The Caravan - January 2023 8688065543, 9529020226

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13TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

Founder: Vishva Nath (1917-2002) Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Printer: Paresh Nath

VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 1 JANUARY 2023

cover story / film 26

Tightrope Act Shah Rukh Khan’s silent rebellion eram agha

26

Ever since his 2015 comments on rising intolerance in India created a major controversy, the actor Shah Rukh Khan has refrained from speaking out about the erosion of Indian secularism. However, even as Bollywood’s biggest superstar has been intimidated into silence and faces intense scrutiny from both sides of the political aisle, he has refused to join the rest of the industry in its sycophantic praise for the Narendra Modi government or in its pandering to the Hindu supremacist tropes prevalent in contemporary cinema. Over a career spanning three decades, his films have often espoused love for the nation—not to an idealised India but to a complex, often deeply flawed, country. Moreover, in an industry, and an era, in which being a Muslim has often been fraught, he has neither shed his religious identity nor allowed himself to be defined by it.

perspectives

16

security

16 Green Herring Why India’s political leadership is bragging about winning a war with Pakistan

sushant singh politics

18 Big Chief, Little Country

48

Narendra Modi’s outsized image comes at the cost of a shrinking democracy

hartosh singh bal politics

48 11,299 Days

politics

How an entire state got behind Arputhamammal in her quest to free her son

22 Code of Silence

sujatha sivagnanam

dhirendra k jha JANUARY 2023

Why the demand for the Sarna code rattles the RSS

3

the lede

66 12

arts

10 Sculpting Lives How an anaplastologist combines art with science

photo essay / communities

shradha triveni

Inside Gangtok’s skateboarding subculture

communities

kunga tashi lepcha

66 Room and Board

12 Sea of Troubles The Italian government’s reluctance to grant safe harbour to refugees

alessia manzi

books

literature

88 The World of

Bibhutibhushan Efforts to memorialise the author’s legacy in Ghatsila

hansda sowvendra shekhar

98 the bookshelf

96

editor’s pick

98

88

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contributors THE LEDE

10 12

Shradha Triveni is an editorial intern at The Caravan. Alessia Manzi is a freelance journalist based in Italy. Her work has appeared in El País, Die Tageszeitung and Balkan Insight, among others. She covers the environment, society, migrants and human rights.

PERSPECTIVES

16

Sushant Singh is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and a visiting lecturer at Yale University. Hartosh Singh Bal is the political editor at The Caravan. Dhirendra K Jha is a contributing writer at The Caravan.

18 22

REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS

26 Eram Agha is a reporting fellow at The Caravan. 48 Sujatha Sivagnanam is a reporting fellow at The Caravan.

PHOTO ESSAY

66 Kunga Tashi Lepcha is an independent photographer based in Gangtok, Sikkim. He works on identity, space, the environment and social issues.

BOOKS

88 Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar is a writer and translator based in Jharkhand.

COVER

Photo: Gareth Cattermole / DIFF / Getty Images

Corrections: The December cover story, “Today’s Truth,” erroneously referred to a 1998 article in India Today precipitating the fall of the Congress-led IK Gujral government. The article was published in 1997 and the Gujral government was not led by the Congress. It also said Shyam Meera Singh worked as a reporter at Aaj Tak, whereas he worked as a sub-editor.

editor Anant Nath executive editor Vinod K Jose political editor Hartosh Singh Bal senior associate editor Puja Sen books editor Maya Palit creative director Sukruti Anah Staneley associate editor Ajachi Chakrabarti web editor Surabhi Kanga assistant editors Tusha Mittal, Amrita Singh, Abhay Regi and Mehak Mahajan assistant editor (hindi) Vishnu Sharma staff writers Sagar, Nileena MS, Aathira Konikkara and Sunil Kashyap contributing writers Dhirendra K Jha, Prabhjit Singh, Jatinder Kaur Tur and Nikita Saxena editorial fellow Jessica Jakoinao reporting fellows Sujatha Sivagnanam and Eram Agha multimedia producer CK Vijayakumar multimedia reporter Shahid Tantray fact-checker Swetha Kadiyala social-media and audience editor Anandita Chandra senior software engineer Anjaneya Sivan photo researcher Devadeep Gupta senior graphic designer Paramjeet Singh junior graphic designer Shagnik Chakraborty hindi translator Parijat P trainee journalist (hindi) Ankita Chauhan editorial manager Haripriya KM contributing editors Deborah Baker, Fatima Bhutto, Chandrahas Choudhury, Siddhartha Deb, Sadanand Dhume, Siddharth Dube, Christophe Jaffrelot, Mira Kamdar, Miranda Kennedy, Amitava Kumar, Basharat Peer, Samanth Subramanian and Salil Tripathi editorial interns Ishika Chauhan and Shradha Triveni social-media intern Sushmita Balakrishnan

[email protected]

Amrita Singh’s “Agent Orange,” also published in December, incorrectly stated that the Alt News editor Priyanka Jha spent the COVID-19 lockdown in Bhopal. In fact, she was staying in Ahmedabad at the time.

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The Caravan regrets the errors.

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THE LEDE Sculpting Lives How an anaplastologist combines art with science / Arts

/ shradha triveni Daril Atkins sculpts parts of the human body. The life of this 77-year-old sculptor-turned-anaplastologist is marked by giving helping hands to people, literally. “I am a trained sculptor,” he told me at his lab, DA Anaplastology India LLP, in Bengaluru. “As an anaplastologist, I am expected to create a masterpiece that nobody would be able to detect.” When I entered his lab, Atkins was gazing intently at an object in his hand, with his back toward me. “Give me a minute,” he told me. Looking around, I saw parts of an eye, a nose, fingers and toes of various textures, skin tone and size—which were not merely the paraphernalia of an anaplastologist but also pieces of art, made by an artist. In a minute’s time, a sagely face greeted me. Atkins never imagined he would become a certified clinical anaplastologist. In fact, the term anaplastology became popular only after the 1980s with the establishment of the American Anaplastology Association in Stanford University, California, under the leadership of Walter G Spohn, a contemporary of Atkins. “Ana means to restore, to make again, and plast is the use of synthetic materials,” he told me. “So, the craft of lifelike prosthetic restoration is called anaplastology.” The AAA grew from being a small group of like-minded

For Atkins, anaplastology goes beyond restoring malformed or absent anatomy. “It is more of a psychic package.”

ww 10

professionals into the International Anaplastology Association—a global council for medical, dental, artistic and scientific professionals providing prosthetic restorative care for patients with absent or malformed anatomy. As a fine-arts graduate from the MS University of Baroda in the 1960s, Atkins was confused about his career prospects. One day at his ancestral house in Gujarat, he was drawn towards a unique advertisement in a magazine which required people who could craft human body parts. This was a moment of revelation for young Atkins. By 2006, he was one among a handful of people to be recognised by the Board for Certification in Clinical Anaplastology as a certified clinical anaplastologist. With over five decades of dedication to this art and science, Atkins is practically part of the historical evolution of the field. He left for Dubai in 1985 when he was appointed as an anaplastologist at the Rashid Hospital under the Dubai Health Authority in the United Arab Emirates. “I used to be so excited when I started with work that I would not go home at 5 o’clock,” he recalled. “I used to sleep in the lab. I spent almost five years like that.” Between 1969 and 1985, he worked in the Tata department of plastic surgery and the cosmetic prosthetics lab of Society for Research, Reconstruction and Rehabilitation in Bombay, and the Gujarat Cancer and Research Institute in Ahmedabad. In this period, Atkins told me, he not only executed the country’s first case of skull reconstitution in 1973 and created India’s first lifelike hand glove for partial hand loss, but also fabricated the first penile prosthesis for sex reassignTHE CARAVAN

ment and traumatic loss in 1980. As a delegate at the International Anaplastology Association’s annual conferences, Atkins has presented papers in international seminars and conducts rigorous workshops at his lab, in addition to spreading awareness about this branch of medicine. In India, prosthetics is commonly mentioned as artificial limbs, which refers to upper and lower functional limbs. In that context Atkins said that except for the Jaipur leg—a rubber-based prosthetic leg developed in Jaipur—almost all the private artificial-limb centres are just assembling imported components and charging exorbitant fees. The awareness about prosthetics and anaplastology is lacking even among experts. The journey of a patient with a lost or absent external body part typically begins at the accident emergency unit, or in a clinical out-patient department, or in the obstetrics ward. From there, the patient may be referred to medical specialists and eventually to the plastic and reconstructive surgeons. However, if reconstructive surgery needs to be postponed or ruled out, the surgeon may refer the patient to a prosthodontist and an anaplastologist. It is anaplastologists like Atkins who create the lifelike camouflage that enables the patient to reintegrate into society and become psychosocially rehabilitated. Back in 1974, Atkins realised that lifelike hand gloves were not available in India. The ones that were available at the armed forces limb centre in Pune were imported from the United Kingdom. So, he began experimenting with the design and fabrication

courtesy shradha triveni

the lede

above: Parts of an eye, a nose, ears, fingers and a breast, of various sizes and textures, created by Daril Atkins, a trained sculptor and anaplastologist.

of lifelike hand gloves at plastics factories in Mumbai. In 1975, when he joined the Gujarat Cancer & Research Institute, there seemed to be no need for this product. But Atkins continued experiments at his outhouse. By 1979, he resigned from the institute and set up his own research lab dedicated to loss and absence of parts of the hand and foot. Working sixteen hours a day to meet the demand and to make ends meet, he had little or no family life. At a conference in Germany, other delegates were amazed at his work on partial hand loss—the first of its kind in India—which attracted global recognition. He returned to India in 2019 and was pleasantly surprised to learn about the increase in the number of practising anaplastologists. He said that, considering the population of India, many more practitioners will be needed. This can begin with dedicated workshops, internships and fellowships, he told me. JANUARY 2023

“Every district government hospital should have a certified clinical anaplastologist working in collaboration with other departments for the treatment of people from every section of society—not only those who can afford cutting edge materials like medical silicone polymers,” Atkins said. He noticed the growing awareness about his field while emphasising the need for availability of anaplastologists all over the world. He said they should not be concentrated in big cities alone but should also be more “spread out.” An individual from a working-class background with a certain body malformation should be able to reach out to the nearest anaplastologist, perhaps in every government hospital. For Atkins, anaplastology goes beyond restoring malformed or absent anatomy. “It is more of a psychic package. People with absent body parts or deformities become objects of morbid curiosity and embarrassment. They try to isolate themselves from society. They do not want to integrate. And that’s where people like myself come in, where we create camouflage items with which they can look almost ‘normal’ again.” Atkins recalled that the case of Zakia, an acid-burn victim, was an unnerving moment. It was a pro-bono case handled by a London-based reconstructive surgeon with Atkins, which was captured in an Oscar-winning documentary, Saving Face. “That was a tremendous experience for me and for the patient. The patient’s children were grown up, and they would feel a tremendous amount of regret to see their mother in that condition. And then they were able to see their mother again, with her complete face.” He harked back to the mood of the scene and the gratitude in their eyes. “For people like myself, that is the main satisfaction where money doesn’t count at all,” he said. “I felt that I was able to do something. To make a difference in the lives of these people … As long as I am alive, and capable, I will do my part. What more can I do?” s 11

the lede

Sea of Troubles The Italian government’s reluctance to grant safe harbour to refugees / Communities

/ alessia manzi “I was just a child when I left Mali,” Mamadou said. “I travelled a long way arriving in Libya, but after the fall of Gaddafi, the socio-political situation in the country…” His voice trailed off, as he stirred the remaining sugar at the bottom of his cup. “I ended up in prison. There, my body went through all the torture of the world.” He continued, “One day, the Libyans dumped us on the beach. I had never seen the sea.” From the coast, Mamadou saw the Mediterranean Sea for the first time. “Libyans ordered us to inflate the boat to enter the sea. Those who refused were killed. So, I trusted fate and I crossed the sea.” He boarded the boat with about a hundred people but, seven miles off the Libyan coast, the engine broke down. They remained at sea for seven days and seven nights. He arrived in Italy in 2015. “There were about a hundred people on the boat but only forty people arrived in Italy. I don’t know how I survived. Now I would like to help others and say Libya is hell.” For most refugees, the journey to Europe by sea is perilous. On 3 October 2013, 368 people died off the coast of Lampedusa, Sicily, in southern Italy— by far the most devastating migrant shipwreck. Since then, more than twenty-nine thousand migrants have died trying to reach Europe. On 2 November 2022, Italy tacitly renewed a memorandum with Libya, to curb the arrivals of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Humanitarian groups, including Amnesty International Italy, have said the memorandum can create “conditions for the violation of the rights of migrants and refugees.” The pact, signed in 2017, provides for support to the Libyan coast guard through funding and training, for which Italy has already spent at least a hundred and fifty million euros over the past five years. According to a 2021 Amnesty Interna12

tional report titled, “No one will come looking for you,” migrants intercepted and returned to Libyan territory suffer all kinds of abuses, including sexual violence, in Libyan detention centres. For the same year, NGO International Rescue Committee reported that in the first eight months alone, more than twenty-three thousand people had been repatriated to Libya. Within days of renewed agreements with Libya, on 4 November 2022, the Giorgia Meloni government refused safe port to the ship Humanity 1, run by German charity SOS Humanity, and another ship, Geo Barents, operated by Médecins Sans Frontieres—also known as Doctors Without Borders—carrying 179 and 572 rescued migrants respectively. After the delay and selective disembarkation, a total of 35 and 215 migrants remained on the vessels. The interior minister Matteo Piantedosi called them “residual cargo,” directing

LETTER FROM ITALY

the ships to leave Italian territorial waters. The ships remained docked at the Catania pier as the European Commission called on Italy not to commit human rights violations. Throughout the country, there were demonstrations in support of the migrants stranded on the boats, most of whom had fled Libya. By 9 November, all were allowed to get off the ships. But not before Meloni made the statement that “there are no shipwrecked people on those vessels, but migrants that can also be catered to by well-equipped ships, such as those of the NGOs.” Meloni and the Italian right-wing have long since tried to make a distinction between “real” and “fake” refugees: among the real THE CARAVAN

refugees are Ukrainians, to whom Italy has not closed its doors. The far-right coalition, made up of Meloni’s Fratelli D’Italia, Lega Nord and Forza Italia, had won elections not too long ago, in September 2022. They have been raising the fear of what non-European migration will do to the region—with Meloni calling to resist the “Islamisation of Europe” which she claims threatens the country’s “Christian identity.” Meloni and her government have clamped down on the NGOs, called for naval blockades, and the construction of camps or “hotspots” in African countries to stop migrants at the point of departure itself. The deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, is currently on trial for refusing to allow 164 migrants off the rescue ship operated by Open Arms, a Spanish charity, in August 2019 for six days, when he was interior minister. He claims to have been following the government’s “closed ports” policies. Refugees arrive mainly by sea. Those by land, do so by crossing the Italian-Slovenian border. Due to largescale refugee movements since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, support hubs known as “blue dots”—safe spaces dedicated to women, children and people with specific needs—were also opened in Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy’s north-easternmost region, by UNHCR and UNICEF and others in April. “We are bombarded with inquiries about unaccompanied minors because we listen for the territorial commission,” Veronica Saba, a social worker with the Stella Polare project of the Committee for the Civil Rights of Prostitutes working against human trafficking, explained. “Many kids come from rural and poverty-stricken backgrounds. There are only two options for a boy to escape family feuds—sent away or sold. Along these long journeys, people may be sexually assaulted; a phenomenon that if it touches men, it hardly emerges.” Hermine Gbedo, the project coordinator, added that women

the lede

samuel nacar / sopa images / getty images

left: Migrants looking at the Mediterranean Sea after being rescued. Within days of renewed agreements with Libya, on 4 November 2022, the Giorgia Meloni government refused safe port to the ships Humanity 1 and Geo Barents.

arriving from the Mediterranean route entered the project but for those arriving from the Balkan route, Trieste—the capital seaport city of Friuli Venezia Giulia—“is just a stopover.” “Since this summer, we have seen fifty to seventy people arrive per day mainly from the Balkan route,” Gianfranco Schiavone of the Italian Solidarity Consortium, told me. “But some also come from the central Mediterranean. There are hundreds of people sleeping in the streets. Many of them have also applied for asylum. If the government assigned the place to those who ask to stay in Italy, there would also be a bed for migrants not yet in the system reception or in transit. Especially those who come from Kurdistan or Afghanistan want to continue their journey. They continue their journey to the rest of Europe. So many unaccompanied minors do the same, but the risk of being stranded in Italy is high, despite being entitled to family reunification because it is a very long procedure.” “A few months ago, I ran away from my village in Kerala,” a labourer from India told me as he got off the train from the Slovenian border to Trieste, Italy. “I’m Catholic, and during the religious holiday period, my community becomes the target

of extremists. I took a flight from India to Greece and continued on foot to Serbia. With me are other friends. Some are bricklayers, others are farmers. In Slovenia, we were rejected several times until we got a chance to cross the border and enter Italy. It was an exhausting journey. Now we just hope to start a new life.” “It’s a disaster,” Ismael, a cultural mediator who arrived from Pakistan a few years ago, told me, bringing a thermal blanket to a Pakistani boy sitting on a bench. “In these four years, there have never been so many arrivals.” “Volunteers are coming from all over Italy. The migrants are hungry and looking for clothes and shoes. How can you say no?” Paola T, a volunteer with Linea D’Ombra, an association founded in 2019 which offers support to migrants in transit along the Balkan route, said. “This square is now a meeting point and has a high symbolic value, a solidarity has been generated here that has spread like wildfire.” As night fell, a family that had come from Rojhelat, Iranian Kurdistan, with two small girls, taking some cardboard boxes, lay down on a flowerbed. That night, too, they would sleep under the stars. s JANUARY 2023

13

True media n eeds true allies .

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I read Caravan because I find it to be a journal that tells, investigates, and delves into important stories, on what’s going on in the country today. Caravan is not influenced by corporate interest or political alignments, and investigates in a genuine sense the real stories that we need to know. ORIJIT SEN , Artist

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PERSPECTIVES Green Herring Why India’s political leadership is bragging about winning a war with Pakistan / Security

The questions are about China. The answers are about Pakistan. That seems to be the case when it comes to the Narendra Modi government’s designs for India’s security challenges. Even as the Chinese army clashed with Indian soldiers at Tawang’s Yangtse Ridge, in December, the Modi government was more focussed on issuing diplomatic statements against Pakistan. The charge was led by the minister of external affairs, S Jaishankar, in New York, using India’s turn at the presidency of the UN Security Council to converge attention towards countries harbouring terrorism—a thinly guised euphemism for Pakistan. That terrorism is a priority when no major terror attack has taken place in India since the 2019 Pulwama suicide bombing while the Chinese continue to militarily threaten India along the border makes this direction incomprehensible. That too when the Modi government is robustly engaging with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a dispensation seen to be synonymous with terrorism. The incessant focus on Pakistan has been on for a few months now. In October, Modi donned battle fatigues and boasted of military preparedness while spending a few hours with soldiers in Kargil, where India and Pakistan last fought a limited war in 1999. That same month, on Shaurya Diwas, commemorating the day the Indian Army landed in Kashmir in 1947, the defence minister, Rajnath Singh, said that the unfinished agenda of 5 August 2019— when Article 370 was abrogated—is to 16

courtesy press information bureau

/ sushant singh

wrest back Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Gilgit–Baltistan. In November, responding to a question during a media interaction, Lieutenant General Upendra Dwivedi, the chief of the Northern Command, stated that the army was ready to take back PoK whenever such orders are given by the government. In fact, he did not go as far as the late Bipin Rawat who, as the army chief in September 2019, had said that, should the union government decide, the army would be ready to “retrieve PoK and making it a part of India.” India’s claim over parts of Kashmir emanates from the instrument of accession signed by the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir on 26 October 1947. At the peak of the Kashmir insurgency, in February 1994, parliament passed a THE CARAVAN

unanimous resolution stating that PoK is an integral part of India and that “Pakistan must vacate the areas of the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir, which they have occupied through aggression.” That is not very different from the unanimous resolution on China passed on 14 November 1962, where the same parliament affirmed “the firm resolve of the Indian people to drive out the aggressor from the sacred soil of India, however long and hard the struggle may be.” Any such resolve on China today is unlikely to be invoked by the current dispensation. Pakistan, caught in its own whirlpool of economic disaster, political turmoil and social strife, is a much more convenient target for Hindutva ideologues. However, such noise may be pushing India towards a dangerous precipice.

perspectives It is easy to ignore the hyper-nationalistic rhetoric of political leaders, but harder to disregard the claims of senior commanders indicating their intent to take back PoK. According to a survey by the Stimson Center, ninety percent of Indians believe that India “probably or definitely would” defeat Pakistan in a war, and now the Indian media is reporting claims of taking back PoK with great sincerity. These claims must, therefore, be clinically examined. Senior military officers, serving and retired, have told me that there are no actual plans to start a war with Pakistan to take back PoK. It is not a military aim that has been given any serious consideration within the armed forces. The terrain is very tough and, as the military dictum goes, “mountains eat troops.” Further, the current force levels would rule out any such endeavour. The army can only undertake offensive operations in areas where the going is relatively easier. That would mean the Jammu and Chamb sectors, and some of the hilly areas in the Rajouri sector. The current plans in other areas are for the very limited objectives of gaining some local tactical and operational advantage—the Haji Pir Pass, which would allow the army to link the Uri and Poonch sectors, being the most prominent. The army has identified some other areas—in Kargil, and the Neelum and Leepa valleys—but, as HS Panag, the former chief of the Northern Command, wrote in 2019, “we have the capacity to extend the LoC by 5-10 kms in selected areas in a 7-10-day limited war.” That is, if everything goes as per plan—a big if. According to military officials I spoke to, the Indian Army’s 14 Corps, looking after the eastern Ladakh border with China, besides its commitments in Siachen, is in no position to even attempt any serious moves to get into Gilgit–Baltistan. This is after discounting the fact that China’s showpiece China– Pakistan Economic Corridor projects pass through that region, which makes Beijing an important stakeholder in preserving the status quo. Considering the quantum of territory that would have to be captured in Gilgit–Baltistan, the force levels simply do not exist with the Indian military.

Any military engagement to wrest back PoK is not going to be a limited war. It will be a protracted conflict— not a short, swift engagement of ten or fifteen days—and a war that shall not be limited to Jammu and Kashmir alone. Pakistan is bound to open other fronts on the international border to relieve pressure in Jammu and Kashmir, even if we somehow assume that China will stay neutral in such a scenario. During the Kargil conflict, India kept the war limited to Kashmir, even ordering the Indian Air Force to fly only on India’s side of the Line of Control. One former army commander told me that such a conflict could easily last for three to four months, a lesson that the Russian misadventure in Ukraine should have driven home to Indian military planners. Despite loftier aims of being prepared for fifty days of intense fighting, as per the defence minister’s operational directive—a document that was produced by the Manmohan Singh government in 2009 and has not been updated since, though it is meant to be issued every five years—the Indian armed forces are barely able to get ammunition and spares to fight for ten days. The Indian economy, post-demonetisation, cannot provide the resources for building up stock levels or for modernising the armed forces. The army remains short of over a hundred thousand soldiers, while the air force has around thirty combat squadrons against an authorisation of 42. The operational readiness of India’s submarines and aircraft carriers is not hidden from anyone in today’s times. All these assessments have been made with two assumptions: one, the China crisis does not exist; and two, Pakistan does not have nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s military leaders—it is the only country where the military, and not the political leadership, controls nuclear weapons—have often argued that they will not hesitate to use their crown jewels if certain red lines are crossed. If, for instance, the Indian military was to somehow capture Muzaffarabad, the biggest town in PoK, it would definitely be crossing one of Pakistani’s red lines. Given that Pakistan is facing economic turmoil and politically instability, the threshold for Rawalpindi could well be lower. After the Balakot episode in JANUARY 2023

opposite page: In October 2022, Narendra Modi donned battle fatigues and boasted of military preparedness while spending a few hours with soldiers in Kargil, where India and Pakistan last fought a limited war in 1999.

2019, when Modi threatened to fire missiles—he later boasted that India had not kept its nuclear arsenal for Diwali—Pakistan threatened to retaliate in greater measure. The threat brought diplomats and leaders from around the world to dissuade India and Pakistan, applying pressure to which New Delhi quickly deferred. Military capabilities apart, the political leadership should heed the maxim that “war is too important to be left to the generals.” If the political objective is to capture PoK, these areas with large, settled populations will have to be controlled and pacified by India. Along with the restive people of the Kashmir Valley, they would create political difficulties that would be insurmountable for months, if not years. In 1971, Indira Gandhi decided that the Indian military should leave Bangladesh within weeks because she knew that the presence of soldiers in such a scenario does not end well. That lesson was forgotten by her son Rajiv in 1987, when he sent the Indian Peace Keeping Force to Sri Lanka. The outcomes could be far worse in the case of PoK. India’s political leadership must also pay heed to China’s plans of integrating Taiwan. The Chinese leadership has no intention of taking over Taiwan through military means, when the whole world, including the United States and India, agree to the One China policy. It is willing to use all the other means in its arsenal—political, economic, and diplomatic—to compel Taiwan to rejoin China. Taiwan is not a nuclear weapon state and China is a much bigger geopolitical, economic and military power than India. Modi should pay heed to his own words, which he spoke to his “friend,” the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Samarkand in September: “Today is not an era of war.” That mantra applies as much to South Asia as it does to Europe. Indians cannot afford the social, economic and human costs of a war. s 17

perspectives

Big Chief, Little Country Narendra Modi’s outsized image comes at the cost of a shrinking democracy / Politics

/ hartosh singh bal The Bharatiya Janata Party foregrounded the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the recent Gujarat assembly election and swept aside the opposition. It fought the Delhi municipal election in his name and came close to winning. The oversized image of Modi has become a political free pass for the party, so much so that its campaigns often succeed in glossing over failures of governance. This image is not, however, permanently established in the public mind. It needs to be constantly nourished. Modi’s political genius lies in his ability to find ever new ways to do so. Even in a state where elections are not due anytime soon, the first image any visitor is likely to encounter is of Modi beaming down from posters celebrating India’s leadership of the G20 summit, an intergovernmental forum. India heading the G20 is not a real achievement—it is a routine opportunity that falls to each country by turn. But that fact is irrelevant when the only political reality that exists in the country is the one that reaches the people. This control of reality has been decades in the making. It began in 2002, with the anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat. Till that point, Modi was a pracharak—full-time worker—of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, seconded to the BJP, who was willing to run from television studio to studio in the hope that someone would have him on. In the tumult of hate and violence, he constructed himself as a leader who would stand up for Hindus. When I travelled to Gujarat a decade later, as Modi campaigned for a third term as chief minister, I found his oversized image, now so familiar to everyone, on display everywhere. Owing to his immense popularity after the violence, all opposition—institutional and political—had been set aside in the state. The media was a mouthpiece of the government. In a piece for the magazine Open, I wrote, Performing for the Modi campaign in rural areas of Gujarat as an entertainer, Arvind Vegda would occasionally improvise, breaking away from a routine cleared by Narendra Modi. CONGRESS VOTER: Mere paas ghar hai, sasti dawai hai, Chinese laptop hai, muft ki bijli hai. Tumhare paas kya hai? [I have a house, cheap 18

medicine, Chinese laptop, free electricity. What do you have?] BJP VOTER: Mere paas Modi hai. [I have Modi.] The template that had then been put in place in Gujarat is now being used in the rest of the country. It does not matter what the pretext is, Modi will find a reason to foreground himself—from a COVID-19 vaccination certificate to any new scheme by his government. If we go back and actually examine the past, many of Modi’s schemes seem to have been designed only as an excuse for projecting his image. For instance, who today can point to a single promised Smart City? The public has been lulled into believing that all good comes from Modi, and all that goes wrong is only because he cannot look after everything. Travelling through Uttar Pradesh just before the assembly election in 2022, I found time and again that voters who had suffered personal tragedies during the pandemic would remark that the government had done comparatively well at tackling a tragedy which even the United States was unable to deal with. Those who were forced to walk home over immense distances, thanks to an ill-conceived lockdown, did not connect their fate to a decision taken by Modi. This failure to see a linkage is rooted in the media’s coverage of the lockdown as a humanitarian crisis with numerous individual stories unrelated to the government’s disastrous decisions. The control and manipulation of information is reflected in the BJP’s ability to create alternate narratives for issues that would damage any other government’s credibility. The Ladakh crisis is a case in point. Chinese troops have changed the status quo along the disputed border in Ladakh and have occupied an additional two thousand square kilometres of territory since 2020. There is a total absence of reportage on the situation in the mainstream media, which is otherwise extremely hawkish on any national-security issue. The government’s response is to find novel ways to evade questions on the crisis, no matter who it is raised by, even if it is Rahul Gandhi. Instead, the government highlights selective local skirmishes with Chinese troops along the border. Each such incident is followed by almost identical news reports on television and newspapers, highlighting the bravery of Indian troops THE CARAVAN

above: A cut-out image of Narendra Modi displayed on a house in Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh, in December 2016. The public has been lulled into believing that all good comes from Modi, and all that goes wrong is only because he cannot look after everything.

dhiraj singh / bloomberg / getty images

perspectives

while citing unsourced claims on the injuries inflicted on Chinese troops by Indians. Such a narrative covers up any examination of India’s strategic weakness with regards to China, by projecting any questions on the subject as an attempt to cast doubts on the patriotism and commitment of the Indian Army. The intent in such an undertaking has little to do with the interests of the armed forces and is tied to projecting

Modi as a strong leader, capable of resisting external enemies. This has necessitated a greater politicisation of the recent leadership of the army, some of whom have taken to speaking the language of the ruling party. The greater the need to project and safeguard Modi’s image, the more necessary it becomes to have a servile leadership irrespective of the damage this does to the armed forces as an institution. JANUARY 2023

This institutional damage is not limited to India’s military. The executive branch of the government has now more or less been reduced to doing the bidding of the ruling party. It began with the police in Gujarat. A number of police officials who had done their duty during the 2002 violence were transferred out, and their subsequent careers have seen them sidelined into inconsequential posts. By contrast, the officials who were in charge of districts 19

big chief, little country · perspectives where the police did little to stop the violence against Muslims have enjoyed stellar careers. The message has not been lost on the bureaucracy: it is not doing one’s duty by the Constitution that ensures a successful career, it is doing one’s duty by the Modi government. Take a recent report in The Hindu on the third extension given to Sanjay Mishra, the director of the Enforcement Directorate. “Under Mr. Mishra’s tenure, the ED launched a probe against a number of high-profile people and politicians, including the Congress’ first family members Sonia Gandhi, her son Rahul Gandhi and daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s husband Robert Vadra,” the article states. The report goes on to list the other leaders that have faced action during Mishra’s time as head: Hemant Soren, the chief minister of Jharkhand; DK Shivakumar, the president of the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee; Anil Deshmukh and Nawab Malik, former ministers in the Maharashtra cabinet; and the former Jammu and Kashmir chief ministers Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, among others.

If we go back and actually examine the past, many of Modi’s schemes seem to have been designed only as an excuse for projecting his image. For instance, who today can point to a single promised Smart City?

ww The article does suggest that a formidable amount of work done by the ED under Mishra was directed largely against non-BJP politicians. “The government told the Supreme Court a few months ago that Mr. Mishra’s tenure was extended in public interest as various cases were at a crucial juncture and for their proper and expeditious disposal, it was important to ensure the continuity of officers,” it notes. It is difficult to imagine any investigative agency where the chief is not overseeing various cases at “a crucial juncture.” Such an argument could be made for an indeterminate number of extensions, but a number of worthy officers have retired from very senior posts without getting even one. The impact of a system of inducements and punishments on the bureaucracy has naturally extended to all institutions that are headed and guided by former bureaucrats where appointments are controlled by the government. The Election Commission of India is perhaps the most worrying example. A recent article in The Caravan noted that the institution’s “partisan behaviour is 20

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now routinely on display.” It states that the “EC’s current lack of independence is made more conspicuous by its historical perception as an independent institution. The EC’s actions during some of the recent elections, such as the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and the 2020 Bihar assembly polls, have been widely questioned.” In November, the Supreme Court questioned the “haste” and “tearing hurry” with which the election commissioner Arun Goel was appointed, with the file moving at lightning speed, within twenty-four hours. The Supreme Court said it was not commenting on the merits of Goel’s appointment but the process. This leaves open the question: why did the government feel the need for such a process for a handpicked officer? The Supreme Court has had to deal with several such issues in cases that have come up before it, from the appointment of the election commissioner to the extension of the ED director. But, by their very nature, the courts can, at best, examine these issues in isolation without passing any judgment on the clear overall trend. This reasoning, however, cannot extend to justify the delay over other cases of vital importance to our democracy, such as the system of electoral bonds, which has totally skewed electoral funding in favour of the BJP. Five chief justices and five years have gone by without a judgment being pronounced on the matter. In our current circumstances, when an institution is not part of the solution, it is part of the problem. There is another truth about Modi’s image that we must note. It may lurk large over our institutions, it may be magnified by the media, it may be a source of his popularity and a great deal of the BJP’s power, but it has no takers among non-Hindus. They know it is an image intertwined with the reality of the RSS’s ideology, meant to ensure that all those who lay claim to being non-Hindus should be less than equal citizens in this country. They also know this image is only a fabrication meant to terrify, and the reality of the 56-inch chest does not fit a man whose belly measures more than his chest. This clear-sightedness about the threat that our reality poses is necessary, especially when others are blinded to the damage it is doing to the country. But, when a democracy is taken over by a majoritarian mob, the deluded are enough to ensure that the image of Modi continues to grow over this country. Institutions meant to maintain the balance of power that makes for a constitutional democracy have either been subsumed or have shrunk. Today, any honest description of the country would require we drop the word “constitutional” when we invoke our democracy. The more the image of Modi grows, the smaller our country seems. s

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perspectives

Code of Silence Why the demand for the Sarna code rattles the RSS / Politics

/ dhirendra k jha A recent groundswell of protests to demand the Sarna code, a separate religious classification in the census for Adivasis, has the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates in a fix. In a special session held in November 2020, the Jharkhand Assembly passed a resolution asking the union government to introduce Sarna—a nature-centric form of worship shared across many tribes in Jharkhand and its neighbouring states—as an enumerated religion in the national census, due in 2021. The resolution marked a flashpoint in the long struggle by the region’s Adivasis for the recognition of their distinctive belief systems and culture. In late 2020, Adivasi groups across Jharkhand launched protests, urging the union government to respond to the resolution immediately. Speaking at a conference organised at Harvard University, in February 2021, Jharkhand’s chief minister Hemant Soren asserted that Adivasi culture and religion was entirely different from that of Hindus. “Adivasis were never Hindus and they never will be,” Soren said. His comments received the support of academics and intellectuals in the state. Since the 2020 resolution, Adivasi groups across several states have come together to demand a “tribal religion” or to back the demand for a Sarna code. In 2021, sit-ins with Adivasis groups from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and nearby states, reached the national capital as well. The 2021 census did not take place as scheduled. In July 2022, the government informed Parliament

The question of the Sarna code has given concrete shape to the fissure between Adivasis and the Sangh.

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that the census had been delayed “until further orders” owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. At present, the census has columns for only six religious codes: Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism. While Adivasi Christians can pick an enumerated religion, in the absence of a separate code, non-Christian Adivasis have no option but to identify themselves as “Other Religions & Persuasions.” The inclusion of Sarna would be an important step in recognising and preserving Adivasi identity and culture. The idea of the Sarna code directly contradicts the Sangh’s ideology. For decades, the RSS has claimed that Adivasis are essentially Hindus living in forests, or vanvasis, rather than independent religious communities. Vanvasis fall neatly into its construct of a Hindu rashtra—where only Hindus, the descendants of Vedic people, are seen as indigenous to India—but “Adivasis,” or original dwellers, contradict it. This was the foundational idea behind the Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, the RSS’s tribal wing, which arrogates to itself the responsibility of bringing Adivasis into the Hindu fold. The ABVKA was first established in 1952 to counter the supposedly “unscrupulous conversion” of Adivasis by Christian missionaries, reportedly under the guidance of MS Golwalkar, the RSS’s ideological patriarch. The RSS has since launched a plethora of organisations that work in tribal areas, with smaller units of the ABVKA, known as Vanvasi Kalyan Kendras, in nearly all districts of India that have significant tribal populations. These organisations run schools as well as various socio-cultural programmes, such as health camps, fairs and sports camps. Ashwini Kumar Mishra, the secretary of the Vanvasi Kalyan Kendra of Jharkhand’s Palamu district, described the Sarna code protests as “a conspirTHE CARAVAN

acy to divide Hindu society.” He said, “Like vanvasis, we also worship trees, mountains and rivers. There is no difference. We are all one. We are all Hindus.” On the ground, the RSS has maintained a studied silence, likely designed to not upset the protesting Adivasis. In September 2022, several senior ABVKA leaders, including its president and general secretary, came from across the country for a three-day national convention at Bengaluru. The leaders seemed circumspect. As if not knowing how to respond to the protests ongoing in Jharkhand and surrounding states at the time, they chose to remain mum on the issue. On 15 November, the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, delivered a speech on the occasion of Janjatiya Gaurav Diwas in the Adivasi-dominated Sarguja district of Chhattisgarh. The “diwas”— day—was established by the union government as part of the seventy-fifth anniversary celebrations of India’s independence, to commemorate tribal freedom fighters. “Janjati,” like vanvasi, is another term that the Sangh uses to refer to Adivasis. In recent months, the election of President Draupadi Murmu, an Adivasi, to the country’s highest constitutional post had added momentum to the demand for a distinct Adivasi religion. Bhagwat avoided saying anything that could be construed as antagonistic. He merely repeated what has become his routine assertion these days: “All those who consider India as their motherland are Hindus … whoever they pray to or don’t, whatever language they speak, the traditions they follow, the dress they wear and whatever their ideology. They are Hindu because Hindutva is the only ideology in the world that brings unity in diversity.” If anything, the speech seemed to indicate Bhagwat’s unwillingness to displease Adivasis further, rather than an attempt to suggest that they give up

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code of silence · perspectives the idea of a religious code separate from Hinduism for themselves. The RSS’s silence is predicated on the hope that the BJP-led government at the centre will block the demand. An RSS pracharak based in Chhattisgarh—another state where the demand for a Sarna code has received massive support from its significant tribal population—admitted that the Sangh is hoping the Modi government will find a way to defuse the situation. “The new religious code is not going to be added to the Census form. The central government will never accept it,” he told me, on the condition of anonymity. “Meanwhile, we are trying to explain to vanvasis that we are all Hindus and that we should not fall prey to any attempts to divide us.” The question of the Sarna code has given concrete shape to the fissure between the Adivasis and the Sangh. “The RSS is against the Sarna code. It calls Adivasis vanvasis and wants to Hinduise them. All these years, the RSS has pitted one group of Adivasis against the other,” Ajay Tirkey, the head of Kendriya Sarna Samiti, a conglomeration of tribal organisations in Jharkhand spearheading the Sarna code demand, said. “Now, as the demand for Sarna code has started gaining ground, it has begun to spread a message that Adivasis would lose the benefits of being part of the majority community if they opt for a separate religion.” According to Tirkey, about fifty lakh people of the Sarna religion opted for the “others” category in the 2011 census. He noted that this was more than the total population of

altaf qadri / ap photo

below: A woman holds a placard that reads, “Victory to Sarna Dharma,” during a protest in Jharkhand’s capital, Ranchi, in October 2022. Tribal groups in the region have long demanded the Sarna code, a separate religious classification in the census, recognising their status as independent religious communities. The demand poses a political problem for the RSS, which claims them to be Hindus.

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THE CARAVAN

Jains—about forty-five lakh, according to the 2011 census figures. The Sangh’s approach to the issue is seen as an attempt to subsume Adivasi cultural identity. “The RSS claims that the Adivasis are Hindus, but I don’t agree with it,” Anuj Lugun, a well-known indigenous poet who hails from Jharkhand, said. “Adivasis constitute an independent identity. The bases of their cultural and philosophical beliefs are completely different from those of the Hindu belief system.” He pointed out that the varna system is integral to Hindu social structure, but that Adivasis exist outside of it. In the absence of the Sarna religion from census, Lugun said that he had been putting himself in the ORP category. “The cultural and religious philosophy of various Adivasi groups in India, no matter how heterogenous they appear, is always linked with jal, jangal and jameen,” Lugun said, referring to water, forest and land, the central pillars of the Sarna religion. “The Adivasis’ demand should be accepted because the Sarna code has nothing to do with politics but is an issue of their cultural identity.” Forcing, or even persuading, a community to merge its religion with another is a complicated matter. It may cut across unpredictable paths and generate unfathomable anger. So far, the RSS thought it could succeed in its Hinduisation mission with superficial socio-cultural activities in tribal regions. But now, as it faces serious ideological pushback, the entire Sangh Parivar, right from the RSS chief to ordinary cadre, appears to be at a loss. s

indranil mukherjee / afp / getty images

COVER STORY / FILM ERAM AGHA

Shah Rukh Khan’s silent rebellion

TIGHTROPE ACT JANUARY 2023

27

a group of around ten people arrived outside the Hyatt Regency in Ahmedabad early in the morning of 14 February 2016. Chanting “Jai Shri Ram” and “Shah Rukh Khan hai hai,” they threw stones into the hotel’s parking lot, shattering the windshield of a car that the actor had been using. They soon fled the scene but, after the hotel’s security officer filed a complaint, the police arrested seven activists of the Vishva Hindu Parishad on charges of rioting and property damage. Later that day, upon hearing that members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s youth wing were planning to burn an effigy of Khan outside the hotel, the police cordoned off the area and detained 17 protesters. Three months earlier, at a Twitter Townhall telecast on the news channel 28

India Today on Khan’s fiftieth birthday, the journalist Rajdeep Sardesai had asked him whether there was growing intolerance in the country. “There is extreme intolerance,” he replied. “People put words in the air even before thinking. And here is a secular country. Here is a country, perhaps for the last ten years, on the cusp of going beyond what we think. We keep talking about modern India, we keep talking about progressing, we keep talking about new India—and we just keep talking.” The youth, he said, would not stand for such intolerance. “Not being secular is the worst kind of crime you can do as a patriot.” In a separate interview with NDTV’s Barkha Dutt, Khan called it “banal and silly” to reduce one’s religion to one’s THE CARAVAN

dietary habits and argued that, if “we keep on talking about our religion, we’re going to go back to the dark ages.” Intolerance did not define India, he said, “but, if we don’t change it for ourselves, it is dangerous for all of us.” When Dutt asked him to elaborate on his statement that not being secular is a crime for patriots, he replied that being a true patriot meant loving one’s country as a whole. “Either you love your country, or you love your country in parts.” He added that those in the film industry returning their national awards in protest were “brave” and that their actions should spark a debate about creative freedom. He also expressed support for the students of the Film and Television Institute of India, who were protesting against the

rafiq maqbool / ap photo

tightrope act · reportage

tightrope act · reportage appointment of a BJP supporter as its chairperson, and called for the dispute to be settled through dialogue. Khan’s comments were fairly anodyne and merely reflected the ideals enshrined in the Constitution, but, coming as they did amid a raging national debate on intolerance in the early years of the Narendra Modi government, they created a major controversy. The BJP leader Kailash Vijayvargiya tweeted that Khan “lives in India, but his heart is in Pakistan.” The VHP ideologue Prachi called him a “Pakistani agent.” Adityanath, the BJP MP from Gorakhpur and a future chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, said that Khan “should remember that if a huge mass in society boycotts his films, he would have to wander the streets like a normal Muslim.” He accused Khan of speaking the language of terrorists. “I think there is no difference between the language of Shah Rukh Khan and Hafiz Saeed,” he said, referring to the founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba. “With great power comes great vulnerabilities,” Khan had said when Sardesai asked him why actors did not take a stand on the prominent issues of the day. “If I take a stand on an X thing or a Y thing, people will come out and throw stones at

As extreme intolerance has continued to grow unabated, Khan has been refraining from making public criticisms of the erosion of Indian secularism, even in the broad terms he used in 2015. my house, but if I do take a stand, I’ll stand by it.” In December 2015, after his film Dilwale underperformed at the box office, he told the media that, while he did not believe he had “said anything that I should apologise for,” he regretted that people had misconstrued his remarks. “I apologise if somebody got disturbed,” he said, asking audiences to “please go out and enjoy the film because it’s not me, there are thousands who have made it with a lot of love.” The backlash continued as he went to Gujarat to shoot his next film, Raees. The stone-pelting at the Hyatt Regency was the culmination of two weeks of disruptions by Hindutva outfits. “We are protesting against Shahrukh Khan as he is indulging in making statements on issues like intolerance,” Raghuvirsinh Jadeja, a VHP leader, told the Indian Express. “He should refrain from making such baseless statements as he has crores of followers and such statements give bad name to

the country. By our protests, we are teaching him what is intolerance.” Thanks to increased police protection, the crew was able to complete filming, but the controversies did not abate. On 18 September that year, four militants, allegedly affiliated to the Pakistan-based outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed, attacked an army base near the town of Uri, in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, killing 19 soldiers. Soon after the attack, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, a political party founded on the twin planks of Hindutva and Marathi chauvinism, threatened to halt the release of Raees because it featured the Pakistani actor Mahira Khan. It issued a 48-hour ultimatum to all Pakistani artists working in Bollywood to leave the country, and the Indian Motion Pictures Producers’ Association passed a resolution blacklisting Pakistanis from the industry. Since they had almost finished filming, the producers of Raees argued that it was too expensive to find a replacement for Mahira Khan. They decided to shoot the remaining scenes in Abu Dhabi. On 23 October, after a meeting between the MNS chairperson, Raj Thackeray, and the chief minister of Maharashtra, the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis, the MNS announced that it would not oppose the release of Raees, since it had been shot before the Uri attack. Nevertheless, in December, shortly before he left for Dubai and Morocco to film two songs for the film, Shah Rukh visited Thackeray at his residence and promised him that Mahira Khan would not be involved in promoting the film. “Rajsaheb had clearly told him that, in India, Pakistani artists will not be allowed,” Ameya Khopkar, a film producer and president of the MNS’s cinema wing, told me. “We were adamant that we won’t let them shoot at all.” Khopkar had also led the MNS’s efforts to boycott Dilwale after Khan donated R1 crore to victims of flooding in Chennai, arguing that he had not extended any such aid to the “drought-stricken and starving farmers” of Maharashtra. He introduced himself as the person responsible for throwing Pakistani artists out of the country. “These people won’t put out tweets condemning terrorist attacks in India,” he said. “The day cross-border terrorism ends, we will roll out the red carpet for them. But not now. Soldiers are dying, and we open the doors for them.” Despite his opposition, Khopkar told me, he has seen every Shah Rukh Khan film—other than Raees. He said that he was enchanted by Khan’s rise to stardom without any connections in the film industry and added that the MNS sends Khan a bouquet of flowers every year on his birthday. The controversies surrounding Raees marked a turning point for Khan, demonstrating that the JANUARY 2023

opposite page: Khan’s comments on intolerance on his fiftieth birthday created a major controversy.

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tightrope act · reportage opposite page: In December 2016, Shah Rukh Khan visited Raj Thackeray at his residence and promised him that Mahira Khan would not be involved in promoting Raees.

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film industry, and the country, had changed. In 2010, Khan had called the boycott of Pakistani cricketers in the Indian Premier League, in which he co-owns a franchise, “humiliating.” Even after Shiv Sena cadre defaced posters of his film My Name is Khan, he had refused to apologise. In his interview with Barkha Dutt, when he was asked whether he would stand up for Mahira Khan, he replied that it was “so silly” that the involvement of Pakistani artists was controversial. “The politics of two countries can be handled by the politicians,” he said, asking how an intercultural exchange between two countries that “used to be the same some years back” made any difference. Now, a year after that interview, he was willing to compromise. Even as extreme intolerance has continued to grow unabated, Khan has been refraining from making public criticisms of the erosion of Indian secularism, even in the broad terms that he had used in his interviews with Sardesai and Dutt. “Things have changed with Shah Rukh over the period of time,” Khopkar told me. “He is not making political statements, not sending any hints against anyone. Achchhi baat hai, kaam se kaam rakhiye”—It’s a good thing, he should mind his own business. “It is very important for him. Bolna bhi nahin chahiye”—He should not even speak. Arvind Sawant, a Shiv Sena MP, agreed that Khan had “improved,” adding that “SRK should focus on work only and not politics.” “Khan’s middle-class roots, interfaith love marriage to a Hindu woman, full-throated embrace of multiculturalism and sardonic humor are among the many factors that made him a symbol of all that is bright, brilliant and possible about India and its pluralism,” Dutt wrote in an October 2021 article for the Washington Post. “Now, his heartbreaking transition to a sad, apologetic and, above all, silent public figure captures all that is being corroded, debased and devalued in India today.” However, even as Bollywood’s biggest superstar has been intimidated into silence and faces intense scrutiny from both sides of the political aisle, he has refused to join the rest of the industry in its sycophantic praise for the Modi government or in its pandering to the Hindu supremacist tropes prevalent in contemporary Indian cinema. This is not to say that Khan’s films are devoid of patriotism. Over a career spanning three decades, his characters have often espoused love for the nation—not to an idealised India but to a complex, often deeply flawed, country. The media scholar Jyotika Virdi told me that she considers Khan “the residual of the old Nehru era and the new India. He was at the cusp. But he was very much part of the waning Nehruvian secularism. He is past the middle of his career and he is seeing that pillar crumbling.” THE CARAVAN

In his upcoming film Pathaan, set to be released on the Republic Day weekend, Khan plays an intelligence agent who considers his country his dharma and serving it his karma. Despite this, there have been calls on social media to boycott the film, with many users digging up his seven-year-old comments about intolerance. On 14 December, Narottam Mishra, the home minister of Madhya Pradesh, threatened to halt the screening of the film because the music video for the song “Besharam Rang” showed Khan dancing with his co-star Deepika Padukone, wearing saffron and green outfits. Mishra also cited Padukone’s earlier condemnation of the crackdown on Jawaharlal Nehru University as support for the “tukde-tukde gang,” a pejorative term supporters of the Modi government use for the university’s students and others they consider seditious or “anti-national.” “Campaigns to economically boycott Muslims have become too common,” the journalist Alishan Jafri told me. “From fringe vigilantes telling

Despite being intimidated into silence and facing intense scrutiny, Khan has refused to join the rest of the industry in its sycophantic praise for the Modi government. people to boycott Muslim vendors to a state home minister and several MPs endorsing the boycott of influential Muslims like the Khans—we have seen this descent into madness. Calling for boycott of Muslim enterprises is basically a larger RSS–BJP politics that reaps active political dividends.” Pathaan, however, came under attack from fundamentalists of both religions. The day after Mishra’s statement, Syed Anas Ali, the president of the Madhya Pradesh Ulema Board, a committee of Islamic clerics, also threatened to block the release, claiming that the performance of “obscene dances” by women in the film defames Pathans and Muslims as a whole. In an industry where Muslim artists have often had to hide their faith, and in an era in which being a Muslim has become increasingly fraught, Khan has neither shed his religious identity nor allowed himself to be defined by it. In doing so, he has appealed to audiences across social and religious divides. And the fans keep showing up in unlikely quarters. Shohini Ghosh, a professor of media studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, pointed out an account in Swati Chaturvedi’s book I Am a Troll, about the BJP’s digital army, that she found

tightrope act · reportage moving. “A Hindu anti-Muslim troll realises that the star she loved growing up, Shah Rukh Khan, is Muslim,” she told me. “He is, in my opinion, the hriday samrat”—king of hearts—“of Hindustan.”

bourhood. (He estimated that there are probably three Muslim families living there now.) “Shah Rukh’s mother had political influence,” Kukreja said. “If we ever needed some work or favour, she was always helpful. I remember she had once taken some of us and Shah Rukh to Indira Gandhi’s birthday celebration.” Fatima, a magistrate, was close to several senior Congress leaders— during the Emergency, she accompanied Indira’s son Sanjay Gandhi to a Muslim-majority slum at Turkman Gate that would later be demolished amid police firing. Kukreja recalled that the Khans were also friends with Radha Raman, a former president of the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee and chief executive of the metropolitan council. “Most of the people in our colony were Congressi,” he added. “Where was the BJP then?”

anshuman poyrekar / hindustan times

in a 1997 interview with the actor Farida Jalal, Khan said that patriotism had been instilled into him at a young age. His father, he recalled, would tell him never to take the freedom he enjoyed for granted. “At that point of time, I really used to think that he meant freedom from foreign rule or something,” Khan said. As he grew up, however, he realised that his father had meant freedom from poverty and misery, as well as freedom of speech and the right to a free press. Although he was not actively involved in politics, reading about the state of the country made him sad, he said, because “it takes away from what my father told me: ‘Keep this country free the way I gave it to you.’” Khan’s father, Meer Taj Mohammed, had been a follower of the nationalist leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan— known as “Frontier Gandhi”—who waged a nonviolent anticolonial struggle in the North West Frontier Province. Taj Mohammed’s cousin Shahnawaz Khan, a general in Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army, was one of the three senior officers tried at Delhi’s Red Fort, in 1945, for waging war against the king. Growing up in Peshawar, Taj Mohammed was an active participant in the Quit India Movement and was arrested several times as a teenager. In 1946, he enrolled in Delhi University as a law student. He remained in Delhi during Partition. As the new Pakistani government began cracking down on Ghaffar Khan’s followers, he found himself on a blacklist, barred from returning home. Taj Mohammed never ended up practising as a lawyer. He briefly travelled to Bombay to try his hand at acting, seeking out a role in the film Mughal-e-Azam, but soon returned to Delhi. He started a number of unsuccessful businesses and, for a while, ran a canteen at the National School of Drama. Khan would tell his biographer, the film critic Anupama Chopra, that his father “was too honest to be rich.”

Taj Mohammed’s best friend was the Congress leader Kanhaiya Lal Poswal, who would go on to become the home minister of Haryana, and he was also on a first-name basis with the future prime minister Indira Gandhi. In 1957, he stood as an independent against the Congress candidate Abul Kalam Azad in the Gurgaon parliamentary constituency, but did not receive a single vote. Khan’s mother, Fatima Lateef, came from a wealthy family that had been based in the erstwhile princely state of Hyderabad before moving to Bangalore after Independence. However, with Taj Mohammed unwilling to depend on her family, they lived in a modest rented house in Rajendra Nagar, a neighbourhood in central Delhi. Khan’s childhood friend Sunil Kukreja, a local businessman, told me that theirs was the only Muslim family in the neigh-

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courtesy mushtaq shiekh / shah rukh can / om books international

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Kukreja told me that their nickname for Khan was maila—train—“because he used to run so fast.” He remembered that, during the festival of Janmashtami, “Shah Rukh would be dressed up as Krishna. He looked so pretty.” Khan also participated at the annual Ramlila functions during Dussehra, sometimes playing the part of one of Ram’s simian soldiers, sometimes reading his poetry during intermissions. “He was living among the Hindus,” Kukreja said. “It is natural for him to celebrate Hindu festivals.” In her biography, Chopra notes that, while Fatima was a devout Muslim, Taj Mohammed “was devoutly secular and encouraged the same in his family.” He rarely fasted during Ramzan, and “there was even a picture of the Hindu god Jagannath in the house.” Khan told Barkha Dutt in their 2015 interview that he has endeavoured to inculcate a similar syncretism among his own children, urging them to follow their own religion. His wife, Gauri, is a Hindu. Her parents had initially been opposed to their marriage—because he was a Muslim as well as a struggling actor—but eventually gave in, though her mother, Chopra writes, “didn’t enjoy her daughter’s wedding because she was afraid that right-wing Hindu or Muslim organizations would try to disrupt the proceedings.” 32

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One day, Khan recalled in the interview, his children came home from school and asked him whether they were Hindus or Muslims. “I said, ‘Put in Christians. It doesn’t make a difference.’” As a child, he had attended St Columba’s School, run by an Irish Catholic congregation, “and I know that stuff too,” he added. “I read those stories out to my kids, and from the Quran, and from the Ramayan and from the Mahabharat.” In his interview with Rajdeep Sardesai, he noted that he does not hesitate to participate in Hindu rituals at home. “We cook sewaiyan for Diwali and burst crackers on Eid,” he said. When Sardesai called his family an inspiration, he replied, “We shouldn’t be an inspiration. This should be normal.” After completing school, Khan studied economics at Delhi University’s Hansraj College. Sudarshan Loraya, one of his teachers, told me that Khan was not involved in campus politics but was an active member of the Economics Society and graduated with a first division. “He was mostly seen organising seminars and deciding topics of discussion,” he said. Around this time, Khan immersed himself in acting, spending his evenings working with the Theatre Action Group, run by a British director named Barry John. His association with TAG helped him bag his first film role, a minor part in Pradip Krishen and Arundhati Roy’s In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. The film, which won two National Awards in 1989, was only screened once on Doordarshan but eventually attained cult status. Khan received far more attention for his role in the television series Fauji, also telecast in 1989. Farhat Bashir Khan, a professor at Jamia Millia Islamia’s Mass Communication Research Centre, where Khan spent a year before dropping out to focus on his acting career, told me that he would visit his house in Zakir Nagar whenever he returned to Delhi. The first time he did so, Bashir recalled, he kept his professor waiting. “I knew he had come to meet me, but it was taking him time. And then he showed up saying that, while he was asking for my home address, the paanwallah recognised him as the Fauji star and took him to meet his family and friends instead of bringing him straight to my house.” Khan’s performance in Fauji also earned him the attention of Iskra, a production company run by the directors Kundan Shah, Aziz Mirza and Saeed Mirza. Aanjjan Srivastav, a former vice-president of the Indian People’s Theatre Association who worked on a number of Iskra projects, told me that the trio, whom he described as staunch Marxists, “saw the star element” in Khan and sought to launch his career. They cast him in three television shows they were producing— Umeed, Wagle ki Duniya and Circus—and helped

tightrope act · reportage him decide which films to sign. Srivastav said that they had decided, “Samne ana chahiye yeh ladka”— This boy should come into the limelight. On Aziz Mirza’s suggestion, Khan worked with the avant garde director Mani Kaul on a Doordarshan miniseries adapting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, one of the first books Taj Mohammed had given him. At the Mumbai film festival in 2016, the miniseries was screened as a film called Ahamaq. Mirza told me that he believes these early years had a lasting impact on Khan’s thinking. “Shah Rukh comes from the background of Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Ketan Shah, Aziz Mirza, Kundan Shah, Mani Kaul,” he said. “He has worked with these people earlier in his career. He has heard the right sounds. I am not going into what he is doing now, but, when he was being groomed, he heard the right sounds, discussing progressive thoughts. That has somewhere affected him, should have affected him.” Taj Mohammed died of cancer in 1981, soon after he was finally allowed to visit Pakistan twice and meet what remained of his family. Fatima died suddenly, a decade later, of septicaemia caused by diabetes. Until then, Chopra writes, Khan’s “ambitions were not centered on becoming a Hindi film hero. He wanted to be a famous television personality, someone like Oprah Winfrey, with a signature talk show.” However, in an effort to break out of the “fog of despair and anger” that set

in after his mother’s death, he decided to take the plunge into mainstream cinema. At the time, Bollywood was undergoing an interregnum, with its biggest star, Amitabh Bachchan, taking a five-year hiatus from making films. There was no obvious heir apparent; Sunny Deol, Anil Kapoor and Jackie Shroff were “leading contenders,” Chopra notes, while the other two Khans who would go on to rule the industry with Shah Rukh, Aamir and Salman, were just getting started. With producers willing to take a chance on new faces, Khan received plenty of offers and immediately signed four films: Aziz Mirza’s Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, Raj Kanwar’s Deewana, Rajiv Mehra’s Chamatkar and Hema Malini’s Dil Aashna Hai. Deewana was released first, on 25 June 1992, and was a major hit. The film critic Nikhat Kazmi wrote that Khan had interpreted the “clichéd role” of an obsessed lover “with a fresh zeal.” His scenery-chewing performance, which he would later describe as “awful—loud, vulgar and uncontrolled,” earned him the Filmfare Award for Best Male Debut, and the film’s success invited further offers from more established producers.

opposite page: Shah Rukh Khan sits on the lap of his grandfather Iftikaar Ahmed along with his sister, Shahnaz Lala Rukh, and cousin Tasneem Fatima. below: Khan’s first film performance was a minor role in Pradip Krishen and Arundhati Roy’s In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. The film won two National Awards but was only screened once on Doordarshan.

before he agreed to give me an interview, Aziz Mirza insisted that I re-watch his film Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani. “Just see the film and see what is in it that’s not happening now,” he told me. Released in 2000, nearly a decade after India opened

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up its economy and its airwaves to private players, the satirical film, starring Khan and his frequent collaborator Juhi Chawla, depicted the country at a crossroads, unsure of where it stood, severing its ties to the old order and facing an uncertain future in the new millennium. “That the pan-Indian polity no longer attracts the allegiance of the majority of the masses and is increasingly being replaced by smaller entities is clear from the emergence and struggle of nationalities often denigrated through charges of regionalism, linguistic chauvinism and separatism,” the sociologist G Aloysius had written, three years earlier. “India seems to have become, instead of a nation-state, one powerful state system, comprised of multiple warring communities.”

Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani represented an attempt to use the star power generated by the commercial forces of neoliberalism to tell a cautionary tale about their excesses. 34

The film begins with a paean to a flawed nation. Hum logon ko samajh sako to samjho dilbar jani Jitna bhi tum samjhoge, utni hogi hairani Apni chhatri tumko de dein kabhi jo barse pani Kabhi naye packet mein bechein tumko cheez purani Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani Understand us if you can, my darling The more you understand, the more you will be astonished We might give you our umbrella when it is raining We might sell you old things in new packaging Yet our heart remains Indian The title track, written by Javed Akhtar and sung by Udit Narayan, is a reference to an earlier song, from the 1955 film Shri 420. (The film had also been an inspiration for Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman.) That song—belonging to an era in which the postcolonial nation was living “ship to mouth,” depending on imported food to survive, while struggling to set up indigenous industries—sought to derive pride in one’s heart being Indian despite all THE CARAVAN

their clothes being from other countries. This one, meanwhile, is full of allusions to the multitudes contained in the millennial Indian’s contradictory psyche: Indians want both love and money, they possess both honesty and dishonesty, their eyes are full of both tears and aspirations. “We are like this,” Narayan sings, as Khan dances in front of a poster for a wanted criminal, “and also like this,” as Khan leans over to dance in front of a poster depicting the same person as a politician seeking votes. “Our hearts ache but have not been broken,” he adds. “Our hope has not faded away.” In the film, Khan and Chawla play intrepid reporters working for rival news channels, which are, in turn, patronised by rival politicians. Their journalism is often directed towards making news, rather than breaking it. “During your time, when a dog bit a man, it would be news,” Khan’s character, Ajay Bakshi, tells his father, who is sceptical of his success. “Later, it was news when a man bit a dog. These days, it is news when a man and a dog together bite a donkey. And if it isn’t, we make it news. We tell the people what they want to hear.” As they compete for ratings during an election campaign, Bakshi and Ria Banerjee, played by Chawla, seek to gener-

tightrope act · reportage ate favourable publicity for their political backers. After a prominent industrialist is assassinated at a campaign rally, however, they lose control of events, as the politicians unleash violence on the city. The opposition leader blames the chief minister for ordering the hit and orchestrates riots; the chief minister orders that the riots be turned into communal pogroms. The opposition leader holds a puja as the city burns, much like the former prime minister PV Narasimha Rao had reportedly done as a Hindutva mob demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Bakshi and Banerjee spend the rest of the film trying to clear the name of the assassin, who is designated an international terrorist by the police but was actually seeking revenge after the industrialist raped and murdered his daughter. To do so, they must come in conflict with their bosses and the politicians, who set aside their differences to prevent the truth from coming out. When all else fails, the journalists appeal to the public to gather at the prison where the assassin’s execution—broadcast live on television, complete with title sponsors and promotional contests offering bumper prizes if viewers guessed the name of the hangman’s wife—is being carried out, a scene that, Mirza told me, was modelled on the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution. They succeed after the police refuses to open fire on a crowd of people carrying national flags. Much like the nation it depicts, and the industry that produced it, Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani is a flawed film. Its plot is often wafer-thin, and the performances are extraordinarily hammy, even by Bollywood’s usual standards. Although Bakshi gets his comeuppance and is by no means depicted as a paragon of virtue, his romantic pursuit of Banerjee in the early stages of the film reflects the sexual harassment that is all too common in the Indian media. There is a certain tone-deafness, and caste-blindness, about two Brahmin journalists helping another Brahmin evade consequences for a crime he admits to having committed, even if his motives have been misrepresented, in a country where the jails are full of Bahujans who have not yet been convicted of a crime. However, the film aspires to a level of social commentary that has been extremely rare in mainstream cinema, especially in recent years. Khan’s success has been intrinsically linked to the neoliberalism that the film critiques. “Just as Vijay”—a name frequently used by Amitabh Bachchan’s “angry young man” characters—“embodied the angst of 1970s India, Raj”—Khan’s character in his biggest hit, the 1995 film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jaenge—“resonated with the aspirations of a post-liberalization 1990s India,” Chopra writes. “Shah Rukh became the personification

of the collective ideals and longings of a country undergoing social upheaval.” Economic reforms had brought about a “torrent of Western goods and ideas,” which was “paralleled by a retreat into a comforting cocoon of conservatism and family values.” The conflict between these two tendencies, which often descended into mindless violence, contributed to much of the chaos of the decade. In these complicated times, DDLJ offered an uncomplicated solution: fusion. Like fusion clothes and fusion food, DDLJ suggested a fusion lifestyle. Shah Rukh as Raj was the best of the East and the West. He became all things to all people. He was a yuppie hero whose cool clothes and cooler personal style made him a youth icon. But he also unabashedly celebrated and perpetuated homespun swadeshi values. He was moral without being tediously pious. Like millions of urban Indians in the 1990s, Raj negotiated between tradition and modernity. But unlike most real-time struggles, Raj’s conflicts were beautifully resolved without any permanent heartache or unsanctioned sex.

opposite page: In the climax of Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani, ordinary Indians carrying national flags converge on a prison to stop an execution, a scene that was modelled on the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution.

The actor Swara Bhasker, who became a loyal fan of Khan after watching the film, told me that he had “redefined the toxic masculine Hindi film hero without making anyone feel threatened by him; he challenged patriarchy by winning it over—charming it, if you will.” She understood the feminist critique of the film but argued that “one cannot deny the film and SRK’s performance changed the paradigm of how our male heroes will be.” Khan was a “soft and sensitive” star, she said, presenting an idea of romance in which “your lover could first be your friend, understand you and not try to control you.” She added that there “is always a softness in every role SRK interprets. Never too radical, always respectful; everyone comes away happy. That’s also true for his stardom. He makes everyone happy.” While Khan had been launched in the industry by staunch Marxists and had bucked the trend for leading men by playing dark antiheroes and unrepentant villains in some of his early films, it was this archetype of the romantic hero—whom Shohini Ghosh described as “a metrosexual aspirational figure with a wide appeal who held the vision of a new and better world”—that made him the king of Bollywood. Moreover, he was a pioneer in taking celebrity endorsements to unprecedented levels, using advertisements to bolster his brand and protect his earnings from the vagaries of the box office. “I need money for my bungalow and my son’s future,” he told the magazine Filmfare in 1998. “If that means plugging everything from colas to condoms, that’s fine by me.” JANUARY 2023

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Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani represented an attempt to use the star power generated by these commercial forces to tell a cautionary tale about their excesses. In another pioneering move for the industry, Khan, Chawla and Mirza produced the film themselves, through a new venture called Dreamz Unlimited. It was an abject failure, ridiculed by critics and rejected by audiences, fuelling speculation that Khan’s days of being a box office draw were over. “The tragedy of this film was that the journalists, who were supposed to be the enlightened ones who taught people how to view the film, they themselves had bloody clay feet,” Mirza told me. He said that several political writers, such as the communist leader Prakash Karat and the journalists Rahul Singh and Mark Tully, had lauded the film as ahead of its time, but critics had not bothered to try to understand it. The essence of the film, Mirza said, was resisting the “hypnotic nationalism” that the political class mobilises to crush dissent. He quoted the eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson’s famous dictum, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Instead, the film’s notion of nationalism was what Khan had described in his interview with Barkha Dutt as a true patriot loving the country as a whole and not in parts. Mirza mentioned his “constructive use” of the national flag, as a shield for the freedoms of speech and assembly, and as a banner urging Indians from all walks of life to come together and solve the problems that ail the country. This stands in stark contrast to how the Modi government uses symbols of the nation, such as the flag or the anthem, to drive a wedge between its supporters and opponents. “It wasn’t Sholay or DDLJ, but it was a classic,” the playback singer Abhijeet Bhattacharya, who sang dozens of songs filmed on Khan, including “I’m the Best” in Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani, said about the film. A vocal supporter of Modi, Bhattacharya had his Twitter account suspended, in 2017, after hurling abuse at prominent critics of the government. He also attacked several prominent Bollywood figures, such as Karan Johar and Mahesh Bhatt, for being insufficiently anti-Pakistan, leading to Khan rebuking his statements as “rude” and “mistaken.” However, he told me that Khan is a “bigger nationalist than any hero. Others are being paid for nationalism. He has paid a lot for being nationalist.” Although he refused to elaborate on which film stars he considered “paid nationalists,” he said, “When you see that nationalism is being projected, then they are paid, nationalism is their profession.” Besides Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani, Bhattacharya cited Swades and Chak De! India as examples of Khan’s nationalist films. In Swades, directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar—who acted with him in THE CARAVAN

Circus—Khan plays a non-resident Indian working at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the United States who returns to his homeland to look for his childhood nanny. His search leads him to a remote village, where he must confront the socioeconomic realities of rural India. In Chak De! India, he plays a coach who must unite a group of female hockey players from all over the country in order to win an international tournament. Neither film shies away from the ugliness of contemporary India, depicting the hatred that persists on account of caste and religion, but, again, they promote a love for the country, warts and all. As his character tells a group of village elders in Swades, India is not the greatest country in the world, but it can be. even manoj desai, the owner of Maratha Mandir, a cinema near Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus that has been screening Dilwale Dulhania Le Jaenge daily for nearly three decades, told me that he considered Ajay Bakshi or Major Ram in Main Hoon Na, rather than Raj, to be the real Shah Rukh Khan performance. “Being a Muslim, Shah Rukh worked for India, especially in Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani,” he said. “Remember the poster with the national flag flashing on his face?” Over his career, Khan has often been asked to prove his credentials as a Muslim patriot—an “Adarsh Muslim Moderate,” as the development economist Shrayana Bhattacharya writes in her book Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh. “Whenever there is an act of violence in the name of Islam, I am called upon to air my views on it and dispel the notion that by virtue of being a Muslim, I condone such senseless brutality,” he wrote in a 2013 article for Outlook. “I am one of the voices chosen to represent my community in order to prevent other communities from reacting to all of us as if we were somehow colluding with or responsible for the crimes committed in the name of a religion that we experience entirely differently from the perpetrators of these crimes.” He added that he sometimes becomes “the inadvertent object of political leaders who choose to

Over his career, Khan has often been asked to prove his credentials as a Muslim patriot—an “Adarsh Muslim Moderate,” as Shrayana Bhattacharya writes in her book Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh.

tcd / prod db / alamy stock photo

opposite page: In Swades, Khan plays a nonresident Indian who confronts the socioeconomic realities of rural India.

tightrope act · reportage make me a symbol of all that they think is wrong and unpatriotic about Muslims in India.” Even though his father had been a freedom fighter, he wrote, he was repeatedly accused of harbouring allegiance to Pakistan. “Rallies have been held where leaders have exhorted me to leave my home and return to what they refer to as my ‘original homeland.’ Of course, I politely decline each time, citing such pressing reasons as sanitation works at my house preventing me from taking the good shower that’s needed before undertaking such an extensive journey. I don’t know how long this excuse will hold though.” As with most political statements he has made, the article caused a controversy. Hafiz Saeed invited Khan to move to Pakistan if he did not feel safe in India, while Rahman Malik, Paki-

stan’s interior minister, asked the Indian government to provide him protection. Both the government and the opposition rebuked Malik, asking him to focus on his own country instead. Khan responded with a media statement, calling it “irksome for me to clarify this non-existent issue.” Even though the article had been “meant to reiterate that on some occasions my being an Indian Muslim film star is misused by bigots and narrow minded people who have misplaced religious ideologies for small gains,” he wrote, that was exactly what had happened in this case. He added that “nowhere does the article state or imply directly or indirectly that I feel unsafe,” or that he was “ungrateful for the love that I have received in a career spanning 20 years,” and asked “those who are offering me unsolicited advice

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that we in India are extremely safe and happy. We have an amazing democratic, free and secular way of life.” It was yet another step on the tightrope Khan has had to walk as India’s most famous Muslim. He had made his Bollywood debut at a time when anti-Muslim sentiment was at its highest point since Partition. Less than six months after the release of Deewana, the Babri Masjid was demolished, triggering communal violence throughout the nation. The industry he was entering had long had a complicated relationship with Islam. “From its very inception Bombay cinema, via the influence of Parsi theatre, has been informed by Islamic culture and the Urdu language, the Persian love stories of Laila–Majnun and Shirin–Farhad, poetic forms such as the ghazal and

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tightrope act · reportage opposite page: Dilip Kumar, the first Bollywood superstar of independent India, was born Mohammed Yousuf Khan in Peshawar, within walking distance of Taj Mohammed’s ancestral home.

the masnavi, and song traditions such as nazms, ghazals and qawwalis,” the film scholars Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen write in their book Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema. However, even though these influences have remained integral to the film industry, the media scholar Shakuntala Rao writes, it has “almost always” treated Islam “as subordinate to the upper-caste, north Indian male as the norm.” She quotes the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s description of Muslims as “a group whose presence was crucial to the self-definition of the majority group.” Fatima Lateef had believed, Chopra writes, that her son would be the next Dilip Kumar. The first Bollywood superstar of independent India, Kumar was born Mohammed Yousuf Khan in Peshawar, within walking distance of Taj Mohammed’s ancestral home. He changed his name on the suggestion of the actor Devika Rani, who suggested that the Hindu-sounding name would be “very appropriate for your audience to relate to and one that will be in tune with the romantic image you are bound to acquire through your screen presence.” Rao notes that, over his forty-year career, Kumar “played a Muslim character only once”— Salim in Mughal-e-Azam—“always shied from publicly discussing India’s minority politics or his religious beliefs, and none of his films featured plots involving inter-religious love or inter-ethnic relations.” Towards the end of his career, however, he became an active member of the All India Muslim OBC Organization and campaigned for the rights of Pasmanda communities. When he was awarded the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, Pakistan’s highest civilian honour, in 1998, the Shiv Sena insisted that he return the award or go to Pakistan. He refused to do either and found support from the prime minister at the time, the BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who insisted that there was “no doubt” about his patriotism. When I asked her whether Khan had considered changing his name, Divya Seth, his TAG colleague and a veteran film and television actress, said, “No, no, he loves his name.” Rao writes that, in the wake of Babri, he provided a persuasive answer to the question, “What does it mean to be Indian?” Khan, who had often described himself as Muslim by birth but as having been raised in a “mix of religions,” began to provide a counter-discourse to the hard line religious fundamentalism of the BJP. In film after film he played Hindu heroes with Hindu names like Raj, Vikram and Arjun. At the same time, he began to project a cosmopolitan and global look and, unlike the BJP, came to represent the secular face of a fast globalising economy. In films like Dil To Pagal Hai, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, and Kal Ho Naa Ho,

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Khan showed viewers that a man could straddle several religions and identities as a multivocal, multilingual Indian. Jyotika Virdi told me that Khan “never underplayed his Muslim identity. He openly embraced it. He was also embracing other religions. She called this “the principle and the national definition of secularism in India: that we embrace anything, and we don’t deny or reject religion in the public or private sphere. He really combined it together and was rewarded for this ethos.” “SRK has never been apologetic about his identity as a Muslim,” Shohini Ghosh said. “On the contrary, he self-admittedly sees himself as an ambassador of Islam.” She quoted a 2007 interview he had given to the magazine Tehelka, in which he noted that he followed “the tenets of Islam—peace, goodness, kindness to mankind.” He said that he stood for “what a modern Muslim should be,” offering namaz “when I feel like” and refusing to accept regressive traditions “that have lost relevance,” such as polygamy, “but that doesn’t mean I’m questioning the Quran. I’d like people to know

Shakuntala Rao writes that, in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition and the communal carnage that followed, Khan provided a persuasive answer to the question, “What does it mean to be Indian?” that Islam is not only about being a fanatic or a radically different, angered person, or one who only does jehad. I’d like people to know that the actual meaning of jehad is to overcome one’s own violence and weakness.” That was the year Khan starred in Chak De! India, in which he played Kabir Khan, a retired hockey player seeking to rehabilitate his reputation, after missing a crucial penalty in a match against Pakistan in a World Cup seven years earlier, by coaching the Indian women’s team to great success. A photograph of Kabir shaking hands with the Pakistani captain after the match is circulated in the media, leading to rampant speculation that he had thrown the match. He is forced to leave his home because of the abuse he receives. Questioning the patriotism of minority players after sporting losses is a common phenomenon worldwide. Three Black English footballers who missed penalties in the finals of the 2021 European Championship were subjected to a torrent of racist abuse online, as were the French play-

vijayananda gupta / hindustan times

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ers who missed penalties in the 2022 World Cup final. “I think you look at the run into the final, it felt like the country had united and it felt like we were heading on the same path,” Jude Bellingham, a member of the English team, told CNN after the European Championship. “We had players, Black players in the team, players of all different backgrounds from all different countries in the team. And then as soon as they missed the penalty, they’re not English, they’re just Black.” “Here is a Muslim character who is seen as betraying India,” Ira Bhaskar said about Kabir Khan. “The film is a commentary on how Muslims have to prove allegiance to the nation. If you don’t do that, you are seen with suspicion. Shah Rukh is intervening directly in the discourse of suspicion about Muslims.” She noted that the climac-

tic victory is poignant, leaving Kabir teary-eyed, because he has proven “his credentials as a Muslim. He comes back as a hero.” In his 2010 film My Name is Khan, Shah Rukh plays Rizwan Khan, an Indian Muslim with Asperger’s syndrome who seeks a meeting with the US president to clear the name of his stepson, who has been killed in a racist attack. According to Bhaskar, the film, released just over a year after the terror attacks in Mumbai and set in a post9/11 America, marked “a departure from his romantic persona” and portrayed “Muslim anxiety from an Indian perspective.” She contrasted My Name is Khan with two other films about Islamophobia in the United States that were released in 2009: New York and Kurbaan. “The heroes are Muslims in these films but, while responding to JANUARY 2023

global Islamophobia, these films show heroes resorting to terrorism, while Rizwan Khan goes around the world saying, ‘My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist,’” she said. Ghosh said that, while My Name is Khan was a very personal film, “his most political film as a Muslim is Raees.” In the film, Khan plays Raees Alam, a gangster and politician who is a beacon of hope for his community. As he grows in stature, the political establishment conspires to bring him down. He is tricked by a rival to smuggle RDX into the country. When it is used to carry out serial bombings, he kills the rival and surrenders himself to the police, knowing that he will be killed. “Even in Raees, he is dying for the country, for the motherland,” Bhaskar said. Among the many controversies that surrounded Raees was that it was the 39

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third Muslim character he was playing in a row, after Jehangir Khan in Dear Zindagi and Tahir Taliyar Khan in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. In a column for the Times of India, the author and social commentator Hasan Suroor sought to put the “silly debate” to rest. Suroor argued that the controversy was illustrative of “a wider problem: the dilemma Indian Muslims face in relation to their religious identity vis-à-vis their national identity. It would seem there’s an unwritten code of conduct that they’re expected to abide by in order to be seen as loyal Indians.” While his characters in the two previous films were only 40

“nominally Muslim”—just like many of his nominally Hindu characters in his previous blockbusters, Ghosh told me, “could belong to any community”—critics were claiming that “he has abandoned his previous caution and done the full Monty in Raees,” Suroor wrote. “There is even a suggestion that the previous two films were a carefully rehearsed build-up to this one, where he finally blows his cover.” Suroor also disputed the journalist Rana Ayyub’s assertion that the three consecutive Muslim roles marked “a rebellion that needs to be noticed and lauded,” calling it a “troubling” stateTHE CARAVAN

ment “because it suggests that a Muslim actor needs to justify his decision to play a Muslim character when no such justification is needed in the case of a Hindu actor playing a Hindu character. We need to be careful reacting to rightwing provocations in a way that ends up playing into their hands.” Despite his interventions in debates about Islamophobia through his films, Khan has been careful to only play Muslim characters on his own terms. In 1997, at the height of the Mumbai underworld’s intervention in Bollywood, he successfully resisted demands by the gangster Abu Salem

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prakash singh / afp / getty images

that he work in a film being made by a Muslim. An actor who has worked with Khan in the past told me, on condition of anonymity, about another Muslim producer who had pitched a film to Khan. “Shah Rukh agreed to do the film, and then the producer said to him, ‘Apna miyan bhai jo hai na mil kar kaam karenge’”—We will work together, my Muslim brother. “He left the film over the ‘miyan bhai’ comment,” the actor said. “He said to him, ‘I am not your type or category of actors.’” Just as Khan’s Hindu roles have almost exclusively been coded as Savarna, his Muslim characters usually appear to be Ashraf. The actor told me that another producer once offered Khan “a role of an uneducated Delhi boy struggling in life. Shah Rukh understood the narrative of the film and told him, ‘Bhai, bhad me jao, mere gharwalon ne mujhe badi mehnat se padhaya hai’”—Go to hell, my parents worked very hard to get me educated—“‘and I am not participating in your clichéd Muslim view.’” Khan told the producer that he had been an excellent student, they recalled, adding, “I cannot be a part of this narrative.”

above: In his 2010 film My Name is Khan, Shah Rukh plays Rizwan Khan, an Indian Muslim with Asperger’s syndrome who seeks a meeting with the US president to clear the name of his stepson, who has been killed in a racist attack.

according to ira bhaskar, Khan is an example of an old, tolerant, secular India, where “Muslims play a central, integral, cultural and emotional role.” During the tenure of the Modi government, she said, attempts are being made “to put him in his place.” She noted that there “is an ironic gap between his international stardom and his value in the eyes of the power at the centre today.” The backlash over Khan’s comments over intolerance has continued over the years, with calls for boycott cropping up in every subsequent release. This has coincided with a slump in his films’ box office returns. The trade analyst Komal Nahta told me that this had more to do with Khan’s departure from his usual oeuvre rather than politics. “In India, the movie-going experience is not marked by who is in power politically,” he said. “The stars of this stature must focus on the subject of the film than the role. Doing different things for the sake of being different doesn’t work, because that’s not how audiences think. They want value for their money.” Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, who acted in Khan’s 2018 film Zero—one of his biggest commercial failures—had a different perspective. “What happened was, within two days, militant reactions to the film started coming in,” he told me. “Some places did not have an opening, and we got to know that, from Saturday, the next day onwards people stopped going to the film. There were film reviews, and then people started spitting venom on the film.” Such a reaction was new, he said. “Even with Fan”—a 2016 film about a Shah Rukh JANUARY 2023

Calling Khan an example of an old, tolerant, secular India, Ira Bhaskar said that, during the tenure of the Modi government, attempts are being made “to put him in his place.” Khan impersonator obsessed with meeting his idol—“the film didn’t do well, but people still went and watched it before saying that it is a bad film. In case of Zero, they were not going. There were personal abuses being hurled at Shah Rukh. Bina dekhe hi film pasand nahin aayi”—They disliked the film even without watching it. He added that people sent him screenshots of WhatsApp messages being forwarded, which said, “Inko paise dete ho, Islamion ko, jihadion ko paise dete ho. Ye bahar jakar bolte hain India is intolerant”—You give your money to these Islamists and jihadis who go out and say that India is intolerant. Ayyub said that such messages, and Zero’s failure, did not affect Khan, who instead “started to plan for other films.” He had noted a similar equanimity while filming Raees, after the VHP protests in Gujarat. “He was calm and laughed it off,” he told me. “He did not bring it up with anyone for sympathy. Shah Rukh loved the film script of Raees, which was a political film. He follows one ideology: ‘hamne field chuni hai films ki’”—this is the field we have chosen—“‘we will talk through our films.’” Following Zero, however, Khan stopped talking through his films too. He has not starred in any subsequent film, only making a few cameo appearances. The hiatus was partly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but a personal crisis might also have played a part. On 3 October 2021, his son Aryan was among eight people arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau during a raid on a cruise ship off the Mumbai coast. Charged with possession, consumption and sale of illegal drugs, Aryan spent nearly a month in custody before being granted bail on 29 October. (Juhi Chawla signed his bail bond of R1 lakh.) The NCB dropped all charges against him, on 27 May 2022, due to lack of evidence and procedural issues in the investigation. Nawab Malik, Maharashtra’s minister for minority development at the time, alleged that the NCB’s zonal director, Sameer Wankhede, had framed Aryan as part of an extortion racket. He released a letter that he claimed to have received from an unnamed NCB official who wrote that Rakesh Asthana, the commissioner of the Delhi 41

tightrope act · reportage very close to Rakesh Asthana,” they said. “It is quite possible that he wanted to act on this opportunity and see where it takes him.” When no evidence was found against Aryan, they added, “the whole issue turned against Wankhede. He had certainly bitten off more than he could chew.” Following Malik’s allegations, Wankhede was removed from the investigation and an inquiry was instituted against him. Three days after Aryan was exonerated, the government transferred him to the Chennai office of the director general of taxpayers’ services. The inquiry report, submitted in October, found several procedural lapses in the case, as well as in others handled by Wankhede,

anshuman poyrekar / hindustan times

Police, had directed Wankhede and KPS Malhotra, another NCB officer who would later be appointed a deputy police commissioner of Delhi, “to frame Bollywood artists through any means necessary.” After Wankhede’s father filed a defamation suit against him, Malik tendered an unconditional apology, on 10 December 2021, promising not to make any further comments about the officer. Two months later, he was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate on charges of money-laundering. A journalist who covered the case for a national newspaper told me, on condition of anonymity, that they did not believe Aryan’s arrest was pre-planned. “Sameer Wankhede is believed to be

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and recommended departmental action against at least seven officials. Aryan’s arrest had an immediate impact on Khan’s brand value, with calls on social media for a boycott on products endorsed by him. According to media reports, the education technology company Byju’s pulled advertisements featuring Khan from television, while several other brands suspended campaigns planned for the festive season. One campaign that went ahead, for Cadbury Celebrations, featured Khan endorsing small businesses that had suffered losses during the pandemic. “After deliberations, we decided to progress with the execution while being prepared for any escalation

tightrope act · reportage below: On 3 October 2021, Khan’s son Aryan was among eight people arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau during a raid on a cruise ship off the Mumbai coast. next spread: Fans gather outside Khan’s bungalow, Mannat, to celebrate his fiftyseventh birthday.

that might occur—we created a control room to track and monitor response,” Anil Viswanathan, the vice president for marketing at Mondelez India, told me. “Honestly, we were also prepared to pull out the execution if it attracted negativity from the public.” The campaign was a success, as the Aryan episode generated nationwide sympathy for Khan, even among his past detractors. “Aryan did not deserve it,” Khopkar, the MNS film representative, told me. “Don’t know what came out of it, political pressure aye to kuchh bhi ho sakta hai”— anything can happen due to political pressure. After the NCB dropped its charges, the Shiv Sena MP Arvind Sawant, whose party led the coalition government in the state at the time, demanded action against the officers responsible for keeping Aryan in custody and accused central agencies of defaming the state. Sawant told me that Khan “dealt with the situation legally. He needed no one, called no one for favours. He is a talent, and talent doesn’t require favours.” Jyotika Virdi told me that she “started paying attention to SRK especially after the ugly manner they went after his son, and that made me sit up and think of him as an emblem of grace in the face of pressure. He didn’t say a word.” Aanjjan Srivastav said that the authorities were expecting Khan to lash out, much like he had done at Mumbai’s Wankhede stadium in 2012, after a security guard allegedly made an Islamophobic comment against him and manhandled his children. “Shah Rukh bhadka nahin, sahi kiya”—He did not lose his temper, he did the right thing. “This is what they wanted. They were looking for a point. He did not give it to them. He did not speak.” Swara Bhasker echoed the sentiment. “SRK just rose to the occasion like any decent Indian citizen—with grace and dignity in the face of a traumatising episode and with faith in the judiciary,” she said. “Despite the verbal assault and hysterical media trial his family was subjected to, he just rose above it all.” “If he had spoken up, taken sides, the scene would have been different,” the advertising film director Prahlad Kakkar told me. “If he had said, ‘Look, I am being persecuted as a Muslim,’ half the country would have abandoned him. And he understands that.” Since 2014, Bhasker said, “SRK has been targeted constantly. The pettiness of Hindutva ideology is such that it bothers them that, in a country where eighty percent of the population is Hindu, in that country, for thirty-five years, the reigning superstars are three Muslim men.” With supporters of the Modi government waiting to pounce on the slightest opening for a controversy—in February 2022, for instance, after he briefly removed his mask and blew into the air while offering prayers JANUARY 2023

at the singer Lata Mangeshkar’s funeral, a traditional gesture in Islamic custom to ward off evil, two BJP leaders accused him of spitting on her grave—silence is often the best option. Khan’s silence in the face of the excesses of the Modi government, however, has also been controversial. He was criticised for not speaking out against the discriminatory Citizenship (Amendment) Act. In January 2020, protesters at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh modified the lyrics to a popular song from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jaenge: “Tujhe dekha toh yeh jana sanam/ Shah Rukh ho gaya begana sanam”—When I saw you, I learnt, my dear/ That Shah Rukh has become a stranger. “Don’t expect stars to speak up, if we as a society don’t respect freedom of expression and opinion,” Bhasker told me. “Big stars are actually vulnerable too. Everyone knows where their house

“SRK’s life is an example of how you will not be spared even if you are viewed as a Muslim who is comfortable with going to a temple or celebrating upper-caste Hindu values,” Alishan Jafri said. is, everyone knows where they shoot, how their children look. I’m sure the Aryan Khan arrest case has every Indian parent—star or not—thinking that, if SRK’s child is not safe from being targeted and harassed, how will our children be safe?” Alishan Jafri noted that, when Khan raised his voice against intolerance in 2015, “he was lonely at that moment. He was not joined by other big stars and actors in the industry. They were optimist about the would-be economic wonders under the newly elected Modi government.” This silence, he added, does not make him a collaborator. “We expect our superstars to be like the legendary Muhammad Ali, but not everyone can be so courageous and vocalise their views the same way. People are different and react differently in different circumstances.” Bhasker argued that Khan “may seem silent, but he does not allow his stardom to be used for any political agenda, at a time when some of his colleagues have allowed themselves to become tools of propaganda.” If one was to believe the rhetoric of the Sangh Parivar, Jafri said, “we might be fooled to think that SRK is what the far right wants a Muslim to do to be spared in their scheme of things, but he is not. In fact, SRK’s life is an example of how you will not be spared even if you are viewed as a 43

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pratik chorge / hindustan times

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Muslim who is comfortable with going to a temple or celebrating upper-caste Hindu values.” In fact, he added, “the only Muslim that is acceptable to the RSS–BJP mindset is the one who abuses Muslims or Islam—someone like Tarek Fatah. SRK will never abuse Islam or cheer bulldozers mowing down homes of the poor, for any market gain or being acceptable in the ecosystem. His films never had Islamophobia, even though they propagated the idea of a very liberal and quite flawless upper-caste Hindu India.” On 15 December, a day after Narottam Mishra fired off his salvo against Pathaan, Khan delivered a speech during the opening ceremony of the Kolkata International Film Festival. As expected, he did not comment on the latest controversy, choosing to speak only in generalities about negativity on social media. “The collective narrative of our time is shaped by social media, and, contrary to the belief that the spread of social media will affect cinema negatively, I believe that cinema has an even more important role to play now,” he said. “Social media is often driven by a certain narrowness of view that limits human nature to its baser self. I read somewhere that negativity increases social-media consumption and, thereby, increases its commercial value as well. Such pursuits enclose the collective narrative, making it divisive and destructive.” Cinema, which exposes human vulnerability, was “best placed to sustain a collective counter-narrative that speaks to the larger nature of humankind, a narrative that brings to the fore humanity’s immense capacity for compassion, unity and brotherhood.” After he ended his speech, members of the audience called for him to recite some of his famous film dialogues. He recited a couple of lines from Pathaan, then expressed his happiness at returning to Kolkata for the first time since the pandemic started. “We are all happy, and I am the happiest of all,” he added, “and I have no objection in saying this: Duniya kuchh bhi karle, main aur aaplog aur jitne bhi positive log hain, sabke sab zinda hain”—Whatever might happen, you, me and all the positive people are alive. s 45

The CaravanԝƹɨȈȶǼɰ ʰɁʍɨljǼʍȢƃɨɁɥȈȶȈɁȶɰ ƃȶǁƃȶƃȢʰɰȈɰǹɨɁȴ ƃʍɽȃɁɨȈɽƃɽȈʤljȚɁʍɨȶƃȢȈɰɽɰ ƺɁʤljɨȈȶǼɥɁȢȈɽȈƺɰӗǼȢɁƹƃȢ ƃǹǹƃȈɨɰӗȃljƃȢɽȃƺƃɨljӗ ɨljȢȈǼȈɁȶӗƺʍȢɽʍɨljӗ ɽljƺȃȶɁȢɁǼʰƃȶǁȴɁɨljӝ caravanmagazine.in/caravan-columns

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REPORTAGE / POLITICS SUJATHA SIVAGNANAM

How an entire state got behind Arputhamammal in her quest to free her son

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palani kumar for the caravan

11,299 days · reportage previous spread: Cameras had followed Arputham when she marched into government offices and prisons for decades, with interviews appearing everywhere. Tamil cinema had long produced stories of tirelessly fierce mothers who fight justice for their sons, and here was a story in the flesh. opposite page: Perarivalan with his mother and others at a tea stall, on his way home following his release on bail, on 15 March 2022. Arivu spent 11,299 days in jail, a majority of that in solitary confinement.

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{ONE} arputham had waited for this moment for 11,299 days. A large crowd had gathered at her house— lawyers, journalists, local political activists and friends. Throughout the morning, more reporters came flooding into the small railway town of Jolarpettai, making their way to the beige-painted house where her family lived. But Arputham herself was at a relative’s house nearby. She wanted to avoid the crowd and manage her expectations. For over three decades, she faced consistent disappointment, navigating her way through India’s labyrinthine court system. On that day, 18 May 2022, the Supreme Court was to decide whether her son, who had been out on bail since March, would finally be granted his freedom. AG Perarivalan had been convicted for the murder of Rajiv Gandhi, India’s sixth prime minister. He was arrested as a 19-year-old, in June 1991, on flimsy grounds. The assassination shook the whole country but it had the most profound impact on Tamil Nadu, particularly in its aftermath. Perarivalan’s incarceration and Arputham’s battle to free him not only captured the imagination of the Tamil public but had a significant bearing on regional politics. “I was an ordinary woman then,” Arputham told me. “A home maker. In just a handful of days, my life turned upside down. People who were close to us till then deserted us, fearing that they would be in danger if they got in touch with us. I was alone, completely alone.” She had decided to hear the judgment separately, because Perarivalan said it would be hard for her to see him if the day’s hearing at the Supreme Court did not deliver a favourable verdict. At 10 am, the verdict flickered through the television set. Loud cheers broke out in all the houses nearby. Perarivalan immediately drove to where Arputham was waiting in anticipation. The moment his mother saw him, she broke into tears. They shared a long hug and returned home, where about twenty people were jostling to capture the moment. Sweets seemed to appear from nowhere, and one slowly powdered in Perarivalan’s shaking hands. Many videos of the occasion spread through WhatsApp groups in the state. It was a long-awaited moment. Cameras had followed Arputham when she marched into government offices and prisons for decades, with interviews appearing everywhere. Tamil cinema had long produced stories of tirelessly fierce mothers, who fight for justice for their sons, and here was a story in the flesh. Previous headlines chose to sell it that way. “Perarivalan’s 27 years of prison—Emotional struggle of Arputham amma,” an Indian Express Tamil headline read. Another, from Vikatan, read, “I have been running for 28 THE CARAVAN

years—Arputham amma.” Arputham’s name suffixed by “amma” became a broad stand-in for all mothers—a sentimentalised core at the heart of the state’s politics. While the case history of Arputham and Perarivalan’s Kafkaesque battle with the legal system has been widely reported, much less has been written about the popular upsurge in Tamil Nadu that made it possible. The interest of the people, press and activists in Arivu—as he is commonly known—has waxed, waned and waxed again over the past thirty years. There were decades when even uttering his name was taboo for fear that it might heighten suspicion of Tamils in India. Yet, over the past decade, he has come to be celebrated, seen as an innocent man, who was jailed unjustly by a distant government with blood on its hands. By the end of the 2010s, the call to free Arivu had become a ubiquitous Tamil concern, much like the opposition to the imposition of Hindi or the demand for greater federalism. These other demands

By the end of the 2010s, the call to free him had become a ubiquitous Tamil concern, much like the opposition to the imposition of Hindi or the demand for greater federalism. are historical, arising out of major social movements. The demand to free Arivu, however, was driven by a single woman whose determination won over a whole state. the politics of tamil nadu and Sri Lanka’s Tamil community—concentrated in the north and east of the country, in the region many Tamils call Eelam, or homeland—are significantly intertwined, a fact that India’s mainstream Hindi-speaking belt seems oblivious to. People on both sides of the Gulf of Mannar share a cultural and social history stretching back millennia. There have been frequent transnational attempts at building a common community, most famously at the World Tamil Conferences, the second of which was hosted in Chennai in 1968 and the fourth in Jaffna in 1974. The 1974 conference made the Sri Lankan government nervous. A police battalion attacked the conference with rifles, tear gas and batons, killing 11 Tamils. Police attacks like this made front page news in Tamil Nadu, drawing greater public sympathy for the suffering of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

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Incidents such as the police and government-backed paramilitaries setting fire to the Jaffna Public Library, in 1981, which led to the destruction of almost a hundred thousand irreplaceable books and manuscripts, many of which were several centuries old, added to the shock and indignation. M Karunanidhi, the president of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Tamil Nadu’s primary opposition party at the time, wrote to the secretary general of the United Nations, saying that the arson attack was “nothing but an attempt at Cultural Genocide.” Arputham was 33 years old when the library went up in flames. She was deeply shaken by it. Her father, Thiruvenkidam, a district secretary of the DMK in the then small town of Vellore, also had an influence on how she saw those across the sea. Born as the eldest daughter of four children, Arputham soaked up her father’s ideology like a

sponge. Her mother, Krishnaveni, was deeply religious and a homemaker, but she had an awkward truce with Thiruvenkidam when it came to raising the children. The family were staunch defenders of the party, which drew its legacy from the iconoclast social reformer EV Ramasamy—commonly known as Periyar. In 1958, when Arputham was just seven, her father had joined a DMK protest against inflation and was jailed in the same cell as CN Annadurai, the party’s founder. When Arputham was in the sixth standard, the actor MG Ramachandran, who had become a star campaigner for the DMK, visited the town during an election. Given her father’s position, Arputham had the opportunity to go to the dais and meet MGR. “That was a moment I will never forget in my life,” she told me. “I gave an election donation of two rupees to MGR. He told me, ‘Now, focus on your studies. Only after JANUARY 2023

completing your studies should you think about politics.’” She would end up not heeding the leader’s advice on both counts. The family had a paucity of funds—her father spent the little he earnt on building an organised DMK cadre in Vellore—and she had to drop out of school after the tenth standard. She spent her time doing odd jobs for the party and residents of the neighbourhood. The year Arputham turned 20, T Gnanasekaran, a Tamil government schoolteacher, who had written sheafs of poetry under his pen name Kuyildasan, visited their home. “My father liked their family as they belonged to the Dravidar Kazhagam,” Arputham said. The DK, a non-electoral political organisation led by Periyar, was the ideological mothership of the DMK. “I was short and had a dark complexion compared to him, but he really liked me.” After fraught discussions about wedding 51

preparations, they tied the knot. “He doesn’t believe in rituals and customs, my husband,” she said. “At the wedding, my husband didn’t want to tie a thali around me, which he considered a symbol of women’s enslavement, but, after much fighting, he obliged my mother.” She smiled before saying, “I removed it soon after during one of the protests organised by the Dravidar Kazhagam.” They married in 1967 in the presence of K Veeramani, the current head of the DK. “Periyar was supposed to attend the wedding but, due to some other commitment, he could not,” Arputham said. “After the marriage I came to Jolarpettai and, for the first time in my life, I saw a house without a puja room. Everyone in their family were staunch DK members, and I came to understand that they believed in the goodness of human beings, not gods. I really became a Periyarist only after my marriage, and Kuyildasan guided me in understanding that ideology.” The couple had three children: their eldest daughter Anbumani—named by Periyar—Arivu and Arulselvi. It was unclear if Perarivalan—meaning a fount 52

of knowledge—took to the name or his name took to him, but he read voraciously in his childhood. “From a very young age, all three of them were also drawn into the ideology,” Arputham said. They also came to share the deep sympathies the family had for Sri Lankan Tamils and the idea of Eelam, but that did not put them at odds with India. Kuyildasan was a drill-master at the National Cadet Corps—the youth wing of the Indian armed forces—when it entered a decade of controversy in the state. In the anti-Hindi agitation of 1967, that ended Congress rule in Tamil Nadu, a key demand of the protesters was that NCC commands be given in Tamil and not Hindi. The demand had been simmering for over a decade, and ideologically driven instructors, such as Kuyildasan, were already issuing commands in Tamil, despite orders to the contrary. The new DMK government banned the use of Hindi in the NCC. When Arivu came of age, he joined the outfit and did well in it. “I had plans to become an air force officer, given my NCC days and the best cadet award,” Arivu told the Times of India. “I was chosen for the Republic THE CARAVAN

Day parade in Delhi but stayed behind as my father wanted me to focus on my class ten board exam.” Arivu was ten when the Jaffna Public Library burnt. Both the DMK and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam—which MGR founded after breaking away from the former—separately met Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, asking her to act to protect Tamils in Sri Lanka. By the early 1980s, both parties were backing rival Tamil militant groups on the island to ensure that they were seen by the people of Tamil Nadu as the foremost protectors of their ethnic brethren. At the time, Karunanidhi, for example, was often addressed by his party as the Thamizhina Thalaivar—the leader of the Tamil ethnicity. MGR, who was afraid of what this might mean to his loosening grip over the state, pushed a lot of his personal and party finances behind a small renegade organisation of youth in Jaffna, called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Indira Gandhi government, then a close ally of MGR’s, soon stepped in to offer more tantalising forms of support.

satanic forces

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11,299 days · reportage From August 1983 to May 1987, the Indian government set up 32 camps, a majority of which were in Tamil Nadu, to train the LTTE and a handful of other Tamil militant groups in guerrilla warfare. The operation was largely run by the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external-intelligence service. To facilitate the training, India’s intelligence agencies worked closely with a handful of Periyarist groups that already had deep sympathies for the Eelam cause. Eelam groups also had an extensive propaganda network in Tamil Nadu. Newspapers working out of Chennai, such as Tamil Eelam and Viduthalai Puligal, wrote extensively about atrocities against Tamils committed by the Sri Lankan army. Shortly after the horrific Black July pogrom of 1983, when police-backed Sinhala mobs murdered over three thousand Tamil civilians and displaced another hundred and fifty thousand over the span of a week, Arputham’s family felt a strong admiration for the LTTE fighting back against the Sri Lankan army. “Of course we were sympathetic to them,” she told me. “Everyone was, back then.”

“Of course we were sympathetic to the LTTE,” Arputham told me. “Everyone was, back then.” However, the relationship between the LTTE and the Indian government quickly soured. In 1987, Rajiv Gandhi sent the Indian Peace Keeping Force into Sri Lanka, attempting to forcefully disarm the LTTE. What followed was India’s longest war, one with the most casualties. The IPKF was accused of committing horrific atrocities against civilians in the region, in incidents such as the Valvettithurai massacre, in which over sixty Tamils were killed, and the Jaffna hospital massacre, in which almost seventy Tamil civilians were gunned down. The Tamil Center for Human Rights notes that IPKF personnel widely used the rape of civilians as a tool to enforce their will on the region. Nearly every political party in Tamil Nadu called for the IPKF’s immediate removal from the island. A report by the Jain commission—set up to investigate Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination—details the widespread anger in Tamil Nadu. It quotes reports by the Intelligence Bureau about how large protests against India’s involvement, led by the AIADMK, DMK and smaller Periyarist outfits, swept the state. Arivu was in college when the protests broke out. “Amid the madness outside, life before 1991 was simple for the family,” Arputham told me, wistfully kneading back her bone-white hair. She seemed unable to talk much about that period in

her life, as if the next thirty years had over-written her memories. “Arivu was a good student, he did well in his studies. He came second in school in his SSLC exams. He was good in sports too. He was a well-behaved boy. Always truthful to a fault and cheerful to all around him.” After completing a polytechnic course, Arivu wanted to pursue an engineering degree in electronics and communication. “That’s the reason he was in Chennai,” Arputham said. “That was the reason they destroyed his life. He would have been spared from everything had he come back to Jolarpettai.” In the year after his polytechnic course, Arivu worked to spread awareness about the situation in Eelam. He stayed at the DK’s Chennai head office, Periyar Thidal. Being the youngest man in a legacy organisation, he managed the computer department for the DK’s flagship magazine, Viduthalai. It was a job that also made him frequent the homes of journalists and small print shops. Newspapers such as Tamil Eelam and Viduthalai Puligal had gone underground since India started its war against the LTTE, and information from the frontlines was scarce. Young men living under the shadows of protests and fear became the lifeblood of the information network in the city. They would get details from reporters on the ground and LTTE sources, and feed it to journalists in the city. They would also find space in small presses around the city, printing glossy material outlining the violence against Tamils in Sri Lanka. Chief among these publications were three carefully laid out issues titled The Satanic Force, which outlined in intimate detail nearly every war crime committed by the IPKF. None of this work was entirely independent of the DK’s political circles. Many such pamphlets were published at a press owned by S Bhagyanathan, who was a frequent fixture at DK meetings and had often published Kuyildasan’s poems. Bhagyanathan’s press became a second home for Arivu’s work in Chennai. He shuttled through the various presses of Chennai for six months. Then, one night, Rajiv Gandhi was killed in Sriperumbudur.

opposite page: A spread of The Satanic Force, an LTTE produced book that documented the Indian Peace Keeping Force’s atrocities in Eelam. Human rights groups continue to accuse India of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the three years their army occupied the Tamil regions of the island.

{TWO} “when rajiv gandhi was murdered, on 21 May 1991, we, like anyone else in Tamil Nadu, were shocked,” Arputham told me. “We were totally against his stand in Sri Lanka, but that does not mean we wanted him to be killed. We were worried because there was panic everywhere and there was a total shutdown in Chennai. Arivu was in Chennai, but we were unable to reach him.” Three days later, Arivu arrived in Jolarpettai. Chennai saw widespread looting and heavy police JANUARY 2023

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clampdown on any crowds. Only after the chaos subsided did Arivu feel comfortable returning to Chennai, to continue his work at Periyar Thidal. “On 10 June, Kuyildasan, Arulselvi and I were at home,” Arputham told me. “Anbu’s wedding was on the cards, so we had all gathered.” But Arputham remembered feeling unsettled, “as if my intuition warned me about the approaching danger.” Around midnight, there was loud banging on the front door. “When my husband opened the door, there were a few men, including the familiar face of the sub-inspector of the Jolarpettai police station. He said that those with him were CBI officers who had come for a small enquiry.” The officers entered the home and noticed a picture of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE’s commander, on one of the walls. For most Periyarists in the state, it was common to display his photo in the house—many political parties in Tamil Nadu still regularly add his face to the pantheon of leaders atop their election posters—but, for an officer from outside the state, it would have seemed damning. “They looked into the letters on my husband’s table and asked about a letter from Bhagyanathan,” Arputham said. “Kuyildasan replied that he had met Bhagyanathan at Dravidar Kazhagam meetings and that the letter was regarding the publishing of his poems at Bhagyanathan’s publishing house.” Arputham and Kuyildasan did not know at the time, but Bhagyanathan’s sister, Nalini Sriharan, had just become one of the prime suspects in the assassination. The officers took the letters with them and asked the family to bring Arivu to Malligai, the CBI’s state headquarters, in Adyar. “That night was the first of the many, many sleepless nights I have had,” Arputham told me. The next morning, Arputham left for Chennai. As soon as she told Arivu about what had happened, she recalled him saying, “Let’s go to the CBI office now, amma. Let me clarify their doubts and they will send me back.” On the advice of comrades at Periyar Thidal, who cautioned against going in the evening, they decided to go the next morning. That night, a large police posse showed up at Thidal. “The officials 54

senthil kumar for the caravan

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wanted us to send our son along with them,” Arputham said. “When everyone said we would bring him to Malligai the next morning, the CBI official replied that it was just a small enquiry and that they would bring him back the next day. I asked them to let Arivu eat, but they said they would take care of it.” She said she was not worried when she sent Arivu along with the CBI officers. It was 11 June 1991, the day her long battle began. The CBI’s records officially show that he was arrested only a week later, on 18 June. That week was one of worry for Arputham and unbelievable suffering for Arivu. THE CARAVAN

Early on the morning after Arivu was taken, Arputham went to Malligai. The building sits in a lush wooded outcropping along one of the last meanders of the Adyar River. It is a neighbourhood largely reserved for the residences of state ministers, with a daunting police presence at every street corner. She was stopped at the gate and waited there for hours. “I went around requesting people there, but there was no response,” she said. “Only then did I realise that this would not be a simple interrogation. That night, I went back to Periyar Thidal with fear beginning to bloom across my chest. Kuyildasan consoled

11,299 days · reportage me, saying Arivu would come the next day and the inquiry must be still on.” She arrived at Malligai even earlier the next morning, but was met with the same silence from the police at the gate. “I finally identified one of the officers who took my son from Periyar Thidal and I rushed to him,” she told me. He did not recognise her. “I told him about Arivu and he immediately replied that my son had been lying and was not admitting to the truth.” Arputham was taken aback, telling him her son would never lie. The officer was not ready to listen. “I insisted that I be allowed to at least meet him and give him his clothes, but he refused. He said he would hand over the clothes himself. When I started crying, he threatened to throw me out of the compound.” Arputham composed herself and asked the officer if they would beat Arivu. “He replied that they all belonged to the CBI and they would not do such things. His reply gave me a small relief.” Arputham would later identify the officer as K Ragothaman, the CBI’s investigating officer in the case. In 2007, Arivu published the book An Appeal from Death Row. “I was taken to the Malligai office with the assurance that I would be sent back the next day,” Arivu writes. “At Malligai, I was taken to a room upstairs. DIG Raju, SP Thiagarajan, SP Saleem Ali and a few other officers were there. I was asked about my education and family background. As soon as I answered that I had done my Diploma in Electronics and Communication, DIG Raju asked, ‘Are you the person who

Arputham composed herself and asked the officer if they would beat Arivu. “He replied that they all belonged to the CBI and they would not do such things.” made the bomb?’ I was shocked and struggled to understand in what way bomb making was related to my course.” He continues: There was a small hole in my shirt. Looking at it, he said, ‘Is this hole due to the bomb blast at Sriperumbudur?’ I denied it. Saying that I would admit only after the right treatment, he handed me over to two inspectors. I was brought to the ground floor. I was forced to remove my pants and shirt … I was beaten by Inspector Sundara Rajan and two others … who beat my bare body with their palms. One of them crushed my toes with his shoe. Suddenly, Inspector Sundar Raj kicked my testicles with his knees. I simply fell

down in great pain. They continued their torture by asking about incidents which were unknown and unrelated to me. Arivu describes being taken upstairs to a torture chamber the next day. He writes that he was handed over to Inspector Madhavan, Chelladurai, and DSP Sivaji. These officers were notorious for torturing people at Malligai. Food and water were refused to me, and I was not even allowed to pass urine. Inspectors Madhavan and Ramesh directed me to stretch my hands, bend my knees, and stand in a posture as if I was sitting in a chair. I was forced to be in that posture for a long time. They kept beating the back of my legs with a stick and using a PVC pipe filled with cement. Inspector Chelladurai forced me to stretch my elbows and beat them strongly.

opposite page: In her most iconic images, Arputham, dressed in a dimly coloured sari, walks stooped by the weight of a carry bag on her right shoulder and a cloth bag in her left fist. She always wears a badge on her sari, with a message opposing the death penalty. This was the Arputham who knocked on the doors of every jurist, court and activist for the next decade.

Arivu describes the torture he faced in that week for over seven pages in his book. He was beaten, not permitted to sleep, and was only allowed small bottlecaps of water occasionally. They promised him he could drink a whole mouthful if he confessed. One incident remains firm in his memory. One day, I was taken from my room to the torture chamber since one inspector wanted to see me. There I was asked to sit on the floor. Then suddenly, he started beating the left portion of my face with shoes. The inspector claimed, ‘Yenda, … you have murdered our leader after crossing from your country to this country.’ Inspector Madhavan, who was sitting by his side, smiled and remarked, ‘This fellow is not from Ceylon. He is from Tamil Nadu.’ Afterwards, I was sent back to my room. Arivu says he remembers this moment clearly because it became evident that the officers who tortured him did not even know who he was. Years later, when Arivu was slated to be executed, he was visited by J Mohan Raj, an inspector in the CBI who had tortured him. Raj had hoped the convict would forgive him before he lost his life. “Who am I to apologise?” Raj told the magazine Open. “What is the point in apologising? I requested Arivu to try to understand me.” Arivu simply walked forward and hugged the former officer. Raj would go on to become an active campaigner against the death penalty. In a 1999 interview with Rediff, DR Karthikeyan, who headed the CBI’s probe into the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, said, “My commitment to the protection of human rights goes back a long JANUARY 2023

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11,299 days · reportage opposite page: Arputham looks at symbolic nooses at the venue of a relay hunger protest, where people from different Tamil organisations gather daily to protest against the death penalty, in Chennai, on 10 October 2011. It was soon after this protest that Sengodi, an Adivasi activist, set herself on fire to protest the union government’s orders to hang Arivu.

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way, much before it was such a catchword.” He continued, “Even at the beginning of the Rajiv investigation, I made two conditions to the government. One, as I have said was about no political interference. The second was that, no matter what, I would not allow or resort to third degree torture in my investigations.” Shortly before the interview was published, Karthikeyan had been made the director general for investigations at the National Human Rights Commission. arputham soon realised that it was not enough to wait outside the building daily and hope the CBI officers would take pity on her. She approached the DK to appoint a lawyer for her son. The DK had a particular interest in the case. Immediately after the assassination, the DK and the DMK—who enjoyed a close relationship with the LTTE after the militant group had a fallout with MGR—were seen by many in the Congress as accomplices to the assassination. In the week after the assassination, Congress cadre had attacked several DMK and DK offices and personnel. The office of Murasoli, the DMK’s newspaper, was set on fire; it burnt for almost two days. Between 16 June and 20 June, the CBI picked up three DK members, who were released only after S Doraisamy, the DK’s lawyer, filed habeas corpus petitions in the Madras High Court. Given the number of cases the DK’s lawyer was handling, Arputham said he was unable to devote the kind of time that was necessary to help Arivu. The CBI had registered the case under the draconian Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, making it even harder to get bail or arrange family visits. “After eight days of unlawful custody, Arivu was produced before the Chengalpattu special court on 19 June, but we were not informed,” she told me. “On the date of the second hearing, at the TADA special court in the Chennai High Court complex, about two hundred people, including friends, family, and relatives, went to the court hoping to see my son. He was brought in a police van, with his face covered. The police took him to the court, and in ten minutes, he was sent back to Malligai. I was devastated that I could not even see my son’s face after waiting for thirty whole days.” Arputham had hoped getting another lawyer, who exclusively worked on her son’s case, might improve matters. But help was in short supply for somebody who had been accused of murdering a prime minister. “Initially, even our close friends were not ready to talk to us, everyone started keeping away from us,” she told me. “There was a lot of government pressure, and the police were arresting people who were even remotely connected to Eelam cause. Everyone was scared at that THE CARAVAN

point. I would go to their homes to meet and ask for help, but nobody was ready.” Arputham told me the sudden lack of support was as shocking as the absence of her son. Since her childhood, there had always been crowds of well-wishers, comrades and party hopefuls at her family’s door, even in the rural vastness of Jolarpettai. For Arputham, the Dravidian movement had always been an ecosystem of friends: a journalist here, a lawyer there, a poet at the doorstep. Now, there was only silence at her home, and a feeling of being besieged at Periyar Thidal. People stopped picking up her phone calls. Journalists were not willing to meet her either in public or private. “I felt truly alone for the first time in my life,” she told me. A week after Arivu had been whisked in and out of the TADA court, Doraisamy managed to get Arputham permission to meet Arivu. “I can’t forget the day I first saw him at Malligai,” she told me. She began crying for the first time during our interview. “After a month of chasing me away at the doorstep, I was allowed inside. My son was sitting on a bench surrounded by policemen with guns,” she told me. “I tried to smile because I knew he would want to see that. Even though he didn’t say anything, his eyes were bloodshot with fear. When I held his hands, I felt them shivering. I tried to console him. He was also trying to stay strong for me. He said, ‘Nothing to worry, amma, but don’t bring relatives or friends when you come here.’” Arputham told me she did not understand at the time why Arivu had said that. In his book, Arivu

In his book, Arivu notes that after his court hearing, Ragothaman had beaten him brutally because so many friends and relatives had shown up at the court. notes that after his court hearing, Ragothaman had beaten him brutally because so many friends and relatives had shown up at the court. Arputham was not allowed to see her son for more than a few minutes. But now that she knew it was possible to meet him, she began pushing her lawyer to arrange as many meetings as possible. A weekly meeting at midday became her routine. She would wake up early in the morning and cook for the family before beginning the five-hour journey to Chennai, catching the same bus at the same time to Adyar and waiting outside Malligai for half an hour to be let in. After her meeting,

nathan g / ap photo

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she would go to Periyar Thidal to meet their lawyer, only to be told nothing more could be done than arranging the next meeting. “One time I went there, in a hurry, I had forgotten to eat,” she told me. “By the time I reached Malligai, my head was reeling and I felt like vomiting. I wanted to use the toilet. Arivu insisted that I leave and come back later, but I didn’t want to waste an opportunity to be with my son. A lady constable there took me to the toilet.” When Arputham tried to

close the door, the constable asked her to keep it open and stood in front of the door, telling her, “That’s how things work here. You can’t close the door.” “I was shocked and slowly understood how my son was treated there,” Arputham said. “If the police people were treating the visitors with such disgrace, I could imagine the way they would treat the inmates. When I came back, my son did not even look at my face. He probably felt angry and ashamed by the way I was insulted.” JANUARY 2023

On one such scheduled visit, Arputham went to the lawyer’s office and was informed that Arivu had been shifted to Poonamallee sub-jail. The lawyer did not know why he had been shifted. “So, I went to Poonamallee, which was at the other end of the city, walked half a kilometre to reach the prison only to be denied permission to see Arivu,” Arputham said. “They asked me to get permission from Malligai, and again, I took multiple buses back to the city to reach Malligai. The officer there assured me that he would inform the prison officials, and again, after changing multiple buses, I reached Poonamallee prison. They did not allow me to meet my son.” It was almost dusk. “I was already exhausted because I was made to travel back and forth for kilometres and I nearly fainted in front of the prison. I sat there resting on a pillar in spite of the prison guard warning me not to sit there. I was adamant. I said I wouldn’t go back without meeting my son. After some time, they called me inside, and I met Arivu after a long struggle that day.” Arivu did not know why he had been shifted either. He claims that he was tortured by police officials in the jail a few days later. “The office in the subjail was actually a torture chamber in which I was tortured by SP Thyagarajan to sign a document of several written pages with many dates,” he writes. “At that time few inspectors tortured me, I was not permitted to read the contents of the papers and I was told that I would be free if I signed them.” Eighteen of the 26 accused in the case signed confessions. Several of them later said they had faced extreme torture to coerce them into signing. Arivu writes that, later that evening, he was left in a prison room where he began weeping uncontrollably. “The guard there on duty asked me, ‘why are you weeping?’ I explained everything to him. Then he consoled me, ‘the signature in police custody is not valid in court. Hence whatever has been written in the document will not affect you.’ I believed his statement. He uttered those words with human love.” Arputham, too, cherished small acts of kindness. She remembers them all 57

the more because all those she had previously depended on now pretended not to know her. She remembered going to Poonamallee one time with her husband. The guard at the entrance was young and watched with curiosity as the other guards kept denying them permission to meet their son. After arguing and pleading, they sat down under a nearby tree. “Then that guard, he was just a boy, approached us and told us to come with him to a nearby teashop,” Arputham told me. “I didn’t want to have anything paid for by the people who were doing such terrible things to my son, but the guard had been in the NCC, one of the boys who my husband had trained. He told me that Arivu was being treated very badly inside and that they were trying to fabricate the full case around him. But he told me to stay strong and that we would get past this. It felt nice to know that there were at least a few kind people around him.” 58

Arivu had little knowledge of how TADA cases worked—few did at the time. The law was only four years old and had not been applied in the state before. Under TADA, confessions under police custody were held as valid in court. In his book, he writes, “In that situation, I could not bear the torture and I signed that document according to their instruction with the hope of saving my life. But the same signature signed under the threat to save my life is now demanding my life.” His confession statement, which the CBI produced in court, would be the only key piece of evidence against him. It hinged on a key aspect of the assassination plot. It claimed that Arivu knew about the plot and had bought two nine-volt batteries that were used in the bomb that killed Rajiv Gandhi. As Arputham’s life changed dramatically, so did the political situation in the state. After a decade of AIADMK THE CARAVAN

rule in the eighties, the DMK had become an ascendent force. In early 1991, the DMK government was arbitrarily dismissed by the union government, leading to another welling of support in the famously federalist region. However, Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination swung popular opinion in a way few events in the state’s history have. In the 1991 elections, held a month after the assassination, the tide turned in favour of the AIADMK–Congress alliance. The DMK got a mere two seats, its lowest tally since it entered electoral politics, in 1957. Popular sympathy with the LTTE and the cause of Tamil Eelam had quickly turned to disillusionment and anger. The Eelam cause became a topic few people and political parties discussed in public until the Sri Lankan Civil War ended, in 2009, with a brutal state-backed genocide of the region’s Tamils. This silence extended to the 26

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11,299 days · reportage Rajiv Gandhi assassination convicts. Meanwhile, it was Arputham alone who ran from lawyer to prison, understanding each aspect of the case while also trying to keep up her son’s sagging spirit. The case dragged on for seven years, long enough for a new courthouse to be built as the TADA special court. Sometime in the late 1990s, when Arputham had gone to meet Arivu in the Poonamallee sub-jail, Ragothaman, who was also visiting the convicts, called her outside. “I didn’t know what to expect and I’m not the kind of person who shows my anger, so I went to meet him,” Arputham told me. He took her to a tea shop, then showed her the construction of the new courthouse. “He pointed to all the sides of the building: ‘This is where we will sit, our lawyers, that is where your son will sit.’ I didn’t know if he was threatening me or trying to be friendly,” she said. “I told him that I’ll see the courtroom on the day Arivu is tried there. He told me that wouldn’t be allowed because it was a TADA court—even on the day of the judgment

She always wears a badge on her sari, with a message opposing the death penalty. This was the Arputham who knocked on the doors of every jurist, court and activist for the next decade. nobody from the public would be let in. They had built an entire covered walkway from the jail to the court room so that the prisoners wouldn’t ever see the light of day.” When Arputham described this exchange to Arivu, already half defeated by his time in jail, he only asked her why she drank the tea that officer had given her. When the day of the judgment came, in 1998, Arputham was outside the courthouse with a small crowd of DK members and journalists. Doraisamy, their lawyer, had given her many assurances that morning. “Don’t worry, amma, it’s already been seven years, he is sure to be freed,” Arputham recalled him telling her. That had kept Arputham in high spirits the whole morning. News kept dripping out of the court room from the morning: the judge has arrived, CBI’s Special Investigation Team head Karthikeyan has arrived, they have brought in the suspects. “We had raised a shamiana outside and I was sitting there and eating when somebody approached me suddenly,” Arputham said. “I don’t know who had leaked the news from inside the court room, but the person told me that Karthikeyan and the CBI had brought

Arivu to the stand for a second time and then a third time. We all felt that was odd.” Arivu was the eighteenth accused in the case. Surely, he did not merit this much scrutiny, she thought. “That person told me that the CBI is going to pin something big on Arivu. That’s when I first got scared.” But the day dragged on and the waiting crowd heard nothing. The sun was setting when the police sent two battalions to block the road on both sides of where they were waiting. Arputham remembers the police also closing all the shops on the street. “Everyone in the crowd got scared,” she said. “And then a reporter came out of the crowd, running to me, fully in tears. She said in English that they had ‘given him the death penalty, hanging.’ I didn’t understand a word of what she was saying. We were all asking her why she was crying. Only then did she explain in Tamil, ‘They are going to hang him, amma.’”

opposite page: Arputham celebrates with relatives in Chennai, after the Supreme Court commuted Arivu’s death penalty to a life term. Seeing the same frail woman walking by every week won her a handful of admirers and well-wishers.

{THREE} if there is any singular image associated with Arputham, it is likely the one from between 1998 and 2011. Most newspapers and online news portals carry it. Dressed in a dimly coloured sari, she is walking stooped by the weight of a carry bag on her right shoulder and a cloth bag in her left fist. She always wears a badge on her sari, with a message opposing the death penalty. This was the Arputham who knocked on the doors of every jurist, court and activist for the next decade. The TADA court had delivered the death penalty to all 26 accused in the case. Three of the accused, all senior leaders of the LTTE, including Prabhakaran, were never arrested. Arputham tried to meet with at least a dozen lawyers who might want to take her son’s case up to the Supreme Court. Most shut their doors immediately. By the time hearings began at the Supreme Court, the senior advocate N Natarajan had decided to represent almost all the accused, including Arivu. Natarajan was an expert at handling high-tenor criminal cases and had a good understanding of the CBI’s inner workings, having represented the bureau in the 1993 Mumbai serial bombings. The Supreme Court’s judgment on Arivu’s case came on 11 May 1999. It pointed to serious lapses in the CBI’s investigation. The CBI had charged people vaguely related to members of the conspiracy, including those who had simply housed their associates without knowing anything about the assassination itself. The judgment also noted that the CBI had used the confessions of some accused to implicate others, which was strictly not admissible under TADA. The judgment noted that membership of a banned outfit alone did not constitute a crime or JANUARY 2023

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11,299 days · reportage opposite page: Arputham at her home. The humble cement house was renamed Sengodi Illam, in the memory of an activist whose self-immolation pushed the courts to reduce Arivu’s death sentence to life imprisonment.

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allow for them to be tried under TADA. One judge specifically stressed that TADA could not even apply to the accused. He noted that, under the act, a terrorist is defined as someone who intends to “overawe the Government” or “strike terror in people.” He surmised they tried to do neither. He concluded that they could not be tried under the act but under other sections of the penal code pertaining to murder, as well as provisions of the Explosives Act, the Arms Act and the Passports Act. In the final judgment in the Supreme Court, 19 were acquitted, and the sentences of a few were reduced to life imprisonment. These included several LTTE members, who the apex court argued, were simply working on the orders of their commanders. It, however, sustained the death penalty against Santhan, a member of the LTTE’s intelligence wing who masterminded the plot, Nalini and her husband Sriharan, an LTTE member—known by his nom de guerre, Murugan—who played a major role in organising the assassination, and Arivu. The evidence against Arivu was drawn primarily from his confession statement, which noted that he knew that the two nine-volt batteries he had bought were for the bomb. Arputham’s most exhausting decade began then. In 2000, Nalini, Murugan, Arivu and Santhan filed mercy petitions to Tamil Nadu’s governor, M Fathima Beevi. The governor commuted Nalini’s sentence to life imprisonment, arguing that, if both Murugan and she were hanged, their only daughter would be put in an orphanage. The mercy petitions of Arivu, Santhan and Murugan were rejected. The petitions were then sent to the president, on 26 April 2000, but were neither accepted nor rejected. Arputham tried to keep up her son’s spirits. “Right from the day Arivu anna was taken into custody, amma has never missed a chance to meet him in prison,” Sivakumar, a lawyer who later represented Arivu, told me. “She always used to carry loads of books and snacks, not only for him but for his fellow inmates as well.” Before one such visit, Sivakumar said that Arputham had sustained a severe injury on her foot. “She did not want to miss the chance to meet anna, so she tied a polythene paper around her leg and went to the prison. That’s the kind of determination she had.” “I had many days when I was denied permission to meet him for silly reasons,” Arputham told me. “I was humiliated and insulted by them.” As the months rolled into years, even her lawyer barely kept abreast of Arivu’s condition in prison. “Once I was heading to Poonamallee prison from Jolarpettai. When the bus reached Vaaniyampadi”—some two hundred kilometres from Chennai—“someone in the bus read out a newspaper that said that the convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi murder case had been THE CARAVAN

shifted to Salem prison,” Arputham told me. She got off the bus there and boarded one to Salem, nearly four hours away. “I found the prison with great difficulty, but, as usual, they denied me permission to meet Arivu.” She did what she always did in such instances: she sat down in front of the gates and refused to move until she was allowed to meet her son. The officials finally let her speak to Arivu for five minutes. “The minute he saw me, he asked me why I would take so much trouble to meet him the same day I had been on my way to Chennai,” Arputham said. “I answered with a smile, ‘All those hardships mean nothing when compared to the troubles my 19-year-old went through.’” “The most difficult part was using the toilet,” Arputham said. “I had to travel long distances without access to a toilet. I use the restroom when I leave Jolarpettai and use it again only when I get back. Only during my periods do I go to a hotel and use the restroom to change napkins.” She had a constant plague of health issues, and the family

“She is not just Arivu anna’s mother, she is my mother too,” Selvam said. “That’s the kind of love she has shown me.” was also running into a deep paucity of funds. “I couldn’t eat food outside when I went to meet him,” she told me. “Whatever little money we had, I saved it up for Arivu—for buying something for him or for legal expenses.” Seeing the same frail woman walking by every week won her a handful of admirers and well-wishers. Among them was N Arunachalam, who owned a chain of photocopy shops in Chennai. Arunachalam’s son, A Savuri Rajan, had also been Arivu’s classmate in college. “He always took care of amma,” Sivakumar said. “She used to stay at their place when there was no one to support her.” Arunachalam grew so close to the family, he paid for the education of Anbumani, Arivu’s elder sister. “Even after his death, his family is close to amma,” Sivakumar said. Even political opponents of Arivu’s Periyarist and Eelam inclinations were moved by Arputham. KK Sulaiman, a local Congress leader in Sriperumbudur, was among the first political leaders to support Arputham. Sulaiman died in 2018. I met his son Nizam Mohaideen at his textile shop in Sriperumbudur. “I was there when the bomb blasted,” Mohaideen told me. “I came back home in a panic. When I realised my father had not reached home, I went back searching for him. My father was kept along with the dead bodies. They

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thought he too had died. We saw a tiny movement in his body and immediately rushed him to the hospital. We admitted him at a nearby hospital, and the doctors saved him miraculously. But my father had a lot of shrapnel in his body which could not be removed.” It was Sulaiman who had given the CBI the first description of the assassins. “I had gone to Malligai many times with my father,” Mohaideen said. “He always believed strongly that Perarivalan was not involved in this conspiracy. There were many in the Congress who were against my father because of this stand. He trusted his innocence. My father never bothered about the criticism of others, he believed in nothing but the truth and god.” Mohaideen showed me a booklet with his father’s signed letterhead. Shortly before he died, Sulaiman had given it to his son and asked him to use it to write to anyone he could about supporting Arivu. According to Arputham, the regularity of her visits made Arivu more confident. After his initial years in

solitary confinement, Arivu began to read. By his first decade in prison, he had completed a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer application. Prison libraries became his usual haunt. “I still remember my first meeting with him,” G Ramachandran, a prison official who has worked in the state’s penal system for more than thirty years, told me. “He had come to me with a request for provisions to make tea. When I objected, he told me politely that there were provisions in the prison manual for his request. Every time he makes a request, it is worded in such a way that any official is obliged to comply. He was so humble and yet clear about his rights. He is well versed in the prison manual, better than even the officials.” Word spread among the other prisoners too. “I met Arivu three years after I went to Vellore prison in 2005,” Munusamy Selvam, a fellow convict who has since been released, told me. “When I was arrested, I had not cleared my tenth standard. I left prison with two degrees and 18 certification coursJANUARY 2023

es, thanks to him.” he added. He had also picked up Arivu’s love for the Tamil language. “I recited all 1,330 verses of the Thirukkural”—an epic of moral couplets that is treated as the bible of Tamil nationalism—“by heart and got recognised by the World Thirukural Forum.” When I asked about Arputham, Selvam took a few moments to respond. “She is not just Arivu anna’s mother, she is my mother too. That’s the kind of love she has shown me. While visiting him, she would bring snacks and books for all of us. She would carry so many bags to bring it all, that’s how deeply she cared for all of us, all her children.” sengodi had read the entire works of BR Ambedkar, Karl Marx and Periyar by the time she was 21 years old. She was from an Adivasi community and had spent much of her childhood working in a power loom. She joined the Makkal Mandram, an Adivasi and Dalit activist commune near Kanchipuram, when she was ten years old. She blossomed there, growing to be one 61

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of its best parai artists and one of the most outspoken voices in its anti-caste campaigns. She was due to begin an arts degree in August 2011, when she heard that the president of India, Prathiba Patil, had rejected the mercy petitions of Murugan, Santhan and Arivu. They were to be hanged on 9 September. The Makkal Mandram, like most grassroots leftist organisations in the state, joined the protests that sprung up immediately after. A major change had come about in the two decades since Rajiv Gandhi’s death. In early 2009, fleeing the Sri Lankan army, more than three hundred thousand Tamil civilians rushed into LTTE-controlled territory, which was shrinking daily. The Indian state had given loans to the Sri Lankan government that were used for the procurement of arms, helicopters and warplanes. Equipment and satellite imagery shared by India were used in the final genocidal massacre at Mullivaikal, a 62

no-fire zone where the Sri Lankan army had said civilians, international aid agencies and hospitals would be safe. On 29 January 2009, the journalist Ku Muthukumar set himself on fire opposite the Tamil Nadu Congress’ head office and succumbed to his wounds. His last letter, addressing the Tamil public, says, “I am also one like you. I am just another average person who has been reading newspapers and websites of how fellow Tamils are daily being killed, and like you I am unable to eat, unable to sleep and unable to even think. When we lend our voices to say the killings should be stopped, Indian imperialism maintains a stony silence and does not give out any reply.” He ended with the lines, “I have used the weapon of my life. You use the weapon of photocopying. Make copies of this pamphlet and distribute it to your friends, relatives, and students and ensure that this support for this struggle becomes greater.” THE CARAVAN

Muthukumar’s self-immolation hit a nerve, sparking wide public protests and prompting political parties to pressure the union government to intervene in Sri Lanka. So, by the time Patil decreed that Arivu would hang in 2011, the Tamil public was not as silent as it had been for the past two decades. On 26 August, the lawyers Sujatha, Angayarkanni and Vadivambal sat on an indefinite fast against the hanging near Chennai’s busiest bus stand. Hundreds of activists from across the state descended on the scene. But, two days later, even as the three women grew frailer, no authorities of the state or union government had made any announcement regarding Arivu. Makkal Mandram had made a human chain across Kanchipuram against the hanging, before visiting the Chennai protest site. Sengodi left the protest site early on 28 August 2011. She took two busses to reach the district collectorate in Kanchipuram. She then set herself ablaze.

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after sengodi’s death, nearly every political party became vocal about Arivu and the death penalty. The next day, J Jayalalithaa, the state’s chief minister, passed a resolution in the state assembly seeking a reduction of his sentence to life imprisonment. On 30 August, the Madras High Court stayed the execution of Arivu, Santhan, and Murugan. The well-known advocate Ram Jethmalani, appearing for the convicts, had argued that, “When the accused have suffered solitary confinement in prison for 21 years, even after the death penalty was pronounced in 1998, why should they suffer two punishments for the same crime when they have already served their punishment?” Arputham had become a cause célèbre again. Political parties hurried to have her on their stages and lawyers rushed to represent her case. Though

Arputham was suspicious of them, she told me, she was “ready to take anyone’s help then. My son had suffered enough.” Her two decades of struggle and Sengodi’s death had catapulted Arivu’s case to a rare position in Tamil Nadu politics: a cause that is seen widely as representing the fundamental interests of the Tamil people. There is a lot that political parties in the state bicker about, but a few concerns stand above it. Among these are the state’s model of upward mobility, the high benchmark of affirmative action and linguistic identity. Since 2011, the demand for the release of Arivu had become one more such issue. But Arivu remained dejected when Arputham met him in prison. “He couldn’t come to terms with Sengodi’s death,” she told me. “He just kept on asking me why she had done it, over and over again. ‘Why did she die for us?’ He was inconsolable.” Arputham had also become a central figure in the debate about the death penalty. In 2013, the People’s Movement Against the Death Penalty, a campaign group started by the former Supreme Court judge VR Krishna Iyer, released a documentary called Uyir Vali—The Pain of Life. The documentary had several interviews with key figures in Arivu’s case. Prime among them was Thiagarajan, the CBI superintendent who had interrogated Arivu and recorded his statement. “Arivu told me

opposite page: Demonstrators hold placards during a protest in Chennai, on 4 March 2013, against Sri Lanka for committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against the island’s Tamil people. Balachandran, the 12-yaer-old son of LTTE Velupillai Prabhakaran, was reportedly murdered in cold blood by the Sri Lankan army in 2009. His image became one of the rallying points for protests in Tamil Nadu. below: Fleeing the Sri Lankan army, more than three hundred thousand Tamil civilians rushed into LTTEcontrolled territory, which was shrinking daily. The Indian state had given loans to the Sri Lankan government that were used for the procurement of arms, helicopters and warplanes. Equipment and satellite imagery shared by India were used in the final genocidal massacre.

courtesy tamil guardian

Her letter is far shorter than Muthukumar’s, written in a childish handwriting, ballpoint pen on school-ruled book. It simply says, “Like comrade Muthukumar’s body woke up Tamil Nadu, I leave you with the hope that my body will be used to save the lives of these three Tamils.” “I have seen her in the protests,” Arputham told me. “Such a bright young girl. Twenty-one is not an age anyone should die at. For months, her face stayed every time I closed my eyes. I had gone to everyone to save my son, and yet she was the one who did it for us.”

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11,299 days · reportage and unchallengeable evidence.” But, like much else, the CBI had buried it. The case stood a much better chance now in the Supreme Court, particularly with a spate of some of the country’s best lawyers willing to work on it pro bono—over ten in just the previous five years. The CBI did not respond to a detailed questionnaire about the case or about their treatment of Arivu in custody. On 18 February 2014, a Supreme Court bench commuted Arivu’s death sentence to life imprisonment, along with that of other convicts. A day later, Jayalalithaa wrote to the union home ministry announcing that she was releasing all three convicts on

nathan g / ap photo

when I was recording his statement that he did not know what that battery was going to be used for,” Thiagarajan admitted in the documentary. “But when I wrote down his confession, I left that line out. The investigation was progressing, so I thought it would be better for us if we left that one line out. Strictly speaking, the law expects you to record the statement verbatim. But we have never done that in practice.” He also said, “Sivarasan, one of the prime suspects, had sent a message to the LTTE headquarters that the plot to kill Rajiv was not shared with anybody but three people: Sivarasan, Dhanu and Subha. Only they knew about the conspiracy. This is very solid, uncontested,

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THE CARAVAN

grounds of good behaviour, given that they had spent 23 years in prison. The Congress-led union government, however, pushed for a stay on their release. The only hope seemed to be a mercy petition, which could again go to the governor, given that their sentencing had changed. A mercy petition was sent, but lay dormant for more than half a decade. Visiting the governor’s office, hoping for an appointment, became a new addition to Arputham’s weekly activities. Age had caught up with her. Her back protested on most days and her hair had gone chalk white. It had been years since her husband moved away to stay with their elder daughter, and she had little time at home to keep things tidy. All that kept her one-woman household afloat now was her husband’s meagre pension. Yet she approached her seventies with dignity, juggling press meets, petitions and her weekly hour with her son. In October 2017, Thiagarajan filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court about leaving out crucial details in Arivu’s confession. “He was totally in the dark as to the purpose for which the batteries were purchased,” it read. “It was not recorded by me, because it would have been an exculpatory statement and hence the whole purpose of recording the confessional statement would be lost.” Arivu’s case now stood a significantly better chance than one combined with the other convicts. When Arputham tried to talk to him about filing a separate case, he closed his ears. “We are in this together, amma,” he told her. “If I contest a case alone, won’t they think I’m selfish?” Arputham told him that Thiagarajan’s affidavit helped absolve only him. Before she left, she told him, “We have struggled enough. I don’t have the energy to prolong this fight.” He finally agreed. The CBI, of course, contested Arivu’s case. The agency initially argued that the investigation into Arivu had already been closed but, when the court pointed to new evidence, it said that the Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency was still processing its investigation. The MDMA was a body set up in 1998, staffed largely by the CBI, to investigate whether the conspiracy had a for-

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eign hand or was backed by influential people in India. It was expected to file a report to the initial TADA court every three months, but had largely gone defunct. In 2016, Arivu filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to monitor the MDMA’s investigation. In 2020, the court said, “No progress has been made in the probe into the larger conspiracy. The MDMA have done nothing … nor do they want to do anything … The past two reports are exactly the same.” For several years, the governor had refused to act on the mercy petition, citing the status of the MDMA investigation. The court’s comments in 2020 made this untenable. The state government redoubled its effort to pressure the governor, Banwarilal Purohit, into signing the mercy petition. Purohit, instead, forwarded the petition to the union home ministry. The Supreme Court stated that the governor had the powers to forgive prisoners as an extension of the state government’s powers, not as a representative of the union. After hearing the state government and the governor’s final arguments on 18 May 2022, the Supreme Court finally ordered Arivu’s release. The first month after his release was hectic. Arputham and Arivu travelled across the subcontinent thanking all those who had helped their

case. When I reached their home in late June, things seemed almost normal. Arivu was beaming. His mother complained that he spent all his time on the phone. “He didn’t have that all those years in jail, why does he act like it is glued to him now,” she complained to me. “People used to sympathise saying I have lost 31 years,” Arivu told me. “I have lost those years but I don’t feel like I’ve lost out. My life inside the prison was always in beat with the outside world. I lived my life through amma.” On most days, they spent their hours playing dhaayam—a traditional dice game—with his nephew who had come home for a month. Arputham continues to wear her anti-death penalty badge when she leaves home, even for errands. She has been talking about getting Arivu married, but he seemed resistant to the idea. She is adamant; the drama has even played out in a series of press conferences. Politicians and actors have weighed in about his duty to get married. Arputham, over three decades, has been seen as the state’s mother. Arivu is now pushed into the role of the state’s son—he sat silent when the press asked him about prospective brides. Mother and son rarely stay away from Jolarpettai. After heated press conferences, they head back to their home, renamed Sengodi Illam. s JANUARY 2023

opposite page: Arputham looks fondly at a childhood photo of Arivu and his siblings on 10 October 2011. That month, Pratibha Patil decreed that Arivu was going to be hanged. above: Arivu and Arputham reunited after a 31-year-long wait. Over the past decade, Arivu has come to be celebrated, seen as an innocent man who was jailed unjustly by a distant government with blood on its hands. It was Arputham who singlehandedly made his plight a ubiquitous concern of the state’s people.

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ROOM AND BOA R D Inside Gangtok’s skateboarding subculture

in september 2018, a member of the skateboarding community in Gangtok invited me to photograph an event. That was my first glimpse into this small fraternity and the skateboarding subculture in the city. In the following months, I started getting more involved with the community and in 2019, I decided to pursue this as a photography project. In my photography work, I find it important to feel a personal connection with the subject—that is what attracts me to a project. As I witnessed the daily lives of the skateboarders in Gangtok, it echoed with the struggles of my youth. I found that I could

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relate to their experiences of growing up in this town. There is a marked dearth of facilities and open spaces for young people in Gangtok. There are limited avenues available for them to channel their energies in productive or creative ways. Public spaces where they can meet during their spare time are hard to come by. And many get immersed in drugs. That is how I grew up. I have sometimes partake in it myself, seen people overdose and lost friends to drugs. Sikkim has one of the highest suicide rates in the country, at 37.5 per 100,000 people, much higher than the Indian average of 10.6.

PHOTO ESSAY / COMMUNITIES PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY KUNGA TASHI LEPCHA

previous spread: A skater with her torn shoes rests after a round of skateboarding at the Lal Bazaar Terrace in Gangtok, Sikkim.

above: A view of the Lal Bazaar Terrace, one of the few open spaces in the city where the skateboarding community can gather.

opposite page: A quarter pipe ramp, a prop used for skateboarding, designed by the skaters.

As I became familiar with the skateboarding subculture, I realised that it represented a spot of light amid the town’s darker underbelly. It is an attempt to foster a new space and build something positive in the city, despite its constraints. Gangtok is a small mountain city. Overtime it has grown bigger and dense, leaving barely any space for the ordinary public. The city is a concrete jungle of supermarkets, office buildings, hotels and spaces catering to tourists, as it is heavily dependent on tourism. The only potentially open space in the Gangtok main city for

the public is a terrace atop a supermarket in the Lal Bazaar area, which has come to be known as the LB Terrace. This is where many of Gangtok’s young people come and spend their time. It is here that the small skateboarding fraternity has been meeting and attempting to skate. When I saw these young people coming every day to practice, becoming a sort of familial community, I felt that it was the birth of something optimistic. They are utilising their limited options to create something new. I wanted to highlight how just one single space

opposite page: A picture of a skateboard belonging to Tenzing Bhutia with the inscription, “From Addicted to Konnected,” capturing his own skateboarding journey.

above: Tenzing Bhutia, 25, with tattoos on his chest. Tenzing was involved in substance abuse for some time and found it difficult to quit. Soon, he began to skate. The community became like family, concerned about him and taking care of him. Now he is clean. While it may not have been the sole factor, skateboarding played an important role in helping him heal.

below: A group of young people running from sudden rain, while searching for a spot to skate.

can begin to change what young people do with their lives. Over the course of three years, I spent several days visiting the LB Terrace, talking to the skateboarders and photographing them. Gradually we became friends and I became a part of their community. Through this project, I hope to help them reach more people and realise their dream of someday having a proper skating park. Ironically, the LB Terrace itself has an unsavoury reputation. Given the lack of options, this is where young people would

above: A wall at the LB Terrace filled with graffiti. It indicates the names of members of the skateboarding community and their group initials. When the group was first formed, they called themselves “Skate Konnect.”

right: Two skaters, CheChe, 19, and Passang, 21, spend a light moment together. Both have formed a friendship through skating.

often meet and partake in brown sugar, weed or opioids. Soon, this space became known as a “bad” space. Parents would tell their children to keep away. The use of drugs in Gangtok has only been increasing over time. But, for the first time, a group of young people, not into drugs, have been coming to this space to use it for something different. In a sense, they are changing the narrative of this place. This has not been without its challenges. The community is sometimes harassed by the police. Cops patrolling the area often confiscate their skateboards, declaring these illegal. They say the space is dangerous to skateboard in as it is not fenced in. There is also a perception among the locals that these young people are a nuisance. The members of the skateboarding community are often into pop and street culture, and the way they dress is sometimes non-conformist. This adds to the perception that they are rebellious and leads to them being

opposite page: The community celebrating the birthday of one of its members at the LB Terrace.

above: CheChe braiding and styling the hair of Joseph Subba, a senior member of the community, at the LB Terrace.

below: A portrait of Tseten Bhutia, 19. He stopped coming to the terrace to skate after the pandemic.

above: A portrait of Joseph Subba, 31. Joseph suffers from cerebral palsy and doesn’t skateboard. However, he is still an integral part of the community who looks after younger members.

below left: A portrait of Mohammed Tariq, 20, sitting on an incomplete kicker ramp.

below right: A portrait of Norbu Bhutia, 15, on a quarter pipe ramp at the LB Terrace in 2019.

stereotyped as “wasted” kids. However, some locals have now slowly begun to recognise that reality is much to the contrary. What is truly required for these perceptions to change is a dedicated space for skateboarding. In order to gain some official legitimacy, the community has recently registered an organisation, the All Sikkim Skateboarding Association. Since there are no formal instructors, most of the young people have taught themselves skating through online videos. They continue to practice without many resources or outside support. They have invested their own money and gotten carpenters to make skateboarding ramps. This year, one of the members participated in a national sporting event in Gujarat. Every year, they also celebrate “Go Skateboarding Day,” a day marked worldwide by the skateboarding community. But the story of the skateboarders of Gangtok is about much more than their skateboarding skills. Not all the community’s members are adept at skateboarding or

below: Marks from the wheels of skateboards at the LB Terrace.

opposite page: Phurba Bhutia, 18, rests on the floor after falling down from his skateboard, while trying to perform a trick at the LB Terrace.

desire to skateboard professionally. Yet, they come to this space to feel a part of a community. Many come from broken homes. Others from families that are not very well off. Their ages range from 15 to 25. For them, the LB Terrace has become a safe space to be themselves and to belong. If a small space that is not even meant for skateboarding can provide this sustenance, one can only imagine what a bigger dedicated space could achieve. There are many public conversations in Sikkim about how to get young people off drugs. One cannot just send a child to an institution for a few months

this spread: Young people from the skateboarding community at a local tea shop. They are celebrating the birthday of one of the skaters.

below: Norbu Bhutia, now 18, one of the youngest members of the community with Mohammad Tariq, 20, a promising skateboarder.

left: A flat bar rail at the LB Terrace designed by the skaters to perform tricks.

right: A skateboard with water bottles used as a prop to perform tricks during “Go Skateboarding Day” in Gangtok in 2018.

and expect immediate change. There needs to be some other activity available to direct their energy. The skateboarding community has been able to do this, and do so without help from the state. This is what makes their story important to tell. It shows that we need to focus on having more open spaces for youth, and on building a community and an individual’s character. When I first started photographing the community in 2019, the photos felt a little unnatural. They were not used to being photographed and were sometimes shy and conscious. I was not able to instantly build a connection. It took me about five months to establish a comfort level. On personal projects, I prefer to take it slow. In my visual approach, I like to have a sense of softness and show intimacy in the work, to capture how the community exists in their own space. One of my favourite photographs is an image of a girl braiding a young

above: A damaged quarter pipe ramp. Due to the pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns, many people stopped coming to the terrace to skate. Overtime several of props the community had gotten made were damaged.

below: CheChe with her braided hair. The skateboarding community often dresses in a non-conformist manner.

man’s hair on the terrace. I like the connection between the two. I felt that in that instance, I was invisible and became a part of them. I did not want my presence to come through. In this photo, the girl is no longer conscious of me, she is free. In a sense, that is how the sport is too—for this small Gangtok community, skateboarding is an expression of freedom. There are parallels I see with my own practice. When I am taking pictures, I feel free. When these young people are skating, they too do not think about anything but their skateboarding. In that sense, I could relate. In many ways, just like photography, skateboarding is an art, a form of self-expression that can be both empowering and freeing.

left: A young member holds his foot in pain after a failed trick.

above: A skateboarder seated on the floor after a tiring day of practice.

above: Two skateboards being used as props to perform tricks.

this spread: A scene from the LB Terrace, which has slowly become a safe space for young skateboarders.

courtesy hansda sowvendra shekhar

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books

The World of Bibhutibhushan Efforts to memorialise the author’s legacy in Ghatsila

/ LITERATURE HANSDA SOWVENDRA SHEKHAR

left: A memorial to the author Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay in Ghatsila, where he spent a part of his life.

“don’t you live in ghatsila? You were born here, weren’t you?” Sushanto Seet asked me, visibly exasperated. Seet is the organising secretary of the Bibhuti Smriti Sansad—a cultural organisation based in Ghatsila, in the Purbi Singhbhum district of Jharkhand—named after and created in memory of the Bengali author Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. Bandyopadhyay spent a part of his life in Ghatsila, which is also where he died. The Bibhuti Smriti Sansad is housed in an old-fashioned building—havelilike, but smaller—on College Road. Its whitewashed façade was a familiar site, more like a landmark, while I was growing up. Bandyopadhyay’s legacy looms over Ghatsila. There is a hotel JANUARY 2023

named Bibhuti Vihar on the national highway, and a resort named Aranyak— named after a novel by Bandyopadhyay—is situated close to the Burudih Dam, a tourist attraction outside Ghatsila, while recently, a restaurant named Pather Panchali was opened on the main road. Bengali tourists, known colloquially as “changers,” have contributed to keeping Bandyopadhyay’s memory alive. He remains a celebrated author, and a part of Ghatsila’s charm— apart from its forests, hills, greenery, waterfalls and the banks of the river Subarnarekha—is the house where he lived and died. Bandyopadhyay named it Gourikunja—Gouri’s garden—after his first wife, Gouri Devi. It is located in Pancha Pandav, a village in Dahigora. 89

Dahigora is on the main road between Moubhandar and Ghatsila, and has a huge field known as Circus Maidan, which, during my childhood, was used for hosting circuses. There is a road beside it that goes southward towards villages, including Pancha Pandav, that lie by the river Subarnarekha. This road is called Apur Path—Bengali for “the road of Apu”— named after Apu, the hero of Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali and Aparajito. Today the daily morning markets are held there and there are occasional fairs, but this was not the case during the 1980s and the 1990s, when I was growing up. Back then, it appeared to be a quiet, deserted space, unless there was an event taking place, and, while there were villages beyond the field, in my childhood, I had no reason to travel so far. The area of Ghatsila where I grew up is called Moubhandar. Hindustan Copper has a factory there, where my father worked, while my mother worked in the company’s hospital. I am an only child, and my upbringing was befitting one—I was not allowed to go out all that freely and I often found myself playing with imaginary friends. I had seen the Bibhuti Smriti Sansad from afar throughout my childhood; it was a very visible sight on the route on which I usually travelled, but I had never entered it or been to Gourikunja. We were not Bengalis and did not have a reason to revere Bandyopadhyay. My family had heard about him, but they had not read any of his works, nor had they seen a film based on any work of his. Not even Amar Prem—based on Bandyopadhyay’s short story “Hinger Kochuri.” They preferred Dharmendra, Manoj Kumar, Asha Parekh and Mala Sinha. The novel Pather Panchali, perhaps Bandyopadhyay’s most famous work, is said to have been written in Ghatsila. Published in 1929, this was the book on which the filmmaker Satyajit Ray based his first feature film, which brought him international acclaim. Ashani Sanket, Bandyopadhyay’s novel based on the Bengal famine of 1943 and published posthumously in 1959, was also adapted by Ray. Perhaps that was Bandyopadhyay’s genius—he wrote on varied themes and his writings had a certain visual 90

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quality that yielded easily to screen adaptations. But he specialised in writing about villages, about the downtrodden. Ashani Sanket was set in a village, and so was his story, “Kinnar Dal,” adapted into the Bengali film Alo, directed by Tarun Majumdar. Alo was based on a story by Bandyopadhyay, while its soundtrack featured songs composed by Rabindranath Tagore. There was a certain empathy in Bandyopadhyay’s writing that spoke to readers. In “Distant Thunder,” Chhanda Chattopadhyay Bewtra’s English translation of Ashani Sanket, when he writes, “the conditions became so bad that whole families with small children were begging for phyan [starch removed from boiled rice],” a lump forms in the throat. That was THE CARAVAN

realism, whereas he also wrote a book set in Africa in the 1930s—Chander Pahar—without having set foot on that continent. I read Bandyopadhyay only after I left Ghatsila as an undergraduate. I started with Pather Panchali, in an English translation by TW Clark and Tarapada Mukherji. The deaths of the characters Durga and Indir Thakrun moved me, as did the vignettes of rural life, especially the chasm between the wealthy and the poor. Reading Bandyopadhyay was enriching, but thinking back to it now, I wonder if knowledge of the author was limited only to a certain circle of Ghatsila, among people who could read Bengali, were interested in literature and had access to his work.

the world of bibhutibhushan · books The Bengali-speaking, proper, genteel, upperclass associations with his work cannot be missed, and the majority of Ghatsila’s population is not this demographic. The assembly constituency of Ghatsila is reserved for candidates from Scheduled Tribes, which have their own languages. Even if some of the Scheduled Tribes of the area—such as the Mahali and Bhumij communities—speak Bengali, their dialect is not the Bengali from the books of Bandyopadhyay and Tagore. Perhaps that was why Bandyopadhyay did not mean anything to me—or my family—till I read him in the English translation. What I see, even now, is that the legacy and memory of Bandyopadhyay is mostly served up as exotica, perhaps to attract changers—specifically those who belong to that circle where Bandyopadhyay is known and appreciated, and also among those who have the means to stay at places named after his works. In any case, despite being aware of him, I had not really sought to know more until last year, which is when Seet’s exasperation made me feel like an ignoramus. On 11 September 2022, I finally entered Bibhutibhushan’s world. The journey I undertook while tracking the various efforts at keeping Bandyopadhyay’s memory alive in Ghatsila was thought-provoking, in quite a few

Bandyopadhyay wrote on varied themes and his writings had a certain visual quality that yielded easily to screen adaptations. But he specialised in writing about villages, about the downtrodden. ways. It was enlightening, of course, but it also helped me reconnect with the place where, as they say in Bengali, manush hoyechhi—“where I grew up,” but, literally, “where I turned into a human.” when i went to the bibhuti smriti sansad, I saw the entire building being spruced up. The front hall had been cleaned and alpana was being painted on the ground. The haveli, I saw, had five rooms. There was the hall in the front and one room on each side of it. Both those rooms were locked at the time I visited. Behind the hall was a veranda, and either end of it were more locked rooms. The outer walls of the haveli were painted with scenes from Bandyopadhyay’s life: the author riding a bullock cart with his son, Taradas, at the Subarnarekha river or standing at the Dhara Giri waterfall, where he was inspired to write his novel Ichchhamati. The illustrations, by

a local artist named Kishore Gayen, were in paitkar, an art form that is apparently on the verge of decline today. I asked the man painting the alpana why they were cleaning the house. He said the next day was Bandyopadhyay’s birth anniversary, and a library was to be inaugurated then as well. Happily surprised, I decided to join the celebrations. The library was in the hall, most of which was bare, but there were two book racks, each about three feet tall, placed against the wall. There were around a hundred and fifty books in total, a good enough number, particularly since the library was newly created. The haveli had initially been intended to be an art gallery, which was inaugurated in 2004. I scanned the books on the racks. They were all in Bengali. There were eight volumes of Bibhuti Rachanabali—Bandyopadhyay’s collected works— alongside three volumes of the collected works of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. There were books by Nimai Bhattacharya, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Buddhadeb Guha, Sanjib Chattopadhyay, Samaresh Majumdar and Taslima Nasrin. When I asked the alpana artist who would be able to give me more information about the building and the organisation, he directed me towards a huge hall, about fifty feet from where we were standing. The auditorium, named Bibhuti Smriti Mancha, had, till that point, evaded my vision. “They’re going to stage a play there tomorrow,” he added. The play that was to be staged was an adaptation of Mehanga Sauda—Premchand’s Hindi translation of Leo Tolstoy’s Too Dear—by Shekhar Mallick, a poet and author from Ghatsila. The stage was being prepared for a rehearsal. I was told to speak to a man in a white shirt, who seemed to be in charge of the ongoing preparations, for more details. I could not figure out exactly what to say or how to start asking the questions that were in my mind. The reason was that, despite having grown up in Ghatsila, I still felt so unfamiliar. I am currently working and living in Chandil and have an identity of my own there, but I do not have much of one in Ghatsila—the place where I was educated, where I grew up, where I wrote my first book, the place that is apparently my hometown. I asked the man when the play was to be staged and when the auditorium had come up. When I asked about the main building, he replied, “That building is quite old,” and then stopped. He turned towards me, his face quite crunched up, and asked, “E shob jigyesh korchhen keno? Ke aapni?”—Why are you asking all these questions? Who are you? When I began telling him, he cut me short, saying he knew who I was, and referred to my father by name. “Tumi Tasildar babur chhele?”—You are Tasildar babu’s son? “Why don’t you come to the JANUARY 2023

opposite page: Gourikunja had a small veranda and just two rooms. In these were handwritten manuscripts, letters the author had received and copies of his various books.

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the world of bibhutibhushan · books below: Bandyopadhyay named his house Gourikunja— Gouri’s garden— after his first wife, Gouri Devi. It is located in Pancha Pandav, a village in Dahigora.

rehearsal tonight?” he then asked. “You’ll find quite a few people who’d be able to tell you about Bibhuti Smriti Sansad.” I learnt his name was Sushanto Seet. I said I would and then mentioned I wanted to see Gourikunja, Bibhutibhushan’s house, and requested directions to it. Seet threw an incredulous look at me, and asked, “Tumi ekhane thako na ki? Tomar to jonmo hoyechhe ekhane!”—Don’t you live in Ghatsila? You were born here, weren’t you? I decided to be frank with him. “I live in Chandil now and I wasn’t born in Ghatsila. I was born in Ranchi. I only grew up in Ghatsila but I wasn’t really allowed to go out and explore, so…” I shrugged my shoulders, unable to add further words. “You’ve seen Apur Path, right?” Seet asked. I nodded, and he gave me the directions. And then I left to do what I should have done in my childhood and youth: exploring.

courtesy hansda sowvendra shekhar

i visited gourikunja that afternoon, riding along Apur Path. I remembered that I had been to the surrounding area once before, with my mother, to attend a wedding reception, in the 2000s. I asked for directions and found, after roaming around a

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bit, one of Ghatsila’s most famous addresses. I was a bit embarrassed—why could I not find Gourikunja on my own? It was a Sunday and the place was locked, so I decided to return the next day. In the evening, I went to Bibhuti Smriti Mancha to attend the rehearsal of Mehanga Sauda. I could not remember when I had last seen a play on stage. In Chandil, chhau dance performances are a craze, whereas Ghatsila has a mix of rural and urban sensibilities, and quite an air of intellectualism—especially in Moubhandar and Mosaboni, where the copper factory and mines, respectively, are based. The presence of the copper company gave birth to a club culture—clubs run by the company, with employees at their helm. In Moubhandar, for instance, there was a Copper Club, a Golf Club and a Ladies’ Club while Mosaboni had a Recreation Club and a Cinema Club. (The building of the Cinema Club crumbled long ago and the Recreation Club is today the zonal training centre of the Central Reserve Police Force.) Apart from these, Ghatsila had citizen-run clubs too—those citizens being predominantly Bengali. The predominant culture in Ghatsila, in any case, had always been Bengali—particularly

the world of bibhutibhushan · books in the 1990s, it revolved around the bhadralok, high-caste Bengali, and Rabindra Sangeet, grand Durga Puja celebrations and having connections to Calcutta were common. At the rehearsal, Seet introduced me to a gentleman named Anup Datta, and told me to ask him the details I wanted to know. Datta, now retired, used to be an employee of the Indian Railways and was posted in Jamshedpur. Originally from Krishnanagar, in the Nadia district of West Bengal, he settled in Ghatsila, where his wife was from, in 1980. While there, Datta came into contact with Shital Prasad Bhattacharya, an educationist who had been the principal of Raghunathpur College in Purulia. Datta recalled that Bhattacharya was also quite well-connected, and was in touch with various writers and intellectuals from Calcutta who came down to Ghatsila during winter, over the years. They had collectively decided that there should be a memorial to Bandyopadhyay in Ghatsila. Bhattacharya, along with them, founded the Bibhuti Smriti Sansad in 1964, and was its president. They sought land in Dahigora, because of its proximity to Gourikunja, but they could not find any. Datta explained that they tried to establish a memorial in Gourikunja itself; but it was so complex to acquire that property that they felt it would be easier to establish a new, separate memorial in the author’s name. Eventually they spotted a property on College Road, and that was how the Bibhuti Smriti Sansad came into being. That land, along with the haveli on it, was originally owned by a zamindar from Calcutta but it had been sold to S Kumar and Company, from Ghatsila, which ran a cinema hall there. “Bhattacharya and the intellectuals from Calcutta requested S Kumar and Company for the land so much that they could not refuse,” Datta told me. “Finally, an advance of thirty-five thousand rupees, collected through donations, was paid for that land.” I asked who had approached them for the land, and he began listing the individuals, such as Soumitra Chatterjee, who played the adult Apu in Ray’s Apur Sansar, as well as the actors Robi Ghosh and Anubha Gupta.

“This entire plot was divided into 33 or 34 smaller plots,” Datta added. “And one plot each was registered in the name of whichever celebrity donated money to this cause.” Even after the land was acquired and despite having found a readymade building for the purpose, the Bibhuti Smriti Sansad could not do much for close to two decades because of a lack of funds. Eventually, when enough funds had been gathered, the task of memorialising Bandyopadhyay began with the installation of his bust, which was carved by the well-known sculptor Gautam Pal in Calcutta and installed in Ghatsila in 1982. Other plans were hatched to gather funds for its upkeep—a music school called Megh Mallar Sangeet Vidyalaya, named after a collection of Bandyopadhyay’s stories, was run in the building during the 1980s, as was a painting school. But the lack of funds ensured the failure of those activities as well. However, the Bibhuti Smriti Sansad seems to have revived itself now, after all these decades. I attended the event on Bandyopadhyay’s birthday there, on 12 September. The chief guest was the well-known Hindi author Ranendra, who is the director of the government of Jharkhand’s Dr Ram Dayal Munda Tribal Research Institute in Ranchi and the president of the Jharkhand chapter of the Progressive Writers’ Association. He inaugurated the library, and was also presented with the inaugural Subarnashila Award, for his contribution to literature. As the proceedings continued, I remembered that Gourikunja was one of the reasons Bengalis visited Ghatsila. I was beginning to understand why the need arose for a separate memorial when a part of Bandyopadhyay’s life, Gourikunja, was already there. I asked the president of the Bibhuti Smriti Sansad, Debi Prasad Mukherjee, whether it would be open to working with Gourikunja. “Of course,” he said without batting an eyelid. “We’re not rivals.” As soon as the programme broke for lunch, I rushed to Gourikunja. bandyopadhyay did not build Gourikunja. He was already a regular visitor to Ghatsila even before deciding to JANUARY 2023

settle there. The house that came to be known as Gourikunja was originally the property of Ashok Dutta, a resident of Ghatsila who became acquainted with the author, and, on one occasion, borrowed five hundred rupees from him. He was not able to repay that money and, on crossing paths with Bandyopadhyay in Calcutta, was so embarrassed that he bequeathed his small house in Pancha Pandav to the author. According to Datta, this transpired in the 1930s, and, at the time, a charity organisation used to be run in the house. In fact, Datta continued, one reason Bandyopadhyay purchased the house was to enable his doctor brother, Nut Bihari, to serve people in the region—he used to run a dispensary in Dhalbhumgarh, about sixteen kilometres away. Bandyopadhyay did not have children with Gouri. He later married Rama Chattopadhyay, with whom he had a son—his only child—the Bengali writer

What I see, even now, is that Bandyopadhyay’s legacy is mostly served up as exotica, perhaps to attract those who belong to that circle where he is known, and also among those who have the means to stay at places named after his works. Taradas Bandyopadhyay, who was born in 1947. Bandyopadhyay died three years after. Following his death, Rama decided to leave Ghatsila for good and returned with her son to Bandyopadhyay’s family house in Barakpur. An individual named Tapas Chatterjee informed me that Gourikunja passed on—without any written deed—to a resident of Ghatsila, who worked as a priest and used to frequent the place during Bandyopadhyay’s lifetime. When I reached Gourikunja, it was open but quiet. It had none of the sprawling space nor the bustle of the Bibhuti Smriti Sansad, and I was the 93

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only visitor there at that time, although there were signs of celebrations from earlier in the day, including a bust of Bandyopadhyay in front of the house with marigold garlands around it. At one end of it was a stage named Taradas Mancha, named after Bandyopadhyay’s son. I learnt that Gourikunja was being managed by an organisation named Gourikunja Unnayan Samiti, which ran a school called Apur Pathshala there. I saw the mango tree that Bandyopadhyay’s younger brother had apparently planted for him. On the walls were paintings, again in the paitkar style, painted by the same artist, that told the story of Bandyopadhyay’s life. Gourikunja had a small veranda and just two rooms. In these were clothes worn by Bandyopadhyay, handwritten manuscripts, letters he had received and copies of his various books, including Aam Aantir Bhepu, Kinnar Dal, Megh Mallar and Pather Panchali, all preserved in 94

glass showcases, as well as charts detailing the history of his life and a list of his body of work. Chatterjee, who heads the Gourikunja Unnayan Samiti, is responsible for maintaining the place. It was Chatterjee and the website of Gourikunja Unnayan Samiti that informed me that Bandyopadhyay came to Ghatsila every year just before Durga Puja and lived there till after Holi, and that he was also visited in Gourikunja by his writer friends, including Sajanikanta Das, Radharaman Mitra, Sushil Kumar De and Nirad Chaudhuri. As I was planning to meet with Chatterjee, two autorickshaws stopped, both packed with tourists. One of them explained that they had come from Kolkata, having originally intended to travel to the Duarsini forest in Purulia, but when they remembered that it was Bandyopadhyay’s birthday, they travelled the additional distance to visit Gourikunja. THE CARAVAN

Chatterjee explained that this popularity is not new either. “I was a tour guide in the early 1990s,” he Chatterjee told me when we met at his house. “I used to have an autorickshaw in which I gave changers—tourists from Kolkata—a tour of Ghatsila. They all went to Gourikunja, without fail. It was high on their itinerary. But they were disappointed to see the dilapidated state that Gourikunja was in. They passed comments such as, ‘What have you all done to Bibhutibhushan’s house?’ and I felt very bad. That was when I decided that I will work towards the restoration of Gourikunja.” The various Ghatsila clubs run by Bengalis played their role in the restoration. Chatterjee approached five clubs with Bengali roots—including one that he headed, the Sanskriti Sansad—for contributions, explaining how it was brought back into the public domain from being a private residence and why a memorial named after Ban-

the world of bibhutibhushan · books our library at Sanskriti Sansad. Who reads those nowadays? No one.” Chatterjee’s view of the public’s reading habits being on the wane today is undeniable, but the efforts that he and others have demonstrated towards the collective preservation of Bandyopadhyay’s legacy suggest that determination can go a long way. But there are still questions about a number of issues that pop up. At the celebration at the Bibhuti Smriti Sansad, I could spot only one Adivasi—a Santal—but that was perhaps because he was a member of the theatre group that staged the adaptation of Mehanga Sauda. Around the time the play was being staged, I met a person who referred to the memorial as “the hotel.” I believe there are several people for whom Bandyopadhyay’s name would hardly ring a bell, irrespective of the status of their education or literacy or the level of general knowledge. Commercial ventures named after Bandyopadhyay and his works may enable some familiarity, but his legacy does not reach across the barriers of language or background. Even though a commendable contribution towards keeping Bandyopadhyay’s memory alive in Ghatsila has been made by the intelligentsia of that place, the fact remains that the ones making this contribution are the intelligentsia. Nonetheless, it was interesting to observe how Ghatsila enriched Bandyopadhyay, and his legacy is in its own way enriching Ghatsila. s

opposite page: I learnt that Gourikunja was being managed by an organisation that ran a school called Apur Pathshala there. There was also a stage named Taradas Mancha, named after Bandyopadhyay’s son. below: The illustrations of parts of the author’s life, in the paitkar art form, were by a local artist named Kishore Gayen.

courtesy hansda sowvendra shekhar

dyopadhyay was established instead of one at his own former residence. Chatterjee explained that efforts at restoring Gourikunja began in 1995. He was a member of the Congress Party and active in local politics. In 1997, he requested the local legislator to support the restoration, but, despite the latter’s interest, nothing could be done, as a noobjection certificate regarding Gourikunja could not be procured from the author’s son and legal heir. Finally, in 2008, the Bibhuti Smriti Sansad organised an event in Ghatsila, to which Taradas was invited; there, citizens requested him to hand over Gourikunja—by then, nearly in ruins—to the public so that a memorial could be established. He eventually agreed. The Gourikunja Unnayan Samiti came up soon after, and the renovated Gourikunja was inaugurated in February 2009. Apur Pathshala, which provides free Bengali lessons, was opened only in 2018. Chatterjee told me that he invests close to seven thousand rupees each month for Gourikunja’s maintenance. He clarified as well that there was no antagonism between Gourikunja and the Bibhuti Smriti Sansad. “I have, in fact, contributed some books to the library they inaugurated today at Bibhuti Smriti Sansad,” he said. He was iffy about the role of libraries in the present time, though. “Who’d go to a library and flip through an encyclopaedia or a dictionary? We have close to three thousand books in

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THE BOOKSHELF

ANDHAR BIL

A DISMANTLED STATE THE UNTOLD STORY OF KASHMIR AFTER ARTICLE 370

Kalyani Thakur Charal Translated by Asit Biswas

Anuradha Bhasin

A book that confronts the disinformation in the official narrative after the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir in 2019, looking closely at how the past three years have impacted the lives of Kashmiris.

This novella narrates the stories of communities who settled near the Andhar Bil lake, in a place that has seen many migrations and lives being rebuilt in the aftermath of partitions, and weaves them into the trajectory of Kamalini, a young girl who leaves her home for the city.

harper collins, S699, 408 pages zubaan, S340, 144 pages

SWIMMING IN OUR OCEANS

INDIAN CHRISTMAS

Pragya Bhagat

ESSAYS, MEMORIES, HYMNS Edited by Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle

A memoir that explores marriage, writing, notions of belonging and families, among other things, following the author as she moves to a village in Uttarakhand, and oscillating between her past and present.

An anthology with writing by Easterine Kire, Elizabeth Kuruvilla, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Jane Borges and Mary Sushma Kindo, among others, about Christmas traditions, art, poetry and anecdotes set in Goa, Nagaland, Kerala, Ranchi, Shillong, Jharkhand and other parts of the country.

zubaan, S495, 254 pages speaking tiger, S699, 244 pages 96

THE CARAVAN

THE BOOKSHELF

MARINA TSVETAEVA

WHERE MAYFLIES LIVE FOREVER

Vénus Khoury-Ghata Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan

Anupama Mohan

A biographical novel exploring the turbulent life of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, including the Russian civil war, her husband’s execution by the Soviet state, love affairs, her move to France and more.

A debut novel and thriller that begins with the residents of a town in Tamil Nadu being taken aback by a beheading. Although the people suspect a geography teacher, she has disappeared as well. As the plot thickens, the novel explores themes of trauma, violence and identity.

picador india, pan macmillan, S599, 240 pages seagull books, S699, 152 pages

FOR, IN YOUR TONGUE, I CANNOT FIT

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF DEMOCRACY Sundar Sarukkai

ENCOUNTERS WITH PRISON Edited by Shilpa Gupta and Salil Tripathi

This book brings together the work of several poets, across several periods and places, who were featured in Shilpa Gupta’s multimedia installation comprising one hundred authors persecuted for their writing and thinking.

A response to increasing political polarisation that takes off from BR Ambedkar’s views to argue that democracy needs to be seen as a form of social life that has to be part of our everyday practice. The book also analyses the relations between democracy and labour, ethics, science and religion.

context, S699, 358 pages

seagull books, S599, 184 pages JANUARY 2023

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roger viollet collection / getty images

Editor’s Pick

on 13 january 1898, the newspaper L’Aurore published an open letter by the novelist Émile Zola to the French president, Félix Faure. Titled “J’accuse…!”—I accuse—the article deplored the antisemitism that had led to the artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus being convicted of treason, three years earlier. Zola called the conviction a “horrid miscarriage of justice” that would “leave a stain” on Faure’s presidency. He urged Faure to fulfil his “duty as a man” by intervening in the case. Dreyfus was arrested in October 1894, soon after the Deuxième Bureau, France’s external military intelligence agency, received a letter found in the German embassy at Paris. Retrieved

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from a dustbin in the office of the embassy’s military attaché, the letter mentioned a number of confidential documents that the author was sending the Germans. Operating on the erroneous assumption that the sender would have been an artillery officer who had recently been assigned to the staff office, investigators settled on Dreyfus, a Jewish man from Alsace—which had been annexed by Germany—as their prime suspect. There was little evidence against him, other than a vague resemblance between his handwriting and that used in the letter. While the court martial that December was conducted in secret, Dreyfus’s guilt was assumed by the right-wing

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press, who used the case as justification for their past denunciations of France’s Jewish population. In the years following his conviction, as it became clear that the actual culprit was Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, several prominent intellectuals took up Dreyfus’s cause. Zola’s letter, published two days after Esterhazy was acquitted, was followed by antisemitic riots throughout France, and he was convicted of libel. The government appealed to the Supreme Court for a supplementary investigation. Dreyfus was tried again, at Rennes, and convicted once more, but the government pardoned him. In 1906, he was exonerated and reinstated in the army.