers, media persons, and spectators. There is a distinctly feudal quality to the “royal” warmth the green vest-wearing volunteers and interns shower on the invitees, riffing on the grand, luxurious image of Rajasthan in both the global and desi imagination. Rajasthan is after all the province where celebrities like Liz Hurley and Priyanka Chopra have hosted their weddings. Like crazy rich desi weddings, the happy hodge podge at JLF trades in stereotypes about South Asia’s mystique and splendour. JLF has a controversial history with respect to free speech, which Amitav Ghosh points out , shows how literature has become “embedded within a wider culture of public spectacles and performances…overtaking, and indeed overwhelming writing itself as the primary end of a life in letters.” As far as frenzied public spectacles in India go, none in recent times can compete with the individual and collective performances of the Hindu religious identity at the Mahakumbh, and the book festival arena is a porous zone. The five-day programming at JLF, what speakers thought permissible to say or not say, the audience questions, the popularity of sessions were all rooted within a broader cultural sphere that in 2025 was flooded with giant billboards starring the tight-lipped smiles of India’s Prime Minister alongside his brother in arms, the ascetic-politician Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Both their portraits were pasted onto scenes showing millions on the banks of a river, coloured a shade of blue so rich that I could tell it could only have been achieved after going through layers of digital filters, if the raw photograph was ever of the muddied brown Ganges I have known and swum in. The hoardings carried taglines like “Message from Kumbh, The Nation Must Unify” and “Sanatan Pride, Maha Kumbh Edition.” Courtesy of the author. Desi internet was trending Kumbh news and memes, minting new viral heartthrobs—hot Sadhus and Sadhvis—through WhatsApp forwards and Instagram reels, plus supplying shock and cringe content, that I and surely other festival attendees dutifully consumed. Young people are showing interest in scriptures, Malashri Lal remarked at a session launching mythologist Sunita Pant Bansal’s A Comprehensive Guide to Indian Scriptures . The slim book introduces Hindu sacred texts like the Puranas, Vedas, and the epics “as it is,” the author insisted, “without my opinion.” The aim is to demystify and correct beliefs about Hindu religious texts. Why, then, does the jacket say “Indian scriptures” rather than Hindu scriptures? A young audience member asked after admitting he was “nervous and worried” to raise the question. And if the book is on Hinduism, have texts from Nepal been included? The publisher Dipankar Mukherjee, who was also on stage, chivalrously swooped in to field the question, rationalizing that they were “trying to be somewhat politically correct to ensure the book reaches the right audience…Where they [the scriptures] started to become codified, recorded that’s part of current India.” He subsequently plugged the festival co-director William Dalrymple’s latest book, crediting Dalrymple for completing “half our work” tracing the influence of Indian traditions and philosophy on other cultures. Mukherjee’s blithe verbal acrobatics for swapping Hindu with India not only aligns with the religion-nation nexus the country’s government has openly adopted in the last decade but also follows the money as it were. Writing for New York Times, Anupreeta Das claims that book festivals are all the rage among India’s youth. On the surface, the hipness of literary festivals bodes well. Das notes young people “are increasingly reading literature in their native tongues alongside books written in English. For these readers, books open worlds that India’s higher education system, with its focus on time-consuming preparation for make-or-break examinations, often does not.” But what are the young people reading in these various languages? What kinds of worlds are books unlocking? The answers are not straightforward. Trapped in a long, slow-moving queue formed in front of a toilet in Amer Clarks, women were commiserating about the shortage of bathrooms at the venue. Interrupting this communal bonding, a woman in her early twenties started to hype up her novel that retells the Hindu epic Ramayana. Ramayana has become something of a foundational text in the Hindu nationalist imagination. The woman pitching her retelling to a captive, pee-holding audience explained that her book followed the love story of the Hindu demigod Lakhsman whom “feminism” has unfairly sidelined. Her pithy spiel echoed a pervasive cultural sentiment wherein Hindu culture and Hindu Gods need constant protection from the evil eyes of liberals and heretics. Another young woman asked for the book’s title to order on Amazon. Some days later, while looking up the book, I stumbled upon the author’s public Instagram grid that featured side-by-side photos of her in JLF and at Mahakumbh. Completing the spiritual chic circuit of JLF-Mahakumbh, she follows in the illustrious footsteps of others like Sudha Murty who took a holy dip at Kumbh days ahead of her JLF session. Browsing the aisles of bookstores and catalogues of Indian publishers gives an impression that pop spirituality is booming in India. OMTV, an “Indic storytelling” app, surveyed its users and found that around 80% of those consuming spiritual content are aged between 18 and 30. At the same time, The Crossword Bookstore on JLF festival grounds had eager customers crowding pretty much every corner, picking up new and old titles, not just the spirituality laced ones. And in an offline and online public sphere dominated by Maha Kumbh , JLF still managed to hold some conversations offering critical and nuanced perspectives on political Hinduism. Courtesy of the author. But among the nearly three-hundred delegates, the festival included just a handful of Indian Muslim speakers. Bollywood celebrities like the director Imtiaz Ali, Huma Qureshi, and Javed Akhtar were part of this roster. Mujibur Rehman, who used a comparative framework drawn from histories of Black resistance to talk about the political marginalization and de-Islamization of Indian Muslims in Shikwa-e-Hind (2024), was challenged by a middle-aged, ostensibly Hindu, ponytailed thought leader among the audience. “I have lots of confusion about the premise of your book…Should we continue to call Muslims minorities with twenty percent population?” the man asked. Rehman told the man his book answers the question and supplemented his response with analogies underscoring how minority identity and minority rights are not simply pegged on numbers or even the success and visibility of a select few. India’s constitution despite its secular promises is inherently majoritarian, he argued, which informs the cultural landscape where Indians clapping at America’s flag do not invite suspicion, but an Indian Muslim boy clapping at Pakistan’s flag is interpreted as sedition. Kashmiri Muslim, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi literary authors were largely absent from this edition. Some absences can be blamed on logistics—Pakistan passport holders have immense difficulty procuring Indian visas at present, unless of course they are Maha Kumbh enthusiast Hindus. Then they are handed Indian visas swiftly . State rules force compliance but even state policies cannot explain all erasures. Theatre actor and director MK Raina who comes from a Kashmiri Pandit family, spoke about owing his career to the state of Kashmir’s policy of allowing free education right from the 1940s, commented on inequities in contemporary India, and criticized the unrealistic portrayals of Kashmir in Bollywood. He left the stage when his co-panelist, the Rajasthani singer and thespian Ila Arun, started enacting a lengthy sequence from an Ibsen play she adapted and partly set in Kashmir, where a character “hurts the mother” and “hurts the motherland.” Raina’s abrupt departure was first extrapolated as resulting from his frustration about the supposed misrepresentation of Kashmir and later as following from his irritation with Ila Arun for hogging stage time. Multiple sessions addressed Israel’s war on Gaza, but the sessions recycled a small group of speakers that included the Indian American author Pankaj Mishra, Palestinian author Selma Dabbagh, Pulitzer-winning American journalist Nathan Thrall, and Israeli British historian Avi Shlaim. The number of Arab authors featured was in the low single digits. A JLF official reportedly interrupted an interview between the Press Trust of India and the Palestinian envoy to India Abed Elrazeg Abu Jazer on the grounds that the festival’s PR team hadn’t sanctioned it. JLF’s speaker lineup suffers from issues common in invite-only prestige events. The curators turn to the same authors and cultural delegates year after year, and even each year, the same names reappear across sessions. The festival seems to be battling two opposing drives: an impulse to represent a diversity of relevant ideas and a desire to wring the most out of a trusted clique of speakers, resulting in conversations that sometimes feel repetitive, sometimes tokenistic. Although the festival is held in the state of Rajasthan and makes decorative use of Rajasthan’s crafts and colours to create Instagrammable corners, Rajasthani authors and Rajasthani literature are not at the forefront. The festival is a shimmery tamasha that, like high-budget high-gloss Bollywood films, is fun to dip in, so long as one is willing to forgo critical questions. The scale of the festival remains something to marvel at. But other literature festivals that have cropped up in India after Jaipur, such as the Kerala Literature Festival and Mizoram Literature Festival , have made more emphatic attempts at grounding their events in their local cultures. JLF, on the other hand, is happy to remain the Chicken Tikka Masala of festivals, palatable to a wide-ranging, somewhat international audience, seemingly representative of South Asia, with a desi man and a Scottish one claiming credits for its origins. Courtesy of the author. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Review Jaipur Jaipur Literature Festival JLF Kumbh Mela Hindu Nationalism religious nationalism Religion Contemporary Literature Literature & Liberation Pop Spirituality Elitist elitism tokenism Representational Space representation suppression Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 1st Aug 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

On 20th July Shahidul Alam wrote another dispatch from Dhaka, detailing the list of student demands posed at the Bangladeshi government, whose signatories and organizers have since gone missing. The scale of the massacre is presently unknown but seemingly far larger than media outlets report. THE VERTICAL Update from Dhaka II On 20th July Shahidul Alam wrote another dispatch from Dhaka, detailing the list of student demands posed at the Bangladeshi government, whose signatories and organizers have since gone missing. The scale of the massacre is presently unknown but seemingly far larger than media outlets report. Shahidul Alam EDITOR'S NOTE: On 21st July, SAAG received another dispatch from Shahidul Alam, following th e one published o n 20th July. Publication was postponed due to security concerns for those involved. We chose to publish this piece without thorough fact-checking due to the urgency of the situation, the internet blackout, and news reports that do not correspond with eyewitness accounts. —Iman Iftikhar The government has paraded several student leaders on TV, and multiple versions of the demands made by student coordinators of this leaderless movement, are in circulation. The original list of demands was circulated in an underground press release yesterday. The signatory, Abdul Kader, has since been picked up. Another coordinator, Nahid Islam, was disappeared by over 50 plainclothes people claiming to belong to the Detective Branch. A third coordinator, Asif Mahmud, is reportedly missing. The Prime Minister must accept responsibility for the mass killings of students and publicly apologise. The Home Minister and the Road Transport and Bridges Minister [the latter is also the secretary general of the Awami League] must resign from their [cabinet] positions and the party. Police officers present at the sites where students were killed must be sacked. Vice Chancellors of Dhaka, Jahangirnagar, and Rajshahi Universities must resign. The police and goons who attacked the students and those who instigated the attacks must be arrested. Families of the killed and injured must be compensated. Bangladesh Chhatra League [BCL, the pro-government student wing, effectively, the government’s vigilante force] must be banned from student politics and a students’ union established. All educational institutions and halls of residences must be reopened. Guarantees must be provided that no academic or administrative harassment of protesters will take place. That the Prime Minister publicly apologises for her disparaging comments about the protesters may seem a minor issue, but it will surely be the sticking point. This PM is not the apologising kind, regardless of how it might seem. Regardless of the three elections she has rigged. Regardless of the fact that corruption has been at an all-time high during her tenure. Regardless of the fact that hundreds of students and other protesters have been murdered by her goons and the security forces. Regardless of the fact that she has deemed all those who oppose her views to be “Razaakars” (collaborators of the Pakistani occupation army in 1971). Regardless of all that, there simply isn’t anyone in the negotiating camp who would have the temerity to even suggest such a course for the prime minister. There is a Bangla saying, “You only have one head on your neck.” The ministers do the heavy lifting. They control the muscle in the streets and manage things when resistance brews. The previous police chief and the head of the National Board of Revenue did the dirty work earlier. They were easily discarded. But the ministers are seniors of the party, and apart from finding suitable replacements, discarding them would send out the wrong message within the party. Making vice-chancellors and proctors resign is also easy. These are discardable minions. The perks are attractive, and there are many to fill the ranks. The police being dumped is less easy, but “friendly fire” does take place. Compensation is not an issue. State coffers are there to be pillaged, and public funds being dispensed at party behest is a common enough practice. BCL and associated student organisations in DU, RU, and JU to be banned is a sticking point, as they are the ones who keep the student body in check and are the party cadre called upon when there is any sign of rebellion. A vigilante group that can kill, kidnap, or disappear at party command. For a government that lacks legitimacy, these are the foot soldiers who terrorise and are essential parts of the coercive machinery. Educational institutions being reopened is an issue. Students have traditionally been the initiators of protests. With such simmering discontent, this would be dangerous, particularly if the local muscle power was clipped. The return of independent thinking is something all tyrants fear. The cessation of harassment is easy to implement on paper. It is difficult to prove and can be done at many levels. Removing the official charges will leave all unofficial modes intact. Of all these demands, it is the least innocuous, that of the apology, that is perhaps the most significant. It will dent the aura of invincibility the tyrant exudes. She has never apologised for anything. Not the setting up of the Rakkhi Bahini by her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman , nor the paramilitary force that rained terror on the country and, in all likelihood, contributed to the assassination of seventeen members of the family in 1975. Not Rahman’s setting up of Bakshal, the one-party system where all other parties, as well as all but four approved newspapers, were banned. And certainly not the numerous extra-judicial killings or disappearances and the liturgy of corruption by people in her patronage during her own tenure. An apology to protesting students, while simple, would be a chink in her armour she would be loath to reveal. The body count is impossible to verify. I try to piece things together from as many first-hand reports as I can. Many of the bodies have a single, precisely-targeted bullet hole. Pellets are aimed at the eyes. As of last night, those monitoring feel the number of dead is well over 1,500. International news, out of touch as the Internet has been shut down and mobile connectivity severely throttled, say deaths are in the hundreds. The government reports far fewer. Staff at city hospitals are less tight-lipped and can give reasonably accurate figures, but not all bodies go to hospital morgues. An older hospital in Dhaka did report over 200 bodies being brought in as of last night. The injured who die on the way to the hospital are not generally admitted. Families prefer to take the body home rather than hand them over to the police. Bodies are also being disappeared. Police and post-mortem reports, when available, fail to mention bullet wounds. My former student Priyo’s body was amongst the missing ones, but we were eventually able to locate him. A friend took him back to his home in Rangpur to be buried. Constant monitoring and checking by activists resulted in the bullet wound being mentioned in his case, though a deliberate mistake in his name in the hospital’s release order that was overseen by a police officer attempted to complicate things. Fortunately, it was rectified in the nick of time. Getting the news out has become extremely difficult, and coordinating the resistance is challenging. This piece goes out through a complicated route. I’ve deleted all digital traces to protect the intermediaries. The entire Internet network being down because of a single location low-level attack, as claimed by the technology minister, appears strange for a police state that boasts of being tech savvy, but there are other strange things happening. Helicopters flying low, beaming searchlights downwards, and shooting at people in narrow alleyways—this is spy film stuff. But it is not stunt men down below. Even teargas and stun grenade shells become lethal when dropped from a height. The bullets raining down have a more direct purpose. A student talks of the body lying on the empty flyover being dragged off by the police. A friend talks of an unmarked car spraying bullets at the crowd as it speeds past. She was lucky. The shooter was firing from a window on the other side. A mother grieves over her three-year-old senselessly killed. Gory reports of human brain congealed on tarmac is a first for me. The curfew has resulted in rubbish being piled up on the streets. The brain will be there for people to see, perhaps deliberately. The raid at 2:20 am earlier this morning in the flat across the street was also in commando fashion. The video footage is blurry, but one can only see segments of the huge contingent of Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), heavily armed police, and others in plainclothes. They eventually walked out with one person. Perhaps an opposition leader. My memories of the genocide in 1971 seemingly pale in comparison to what is happening in the streets of Bangladesh today. Ironically, it was the Awami League that had led the resistance then. The revolutionaries have now become our new occupiers. They insist it’s still a “democracy.” APCs prowl the streets. Orders to shoot on sight have not quelled the anger, and people are still coming onto the streets despite the curfew. There is the other side of the story. Reports of policemen being lynched and offices being set on fire are some of the violent responses to the government-led brutality. Some of the damage to government buildings could possibly be the act of paid agent provocateurs hired to tarnish the image of the quota protestors. There are other instances, less extreme, but just as serious. The impact on the average person, as most working-class Bangladeshis live day to day. Their daily earnings feed their families. As a prime minister desperately clinging on to a position she does not have a legitimate right for and a public who has been tormented enough to battle it out. They are the ones who starve. Private TV channels vie with the state-owned BTV and churn out government propaganda, and I watch members of the public complain but am unable to forget all the average people I spoke to. The rikshawalas and fruit sellers with perishable goods express solidarity with the students. Their own immediate suffering, though painful, is something they are willing to accept. She has to go, they say. ∎ EDITOR'S NOTE: On 21st July, SAAG received another dispatch from Shahidul Alam, following th e one published o n 20th July. Publication was postponed due to security concerns for those involved. We chose to publish this piece without thorough fact-checking due to the urgency of the situation, the internet blackout, and news reports that do not correspond with eyewitness accounts. —Iman Iftikhar The government has paraded several student leaders on TV, and multiple versions of the demands made by student coordinators of this leaderless movement, are in circulation. The original list of demands was circulated in an underground press release yesterday. The signatory, Abdul Kader, has since been picked up. Another coordinator, Nahid Islam, was disappeared by over 50 plainclothes people claiming to belong to the Detective Branch. A third coordinator, Asif Mahmud, is reportedly missing. The Prime Minister must accept responsibility for the mass killings of students and publicly apologise. The Home Minister and the Road Transport and Bridges Minister [the latter is also the secretary general of the Awami League] must resign from their [cabinet] positions and the party. Police officers present at the sites where students were killed must be sacked. Vice Chancellors of Dhaka, Jahangirnagar, and Rajshahi Universities must resign. The police and goons who attacked the students and those who instigated the attacks must be arrested. Families of the killed and injured must be compensated. Bangladesh Chhatra League [BCL, the pro-government student wing, effectively, the government’s vigilante force] must be banned from student politics and a students’ union established. All educational institutions and halls of residences must be reopened. Guarantees must be provided that no academic or administrative harassment of protesters will take place. That the Prime Minister publicly apologises for her disparaging comments about the protesters may seem a minor issue, but it will surely be the sticking point. This PM is not the apologising kind, regardless of how it might seem. Regardless of the three elections she has rigged. Regardless of the fact that corruption has been at an all-time high during her tenure. Regardless of the fact that hundreds of students and other protesters have been murdered by her goons and the security forces. Regardless of the fact that she has deemed all those who oppose her views to be “Razaakars” (collaborators of the Pakistani occupation army in 1971). Regardless of all that, there simply isn’t anyone in the negotiating camp who would have the temerity to even suggest such a course for the prime minister. There is a Bangla saying, “You only have one head on your neck.” The ministers do the heavy lifting. They control the muscle in the streets and manage things when resistance brews. The previous police chief and the head of the National Board of Revenue did the dirty work earlier. They were easily discarded. But the ministers are seniors of the party, and apart from finding suitable replacements, discarding them would send out the wrong message within the party. Making vice-chancellors and proctors resign is also easy. These are discardable minions. The perks are attractive, and there are many to fill the ranks. The police being dumped is less easy, but “friendly fire” does take place. Compensation is not an issue. State coffers are there to be pillaged, and public funds being dispensed at party behest is a common enough practice. BCL and associated student organisations in DU, RU, and JU to be banned is a sticking point, as they are the ones who keep the student body in check and are the party cadre called upon when there is any sign of rebellion. A vigilante group that can kill, kidnap, or disappear at party command. For a government that lacks legitimacy, these are the foot soldiers who terrorise and are essential parts of the coercive machinery. Educational institutions being reopened is an issue. Students have traditionally been the initiators of protests. With such simmering discontent, this would be dangerous, particularly if the local muscle power was clipped. The return of independent thinking is something all tyrants fear. The cessation of harassment is easy to implement on paper. It is difficult to prove and can be done at many levels. Removing the official charges will leave all unofficial modes intact. Of all these demands, it is the least innocuous, that of the apology, that is perhaps the most significant. It will dent the aura of invincibility the tyrant exudes. She has never apologised for anything. Not the setting up of the Rakkhi Bahini by her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman , nor the paramilitary force that rained terror on the country and, in all likelihood, contributed to the assassination of seventeen members of the family in 1975. Not Rahman’s setting up of Bakshal, the one-party system where all other parties, as well as all but four approved newspapers, were banned. And certainly not the numerous extra-judicial killings or disappearances and the liturgy of corruption by people in her patronage during her own tenure. An apology to protesting students, while simple, would be a chink in her armour she would be loath to reveal. The body count is impossible to verify. I try to piece things together from as many first-hand reports as I can. Many of the bodies have a single, precisely-targeted bullet hole. Pellets are aimed at the eyes. As of last night, those monitoring feel the number of dead is well over 1,500. International news, out of touch as the Internet has been shut down and mobile connectivity severely throttled, say deaths are in the hundreds. The government reports far fewer. Staff at city hospitals are less tight-lipped and can give reasonably accurate figures, but not all bodies go to hospital morgues. An older hospital in Dhaka did report over 200 bodies being brought in as of last night. The injured who die on the way to the hospital are not generally admitted. Families prefer to take the body home rather than hand them over to the police. Bodies are also being disappeared. Police and post-mortem reports, when available, fail to mention bullet wounds. My former student Priyo’s body was amongst the missing ones, but we were eventually able to locate him. A friend took him back to his home in Rangpur to be buried. Constant monitoring and checking by activists resulted in the bullet wound being mentioned in his case, though a deliberate mistake in his name in the hospital’s release order that was overseen by a police officer attempted to complicate things. Fortunately, it was rectified in the nick of time. Getting the news out has become extremely difficult, and coordinating the resistance is challenging. This piece goes out through a complicated route. I’ve deleted all digital traces to protect the intermediaries. The entire Internet network being down because of a single location low-level attack, as claimed by the technology minister, appears strange for a police state that boasts of being tech savvy, but there are other strange things happening. Helicopters flying low, beaming searchlights downwards, and shooting at people in narrow alleyways—this is spy film stuff. But it is not stunt men down below. Even teargas and stun grenade shells become lethal when dropped from a height. The bullets raining down have a more direct purpose. A student talks of the body lying on the empty flyover being dragged off by the police. A friend talks of an unmarked car spraying bullets at the crowd as it speeds past. She was lucky. The shooter was firing from a window on the other side. A mother grieves over her three-year-old senselessly killed. Gory reports of human brain congealed on tarmac is a first for me. The curfew has resulted in rubbish being piled up on the streets. The brain will be there for people to see, perhaps deliberately. The raid at 2:20 am earlier this morning in the flat across the street was also in commando fashion. The video footage is blurry, but one can only see segments of the huge contingent of Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), heavily armed police, and others in plainclothes. They eventually walked out with one person. Perhaps an opposition leader. My memories of the genocide in 1971 seemingly pale in comparison to what is happening in the streets of Bangladesh today. Ironically, it was the Awami League that had led the resistance then. The revolutionaries have now become our new occupiers. They insist it’s still a “democracy.” APCs prowl the streets. Orders to shoot on sight have not quelled the anger, and people are still coming onto the streets despite the curfew. There is the other side of the story. Reports of policemen being lynched and offices being set on fire are some of the violent responses to the government-led brutality. Some of the damage to government buildings could possibly be the act of paid agent provocateurs hired to tarnish the image of the quota protestors. There are other instances, less extreme, but just as serious. The impact on the average person, as most working-class Bangladeshis live day to day. Their daily earnings feed their families. As a prime minister desperately clinging on to a position she does not have a legitimate right for and a public who has been tormented enough to battle it out. They are the ones who starve. Private TV channels vie with the state-owned BTV and churn out government propaganda, and I watch members of the public complain but am unable to forget all the average people I spoke to. The rikshawalas and fruit sellers with perishable goods express solidarity with the students. Their own immediate suffering, though painful, is something they are willing to accept. She has to go, they say. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making bichar hobe (ink drawing and digital collage, 2024), Prithi Khalique SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Opinion Dhaka Quota Movement Fascism Student Protests Bangladesh Awami League Sheikh Hasina Police Action Police Brutality Economic Crisis 1971 Liberation of Bangladesh BTV Zonayed Saki Internet Crackdowns Internet Blackouts BSF Abu Sayeed Begum Rokeya University Abrar Fahad BUET Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Mass Protests Mass Killings Torture Enforced Disappearances Extrajudicial Killings Chhatra League Bangladesh Courts Judiciary Clientelism Bengali Nationalism Dissent Student Movements National Curfew State Repression Surveillance Regimes Repression in Universities Bangladesh Chhatra League Demands Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Corruption Rakkhi Bahini Democracy The Guise of Democracy Rapid Action Battalion July Revolution Student-People's Uprising SHAHIDUL ALAM is a Bangladeshi photographer, writer and social activist. He co-founded the photo agencies Drik and Majority World . He founded Pathshala , a photography school in Dhaka, and Chobi Mela , Asia’s first photo festival. He is the author of Nature's Fury (2007) and My Journey as a Witness (2011). His work has been featured and exhibited in MOMA , Centre Pompidou , Tate Modern , Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art , the Royal Albert Hall , among others. He was one of TIME Magazine's person's of the year in 2018. 21 Jul 2024 Opinion Dhaka 21st Jul 2024 PRITHI KHALIQUE is a visual designer and animator based in Dhaka and Providence. 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:

Early in 2022, the signs of an unprecedented and historic movement in Sri Lanka were already visible. A dire economic crisis and a corrupt and languid government from a political dynasty that had ruled for many years in Sri Lanka bred discontent of unprecedented proportions, leading to the Aragalaya. This photo essay documents some of the earliest days of the protests. FEATURES Scenes From Gotagogama Early in 2022, the signs of an unprecedented and historic movement in Sri Lanka were already visible. A dire economic crisis and a corrupt and languid government from a political dynasty that had ruled for many years in Sri Lanka bred discontent of unprecedented proportions, leading to the Aragalaya. This photo essay documents some of the earliest days of the protests. VOL. 2 ISSUE 1 PHOTO-ESSAY AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR A group of protestors wave the Sri Lankan flag on the 10th day of protests at Galle Face Green, unofficially named Gotagogama among locals. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 A group of protestors wave the Sri Lankan flag on the 10th day of protests at Galle Face Green, unofficially named Gotagogama among locals. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Photo-Essay Sri Lanka 23rd Feb 2023 Photo-Essay Sri Lanka Gotagogama Aragalaya Movement Organization Capitalism Economic Crisis Energy Crisis Galle Face Green Mass Protests Mahinda Rajapaksa Gotabhaya Rajapaksa Low-Income Workers Ramadan 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. EDITOR'S NOTE: In March 2022, I was in Colombo, hosting the Fearless Ambassadors' Residency with our team. Artists had gathered from across South Asia to paint two murals in the streets of Colombo. When we arrived, little did we know that the country would break into one of the biggest protests that it has seen. There were big rallies of people burning party flags and shouting, "Gota Go Back!" A people divided had come together. Years of corruption and divisive politics led the country to one of its worst socio-political and economic crises since independence, resulting in people protesting against the incumbent President and the government. The protests, led purely by the people of Sri Lanka, especially the younger generation, supported by the workers' and students' unions, started in early March 2022 and spread islandwide. Rage in their eyes, they walked hand in hand, ready to take down the government that had left them to face acute shortages of food, fuel, and other basic supplies because of its ridiculous policies followed by the pandemic leaving the country bankrupt. It is no longer only about reform or political change but a matter of survival for the people of Sri Lanka. They were tired. Their life-long savings had been reduced to nothing. There was no petrol or cooking oil. There were long queues everywhere, anger and despair at every nook. They demanded justice for journalists and activists killed in the past and decried corruption and deception from the uppermost echelons of power. The protest in front of the Presidential Secretariat soon turned into a model village called "Gotagogama" (Go Gota Village). While the protests were peaceful, police fired tear gas at the protestors and assaulted them in an attempt to stifle the protests. There were artworks lined up, medical camps, IT support stations, and community libraries, all in one place, as if the people were reimagining every system that existed. Every morning we could see our friends and colleagues plan and participate in rallies and protests. We made posters and stood with them with affirmations such as "Take back our power" and "We are our own leaders" being passed across the streets. There was hopelessness but also a will to dismantle the system. These photographs were taken as part of the first wave of protests that broke out. Much happened after that. A few months later, in June, the people marched into the President's house and took over, watered his plants, picnic-ed in his lawns, slept in his bed, and made memes as a protest. The government changed, the village was taken down, more protestors and activists were arrested, and mysteriously disappeared. Gota Go Gama didn't exist anymore. When work took me to Colombo again later that year, I saw no big protests. Instead, I saw shoulders carrying hopelessness, eyes filled with broken dreams, and a lot of perseverance. People are struggling to get back to "normal." The new guard is no better. It has tried every tactic to crack down on anti-government movements. The real causes of the crisis are yet to be solved. Sri Lanka still awaits an IMF bailout and assurances from China and India, while the people's struggle will continue. Their struggle requires thinking about what has transpired: Harshana Rambukwella's analysis is a strong partner to the photo essay that follows. But one thing is clear: the movement of people in Sri Lanka may have subsided, but something new to Sri Lanka began in 2022. —Sabika Abbas Naqvi, Senior Editor From the earliest days, the youth were a significant driving factor in the protests against the Rajapakse government. A creative representation of the expectations of protestors using the colour red, a signifying motif of the Rajapakse regime. The Rajapaksas have been known to weaponise the colour red and inculcate hate among racial groups through their choice of clothing and colours. Protestors are using this motif against them in an ironic way. The sign translates to: "The oppressed in the queue while the oppressor is in the mansion." With such signs, protestors pointed clearly to dwindling supplies of essential resources among ordinary citizens, while those in power remain unaffected. Many children attended the protests, inciting larger conversations on politics and accountability within families—a first for many Sri Lankans. First rain at the protest site: Determined citizens continued to protest in thunderstorms and heavy rainfall. The breeding ground of Gotagogama, where the largest record of citizens gathered outside the Presidential Secretariat’s office. On March 31st 2022, a protest in Mirihana, Nugegoda (a suburb of Colombo) sparked a chain of organic and interminable protests across the country. The crowd present at this protest blocked a police bus from entering the protest site. 37 people were injured, 53 were arrested. Several journalists were brutally assaulted, with at least 6 arrested by Sri Lanka's Special Task Force. Protestors of all ages hold up signs reflecting the magnitude of the economic crisis in Sri Lanka created by the current government. Pleas to the government to right their wrongs, taken at the largest youth-led protest at Independence Square, Colombo. A figure of Mahinda Rajapakse, then-Prime Minister and Gotabhaya Rajapakse's brother, depicted holding a self-imposed request to be struck by lightning: a popular curse in Sinhalese folklore. A group of nuns join the protest to show their solidarity and dissent against the current government. People continued their fight well into the night, with many Muslims breaking their fast during the holy month of Ramadan coinciding with the beginning of summer. More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

Musician Ali Sethi in conversation with Associate Editor Kamil Ahsan COMMUNITY Syncretism & the Contemporary Ghazal AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Musician Ali Sethi in conversation with Associate Editor Kamil Ahsan SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Music Ghazal Art History Historicity Syncretism State Repression Faiz Ahmed Faiz Khabar-e-Tahayyar-e-Ishq Siraj Aurangabadi Mah Laqa Bai Sensuality Metaphor Cultural Repression Art Practice Sound Poetic Form Performance Art Grief Raaga Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Interview Music 14th Oct 2020 The Ghazal originated in Arabia in the 8th century. That's the funny stuff right? That in order to retrieve legitimate cosmopolitanism, we have to go back to a medieval multicultural moment. 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:

Novelist Shehan Karunatilaka in conversation with Fiction Editor Kartika Budhwar. COMMUNITY A State of Perpetual War: Fiction & the Sri Lankan Civil War AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Novelist Shehan Karunatilaka in conversation with Fiction Editor Kartika Budhwar. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Sri Lanka Sri Lankan Civil War Satire Chinaman Tamil Tigers Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Enforced Disappearances Cricket Extrajudicial Killings Kumar Sangakkara Shakthika Sathkumara Sri Lankan Literary Tradition Chats with the Dead Booker Prize Buddhism Ghost Stories Theater South Asian Theater Carl Muller Anarchist Writing Writing about Recent History Discourses of War Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna Marxist-Leninist Uprising JVP Worrying Humor Gallows Humor Absurdity Queerness Gananath Obeyesekere Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Interview Sri Lanka 10th Jan 2021 The stereotypes of the commercial sphere, the smiley, happy go lucky, Sri Lankans—there is something to that stereotype. It's not a grim place, even though a lot of grim things take place here. A tragedy will happen, the jokes will start almost immediately. Maybe it's gallows humor or a coping mechanism. Whatever it is, that seems to always be there. RECOMMENDED: This interview took place prior to the publication of Shehan Karunatilaka's Booker-Prize winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Penguin), which he discusses in the interview as a work-in-progress. 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:

ART EDITOR Clare Patrick CLARE PATRICK is an independent curator and writer who hails from Cape Town. Formerly at NXTHVN , the Norval Foundation , and the Paris College of Art , she currently works at Atelier 11 Paris and No! Wahala Magazine . Her work has been featured in Art Throb , Contemporary And , Vogue , and The New York Times . ART EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Sabrina Tirvengadum SABRINA TIRVENGADUM (b. 1984, deaf British Mauritian) is a London-based visual artist and graphic designer. Blending AI-generated art, photography, graphics, collages, and digital illustrations, her work delves into themes of identity, relationships, and heritage. Inspired by her family’s history and the legacy of colonialism, Sabrina's work bridges the past and present, questioning the narratives we accept as truth. She has two upcoming exhibitions: Sabrina Tirvengadum: Who Were They? Who Am I? at the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester (7th February - 6th April 2025), and I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies at Autograph, London (8 Oct 2025 – 18 Mar 2026). ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Feminist Theorist and English Professor Fawzia Afzal-Khan, in conversation with Drama Editor Neilesh Bose. COMMUNITY Movements in Pakistani Theatre Feminist Theorist and English Professor Fawzia Afzal-Khan, in conversation with Drama Editor Neilesh Bose. VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Theater 24th Sep 2020 Interview Theater Performance Art South Asian Theater Internationalist Solidarity Parallel Theatre Movement Realism Non-Realist Plays Sufism Ajoka Theatre Women Singers of Pakistan Madeeha Gauhar Women Democratic Front Shahid Nadeem Authenticity Avant-Garde Form Native Formats Nationalism 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. The work I started doing, like Sheherzade Goes West could be considered avant-garde in a certain way it did not conform to representational theatre even though I gave it a very self-ironizing subtitle—speaking out as a “Pakistani/American/wo/man, because I wanted the title itself to question certain ideas of self-representation. RECOMMENDED: A Critical State: The Role of Secular Alternative Theatre in Pakistan (Seagull Press, 2005) by Fawzia Afzal-Khan More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

The aragalaya is an exceptional expression of democratic activism—but it contained contradictions that force us to reckon with its true limits and potential. THE VERTICAL Whiplash and Contradiction in Sri Lanka’s aragalaya The aragalaya is an exceptional expression of democratic activism—but it contained contradictions that force us to reckon with its true limits and potential. Harshana Rambukwella HOW DO we begin to make sense of the events of the past several months in Sri Lanka? A country that was ranked as a “middle-income” nation and had one of the highest standards of living in South Asia, now faces economic oblivion. What is truly stunning is the rapidity with which this national tragedy unfolded. Of course, this all says a great deal about the social and economic precarity that neoliberal policies force upon entire populations, who become unwilling victims of an insidious nexus between the instrumental interests of political and corporate elite. And all this has indeed been said frequently. But amidst its dizzying journey to national catastrophe, Sri Lanka also bore witness to a spectacular people’s movement—the aragalaya (“protest” in Sinhala)—which unseated a cabinet of ministers, a prime minister, and ultimately the all-powerful executive president of the country. However, almost equally swiftly the ‘democratic’ gains of the aragalaya have been rapidly undermined and the discredited political culture which the people’s uprising has begun to reconsolidate. The aragayala was a historic first for many reasons. It succeeded in breaking the vicious cycle of patron-client politics which often distorts electoral democracy in the country—with impoverished populations being mobilized on the promise of political largesse. It transcended—if temporarily—ethnic and religious divisions that have fueled conflict in Sri Lanka. It provided a space for youth activism rarely visible in the political mainstream. And it also provided a rare space for alternative cultural expression, including a visibly active LGBTQ community. One could cautiously argue that the aragalaya represented the emergence of a sense of democratic citizenship that has been rarely visible in Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history, despite Sri Lanka’s long tradition of electorally sanctioned democratic transitions of power at regular intervals. But since July 9th when the aragalaya peaked, forcing the executive president Gotabhaya Rajapaksa to flee the country and subsequently resign, the historic gains of the struggle have been rapidly reversed. A parliament, dominated by the ousted president’s party, the Sri Lanka Podu Jana Peramuna (SLPP), supported the election of Ranil Wickremasinghe—a deeply unpopular six-time prime minister—as executive president, resulting in a situation where the very political forces that were rejected by the aragalaya and had seemingly lost their legitimacy rapidly reasserted themselves. Wickremasinghe, a canny and expedient politician, swiftly undermined the aragalaya through two strategies. One was to unleash a wave of state repression with arbitrary arrests and abductions, severely undermining the “liberal democratic” image Wickremasinghe has been careful to cultivate throughout his career. The other strategy has sought to undermine the legitimacy of the people’s movement by characterizing it as a form of anarchy: a deeply conservative and reactionary discourse which has unfortunately found some resonance in society, particularly among segments that have an instrumental motive for backing Wickremasinghe, who they believe will bring economic stability. Democracy, or something like that All of which begs the question: how can the rapid reversal of the aragalaya gains be explained? Given the seeming rapidity with which the aragalaya arose and its apparently equally swift decline, the nature of the aragalya and what it represents in terms of Sri Lanka’s democratic history requires closer scrutiny. The characterization of the aragalaya as a form of anarchy can be traced to a conservative political culture where mass politics, despite regular elections, has had an ambiguous status. Sri Lanka received universal franchise in 1931, ahead of all of its colonial peers. But from the very outset Sri Lanka’s political elite argued against universal franchise, worried about its implications for their authority. They instead argued for a restricted franchise and expressed deep reservations about the ability of the “people” to act with political responsibility. But when the Doughnomore Commission recommended universal franchise in 1931, despite elite objections, the political elite scrambled to work around it by building ethnically and religiously partisan voter bases rather than work towards a more democratically enlightened citizenry. This effectively resulted in the beginnings of a system of patronage politics, and at the same time laid the foundations for an ethnically polarized political culture that has bedeviled the country since independence. Unlike in neighboring India where the political elite were able to mobilize people through an anti-colonial agenda and develop a sense of pan-Indian identity (despite its Hindu-centric nature), Sri Lanka’s elite politics in the period leading up to independence in 1948 failed to articulate such a Sri Lankan identity. In post-independence Sri Lanka, therefore democratic politics easily translated into majority rule, which some commentators have dubbed a form of “ethnocracy”. Although transitions of political power in Sri Lanka have taken place through regular electoral cycles, the minimalist operation of democracy masked a deeply illiberal political culture. One dimension of this illiberality is in how the entrenched culture of Sinhala majoritarianism in the country has marginalized minorities—initially the ethnic Tamil community, and more recently the Muslim community. Sri Lanka’s thirty-year militant conflict where a faction of the Tamil minority fought for an independent state was a direct outcome of this illiberal democracy where the electoral domination of the Sinhala numerical majority led to a distorted rationalization and normalization of majority rule. At the same time, the post-independence Sri Lankan state was unable to establish a system of social and economic justice, an inability which perhaps explains the two armed insurrections among the Sinhala youth in the 1970s and 1980s. Both uprisings were brutally suppressed, and the state’s violent response to the Sinhala youth mirrored how it dealt with Tamil militancy, even if the ethnically biased nature of the state resulted in a more insidious form of state violence against Tamil militancy. In post-independence Sri Lanka, democratic politics easily translated into majority rule, which some commentators have dubbed a form of “ethnocracy”. In Sri Lankan political history the two Sinhala youth uprisings and the Tamil secessionist movement stand as the three most significant people’s uprisings against the state. All three were violent in nature, advocated the use of militant force to overthrow and challenge the state, and were also ethnically marked and geographically confined to a particular territory of the country. While all three uprisings emerged from what might be called a “democratic deficit” in the country’s political mainstream, their ambition could not be termed as truly democratic because of the militant and authoritarian nature of the politics they represented. It is against this history of armed insurrection as well as a warped and majoritarian, albeit seemingly smooth system of electoral politics, system of democracy, that one has to read the aragalaya —both its potentials and limitations. Gotabhaya’s Many Sudden Turns of Fortune The broader context to the emergence of the aragalaya lies in the historic mandate Gotabhaya Rajapaksa received in 2019, winning six point nine million votes—the largest presidential electoral margin in Sri Lankan history. Islamophobia in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday bombings of 2019 and nakedly racist political campaigning shored up a narrative of existential fear in the Sinhala majority and drove them in their millions to vote for Rajapaksa. But these developments were also accompanied by a non-ethnically marked discourse about a need for substantive political change. While Gotabhaya is a member of the Rajapaksa dynasty, headed by his charismatic two-time president and elder brother Mahinda, he was marketed as the “non-political” Rajapaksa option: the technocrat who successfully guided the war effort in 2009 as Defense Secretary and therefore, an efficient apolitical candidate. Gotabhaya was seen perhaps as the Sri Lankan incarnation of a fusion between Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamed and Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yu—an efficient, nationally committed, benign authoritarian figure who would herald tough and efficient governance. It's easy to forget that in 2019, Gotabhaya’s overwhelming victory was hailed as a historic harbinger of change. Sinhala youth embraced his win enthusiastically. Days after his election a spontaneous nation-wide graffiti campaign (with the exception of the North) transformed wayside walls into colorful, if cheesy, murals themed variously on Sri Lanka’s past grandeur as well as visions for a future of prosperity. And yet, just two years from this moment of hope, it was arguably the same youth who gathered in their hundreds of thousands to oust Gotabhaya—disillusioned by consistently failing governance and holding him accountable for robbing them of their future, a disillusionment that resonated in the slogan “Gota Go Gama” (Gota Go Home). In this context, both Gotabhaya’s election within the recognized democratic system, and his ousting outside the electoral process, need to be seen as democratic. From a liberal perspective, the election of Gotabhaya—an heir to the dark and poisonous racist legacy of the Rajapaksa dynasty— was an illiberal outcome. But it was nonetheless an expression of the people’s will. Similarly, the ousting of Gotabhaya through a popular uprising, when no constitutionally sanctioned alternative was forthcoming is also democratic in its broadest sense. Undoubtedly, extreme economic precarity fueled the aragalaya . However, amidst the solidarity forged by precarity, less instrumental political desires also found a space of expression. This was facilitated by the formlessness of the aragalaya which had no distinct political leadership, no distinct political ideology, and no singular authorship, thus making it possible for diverse forces to coalesce under its banner. Set against the history of Sri Lanka’s armed insurrections sketched above, it is also easy to see why the aragalaya is an exceptional moment of democratic activism. But the very diversity of the aragalaya also meant that many contradictory forces operated within it, and these contradictions, in turn, speak to the limits of what the aragalaya represented. This formless nature of the aragalaya can be attributed to its beginnings. The most immediate precursors of the aragalaya were two protest movements that emerged during the early phase of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s presidency. One was a nationwide teachers’ struggle for better wages, which morphed into a national movement questioning the legitimacy of the government and its inability to be receptive to just demands by important segments of society. This was closely followed by a disastrous overnight attempt to switch to one hundred percent organic farming, resulting in farmers across the country protesting as yields plummeted and the entire agricultural sector was plunged into crisis. These two protest movements shook the seemingly solid foundation of the Gotabhaya Rajapaksa government. The rising public dissatisfaction swiftly accelerated as the economic crisis worsened and daily essentials such as fuel, cooking gas and increasingly medicines became scarce. Soon enough, the burden of economic mismanagement was laid squarely on the doorstep of the Rajapaksa presidency. In this context, both Gotabhaya’s election within the recognized democratic system, and his ousting outside the electoral process, need to be seen as democratic. On March 31st, a series of small-scale protests and candlelight vigils—a largely urban middle class phenomenon—that had emerged throughout Colombo and its suburbs turned into a more confrontational mode. Thousands congregated in the vicinity of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s private home in the suburbs of Colombo. In the ensuing confrontation with the police scuffles broke out, a bus was torched, and teargas was used. The government attempted a swift crackdown with mass arrests, but the legal community ensured that the protestors were provided protection. Mobilization for this protest happened mainly through social media—which became the default medium for protest mobilization and dissemination of aragalaya news. While the earlier teachers' and farmers' protests had provided the political backdrop, it was this urban activism that created the immediate conditions for the emergence of the aragalaya in a more visible and concrete form. Soon after the events of March 31st, the “Gota Go Gama” village became established as a group of youth began occupying the area in front of the Presidential Secretariat at Galle Face in the heart of the downtown business district in Colombo. As protests continued throughout the country, Gota Go Gama (or GGG) became their focal point. From its outset some organized groups with connections to political parties like the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the leftist party which launched the two insurrections against the state in the 1970s and 80s, and the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), a breakaway group from the JVP were present at GGG. In addition, the Inter University Students Federation (IUSF), which is connected to the FSP and has a large following among undergraduates at state universities, along with other trade unions and activist groups, were also present. However, none of these groups could claim ownership over the aragalaya . Instead, a group of youth with no distinct political affiliations essentially managed the GGG site. This politically non-partisan nature of the GGG site allowed it to flourish with a library, an IT facility, a kitchen, and even a cinema hall. At the height of its existence, GGG resembled a mini-township. Aragalaya Culture The cultural dynamics of GGG are immensely significant. GGG allowed a rare mainstream space for alternative cultural expression. The musician Ajith Kumarasiri, a man with a strong presence in the avant-garde musical scene in Sri Lanka but long shunned by the musical establishment, played a prominent role with regular musical performances. Alongside the music, installation and performance art that were both thematically and formally daring found expression at GGG. This cultural dynamic of the aragalya challenged the hegemonic Sinhala national cultural form—a form that is deeply conservative and has little space for marginal identities like the LGBTQ community. The “alternative” cultural identity of GGG also facilitated two significant events. One was the Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day which falls on May 18th and marks the deaths of hundreds of Tamil civilians in the closing stages of the war in 2009. This commemoration, effectively banned by the Sri Lankan state due to its human rights implications, and an uncomfortable truth that the Sinhala community had long ignored, was marked at GGG. What made the event all the more significant was the participation of Buddhist priests—often seen as guardians of Sinhala nationalist ideology—in addition to clergy from other faiths such as the iconic Catholic priest Father Jeevantha Peiris who was closely identified with the aragalaya. The other significant event was a Pride March at GGG on 25th June—a mass celebration of sexual identities that was an unprecedentedly public challenge to the traditional political and cultural mainstream of the country. Still, even while the “alternative” cultural vibe of GGG and the aragalaya forcefully flagged a progressive movement, this aspect of aragalaya culture also jostled for power alongside more established undercurrents. For instance, GGG had a hut for disabled soldiers that promoted the narrative of the ranaviruwa (or war hero), a trope that was weaponized by the Rajapaksas to delegitimize minority political demands and shore up their patriotic Sinhala credentials. Supporters of the controversial war-winning miliary officer-turned-politician Sarath Fonseka were also present in the space of GGG, as was the Buddhist priest Omalpe Sobitha who has a history as a hardline Sinhala nationalist. Their presence could be read in multiple ways. It could mean they strategically maintained a presence within the aragalaya to ensure that its political power remained within the ambit of Sinhala nationalist interests. At the same time, it could also be read as a softening of Sinhala nationalist ideology, potentially creating more space for alternative political and cultural imaginaries. These competing interests and ideologies that were united under the common aragalaya banner of “Gota go Home” became more starkly visible in the aftermath of the July 9th “victory” when protestors stormed several key state buildings, including the Presidential Secretariat, resulting in Gotabhaya Rajapaksa fleeing the country and eventually resigning from the presidency. With the common enemy gone, the competing interests of the various groups represented within the aragalaya began to emerge more explicitly. The FSP began promoting a narrative that the aragalaya had delegitimized the entire parliamentary system in Sri Lank a and that a radical restructuring of the state was necessary. This was also accompanied by a strategic insertion of the notion of a “people’s council,” a seemingly progressive proposal that empowers more direct citizen engagement with governance but was also an obviously strategically motivated bid for the FSP to become relevant in mainstream politics. One narrative that has since emerged is that the aragalaya was hijacked by organized political interests: an accusation that was directed towards the FSP and the JVP by middle class and professional groups that backed the aragalaya but are deeply suspicious of revolutionary politics and subscribe to the more conservative “liberal democratic” discourse discussed above. This narrative of hijacking was not entirely new: indeed, it dovetailed into the incidents of May 9th—early days of the movement—when politically backed thugs, emerging from a meeting at the Prime Minister’s official residence, Temple Trees, unleashed brutal violence on GGG while the police and armed forces did little to intervene. In the aftermath of this unprovoked attack, there was a national backlash, with over 70 houses and properties belonging to politicians thought to be involved in the attack on GGG being torched. One parliament MP was also killed when a mob attacked his vehicle. This is an interregnum in which fluid new political forms are emerging. The spectacular democratic mobilization that emerged during the height of the aragalaya and the spirit of active citizenship it unleashed remains—as does the economic precarity that fueled it. The drivers of the violence of May 9th are unclear. While there was a spontaneous backlash immediately following the attack on GGG, what followed later in the night with systematic burning of politician’s houses had a much more organized dynamic, but it is unclear to this day who drove this wave of attacks. The vigilante violence was of course repudiated by the youth of the aragalaya. But in a deeply conservative political culture where revolutionary political action is viewed with extreme suspicion, May 9th marked a loss of innocence for the aragalaya. Today, there is a sustained campaign to discredit the aragalaya by associating it with violence, a pernicious characterization of it as a “breakdown of the rule of law.” It is frustrating to insist on the fact that given Sri Lanka’s violent history, the aragalaya was indeed a peaceful expression of the people’s will, and not a violent, anarchic movement. It was a creatively conceptualized and executed protest movement that maintained non-violence as a cardinal principle. And it is precisely this peaceful nature of the protest that frustrated a national security apparatus used to the mobilization of force and violent confrontation to suppress dissent. What now? The aragalaya in the form it took since March 31st and lasted more than 100 days appears to be over now. The last of the physical structures that marked the GGG occupy site have been dismantled. As of now, the repression of the Ranil Wickremasinghe government along with its insidious narrative to discredit the aragalaya as a form of anarchy appears to be at least temporarily succeeding. But if we’ve learned anything over the past few months it is that this moment in Sri Lanka is a moment of significant and unpredictable transition. This is an interregnum in which fluid new political forms are emerging. The spectacular democratic mobilization that emerged during the height of the aragalaya and the spirit of active citizenship it unleashed remains—as does the economic precarity that fueled it. The aragalaya marked a distinct turning point in Sri Lanka’s political history as a population used to exercising their franchise within a system of political patronage, at least briefly, transcended instrumental political motivations to demand democratic accountability. The aragalaya also rattled a complacent political class that imagined it was secure within an entrenched patron-client political system. Politics in Sri Lanka are unlikely to follow a familiar script in the aftermath of the aragalaya. The traditional political party system of the country has confronted a significant existential challenge due to the aragalaya . A vast majority of the political parties and their representatives in the current parliament have had their legitimacy undermined—they are held accountable for the current state of the country and they are associated with a corrupt political culture. However, what the swift reversal of fortunes in the aftermath of the aragalaya suggests is that Sri Lanka’s long-entrenched culture of political impunity with deeply institutionalized structures of corruption, nepotism, repression, and violence are unlikely to change easily. If the brief hope kindled by the aragalaya is to survive and be fashioned into viable and sustained political change, it will take committed and long-term engagement by a variety of actors, including civil society and progressive political parties, as highly contingent socioeconomic conditions continue to shape the politics of the moment. Whether anything of this nature will emerge is anybody’s guess. ∎ HOW DO we begin to make sense of the events of the past several months in Sri Lanka? A country that was ranked as a “middle-income” nation and had one of the highest standards of living in South Asia, now faces economic oblivion. What is truly stunning is the rapidity with which this national tragedy unfolded. Of course, this all says a great deal about the social and economic precarity that neoliberal policies force upon entire populations, who become unwilling victims of an insidious nexus between the instrumental interests of political and corporate elite. And all this has indeed been said frequently. But amidst its dizzying journey to national catastrophe, Sri Lanka also bore witness to a spectacular people’s movement—the aragalaya (“protest” in Sinhala)—which unseated a cabinet of ministers, a prime minister, and ultimately the all-powerful executive president of the country. However, almost equally swiftly the ‘democratic’ gains of the aragalaya have been rapidly undermined and the discredited political culture which the people’s uprising has begun to reconsolidate. The aragayala was a historic first for many reasons. It succeeded in breaking the vicious cycle of patron-client politics which often distorts electoral democracy in the country—with impoverished populations being mobilized on the promise of political largesse. It transcended—if temporarily—ethnic and religious divisions that have fueled conflict in Sri Lanka. It provided a space for youth activism rarely visible in the political mainstream. And it also provided a rare space for alternative cultural expression, including a visibly active LGBTQ community. One could cautiously argue that the aragalaya represented the emergence of a sense of democratic citizenship that has been rarely visible in Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history, despite Sri Lanka’s long tradition of electorally sanctioned democratic transitions of power at regular intervals. But since July 9th when the aragalaya peaked, forcing the executive president Gotabhaya Rajapaksa to flee the country and subsequently resign, the historic gains of the struggle have been rapidly reversed. A parliament, dominated by the ousted president’s party, the Sri Lanka Podu Jana Peramuna (SLPP), supported the election of Ranil Wickremasinghe—a deeply unpopular six-time prime minister—as executive president, resulting in a situation where the very political forces that were rejected by the aragalaya and had seemingly lost their legitimacy rapidly reasserted themselves. Wickremasinghe, a canny and expedient politician, swiftly undermined the aragalaya through two strategies. One was to unleash a wave of state repression with arbitrary arrests and abductions, severely undermining the “liberal democratic” image Wickremasinghe has been careful to cultivate throughout his career. The other strategy has sought to undermine the legitimacy of the people’s movement by characterizing it as a form of anarchy: a deeply conservative and reactionary discourse which has unfortunately found some resonance in society, particularly among segments that have an instrumental motive for backing Wickremasinghe, who they believe will bring economic stability. Democracy, or something like that All of which begs the question: how can the rapid reversal of the aragalaya gains be explained? Given the seeming rapidity with which the aragalaya arose and its apparently equally swift decline, the nature of the aragalya and what it represents in terms of Sri Lanka’s democratic history requires closer scrutiny. The characterization of the aragalaya as a form of anarchy can be traced to a conservative political culture where mass politics, despite regular elections, has had an ambiguous status. Sri Lanka received universal franchise in 1931, ahead of all of its colonial peers. But from the very outset Sri Lanka’s political elite argued against universal franchise, worried about its implications for their authority. They instead argued for a restricted franchise and expressed deep reservations about the ability of the “people” to act with political responsibility. But when the Doughnomore Commission recommended universal franchise in 1931, despite elite objections, the political elite scrambled to work around it by building ethnically and religiously partisan voter bases rather than work towards a more democratically enlightened citizenry. This effectively resulted in the beginnings of a system of patronage politics, and at the same time laid the foundations for an ethnically polarized political culture that has bedeviled the country since independence. Unlike in neighboring India where the political elite were able to mobilize people through an anti-colonial agenda and develop a sense of pan-Indian identity (despite its Hindu-centric nature), Sri Lanka’s elite politics in the period leading up to independence in 1948 failed to articulate such a Sri Lankan identity. In post-independence Sri Lanka, therefore democratic politics easily translated into majority rule, which some commentators have dubbed a form of “ethnocracy”. Although transitions of political power in Sri Lanka have taken place through regular electoral cycles, the minimalist operation of democracy masked a deeply illiberal political culture. One dimension of this illiberality is in how the entrenched culture of Sinhala majoritarianism in the country has marginalized minorities—initially the ethnic Tamil community, and more recently the Muslim community. Sri Lanka’s thirty-year militant conflict where a faction of the Tamil minority fought for an independent state was a direct outcome of this illiberal democracy where the electoral domination of the Sinhala numerical majority led to a distorted rationalization and normalization of majority rule. At the same time, the post-independence Sri Lankan state was unable to establish a system of social and economic justice, an inability which perhaps explains the two armed insurrections among the Sinhala youth in the 1970s and 1980s. Both uprisings were brutally suppressed, and the state’s violent response to the Sinhala youth mirrored how it dealt with Tamil militancy, even if the ethnically biased nature of the state resulted in a more insidious form of state violence against Tamil militancy. In post-independence Sri Lanka, democratic politics easily translated into majority rule, which some commentators have dubbed a form of “ethnocracy”. In Sri Lankan political history the two Sinhala youth uprisings and the Tamil secessionist movement stand as the three most significant people’s uprisings against the state. All three were violent in nature, advocated the use of militant force to overthrow and challenge the state, and were also ethnically marked and geographically confined to a particular territory of the country. While all three uprisings emerged from what might be called a “democratic deficit” in the country’s political mainstream, their ambition could not be termed as truly democratic because of the militant and authoritarian nature of the politics they represented. It is against this history of armed insurrection as well as a warped and majoritarian, albeit seemingly smooth system of electoral politics, system of democracy, that one has to read the aragalaya —both its potentials and limitations. Gotabhaya’s Many Sudden Turns of Fortune The broader context to the emergence of the aragalaya lies in the historic mandate Gotabhaya Rajapaksa received in 2019, winning six point nine million votes—the largest presidential electoral margin in Sri Lankan history. Islamophobia in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday bombings of 2019 and nakedly racist political campaigning shored up a narrative of existential fear in the Sinhala majority and drove them in their millions to vote for Rajapaksa. But these developments were also accompanied by a non-ethnically marked discourse about a need for substantive political change. While Gotabhaya is a member of the Rajapaksa dynasty, headed by his charismatic two-time president and elder brother Mahinda, he was marketed as the “non-political” Rajapaksa option: the technocrat who successfully guided the war effort in 2009 as Defense Secretary and therefore, an efficient apolitical candidate. Gotabhaya was seen perhaps as the Sri Lankan incarnation of a fusion between Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamed and Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yu—an efficient, nationally committed, benign authoritarian figure who would herald tough and efficient governance. It's easy to forget that in 2019, Gotabhaya’s overwhelming victory was hailed as a historic harbinger of change. Sinhala youth embraced his win enthusiastically. Days after his election a spontaneous nation-wide graffiti campaign (with the exception of the North) transformed wayside walls into colorful, if cheesy, murals themed variously on Sri Lanka’s past grandeur as well as visions for a future of prosperity. And yet, just two years from this moment of hope, it was arguably the same youth who gathered in their hundreds of thousands to oust Gotabhaya—disillusioned by consistently failing governance and holding him accountable for robbing them of their future, a disillusionment that resonated in the slogan “Gota Go Gama” (Gota Go Home). In this context, both Gotabhaya’s election within the recognized democratic system, and his ousting outside the electoral process, need to be seen as democratic. From a liberal perspective, the election of Gotabhaya—an heir to the dark and poisonous racist legacy of the Rajapaksa dynasty— was an illiberal outcome. But it was nonetheless an expression of the people’s will. Similarly, the ousting of Gotabhaya through a popular uprising, when no constitutionally sanctioned alternative was forthcoming is also democratic in its broadest sense. Undoubtedly, extreme economic precarity fueled the aragalaya . However, amidst the solidarity forged by precarity, less instrumental political desires also found a space of expression. This was facilitated by the formlessness of the aragalaya which had no distinct political leadership, no distinct political ideology, and no singular authorship, thus making it possible for diverse forces to coalesce under its banner. Set against the history of Sri Lanka’s armed insurrections sketched above, it is also easy to see why the aragalaya is an exceptional moment of democratic activism. But the very diversity of the aragalaya also meant that many contradictory forces operated within it, and these contradictions, in turn, speak to the limits of what the aragalaya represented. This formless nature of the aragalaya can be attributed to its beginnings. The most immediate precursors of the aragalaya were two protest movements that emerged during the early phase of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s presidency. One was a nationwide teachers’ struggle for better wages, which morphed into a national movement questioning the legitimacy of the government and its inability to be receptive to just demands by important segments of society. This was closely followed by a disastrous overnight attempt to switch to one hundred percent organic farming, resulting in farmers across the country protesting as yields plummeted and the entire agricultural sector was plunged into crisis. These two protest movements shook the seemingly solid foundation of the Gotabhaya Rajapaksa government. The rising public dissatisfaction swiftly accelerated as the economic crisis worsened and daily essentials such as fuel, cooking gas and increasingly medicines became scarce. Soon enough, the burden of economic mismanagement was laid squarely on the doorstep of the Rajapaksa presidency. In this context, both Gotabhaya’s election within the recognized democratic system, and his ousting outside the electoral process, need to be seen as democratic. On March 31st, a series of small-scale protests and candlelight vigils—a largely urban middle class phenomenon—that had emerged throughout Colombo and its suburbs turned into a more confrontational mode. Thousands congregated in the vicinity of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s private home in the suburbs of Colombo. In the ensuing confrontation with the police scuffles broke out, a bus was torched, and teargas was used. The government attempted a swift crackdown with mass arrests, but the legal community ensured that the protestors were provided protection. Mobilization for this protest happened mainly through social media—which became the default medium for protest mobilization and dissemination of aragalaya news. While the earlier teachers' and farmers' protests had provided the political backdrop, it was this urban activism that created the immediate conditions for the emergence of the aragalaya in a more visible and concrete form. Soon after the events of March 31st, the “Gota Go Gama” village became established as a group of youth began occupying the area in front of the Presidential Secretariat at Galle Face in the heart of the downtown business district in Colombo. As protests continued throughout the country, Gota Go Gama (or GGG) became their focal point. From its outset some organized groups with connections to political parties like the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the leftist party which launched the two insurrections against the state in the 1970s and 80s, and the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), a breakaway group from the JVP were present at GGG. In addition, the Inter University Students Federation (IUSF), which is connected to the FSP and has a large following among undergraduates at state universities, along with other trade unions and activist groups, were also present. However, none of these groups could claim ownership over the aragalaya . Instead, a group of youth with no distinct political affiliations essentially managed the GGG site. This politically non-partisan nature of the GGG site allowed it to flourish with a library, an IT facility, a kitchen, and even a cinema hall. At the height of its existence, GGG resembled a mini-township. Aragalaya Culture The cultural dynamics of GGG are immensely significant. GGG allowed a rare mainstream space for alternative cultural expression. The musician Ajith Kumarasiri, a man with a strong presence in the avant-garde musical scene in Sri Lanka but long shunned by the musical establishment, played a prominent role with regular musical performances. Alongside the music, installation and performance art that were both thematically and formally daring found expression at GGG. This cultural dynamic of the aragalya challenged the hegemonic Sinhala national cultural form—a form that is deeply conservative and has little space for marginal identities like the LGBTQ community. The “alternative” cultural identity of GGG also facilitated two significant events. One was the Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day which falls on May 18th and marks the deaths of hundreds of Tamil civilians in the closing stages of the war in 2009. This commemoration, effectively banned by the Sri Lankan state due to its human rights implications, and an uncomfortable truth that the Sinhala community had long ignored, was marked at GGG. What made the event all the more significant was the participation of Buddhist priests—often seen as guardians of Sinhala nationalist ideology—in addition to clergy from other faiths such as the iconic Catholic priest Father Jeevantha Peiris who was closely identified with the aragalaya. The other significant event was a Pride March at GGG on 25th June—a mass celebration of sexual identities that was an unprecedentedly public challenge to the traditional political and cultural mainstream of the country. Still, even while the “alternative” cultural vibe of GGG and the aragalaya forcefully flagged a progressive movement, this aspect of aragalaya culture also jostled for power alongside more established undercurrents. For instance, GGG had a hut for disabled soldiers that promoted the narrative of the ranaviruwa (or war hero), a trope that was weaponized by the Rajapaksas to delegitimize minority political demands and shore up their patriotic Sinhala credentials. Supporters of the controversial war-winning miliary officer-turned-politician Sarath Fonseka were also present in the space of GGG, as was the Buddhist priest Omalpe Sobitha who has a history as a hardline Sinhala nationalist. Their presence could be read in multiple ways. It could mean they strategically maintained a presence within the aragalaya to ensure that its political power remained within the ambit of Sinhala nationalist interests. At the same time, it could also be read as a softening of Sinhala nationalist ideology, potentially creating more space for alternative political and cultural imaginaries. These competing interests and ideologies that were united under the common aragalaya banner of “Gota go Home” became more starkly visible in the aftermath of the July 9th “victory” when protestors stormed several key state buildings, including the Presidential Secretariat, resulting in Gotabhaya Rajapaksa fleeing the country and eventually resigning from the presidency. With the common enemy gone, the competing interests of the various groups represented within the aragalaya began to emerge more explicitly. The FSP began promoting a narrative that the aragalaya had delegitimized the entire parliamentary system in Sri Lank a and that a radical restructuring of the state was necessary. This was also accompanied by a strategic insertion of the notion of a “people’s council,” a seemingly progressive proposal that empowers more direct citizen engagement with governance but was also an obviously strategically motivated bid for the FSP to become relevant in mainstream politics. One narrative that has since emerged is that the aragalaya was hijacked by organized political interests: an accusation that was directed towards the FSP and the JVP by middle class and professional groups that backed the aragalaya but are deeply suspicious of revolutionary politics and subscribe to the more conservative “liberal democratic” discourse discussed above. This narrative of hijacking was not entirely new: indeed, it dovetailed into the incidents of May 9th—early days of the movement—when politically backed thugs, emerging from a meeting at the Prime Minister’s official residence, Temple Trees, unleashed brutal violence on GGG while the police and armed forces did little to intervene. In the aftermath of this unprovoked attack, there was a national backlash, with over 70 houses and properties belonging to politicians thought to be involved in the attack on GGG being torched. One parliament MP was also killed when a mob attacked his vehicle. This is an interregnum in which fluid new political forms are emerging. The spectacular democratic mobilization that emerged during the height of the aragalaya and the spirit of active citizenship it unleashed remains—as does the economic precarity that fueled it. The drivers of the violence of May 9th are unclear. While there was a spontaneous backlash immediately following the attack on GGG, what followed later in the night with systematic burning of politician’s houses had a much more organized dynamic, but it is unclear to this day who drove this wave of attacks. The vigilante violence was of course repudiated by the youth of the aragalaya. But in a deeply conservative political culture where revolutionary political action is viewed with extreme suspicion, May 9th marked a loss of innocence for the aragalaya. Today, there is a sustained campaign to discredit the aragalaya by associating it with violence, a pernicious characterization of it as a “breakdown of the rule of law.” It is frustrating to insist on the fact that given Sri Lanka’s violent history, the aragalaya was indeed a peaceful expression of the people’s will, and not a violent, anarchic movement. It was a creatively conceptualized and executed protest movement that maintained non-violence as a cardinal principle. And it is precisely this peaceful nature of the protest that frustrated a national security apparatus used to the mobilization of force and violent confrontation to suppress dissent. What now? The aragalaya in the form it took since March 31st and lasted more than 100 days appears to be over now. The last of the physical structures that marked the GGG occupy site have been dismantled. As of now, the repression of the Ranil Wickremasinghe government along with its insidious narrative to discredit the aragalaya as a form of anarchy appears to be at least temporarily succeeding. But if we’ve learned anything over the past few months it is that this moment in Sri Lanka is a moment of significant and unpredictable transition. This is an interregnum in which fluid new political forms are emerging. The spectacular democratic mobilization that emerged during the height of the aragalaya and the spirit of active citizenship it unleashed remains—as does the economic precarity that fueled it. The aragalaya marked a distinct turning point in Sri Lanka’s political history as a population used to exercising their franchise within a system of political patronage, at least briefly, transcended instrumental political motivations to demand democratic accountability. The aragalaya also rattled a complacent political class that imagined it was secure within an entrenched patron-client political system. Politics in Sri Lanka are unlikely to follow a familiar script in the aftermath of the aragalaya. The traditional political party system of the country has confronted a significant existential challenge due to the aragalaya . A vast majority of the political parties and their representatives in the current parliament have had their legitimacy undermined—they are held accountable for the current state of the country and they are associated with a corrupt political culture. However, what the swift reversal of fortunes in the aftermath of the aragalaya suggests is that Sri Lanka’s long-entrenched culture of political impunity with deeply institutionalized structures of corruption, nepotism, repression, and violence are unlikely to change easily. If the brief hope kindled by the aragalaya is to survive and be fashioned into viable and sustained political change, it will take committed and long-term engagement by a variety of actors, including civil society and progressive political parties, as highly contingent socioeconomic conditions continue to shape the politics of the moment. Whether anything of this nature will emerge is anybody’s guess. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Mural painted as a Rapid Response by the Fearless Collective during the GotaGoGama protest in Galleface, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Courtesy of the Fearless Collective (June 2022). SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Op-Ed Sri Lanka Aragalaya Gotagogama Energy Crisis Economic Crisis Poverty Gotabhaya Rajapaksa Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day Ranil Wickremasinghe Contradiction Teachers Movement Movement Organization Movement Strategy Precarity Postcolonialism Doughnomore Commission Universal Franchise Ethnocracy Sri Lankan Civil War Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Islamophobia Easter Sunday Bombings of 2019 Lee Kwan Yu Mahathir Mohamed Technocracy Agricultural Labor Agriculture Agrarian Economy Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna Sinhala Nationalism Majoritarianism Accountability HARSHANA RABUKWELLA is the director of the Postgraduate Institute of English, Open University of Sri Lanka, and the author of Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism (2018). His work has appeared in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, boundary 2 , and Journal of Asian Studies , among others. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Social Studies and Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. 27 Feb 2023 Op-Ed Sri Lanka 27th Feb 2023 The Citizen's Vote Jeevan Ravindran 16th Jul The Ambivalent Voter Jeevan Ravindran 20th Sep Storytelling in Post-Aragalaya Sri Lanka Andrew Fidel Fernando · Benislos Thushan · Darshatha Gamage · Raisa Wickrematunge · Kanya D'Almeida 27th Aug Scenes From Gotagogama Sakina Aliakbar · Ruvin De Silva 23rd Feb Chats Ep. 7 · Karti Dharti, Gender & India's Farmers Movement Sangeet Toor 29th Apr On That Note:

ACTIVIST Darshatha Gamage DARSHATHA GAMAGE is currently the Head of Programmes at Hashtag Generation . He has worked on youth participation, preventing violent extremism, countering harm online, and elections. He has designed and implemented capacity-building programmes focused on critical thinking, digital media literacy, peacebuilding, and youth development. ACTIVIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE