WRITER Nidhil Vohra NIDHIL VOHRA is a writer, filmmaker, and a Cinema Studies and Peace & Conflict Studies student at the University of Toronto. His work has been published in NDTV , The Tribune , and The Varsity . WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. FEATURES Whose Footfall is Loudest? AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Essay Myanmar Military Coup Spring Revolution Saffron Revolution Hla Than Aung San Suu Kyi National League for Democracy Amay Sound Low-Income Workers Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring Student Movements Student Protests Incarceration Military Crackdown Military Dictatorship Military Operations Revolution Histories of Revolutionary Politics Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Essay Myanmar 24th Feb 2023 Never in my life did I think that flip-flops could be fascinating. Only after a memorable incident entailing a particular pair of flip-flops did I begin to pay attention to them. An incident, yes! The one that will stay with me my whole life. It made me realise that certain footwear could carry more meaning than just “footwear”. It happened after Amay passed away. Before she drew her last breath, Amay had been struggling with lung cancer for nearly three months. At the time, we were living in a small town. Hoping that we could still save her, we sent her to a hospital in the city. We buried her there when she died. Without Amay, our journey back to our small town was desolate. My heart felt empty, as if there was nothing left for me to hold on to. Everything around me went pitch dark, as if I had been pulled into a black hole. When it was decided that all of Amay’s belongings would be given away to needy families, I acquiesced. I didn’t want to cling to her stuff—after all, I had lost Amay as a person already. Even then, something that belonged to Amay was discovered unexpectedly. A pair of flip-flops. Under Amay’s bed, lying still and quiet in the darkest corner as if they were hiding, were a pair of her flip-flops. They must have been separated from Amay when she was taken to hospital. When I looked at them carefully, I saw that the soles were worn out and the heels were ragged. Amay was a frugal woman who always budgeted carefully and spent wisely. Apart from a new pair of flip-flops for some occasions, she wore these worn rubber flip-flops on a daily basis—when she did household chores and went grocery shopping—for many years. If the straps were broken, she would replace them with new ones herself. If only one strap of her flip-flop was broken, she would keep one new strap for later use. After several years of daily use, Amay’s toeprints were imprinted on the flip-flops. Tears started rolling down as I looked at them. These flip-flops showed me beyond a doubt how Amay went through hard times in her life, and how she endured pain and suffering. That pair of flip-flops I inherited from Amay would stay with me for many, many more years. Since then, I’ve been drawn to stories, memories and lives that could be revealed by well-worn flip-flops. We might change clothes every day, but a member of a low-income household, who could barely afford an extra pair of flip-flops, had to rely on the only pair they had. Flip-flops were a poor person’s comrades-in-arms on a thorny road. Flip-flops gave them strength. They were as close to them as their own skin. “My flip-flops are my fortress!” poet Hla Than declared. After the military coup in February 2021, I collected more intriguing stories of flip-flops and their owners. A small, underdeveloped country suffering from economic asthma under COVID-19 was hit by a rogue political wave. This spring, the future of the nation became as blurry as the spring mist itself. If someone looked far into the future, they would only see a parched land. The military claimed that the 2020 election fraud made the coup inevitable. Prior to the election, “The Sound of Heels,” an election campaign song by the National League for Democracy (NLD), was very popular. It became the NLD’s triumphant anthem following the party’s landslide victory in the election, but it vanished into thin air after the military seized power. The song was dedicated to the State Counsellor, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the NLD, to whom her supporters referred as “Amay”. The song was about how her efforts gave Myanmar, an ostracised society under long years of military rule, a chance to step onto the world stage. On 1 February, the clack-clack of heels were silenced by the bang-bang of military boots. Before long, the whole country was completely under the boots. The voices of mourning mothers, the tongue-clicking of dismayed youth, the moaning of farmers out of their stubbled fields and workers out of their factories got louder and louder each day. “Join the CDM now!” As soon as the rallying cry put people on alert, all those different voices merged together—ineffectual whines turned into battle cries reverberating across the sky. If someone had ever questioned whether footwear could be frightening, the answer would have been “yes” if they were military boots. In the first week of the Spring Revolution, civil servants joined the CDM en masse. The main action of the CDM was that no employee should go to work. In some political cartoons, military generals in jackboots trampled doctors, school teachers and workers. “Stop going to office, struggle out of the dictatorship!” was the slogan of the strikers. They warned each other that if people continued to work for the military state, many precious lives, beautiful things and human values would be smashed under the boots. That’s how footwear became a central character in the Myanmar Spring Revolution. There was more to come. Within a week of the coup, thousands of young people took to the streets. In response, the military hired a group of jingoists and staged counter-protests. Some anti-coup protesters started shouting that they were out on the street on their own volition, and that they had not been paid by anyone. To drive home the point that they were from well-to-do families and that they could not possibly be bought, they came to the protests in expensive outfits and shoes. This, however, only highlighted the dire situation of most of their fellow protestors, who couldn’t afford fancy outfits. There were messages on social media condemning some affluent protesters for talking down to people from underprivileged backgrounds, including those hired by the military. In opposing tyranny, people simultaneously learned to smash any form of discrimination based on wealth or class. Day by day, the revolution gathered strength. It soon turned into a nationwide protest of people from all walks of life—rural and urban. Their footfall echoed in the streets. Now street surfaces seemed totally covered by an array of flip-flops and shoes that it would be difficult for anyone to gain a foothold there. Spring was in full bloom. On roads where fallen ones would be laid to rest, columns after columns of rallies continued to march over and over again. One of the non-violent protests was known as “Lace your shoes up!” In the early days of the Spring, security personnel seemed uncertain about whether they should use force against protesters. They tried to push the crowds off the roads, saying the people were obstructing traffic. The youth reacted by making their protests mobile. They moved around in small groups and continued to protest. They crossed the road when the light was green. They stopped when the light turned red. They shouted rally cries. As soon as they had the chance, they sat on the road, lacing up their shoes at a leisurely pace. Policemen watching them were speechless. In the following days, there were “harvesting onion” and “collecting rice grains” movements. Loose onions and grains of rice were deliberately poured out in the middle of a road so everyone could help pick them up and put them back in the bags to annoy the police. Spring flowers of a variety of colours were seen everywhere. New and creative forms of revolutionary activities shone here and there. Some people found fault with these kinds of protests. Young people were not serious, they said. Others pointed out the generation gap. Older people did not understand the state-of-the-art techniques of young people. In reality in the early days of the spring, people of all ages managed to build mutual trust and solidarity. They were full of energy, enjoying the calm before a storm. The fresh, green spring would soon turn into a fully-blown parched summer. The intense heat made wall tiles rise up and crack. A heatwave also pervaded throughout the democratic movement. The forces, standing up hand-in-hand against the junta, were hit with a bloody gust. A volley of gunfire across the sky set a flock of roosting birds on a chaotic flight. A group of soldiers and police chased down the protesters who were retreating into a neighbourhood, and beat them to death like blood-starved beasts. Even the black asphalt road began to weep, blood streaming down all over her face. After blood was spilled, the style of people’s revolutionary art also changed. Each time a group of people were chased by guns and batons, dozens of ownerless flip-flops would be left abandoned on the street. Some flip-flops were upside down, others in the gutter, and many of them unpaired. And yet most of them looked well-worn. When the security forces were gone, people picked them up and organised them in pairs for their owners to come and collect them. The abandoned flip-flops didn’t look great but they could be invaluable to their owners. In this way, I learned, rather accidentally, that flip-flops had always been important witnesses to our revolutions. In the 1988 uprising, flip-flops were scattered everywhere on the road. In the 2007 Saffron Revolution, there were many flipflops drenched in blood. Following the 2015 student protests, hundreds of flip-flops were on the road again. There was even a shoe charity campaign in 2021. It emerged after some people began to question on social media what kind of shoes would be most suitable for protests if they were to escape from violent attacks. A number of shoe donors came forward. In some places, many pairs of “used, feel free to take” shoes in various sizes were on offer. Some people who owned extra pairs of shoes shared them with their comrades. They exchanged metta in sharing shoes. They looked after each other. They became more united, realising that people were cut from the same cloth. On top of physical violence, people also suffered from psychological warfare by the regime. The longer a revolution dragged on, the more volatile revolutionary morale could become. And yet, crackdowns notwithstanding, most protesters decided to continue with their struggle. Some bid farewells to their parents and friends. “In the event that I am killed I donate my organs to anyone in need,” some people wrote in their wills. “Don’t push this person any further, / at land’s end / my flipflops are my fortress,” read the last lines of a poem by Hla Than. People prepared for a last-ditch fight. Oaths—that they would not back down no matter what—were sworn. They glued pictures of the coup leader on the roads and marched on them. The senior general’s face was smeared with hundreds of footprints. The murder of protesters became more commonplace. The number of martyrs multiplied every day. People shed new tears before old tears dried on their cheeks. They were placed under curfew. Internet access was restricted. Arrests and detentions under various charges became more frequent. People felt less and less secure. There were no more grounds for them to take a stand, so it seemed. They became afraid of nightfall. What they feared more probably was the nightfall over their future. One day I saw a photo of a pair of slippers on social media. “These belonged to a mother. They were left during a protest.” They were white and size 37. The straps were white, but not pure white. The left and right slippers must have been thrown into disarray when the wearer was attacked. There was a line of blood on the pavement that stained one of them. I learned that the owner was a 50-year-old schoolteacher. She was shot to death at that spot by the military terrorists. A bullet that hit her hand took her life as she had a heart condition. “She wasn’t feeling very well when she went to the protest,” said her daughter in an interview. The alleged “2020 election fraud” brought dishonour to members of the education department who had overseen the polling stations. That’s why she believed that it was her duty to protest the coup on the front line. Before she left home, she had comforted her daughter that the security forces would go easy and not use violence against school teachers. Sadly, the gun barrel does not discriminate—it was loyal only to the finger that pulled the trigger. One bullet after another shattered our dreams. Karl Marx’s slogan “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” echoed loudly among the masses. The daughter wept violently over the slippers left by her fallen mother. This reminded me of how I cried whenever I saw my amay’s flip-flops. What of her? Would she become interested in footwear too? In revolutions, footwear is often prematurely parted from its wearers. The group in military boots stood firm, determined to put an end to the civilian resistance. The people had no weapons, nor sturdy shields. Their flip-flops wore thin. Even then, the hot, bloody roads couldn’t be worse than hell. No one seemed to mind the intense heat under their soles. With or without footwear, their way out of hell would be an arduous journey. ∎ Endnotes : Hla Than’s poem was translated by Ko Ko Thett. This essay appeared in Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar 1988-2021 , edited by Ko Ko Thett and Brian Haman, and published by Gaudy Boy in North America, Balestier Press in the UK, and Ethos Books in Singapore. 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:

“When the student at Jamia Millia Islamia University first uttered ‘Dear Shahid’ right after the film's intertitle, I felt a tightening in my chest. It reminded me of my own days in Mumbai at Prithvi Theatre, where idealism was somehow removed from politics and the marginalization that was occurring. When I first saw the film, I felt like I knew this person.” INTERACTIVE On “Letter from Your Far-Off Country” AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “When the student at Jamia Millia Islamia University first uttered ‘Dear Shahid’ right after the film's intertitle, I felt a tightening in my chest. It reminded me of my own days in Mumbai at Prithvi Theatre, where idealism was somehow removed from politics and the marginalization that was occurring. When I first saw the film, I felt like I knew this person.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Live Los Angeles Indian Film Festival of LA Film Film-Making Gujarat Pogroms Letter From Your Far-Off Country Gujarat Riots Genocide Jamia Millia Islamia Epistolary Form Shaheen Bagh Movement CAA Protests Ambedkar Arundhati Roy Black Solidarities Internationalist Solidarity Global Agha Shahid Ali Safdar Hashmi Avant-Garde Form Avant-Garde Traditions Communist Tradition Faiz Ahmed Faiz Iqbal Bano Avant-Garde Aesthetics & Protest Farmers' Movement Diasporas Temporality Avant-Garde Film Short Film Personal History Directors Intertext Mikhail Bakhtin Black Lives Matter Prithvi Theatre Diasporic Distance Unspeakable Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Live Los Angeles 5th Jun 2021 Letter from Your Far-Off Country , a short film by Suneil Sanzgiri, was shot on 16mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as Gujarat’s state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide. The film weaves through forms and footage of a dizzying variety, from epistolary family stories, Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry, the theater of Safdar Hashmi, the Muslim women-led Shaheen Bagh movement, and more, creating a mosaic of temporalities that probe the personal and political together within the context of a fraught nation. As part of our event In Grief, In Solidarity we screened the film, which had been screened just prior at the Indian Film Festival of LA (IFFLA). Here, we show the post-screening Q&A that followed the screening, where xenior editor Vamika Sinha talked to Suneil Sanzgiri and Ritesh Mehta, senior programmer at IFFLA, about the film, how Sanzgiri pulled off his very experimental film, what motivated it, and his intellectual and aesthetic preoccupations. In particular, Sanzgiri talks at length about how the weaving of his personal history connected not just with the Shaheen Bagh movement and CAA protests broadly, but with the fact that protests in India included books by Ambedkar and Arundhati Roy alongside those of Angela Davis, while protests in the US played or sang music by Faiz, Agha Shahid Ali, Iqbal Bano at Black Lives Matter protests. These evocations of a global struggle were key to his approach to filmmaking. Mehta discusses his own emotional response to the film, which was deeply connected to his own experience in theatre in Bombay, and what it felt like to process much of what India had undergone recently, as refracted through Sanzgiri's prism. Letter From Your Far-Off Country is available through the Criterion Collection. In March 2024, Sanzgiri discussed his approach to form at our launch event, “Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse.” 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:

For years, “The Urgent Call of Palestine,” a rallying cry from the 1970s by Zeinab Shaath, was a lost cultural artifact until it was recovered in 2017. In 2024, British-Palestinian label Majazz Project and LA-based Discostan released an EP with the titular song, sitting with startling ease alongside contemporary Palestinian music. BOOKS & ARTS The Tortured Roof AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR For years, “The Urgent Call of Palestine,” a rallying cry from the 1970s by Zeinab Shaath, was a lost cultural artifact until it was recovered in 2017. In 2024, British-Palestinian label Majazz Project and LA-based Discostan released an EP with the titular song, sitting with startling ease alongside contemporary Palestinian music. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Profile Palestine Zeinab Shaath Music Culture Art Art Activism Resistance Peaceful Resistance Methods of Resistance Majaaz Project Discostan Artifact History Egypt Lebanon Poetry Lalita Punjabi Politics of Ethnic Identity political activism Displacement Nakba Gaza Political Organizing Guitar Acoustic Composer Composition Liberation The Urgent Call of Palestine Rally Protest Poetry Ismael Shammout Palestine Liberation Organization Culture and Arts Division Music Video Occupation Militarism Discovery EP Collaboration Freedom Freedom of Movement Memory Conflict Censorship Genocide Anti-Zionism Communication Community Folk Music Global Protest Muqata Shadi Zaqtan Tamer Nafar Palestinian Music Hip Hop 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 Profile Palestine 2nd May 2025 Fifty-four years ago, a sixteen-year-old girl named Zeinab Shaath sat in her bedroom in Alexandria, Egypt, with a guitar and a poem. Her older sister had handed her “The Urgent Call of Palestine,” written by Indian poet Lalita Punjabi, and told her that she couldn’t come out of her room until she had composed music to accompany the words. Shaath came from a politically active family. Her father left Palestine in 1947, just months before the Nakba led to the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians , but he always maintained that they would all return one day. Her Lebanese mother was constantly hosting Gazan students at their home and organizing many fundraisers for Palestine. The musician had been singing for a few years but was hesitant about starting the project. She had never composed music before and was still determining how to become more involved in political organizing. Nonetheless, she got to work. Two days later, she had composed a track that elevated the defiant tone of the poem. Across a fervently strummed acoustic guitar, Shaath sings in an unwavering, golden vibrato that builds intensity and verve as the song progresses. “Liberation banner, raise it high,” she declares in the song's last few seconds. “For Palestine, let us do or die.” Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. Shaath’s powerful voice and unequivocal message resonated widely. In the early 1970s, “The Urgent Call of Palestine” became a rallying cry heard (and subsequently censored) around the world. Shaath’s sister played it on her radio station where it immediately gained popularity. Shaath went on to perform it—and a collection of other musical adaptations of Palestinian protest poetry—everywhere from Beirut to Berlin to Baghdad. The song especially moved Palestinian artist Ismael Shammout , who ran the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) Culture and Arts division in Beirut. He filmed Shaath singing the song in what some historians consider the first Palestinian music video. The master copy of the footage, along with countless other cultural artifacts by Palestinian artists, were stolen from Beirut in 1982 during a mass looting by the Israeli Occupation Forces. “Urgent Call” seemed lost for years until Israeli scholar Rona Sela fought to have it declassified in 2017, by which time momentum around Shaath’s work had lessened. But in March 2024, Shaath started a new chapter in her career: an EP of songs, first released via the PLO in 1972, including “Urgent Call,” was reissued as a collaboration between the Palestinian-British label Majazz Project and the Los Angeles-based label Discostan. Arshia Haq and Jeremy Loudenbak, who run Discostan, discovered the EP via the UK collector James Shambles and then reached out to Mo’min Swaitat, the archivist and label runner behind Majazz Project , to see if he wanted to co-release the album. Swaitat had encountered the record already and felt it was “the greatest Palestinian record we’ve ever had.” Haq and Loudenbak were piqued by the record’s contemporary resonance. “When we play the music in record stores, people stop and listen,” says Loudenbak. “[The state] attempted to erase these songs from the cultural imagination, but they have had an incredibly long life.” “I’m struck by the very hopeful voice of a 16-year-old calling us together.” In March 2024, Arshia Haq, Jeremy Loudenbak, Zeinab Shaath, and Mo’min Swaitat met with me via Zoom to discuss the project . Haq and Loudenbak were in Los Angeles, Shaath in Cincinnati, and Swaitat in London. Shaath and Swaitat reminisced about their homeland. Shaath recalled the beaches her cousins visited until the early hours of the night in 1993 after the first Oslo Accord , which gave them slightly more freedom of movement, as well as the green almonds and olives they brought to her family when they visited Egypt. Swaitat traced his love of music to the memory of the weekly wedding songs he had heard played from car speakers, which created a “psychedelic orchestra” of sound and would continue playing in the streets until 3 am. Of course, their grief emerged in lockstep. By the time we spoke, Shaath had lost 27 members of her extended family in Palestine since Israel’s attack on Gaza began in October of 2023 . Swaitat, meanwhile, had been on the phone all night: Israeli forces had just invaded Jenin. Album cover. Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. Teenage Shaath originally composed “The Urgent Call of Palestine” at a historic moment for Palestinians. Six years before she wrote the song, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) came into being, intending to restore an independent Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And just three years before, Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank, The Sinai Peninsula, and East Jerusalem after the Six-Day War of 1967 . The amount of Palestinian land that Israel controlled doubled during this conflict, despite later attempts from Egypt to regain control of some of the land. Over half a century later, Shaath’s protest music is just as relevant. Israel has been imposing a land, sea, and air blockade on Gaza since 2008. As of October, 2024, airstrikes in North Gaza continue, even as the ambit of Israel’s attacks has expanded to Lebanon. Incomplete estimates claim that Israel’s systematic campaign of genocide since October has killed over 50,000 Palestinians , according to official numbers. In a piece about Palestinian rap, Vivian Medithi writes that it can feel frivolous to over-emphasize art’s radical potential in such times. And yet, Medithi argues, Israel’s censorship of Palestinian art, music, and culture—especially at protests—is proof of its power. After all, cultural expression is a means of record-keeping, a counter to Israel’s attempts to control narratives about their genocide and occupation in international news and social media. Swaitat explicitly calls Shaath’s project a “failure of the Zionist plan” because it so clearly documents Palestinian resistance, connecting Palestinians across the world. “One of the main targets of Zionism is Palestinian identity and knowledge systems, which is where we save our memory,” he says. “They don’t think of us as a group of people who should exist, and they don't want us to have any control over our cultural heritage or communication.” Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. In addition to the poem written by Lalita Punjabi, the three other tracks on Urgent Call are adapted from poems by three Palestinian poets. As she sings their words, Shaath takes on various identities. A proud parent of eight demanding that history remember him and his family. A political prisoner dreaming of returning to their homeland, and a Palestinian citizen finding the strength to survive in the stones of their walls, in “every drop of rain dribbling over the ceiling of the tortured roof.” Shaath’s plainspoken cadence unites these disparate perspectives She sings alone on each song, her vibrato piercing across simple chord progressions strummed on an acoustic guitar. And yet, the songs feel communal, not only because the various perspectives she adopts offer multiple entry points into the music but also because the sparse folk arrangements use candid, repetitive language that encourages the listener to sing along. “Because these songs are composed in direct language, they can be held and carried by people of different ages, from children to people of an older generation,” says Haq. “The musical compositions lend themselves to being repeated, almost like mnemonics.” On “Resist,” Shaath’s call to action is clearly stated and deeply felt: “They slapped down a paper/And a pen before my nose…The paper they wanted me to blemish/Said ‘Resist’/ The pen they wanted to disgrace/ Said ‘Resist, oh, resist.’” On “I Am an Arab,” Shaath repeats the titular phrase with such force that it lingers long after the song finishes. Shaath also directly involves her audience. With her arrangements so minimal and vocals so rich, it feels as if Shaath’s looking you in the eye, candidly asking rhetorical questions: “Can’t you hear the urgent call of Palestine?” “Are you angry?” It is often argued that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land is too complex for the average person to comprehend. Shaath’s phrasing cuts through this fallacy with defiance, her vocals evoking longing, fury, and grief to make the reality of Palestinian suffering entirely clear. Beyond Shaath’s efforts to involve the listener in these specific songs, a broader sense of community informed her activism, too. Not only do the lyrics come from translated works of numerous poets, but they were also written at a time of tremendous creative innovation and organization by other Palestinian artists. Many Palestinian artists were spurred into action following the Six-Day War of 1967. The Third Cinema Movement in the 1960s and 1970s established a transnational anticolonial framework for artistic expression. In 1973, the League of Palestinian Artists was created to unify the output of artists across Palestine and “bring a sense of political urgency” to their work: the sound of an entire movement of artists refusing to be silenced . In addition to the organizing and art happening around her, Shaath also looked to Americans protesting racism and segregation in their country, as well as their government’s involvement in Vietnam, for political inspiration. “I would sing ‘ We Shall Overcome ,’ which is used in the U.S. in Black activist spaces, but it was also a Joan Baez song,” Shaath says. “It was very much relevant to us as Palestinians. We sang that, and everyone would sing with me.” You can hear the influence of activists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the plucky, acoustic folk melodies she deploys on the project, as well as her use of guitar and English lyricism. “I used English lyrics because Arabs and Palestinians all know our own history,” she tells me. “We needed the world to know. Even though it’s not a Palestinian or Arab instrument, I thought the guitar would be attractive to the outside world. I felt that people would listen to a song much more than they would read a whole book.” The title track of Urgent Call was—and continues to be—uniquely global in its construction, production, and impact. An Indian woman wrote a poem in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. A few months later, a Palestinian woman living in Egypt transposed the poem into a song that moved hundreds of thousands around the world. Over decades, it became part of an artistic anti-imperial movement that thought beyond borders and saw all struggles as intertwined. This year, American and British archivists are bringing it to entirely new audiences in their countries and beyond. Zeinab in Lebanon. Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. For Shaath, it’s surprising—and saddening—that her music still resonates so widely. “It blows my mind after all these years,” she says. “Our suffering is still continuing, that’s what it means.” Which also lends credence to Palestinian music as a valuable form of resistance: it must continue. Indeed, Shaath is part of a cohort of Palestinian musicians who recall the past, commune with fellow activists, and create by thinking with street protests. Palestinian rapper Muqata’a samples records his grandparents listened to and had to leave behind when they fled their homes. Oud players in Egypt today revive music that initially served as a protest against Israeli occupation in 1967. Alternative musician Shadi Zaqtan pioneered the Palestinian blues genre to express his sorrow at the ongoing genocide. The daring of this work lies in the strategies of truth-telling in composition: most of these musicians use the most direct, unflinching language possible to document their stories. Often, their work sits alongside darker, more personal reckonings about the reach of their work.“For most of my life, I stupidly believed that art exists to change the world,” Tamer Nafar, often credited as the grandfather of Arab hip hop, has said . “Now, I think about art more like the black box flight recorder on an airplane: it won’t navigate the landing; it’s here to document the crash.”∎ 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:

The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. FEATURES Whose Footfall is Loudest? Thawda Aye Lei The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. Never in my life did I think that flip-flops could be fascinating. Only after a memorable incident entailing a particular pair of flip-flops did I begin to pay attention to them. An incident, yes! The one that will stay with me my whole life. It made me realise that certain footwear could carry more meaning than just “footwear”. It happened after Amay passed away. Before she drew her last breath, Amay had been struggling with lung cancer for nearly three months. At the time, we were living in a small town. Hoping that we could still save her, we sent her to a hospital in the city. We buried her there when she died. Without Amay, our journey back to our small town was desolate. My heart felt empty, as if there was nothing left for me to hold on to. Everything around me went pitch dark, as if I had been pulled into a black hole. When it was decided that all of Amay’s belongings would be given away to needy families, I acquiesced. I didn’t want to cling to her stuff—after all, I had lost Amay as a person already. Even then, something that belonged to Amay was discovered unexpectedly. A pair of flip-flops. Under Amay’s bed, lying still and quiet in the darkest corner as if they were hiding, were a pair of her flip-flops. They must have been separated from Amay when she was taken to hospital. When I looked at them carefully, I saw that the soles were worn out and the heels were ragged. Amay was a frugal woman who always budgeted carefully and spent wisely. Apart from a new pair of flip-flops for some occasions, she wore these worn rubber flip-flops on a daily basis—when she did household chores and went grocery shopping—for many years. If the straps were broken, she would replace them with new ones herself. If only one strap of her flip-flop was broken, she would keep one new strap for later use. After several years of daily use, Amay’s toeprints were imprinted on the flip-flops. Tears started rolling down as I looked at them. These flip-flops showed me beyond a doubt how Amay went through hard times in her life, and how she endured pain and suffering. That pair of flip-flops I inherited from Amay would stay with me for many, many more years. Since then, I’ve been drawn to stories, memories and lives that could be revealed by well-worn flip-flops. We might change clothes every day, but a member of a low-income household, who could barely afford an extra pair of flip-flops, had to rely on the only pair they had. Flip-flops were a poor person’s comrades-in-arms on a thorny road. Flip-flops gave them strength. They were as close to them as their own skin. “My flip-flops are my fortress!” poet Hla Than declared. After the military coup in February 2021, I collected more intriguing stories of flip-flops and their owners. A small, underdeveloped country suffering from economic asthma under COVID-19 was hit by a rogue political wave. This spring, the future of the nation became as blurry as the spring mist itself. If someone looked far into the future, they would only see a parched land. The military claimed that the 2020 election fraud made the coup inevitable. Prior to the election, “The Sound of Heels,” an election campaign song by the National League for Democracy (NLD), was very popular. It became the NLD’s triumphant anthem following the party’s landslide victory in the election, but it vanished into thin air after the military seized power. The song was dedicated to the State Counsellor, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the NLD, to whom her supporters referred as “Amay”. The song was about how her efforts gave Myanmar, an ostracised society under long years of military rule, a chance to step onto the world stage. On 1 February, the clack-clack of heels were silenced by the bang-bang of military boots. Before long, the whole country was completely under the boots. The voices of mourning mothers, the tongue-clicking of dismayed youth, the moaning of farmers out of their stubbled fields and workers out of their factories got louder and louder each day. “Join the CDM now!” As soon as the rallying cry put people on alert, all those different voices merged together—ineffectual whines turned into battle cries reverberating across the sky. If someone had ever questioned whether footwear could be frightening, the answer would have been “yes” if they were military boots. In the first week of the Spring Revolution, civil servants joined the CDM en masse. The main action of the CDM was that no employee should go to work. In some political cartoons, military generals in jackboots trampled doctors, school teachers and workers. “Stop going to office, struggle out of the dictatorship!” was the slogan of the strikers. They warned each other that if people continued to work for the military state, many precious lives, beautiful things and human values would be smashed under the boots. That’s how footwear became a central character in the Myanmar Spring Revolution. There was more to come. Within a week of the coup, thousands of young people took to the streets. In response, the military hired a group of jingoists and staged counter-protests. Some anti-coup protesters started shouting that they were out on the street on their own volition, and that they had not been paid by anyone. To drive home the point that they were from well-to-do families and that they could not possibly be bought, they came to the protests in expensive outfits and shoes. This, however, only highlighted the dire situation of most of their fellow protestors, who couldn’t afford fancy outfits. There were messages on social media condemning some affluent protesters for talking down to people from underprivileged backgrounds, including those hired by the military. In opposing tyranny, people simultaneously learned to smash any form of discrimination based on wealth or class. Day by day, the revolution gathered strength. It soon turned into a nationwide protest of people from all walks of life—rural and urban. Their footfall echoed in the streets. Now street surfaces seemed totally covered by an array of flip-flops and shoes that it would be difficult for anyone to gain a foothold there. Spring was in full bloom. On roads where fallen ones would be laid to rest, columns after columns of rallies continued to march over and over again. One of the non-violent protests was known as “Lace your shoes up!” In the early days of the Spring, security personnel seemed uncertain about whether they should use force against protesters. They tried to push the crowds off the roads, saying the people were obstructing traffic. The youth reacted by making their protests mobile. They moved around in small groups and continued to protest. They crossed the road when the light was green. They stopped when the light turned red. They shouted rally cries. As soon as they had the chance, they sat on the road, lacing up their shoes at a leisurely pace. Policemen watching them were speechless. In the following days, there were “harvesting onion” and “collecting rice grains” movements. Loose onions and grains of rice were deliberately poured out in the middle of a road so everyone could help pick them up and put them back in the bags to annoy the police. Spring flowers of a variety of colours were seen everywhere. New and creative forms of revolutionary activities shone here and there. Some people found fault with these kinds of protests. Young people were not serious, they said. Others pointed out the generation gap. Older people did not understand the state-of-the-art techniques of young people. In reality in the early days of the spring, people of all ages managed to build mutual trust and solidarity. They were full of energy, enjoying the calm before a storm. The fresh, green spring would soon turn into a fully-blown parched summer. The intense heat made wall tiles rise up and crack. A heatwave also pervaded throughout the democratic movement. The forces, standing up hand-in-hand against the junta, were hit with a bloody gust. A volley of gunfire across the sky set a flock of roosting birds on a chaotic flight. A group of soldiers and police chased down the protesters who were retreating into a neighbourhood, and beat them to death like blood-starved beasts. Even the black asphalt road began to weep, blood streaming down all over her face. After blood was spilled, the style of people’s revolutionary art also changed. Each time a group of people were chased by guns and batons, dozens of ownerless flip-flops would be left abandoned on the street. Some flip-flops were upside down, others in the gutter, and many of them unpaired. And yet most of them looked well-worn. When the security forces were gone, people picked them up and organised them in pairs for their owners to come and collect them. The abandoned flip-flops didn’t look great but they could be invaluable to their owners. In this way, I learned, rather accidentally, that flip-flops had always been important witnesses to our revolutions. In the 1988 uprising, flip-flops were scattered everywhere on the road. In the 2007 Saffron Revolution, there were many flipflops drenched in blood. Following the 2015 student protests, hundreds of flip-flops were on the road again. There was even a shoe charity campaign in 2021. It emerged after some people began to question on social media what kind of shoes would be most suitable for protests if they were to escape from violent attacks. A number of shoe donors came forward. In some places, many pairs of “used, feel free to take” shoes in various sizes were on offer. Some people who owned extra pairs of shoes shared them with their comrades. They exchanged metta in sharing shoes. They looked after each other. They became more united, realising that people were cut from the same cloth. On top of physical violence, people also suffered from psychological warfare by the regime. The longer a revolution dragged on, the more volatile revolutionary morale could become. And yet, crackdowns notwithstanding, most protesters decided to continue with their struggle. Some bid farewells to their parents and friends. “In the event that I am killed I donate my organs to anyone in need,” some people wrote in their wills. “Don’t push this person any further, / at land’s end / my flipflops are my fortress,” read the last lines of a poem by Hla Than. People prepared for a last-ditch fight. Oaths—that they would not back down no matter what—were sworn. They glued pictures of the coup leader on the roads and marched on them. The senior general’s face was smeared with hundreds of footprints. The murder of protesters became more commonplace. The number of martyrs multiplied every day. People shed new tears before old tears dried on their cheeks. They were placed under curfew. Internet access was restricted. Arrests and detentions under various charges became more frequent. People felt less and less secure. There were no more grounds for them to take a stand, so it seemed. They became afraid of nightfall. What they feared more probably was the nightfall over their future. One day I saw a photo of a pair of slippers on social media. “These belonged to a mother. They were left during a protest.” They were white and size 37. The straps were white, but not pure white. The left and right slippers must have been thrown into disarray when the wearer was attacked. There was a line of blood on the pavement that stained one of them. I learned that the owner was a 50-year-old schoolteacher. She was shot to death at that spot by the military terrorists. A bullet that hit her hand took her life as she had a heart condition. “She wasn’t feeling very well when she went to the protest,” said her daughter in an interview. The alleged “2020 election fraud” brought dishonour to members of the education department who had overseen the polling stations. That’s why she believed that it was her duty to protest the coup on the front line. Before she left home, she had comforted her daughter that the security forces would go easy and not use violence against school teachers. Sadly, the gun barrel does not discriminate—it was loyal only to the finger that pulled the trigger. One bullet after another shattered our dreams. Karl Marx’s slogan “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” echoed loudly among the masses. The daughter wept violently over the slippers left by her fallen mother. This reminded me of how I cried whenever I saw my amay’s flip-flops. What of her? Would she become interested in footwear too? In revolutions, footwear is often prematurely parted from its wearers. The group in military boots stood firm, determined to put an end to the civilian resistance. The people had no weapons, nor sturdy shields. Their flip-flops wore thin. Even then, the hot, bloody roads couldn’t be worse than hell. No one seemed to mind the intense heat under their soles. With or without footwear, their way out of hell would be an arduous journey. ∎ Endnotes : Hla Than’s poem was translated by Ko Ko Thett. This essay appeared in Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar 1988-2021 , edited by Ko Ko Thett and Brian Haman, and published by Gaudy Boy in North America, Balestier Press in the UK, and Ethos Books in Singapore. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Artwork by Mahnoor Azeem. Ink collage on cardstock. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Essay Myanmar Military Coup Spring Revolution Saffron Revolution Hla Than Aung San Suu Kyi National League for Democracy Amay Sound Low-Income Workers Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring Student Movements Student Protests Incarceration Military Crackdown Military Dictatorship Military Operations Revolution Histories of Revolutionary Politics THAWDA AYE LEI is a Burmese writer who has published four novels and two short story collections. She is currently working as a researcher on gender- and media-related studies for Burma-based international NGOs. In 2021, she enrolled in the PhD program in Political Science at McMaster University, Canada. Essay Myanmar 24th Feb 2023 MAHNOOR AZEEM is an illustrator, writer, and recent graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design. She is based in Lahore. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

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

WRITER Paweł Wargan PAWEŁ WARGAN is an activist and organiser based in Berlin. He co-founded and coordinates the Green New Deal for Europe campaign, sits on the Coordinating Collective of the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25) and serves as the Coordinator of the Secretariat at the Progressive International. He publishes regularly in Jacobin , the New Statesman , Tribune, and Politico. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Information asymmetry, shadowy military operations, mining mafias, and the consent, or lack thereof, of the working class in how their information, labor, and presence are used are all tied to the production, distribution, and consumption of food, energy, and water in India. For climate journalist Aruna Chandrasekhar, this understanding, as well as the proximity of Operation Green Hunt to her hometown, led her to journalism. COMMUNITY On the Ethics of Climate Journalism Aruna Chandrasekhar Information asymmetry, shadowy military operations, mining mafias, and the consent, or lack thereof, of the working class in how their information, labor, and presence are used are all tied to the production, distribution, and consumption of food, energy, and water in India. For climate journalist Aruna Chandrasekhar, this understanding, as well as the proximity of Operation Green Hunt to her hometown, led her to journalism. There is an imbalance of power to be corrected—how do you level a playing field where, for centuries, you have oppressed, displaced communities, and always justified it for your own benefit? RECOMMENDED: " How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades " , NY Times . By Somini Sengupta, Jacqueline Williams, and Aruna Chandrasekhar. On how the Adani Group lobbied successfully to mine for coal in Australia and subsequently transporting it to India and contributing to energy and climate crises in both India and Bangladesh. 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 Andhra Pradesh Climate Climate Change Investigative Journalism Coastal Displacement Anthropocene Parachuting Mining Freelancing Environmental Disaster Environment Power Dynamics Operation Green Hunt Bombay Diaspora Diasporic Distance Journalism Ethics of Journalism Displacement Evictions COVID-19 Forest Collective Energy Crisis Telugu Tamil Movement Organization Corporate Power Adani Group Coal Visakhapatnam Vizag Port Cities Labor Rights ARUNA CHANDRASEKHAR is an independent journalist and a writer from India, currently at the University of Oxford. Her interests in work dwell on themes of corporate accountability, climate change, indigenous rights and resistance, environmental law, energy, conflict, gender and public health. Her stories have appeared in The New York Times , The Guardian, New Internationalist, BuzzFeed, and many other outlets. Interview Andhra Pradesh 22nd Aug 2020 On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

"The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized." COMMUNITY Indentured Labor & Guyanese Politics "The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized." 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 Guyana 11th Oct 2020 Interview Guyana 2020 Guyanese Election People's Progressive Party Cold War Politics Black-Indian Tensions in Guyana Cheddi Jagan Black Solidarities Forbes Burnham Coolitude Fictional Essay Khal Torabully Avant-Garde Destabilizing History Irfaan Ali David Granger Ethnically Divided Politics Indentured Labor Labor Indo-Caribbean Georgetown 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 People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized. RECOMMENDED: Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur. 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

"For most dissenters in Pakistan, whether it's a movement like the PTM, or journalists critical of the state, the first reaction of the state's representatives is to characterize them as traitors, or funded by foreign governments." COMMUNITY Progressivism in Pakistani Higher Education Nida Kirmani "For most dissenters in Pakistan, whether it's a movement like the PTM, or journalists critical of the state, the first reaction of the state's representatives is to characterize them as traitors, or funded by foreign governments." RECOMMENDED: Questioning the ‘Muslim Woman’: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality by Nida Kirmani (Routledge, 2013) 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 Karachi Pashtun Tahafuz Movement Postcolonial Feminist Theory Feminist Organizing Progressivism Deniz Kandiyoti Lyari Sociology Mama Qadeer Refusal of Anthropology Anthropology Baloch Missing Persons Slums Dissent State Repression Statelessness Gulalai Ismail Matiullah Jan Lahore LUMS Urbanization Islamophobia NIDA KIRMANI is the Madeleine Haas Russell Visiting Associate Professor of South Asian Studies at Brandeis University. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), and coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Minor. She is a leading feminist public intellectual who has published widely on issues related to gender, Islam, women’s movements, development, and urban studies in India and Pakistan. She completed her Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Manchester in Sociology. Her book, Questioning ‘the Muslim Woman’: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality , was published in 2013 by Routledge. She is currently working on on urban violence, gender, and insecurity in Lyari in Karachi, Pakistan. Interview Karachi 27th Aug 2020 On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

Tarfia Faizullah's oeuvre is one of poetic attunement to how the temporalities of violence at various scales—be it the mass rape and torture of women in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 or the colonial plunder of cultural artifacts—are linked with crimes of intimacy at the most personal and private level. Eliding cliche, her work is connected by a searching fury at unjust banalities. INTERACTIVE FLUX · Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Tarfia Faizullah's oeuvre is one of poetic attunement to how the temporalities of violence at various scales—be it the mass rape and torture of women in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 or the colonial plunder of cultural artifacts—are linked with crimes of intimacy at the most personal and private level. Eliding cliche, her work is connected by a searching fury at unjust banalities. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Event Dallas Live FLUX Published Work Poetry Alien of Extraordinary Ability Seam Reading Bangladeshi Diapora Bangladesh Immigration Work Authorization Borders Visa 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 Event Dallas 5th Dec 2020 FLUX: An Evening in Dissent A selection of readings by Tarfia Faizullah served as a gentle, immersive break between panels. Faizullah read excerpts from her poetry collections Registers of Illuminated Villages and Seam and the experimental poem Alien of Extraordinary Ability , which we published earlier that year. “ Is this a museum or a border? where there / is a border, does there need to be patrol? ” Faizullah muses in Alien of Extraordinary Ability , a startling and experimental work shifting slowly from a visa alien classification by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) federal agency to the vicissitudes of borders, abuse, and plunder simultaneously intimate and global: speaking with one voice, then with many, often within a single verse or phrase. Jaishri Abichandani's Art Studio Tour Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval: A panel on US left electoralism, COVID19, recent victories, & lasting problems. Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Bhavik Lathia & Jaya Sundaresh: A panel on the US Left & its relationship with media in the wake of Bernie Sanders' loss. Rajiv Mohabir: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors DJ Kiran: A Celebratory Set 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: