The Caravan - September 2019 8688065543, 9529020226

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

VOLUME 11 • ISSUE 9 SEPTEMBER 2019

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38

In early August 2019, the Indian state deployed probably the highest number of forces in Jammu and Kashmir since the first outbreak of militancy and imposed an almost complete communication black out. Soon, the Bharatiya Janata Party government abrogated the state’s special status, and split the state into two union territories. Despite the government’s public preparation to tackle the backlash, which also included putting pro-India leaders of the state under house arrest, it maintained that there was normalcy in Kashmir. The Indian media, especially television journalists, glorified the move and furthered the government’s narrative. But on the ground in Kashmir, the psychological trauma of near-violence under siege was palpable. By marginalising the pro-India leaders in the state, the central government has given legitimacy to the separatist sentiments that it was trying to suppress. It is evident that the people of Kashmir consider the government’s move to be a larger ploy to annihilate India’s only Muslim-majority state, and force it under the Hindutva fold.

perspectives

48

conflict

20

28 “One Solution, Gun Solution” Kashmir in shock and anger

praveen donthi government conflict

20 Crossing the Line

38 The Silence is the Loudest Sound Echoes of fascism in the Kashmir Valley

The NRC’s threat to Bangladesh, and the India–Bangladesh relationship

arundhati roy

afsan chowdhury

politics

art

48 Herding The Hindutva Flock

23 Scratching the Surface

For Modi and RSS, Kashmir is a tool to consolidate their hold over the twice-born castes

How the Venice Biennale reveals problems with nationalist art patronage

hartosh singh bal

skye arundhati thomas SEPTEMBER 2019

3

the lede

8 communities

8 Eroding People Power

A Himalayan village’s struggle to assert its forest rights

manshi asher communities

52

10 Separate and Unequal

How growing communalisation led to a rise in Muslim-only enclaves

hanan zaffar sport

12 Ring of Fire

photo essay / conflict

The Hazaras who made Quetta a boxing powerhouse

52 Spectres of

sama faruqi

Violence

art

Piecing together a history of extrajudicial killings in Manipur

14 Opening the Mic

rohit saha

A new generation of comedians examines what it means to be French

clea chakraverty

books

94

art

72 Standing the Test

of Time

The legacy of a pioneering Sri Lankan architect

smriti daniel literature

84 Sites of Battle the bookshelf showcase editor’s pick 4

92 94 98

72 THE CARAVAN

What Sri Lankan civil-war fiction tells us about the country’s political landscape

sharanya manivannan

contributors THE LEDE

8 10 12 14

Manshi Asher is with Himdhara, Environment Research and Action Collective, based in Himachal Pradesh. Hanan Zaffar is a journalist based in Delhi. Sama Faruqi is a Karachi-based journalist with the Pakistani daily Dawn. Clea Chakraverty is a journalist based in Paris. She worked in Mumbai as a freelance reporter between 2006 and 2013, and now works for the website The Conversation France.

PERSPECTIVES

20 Afsan Chowdhury is a journalist and research scholar based in Dhaka. 23 Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer based in Mumbai. She is contributing editor at the White Review.

REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS

28 Praveen Donthi is a staff writer at The Caravan. 38 Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Her most recent book is a collection of essays, My Seditious Heart. 48 Hartosh Singh Bal is the political editor at The Caravan.

PHOTO ESSAY

52 Rohit Saha is a visual artist from Kolkata. He works with photography, illustration and animation. He was awarded the Magnum Foundation’s Social Justice Fellowship in 2018. Tanvi Mishra is the creative director at The Caravan.

BOOKS

72

COVER

Photo: Atul Loke / The New York Times

Smriti Daniel is a journalist who writes on culture, politics, development and history. She is a two-time winner of the Feature Writer of the Year award from the Editor’s Guild of Sri Lanka. Her work has been featured in Al Jazeera, The Atlantic’s CityLab and Architectural Digest, among others. 84 Sharanya Manivannan is the author of five books, including The Queen of Jasmine Country and The High Priestess Never Marries.

Correction: Pieter Friedrich’s “All in the Family,” mistakenly stated that Sina Gabbard recalled her brother’s family prostrating themselves before an altar to Chris Butler. Instead, Sina recalled hearing of the family prostrating themselves at the feet of Butler. The Caravan regrets the error.

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THE CARAVAN

editor Anant Nath executive editor Vinod K Jose political editor Hartosh Singh Bal senior associate editor Roman Gautam books editor Maya Palit creative director Tanvi Mishra senior assistant editors Martand Kaushik and Puja Sen copy editors Ajachi Chakrabarti and Akash Poyam web editor Surabhi Kanga assistant editors (web) Arshu John and Tusha Mittal 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 staff writers Praveen Donthi, Atul Dev, Nikita Saxena, Sagar, Kaushal Shroff and Dearton Thomas Hector reporting fellow (north india) Tushar Dhara reporting fellow (government) Nileena MS reporting fellow (south india) Aathira Konikkara editorial fellows Amrita Singh and Mehak Mahajan multimedia producer Shaheen Ahmed fact checking fellows Ahan Penkar and Armanur Rahman social-media management and engagement fellow Arunima Kar senior software engineer Anjaneya Sivan assistant photo editor Shahid Tantray graphic designers Paramjeet Singh and Kevin Ilango hindi translator Vishnu Sharma editorial trainee Mohammed Tahir editorial manager Haripriya KM editorial assistant Akshita Pattiyani editorial interns Appu Ajith, Sreerag PS, Karishma Koshal and Kartikeya Shankar photo intern Rishi Kochhar

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THE LEDE Eroding People Power A Himalayan village’s struggle to assert its forest rights / Communities

Karam Sain led the way through the narrow paths of the temperate forest near the tribal village of Lippa, located in the Kinnaur district of Himachal Pradesh. The cool May air was filled with the scent of dried chilgoza pine cones, which crackled under his surefooted steps. Sain, whose fellow villagers save his name as CM—short for chief minister, reflecting his leadership role in the community—in their mobile phones, entered the small gompa—Buddhist religious structure—at Dakchompa. Located at an altitude of ten thousand feet, the site is said to house the spirit of the eighth-century Buddhist teacher Padmasambhava, who is revered by the Kanauras, the indigenous people of Kinnaur. The people of Lippa trek even higher up, to a holy lake called Ronnam Sorang, to celebrate the festival of Dakhrain. The Kanauras are a Scheduled Tribe, whose cultural and religious practices are rooted in the worship of animistic deities and ancestral spirits. Over time, these have become intertwined with Buddhism, the predominant religion in upper Kinnaur. In recent years, Lippa—a topographically fragile region with bare, rocky outcrops and patches of pine and cedar forests—has experienced the impact of rapid climatic changes, with lesser precipitation on average and unexpected heavy rains. Its main habitation is boxed in, with precipitous slopes on both sides and a raging river cutting at the feet of the village. The Pajer khadd—stream—brings millions of tonnes of silt to Lippa’s doorstep year after year, as it floods during 8

sumit mahar

/ manshi asher

Dakchompa gompa, a sacred site revered by tribals of Lippa, is under threat by proposed Kashang hydroelectric project.

the monsoon. Six years ago, even as disastrous floods in Kedarnath made national headlines, many parts of Kinnaur suffered unprecedented rains and loss of property. If it were not for the Kerang stream, which flows from the west to meet the Pajer near Lippa, their habitations would have been buried in a mountain of debris by now. After six months of snowfall, the summer is the only time of the year the people of Lippa can work in their fields. Commercial horticulture—mainly apple cultivation, which has been promoted by the state government since the 1970s—is the primary source of sustenance. The villagers ensure irrigation by diverting chashmas—underground THE CARAVAN

springs—from the forest. The forest also provides fuel, fodder, medicinal plants and the precious chilgozas, which are harvested and sold annually. For the last decade, the tribal community of Lippa has been engaged in a relentless struggle to protect each of these critical elements of their lives and livelihoods: the revered Dakchompa gompa, the forest, the groundwater springs that feed their apple orchards, and the Kerang, the village’s lifeline. The proposed 130-megawatt Kashang hydroelectric project, to be constructed by the state-run Himachal Pradesh Power Corporation Limited with a $208 million loan from the Asian Development Bank, involves the diversion

the lede

Of the 2,319 individual and community claims filed under the forest rights act, only 136 had been recognised by Himachal Pradesh till January this year.

ww of the Kerang through a six-kilometre tunnel into a neighbouring valley. In recent years, the construction of underground tunnels for hydropower projects has become the major cause of erosion, landslides and disturbance of groundwater in the Himalayas. The clearance given to the project by the environment ministry, in 2009, was fiercely opposed by the residents of Lippa, who set up the Paryawaran Sanrakshan Sangharsh Samiti to fight for their forest rights in court. Since Kinnaur is listed in the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution, the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 and the Himachal Pradesh Lease Rules are applicable here. The project also violated the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwelling Communities (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006—which requires gram sabha consent before diversion of forest land. On 6 May 2016, in response to a petition filed by the PSSS, the National Green Tribunal ordered that all community and individual claims should be considered by the gram sabhas. Himachal Pradesh has been one of the worst implementers of the forest-rights act. According to the minutes of the state-level monitoring committee constituted under the FRA, in January this year, while the state government was effectively implementing Section 3(2) of the act, which provides for diverting forest land for development projects, claims under Section 3(1), which enumerates a number of rights for forest-dwelling communities, remained pending “in absence of appropriate directions to field officers.” Of the 2,319 individual and community claims filed under the FRA, only

136—less than six percent—had been recognised by the state. A member of the PSSS told me that after the NGT ruling in 2016, “every effort was made by the company to scuttle the judgement, cajole and intimidate us into giving consent, even as the claims process was pending.” The community-rights claim filed by the Lippa gram sabha, covering 829 rights holders and over six thousand hectares of forest land, was approved by the district-level committee in 2018. Within months of the approval, the state cabinet decided to lease out 17 hectares of forest land to HPPCL for the Kashang project, in violation of the Himachal Pradesh Lease Rules and the NGT order. The PSSS approached the high court, but their appeal for a stay order was not granted. The case is ongoing. Meanwhile, the company, the district administration and the police ratcheted up the pressure on the local community, and cases have been filed against some of the villagers. Even as the intimidation to let HPPCL start construction was mounting, the people of Lippa faced a fresh crisis. The Indian army asked for 40 hectares of Lippa’s forest land to build an ammunition depot at Tsering Thanga, across the river from Dakchompa. A large open field surrounded by massive trees, Tsering Thanga is considered the home of Lippa’s ancestral deity, Tantanarenas. “The entire village gathers here annually to appease the spirits of their ancestors,” Semjang Dasi, a member of the Oras community, which traditionally practises carpentry, told me. The ammunition depot, currently located on the right bank of the Satluj river, has to be relocated as it falls on the alignment of an underground tunSEPTEMBER 2019

nel of Shongthong Karchham—an under-construction hydroelectric project, also being developed by HPPCL with Asian Development Bank funding. On 21 December last year, the Lippa gram sabha passed a resolution refusing the army’s proposal, and even proposed an alternative site. The proposal remains uncertain. However, the status of Lippa’s community forest rights is more uncertain. A year after granting approval, the district-level committee has still not issued a CFR title. To make matters worse, 47 individual forest-rights claims that had been approved by the Lippa gram sabha were rejected by the sub-divisional and district committees on unreasonable grounds. The rejection is being challenged in the high court. Tashi Chhewang, the secretary of Lippa’s forest-rights committee, discovered through a right-to-information application that the district administration had excluded the area diverted for the Kashang project—land-record numbers 827 and 944—from the forest land for which the village was to receive a CFR title. “Our CFR application included the entire forest land as per the settlement records,” Chhewang said. “HPPCL has already begun tendering contracts for the project to outsiders” Kalzan Neema, the head lama of Lippa, told me. “I would not blame the people if they choose to give in to the company’s pressure. If the law does not mean anything to them, then what more can be done? The youth in the village are saying, ‘Kal to hum samjhauta karne layak bhi nahin rahenge’”—Tomorrow we will not even be in a position to negotiate. Despite a favourable court judgement and central laws meant to protect them, the Kanauras are no closer to exercising their forest rights. “The gram sabha has already spent time and resources, and we cannot keep fighting endlessly,” Neema said. “We are just one small village.” s 9

the lede

Separate and Unequal How growing communalisation led to a rise in Muslim-only enclaves / Communities

/ hanan zaffar Earlier this year, Muhammad Raees, a 57-year-old resident of Jamia Nagar, began looking for a new house for his family. In his years of living in Delhi, he had never found a house that suited his requirements, a secure locality being top of his list. In May, a fortnight before Eid-ul-Fitr, he found a lead. “Festivities before festivity for Muslims who wish to live in Noida,” an online advertisement read. It offered residential towers “exclusively for Muslims” at R4,200 per square foot. Jamia Nagar, the predominantly Muslim neighbourhood where Raees has lived for the past fifteen years, lacks several basic facilities, such as clean drinking water, schools, parks and dispensaries, like most other Muslim localities in India. Nevertheless, it provided Raees “a sense of security,” he told me. “The first and foremost thing for anyone is being free from a sense of threat. I can afford a flat at many places in Delhi, but I did not move anywhere as I felt more safe living among the members of my own community.” In his 2017 paper, “Muslims in Indian Cities: Degrees of Segregation and the Elusive Ghetto,” Raphael Susewind, a lecturer in social anthropology and development at King’s College in London, studied religious demography and segregation in 11 Indian cities. He found that the segregation faced by the Muslim community in Delhi and its adjoining areas was the third highest among those cities, behind only Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. He wrote that “in order to achieve a religiously even spatial pattern in Delhi, either half of the capital’s Muslims or half of its non-Muslim citizens would need to relocate to another neighbourhood.” Religious ghettoisation in urban areas is not new, and has been widespread for over two decades. In 2006, the Sachar committee’s report on the socioeconomic status of Muslims in 10

India noted that “fearing for their security, Muslims are increasingly resorting to living in ghettos across the country. This is more pronounced in communally sensitive towns and cities.” “It takes more than segregation to form a ghetto,” Susewind wrote in his paper. “Or rather: it takes something else.” He argued that the policy debate and academic literature about ghettoisation has neglected “the political and social mechanisms that produce these spaces.” A key factor behind the emergence of Muslim ghettos was the growth of Hindutva politics and large-scale communal violence during the 1990s. The 1992 riots in Bombay, which began as a consequence of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, resulted in over seven hundred deaths, and contributed to the influx of thousands of Muslims into Mumbra. The suburb is now home to nearly a million people; Muslims make up 80 percent of the population. The neighbourhood of Juhapura, in Ahmedabad, houses almost half a million Muslims—a consequence of consistent communal violence between 1985 and 2002. The advertisement that caught Raees’s attention was published by the Aqaar Group, a Delhi-based builder. It is not the only real-estate company in Delhi that builds Muslim-only enclaves. In 2014, Adarsh group announced the construction of Gulistan Golf View Heights, promoted as “dream homes for elite Muslim brotherhood.” Since then, the company has been constructing apartment buildings exclusively for Muslims. “Circumstances drive such ideas,” Mohammed Saleem Jafar, the managing director of the Adarsh Group, told me. He said that many Muslims realised after the demolition of the Babri Masjid that they were susceptible to communal attacks, and it was better to form safety constellations. They began moving to neighbourhoods that already had a substantial Muslim presence as a defence mechanism. THE CARAVAN

“We all know Muslims as a community are living through difficult times,” Jafar said. “Being a builder, my motive is profit, but if my community benefits from my business, it is a bonus.” However, while they provide security to people like Raees, the unabated construction of such highend minority enclaves only contributes to residential segregation in India. Landlords and property dealers have long had informal rules to keep out religious minorities, which goes against the multi-ethnic nature of urban India. “We are being denied spaces on the pretext of being meat eaters or on the assumption of being too aggressive or conservative,” Arif Ahmad, an intern at a Delhi-based law firm, told me. There is no law in India that prohibits religious discrimination while selling or leasing property. “There

In 2006, Sachar Committee’s report noted that “fearing for their security, Muslims are increasingly resorting to living in ghettos across the country.”

ww is literally no way I can see people getting out of these concentrated clusters anytime soon, even if they have the means,” Neyaz Farooquee, the author of The Ordinary Man’s Guide to Radicalism, an autobiographical account of growing up Muslim in India, told me. “I know people who can afford to buy properties in the most posh localities of Delhi, but they don’t. Even if some people live in these posh areas, they have reserve flats in the ghettos.” While access to housing primarily remains tied to one’s caste and religious identity, other persistent gaps, such as economic status, education and employment, also play a substantial role. Indian Muslims, who find themselves at the lower ends of these indicators, are particularly vulnerable to being denied the housing of their choice. “We conducted a

the lede

survey on three social groups in India—Muslims, Scheduled Castes and upper castes—and found that Muslims were most discriminated, even worse off than Dalits,” Vinod Kumar Mishra, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, told me. In addition to such informal exclusion, residential segregation is further aggravated through legislation. In Gujarat, the Prohibition of Transfer of Immovable Property and Provision for Protection of Tenants from Eviction from Premises in Disturbed Areas Act, 1991 prohibits a Muslim from selling or leasing their property to a Hindu, and vice versa, in areas deemed communally sensitive, without clearance from the district collector. The law was amended in 2010 to give the local administration greater authority over granting permission for inter-community sales of property. Another amendment, passed in July this year, increased the punishment for unauthorised transactions in disturbed areas, and expanded the definition of “transfer of property.” It did, however, authorise the district collector to ascertain whether a transfer of property disturbs the demographic equilibrium of a disturbed area and increases the likelihood of “improper clustering of persons belonging to one community in the area.” The state government has been given the power to review any order passed by the district collector in this regard. “The amendment has made it tougher for people to buy and sell their properties,” Majid Alam, a journalist with the news channel News18, told me. “Even if two parties are in agreement, the district collector has powers to nullify it. Definitely, anyone can discern the evil intentions at the face of it.” A number of experts have warned of the impact of residential segregation, and advocated reintegration of neighbourhoods as a means of de-escalating the situation. The Sachar committee argued that ghettoisation had made the Muslim community “easy targets for neglect by municipal and government authorities.” Farooquee argued that along with the infrastructural exclusion, the ghettoisation also affects the psychological well-being of an individual living in such an atmosphere. As inhabitants of a ghetto respond to a certain stimuli in a similar and expected manner, “it becomes sort

rishi kochhar for the caravan

right: According to a 2017 study, the segregation faced by the Muslim community in Delhi and its adjoining areas was third highest among the 11 cities.

of a herd mentality” he added. The social activist Shabnam Hashmi called the mushrooming of minority ghettos a huge problem, “since in these areas, you may have a sense of security, but there is also more susceptibility to fall prey to conservative forces. It is like living in a bubble.” s SEPTEMBER 2019

11

the lede

Ring of Fire The Hazaras who made Quetta a boxing powerhouse / Sport / sama faruqi

LETTER FROM PAKISTAN

“Boxing was an unknown sport in Balochistan,” Hasratullah said. But whenever the state-run channel PTV would telecast the fights of Muhammad Ali, the boys of Alamdar Road would huddle around black-and-white televisions to watch. Then, in the 1980s, they began renting video cassettes of the matches of boxing legends. “We never missed a fight,” Habibullah remembered. “We 12

sadat sabori

Under the dilapidated ceiling of the Taji Khan Hazara Sports Complex—its white paint now grey and peeling—72year-old Habibullah Jaferi practised punches with a young student. A spot of sunlight lit the cold, concrete ground. The two danced around it. As his narrowed eyes followed her movements from behind a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, she positioned her gloves close to her face, swung a left, then a hurried right. He parried the blows, before shifting his focus to the next student. For six days a week, Habibullah holds free coaching classes at this club on Quetta’s Alamdar Road—one of four boxing clubs in the neighbourhood. A washed-out poster of the “father of boxing,” as he is known here, standing next to his star student, Syed Asif Shah Hazara, was plastered on the wall. Through the windows, the towering, barren mountains that surround the city were visible. Habibullah would practise along the foothills as a teenager in the 1960s. He would run in the open field, throwing his bare fists against the wind. “Has Habibullah lost his mind?” alarmed bystanders would ask his younger brother, Hasratullah Changezi.

would hire a TV and VCR from the shop and all would gather to watch the fight. The children would get very excited. They would imitate the moves of Ali, Joe Frazier and Mike Tyson.” Even now, decades later, Ali remains the reason many children here are drawn to boxing—although YouTube has replaced state television and VCRs as the medium for watching the sport— THE CARAVAN

Fatima, a 15-year-old who already holds a black belt in karate and took up boxing when the club introduced an afternoon slot for girls last year, told me. Her friends made fun of her for taking up such a “masculine sport,” but her family has largely been supportive. “It’s more difficult than karate. There are more injuries,” she said, holding out her hardened knuckles.

the lede

Alamdar Road’s identity was once linked to the imambargahs—Shia congregation halls—scattered along its length. Now, its name brings back dreadful memories of 10 January 2013, when two explosions ripped through a snooker hall and killed over a hundred people. Incessant attacks against the Hazara community, including bomb blasts and targeted killings, have led the Hazara-dominated neighbourhoods of Quetta to become heavily fortified ghettos. Haji Abdul Wahid, who owns the Azaad Boxing Club in the neighbourhood, said that earlier, “there used to be an equal number of Baloch and Hazara students training, but barely anyone from outside comes anymore. We can’t go outside to practise either. We’ve become isolated. It’s like we’re in camouflage here.” Despite the turmoil they live in, the Hazaras continue to take immense pride in their success at competitive sports. Last year, 19-year-old Nargis Hameedullah returned home to cheering crowds after winning a bronze medal in karate at the Jakarta–Palembang Asian Games. However, apart

“A boxer—or anyone, really—has to live,” Habibullah said. “Boxing is not going to put bread on the table. Only if you become a great player does this profession pay off.”

ww from the occasional accolade won by Asif, the state of boxing remains a far cry from its glory days in the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, the Hazara boxers of Quetta—led by the formidable trio of Abrar Hussain, Haider Ali and Asghar Ali Changezi—would regularly bring home medals from international events. All three honed their craft at Alamdar Road, under Habibullah’s watchful eye.

Habibullah took up coaching after touring the country as an amateur boxer for several years. He represented Balochistan for the first time in an inter-provincial competition at Karachi in 1971. There, he met the legendary sports official Anwar Chowdhry, then the secretary of the Pakistan Boxing Federation, who would go on to serve as the president of the International Boxing Association for two decades. On a trip to Quetta, Chowdhry was taken aback by the popularity of the sport among the locals, after attending a boxing meet on the grounds of a government school. “It was a football field,” Habibullah recalled. “We had a boxing ring we could dismantle and get reassembled there.” When Chowdhry saw the crowd of people clamouring to buy tickets, he told Habibullah to let them in for free. Chowdhry sent Abdullah Baloch from Lyari—the conflict-ridden town in Karachi that is the other powerhouse of Pakistani boxing, and was the hometown of Hussain Shah, who would go on to win Pakistan’s only Olympic medal in the sport, at Seoul in 1988—to coach the local prospects, including Habibullah. Then, during a tournament in 1980–81, he told Habibullah to start coaching. “He told me, ‘Make these boys into something. Otherwise, all this talent will go to waste.’” In 1997, after spending over a decade touring the world as a light-heavyweight and heavyweight boxer, Asghar Ali Changezi fought his final bout, in Quetta. He had won his first gold medal at the 1984 South Asian Games, at the age of 17. Then, in 1992, he won the gold at the Asian Championship in Bangkok, and qualified for the Barcelona Olympics. “At the time, the Koreans dominated boxing in Asia, but I was able to defeat North Korea in the semifinals,” he said. Asghar’s interest in boxing was spurred by watching his “senior” Abrar Hussain train as a child. A few years SEPTEMBER 2019

opposite page: For six days a week, Habibullah holds free coaching classes at the Taji Khan Hazara Sports Complex.

older than him, Hussain, a light-middleweight boxer, would go on to thrice represent Pakistan at the Olympics and become the chairman of Balochistan’s sports board after his retirement. In 2011, Hussain was killed by unknown assailants as he stepped out of his office. In response, Haider Ali, the third giant of Quetta boxing, who won the featherweight gold at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, fled the country—“to save his life,” Changezi told me—and settled in the United Kingdom. Asghar decided to stay on. After retiring, he joined the Quetta police. He confessed that he no longer follows the boxing scene closely. “What I notice now is that whenever our boxing teams play internationally, they return home empty-handed,” he mused. “This wasn’t the case in our time.” He added that since the presidency of Pervez Musharraf, more money has been pumped into sports boards, and winners are now awarded large sums. “Now, there are more resources,” he said,“but perhaps there is less passion.” Habibullah disagreed. “A boxer—or anyone, really—has to live,” he said. “Boxing is not going to put bread on the table. Only if you become a great player does this profession pay off. All these children who train here are from poor families. They cannot afford to pay. Look at the state of our club. Has anyone from the sports board ever donated a pair of gloves? No.” More than the lack of money, Habibullah added, it is the climate of fear among the Hazara that is hurting boxing in Quetta, particularly after Hussain’s assassination. He rued that the crowds at boxing matches had fallen drastically. “You need to have peace of mind to be a good boxer,” he said. “Where is the peace?” s 13

the lede

Opening the Mic A new generation of comedians examines what it means to be French / Art

/ clea chakraverty As I walked past the barbershops and dimly lit bars on the right bank of the Seine, young men, mostly Malian and Ivorian, called out, offering manicures and haircuts. The east-central boroughs of the tenth and eighteenth arrondissements of Paris are a haven for African touts, Turkish cafes, Pakistani shops, migrant tenements, hipster joints and a few shady ones too. But when I reached the Comédia, a concert hall built in 1858, the crowd queuing on the pavement was posh, fashionable and as mixed race as it can get in Paris. The audience of over six hundred people was here to watch Fary Lopes, a 28-year-old comedian who is one of the biggest stars of the French stand-up scene. “We have a problem here in France,” Fary said during his act. “We don’t say we love our country enough.” The comedian, whose parents came from Cape Verde, questioned our relationship with the French nation and its complicated history of immigration. He talked about identity politics, feminism and selfrespect—“Does being integrated mean you have to forget who you are?” He made sure that each punch line drew laughs, applause and cheering. As he ended the ninety-minute show with a rousing “Long live the Republic! Long live France!” to the beats of the Congolese-French rapper Youssoupha, I could not help wondering whether I had been attending a political rally. “There is a long tradition of bouffonerie and humour as a counter power in France, but till the 1960s or 1970s, it was popularised through concert theatres and singing items,” Nelly Quemener, a sociologist at Sorbonne University who specialises in the politics of humour, told me. “The scene changed thanks to important figures such as Coluche. His style defied all theatre conventions. Artists like him directly addressed the public, without props or gimmicks.” 14

Coluche was the stage name of Michel Gérard Joseph Colucci, a comedian and actor whose political irreverence and working-class aesthetic made him a household name during the 1970s. In October 1980, he announced that he would run for president the following year, against the incumbent, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and the Socialist Party’s candidate, François Mitterrand. Although he did not expect to win, he was appealing, he said, “for the votes of the lazy, the dirty, the drug-addicted, and the alcoholic, of queers, women, parasites, the young, the old, artists and jail-birds … blacks, pedestrians, Arabs, the French, the hirsute, the mad and the transvestite, everyone whom the politicians don’t give a stuff for.” The humour magazine Charlie Hebdo organised his campaign, and published his manifesto. In December, an opinion poll gave him 16 percent of the vote.

LETTER FROM FRANCE

Coluche withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Mitterand shortly before the first round of voting, but his support among those disaffected by French politics would remain. Forty years on, Coluche’s portrait adorns the signs of the “yellow vest” protestors. In neighbouring Italy, the Five Star Movement, which was co-founded by the comedian Beppe Grillo and harbours similar disenchantment with the political class, is part of the ruling coalition. Coluche, Quemener told me, marked a profound shift in French humour. “Suddenly, political satires and social critics were much more present. It paved the way for a new generation of artists.” In the 1990s, France discovered a vocal, yet stuttering young adult, who was short, brown, hiding his paralysed right arm and always dressed in street wear. THE CARAVAN

The Moroccan-French comedian Jamel Debbouze, who described life in Trappes, the troubled southern suburb of Paris, as “always a sketch,” rapidly became the radical new face of French comedy. “He was brilliant!” Alexis le Rossignol, a 28-year-old stand-up artist, told me. “He had his own style and language. He didn’t need to incarnate someone else to be funny. People could identify with him, as he brought issues such as being of immigrant parents, suffering from inequalities or from the regular clash with police.” Le Rossignol aspires to be the voice of the forgotten rural regions of France through his comedy. “My dad works with vets and poor farmers in an ugly region,” he told me. “That’s a France no one wants to hear about.” It is a France at the forefront of a social crisis, struggling to survive amidst welfare cuts and labour reforms, filled with people whom the author Édouard Louis describes as a “category of humans whom politics has doomed to an early death.” A similar feeling animates 22-year-old Rémi Lufuta Kuamba. “French politics is useless, but with stand-up comedy I can create awareness about climate change, corruption or pollution, especially where I come from,” the former undergraduate in political science from Gorges-lès-Gonesse, a northern suburb of Paris, told me. We were meeting at the Café Paname, which the playwright and director Kader Aoun called a “factory for stand-uppers.” Aoun worked closely with Debbouze during the 1990s. “Politics has always been present in French humour, but stand-up brought forward a whole population left out by the system, the poor, uneducated sons and daughters of immigrants,” he told me. Aoun still lives in the suburbs of Paris, and his work focusses on “peripheric France,” as “it can bring as much art as anywhere else.” For years, the performers and audiences at Paris’s comedic theatres were overwhelmingly white. Thanks to people such as Debbouze and Aoun, Quemener said, “a whole new public found an avenue to express itself.” Today, the emerging voices of French comedy have established a contrast with the Debbouze years. Kuamba, who hosts a web-radio talk show, told me he wanted to avoid the “usual clichés about being a black guy from a backward suburb.” He said that he was “trying to

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opening the mic · the lede

bertrand rindoff petroff / getty images

right: In March, Fary’s show Hexagone drew fifteen thousand people at the AccorHotels Arena in Paris, and he is the first French comedian to host a Netflix special.

draw kids to politics in a way they are not used to. I usually say that life in the projects is very much like life in the French parliament.” Shirley Souagnon, a 32-year-old comedian and producer of Ivorian descent, who is openly lesbian and uses her own multiple identities to discuss gender, sexuality, discrimination and inequality on stage, said that “French identity is multiple, but also more open to the world today. As I grew up, people like me were very rarely represented in the French elite or media. Little has changed today. So stand-up offers such a platform.” “Getting on stage is always a political act,” Bun Hay Mean, a comedian who had recently returned from an international tour of various Asian and francophone countries, told me. Born to Cambodian and Chinese parents in France, Bun performs under the name Chinois Marrant—“funny Chinese”—and often denounces the discrimination faced by the Asian community in France, as well as other immigrants. “Laughing allows you to enter one’s mind. We still live in a society dominated by white, heterosexual, capitalist men. I want to show there is more to that.” His producer, Fanny Jourdan, makes it a point to represent artists who defend ideas of togetherness. “They can say anything they want, as long as it is done cleverly,” she said. “But the public knows best.” Last December, Donel Jacks’man, one of the artists Jourdan represents, was called a “filthy black” by a member of the audience while discussing right-wing politics during a performance in Nice. Jacks’man used the incident to condemn 16

THE CARAVAN

all forms of racism. During another performance, at a packed venue in Paris’s Quartier Pigalle, he pointed out what the French people should work on: empathy, tolerance and love for each other. “We have the values of the French Republic on our side,” he said. His latest show, which launches in September, is appropriately named Together. “We can be, and have been, the voice of many people,” Olivier Balestriero, who performs under the stage name Vérino, told me. Aoun, however, was sceptical of the politics of the new generation of French comedians. “Most of them are caught up by the neoliberal system,” he said. “They lack decent education, musical or even political culture, and often they have no sense of history.” In May this year, Fary, who was one of Aoun’s protégés, introduced the award for best comedic play at the Molières ceremony, the prestigious theatre awards. “Salut les blancs!”—Hello, white people!—he began, drawing groans from the audience. They were soon laughing along, as he joked about the lack of diversity that still persists on the French stage, calling for the addition of an “urban” category at the Molières. Many people lauded his speech as radical truth-telling; many others called him a racist. The controversy only underscored the popularity he has achieved—in March, his show Hexagone drew fifteen thousand people at the AccorHotels Arena in Paris, and he is the first French comedian to host a Netflix special. By picking at the crucial question of what it means to be French in the twenty-first century, a new generation of comedians is finding its audience, and its political voice. s

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PERSPECTIVES Crossing the Line The NRC’s threat to Bangladesh, and the India–Bangladesh relationship / Government / afsan chowdhury

opposite page: Halima Khatun poses with her election card in Darrang, Assam. Her 17-yearold daughter committed suicide after discovering that her name was not included in the NRC list. 20

“While we should not be worried, there is some anxiety after reading news reports,” AK Abdul Momen, the foreign minister of Bangladesh, told a television channel in July. He was speaking of the National Register of Citizens, the Indian government’s project to define and identify legal residents of the state of Assam—and, more importantly, to identify and make stateless those who it claims are illegal immigrants. Last year, the NRC provisionally identified around four million supposedly “illegal” people—almost exclusively Muslims—who in the official Indian narrative have been branded “Bengali” infiltrators, from across the border in Bangladesh. Momen’s cautious statement was reported as the first public admission of concern over the NRC by the Bangladesh government. Those the NRC had singled out, he said, had been living in Assam for over 75 years. “They are their citizens,” he insisted, “not ours.” India has not said what it plans to do with those the NRC tags as outsiders and renders stateless. But in Bangladesh, few have any doubts as to what the eventual goal is—and many raise warnings in sharper terms than Momen did. Shaheen Afroze, a research director at a think tank under the country’s foreign ministry, told me that the Assamese Muslims targeted by the NRC “are not only an internal issue of India anymore, because their intended eviction destination is Bangladesh.” Bangladesh has seen this tragic charade before—across its other international border, with Buddhist-majority Myanmar. There too, a Muslim people, the Rohingya, are considered illegal though they have lived in the country for many generations. There too, they are being pushed out to further narrow domestic political ends, and are portrayed as “Bangladeshis.” Since 2017 alone, three quarters of a million Rohingyas have been pushed out of Myanmar by force. THE CARAVAN

“We are already in much difficulty with the 11 lakh Rohingya refugees, so we can’t take anymore,” Momen said in July. “The issue must be handled carefully and policy options to meet the future found,” Afroze told me. “We can’t have another Rohingya-like crisis.” Last year, a headline in the Dhaka Tribune asked, “Will 1.6m ‘non-Indian migrants’ in Assam become the new Rohingyas?” The chances of the Rohingya returning safely to Myanmar are zero, despite the United Nations saying otherwise, and Bangladesh is resigned to hosting them permanently, though this has never been officially stated. Bangladesh is straining to pay for the refugees’ upkeep, despite international aid, and their presence has become a tricky political issue. It is clear that Bangladesh cannot afford a similar situation with refugees from India, yet the Indian government has not so much as spoken of the matter with Bangladeshi officials. The NRC threatens to cause a major crisis in Bangladesh—one much larger than the one caused by Myanmar’s eviction of the Rohingya. The powers in Delhi might not care much for how their domestic policies affect a neighbouring country, but even so their approach is short-sighted. The fallout from the NRC will unavoidably scar the ties between the two countries—almost the last relatively cordial relationship India has left with its neighbours—and the consequences could be counter to India’s own international interests. India is Bangladesh’s closest neighbour at present, and India–Bangladesh ties have been steady and strong under the incumbent rule of Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League. India is not popular in Bangladesh—just as Muslims in India are often considered proxy Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, Hindus in Bangladesh are often seen as proxy Indians—Hasina’s Awami League does not play up hostility to India and Hindus. This is unlike the Awami League’s main rival, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. As leverage against India,

zishaan a latif for the caravan

perspectives

past Bangladeshi governments—particularly those led by the BNP—reportedly supported militant groups in the Indian northeast, providing sanctuary and safe passage of arms and supplies. Hasina is believed to have reversed that policy, and earned much thanks from Delhi for it, so much so that her critics complain it is Indian backing that keeps

her in power in exchange. Also to India’s liking, where Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence found friendlier soil in Bangladesh under the BNP, under Hasina it is deemed an enemy agency and Pakistan–Bangladesh relations are acrimonious. Trade between the two countries has been excellent—India is Bangladesh’s second-largest source of SEPTEMBER 2019

imports, and trade between the countries in both directions continues to grow. The two countries also have extensive social and cultural ties, and the historical legacy of India’s backing for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan, achieved in 1971. Nonetheless, there has been friction. The most notable source of it so far is 21

crossing the line · perspectives disagreement over the cross-border sharing of river waters. The Farakka Barrage, which controls the flow of the Ganga before it enters Bangladesh, is a perennial sore point despite a standing treaty on how to share the river’s flow. A similar treaty mooted for the Teesta has yet to materialise, despite placatory words from the Indian government under Narendra Modi. With the water question, Bangladesh has essentially given up on India. These are the main arenas of the India–Bangladesh relationship. Increasingly, however, the relationship must be understood not in bilateral terms, but as part of a trilateral dynamic involving an added agent—China. The country has emerged as Bangladesh’s main source of imports and largest trading partner, replacing India. In 2016, Bangladesh signed on to China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, which India bitterly opposes. (Hasina, as an interlocutor of sorts, even invited India to join the BRI.) Chinese investment in Bangladesh runs into billions of dollars, and is growing. China

“First, anti-Indian sentiment would rise. Second, anti-government sentiment would rise, as this would give a fillip to those who claim that the Bangladesh government is in the Indians’ pockets. And, finally, it could have a really negative impact on Hindus living in Bangladesh. For me, the last is the most serious concern.”

ww is also linked to high-profile and politically valuable infrastructure projects—most notably the Padma Bridge, a road-rail link across the Padma River to improve access to the Bangladesh’s geographically isolated south-west—and is the largest supplier of hardware to the Bangladeshi military. All the business China brings in has made it a close friend especially of Bangladesh’s military and business elite, and the country now has a large lobby in favour of Chinese investment, in particular the BRI. India’s connections, by contrast, are strongest with the cultural and political classes rather than with the military and big business. Beyond its obvious anger at Myanmar over the 2017 Rohingya exodus, Bangladesh saw the regional diplomatic consequences of that crisis from a trilateral viewpoint. After past Rohingya evictions—in 1977 and 1992—Myanmar was forced to take them back due to international pressure. This time, with the United Nations toothless, Bangladesh could only have looked for help to its 22

THE CARAVAN

two great regional allies. But, tacitly or otherwise, both chose to back Myanmar and further their interests there. Keeping in mind the deep history of India–Bangladesh ties, India’s support for Myanmar was less expected than China’s. None of this was allowed to affect trade with either country, but there was apprehension that Hasina’s political stature could be undermined by the apparent letdown for Bangladesh in spite of her friendly policy towards both governments. To add to that, there was the possibility of a popular backlash against Bangladesh’s hosting of Rohingya refugees, who remain seen as outsiders and a burden by many Bangladeshis. But Hasina saw off those doubts to sweep an election in 2018. If refugees flood in from Assam, Bangladeshi resentment will attach unequivocally to India, and no amount of harping on the spirit of 1971 will help. And most Bangladeshis have much greater cultural and linguistic affinity for Assamese Muslims than the Rohingya, so the rancour over their mistreatment will be louder and more potent, in domestic politics and regional diplomacy. This only plays into China’s hands, since India stands to lose social, historical and political stock that China cannot match. Popular anger against India could force Hasina to alter Bangladesh’s friendly stance towards its neighbour. That will translate into more financial and political clout for China, and likely also an increase in China’s military influence on Bangladeshi soil and naval presence in Bangladesh waters—issues already irking India. “The collateral damage would be three-fold,” Zafar Sobhan, the editor of the Dhaka Tribune, told me. “First, anti-Indian sentiment would rise. Second, anti-government sentiment would rise, as this would give a fillip to those who claim that the Bangladesh government is in the Indians’ pockets. And, finally, it could have a really negative impact on Hindus living in Bangladesh. For me, the last is the most serious concern.” Sobhan could not imagine “that India would make such a move unilaterally. Before any largescale eviction, it will be discussed with Bangladesh.” Just how large the eviction might be is impossible to predict, but it might well dwarf the Rohingya influx—the final tally of those the NRC excludes in Assam will very probably be in the millions, and last month the Indian government announced that it will prepare a country-wide national population register within the coming year. Sobhan had no doubt about the severity of the problem. The NRC, he said, “is not just about political posturing and winning votes, this is actually a policy many in the [Indian] government feel strongly about.” That suggests the start of Bangladesh’s next refugee crisis is a matter of when, not if. s

perspectives

Scratching the Surface How the Venice Biennale reveals problems with nationalist art patronage / Art / skye arundhati thomas Docked in the choppy waters of a Venetian canal, along the warehouse architecture of the Arsenale—one of two venues of the 2019 Venice Biennale—is the ruin of a 90-foot fishing boat. Titled “Barca Nostra”—Italian for “our boat”—it forms part of a project by the Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel. On the night of 18 April 2015, in waters between Libya and the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, this boat capsized, and nearly eight hundred passengers drowned or were lost at sea. Each passenger was a migrant fleeing war or famine, hoping to seek refuge in Europe. On board were people from Syria, Gambia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Mali, Libya, Eritrea and Bangladesh. Only 28 people survived. A year after it was wrecked, the boat was brought back to Sicily, where forensic experts combed through its interiors to segregate and identify the body parts and belongings left behind. The boat’s passage from Libya was an operation spearheaded by Mohammed Ali Malek, a Tunisian smuggler. Malek was seen brandishing a long wooden pole to keep his passengers in line while ferrying them to the boat in a small wooden dinghy. He contacted the Italian coastguard in Rome as soon as they hit international waters, asking for help. The coastguard responded by signalling a nearby Portuguese container ship. Witnesses saw Malek grab the steering wheel and slam it into the oncoming vessel. He was found guilty of manslaughter, and sentenced to 18 years in prison and a ¤9 million fine. Büchel’s project to bring the vessel to Venice cost a cool ¤33 million to complete, including the original ¤9.5 million the Italian navy spent on salvaging the boat. Venice is just the first port of call; the boat will later travel to the Sicilian town of Augusta, where it will be developed into a “garden of memory.” Barca Nostra is currently anchored

opposite a Biennale coffee shop. On the opening days of the art show, immaculately dressed—and primarily European—attendees were slurping down espressos within eyeshot of the large tear on the side of its hull, which had originally let water flood in and sink the ship. Most visitors did not recognise that the boat was a so-called artwork, or anything of note at all, assuming it to be part of the existing infrastructure of the Arsenale, a former shipyard. The presence of the boat, especially as an “artwork,” is uncomfortable: the only purpose it serves is to shock its viewing audience, should they be able to discern what it is. Its inclusion in the Biennale, as part of the curator Ralph Rugoff’s group exhibition May You Live in Interesting Times—a show that happens in tandem with the independent presentations at national pavilions—is perplexing, and reeks of Büchel’s privilege. The phrase “May you live in interesting times” comes from a non-existent Chinese proverb. In the late 1930s, a British member of parliament used it to describe the unsteady future of Britain in the face of escalating war rhetoric. He claimed it was an ancient Chinese curse, and in typically Orientalist fashion, this turned out to be completely untrue. Rugoff intentionally plays with this misunderstanding, and the unlikely generosity of the phrase allows for several different interpretations at once. The “interesting times” threatened here are plagued by the calamities of twenty-first-century living: the migration crisis, big data, surveillance technologies, institutionalised racism, the arms trade, the prison–industrial complex and climate change. Our times get most interesting when the theme is taken as a provocation or a threat. To live in an interesting time is to live in an extraordinary time, when the bizarre, frightening and uncanny is no longer the exception but the rule. But the premise of “Barca Nostra” is insulting. The project demonstrates SEPTEMBER 2019

a shallowness typical to blockbuster artworks that take on politics in the twenty-first century—big gestures do not always equal smart arguments. The work does not offer nuance or agency to those who died. It also misses an opportunity, especially given the Biennale’s European context, to point toward the audience’s own complicity with the boat’s brutal history. As the critic Alexandra Stock wrote for the Egyptian online newspaper Mada Masr, “Barca Nostra is a performance. It’s watching a middle-aged European man metaphorically drape himself in the violent deaths of migrants whom he doesn’t bother to name and then, as a second act, attempt to pin some form of vague guilt on his audience.” Perhaps Rugoff intended the work to introduce a realpolitik in the midst of contemporary art’s tendency towards abstraction. As a result of that curatorial choice, a literal piece of failing political infrastructure now sits among conceptual or propositional works. But the boat works more as a gruesome reminder of the violence of nationalised border politics. The irony is not lost here, at the Venice Biennale, where one of the central modes of representation at play is that of the nation state, through the format of the national pavilions. For each edition, participating national pavilions put on individual exhibitions that respond to the overarching theme. India has a pavilion this year—its second ever, after an eightyear hiatus. Given the momentum created by the first pavilion in 2011, which was curated by Ranjit Hoskote and fashioned itself as a “laboratory for the Idea of India,” the arts community was hoping to have a more permanent place at the event. However, this requires some serious political manoeuvring and negotiation. First, the organisers must extend an invitation to participate, which is exclusive. And then, the ministry of culture of the nation in question must duly respond. Given the 23

scratching the surface · perspectives Biennale’s model, in order to have an official presence, nation states must be involved in the production, funding and facilitation of the pavilions. It is a form of soft cultural diplomacy, whose origins go back to the nationalist politics of the late nineteenth century. The first iteration of the event was in 1895, an initiative of Riccardo Selvatico, the mayor of Venice and a comic playwright. In 1893, Selvatico and his team sent invitations to artists from 15 countries stating that the biennial event would display “all the noblest activities of the modern spirit, without any distinction of nationality.” The presentation took place at the Napoleonic gardens, the Giardini, across a string of interlinking public promenades and gardens. By 1905 the exhibition had grown exponentially, and needed to expand its infrastructure. This is how, in 1907, the first national pavilion was built, by Belgium. Hungary, Bavaria— now Germany—and Britain followed, as did France in 1912. After the First World War, more contenders flooded in: Spain, Czechoslovakia, the United States, Austria and Greece. An event that had resolved to eschew nationalism had quite literally cemented the legacy of nation states across Europe. In 1976, the practice of setting an overarching theme to unite the works on display was developed, a model that now proliferates in biennales across the world—Istanbul, Sao Paulo, Gwangju, Sharjah and, of course, Kochi. Venice, however, remains the only one tied to its nationalist representations. The format certainly needs an update, and sits as a bewildering anomaly in the globalised politics of the twenty-first century. Participating nation states rarely overlap their presence, and the pavilions come off as largely separatist in nature. They are also pitted against each other in vying for the coveted Golden Lion. In its most basic form, each pavilion serves to give a survey, commentary or insight into the current discourses of its nation state. As such, the Indian pavilion takes the theme, Our Time for a Future Caring, with explicit reference to the “legacy of Gandhi,” who is the protagonist of a presentation that represents the current political moment as one of 24

needing a move toward nonviolence and collective mass action. While this call for collective mass action is potent, and serves as an urgent reminder, the pavilion does little to reference the violence of contemporary Indian politics. The show is curated by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art—which is also the pavilion’s primary sponsor—and features several works from the museum’s own collection. Roobina Karode, the chief curator at the museum, does not take a literal approach to this legacy of Gandhi. She is cognisant of how Gandhi recurs in the political consciousness during times of crisis, and attempts a critique of this tendency. The pavilion is thus informatively hung, like a museum show, and Karode has focussed her attention on Gandhi’s writings on craft, the dignity of labour, non-violence and protest. Her argument is peaceful, but a little too quiet: one has to look closely to find the critique of dominant—particularly Hindu—political narratives in the works on display. Ashim Purkayastha’s series of stamps take on caste and farmer’s suicides, and even depict a small image of a “Muslim

anonymously, in the press. This is, undoubtedly, very difficult to do, given the involvement of the Indian culture ministry. The KNMA, with its delicate curatorial approach, seems to have pulled off an immense logistical and organisational feat. It does become quickly apparent that this particular theme, with its focus on Gandhi, has a lot to do with the ministry of culture. The pavilion is the result of a public–private partnership between the culture ministry, the National Gallery of Modern Art, the KNMA and the Confederation of Indian Industry. The nature of this partnership seems to imply that the financial heavy lifting has come from the private bodies, which acquiesced to the demands made by the ministry, such as the theme. The Indian cultural economy certainly relies on private initiatives much more than on public ones—and, in turn, on private institutions—as there is such little access to public funding and, of course, the ever-present threat of censorship. This particular partnership has enabled the pavilion to exist where at other moments in the past it has stalled. And this

The question remains of how accurately the pavilion speaks to the present political moment in India. One response is to demand a sharper critique that shows the world that the cultural practitioners of India do not shy away from asking tough questions. Some have said this, anonymously in the press, after the Biennale opened.

ww Gandhi.” Rummana Hussain’s sculptures—assemblies of terracotta, bricks and pigments—make reference to the fall of the Babri Masjid: a dome-like pot spills over in red hues of terracotta and brick. The tenderness of the works is a refreshing approach in comparison to some of the shock-value pieces on display elsewhere at the Biennale, such as Büchel’s boat, but the question remains of how accurately the pavilion speaks to the present political moment in India. One response is to demand a sharper critique, something that shows the world that the cultural practitioners of India do not shy away from asking tough questions. Some have said this after the Biennale opened, albeit THE CARAVAN

is significant. Presumably, the ministry of culture also noticed an opportunity to continue the rhetoric of a nonviolent India abroad. The stakes are high. India should indeed have a permanent place at the event, but to do so it must straddle both the demands of the ministry as well as those the Biennale Foundation itself. It must be informative; it must also be critical. For the Indian pavilion to exist, it must work harder than others: be relatable to an audience that is largely unaware of the nuances of the Indian context as well as assent to the brief set out by the state’s involvement with its infrastructure. Furthermore, it stands on shaky ground, as its continued pres-

courtesy andrea avezzù la biennale di venezia

scratching the surface · perspectives

ence at the event remains uncertain, given that we do not yet have a permanent pavilion at the Biennale. For another pavilion to happen, the culture ministry must, once again, be brought to the table. It must also be said that, regardless of whether pavilions choose to critique the nation states they represent, or to quieten the present-day politic, both approaches are performative, and come with their own contradictions. It is evident that certain countries also perform their critique much more than others. For instance, at the 2015 Biennale, titled All the World’s Futures, the German national pavilion offered a group presentation that included a film and installation by Hito Steyrl, a German artist of Japanese descent. Steyrl’s “Factory of the Sun” was a kind of virtual-reality game and documentary-film dance party. In the film’s opening sequence, a Deutsche Bank PR agent delivers an emotionless justification of an assassination—by drone—of anti-capitalist protestors in Germany. Using images of dystopia so prevalent in our times, where everyday aesthetics are only slightly tweaked to look futuristic—think Black Mirror— here the point is that financial institutions are the real perpetrators of state-sanctioned violence. Steyrl called out Deutsche Bank for being complicit and accelerationist, and she did so at a time when the European debt crisis was reaching its

climax, as were the negotiations over Greece’s debt to Germany. In a final twist, Sparkassen-Kulturfonds, a cultural fund established by a coalition of German savings banks, was the main sponsor of the pavilion. Unfortunately, in order to critique the structure one is often co-opted by its infrastructure. This year, the Belgian pavilion—the oldest at the Biennale—took a markedly different approach, with a presentation by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys. Rickety amusement-park-style animatronics typify Belgian characters that knead bread, knit from rocking chairs or grind knives. Each has an eerie and completely vacant look. Each is also a character of European pastoralism, repeating the same task on a loop. The work can be read as a joke, or an admission of guilt, with a kind of vulnerability to its confession: white privilege must at first recognise itself before it begins the process of correcting its patterns. In 2015, the Belgian pavilion did something bold, and opened itself up to outside collaboration: in a presentation entitled Personne et les autres—Person and the Others—the artist Vincent Meessen invited artists from Africa and Asia to show their work—primarily those from Belgium’s former colony, the Congo. In “The Other Memorial,” the Congolese artist Sammy Baloji proposed that the industrialisation of the Congo SEPTEMBER 2019

above: The ruins of a 90-foot fishing boat. Titled “Barca Nostra”—Italian for “our boat”—it forms part of a project by the Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel. The artwork has been critiqued for the shallowness of the political gesture it attempts to make.

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right: However, it is difficult not to notice the voyeuristic nature of the images in Soham Gupta’s portraits of people in Kolkata marginalised by caste and class. In an attempt to deliver agency, Gupta proposes that each image is a “collaboration” between subject and photographer but the power dynamics of this collaboration is not clear.

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was the direct result of imperialism, with a delicate and moving work of thinly hammered copper sheets of leaves that were historically confiscated from the people who lived in Katanga. The idea of the pavilion was also to revisit Belgian modernity and see it for the referential project that it was: heavily dependent on influences from Congolese intellectuals and artists. In an audio-visual contribution, Meessen discovers a previously unpublished document: the lyrics of a protest song from 1968, written by Joseph M’Belolo Ya M’Piku in Kikongo. The document was often quoted by the Situationist International, a group of Marxist artists, intellectuals and self-proclaimed social revolutionaries, of which M’Belolo Ya M’Piku was a part, but never mentioned anywhere in the writing of that history. Meessen shows us the document’s authorship through a rumba ensemble recorded in Kinshasa at the famous nightclub Un Deux Trois, which was founded by the Congolese musician Franco Luambo. This pavilion showed how systems of reparation can be put in place in order to counter nationalist narratives—a particularly important objective in Venice, given its global reach. Apart from being a space for reparations, the Venice Biennale can also be a site where histories can be actively rewritten or challenged. In 2015 the Gujral Foundation put on a collateral event entitled My East is Your West, curated by Natasha Ginwala, which was a shared pavilion between India and Pakistan, with works by Rashid Rana and Shilpa Gupta. It showed an optimistic model for what was possible: nations of the subcontinent coming together to contest their individualised histories. The Indian arts infrastructure certainly could do more to recognise its privileged place in subcontinent, and open itself up to sharing space with other South Asian artists. The onus here should certainly be on the Indian cultural economy to support and encourage the dissidence of artists from neighbouring nation states, and give them protection through access and infrastructure. The international group show can also stand in response to this nationalist representation. In what was a neat decision by Rugoff this year, both venues—the Giardini and the Arsenale—showed work by the same artists. Each venue held a “proposition”. The group show includes the work of three Indian artists, the photographers Soham Gupta and Gauri Gill, and the conceptual artist Shilpa Gupta. In Gill’s series Becoming, 54 archival prints survey the architectural landscape of a rapidly urbanising India. Gill takes us to newly built townships at the outskirts of cities, often stripping them of their names and locations to comment on their “sameness.” She approaches these townships with a tender formal attention—all images are in black and white; deprived of colour to show only glass and steel—and this makes them deeply THE CARAVAN

courtesy andrea avezzù la biennale di venezia

scratching the surface · perspectives

poetic. The logic here takes a postmodern route: of flamboyance, pastiche and aspiration. Given the dusty rolling infrastructure of steel and glass, we could be in any rapidly developing city in the world. The images are not melancholic, and while they are emptied of their human inhabitants, we still notice their hybridity: facades remain unfinished, paint peels off from neglect and poor materials, roads split open. Gill disturbs the hierarchy of what we see as being worthy of our attention. In a more nostalgic mode, Shilpa Gupta’s work directs our attention to narratives that are actively erased. In a work entitled “For, In Your Tongue I Cannot Fit”—the phrase comes from a poem by the fourteenth-century Azerbaijani poet Seyid Imadeddin Nesimi—Gupta commemorates a hundred poets who have been either executed or imprisoned by fascist regimes for their political commentary. It is a sound installation, and upon enter-

scratching the surface · perspectives thoughts on the actions themselves. Like Gill, Gupta is not nostalgic, but seems to be working toward an aesthetic clarity. This can sometimes be enough, without requiring a further moral explication. When the state and its institutions fail, it is art that takes on the burden of politics, and this is nowhere truer

Regardless of whether pavilions choose to critique the nation states they represent or quieten the present-day politic, both approaches are performative and come with contradictions.

ww

ing it, whispered slivers of poems run through the space in a dramatic choreography. The work is immersive and moving. It is a direct comment on the vulnerability of our freedoms of speech, and takes a global approach: Gupta has gathered poems in Arabic, Hindi, Azeri, Russian, Spanish and Urdu. Of the three, Soham Gupta is the most confrontational. In a series of images of “the nightlife of Kolkata,” Gupta uses a high-intensity flash to make portraits of those marginalised by the city’s caste- and class-based segregation—the homeless, the addicts, the transgender people, the diseased, the differently abled, to name a few, almost all of whom belong to oppressed castes. His work is not polite, neither is

it beautiful, he instead points a harsh light to the human cost of what is being cleansed from the city. He makes us look at what we are otherwise used to averting our gaze from. However, it is difficult not to notice the voyeuristic nature of the images. In the curatorial note, Rugoff insists that the images are of “poverty and the homeless,” and this feels reductive. In an attempt to deliver agency, Gupta proposes that each image is a “collaboration” between subject and photographer. But though many of the works in Rugoff’s show propose such collaborations, the power dynamics of these are not always made clear. It creates a defensive atmosphere, where artists are justifying their actions before we are able to gather our SEPTEMBER 2019

than in the representational infrastructure of the Venice Biennale. In these politically charged times, what feels missing is a vulnerability of process rather than of subject. In a powerful letter of protest against the American Whitney Biennale, two artists and a writer declared, “Now the highest aspiration of avowedly radical work is its own display.” This holds true for all arts infrastructure—galleries, museums, public projects such as biennales. Representational infrastructure makes certain demands of its work, and no matter the political promise of the work on display, it is difficult for this not to get co-opted. While the Biennale ensures that visitors are able to survey a wide range of representations, it is in fact the representational aesthetic that we must dispute. This is especially true of the national-pavilion model, considering, especially, the global death of the nation state. For most of the twentieth century, as Rana Dasgupta wrote in The Guardian, there was “an authentic ‘fit’ between politics, economy and information, all of which were organised at a national scale.” This “authentic fit” has certainly ruptured, and exactly by those things that threaten our interesting times: surveillance capitalism, the international market, big data and the arms trade. Identity politics has reached a dead end, and there is an urgent need for its redressal. s 27

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danish siddiqui / reuters

reportage the sense of siege hit early, in the air, long before seeing the barbed-wire barricades and security forces armed to the teeth blocking the way. Fifteen minutes before the plane touched down at Srinagar, an announcement was made asking the passengers to close the windows. The staff went around making sure all windows are shut—“An order from the DGCA, sir,” one of the flight attendants said upon enquiry, referring to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation. First there was mild disbelief, then there was mocking. A Kashmiri passenger next to me laughed and said, “This is nazarbandi”—house arrest. Others repeated the word as if they were adding it to their vocabulary. Some of them, curious, opened the windows halfway to peep out, but closed them in a hurry. It was 7.30 am and I saw a glimpse of the verdant green Valley enveloped in grey monsoon mist. “Probably they don’t want us to see how many (security) forces they have brought into the Valley,” one person said. The passenger was coming home for Eid, which was the next day, on 12 August. Some tried to laugh about it while others looked anxious. Soon, they had to figure out how to reach their destinations. As the flight landed on the runway, many passengers switched on their cell phones and kept staring at them, probably out of habit, and maybe some hope. The reality struck them soon enough. The Valley has been under strict lockdown, with no communication services, since 5 August, when the union government effectively abrogated Article 370 of the Constitution. The green ticker at the tourist department counter next to the baggage belt kept flashing the message: “Welcome to the paradise on earth.” I went to the office of the divisional commissioner of Kashmir, along with a couple of other Delhi-based journalists,

Kashmir in shock and anger REPORTAGE / CONFLICT PRAVEEN DONTHI SEPTEMBER 2019

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“one solution, gun solution” · reportage to secure what is called a “curfew pass,” which is helpful for moving across some parts of the city. Technically, it is a “movement pass valid for 144 CRPC restrictions” only, and useless during curfews. The red Kashmiri flag with a plough and three vertical stripes was fluttering next to the Indian tricolour on the divisional commissioner’s office building. The office premises were full of angry people waiting to make calls to their family members outside the Valley. Many who could not make the calls were shouting and venting in Kashmiri and, in a camaraderie triggered by crisis, complained to random strangers who would listen. It was the turn of serial number 32, during the forenoon, and 420 people were still waiting. The television journalists from Delhi were, however, seen giving a positive twist about the telephone facility easing people’s troubles. A young man confronted Nazir Masoodi of NDTV, accusing him of reporting that there has been normalcy when there is so much repression. Others joined him and surrounded Masoodi and argued with him till other journalists came to diffuse the tension. The young man, a 25-year-old student named Arif, later told me he was more upset with the Indian media for peddling the narrative of normalcy than not being able to contact his brother. “If India was so adamant at abrogating Article 370, they could have at least taken into confidence the leaders such as Omar and Mehbooba,” Arif said, referring to the former chief ministers Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, both of whom have been arrested. “They are the ones who instilled and fought for the idea of India in the Valley ... Today, it is clear that the idea of Kashmir is completely unsafe with India.” “India seems to be saying, ‘We have power and majority and we can do anything,’” he continued. “The bottom line is that they cannot accept it and swallow that there is a Muslim-majority state in India. So, they want to change the demography of the state.” Arif said that this can revive militancy in the state like in the 1990s. “When sadr-e-riyasat was removed, Kashmir should have protested and fought against it.” The Jammu and Kashmir constitution 30

provided for a separate prime minister and sadr-e-riyasat—president—till 1965, when the positions were replaced with a chief minister and governor, respectively, by a constitutional amendment. “We criticise that generation for not doing that. So, there will be a fightback this time,” he said. There was widespread resentment over the unprecedented restrictions before Eid and many believed that it was done deliberately, under a Hindutva project, to obstruct them from performing their religious duties. Along the Jammu highway and other important areas, the Bakarwals—a nomadic-shepherd community—had been allowed to move in with their flock, but the buyers found it difficult to reach them and buy the sacrificial animal for Eid due to the restrictions. Even for a journalist with a curfew pass, movement depended on the whim of the security forces, and their reaction varied from barrier to barrier. Those who decided to brave it out sometimes got lucky and sometimes got beaten. The tradition of pooling in money and sharing the meat among relatives could not happen as the relatives were spread out across the city. Even those who managed to go ahead and perform the qurbani—ritual sacrifice—could not distribute the meat to family and friends living away from their own locality. The city had been parcelled out into small manageable blocks, cordoned off from all sides. “We have never seen anything like this,” a university professor told me. “It has been smart and sophisticated. They have remapped the Srinagar roadmap for its residents in what seemed like a psychological drill.” The strategy was devised by either an American consultancy or Israeli army contractors, according to the security-analyst grapevine. A huge team of officials from the National Technical Research Organisation, who were stationed at Srinagar’s Gupkar road and Church Lane, had set up a massive surveillance network, including drones. Everyone expected that there would be large-scale violence, but it has not happened so far. However, the psychological trauma of near-violence under siege is palpable everywhere. With restrictions on movement, snapping of THE CARAVAN

communication networks and an information blackout, rumours had begun to fill the vacuum. I heard that there had been clashes between the Jammu and Kashmir police, who are angry at being stripped of their arms, and the Central Reserve Police Force at the Nawa Bazar locality, after small boys were hit with pellets. But there was no way to confirm this. Those journalists friendly with the establishment were driven and flown around in helicopters. Others had begun to move around in groups as it felt safer and easier to negotiate with the security forces. I, along with three journalists from Delhi, decided to go in a cab to the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences hospital in Soura to check if there had been any casualties during protests. This was the only area from where the media had been able to capture protests. The BBC reported that on 9 August, thousands of people in Soura took to the streets to protest against the Indian government’s abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status. While the government earlier maintained that there had been no protests and everything was peaceful, the ministry of home affairs later admitted, on 13 August, that there was “widespread unrest” in the area that day after “miscreants” resorted to “unprovoked stone pelting against law enforcement.” Violence has become so normalised in Kashmir that the lack of large-scale violence—and the scarcity of any information on violence—allows the government to brazenly declare that everything is calm. In fact, the government and its many agencies have gone to a great extent to stay in control of the narrative. Local journalists would reach the hospitals and gather information regarding the injured but the hospitals have been put under pressure to discharge patients as soon as possible. Rohit Kansal, the principal secretary of planning, development and monitoring in the Jammu and Kashmir government, would hold press conferences at the media centre set up in a hotel every evening, only to deflect any and all questions and instead push the narrative of a prevailing calm. On 14 August, however, he said the situation

danish siddiqui / reuters

“one solution, gun solution” · reportage

has “improved” and a senior Kashmiri journalist immediately latched onto it. The journalist asked Kansal to define the improvement, considering all these days he had been claiming that everything is normal. Kansal looked a bit embarrassed but said he did not have to resort to wordplay. Any questions on the whereabouts of the former chief ministers were met with an anodyne response that no details about any individuals would be given away. As we drove through the sensitive downtown areas of Srinagar, such as Khanyar and Rainawari, the streets looked empty. Sometimes, at every hundred metres or less, we had to change lanes and come back on the original road—if there were clashes happening ahead, we were not allowed to proceed and diverted away. The security-forces personnel looked quite surprised to see non-Kashmiris travelling through. They would ask where we were going and why. When we identified ourselves as Delhi media, they would let us through. One of them asked us, “Shweta Singh hai kya andar?”—Is Shweta Singh inside?—referring to the Aaj Tak journalist, and asked us to send her the next time. It took us more than an hour to cover 14 kilometres.

At the SKIMS, the patients entered in a slow trickle. Once in a while, the odd ambulance would appear with a patient. Inside, we tried to find out if there had been any new casualties since the imposition of the lockdown. We saw pictures of young men injured by pellet guns during protests on somebody’s cell phone. Even as we were trying to gather information, plain-clothed police officers from the Criminal Investigation Department, who were stationed at the hospital, got wind of it and came looking for us. In the meantime, a young man asked us to come with him for some important information. A hospital employee warned us that he could be a police informer but we decided to follow him. He took us from the rear entry of the hospital into the by-lanes of the Soura Anchar locality, where the protests captured by the BBC took place. After walking for fifteen minutes, suddenly we were in front of the popular Jenab Saeb mosque. It is a huge mosque with beautiful white walls, minarets and green domes. The courtyard in front is the size of a football ground. There were about three hundred to four hundred people—men, women and children—spread out in various corners enSEPTEMBER 2019

previous spread: Kashmiri women shout slogans during a protest in Srinagar six days after the Indian government scrapped Kashmir’s special status. above: Kashmiris protest after Eid-alAdha prayers at a mosque in Srinagar on 12 August 2019.

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“one solution, gun solution” · reportage

praveen donthi for the caravan

right: In the courtyard in front of the Jenab Saeb Mosque, in Soura Anchar, there were about three hundred to four hundred people— men, women and children—spread out in various corners engaged in intense discussions.

gaged in intense discussions. They were sloganeering, and their voice became louder as they saw us journalists. Each of us was circled by groups of men. There was such a cacophony of voices that I could hardly comprehend them for a few minutes. For the first half an hour, I listened to them abuse the Indian media. I had no chance to ask questions, and kept rotating to all sides, listening to each of them. New people would join the group and everyone would go on loud, passionate rants, which lasted up to fifteen minutes, to talk about what they think is wrong. They all had more or less the same things to say: “Indian media is the culprit. They are the real terrorists. They are forcing us to become terrorists.” “This relationship with India was built on Article 370. Now that it is gone, we are azad. Now, it is a naked occupation.” “Forget about Pakistan and Hindutva, where is humanity? We are not being allowed to practice our religious duties.” “Kashmir will become Palestine. We will lose everything.” “Kashmir population is already high and the land is less. What will happen if the outsiders come in. What will be left for our future generations?” “We are left with no choice but to pick up guns.” 32

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As soon as one young man mentioned guns, all the others started shouting, “One solution, gun solution, gun solution.” After an hour, when we were ready to leave, some of them asked us to come back the next day, during the Eid morning prayers. “We will take out a juloos”—procession—“of fifty–sixty thousand people soon after namaz,” one man said. As we walked out, there was a small rally of women and children and some men shouting slogans of azadi—freedom. As I started walking along the rally and towards the SKIMS, one young man came to me and identified himself as a journalist. “Now, we are not going to wait for the Hurriyat or anybody else,” he said. “We will take the initiative. It’s been decided, at some places, to form mohalla committees and fight till death. This will be the end of Kashmir otherwise. Our goal would be referendum.” The earlier divisions have vanished in the face of this new development, according to him. “The fault lines between the rich and poor don’t exist anymore,” he said. “Earlier, people from poor localities participated in protests and stone pelting against India more. But now even the old and the elite are taking out rallies. The Sunni, Shia, Wahabi, Jama’at, NC, PDP differenc-

“one solution, gun solution” · reportage es are irrelevant now and they are all counting themselves as one.” According to the young journalist, the lollipop of development is not going to appease Kashmiris. “They say now outsiders will come and invest and create jobs and development. There is already a provision for that. Look at so many establishments such as Tyndale Biscoe School and Taj Vivanta in Srinagar. They are all leased for really long periods, like 99 years, at throw away lease rates like R100 per year or something,” he said. “They make a lot of money. What do the Kashmiris get out of it? Not much. The government certainly gives permission to those who want to come and invest in the state. Why squash Article 370 for that?” Some others have pointed out that the army and the Indian Railways also bought a lot of land permanently in the state through the state government. “Our fight will be all about land,” the young journalist told me. “Kashmiris will be driven out of their own land or pushed to the margins. They will expect us to live quietly forgetting about our rights and political aspirations.” In Kashmir, comparisons with the Israel–Palestine conflict have become part of everyday talk. Given the fondness of the BJP and RSS for Israel, these comparisons do not look out of place. The current situation of siege and the response of the people comes close to what the novelist John Berger described in a dispatch from Ramallah in 2003: The Israeli government claims that they are obliged to take these measures to combat terrorism. The claim is a feint. The true aim of the stranglehold is to destroy the indigenous population’s sense of temporal and spatial continuity so that they either leave or become indentured servants. And it’s here that the dead help the living to resist. It’s here that men and women make their decision to become martyrs. The stranglehold inspires the terrorism it purports to be fighting. sher-i-kashmir International Conference Centre and Centaur Lake View Hotel is situated on the banks of the

Dal lake. All the important government functions and conferences used to happen there. It has been turned into a prison since 5 August. The director of the centre is now effectively a jailor. We went to check the status of political prisoners there and found a family— two women and two boys—waiting outside the gates. They were reluctant to disclose any details at first. One of them was the wife of Sheikh Ishfaq Jabbar, a former National Conference member of the legislative assembly, from the Ganderbal constituency, and the other one was his sister, Shahin Jabbar. The boys were his sons. Jabbar was first put under house arrest on 5 August, and then moved to the SKICC two days later. Jabbar’s father-in-law, Syed Akhoon, also a former MLA, and the provisional president of the National Conference, was arrested and brought to the SKICC as well. The local station house officer told the family where he was and the family reached the day before Eid. “Kis buniyad pe arrest kiya pata nahi”—We don’t know on what basis they arrested him—Shahin Jabbar told us, and added, “My father was killed in the 90s by the militants because he was an Indian.” The family is worried after hearing that the stringent Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, 1978 will be slapped on him. The law allows an individual to be taken into preventive custody for two years without any charges or a trial. Mohammed Yousuf Tarigami, the lone MLA of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), from Kulgam in south Kashmir, has been put under house arrest. Waheed Ur Rehman Para, a youth leader of the People’s Democratic Party, has also reportedly been detained under the PSA. Both are known to be close to the army establishment in the Valley. Jabbar himself was a sub-inspector of police before he joined politics. His friend and neighbour said, “Earlier they used to arrest pro-Pakistan guys, now they are taking pro-India people

also. There are two people in Kashmir who never lied. Geelani, who is a pure Pakistani, and Farooq Abdullah, who is pure Indian.” The friend and neighbour was referring to Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the powerful separatist leader, and Farooq Abdullah, the chairperson of the National Conference. “But today, Farooq is also crying because he is under house arrest.” According to the friend, there are more than two hundred political leaders and workers inside the SKICC along with Jabbar. He listed four other politicians from Ganderbal who have been arrested. After waiting for two hours at the gate, by the roadside, Jabbar’s wife and sons were allowed to go inside to meet him. She came back after forty minutes or so and said that she was allowed to look at him from a distance for two minutes in the conference hall. “Tomorrow is Eid and we came to meet him. But it was hardly a meeting. We should at least be allowed to get him Eid lunch. He is not a militant,” the wife told us. “Sazaa mil rahi hai Hindustani hone ki wajah se.”—He is being punished for being a Hindustani. There was so much security inside that it looked like a central jail, she said. She was not allowed to meet her father, who is also under house arrest there. Jabbar’s friend, a government employee, said, “Till today, only a handful of people were fighting against India. But now the whole qaum”—community—“will fight.” the atmosphere stayed relatively calm in Srinagar—to facilitate Eid, according to many, which is celebrated for two and a half days. The high-level security was another reason. There was a possibility of protests on the afternoon of Eid, after prayers and lunch. But the protests were not fierce or widespread as was expected. There were no Eid prayers in 22 locations in Srinagar, according to an official estimate, and

“We have never seen anything like this,” a university professor told me. “It has been smart and sophisticated. They have remapped the Srinagar roadmap for its residents in what seemed like a psychological drill.” SEPTEMBER 2019

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Indian media. As there was a journalist working for a foreign publication, they cooled down. One of them said, “Idhar lull hai”—There is a lull here. “Lull before the storm.” As we left, another said, “Modi ko mera namaskar bolna”—Convey my greetings to Modi— and everyone laughed. An old man, who is a trader in Kolkata, joined me on the walk and said, “This is Sheikh Abdullah’s fault.” Abdullah was the founder of the National Conference and a former prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir who signed an accord with Indira Gandhi in 1974 that separatists regarded as a capitulation. The trader added, “He trusted India and opened the gates for what is happening today.” A lot of people have been talking about Sheikh Abdullah as the original sinner. At a place called Alipora, as we sat down to take rest a group of people came to talk to us. A young man in his twenties told me, “Earlier, Indians were our guests. We used to treat them with great hospitality. Now it won’t be the same. Militancy will increase from 10 percent to 60–70 percent. BJP ne gundagardi shuru kiya hai”—The BJP has started hooliganism. “They have to come with passports. Otherwise we will burn them.” An old man said,

praveen donthi for the caravan

the real number could be much bigger. The maulvis were warned in advance to not to talk about the political situation in their Eid sermons. “If you give a political sermon, then come to the police station and surrender voluntarily,” the police had warned them, according to one maulvi. On the first day, 12 August, I went to Lal Chowk. It had been cordoned off and was deserted even by stray dogs. There were a couple of fortified security-force vehicles. A small group of journalists, including myself, decided to go to Soura on foot to see if there would be a protest rally as the people there had told us. On the way, I saw a few people dressed in their Eid clothes moving around in their own colonies. At Khanyar, where the downtown area starts, a convoy accompanying K Vijay Kumar, the advisor to the governor of Jammu and Kashmir, passed us by as he took stock of the situation on the ground. Soon after that, we were almost caught in a clash. The security personnel had been whistling away anybody stepping on the street to go back inside. A couple of youngsters who were standing fifty metres ahead on the roadside, in new clothes, gestured with their hands and refused to go. The security personnel started loudly abusing them, used their catapult to sling stones at them and chased after them. The youngsters ran away and the soldiers returned to their position. We waited in the by-lanes till the commotion ended. After that we decided to not use the main road and take the narrow by-lanes instead. I heard about many instances of Kashmiris who had been loyal to the idea of India now turning against India. “The legitimacy for violence is at its peak now,” a senior journalist told me. “The lines between civilian and military are getting blurred. Every Indian would become a legitimate target here.” There is also a mention, even in middleand upper-middle-class homes, of how suicide bombers might find more acceptance now. A businessman based in Srinagar told me about his family member who was opposed to the idea of the very creation of Pakistan—and the two-nation theory—is now supporting it. After crossing Kathidarwaza, a group of people started abusing the

THE CARAVAN

“Inhone shuru kiya hai, lekin isko hum khatam karenge”—They started this, but we will end it. He added that two of his sons are ready to sacrifice themselves. “Tell Modi, they are ready.” Another pitched in, “Modi humein aazadi dega, inshallah”—Modi will give us freedom, inshallah. We took a lift in a SKIMS hospital bus used to fetch employees. There was only one old lady and her husband in the bus. The driver picked them up from a place called Manigam because she was too sick to walk. He told us that the security forces wanted him to offload her. “I got 40 injured people in this bus day before yesterday to the hospital,” he told us. But the Indian media says everything is under control.” He said that even during the 2016 protests, after the death of the militant commander Burhan Wani, restrictions were not as bad. “Sometimes, even the operation theatre staff are not allowed to come. They deliberately delay us.” After two hours of walking and taking a lift, we reached the SKIMS. When we entered the Soura Anchar locality from the SKIMS rear gate, we saw the narrow road blocked with stones and logs of wood. There was a bonfire that had burnt out. Just before the Jenab

tauseef mustafa / afp / getty images

“one solution, gun solution” · reportage

Saeb mosque, some of the people we spoke to the previous day recognised us and started showing us what happened. There were four to five teargas shells on the road. The entire street was full of broken bricks. There was a huge iron water tank in the middle of the road used to stop the forces from advancing. It gave us a glimpse of the clash that took place the previous night. “We were all sitting here after our dinner and chatting,” a young man recounted. “Suddenly, around 11 pm, we saw forces appear on this road. They started shelling immediately. We retorted. An announcement was made from the mosque to come out and resist the forces who had come to stop offering our Eid namaaz in the morning. Everybody came out and kept a vigil and clashed with the forces.” He said that they only went to sleep at around 6 am, and that many of them were still sleeping. “They tried to attack us two–three times and move in. If we had slept, they wouldn’t have allowed us to offer namaaz today morning.” There were posters of Burhan Wani and other militants stuck on the wooden doors of closed shops. “Modi angootha chhap hai. Usko kya pata kyun PhD wale gun uthate hain”—Modi is uneducated. How would he know why people with PhDs pick up guns—an old man said. “Since morning, six to seven helicopters have been doing rounds above us.” Another man, holding a wicker basket,

told me, “They are not allowing us to even share the qurbani meat.” Since they closed off all the exits and entry points, people from other localities could not come in for the planned protest rally. As we were walking back to the SKIMS, one man offered us tea. When we politely refused, he smiled and said, “Yeh Modi ki chai nahi hai, apni hai chai”—This is not Modi’s tea, it is our own. On the way back, we were diverted at a couple of places because of stone pelting. By evening, the restrictions were slightly eased. A Srinagar resident who frequently visits Pattan in north Kashmir for Eid said that it was gloomy there. “Last Eid, the maulvi had in his sermon asked the youth not to burst crackers on Eid,” he recounted. “But as soon as the prayers were over, they started bursting crackers and didn’t stop till night. This time, he didn’t even mention but it was so quiet, as if the air was also still. Everybody is in a shock.” There had been no news of violence and there was a collective sigh of relief. But everybody knew that they probably did not have all the information to be certain.

opposite page: There were posters of Burhan Wani and other militants stuck on the wooden doors of closed shops. above: Security personnel patrol during a lockdown in Srinagar on 10 August 2019.

around 6 pm the next day, there was a tip-off about 35 victims of pellet eye injuries at Ward Number 11, in Srinagar’s Shri Maharaja Hari Singh hospital. Two senior Kashmiri journalists and I reached the hospital to find out. But there were none. The hospital was almost empty. While lookSEPTEMBER 2019

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“one solution, gun solution” · reportage opposite page: On Eid, a CRPF jawan hit Muneefa, a five-year-old, with a stone from his catapult as she sat on her uncle’s bike.

ing for them, we found a small five-year-old girl, Muneefa Nazir, with her right eye bandaged. She was lying on the bed and sleeping, with Eid mehendi on her hands, as more than ten family members sat around her looking shattered. She had been brought the previous day at 6.30 pm from Safakadal after a CRPF jawan hit her with a stone from his catapult. “We were going to distribute the qurbani meat,” Farooq Ahmad Wani, the uncle, told me what had happened. “She sat in front, on the fuel tank. Two people sat behind me. As I tried to cross the road, one CRPF jawan asked me to take another way. As he was talking to me, another CRPF guy across the road hit us with the stone. Muneefa was injured and started bleeding a lot. When I tried to confront him and ask why he did it, he cocked his gun and said I will shoot you if you don’t leave. All the others who gathered to support me also ran away after that.” He added that everything was peaceful and their shift was also coming to an end, at 6 pm, when the incident happened. One doctor was available when they brought her to the hospital. The doctor, Tariq Qureshi, told the family that the right eyeball has been dislocated and he will examine the damage after ten days and perform a surgery. Muneefa is studying in lower kindergarten. She is the youngest child of Nazeer Ahmad Wani, a cameraman with Asia News Network. “The hospital employees told me that the police is putting pressure on them to discharge my daughter because they don’t want this to be reported by the media. Today, if the doctor had come, they would have discharged, but he didn’t,” he told me. Though he is a journalist, he has not been able to inform anybody because there is no way to communicate. “She has not eaten any food till 2 pm today. The only thing she said was, ‘Take me home, take me home.’” after four days of talking to people, the only reconciliatory voice I have heard on the scrapping of Article 370 was of Jan Mohammad, a 33-yearold school teacher from Budgam, who had come to attend the Independence Day parade in Srinagar’s Sher-I-Kashmir Stadium on August 15. “There is a lot of insecurity everywhere, even among the educated youth who wanted to get into government services as they have to now compete at the national level,” he told me. “An amendment should be brought in giving some security of land and security of jobs.” And then he added, “But whatever the central government does from now on, it will be near impossible for them to win the confidence of the people of the Valley now.” The last flashpoint in Kashmir was in 2016, when Burhan Wani was killed and the Valley erupted in anger. There were large-scale protests

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that were met with brutal violence, especially in south Kashmir. As if it is expecting a similar reaction, the Indian state has deployed probably the highest number of forces since the first outbreak of militancy. But the effective scrapping of Article 370 has thrown Kashmir into a deeper existential crisis as its people consider it a matter of survival—of their land, religion and culture. Their response would be measured and strategic. It seems like they think it’s not wise to face

“Some Kashmiris are joking that Ajit Doval is an ISI agent for having finished the Indian leadership here and doing a favour to Pakistan,” the journalist said. The middle ground has finished. the might of the state right away. A resident of Srinagar who had recently visited Shopian in south Kashmir told me that a group of militants had come to Pinjura village and Zainpura on bikes last week. They told people to remain calm and not clash with the security forces as it is going to be a protracted battle. “This time around, it will take some time to figure out what will be the meaningful resistance,” a senior journalist told me. “But there will be resistance.” The biggest talking point is the complete marginalisation and annihilation of the pro-India politicians of the Valley such as Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti. The pro-Pakistan and pro-azadi lobby could not succeed all these years because of these leaders and parties. “What couldn’t be achieved in more than seventy years by the separatists, the BJP government achieved in one stroke,” a journalist told me. “These pro-India political leaders have been the firewall against the azadi and Pakistan sentiment.” One common refrain in the Valley is that the scrapping of Article 370 does not concern those who are fighting for azadi—as they had never believed in the Indian Constitution in the first place. It was the responsibility of those pro-India leaders who benefitted from it. “Some Kashmiris are joking that Ajit Doval is an ISI agent for having finished the Indian leadership here and doing a favour to Pakistan,” the journalist said. Doval, who is the national security advisor, was in the Valley closely monitoring the situation. The middle ground has finished. “The end of status quo is a good sign for Kashmir. Now there will be a solution, one way of the other,” he said.

“one solution, gun solution” · reportage Faesal’s name has been mentioned by various people as a possible candidate to replace the erstwhile pro-India leadership. “He will be the next Farooq Abdullah,” a young man in Soura said. Another senior journalist concurred. “Article 370 and 35A are gone. None of the existing characters can bring them back. Now all they can hope and fight for is statehood. A door for that has

praveen donthi for the caravan

However, Kashmiris suspect that the BJP government will create a new crop of leaders. “People such as Mir Junaid and other nobodies have their phones working now,” a senior journalist told me. “This is being done at the highest level. There is already a small crop of politicians who will rally for India when there will be next elections. I have a good sense that a new leadership

has been prepared. Modi’s speech on Article 370 was a confirmation of that. He said, ‘Parivarvaad khatam ho gaya hai aur naye log aa rahe hai’”—Dynastic politics is over and new people are coming. The former Indian Administrative Services officer and politician Shah

been left open in the 38-page document of the bill. If you examine what Shah Faesal has been talking, it seems like he has been preparing to play a role in this kind of situation and context,” he told me. Though Shah Faesal has reportedly been detained under the PSA, many believe it is a pre-planned bid by the InSEPTEMBER 2019

dian establishment to build him up as a hero in this political vacuum. But there are others who think the BJP government will bring a Hindu chief minister after delimitation by increasing seats in Jammu. Another perspective is that the resistance will intensify one way or the other but much of it is will depend on what Pakistan will do. People have been watching Pakistani TV channels for clues. “Kashmir issue has been internationalised in various ways,” a security analyst told me. “The US and Pakistan probably had intelligence that this was going to happen. When Imran Khan made the statement about how he has to take care of forty thousand militants back home, it looked silly at that time. But now in hindsight it seems like he knew about this and was giving a veiled threat to the Indian establishment.” An audio clip of the Hizbul Mujahideen commander Riyaz Naik released two days before the scrapping of Kashmir’s special status under Article 370 had a message that talked about desperate measures by India. He appealed to the Kashmir police to support him as they would be used and thrown away like the pro-India politicians. The Kashmir police—at the lower and middle rungs, especially—is angry at the insult of being disarmed by the government. “There is a certain mutinous undercurrent,” the senior journalist told me. “I have never heard an SHO refusing to pick up people. I know of two SHOs who have refused to follow orders and questioned why they should be picked up, whereas the nearby SHO picked up 50 people and PSA-ed them. Kashmiri bureaucracy are also angry but petrified. You can’t even quit now as that will be considered as rebellion. The sentiment among them is that if you don’t behave, nobody will save you from Amit Shah and Modi.” This has created a new set of pressure points that might explode at a certain point in the future. But nobody knows when. Most people, however, believe the Kashmiris are digging their heels for a long haul. “The quality and timbre of this anger is very different,” the senior journalist told me. s 37

The Silence is the Loudest Sound Echoes of fascism in the Kashmir Valley

ESSAY / CONFLICT atul loke / the new york times

ARUNDHATI ROY

the silence is the loudest sound · essay The act strips the state of Jammu and Kashmir of its special status—which includes its right to have its own constitution and its own flag. It also strips it of statehood and partitions it into two union territories. The first, Jammu and Kashmir, will be administered directly by the central government in New Delhi, although it will continue to have a locally elected legislative assembly but one with drastically reduced powers. The second, Ladakh, will be administered directly from New Delhi and will not have a legislative assembly. The passing of the act was welcomed in parliament by the very British tradition of desk-thump-

atul loke / the new york times

as india celebrates her seventy-third year of independence from British rule, ragged children thread their way through traffic in Delhi, selling outsized national flags and souvenirs that say, “Mera Bharat Mahan”—My India is Great. Quite honestly, it’s hard to feel that way right now, because it looks very much as though our government has gone rogue. Last week it unilaterally breached the fundamental conditions of the Instrument of Accession, by which the former princely State of Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India in 1947. In preparation for this, at midnight on 4 August, it turned all

of Kashmir into a giant prison camp. Seven million Kashmiris were barricaded in their homes, internet connections were cut and their phones went dead. On 5 August, India’s home minister proposed in parliament that Article 370 of the Indian Constitution—the article that outlines the legal obligations that arise from the Instrument of Accession—be overturned. The opposition parties rolled over. By the next evening the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019 had been passed by the upper as well as the lower house. 40

ing. There was a distinct whiff of colonialism in the air. The masters were pleased that a recalcitrant colony had finally, formally, been brought under the crown. For its own good. Of course. Indian citizens can now buy land and settle in their new domain. The new territories are open for business. Already India’s richest industrialist, Mukesh Ambani, of Reliance Industries, has promised several “announcements.” What this might mean to the fragile Himalayan ecology of Ladakh and Kashmir, the land of vast glaciers, THE CARAVAN

previous spread: Security personnel on the streets of Srinagar after the lockdown began in early August. below: Sameer Ahamed, a page designer for local newspapers, whose eyes and arms were injured from pellets, in Srinagar.

the silence is the loudest sound · essay high-altitude lakes and five major rivers, barely bears consideration. The dissolution of the legal entity of the state also means the dissolution of Article 35A, which granted residents rights and privileges that made them stewards of their own territory. So, “being open for business,” it must be clarified, can also include Israeli-style settlements and Tibet-style population transfers. For Kashmiris, in particular, this has been an old, primal fear. Their recurring nightmare—an inversion of the one being peddled by Donald Trump—of being swept away by a tidal wave of triumphant Indians wanting a little home in their sylvan valley could easily come true. As news of the new act spread, Indian nationalists of all stripes cheered. The mainstream media, for the most part, made a low, sweeping bow. There was dancing in the streets and horrifying misogyny on the internet. Manohar Lal Khattar, the chief minister of Haryana, while speaking about the improvement he had brought about in the skewed gender ratio in his state, joked: “Our Dhakarji used to say we will bring in girls from Bihar. Now they say Kashmir is open, we can bring girls from there.” Amid these vulgar celebrations the loudest sound, however, is the deathly silence from Kashmir’s patrolled, barricaded streets and its approximately seven million caged, humiliated people, stitched down by razor wire, spied on by drones, living under a complete communications blackout. That in this age of information, a government can so easily cut off a whole population from the rest of the world for days at a time, says something serious about the times we are heading toward. Kashmir, they often say, is the unfinished business of the “Partition.” That word suggests that in 1947, when the British drew their famously careless border through the subcontinent, there was a “whole” that was then partitioned. In truth, there was no “whole.” Apart from the territory of British India, there were hundreds of sovereign principalities, each of which individually negotiated the terms on which it would merge with either India or Pakistan. Many that did not wish to merge were forced to. While Partition and the horrifying violence that it caused is a deep, unhealed wound in the memory of the subcontinent, the violence of those times, as well as in the years since, in India and Pakistan, has as much to do with assimilation as it does with partition. In India the project of assimilation, which goes under the banner of nation-building, has meant that there has not been a single year since 1947 when the Indian army has not been deployed within India’s borders against its “own

people.” The list is long—Kashmir, Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur, Hyderabad, Assam. The business of assimilation has been complicated and painful and has cost tens of thousands of lives. What is unfolding today on both sides of the border of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir is the unfinished business of assimilation. What happened in the Indian parliament was tantamount to cremating the Instrument of Accession. It was a document with a complicated provenance that had been signed by a discredited king, the Dogra Hindu Maharaja Hari Singh. His unstable, tattered kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir lay

The passing of the act was welcomed in parliament by the very British tradition od desk-thumping. There was a distinct whiff of colonialism in the air. The masters were pleased that a recalcitrant colony had finally been brought under the crown. on the fault lines of the new border between India and Pakistan. The rebellions that had broken out against him in 1945 had been aggravated and subsumed by the spreading bush fires of Partition. In the western mountain district of Poonch, Muslims, who were the majority, turned on the Maharaja’s forces and on Hindu civilians. In Jammu, to the south, the Maharaja’s forces, assisted by troops borrowed from other princely states, massacred Muslims. Historians and news reports of the time estimated that somewhere between seventy thousand and two hundred thousand were murdered in the streets of the city, and in its neighbouring districts. Inflamed by the news of the Jammu massacre, Pakistani “irregulars” swooped down from the mountains of the North Western Frontier Province, burning and pillaging their way across the Kashmir Valley. Hari Singh fled from Kashmir to Jammu from where he appealed to Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian prime minister, for help. The document that provided legal cover for the Indian army to enter Kashmir was the Instrument of Accession. The Indian army, with some help from local people, pushed back the Pakistani “irregulars,” but only as far as the ring of mountains on the edge of the valley. The former Dogra kingdom now lay divided between India and Pakistan. The Instrument of Accession was meant to be ratified by a referendum to ascertain the will of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. That promised referendum never took place. So was born the subcontinent’s most intractable and dangerous political problem. SEPTEMBER 2019

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the silence is the loudest sound · essay In the 72 years since then, successive Indian governments have undermined terms of the Instrument of Accession until all that was left of it was the skeletal structure. Now even that has been shot to hell. It would be foolhardy to try to summarise the twists and turns of how things have come to this. Let’s just say that it’s as complicated and as dangerous as the games the United States played with its puppet regimes in South Vietnam all through the 1950s and 1960s. After a long history of electoral manipulation, the watershed moment came in 1987 when New Delhi flagrantly rigged the state elections. By 1989, the thus-far mostly nonviolent demand for self-determination grew into a full-throated freedom struggle. Hundreds of thousands of people poured onto the streets only to be cut down in massacre after massacre. The Kashmir valley soon thronged with militants, Kashmiri men from both sides of the border, as well as foreign fighters, trained and armed by Pakistan and embraced, for the most part, by the Kashmiri people. Once again, Kashmir was caught up in the political winds that were blowing across

Two months into Narendra Modi’s second term, his government has played its most dangerous card of all. It has tossed a lit match into a powder keg. If that were not bad enough, the cheap, deceitful way in which it did it is disgraceful. the subcontinent—an increasingly radicalised Islam from Pakistan and Afghanistan, quite foreign to Kashmiri culture, and the fanatical Hindu nationalism that was on the rise in India. The first casualty of the uprising was the ageold bond between Kashmir’s Muslims and its tiny minority of Hindus, known locally as Pandits. When the violence began, according to the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti, an organisation run by Kashmiri Pandits, about four hundred Pandits were targeted and murdered by militants. By the end of 1990, according to a government estimate, twenty-five thousand Pandit families had left the valley. They lost their homes, their homeland and everything they had. Over the years thousands more left—almost the entire population. As the conflict continued, in addition to tens of thousands of Muslims, the KPSS says 650 Pandits have been killed in the conflict. Since then, great numbers of Pandits have lived in miserable refugee camps in Jammu city. Thirty 42

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years have gone by, yet successive governments in New Delhi have not tried to help them return home. They have preferred instead to keep them in limbo, and stir their anger and understandable bitterness into a mephitic brew with which to fuel India’s dangerous and extremely effective nationalistic narrative about Kashmir. In this version, a single aspect of an epic tragedy is cannily and noisily used to draw a curtain across the rest of the horror. Today Kashmir is one of the most or perhaps the most densely militarised zone in the world. More than a half-million soldiers have been deployed to counter what the army itself admits is now just a handful of “terrorists.” If there were any doubt earlier it should be abundantly clear by now that their real enemy is the Kashmiri people. What India has done in Kashmir over the last 30 years is unforgivable. An estimated seventy thousand people, civilians, militants and security forces have been killed in the conflict. Thousands have been “disappeared,” and tens of thousands have passed through torture chambers that dot the valley like a network of small-scale Abu Ghraibs. Over the last few years, hundreds of teenagers have been blinded by the use of pellet-firing shotguns, the security establishment’s new weapon of choice for crowd control. Most militants operating in the valley today are young Kashmiris, armed and trained locally. They do what they do knowing full well that the minute they pick up a gun, their “shelf life” is unlikely to be more than six months. Each time a “terrorist” is killed, Kashmiris turn up in their tens of thousands to bury a young man whom they revere as a shaheed. These are only the rough coordinates of a 30-year-old military occupation. The most cruel effects of an occupation that has lasted decades are impossible to describe in an account as short as this. In Narendra Modi’s first term as India’s prime minister, his hard-line approach exacerbated the violence in Kashmir. In February, after a Kashmiri suicide bomber killed 40 Indian security personnel, India launched an airstrike against Pakistan. Pakistan retaliated. They became the first two nuclear powers in history to actually launch airstrikes against each other. Now, two months into Narendra Modi’s second term, his government has played its most dangerous card of all. It has tossed a lit match into a powder keg. If that were not bad enough, the cheap, deceitful way in which it did it is disgraceful. In the last week of July, forty-five thousand extra troops were rushed into Kashmir on various pretexts. The one that got the most traction was that there was a Pakistani “terror” threat to the Amarnath Yatra—the annual pilgrimage in which

bettmann archive / getty images

the silence is the loudest sound · essay

hundreds of thousands of Hindu devotees trek (or are carried by Kashmiri porters) through high mountains to visit the Amarnath cave and pay their respects to a natural ice formation that they believe is an avatar of Shiva. On 1 August, some Indian television networks announced that a land mine with Pakistani Army markings on it had been found on the pilgrimage route. On 2 August, the government published a notice asking all pilgrims (and even tourists who were miles from the pilgrimage route) to leave the valley immediately. That set off a panicky exodus. The approximately two hundred thousand Indian migrant day labourers in Kashmir were clearly not a concern to those supervising the evacuation. Too poor to matter, I’m guessing. By Saturday, 3 August, tourists and pilgrims had left and the security forces had taken up position across the valley. By midnight Sunday, Kashmiris were barricaded in their homes, and all communication networks went down. The next morning, we learned that, along with several hundred others, three former

chief ministers, Farooq Abdullah, his son, Omar Abdullah of the National Conference and Mehbooba Mufti of the People’s Democratic Party, had been arrested. Those are the mainstream pro-India politicians who have carried India’s water through the years of insurrection. Newspapers report that the Jammu and Kashmir police force has been disarmed. More than anybody else, these local policemen have put their bodies on the front line, have done the groundwork, provided the apparatus of the occupation with the intelligence that it needs, done the brutal bidding of their masters and, for their pains, earned the contempt of their own people. All to keep the Indian flag flying in Kashmir. And now, when the situation is nothing short of explosive, they are going to be fed to the furious mob like so much cannon fodder. The betrayal and public humiliation of India’s allies by Narendra Modi’s government comes from a kind of hubris and ignorance that has gutted the sly, elaborate structures painstakingly cultivated SEPTEMBER 2019

above: Indian soldiers, supplied by the British, arriving in Srinagar in 1947, to fight Pakistani troops for ownership of the Kashmir region.

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the silence is the loudest sound · essay

over decades by cunning, but consummate, Indian statecraft. Now that that’s done—it is down to the Street vs the Soldier. Apart from what it does to the young Kashmiris on the street, it is also a preposterous thing to do to soldiers. The more militant sections of the Kashmiri population, who have been demanding the right to self-determination or merger with Pakistan, 44

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have little regard for India’s laws or constitution. They will no doubt be pleased that those they see as collaborators have been sold down the river and that the game of smoke and mirrors is finally over. It might be too soon for them to rejoice. Because as sure as eggs are eggs and fish are fish, there will be new smoke and new mirrors. And new political parties. And a new game in town.

the silence is the loudest sound · essay On 8 August, four days into the lockdown, Narendra Modi appeared on television to address an ostensibly celebrating India and an incarcerated Kashmir. He sounded like a changed man. Gone was his customary aggression and his jarring, accusatory tone. Instead he spoke with the tenderness of a young mother. It’s his most chilling avatar to date. His voice quivered and his eyes shone with unspilled tears as he listed the slew of benefits that would rain down on the people of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir, now that it was rid of its old, corrupt leaders, and was going to be ruled directly from New Delhi. He evoked the marvels of Indian modernity as though he were educating

left: A heated debate among moderate and militant Kashmiri separatists at a mosque in Anantnag, Jammu and Kashmir, on 8 October 1989.

On 15 August, in his Independence Day speech, Narendra Modi boasted from the ramparts of Delhi’s Red Fort that his government finally had achieved India’s dream of “One Nation, One Constitution,” with his Kashmir move. But just the previous evening, rebel groups in several troubled states in the north east of India, many of which have special status like the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, announced a boycott of Independence Day. While Narendra Modi’s Red Fort audience cheered, about seven million

robert nickelsberg / getty images

The more militant sections of the Kashmiri population will be pleased that those they see as collaborators have been sold down the river and that the game of smoke and mirrors is finally over. It might be too soon for them to rejoice. There will be new smoke and new mirrors. a bunch of feudal peasants who had emerged from a time capsule. He spoke of how Bollywood films would once again be shot in their verdant valley. He didn’t explain why Kashmiris needed to be locked down and put under a communications blockade while he delivered his stirring speech. He didn’t explain why the decision that supposedly benefitted them so hugely was taken without consulting them. He didn’t say how the great gifts of Indian democracy could be enjoyed by a people who live under a military occupation. He remembered to greet them in advance for Eid, a few days away. But he didn’t promise that the lockdown would be lifted for the festival. It wasn’t. The next morning, the Indian newspapers and several liberal commentators, including some of Narendra Modi’s most trenchant critics, gushed over his moving speech. Like true colonials, many in India who are so alert to infringements of their own rights and liberties, have a completely different standard for Kashmiris. SEPTEMBER 2019

Kashmiris remained locked down. The communication shutdown, we now hear, could be extended for some time to come. When it ends, as it must, the violence that will spiral out of Kashmir will inevitably spill into India. It will be used to further inflame the hostility against Indian Muslims who are already being demonised, ghettoised, pushed down the economic ladder and, with terrifying regularity, lynched. The state will use it as an opportunity to close in on others, too—the activists, lawyers, artists, students, intellectuals, journalists—who have protested courageously and openly. The danger will come from many directions. The most powerful organisation in India, the far-right Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, with more than six hundred thousand members including Narendra Modi and many of his ministers, has a trained “volunteer” militia, inspired by Mussolini’s Black Shirts. With each passing day, the RSS tight45

ens its grip on every institution of the Indian state. In truth, it has reached a point when it more or less is the state. In the benevolent shadow of such a state, numerous smaller Hindu vigilante organisations, the storm troopers of the Hindu Nation, have mushroomed across the country, and are conscientiously going about their deadly business. Intellectuals and academics are a major preoccupation. In May, the morning after the Bharatiya Janata Party won the general elections, Ram Madhav, a general secretary of the party and a former spokesman for the RSS, wrote that the “remnants” of the “pseudo-secular/liberal cartels that held a disproportionate sway and stranglehold over the intellectual and policy establishment of the country … need to be discarded from the country’s academic, cultural and intellectual landscape.” On 1 August, in preparation for that “discarding,” the already draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was amended 46

THE CARAVAN

to expand the definition of “terrorist” to include individuals, not just organisations. The amendment allows the government to designate any individual as a terrorist without following the due process of a first-information report, charge sheet, trial and conviction. Just who—just what kind of individuals it means—was clear when in Parliament, Amit Shah, our chilling home minister, said: “Sir, guns do not give rise to terrorism, the root of terrorism is the propaganda that is done to spread it … And if all such individuals are designated terrorists, I don’t think any member of parliament should have any objection.” Several of us felt his cold eyes staring straight at us. It didn’t help to know that he has done time as the main accused in a series of murders in his home state, Gujarat. His trial judge, Justice Brijgopal Harkishen Loya, died mysteriously during the trial and was replaced by another who acquitted him speedily. Em-

adnan abidi / reuters

the silence is the loudest sound · essay

the silence is the loudest sound · essay

When it ends, as it must, the violence that will spiral out of Kashmir will inevitably spill into India. It will be used to further inflame the hostility against Indian Muslims who are already being demonised, ghettoised, pushed down the economic ladder and, with terrifying regularity, lynched.

opposite page: An Indian policeman patrols a deserted road in Srinagar on 20 August. below: A Kashmiri familiy walks along a deserted street in Srinagar on 20 August.

This piece was originally published in the New York Times.

adnan abidi / reuters

boldened by all this, far-right television anchors on hundreds of India’s news networks, now openly denounce dissidents, make wild allegations about them and call for their arrest, or worse. “Lynched by TV,” is likely to be the new political phenomenon in India. As the world looks on, the architecture of Indian fascism is quickly being put into place. I was booked to fly to Kashmir to see some friends on 28 July. The whispers about trouble,

and troops being flown in, had already begun. I was of two minds about going. A friend of mine and I were chatting about it at my home. He is a senior doctor at a government hospital who has dedicated his life to public service, and happens to be Muslim. We started talking about the new phenomenon of mobs surrounding people, Muslims in particular, and forcing them to chant “Jai Shri Ram!”—Victory to Ram. If Kashmir is occupied by security forces, India is occupied by the mob. He said he had been thinking about that, too, because he often drove on the highways out of Delhi to visit his family who live some hours away. “I could easily be stopped,” he said. “You must say it then,” I said. “You must survive.” “I won’t,” he said, “because they’ll kill me either way. That’s what they did to Tabrez Ansari.” These are the conversations we are having in India while we wait for Kashmir to speak. And speak it surely will. s

SEPTEMBER 2019

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essay

Herding The Hindutva Flock For Modi and RSS, Kashmir is a tool to consolidate their hold over the twice-born castes

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THE CARAVAN

essay

ESSAY / POLITICS

rajesh kumar singh / ap

HARTOSH SINGH BAL

on 31 july, I spoke at an event titled, “An Enigma called Nation & the Question of Identity,” organised in Delhi by the Hindi literary publication Hans to mark the birth anniversary of the writer Premchand. Among my fellow speakers was Makarand Paranjape, the director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, in Shimla. In the course of his lecture, Paranjape referred to various inequities created by provisions of the Indian constitution and invoked Adivasis who do not have to pay taxes. When the time for questions came, an irate member of the audience asked what taxes he expected from those who did not have an income. Paranjape clarified that he was only referring to tribal government servants in the Northeast. When the audience member confronted him with the enabling provisions of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, which give a special status to the northeastern states, Paranjape said that it was precisely such legal distinctions among citizens, as enabled by the schedule, which were the problem. I was staggered by the absurdity of such a formulation. But as it would turn out, the stupidity was mine—and that of the many in the audience who did not take Paranjape seriously. Less than a week later, Article 370, the basis of Kashmir’s special status in India, was rendered ineffective with the same casual disregard for constitutional provisions that Paranjape had displayed on stage. Adivasis who enjoy paying no taxes, Kashmiris who enjoy special status, Muslims who enjoy four wives, the Khan Market Gang who enjoy everything—it’s an endless list. It is a list that is not really about the group being singled out, but about the group for whom the pantomime is being played out. Narendra Modi won four assembly elections in a row appealing to Gujarati asmita, or pride, and he has now won two Lok Sabha elections appealing—in covert but rather evident ways—to Hindu pride. Why does this appeal work? What is it about this Hindu pride that is so fragile? When you look around the country, there is little reason for this fragility. The “twice-born” Hindu castes—a term used to denote SEPTEMBER 2019

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herding the hindutva flock · essay caste groups that are permitted to undergo the sacred thread ceremony, which they consider a second birth— such as the Brahmin and the Bania communities, dominate any list that one could examine. For instance, Banias constitute 24 of the 50 richest billionaires in India, and the heads of most of our top companies as well as the faculty of Indian universities comprise almost entirely of Brahmins and Banias. In liberal and right-wing news organisations, too, the top leadership is entirely made up of the twice-born. Even the debate about the idea of India is largely a debate between twice-born elites. Its participants have been the older, “secular” elite, who did nothing to change this twice-born domination—some hiding behind the Constitution, others behind the mythic

ensuing election victory that year was the first majoritarian Hindu consolidation in independent India. The election, driven by an advertising campaign that evoked the threat posed to the nation by the Sikh minority, was a template for how such majorities would be crafted in the future, but at the expense of another minority—the Muslims. It is no surprise that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ideologues such as Nana Deshmukh had come out in support of Rajiv Gandhi, and that the RSS cadre switched allegiance to the Congress, resulting in the Bharatiya Janata Party winning just two seats in the 1984 elections. But the defeat was a necessary prelude to what lay ahead—the Congress had created a Hindu vote-bank that the BJP would soon take over.

Even the debate about the idea of India is largely a debate between twice-born elites. Its participants have been the older, “secular” elite, who did nothing to change this twice-born domination. tolerance of Hinduism—and those who subscribe to the new, more honestly bigoted Hindutva, who do not disguise their exaltation of the twice-born. This continuing and disproportionate influence—both in terms of wealth and intellectual capital—of a demographic that comprises less than 20 percent of the population has no equivalent in a free society anywhere in the world. In fact, it is more in keeping with the situation in South Africa during the apartheid era. It is necessary to understand the transition from the old, secular twiceborn elite to the recent, more assertive—but as twice born—elite that now dominates our politics to understand the fragility of the idea of Hindu pride. Three events converged in the rise of this new Hindu nationalism. The first was the militant movement in Punjab and the rise of the Sikh radical Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, fuelled by the Congress and followed by Operation Bluestar, the assassination of the former prime minister Indira Gandhi and the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi and much of the Hindi belt in 1984. The 50

Tracing the representation of Muslims in parliament provides numerical evidence of the consolidation of the Hindu vote-bank. The figure rose steadily from two percent, in the first election in 1952, to ten per cent in 1980, approaching the percentage representation of Muslims in the Indian population. In 1984, it fell for the first time since Independence to eight percent, and it has since declined further to less than six percent today. The second event crucial to understanding the rise of Hindu nationalism is the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party under Kanshi Ram, who founded the party in 1984. In the 1989 elections, the BSP won four of the 245 seats it contested, and polled nearly five percent of the corresponding vote share. In his book, The Chamcha Age, Kanshi Ram rather perceptively documents the problem that Dalit, tribal and Other Backward Classes politics in Indian democracy were being mediated by political parties largely controlled by the twice-born castes. The BSP was Kanshi’s Ram’s response to this problem. A party that THE CARAVAN

previous spread: The changes to Article 370 must be seen not as measure to deal with the Valley, but with the tensions within the RSS-BJP faith—Kashmir is Hindutva’s most potent and long-serving means of consolidating its flock.

catered substantially to Dalit interests and hoped to reach out to tribals and Muslims—it was so conceived when it began—was a direct challenge to the Congress’s twice-born leadership who sought to represent the Dalit community. The third event was unfolding parallel to the BSP’s rise—the response born out of the reservations proposed by the second backward classes commission, headed by BP Mandal, in 1980. The Mandal Commission’s report led to the political rise of independent OBC leaders such as Lalu Yadav and Mulayam Singh. Again, it posed a direct challenge to the control that the Congress could exercise over the OBCs. Suddenly, the old Congress consensus started seeming unworkable. The twice-born-led Congress could no longer serve to modulate the aspiration to power of the other castes. On the other hand, the BJP, in tandem with the RSS, could seek to accommodate other castes in its fold by means the Congress had no recourse to—through their new and more strident Hinduism. Simultaneously, the twice-born castes shifted their support from the Congress to the newly emerging face of the BJP, born out of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Where the Congress could only offer some patronage and economic inducements, the BJP-RSS combine could do this and more by appealing to the emotive tug of identity. Unwittingly, this is what the Congress had already managed to do in 1984. The BJP-RSS now sought to turn this temporary Hindu consolidation, achieved through hatred directed outside the Hindu fold, into a permanent mode of being. Their minority of choice was the Muslims, not chosen instrumentally—as was the case with the Congress’ choice of the Sikhs—but flowing naturally from the bigotry of their ideology, which predated its electoral use by several decades. The work of gaining the support of the tribals of central India, and bring-

herding the hindutva flock · essay ing them within the Hindu fold, was carefully directed and calibrated by RSS affiliates throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. The BJP’s victories in Gujarat in 2002 and Madhya Pradesh in 2003 were in part a result of this work. Its other consequences became rather tragically visible through the tribal participation in the anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat, in 2002, and the anti-Christian violence that took place in adjacent Jhabua, in Madhya Pradesh, shortly after. This is work that is still in the making. The growth in the BJP’s support base has happened not by ignoring caste, but by working systematically on it. As the BSP, shorn of Kanshi Ram’s original vision, largely became a party of the Jatav community, the BJP was able to work systemically among the non-Jatav Dalit communities. This was done both through the symbolism of gestures, as recently demonstrated by the prime minister Narendra Modi washing the feet of Valmiki sewage workers, or by increasing the involvement of the RSS and its allied organisations in the temples and religious rituals of particular Dalit castes. Much the same strategy was repeated among non-Yadav OBCs in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. From creating an iconography around semi-mythic figures such as Raja Suheldev of the Rajbhars—a school holiday was declared in Uttar Pradesh in his name—to increased representation for such castes within the party. In comparison to the Congress, the BJP has actually proved to be more inclusive to these castes. Where the BJP and the RSS differ a little from the Congress is in ensuring that control and dominance of the leadership positions remain with the twiceborn castes—even Modi is a Bania posing as an OBC. In fact, even as the BJP support base among the Dalit, tribal and OBC communities has expanded from 2014 to 2019, the union cabinet has come to be even more dominated by twice-born castes. In 2014, Modi’s cabinet comprised of five Brahmins, three Rajputs and three members from the trading class—constituting 46 percent of the total strength. In his 2019 cabinet, there are seven Brahmins and one member from the Bhumihar caste, three Rajputs, and five members from

Given this, the changes to Article 370 must be seen not as measure to deal with the Valley, but with the tensions within the RSS-BJP faith. It is part of a package that will expand to include the construction of a Ram Mandir at Ayodhya and the enactment of a uniform civil code. the trading class—constituting 67 percent of the total strength. The twice-born run BJP-RSS, of course, faces the same problem that the Congress had to face— retaining control of its OBC and Dalit support while denying them actual power. Their consolidation within a Hindu identity, though an improvement over what the Congress could offer, is not a permanent solution. The RSS-BJP’s solution required that their attention is constantly directed away from the dominance of the twice-born castes within Hinduism to the dangers that lie outside its fold. In other words, towards threats to the faith that lie within the borders of India and those that lie outside, in Pakistan—essentially, the Muslims within and the Muslims without. Kashmir seems to fall in both categories. It is Hindutva’s most potent and long-serving means of consolidating its flock. It helps that this deployment of Kashmir or Muslims is not just instrumental—it has been a core part of the ideology that has sustained the RSS for much of its existence. This is why we must understand that the BJP-RSS combine would like nothing better than to turn Kashmir into a permanent zone of attrition. The BJPRSS has accommodated many identities that it cannot bring within its notion of Hinduism—for instance, through the Akali Dals, it has left Punjab to be managed entirely by its Sikh allies, and in the Northeast and Goa, it has accommodated the Christians. But its perception of Muslims as outside any accommodation is central to its world view. The last five years are a good illustration of this ideology. The Modi government has allowed the security situation in Kashmir to worsen considerably since the United Progressive Alliance years, and in doing so, it has gained politically. The second Modi governSEPTEMBER 2019

ment owes its majority to the events in Kashmir—without the militant attack on Pulwama, in February this year, the BJP would still be struggling to form alliances to stay in power. Given this, the changes to Article 370 must be seen not as measure to deal with the Valley, but with the tensions within the RSS-BJP faith. It is part of a package that will expand to include the construction of a Ram Mandir at Ayodhya and the enactment of a uniform civil code. The dangers of this form of consolidation are obvious—each new initiative needs to stoke the novelty of a population that will grow increasingly wary of baiting Muslims for votes. In this, Kashmir will always remain a constant. It is a perfect scenario for the BJPRSS agenda. The twice-born dominance in the country is reinforced through a permanent conflict zone where those on the receiving end are Muslims, and where the dead among the Indian security forces come largely from the very castes who are to be kept from power. As the casualties among the security force personnel in Pulwama reveal—or for that matter, as the count of the security-force casualties of any conflict in India will reveal— when it comes to dying for the country, the twice-born castes are represented in numbers that rarely, if ever, exceed their percentage in the population. This, then, is the problem of Hindu pride. It is the pride of a minority that is less than 20 percent of the Indian population, but which constantly seeks to maintain a majority by directing attention and hatred against minorities—in particular, Muslims. Always living in fear of losing control, the desperation and the insecurity that drives this pride is real, and it is this fear that is the most overwhelming danger to the country. s 51

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Spectres of Violence Piecing together a history of extrajudicial killings in Manipur

PHOTO ESSAY / CONFLICT PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROHIT SAHA TEXT BY TANVI MISHRA

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in the opening sequence to his photo book 1528, Rohit Saha is quick to set the tone for the narrative that follows. It opens with a grainy black-and-white image of a man’s face, framed such that it cuts right under his eyes, his unflinching gaze directed at the viewer. This injects the work with a confrontational tone that resurfaces time and again over the course of the book. The photograph on the following page shows a piece of cloth strewn on the ground, a chair in the middle of the frame and a single window on the far right. Two bars on the window ominously block the view to the outside. The scene is reminiscent of depictions—in cinema and other forms of visual culture—of interrogations in prison cells. Despite the absence of people in the photograph, it conjures up images of hostile questioning by au-

thorities. Often in these scenes, such interrogations are followed by torture, possibly alluded to here by the piece of cloth on the ground. Saha’s book, which has been in the making since 2016, was launched alongside an ongoing exhibition at Art Heritage, a gallery in Delhi, on 30 August 2019. When he was researching for his degree project at the National Institute of Design, he came across headlines about Irom Sharmila breaking a 16-year-long hunger strike by tasting honey. Force-fed during this period through a nasal tube, she had undertaken the strike in protest against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, or AFSPA, in Manipur. In 2016, she decided to end the fast and join politics. At the time, Saha knew about Manipur being a “disturbed state,” and was aware about the presence of AFSPA

in the state, but not the extent of political turmoil that had culminated in Sharmila’s momentous decision. Despite his father’s attempts to dissuade him from going to Manipur because the state was “under curfew,” Saha was spurred on by the forcefulness of Sharmila’s resolve. He decided to begin a photographic work following her journey to the elections, starting on 18 October with Sharmila announcing her political party, the Peoples’ Resurgence and Justice Alliance, in Imphal. When Saha began reporting, his research led him to the incident that prompted Sharmila’s fast—the Malom Massacre—a shooting of ten civilians by army troops, in retaliation against an attack on an Assam Rifles convoy in November 2000. The book traces Saha’s journey in informing himself about the political reality of an unfamiliar place—he was born and raised in Kolkata, and his association with Manipur began through this work. 1528 contains text that runs parallel to the images, in which Saha describes how his relationship with the state evolved over the course of his research and the making of this work. Early on in the book, he writes, “I came to Manipur thinking Malom Massacre was the worst that had happened here.” To see “what remains of the incident,” he set out to meet the families of the victims of the massacre, in order “to look at the present and compare it with the past.” While attempting to locate the families of the victims of the Malom Massacre, Saha came across the work of the Extrajudicial Execution Victim Families Association of Manipur, an organisation formed in 2009 by the widows of men 57

killed in alleged extrajudicial killings. The organisation has spearheaded the movement in Manipur to find justice for civilians who have died in what came to be known as “fake encounters,” suspected to be staged by the armed forces. It has also built a support group for the affected families. In one of their key interventions in 2012, EEVFAM—alongside another organisation called the Human Rights Alert, Manipur— petitioned the Supreme Court, demanding an investigation into 1,528 cases of alleged extrajudicial killings that had occurred between 1979 and 2012. Researching the Malom Massacre in his bid to trace Sharmila’s journey, Saha stumbled upon a reality much more gruesome than he had anticipated: an immense repository of cases, which the EEVFAM had maintained records of at their office in Uripok, Imphal West. In October 2016, Saha began to volunteer at the EEVFAM, poring over files and digitising the recorded material, particularly the forms with details of the incident, vic58

tims and perpetrators, as well as notes about when they were last seen. He repeatedly recalled the cabinet in the EEVFAM office, which houses around eight hundred files for the 1,528 cases. The files also contained identification photographs of the victims, newspaper cuttings and post mortem reports. While remembering a pile of newspaper reports, Saha recalled, “All I could see were people protesting or blocking roads. Dead bodies wrapped in white and families crying. … My way of looking at Manipur started changing from the day I opened that cupboard.” After a day’s work, he would try and visit the places that found mention in the reports he had looked over. He admitted that this immersion into the work affected him deeply, and he began “having dreams where I started relating myself to the victims who lost their lives.” Across the book’s pages is a looming spectre of violence—shown by a pool of blood on the ground or a body face down in the water—though one is never quite able to pin it down to a particular incident or victim. Saha’s ver-

sion of events does not disguise itself as photo reportage, but presents a reading into the psyche of the author as much as of the place and its people. Various elements in the book—including the confrontational gaze that recurs in multiple images of tight-cropped faces staring back at the viewer—reflect this approach. Speaking of his time at the EEVFAM office, Saha said, “I often saw police vans bringing in prisoners with their faces covered. Just their eyes were visible.” His book carries an imprint of the EEVFAM’s archive for the 33-year period over which the extrajudicial killings took place. Its physical appearance is made to resemble the case files: it is of a similar size, and has stamp-like markings on its cover that identify the case material inside. Using various kinds of archival material along with his own photographs, “the dialogue between image and text” forms the underpinning of Saha’s work. There is an image of a man with a gun strung across his shoulder, with a newspaper headline stating “India’s first

adventure park inaugurated in Manipur” pasted on top of it. Another photograph, of a military check post with the phrase, “We are friends of hills/May I Help You,” is juxtaposed with an image of a form stating that no FIR has been filed and no inquiry conducted. These juxtapositions point towards the irony, or what Saha calls “mockery,” of a situation where “the army is supposed to save you, and you are scared of the army.” The narrative is one of dissonance—what one sees is offset by what is placed beside, on top or ahead of it. At other points in the book, the images and words work in tandem to connect disparate aspects of the conflict. A photograph of a man with his hands clasped, his arms hanging limp in resignation, is placed next to an article with the headline, “Army authority rejects allegation.” Collectively, the narrative raises more questions than it resolves, a kind of “systematic chaos” that Saha refers to, in which “who is in control, who is to be blamed and whom to support remains a concern.”

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Much reportage has shown that the killing of unarmed civilians in various parts of the country has been covered up by fake encounters. With the armed forces enjoying impunity under AFSPA, and the version communicated to the public being the state’s narrative, accounts of these encounters are often shrouded in uncertainty. Saha’s decision to intersperse his images with the EEVFAM’s material points towards this incongruity between the state’s version and the ground reality. Since Saha chose to keep his “visual language similar to the archive’s material,” it becomes difficult at times to gauge whether he has taken the high contrast black-and-white photographs, or whether they are pixelated and photocopied documents from the files. Saha, then, uses a visual medium that is often seen to have evidentiary value to draw attention to fake encounters that inherently lack accurate records. While the cases he refers to span a period of 33 years, his images from the present gesture to a reality that appears unchanged—as though, in Saha’s telling, time appears suspended.

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In 2017, a Supreme Court bench directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to set up a special investigation team to probe into allegations of extrajudicial killings in Manipur. But not much has altered for the families of victims of extrajudicial killings, according to Saha. “The village of Malom, Heirangoithong Grounds, RIMS Hospital Parking, Oinam District are among the few out of the many which have been sites for bloodbaths and lead rains,” he said. “Memorials have been put up at these sites and every anniversary they have a flower tribute ceremony. That’s all what has been happening since then. Nothing apart from that has been done about the victims as they still wait for justice.” As the book ends, the images become less visibly disturbing. One of them is of a man under an evening sky, in Ukhrul. Photographed from behind, he is staring at hills that are dotted by lights. But given Saha’s high-contrast aesthetic, it appears to be the sight of a city burning in the distance—alluding, as Saha says, to the feeling that “the air around these places is so damned.” This book was published by the Alkazi Foundation, as part of the Alkazi Foundation Photobook grant.

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page 52-53: Victim Data Collection Form EEVFAM Archives

page 56: The Sangai Express 16 April 2008 EEVFAM Archives

page 53: The Sangai Express 14 October 2008 EEVFAM Archives

page 57 left: Imphal West 2016

page 59 left: Victim Data Collection Form EEVFAM Archives

page 57 left: Imphal Express 27 October 2006 EEVFAM Archive

page 59 right: Victim COHR Report EEVFAM Archives

page 57 right: Account of the incident Data Collection Form EEVFAM Archives

page 60-61: Page from COHR Report EEVFAM Archives

page 54: Evidence Data Collection Form EEVFAM Archives page 54-55: Imphal West, 2016 page 56: Victim Data Collection Form EEVFAM Archives

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page 58 left: Heirangoithong Volley Ball Ground COHR Report (Committee on Human Rights) EEVFAM Archives

page 58 right: Imphal West 2016

page 62 top: Victim Data Collection Form EEVFAM Archives

page 62 bottom left: Account of the incident Data Collection Form EEVFAM Archives page 62 bottom right: Imphal Free Press 27 October 2006 EEVFAM Archives page 62 bottom: Imphal West 2016 page 63 bottom left: Imphal West 2017 page 63 bottom right: The Sangai Express 20 October 2006 EEVFAM Archives

page 64: The Sangai Express, 2006 EEVFAM Archives page 65: Imphal Sunday 20 July 2008 EEVFAM Archives page 66 top left: Imphal East 2017 page 66 top right: Account of the incident Data Collection Form EEVFAM Archives page 67 top left: Kwatha 2016

page 67 top right: Kwatha 2016 page 67 bottom: Evidence Data Collection Form EEVFAM Archives page 68-69: Hueiyen News Service 2011 EEVFAM Archives page 70: Evidence Data Collection Form EEVFAM Archives page 71: Victim Data Collection Form EEVFAM Archives

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BOOKS

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books

Standing the Test of Time The legacy of a pioneering Sri Lankan architect / ART

courtesy le corbusier foundation / f.l.c. / adagp, paris, 2019

SMRITI DANIEL

in shiromi pinto’s new novel Plastic Emotions, released this July, there is a moment where the protagonist, the Sri Lankan architect Minnette De Silva, reads an article about herself. The headline trumpets that it is about “Ceylon’s first woman architect.” Minnette is flattered, even as her mind is crowded with other thoughts, including her rivalry with an architect on the rise—a man she refers to only as “the recluse,” who, she feels, has appropriated her ideas and lured away her collaborator. She also reflects on how some of her clients are quick to express admiration but slow to pay her fees, and wonders, “What good are words, I can’t eat words. I can’t build with words.” At another point in the novel, Minnette writes, in a letter to a close confidante: After all, when have they ever recognised me for what I am here? – a pioneer of Modernism in Ceylon. Instead I am ‘that woman architect’ or worse still, that ‘girl architect’. That has been the root of my difficulties, if I am honest. All the concessions I made … all because they would not take the word of a woman as sound. Pinto uses these moments to bring into sharp focus some of the factors that influenced Minnette’s trajectory. In 1948, she made history as SEPTEMBER 2019

the first Asian woman to become an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects and, in 1949, became the first Sri Lankan woman architect to start her own practice. While Minnette’s buildings would break new ground both stylistically and technically, her oeuvre extended beyond constructed works. She would also establish herself as a vital intellectual, venturing into studies of architectural history and urban planning, design and craftsmanship, archiving, conservation and teaching. Notably, she coined the term “modern regional architecture in the tropics” during the 1950s to advocate replacing the prevailing Eurocentric vision of architecture with an approach that took the best of modernity, but anchored it in the rich architectural history of her own country. Minnette’s ideas set her apart from her contemporaries and appear to have directly influenced the likes of Geoffrey Bawa—the reclusive architect and rival that Pinto refers to. A celebrated figure, sometimes dubbed “the father of tropical modernism,” Bawa was awarded the title of Deshamanya—an esteemed civilian honour bestowed by the Sri Lankan government— for his body of work, which included hotels in the country, such as the Kandalama and the Lighthouse, as well as for his design of Sri Lanka’s parliament complex. Today, Bawa tours are popular, with his house in Colombo and garden 73

courtesy le corbusier foundation / f.l.c. / adagp, paris, 2019

standing the test of time · books

estate in Bentota typically receiving hundreds of visitors every month. By contrast, even in Sri Lanka, Minnette does not enjoy the same easy recognition. Public interest in Bawa has grown with every new book and restoration of an old project, but acknowledgement of Minnette’s work feels almost episodic. The few of her buildings that remain standing in Colombo and Kandy do not draw busloads of tourists, and what could have been an astonishing archive and historical record of her work and personal correspondence, today, exists, for the most part, only on the pages of her autobiography, and on the walls of a hotel run by her niece. The release of Plastic Emotions is likely to generate a fresh wave of interest in Minnette, although Pinto focusses on producing an intimate portrait of the woman rather than on recounting all the particulars of her professional accom74

plishments. The novel follows Minnette in her journeys through Europe and India, but it is anchored in a love affair between Minnette and the Swiss modernist architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. He was married and had already acquired immense fame by the time he met her. In the novel he embarks on a design for a new capital for Punjab at Chandigarh. What Minnette would have made of this blurring between her person and the character in the novel—her loves imagined, her sorrows dissected, her fictional friends an efficient amalgamation of the ones who made up her circle—is debatable. Even in her 1998 autobiography, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, Minnette is proud and thoughtful, open with the details of who she met and what she did, but seldom laying bare her heart. For someone seeking a sense of who THE CARAVAN

Minnette was, both the novel and the autobiography offer only partial truths: the former because it is unapologetically a work of fiction, and the latter because it is so deliberately curated. pinto’s experiments with perspectives in Plastic Emotions reflect something of the construction of Minnette’s own autobiography, which takes the form of a scrapbook containing photographs, letters, records, playbills, invitations and newspaper cuttings. Critics often point to the numerous typos, gaps in narrative and the uneven flow of The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect as evidence that it cries out for an editor. While this is true, it is also the case that this archive has a value greater than the sum of its parts: it is a work in which Minnette constructs a sense of her own legacy, interrogates her family history and reflects on her practice.

standing the test of time · books At times, the novel’s unwavering focus on this affair begins to feel saccharine, as does its portrayal of Minnette as lovelorn and pining for Corbusier’s letters. Pinto’s novel is most compelling, however, in the moments where it strays away from the affair and depicts Minnette back home in Ceylon—as Sri Lanka was called until 1972—trying to carve out a career for herself while contending with a country in transition. Pinto weaves together the lives of people in Minnette’s orbit with pivotal political moments, such as exploring the implications of the adoption of the Sinhala Only Act, 1956, which replaced English with Sinhala as the official language of the country without officially recognising Tamil. The legislation became a key factor in the growing schism between the two communities, eventually culminating in the civil conflict in 1983 between the Sri Lankan state and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Pinto depicts Minnette as a member of an English-speaking elite that is unprepared for how rapidly notions of a Sinhala-Buddhist identity gained precedence in independent Sri Lanka. For instance, she places Minnette in the audience

previous spread: A photograph from Minnette’s autobiography, showing her sitting in front of a bookcase she had designed, made from Ceylon wood. opposite page: Minnette de Silva and the Swiss modernist architect Le Corbusier, in 1947. Shiromi Pinto’s novel is anchored in a love affair between the two. below: A letter from Minnette to Corbusier. At times, Pinto’s depiction of Minnette pining for Corbusier’s letters begins to feel saccharine.

courtesy le corbusier foundation / f.l.c. / adagp, paris, 2019

The autobiography was intended to have two volumes, though only the first was ever published. Somewhat tellingly, Minnette opens it not with details about herself but with several pages dedicated to the history and evolution of Sri Lankan architecture, and follows this with a loving portrayal of her parents’ rather remarkable lives. It is clear she wants to lead the reader to an understanding of the foundations of her work. But, though much can be gleaned from the book, it makes the reader work for insights, asking, among other things, that you squint at faintly visible handwritten notes and sort through a sometimes unreliable structure to understand the chronology of her life. The critic Gillian Darley, who wrote the introduction to the autobiography, told me that Minnette had written the book as a way to ensure that she had the final word with her detractors. “Her own telling of the tale, varnished, was her way of settling the scores, with her family, with the long shadow of Bawa, and of course the fact that she was working in a country riven with its own problems and a business entirely dominated by men,” she said. Plastic Emotions diverges markedly from the autobiography in its fascination with the story of Corbusier and Minnette. Pinto orchestrates their meeting in the Somerset town of Bridgwater, in 1947, at a gathering of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture—conferences that brought together the world’s leading modernist architects to debate new ways of thinking about architecture, urbanism and civic identity. The novel includes an exchange at the conference, also captured in Minnette’s autobiography, in which Corbusier asks the young woman sitting beside him “Vous-êtes architecte?”—You are an architect? When Minnette says yes, he is genuinely surprised. He wants to know why, and in the novel, she “does not have a sensible reply.” Minnette later writes to him that “it is immaterial anyway, for you are captivated by the two roses in my hair.” This is a revealing exchange. According to Pinto, who corresponded with me over email, Minnette’s relationship with Corbusier was deep and vital to her development as an architect. It was also inherently unequal, particularly since Corbusier’s perception of Minnette was coloured by his ignorance of her background: He was a mentor to her. He respected her and her work a great deal: not only did he try to find work for her, but he was also impressed with her architectural thinking ... At the same time, he exoticised her ... So, while he admired her on the one hand, he felt it necessary to “other” her, as a way of satisfying his own fantasy of who and what she was. At least, that’s how I see it.

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standing the test of time · books below: Minnette with her father, the politician and lawyer George de Silva, at the 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace, in Poland.

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when SWRD Bandaranaike—the country’s fourth prime minister—attempts to curtail the growing influence of the Buddhist clergy. But Pinto uses the moment to underscore Minnette’s privilege and the fact that her politics were out of step with a growing undercurrent of nationalism in the country: ‘There is no need to reduce such a sublime creed to a state activity.’ The words pinch another smile from her. With these words,

Pinto shifts between many first-person narratives, straying far beyond Minnette—albeit briefly—to portray certain political events through the eyes of Bandaranaike himself, who she depicts being assassinated by a Buddhist monk, in 1959, over a proposal that would have given greater autonomy to the Tamils. In Minnette’s circle, too, Pinto sows disagreements about the shape that Ceylon’s postcolonial identity should take. This ratchets up the pressure on some of her protagonist’s most intimate relationships, most notably with two of

declaimed in front of the Temple of the Tooth, the Prime Minister raked the monks back into their rightful patch. Minnette wanted to shout out her assent. Instead she offered the dry applause expected of a woman of her class. Her admiration for Ceylon’s leader is tempered only by her reservations about language. What is the point of knowing Sinhala or Tamil outside of Ceylon? We didn’t become a great country with them. We did it with English. She shakes her head. Not for her the sentimental parochialism of the nationalist.

Minnette’s closest friends falling on different sides of the same debate. Pinto’s version of Minnette is of a woman who is inescapably privileged and largely absorbed with her own life until circumstances force her to confront the mounting violence around her. Minnette’s autobiography reinforces some of this: for instance, when Bandaranaike makes an appearance, it is as a guest at her family’s dinner table, where he is, to her, the jovial friend who lends her mother mystery novels. She spares few words for Sri Lankan politics in the latter half of her autobiography, but her childhood, with

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courtesy helga desilva blow perera / life and work of an asian woman architect

standing the test of time · books parents who both play a formative role in post-independence Sri Lankan society, is steeped in politics, and when it comes to her time in India in particular, it is clear that she was far from indifferent. On at least one occasion—as a young student caught in the Quit India movement—she appeared more than willing to sacrifice her professional ambition for her principles.

magazines, inspired her to become an architect. Though she would meet obstacle after obstacle—most notably because her schooling was interrupted and her father faced a financial crisis that meant he could not afford to fund her further education—she found her way to Bombay in 1938. There, she studied at the Academy of Architecture, where she was the only woman among 40 men, and would, as she noted in her

minnette de silva turned 30 in the year that Ceylon claimed its independence. It would remain a dominion of the British Empire until 1972, when it assumed the status of a republic. In her autobiography, Minnette writes about 1947, when India, Sri Lanka and Burma were granted independence: “It was all over in a few minutes; a century and a half of colonialism.” The following year, as Ceylon celebrated the adoption of a bill of independence, Minnette looked out over Kandy—a hill station and home to her family for decades—while fireworks lit up the hills and burst like incandescent flowers in the night sky. Kandy, with its temple of the sacred tooth relic, is viewed as a Sinhala Buddhist stronghold. The city witnessed some critical power struggles, and by virtue of who her family was, Minnette had a front-row seat. Her father, George de Silva, was an influential lawyer and one of the leaders of the Ceylon National Congress, which was instrumental in gaining independence. He supported the opening of Hindu and Buddhist temples to all castes, education for women and the abolition of dowry. He was Buddhist and Sinhala, so his marriage to Minnette’s mother, Agnes Nell, who was of French, Dutch and Sinhalese heritage, created a stir in Kandy’s social circles. Nell was instrumental in establishing the Women’s Franchise Union of Sri Lanka—an organisation that played a critical part in achieving universal franchise—and even argued before the Donoughmare commission, in 1927, for the right of all Sri Lankan women to vote. Thanks to her parents’ stature in local society, their home was a busy one, and Minnette would later claim that a visitor to the house, who came bearing copies of architectural

In 1949, Minnette founded her own studio and vowed to “conquer the distrust” of contractors, firms and architectural patrons who had previously not worked with women architects. autobiography, be readily “drawn into the vortex of Indian social and political life.” In 1941, she enrolled in the Sir JJ College of Architecture, but was soon expelled after joining students on strike over MK Gandhi’s arrest during the Quit India movement. She refused to apologise, although it meant the end of her formal studies there. In 1945, towards the end of her time in India, Minnette would also cofound—along with the writer Mulk Raj Anand and her sister Anil—the Modern Architectural Research Group, and its eponymous magazine on modern art and architecture. Soon after, she returned to Ceylon and decided to apply to the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. The architect Gillian Howell first met Minnette at the Architectural Association shortly after the war, when Howell was a first-year student and Minnette was completing her final year. Her memories of the time capture some of the relentless exoticisation that Minnette experienced. “She was always strikingly beautiful,” Howell would write in a note republished in Minnette’s autobiography. “Always dressed in exquisite saris, with fresh flowers in her hair and always followed by a train of young men carrying her drawing board and portfolio, her handbags, suitcases, scarves and shawls. In the drab days of rationing in the mid-forties she appeared like an exotic visitor from another planet.” However, scholars have argued that SEPTEMBER 2019

Minnette found ways to exercise her agency. In a paper titled “Tropical Modernism/Environmental Nationalism: The Politics of Built Space in Postcolonial Sri Lanka,” for instance, the academic Tariq Jazeel writes that: De Silva’s writings from her London period (1945–1949) betray an awareness of her own difference, her exoticism, in the professional spaces of the

RIBA, the AA, and the CIAM of the late 1940s. Yet her writings also suggest a certain confidence in her own authority to re-negotiate International Modernism precisely because of her difference. So it was that Minnette cut a swathe through London society. When 1948 came around, it felt rich with promise. She had her diploma. She was introduced to the queen. That same year, she was invited to represent Ceylon at the peace congress in Poland. But 1948 was also the year her father insisted she return to Ceylon. In her autobiography, Minnette claims that George, who had never been a fan of his daughter being abroad, told her in no uncertain terms that she could not complete the additional diploma in planning, and that that unless she embarked on her way home, she could never return. Minnette came back home and, in 1949, founded the Studio of Modern Architecture, her independent practice, which she would run out of the family home. She was reportedly one of only two women in the world at the time to have a practice under her own name, and vowed—as she mentions in her autobiography—to “conquer the distrust” of contractors, business firms and the government, as well as architectural patrons who, until her appearance on the scene, had never confronted a woman’s presence in their midst. 77

standing the test of time · books

Though Minnette had an appreciation for Ceylon’s artistic traditions, she was a thoroughly modern architect, and wrote about how the past and present could be synthesised to create exciting work. while her logistical challenges were numerous—she even had to train her own draughtsman, for instance—Minnette confronted fundamental differences in approaches to architecture, which separated her from her peers and challenged her clients. In an essay, titled “Experiments in Modern Regional Architecture in Ceylon, 1950 to 1960,” she would outline what she considered the background to the problem:

Minnette sought to challenge this, drawing on her childhood experiences of being immersed in the social and cultural movements that ran parallel

There are personal, emotional, ornamental elements in a building. Ceylon and the East are alive with colourful features. To deny these natural expressions without establishing a discipline of colour and ornament results only in the garish. Wholly unassimilated modernity is expressed by those who try to ‘build modern’ with aesthetically disastrous results. Rich effects can only be seen today in old structures—in the juxtaposition of different materials—rough natural stone and smooth plaster, and timber that was painted or lacquered or used for its own natural colour and grain … these things can be brought back in a contemporary way.

courtesy helga desilva blow perera / life and work of an asian woman architect

Ceylon, as generally in the East, emerged suddenly in the post-second

world war years from a feudal-cumVictorian past to modern technological influences from the West—a superficial veneer of ‘modernism’ acquired second-hand through films, magazines or short trip abroad, illdigested and bearing no relationship to our traditions and to the region in which we live.

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to the country’s gaining of independence, which she would later describe in her autobiography as a “live course in sociology and the relationship of architecture to it.” In particular, she felt that traditional approaches had much to say on the subject of adapting to a tropical climate. “In Ceylon, climate permits outdoor and indoor activity to be extensions of each other,” she wrote in “Twenty-Five Years of Experiments in Modern Regional Architecture in Sri Lanka and India,” an essay reproduced in her autobiography. She wanted to make full use of verandas and create deep eaves to protect against the tropical sun. She envisioned buildings that had split-ceiling levels, which would improve ventilation and were built around mada midulas—courtyards—as was the tradition in old Kandyan homes. Yet, though Minnette’s philosophy was founded on a deep appreciation of Ceylon’s artistic traditions, she was simultaneously a thoroughly modern architect. The same essay makes it evident that she was interested in how the past and present could be synthesised to create exciting, contemporary work:

There was a clear social dimension to her thinking. Families in this part of the world tended toward the large and enjoyed congregating to mark every occasion, she observed, but the pressures of modern life meant that homes had become smaller. Her solution was flexible open-plan interiors with movTHE CARAVAN

able walls. Overall, her approach would synthesise indigenous traditions in designs for contemporary buildings, using whatever materials and means were suitable. She envisioned homes in which the architect, craftsman and artists were collaborators. Patterns carved in to her walls filtered light as the sun arced overhead. Her balustrades gleamed with the finest lacquer work and the staircases themselves were a feature, sweeping round in elegant spirals. Her love of the garden found expression in every floor, as windows and verandas invited the outdoors in. Everywhere she found room for Dumbara mats, using them as floors rugs, chair covers and even panelling for doors and windows. Much of this style was on display in her first house, which was completed in 1951, and built for Algy and Letty Karunaratne, who were friends of her parents. Appearing to emerge from the hill, the two-level home was distinctive for the ways in which it connected the house and the garden and how its placement on a long strip of land made the most of the view. The home’s design incorporated several artistic features, notably a George Keyt mural for the living room that the Karunaratne family was so disinclined to fund, and Minnette so determined to have, that she contributed some of her own money to make it possible. Minnette later reflected on her work on the house, recalling that she was in the process of learning at the time and was not ashamed of her choices: I look back now and see a few things I’d change—for instance the use of glass bricks; but then I tried everything, but then it was my first house and my first attempt to mix old and new. The Karunaratnes were terribly embarrassed that their humble home resembled a temple, in others’ eyes, with its amalgam of arts and crafts. In 1950, George had a heart attack on the Peradeniya golf course. His death left Minnette overwhelmed. “I suddenly realised I had lost my best friend,” she writes. “The shock of my father’s death combined with the criticism and constant battle of confidence in my

courtesy dominic sansoni

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work took its toll and I had to escape.” She went to Europe to find comfort and inspiration from her friends there. Returning, Minnette would dive into work—the 1950s would be the busiest decade of her career as a practising architect. One of her first projects in Colombo was the Pieris House. The Pieris were great family friends—driving Minnette to school, buying her ice creams and even giving her pocket money—and for them Minnette created an unconventional home built on piloti, which, like stilts, served to lift SEPTEMBER 2019

opposite page: Minnette climbing up to inspect concrete pillars and slab work at the De Saram house in Colombo. above: Geoffrey Bawa, Sri Lanka’s most famous architect in recent history, at his home in Lunugana.

the building off the ground. She had seen this done before with temples on pillars, but she embedded them into a modern house, modifying her design to make room for a car port. In her autobiography, she would describe the ground floor and entrance: 79

courtesy helga desilva blow perera / life and work of an asian woman architect

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above: Minnette’s architectural plans for a building she designed in Colombo. opposite page: A photograph of a dining room, leading to a study, in a house designed by Minnette for the Karunaratnes.

Few heavy walls block the vista of the pillared hall; looking through to an inner courtyard and onto another room or loggia and behind this again to a rear courtyard garden. The air flows through the house and up through the midula to upper floors. Fifteen or twenty perches of ground appears double the size. No space is wasted in pretentious, inadequate driveways. You drive straight under or beside your house. All the garden area possible is collected within for the enjoyment of the householder. The building was carried on reinforced concrete columns with a reinforced concrete slab—another first for Ceylon. Here, again, Minnette went well beyond the brief of a traditional architect, taking an interest in the decor and the interiors by installing a DutchCeylonese lamp, a Kandyan lacquered balustrade, a grill with a bo-leaf motif and a stone floor. “The 1950s was a period of cultural renaissance in Sri Lanka and in that 80

respect, Minnette was definitely a product of her time, but also beyond her time,” Pinto told me, pointing out that Minnette was already thinking about how the architect’s practice had to respond to increasing urbanisation and a growing population. As Minnette’s practice developed, she once again began studying costeffective housing, which had first made an appearance in her notes while she was still a student. She was experimenting with rammed earth, which was essentially compressed soil to be used in walls and foundations, in her buildings (“it made economic sense— using only indigenous materials and local labour”), and considering how ventilation could be optimised through the use of split-levels, courtyards and stairwells situated at the centre of the plan. By leaving materials in their natural state she could economise while celebrating the aesthetics of stone, brick and wood. Minnette also undertook larger projects, such as the Senanayake Flats in Colombo, built between 1954 and 1957. There she was determined to stretch the notion of what a flat in the city could be, aspiring to create a “bungalow in the air.” She built two identical blocks around an interior courtyard THE CARAVAN

to ensure cross ventilation. She saw providing privacy as critical, and so ensured all windows overlooking the courtyards were obscured and that no flat overlooked any other. She kept all the trees that had existed on the site and created communal amenities. She also worked on the Watapuluwa Housing Scheme, in 1958, for public servants in Kandy. The site boasted a panoramic view of the Mahaweli river. To build on it, Minnette consulted with future householders to find how they wanted to live and used that data to inform her design, piloting a participatory approach that was quite unique at the time. In a letter written to Minnette by Asoka Amarasinghe, who was one of her clients, one can have a sense of what it must have been like to live in a home designed by the architect at her most adept. Her clients had asked for a pavilion living room and a home that felt like a garden. After speaking with members of the family, Minnette created an ethereal, airy space that seemed to its occupants to be floating. After they moved in, Amarasinghe wrote to her: As my oldest daughter photographed the house, I recalled your chiding us,

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However, not all her clients were so laudatory, and her practice was not without its challenges. Early on, she was told by her contractor to get her design endorsed by a London engineer before he would consent to building it. A few of her designs never even got past the drawing stage. She would be described as difficult and arrogant by clients and peers. Yet, decades into her practice, some people clearly still expected her to work for free. Writing to ask if Minnette would undertake to design a home for him, Bunnie Molamure, a potential client, wrote, “I have an acre of land, and no money.” The decade that had begun with the death of Minnette’s father came to an end with her mother falling ill and left semi-paralysed in Minnette’s care. She died in 1961. Minnette now felt “completely alone,” writing in the final page of her autobiography, “With the death of my mother, I am bringing volume I to a close—because it marks a significant divide in my life.” Meanwhile, in 1957, as Minnette had been working on the Senanayake Flats, Bawa, who was 38 years old at the time, moved back to work in Ceylon after training at the Royal Institute of British Architects. “Bawa was Minnette’s contemporary, but he came late to architecture and his career ran ten years behind hers,” the scholar David Robson, who has written several books on the architect and his work, said in a 2016 lecture at the AA School of Architecture in London. Bawa was phenomenally talented and would go on to earn international acclaim, becoming Sri Lanka’s most famous architect in recent history. In fact, in 2019, a series of centenary events are bringing together artists

from Sri Lanka, India and beyond to engage with his work. In sharp contrast, Minnette’s hundredth birth anniversary passed with little fuss. According to Robson, it is unlikely that there was any causal link between Bawa’s success and Minnette’s declining career: it may have been simply that Bawa made more strategic choices. Robson noted that by securing a partnership with the Colombo-based firm Edwards Reid and Begg, Bawa was able to establish himself in a way that Minnette did not. He benefited from access to the firm’s established client base and could draw on the technical experience of the team there. Bawa also joined hands with Ulrik Plesner, a Danish architect who had spent 1958 working closely with Minnette and studying her ideas. In 2000, Plesner said in an interview with The Guardian that Minette “thought architecture morning, noon and night. She was always hard up, always struggling, but she was a genuine reformer, very bold, very clear in her ideas. Technically, though, she didn’t have a clue. That was why she employed me.”

Plesner moved to Colombo at Bawa’s invitation. According to Robson, Bawa, too, drew on Plesner’s technical skill and professionalism. He also thinks it quite possible that Plesner carried some of Minnette’s ideas and writings to Bawa. “Indeed, it is unlikely that he [Bawa] would have made the leap from tropical modernism to regionalism if she had not shown the way,” Robson wrote in an article for the architecture and design website Matter. In his 2016 lecture, Robson said that “it must have been devastating for Minnette, first to have watched Bawa poach her assistant and then take her ideas, and also to watch as his practice took off just as hers was starting to falter.” In the 1960s, Minnette received only a handful of commissions, and that number shrank further by the 1970s. It did not help that she travelled frequently out of Sri Lanka during that period. When asked why Minnette’s practice seemed to struggle in later decades, Pinto shared her belief that there were a number of reasons why Minnette ended up “marginalised and alone,”’ including that she chose to base herself

courtesy helga desilva blow perera/life and work of an asian woman architect

with ‘such a beautiful living room,’ for spending all our free time in the spare carport, with its enchanting vistas and lovely play of light and shade. My mother was delighted by the light reflections from the pool ripples and the changing shadow patterns of the floor to ceiling trellis with its Japanese aura … When my son was seriously injured last December I felt again how this tranquil house soothes me.

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standing the test of time · books in Kandy, which was relatively isolated at the time, but also, simply, that she was a woman. Pinto suggested that had Minnette been a man, there would have been no shortage of tomes exploring her oeuvre and campaigns to preserve her work. She would have been framed as an eccentric visionary, rather than being dismissed. “Bawa was, by all accounts, an anti-social type who would peremptorily ask his assistants to build a wall here, then dismantle it and move it elsewhere,” she told me. “Yet he is admired for his vision and drive to create. Minnette, on the other hand, is not afforded the same generosity, with many [men] branding her a difficult woman. I think if that’s what people are going to call you, eventually, you live up to the moniker.” The architect C Anjalendran agreed with Pinto about this perception of Minnette. During his time teaching at the City School of Architecture, in Sri Lanka, in the late 1980s, he ensured that her work was included in the curriculum in an effort to recognise how

ised for being a woman,’” he recalled. Anjalendran believes that she was in some ways doubly disadvantaged by her background: being a Burgher—of mixed-race ancestry—and speaking Sinhalese with an English accent in post-independence Ceylon, she must have felt at times like an outsider in her own country. despite the obstacles in her way, Minnette De Silva was far from idle. In 1973, she closed her office and moved to London, where she wrote the whole section on South Asian architecture in the eighteenth edition of Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture, which included references to the architecture of Ceylon, Afghanistan, Nepal, Tibet, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, China and Japan. This work led her to the department of architecture at the University of Hong Kong, where she served between 1975 and 1979 as a lecturer in the history of Asian architecture. In her paper “Crafting the Archive: Minnette De Silva, Architecture, and History,”

Though Minnette is often portrayed as having suffered a crisis of confidence, the truth was more complex. In reimagining her story, Pinto said that she was keen to raise Minnette’s profile. her writings in particular had influenced the development of Sri Lankan architecture. Anjalendran told me that he first met Minnette when he was 22 years old, and would visit her many times in the following years. Where Minnette received little recognition from her Sri Lankan peers—the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects awarded her a gold medal in 1996, 14 years after it recognised Bawa—he saw that she was celebrated in international spaces and blossomed in the company of those who admired her in Europe and India. “She was completely eccentric,” Anjalendran told me, while readily admitting that this was something she had in common with many from that generation. Minnette herself seemed to think there was only one difference. “She would say, ‘I have been penal82

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, an assistant professor of architecture at Barnard College in New York, notes that Minnette pioneered a new way to teach the history of architecture in an Asian context by offering her students a chance to examine architecture and urbanism in situ. The slideshows she showed them reflected the great breadth of her interests and inspirations: from the jali windows of temples to the assembly building in Chandigarh. (It is revealing that despite her clear stature, Minnette was never invited to teach in Colombo.) Minnette also curated an exhibition, at the Commonwealth Institute in London, featuring a large collection of photographs she had amassed of vernacular Asian architecture. Her study of pattern and form in 12 traditional villages—six in India, and three each in THE CARAVAN

Bangladesh and Sri Lanka—was later seen in exhibition form in Europe in the 1980s. She was also planning her own comprehensive history of Asian architecture, but the project was never completed. Siddiqi contends that Minnette’s significance is best understood in the context of this wider panoply of activities. “This is a person who, through many different avenues, was thinking very deeply about the country in which she was born and lived,” she said to me over Skype, adding that Minnette’s great contribution can be seen also in how she engaged with larger forms of anti-colonialism and pan-Asian culture, for instance in her work with the Modern Architectural Research Group, and also through her teaching and archive building. “For her, these were the really big questions.” Sunela Jayewardene, one of Sri Lanka’s leading environmental architects today, credits an early apprenticeship with Minnette in the 1980s with sparking an interest in how vernacular design held the key to creating contextually appropriate architecture. Minnette was at the time documenting vernacular design elements, and she would send Jayewardene on hunting expeditions. Jayewardene also witnessed up close Minnette’s battles with gender stereotypes. Relatively isolated in Kandy, Minnette did not benefit from the publicity machine that went into overdrive for Bawa. “At a time when there were still very few female architects, she was a role model for me,” Jayewardene said. “She was a woman ahead of her time.” In her paper, Siddiqi points to Minnette’s interest in textiles and crafts as another aspect of her work that deserves attention. Siddiqi writes that Minnette saw her workspace as a study centre and focussed on learning arts and crafts, particularly through the use of modern looms and other technologies. Not only was she hiring local women to execute fashionable clothing and household furnishings in the 1950s, Minnette trained in modern weaving herself and was very much interested in pushing the boundaries of design. Working with the villagers in the Dumbara valley, she specialised in block designs that she later described as “a kind of Op-Art in Kandyan weaves.”

standing the test of time · books dran would like to see her celebrated as one of the greats of Sri Lankan architecture. Siddiqi would like us to appreciate her as someone who set out to study and enrich her fields of interest. For her part, Jayewardene would like more people to remember Minnette as she does, as a woman who was very refined and gentle. “Her intellect was very evident, and as a society, we don’t like smart women,” she said. “You can imagine that they tolerated it even less than they do now.” In his lecture, David Robson recalled an anecdote that Minnette may have found particularly satisfying. He had lived in the Coomaraswamy Twin Houses in Colombo, which Minnette designed between 1970 and 1972. The houses were demolished in the mid 1990s. Robson had loved the buildings, enjoying in particular the doubleheight living room, with a bedroom suspended above it, all topped by a plunging Kandyan-style roof. “It was always full of air and full of light,” he said, adding that Geoffrey Bawa seemed to share his appreciation of the space. Every so often, Robson said, he would pick up the telephone to find Bawa on the other end, usually inviting himself over for a drink. “It wasn’t because he wanted to benefit from my company but because he wanted to sit in this incredible house,” he said. “He loved this house by Minnette.” s

below: The Senanayake Flats on Gregory’s Road, Colombo. These flats, designed by Minnette, were built between 1954 and 1957. Minnette was determined to stretch the notion of what a flat in the city could be, aspiring to create a “bungalow in the air.”

courtesy of david robson

What is also evident is that throughout her crowded career, Minnette remained a figure of great charisma. Though many portrayals of Minnette were of someone who suffered a crisis of confidence and failed to realise her potential, the truth was more complicated. For instance, Lynne Walker, the feminist architectural historian who helped put together AA XX 100—a project designed to tell the story of women in the Architectural Association—recalled meeting Minnette in the 1980s. In an article in the art magazine Apollo, Walker claimed that far from the sad, disillusioned figure she is often depicted as, the Minnette she met was an “electrifying” person, “dynamic and beautifully turned out … She was networking, making sure that she was included in any publications or events about women in architecture.” In The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect, Minnette would confess that “to remain an integrated person ... the cost seems to have been incalculable.” She died in 1998. After her passing, her house was stripped of its contents. It would fall into ruins and be later demolished. Her archive, including letters and sketches from Corbusier, are scattered. There are few now who knew her well, and fewer still who loved her. In reimagining her story, Pinto said that she was keen to raise Minnette’s profile. Anjalen-

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What Sri Lankan civil-war fiction tells us about the country’s political landscape SHARANYA MANIVANNAN

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one day in early april, after contemplating a shelf of local literature for an essay reflecting on the tenth anniversary of the official end of the Sri Lankan civil war, I walked through a Colombo neighbourhood, in defiance of the exceptional heat, giddy with joy to know again so comfortably the city of my childhood. The ease with which I moved through the streets was snatched away from every person in the country when churches in three locations around the island—Colombo, Negombo and Batticaloa—were attacked by suicide bombers on Easter Sunday, killing and injuring hundreds. These attacks were followed a few weeks later by anti-Muslim riots, and an elevated state of tension and distrust that persists months later. The pre-existing communalist sentiments that had preceded the attacks saw a sharp and more explicit rise. These events spun the island’s people, within and afar, into a mix of horror at what was unfolding and a complex sense of trauma at how recognisable that horror is, and at the same time, different. Reading three recently-published novels, by authors of differing backgrounds and positionalities—Sharmila Seyyid’s Ummath (2014, English translation by Gita Subramanian, 2018), Rajith Savanadasa’s Ruins (2016) and Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016)—set at the end of 26 years of war as events unfolded anew, I was intrigued by the foreshadowing they seemed to contain. Ummath explores women’s issues through the eyes of two cadres and an activist, Ruins looks at the frustrations of domesticity even when ordinary people can afford to look away from the conflict and The Story of a Brief Marriage looks at life and death at the furthermost periphery of the bloodshed. The books affirmed, in entirely different ways, that violence

often emerges out of a long and unremembered shadow, and begets more violence as its legacy. Ummath stands at the very intersection between the horrific past and the unfolding present, and if any fiction about Sri Lanka can be said to be prescient about current events, it is this novel. Set after the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam—a militant organisation among whose demands were a separate Tamil nation-state—was defeated by the Sri Lankan government in 2009, it opens with a former cadre returning to her family in the district of Batticaloa. Yoga’s leg was amputated during the conflict, and although she is warmly welcomed as soon as she arrives, her family soon settles into an unpleasant dynamic that reminds her of how she had entered the militancy. Sent to a household as a domestic worker before she reached puberty, and then physically abused by her employer, she had enlisted in the LTTE as a child for no other reason than that it would give her a chance to die. Another character, named Theivanai, joined the insurgency with a sense of purpose. Shattered by having witnessed a mother lamenting for her daughter, who had committed suicide after being raped by the military, she became inspired by the LTTE’s recruitment drive and mission of creating a separate Tamil state. She, too, was injured during the war. Following its end, these two young women are among the many former militants who try to merge back into ordinary life. They meet through the work of the novel’s third protagonist, a social worker named Thawakkul. Thawakkul is a feminist and a devout Muslim, who calls on her faith whenever she and her family suffer harassment and violence owing to her anti-establishment views. All of them are from the Batticaloa district in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province, a SEPTEMBER 2019

region whose complexities were for the longest time flattened into the narrative of the Tamil North. The mastermind behind the Easter bombings was from the district. Most of the novel’s nuanced understanding of conflict, and criticism of the same, is expressed through the character of Theivanai, who had passionately joined the movement for a separate Tamil nation. Following her amputation, she is transferred out of active combat but remains within the insurgency. For the first time, she has the time to mull over the rhetoric of the movement she had joined. She weeps with pride and pain when she hears the movement’s anthems on the radio, but she also begins to read about different perspectives, and this creates a radical shift in her thinking. “I have made a mistake,” she thinks. “I am with a Movement that ostensibly is working for a people’s victory but in fact is leading the people to their death … I am like a frog in the well who thinks the sky is limited to the mouth of the well. My blood boiled with the two or three incidents that happened within our village. Isn’t this the way the others also will feel? Without finding out more about the real nature of things I came here and got lost.” Ummath is equally an indictment of Islamic extremism, the oppression of the Sinhala-led government and military, as well as the LTTE and those who romanticise it. Significantly, it speaks of the LTTE’s anti-Muslim actions, including the 1990 massacre of worshippers at a mosque in Kattankudy. (The same town’s locals had tried to warn authorities about the mastermind behind the Easter bombings for years before the attacks.) The novel also shows how the movement confiscated land and property from Muslims, many of whom sought recourse in West Asia. In this way, it 85

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shows a clear link between long-simmering rancour, necessary migration and the current situation. With work opportunities in West Asia during the 1990s came money, religious extremism, and the ire of Tamils who remained in poverty. This is among what cannot be known except from within—that tensions between Tamil people of Hindu and Christian faiths and the Tamil-speaking Muslims of the Eastern Province had been fraught for several years. Seyyid’s novel documents this fragmentation and brings to the present the understanding that nothing mushrooms overnight. Until Theivanai comes to live with Thawakkul, she “knew nothing about Muslims and their culture, had held an irrational prejudice that Muslims and Tamils were natural enemies.” Located at the end of one war, prescient about events to come a decade later, Ummath depicts, in a nuanced and powerful way, a society in which 86

oppression is woven into the fabric of daily life. Through Thawakkul’s own struggles as an independent woman, and the cases she encounters as a social worker, it is made clear: every shocking headline has a palimpsest of stories beneath it. Many are woven seamlessly into the novel, ostensibly based on real cases. There are the girls who are ostracised because they visited a cybercafé. There is the divorced single mother of two daughters, all three of whom are physically assaulted; when investigated, Eravur society bands together to deny the event having taken place. There are the rumours started against women who work at NGOs, leading one woman to commit suicide. There are the gangs affiliated to the village assembly that break television antennas, disrupt music performances and force women into abayas, terrorising ordinary citizens long before murderous radicals emerged out of the same pool. The details may have been fictionalised, THE CARAVAN

but the ambience evoked is clear: the first sites of battle are women’s bodies, minds and choices. In all this, Seyyid herself is a Cassandra-like figure, who had warned for years of what was coming from the radicalisation that she saw around her. The author was a well-known journalist and poet who frequently came into friction with conservatives and chauvinists of all stripes. In 2012, she was asked by BBC Tamil for her opinion on the legalisation of prostitution, and her expression of support for the same became the final straw in turning sentiment in Eravur against her. Instigated by conservatives, who morphed her photos and set fire to a primary school below her office, the controversy reached a national scale. The author exiled herself to India, eventually relocating to Colombo. On 22 May this year, Seyyid was reportedly summoned by Sri Lankan authorities, where she was questioned

sites of battle · books about having ties to a banned terrorist group. Sri Lankan Muslim women are particularly at risk of discrimination and under suspicion, owing to a national ban on face coverings declared after the Easter bombings, as well as increased general animosity towards the hijab-clad. The nuances of choice or intersectional feminism are gone, and we cannot reach for simplistic concurrence through the moment in her novel when Thawakkul pulls off her head covering upon embarking on a train journey and feels free. In Seyyid’s case, she faces pressure from both anti-Muslim and Islamic sides. I must confess that I had a spark of irritation when I first opened Ummath. It was because of the translator’s note, which contained a slew of unintentionally bruising sentences. Subramanian blithely writes about how her Sri Lankan Tamil friends “adjust” their language around her (oblivious to how this is because our accents are frequently mocked in Tamil Nadu), references a

Located at the end of one war, prescient about events to come a decade later, Ummath depicts, in a nuanced and powerful way, a society in which oppression is woven into the fabric of daily life. Kamal Haasan film in which he mimics an accent as one of her few experiences of an island dialect (it is unclear if she knew there are several), and then the real rub—admits she had not even known that Batticaloa is the English name for the Tamil Mattakallappu. I closed the book and took a deep breath. But as the novel progressed, I realised I had misjudged. Subramanian’s frank admission that she is unfamiliar with the island and its people, unlike the bellicose misappropriation common among Indian Tamils, is refreshing. Moreover, this crucial book exists in the Anglophone world because of her work, and we need the insights it offers into the Sri Lankan situation today. Does it matter who tells a story, who its gatekeepers are, who it is meant for? Yes, of course. But sometimes, does it only matter that a story gets heard? Yes, that too. As Sri Lanka enters a new chapter of suspicion and potential loss, the more stories we have, the more voices—dissonant or otherwise—the better. in sri lanka, distances on maps are far shorter than distances between community to community, or language to language. Batticaloa is

where my roots are, and whenever I return to them, the highways that take me home bisect the island from west coast to east coast. Following the Easter bombings, when culprits were traced to the Eastern Province, relatives of mine were quick to say “Kattankudy is near (inferred: ‘but not’) Batticaloa [town]”, just as “Eravur is outside Batticaloa [town]” was common to hear. It is true, technically. Untrue, otherwise. The ten minutes from the Kallady bridge, so iconically an emblem of Batticaloa, to where the Kattankudy mosque massacre took place say otherwise. The fifteen minutes from the mermaid arch at the northern entrance of Batticaloa town—on which for years, but no longer, “The honey-sweet city where the fishes sing welcomes you with affection” was painted in Tamil—to Eravur say otherwise, too. Sri Lanka is a small nation of enormous divisions, and sometimes the more reliable measurement is not physical distance at all. My sense of scale, of course, comes from living somewhere else. But my sense of propinquity is based on island time. Perhaps the inverse is true in its way: the longer the distance on the map, the shorter the route back through the heart. But even then, there are checkpoints. In one scene in Rajith Savanadasa’s Ruins, the family of a frustrated editor is stopped at a checkpoint on their way from Colombo to Anuradhapura. Their domestic worker, Latha, is attending a funeral in her native village. Her employers, to quell the bickering amongst themselves, and because their household will barely function in Latha’s absence, take the opportunity to go on holiday. The mistress of the house, Lakshmi, blanches when the soldier stops them. She is Tamil, almost fully assimilated into Sinhalese-ness through marriage, but her identity card and the fact that it is 2009, the terminating period of the decades-long war, make the situation frightening for her, just as the Sri Lankan flag, which appeared mysteriously by her bedroom window when the war was declared over, unsettled her. But the soldier turns his attention to Latha instead, asking her about her sister’s son’s funeral, and in an unspoken flash, Latha considers the trajectory of her life:

previous spread: A priest walks past a destroyed shrine in Colombo, in April this year. Churches in three locations around the island— Colombo, Negombo and Batticaloa— were attacked by suicide bombers on Easter Sunday, killing and injuring hundreds. opposite page: Men in front of the damaged Jumha mosque after a mob attack in Minuwangoda, in May this year. The Sri Lankan province was placed under curfew on May 14, following antiMuslim riots.

How could I tell an outsider that I never liked my akka because when I was small she was always too tired to play with me, she never gave me toys, never lifted a finger when I was hurt, always made me do things for her like walking miles for water and filling a kalaya from the well and bringing it back on my head, sorting chillies drying on a mat in the burning mat? And all the times she got angry and hit me if I made a mistake? How could I tell him that as soon as I got SEPTEMBER 2019

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sites of battle · books opposite page: Portraits of fighters from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam—a militant organisation among whose demands were a separate Tamil nationstate—who were killed in battle.

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the chance I left Akka with no one to help and came to Colombo because I thought Colombo was better? It is this sentiment that connects Latha to Ummath’s Yoga: a line of fate, a moment at which choice is contemplated and understood as not being truly an act of personal will. Each seeking an alternative to the absence of love, one character had entered the insurgency, while the other had sought work in the capital. Ruins is told in five voices, opening with Latha’s and then extending to each member of her family of employment. There’s Mano, a middle-aged editor obsessed with a woman other than Lakshmi, his wife. Their children are the misunderstood teenager Anoushka and the adult Niranjan, who is growing ever distant from them all and whose insistence that Latha, who raised him, call him “Niranjan Mahattaya” and not “Niranjan Baby” has the double edged abrasion of classism and coming of age. Each has their inner tensions and secrets, most of which are only peripherally related to the civil war. Ruins can be said to be about—if this string of pedestrian descriptors can be forgiven—an average upper-middle class family in Colombo, just as the war was ending. It is an account of what living through war in the capital was actually like, at least for certain sections of society. There were iPods, and Hiltons, and nightclubs filled with couture. There were curfews, bombings, and white vans into which journalists and others were abducted. There was love and confusion, oppression and opportunity. Experiences were, and are, vastly different, depending on status, happenstance, volition and inclination, and oftentimes these coexisted with an internal logic that may seem absurd to those on the outside. A scene from Afdhel Aziz’s novel Strange Fruit, a love story against the backdrop of war, comes to mind: people coming out of a video-rental store with armfuls of movies, in preparation for the boredom of a three-day curfew. As does a story my family still repeats of how someone snuck out during such tensions to procure cake and rambutans for a childhood birthday of mine in Colombo, while those regretting the risky favour listened to the sounds of a bomb blast. Life both comes to a standstill and goes on, at once. This, too, is a crucial way to look at the timeline of conflict in Sri Lanka, and as the current situation unfolds, it helps to remember it. To think of fiction as a necessary filling in of gaps, and not only as a record of atrocities that should never be allowed to pass out of memory. In nearly thirty years of civil war, do you think no one ever graduated from university, planted a tree, fell in love, THE CARAVAN

built a house? Now, in the aftermath of devastating attacks that have once again punctuated the island with checkpoints, reopened wounds, and created fear, multiple aspects of human experience continue to co-exist. The unhappiness within the family in Ruins has almost nothing to do with the war; yet both far and not so far from them (remember the measurement of distances), tens of thousands were being pushed into a critical state. If life has room for all these realities, so too should fiction. There is a tremendous depravity in the insistence of suffering, be it in politics or on the page, and it is for this reason that I call to task the translators and gatekeepers of Tamil language poetry out of Sri Lanka, who revel in showing only one face of a zocchihedron to the world: Jaffna-centric, bloody, without the reprieve of the mundane, let alone any multiplicity of truth. But this is where a book like Ruins matters, for there is also tremendous compassion in portraying how suffering is more than in explicit brutality. That there are reasons why people stayed, just as there are reasons why people left. If Savanadasa’s positionality as a Sinhalese man lends itself to an easy

There is a tremendous depravity in the insistence of suffering, and it is for this reason that I call to task the gatekeepers of Tamil language poetry out of Sri Lanka, who reveal one face of a zocchihedron to the world. rejoinder on privilege, another beautiful evocation of what it means to be both fortunate and traumatised can be found in Shankari Chandran’s Song of the Sun God (the author is a Tamil woman). It opens before Sri Lanka existed, on the colony of Ceylon in 1932, as a Buddhist monk self-immolates (it is uncertain whether he does so in protest against the British, the Tamils or the Muslims). The roots of all things—love and loathing both— are deep-reaching. But in the bubble of privilege of the family in Ruins is a small, guilty glitch. Lakshmi’s past in Batticaloa—indeed, in Tamilness—is something she has long left behind, except when it raises its head now and then in the form of emails requesting help in locating missing people. She begins to fixate on one person in particular, a man named Khanna whom she recalls from her childhood. One night when she cannot reach Niranjan, who has gone out partying, she re-

sites of battle · books ages were circulated—looking for the missing, the disappeared, the beloved presumed alive despite evidence, as if the photo itself could be evidence of something other than the worst. Like the missives about the East, distant both in space and circumstance, which Lakshmi receives, both hope and the past resurface again and again. we must return to the war, then, to try to understand the present. For how long can we circle its peripheries—those lucky enough to survive, those privileged enough to move on— without ultimately conceding that we must consider the battlefield directly? The emails Lakshmi received showed her how people carried the frontline within them, in their memories and guilt and loss and rage, even as far as other continents. But there was also one particular geographical site where the bitter end unfolded. Nearly thirty years of civil war ended in a massacre

on a strip of beach, Mullivaikkal, on the north-east of the island. It is not clear whether this is where we get to know Dinesh, the protagonist of Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Story Of A Brief Marriage, over the course of a day and a night, but we know that he is by a coast. And he knows that he has been travelling further and further east, as “the movement”—the LTTE—loses more and more literal ground. The book opens on an amputation, calling to mind the women of Ummath. Dinesh has seen so many that he thinks of how he once saw a man wandering in the aftermath of a shelling, picking up limbs and dropping them, looking for his own lost one. Dinesh helps dispose of the parts of people’s bodies that must be severed so that they can survive. He has moved from one hospital to another as each fell under siege, until he is finally here— watching a good doctor work without anaesthetics, pondering whether the boy being operated on will have access

robert nickelsberg / the life images collection / getty images

members one of the images she was sent: “… a young man in an ill-fitting suit. It was Khanna in one of those bizarre studio photographs that were popular in the east—where you posed in front of a painting, pretending you had visited a famous landmark or a pretty landscape.” There is something about this detail that becomes poignant anew when one considers how this reference was no more than a passing one before Easter this year. The photojournalism that came out of the island this April created a new reference point: poster upon poster on the streets mourning the dead, carrying their dates of birth and demise. In the east of the country, where a high number of deaths were of children, these studio photos were often used. The child is well-dressed, posed, sometimes smiling. Never could their use on such an announcement have been expected. Even though, ten years earlier, the same such im-

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wanting to be clean for his new bride, hopes—even make love. Mostly though, they just keep moving: … at such times, a person’s actions are determined solely by the unconscious movements of their arms and legs, by reactions that have never been reflected upon but which, unknown to the individual, have been preparing themselves quietly and meticulously in their muscles and nerves… We know Dinesh within a tiny capsule of time, at an extremity of human experience, a man who has been running for his life for almost a year,

robert nickelsberg / getty images

to a wheelchair, crutches or only his remaining leg after he heals. It is the kind of contemplation Dinesh is always engaged in—practical and objective. The sentimentality is ours alone, for we can afford it, at all our great removes from the bloodshed. As we watch Dinesh watch those around him, we understand firstly that no body part is anonymous, not even in the midst of a battlefield. And so we understand the explanation given by the Sri Lankan authorities as to why they had to revise the death toll of the Easter bombings, lowering it by almost a hundred casualties —there were just so many limbs in the aftermath. Before any person became a casualty, a refugee, a survivor, or just a number in a fluctuating count that has never been confirmed, in those closing weeks of the war, they were likely to have been an evacuee. The number of evacuees grows as more villages succumb, and reduces as more are killed. Whoever Dinesh was before this—a young man who successfully avoided both conscription by the movement or murder by the army—he has come down to this. Dinesh is not a soldier, as Yoga or Theivanai were. He is literally collateral and potentially collateral damage, among tens of thousands. And in this situation, Dinesh is deeply attentive. He considers whether an injured bird would want to have its neck wrung or would like to live out what remains of its life. He takes immense pleasure in the body’s functions: the arc of a piss, the scent of a shit. He observes the traumas of others and how they influence what they do; he knows why an older woman was sometimes startled by his presence, for it brought to mind her lost son, and why a pair of brothers beat up their sister’s husband for having attempted a suicide that would leave his dependents at the mercy of others. So when a man comes to him and offers his daughter Ganga’s hand in marriage, Dinesh understands he must be doing so equally because they lost the other two members of their family recently, and because he believes, trusting in a logic both patriarchal and paternal, that a thaali around her neck will protect her from sexual assault should she fall into the army’s hands. Ganga accepts the marriage with equal equanimity. They all know: no exigencies are unfamiliar in war. The evacuees bury their dead in mass graves in the silence after every bombing, and keep moving. First, they had hired tractors to leave their villages, and then, little by little, relinquished everything “in varying states of disbelief.” Along the way, they cook rice at a thousand rupees a kilo, and still prefer to tell neighbours that they have cooked too much rather than admit that a family member has refused to eat. They sleep well. They even marry, and perhaps—as Dinesh bathing by a well at midnight,

THE CARAVAN

below: Ruins of the Jaffna city library in January 1991. The original building held Tamil religious texts. It was destroyed by Sinhalese policemen following an ambush by Tamil militants in 1981.

sites of battle · books who had run back in one horrible episode to cover his mother’s corpse in a sudden flash of emotion, who has reached a state of consciousness that only we—at our many removes—would try to ascribe words to. As Arudpragasam writes, “From the hemisphere of his mind devoted to the past and the hemisphere devoted to the future great swathes had been shaved off, and enclosing the sensitive little core that belonged to the present there remained only the thin layer of the recent past and the near future, leaving him without that recourse to the distant past or future by which in times of difficulty ordinary people were able to ignore or endure or at least justify the present moment.” It happens continuously; to read The Story Of A Brief Marriage is to chide oneself, to simultaneously acknowledge the futility of literature and its importance, and to recognise that even the characters of Ruins and some of the ones of Ummath also had a recourse where none exist for Dinesh—or for those whom Dinesh is a symbol of. Somewhere on the same island, as Dinesh moves with some equanimity about the possibility of his death, Ruins’ Mano is buying expensive takeout at Flower Drum for his family and Ummath’s Thawakkul is falling, albeit to disappointment, in love. Perhaps this is the abiding challenge: to know that while none of these stories is more true than any other, the mirrors they hold in fiction only become false if, unable to bear it all, we try to erase the most hideous among them. In Arudpragasam’s novel is something which is close to a record, which despite its pleasures in sweat and shit is not overly enamoured of blood, and for this is all the more solemnly powerful. But a record of what? As Seyyid writes in Ummath, “Theivanai understood and accepted that there was no value system to measure the outcome of a war. It was not a beautiful cultural act.” When Dinesh thinks at one moment: “Maybe his trail had been so thoroughly mingled with the trails of those who had come before and after that already it was impossible to distinguish his from theirs, and in a sense, therefore him from them,” it calls to mind Savana-

dasa’s author’s note at the end of Ruins. In it, he writes that the novel’s structure is “loosely based on the ancient stone artefact known in Sinhala as the Sandakada Pahana. While this translates to “moon-lamp,” the commonly used term is “moonstone.” In the book, Latha remembers her employer Mano’s words about the artefact: The moonstone changed. The bull was removed because of the Hindu people. They didn’t want anyone stepping on what they worshipped. The lion was removed because it was the sign of the Sinhalese people. So all the later ones changed, they went from half-circles to triangles to full circles – all kinds of shapes – and the meaning in the original moonstone was lost. As Savanadasa reiterates in its final pages, “The moonstone was no longer a simple analogy that mapped to myth, experience or history but a space to project one’s own meaning.” in his novel, Arudpragasam gives little clue of whether growing up, with certain evident privileges in a Tamil family in Colombo, was similar, or otherwise, to the quotidian experiences of the family in Ruins. This is no indictment, for his choice to use the same to turn the eye towards the apogee point of war, to challenge the erasure of narratives that happens when history is transcribed by the victors, is a meaningful and political act. The author’s reflective contemplation at the end of A Story Of A Brief Marriage, in which he accepts and iterates that some stories can never be wholly transmitted, and that even the attempt to do so is by nature incomplete, is a good place to return to: There were events after which, no matter how long or intimately one has tried to be by their side, no matter how earnestly or with how much self-reproach one desire to understand their situation, how meticulously one tries to imagine and infer it from one’s own experiences, one has no choice but to watch blindly from the outside. SEPTEMBER 2019

This is true for both the makers and the recipients of government doctrine, insurgent rhetoric, activist and academic tracts, foreign journalism, local reportage—as well as films and poetry, and gossip. The archive must necessarily be incomplete, because we are ever projecting our meanings: whether one is a Tamil woman who left the island as a child and bridges that loss with words, a foreign translator enamoured of the idea of Eelam, an author who chooses to take on the mantle of symbolic witness, a reader, a researcher, a

Seyyid writes in Ummath, “Theivanai understood and accepted that there was no value system to measure the outcome of a war. It was not a beautiful cultural act.” reporter, a person very far or very near (however one measures that distance). The archive must gently hold our projections, and as gently contradict them. When it comes to Sri Lanka, then, the archive holds within its blank and expunged pages: the burning of the erstwhile Jaffna library in 1981, the lost opportunities and stolen educations that came with the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, the hesitation in the mothertongue that is a consequence of being born into a thriving diaspora, earlier colonisations, the scars of other uprisings (such as that of the Sinhalese-led Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna insurgency in the south, explored in Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost), the facts and the fibs. And the fiction, of course, which is at once all and none of these. Amid the holding of space for lost narratives and potential testimonies, what literature—whether as bitter and cautionary as Ummath, as contemplative and stoic as The Story of a Brief Marriage or as tangentially illuminating as Ruins—provides is like the moonstone: as mysteriously constituted, as miscellaneous, yet somehow still managing to bring its many shards and shapes into something resembling a full circle. s 91

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FLOOD AND FURY

REEL INDIA

ECOLOGICAL DEVASTATION IN THE WESTERN GHATS

CINEMA OFF THE BEATEN TRACK Namrata Joshi

Viju B

The author looks closely at the devastation brought on by floods and landslides in Kerala and Karnataka in 2018. Drawing on his documentation of the regions at the time, he lays out the havoc wreaked in certain regions, such as the district of Idukki and the town of Aranmula, and argues that the calamity needs to be examined in the context of the larger ecological crisis facing the Western Ghats.

The film critic Namrata Joshi explores the ways in which non-metropolitan India’s relationship with mainstream cinema has changed over the past few decades. One of the aspects she looks closely at is the existence of cinema screenings outside the multiplex—including tent screenings, video parlours and drive-in cinemas—and whether the popularity of these venues has changed with technological access.

penguin, 296 pages, S399

hachette, 252 pages, S599

LOOKING FOR MISS SARGAM

TIBET WITH MY EYES CLOSED

STORIES OF MUSIC AND MISADVENTURE

STORIES

Madhu Gurung

Shubha Mudgal

A debut work of fiction by the acclaimed musician Shubha Mudgal, this collection of stories features classical performers navigating their profession. Among the obstacles they face are quirks of the industry, including longstanding rivalries; the frequently thwarted desire for recognition; exploitation; and wanting to make a living, while immersing themselves in their practice.

The journalist and writer Madhu Gurung’s collection of 11 short stories revolves around the Tibetan community in India. It follows characters navigating life following the Chinese occupation, weaving together fiction and history, and revisits figures in the resistance against the Chinese, such as the Chushi Gangdruk Volunteer Force, an organisation of Tibetan guerrillas.

speaking tiger, 208 pages, S450

speaking tiger, 272 pages, S315

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THE BOOKSHELF

NATION AND REGION IN GRIERSON’S LINGUISTIC SURVEY OF INDIA

BOTTLE OF LIES

RANBAXY AND THE DARK SIDE OF INDIAN PHARMA Katherine Eban

Javed Majeed

This book examines the decades-long Linguistic Survey of India, whose results were published in 1928, and its influence on subsequent census identifications of Indian languages. Majeed argues that the survey, which went against the nineteenth-century colonial preoccupation with Sanskrit, also challenged the idea of India as single coherent geographical entity and played a key role in shaping religious nationalism in the country.

Although generic drugs have been critical in providing cheaper alternatives to patented pharmaceuticals, in this deep dive into the global generic-drug boom, which started in the 1980s, the investigative journalist and author Katherine Eban looks at how the skyrocketing demand for cheaper drugs affected manufacturing in the industry and how often safety regulations were flouted.

routledge, 230 pages, S995

juggernaut, 512 pages, S699

ONE FOOT ON THE GROUND

DARK FEAR, EERIE CITIES

NEW HINDI CINEMA IN NEOLIBERAL INDIA

A LIFE TOLD THROUGH THE BODY

Sarunas Paunksnis

Shanta Gokhale

This study of Indian films from the early twenty-first century looks at the development and rising popularity of crime thrillers and horror films that are often set in haunted urban spaces. The author suggests that these films—in which pessimism, violence and fear feature predominantly— are marked by a new form of realism, and thinks about the reasons behind this shift in cinematic approach.

In this memoir, the literary critic, writer and translator Shanta Gokhale reflects on her life by thinking about it in terms of the journeys her body has been through, from her childhood to surviving cancer and writing through her recovery late in life.

oxford university press, 194 pages, S895

speaking tiger, 264 pages, S399 SEPTEMBER 2019

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SHOWCASE

courtesy kevin goggin

Dance

The Platform WEEKENDS IN SEPTEMBER SHOONYA CENTRE FOR ART AND SOMATIC PRACTICES, BENGALURU 94

This event features the works of 12 young dancers from across the country, spanning a variety of dance forms: contemporary, folk and classical. Scheduled on Saturdays and Sundays beginning 14 September, it aims to THE CARAVAN

showcase Indian dance, as well as educate and raise awareness about its various forms. For further information, write to [email protected]

SHOWCASE

Exhibition

Satrangi: An Exhibition of Warli Art 5 TO 25 SEPTEMBER GALLERY OJAS ART, DELHI

all images courtesy ojas art gallery

The Warli tribal community evokes its ancestral culture through ritualistic paintings— also known as Warli art—made as murals on walls using soil, cow dung and rice paste. Satrangi will showcase this indigenous art form, featuring artists such as Rajesh Chaitya Wangad, Tushar and Mayur Vayeda. For further information, write to pr.nitigarg@ gmail.com

Exhibition

Moments and Transformations: Finding Life in Materiality

courtesy augustine thilak

22 SEPTEMBER TO 5 OCTOBER ART ALIVE GALLERY, DELHI

SEPTEMBER 2019

This exhibition brings together seven artists from Chennai and Puducherry. It aims to investigate the artists’ engagement with different materials to explore their subjectivity and expressions. For further information, write to [email protected] 95

showcase

courtesy sudipta das

Exhibition

Delhi Contemporary Art Week courtesy mahbubur rahman

1 TO 7 SEPTEMBER VISUAL ARTS GALLERY, INDIA HABITAT CENTRE, DELHI

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The third edition of the Delhi Contemporary Art Week will feature the capital’s best contemporary art, with the participation of seven galleries in the city. The eight-day event is focussed on emerging collectors and art enthusiasts. For further information, write to [email protected] THE CARAVAN

showcase

Exhibition

Contemporary Idioms Art Alive Gallery’s new series focusses on young contemporary Indian artists. The first edition, called What is Contemporary, features the works of three artists: Divya Singh, Purvai Rai and Suman Chandra.

22 AUGUST TO 15 SEPTEMBER ART ALIVE GALLERY, DELHI

courtesy suman chandra

courtesy purvai rai

courtesy suman chandra

For further information, write to [email protected]

Exhibition

Woven Memoirs: A New Kind of Nature

This exhibition features the works of the late Priya Ravish Mehra, an artist who started as a traditional weaver. It presents Mehra’s textile works, which incorporate fragments of discarded weaves with paper pulp.

courtesy monica dawar

courtesy monica dawar

6 SEPTEMBER TO 1 OCTOBER CHEMOULD PRESCOTT ROAD, MUMBAI

For further information, write to [email protected] SEPTEMBER 2019

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fototeca gilardi / getty images

Editor’s Pick

an italian soldier carries a captured Ottoman flag during the Italo-Turkish war, which began on 29 September 1911. In the early years of the twentieth century, Italy wanted to assert its place among the great powers of Europe. It had long harboured dreams of colonial expansion, and claimed the Ottoman province of Tripolitania—modern-day Libya—as its share of the spoils of the 1878 Congress of Berlin that followed the Russo-Turkish war. However, its alliance with Germany, which had close ties to the Ottomans, prevented formal annexation, even though Italy encouraged investment in, and migration to, the region. In 1911, responding to growing nationalist fervour and taking advantage of a rebellion against Ottoman rule in Morocco, the Italian government—with the support of Britain, France and Russia—issued an ultimatum to Turkey to hand over the province. Then, before Germany or Austria-Hungary could mediate, it launched an invasion. The better trained and equipped Italian forces expected minimal resistance, but after

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initial gains along the Libyan coast, including Tripoli, their advance was stalled by an Ottoman counterattack. The war witnessed the earliest use of aircraft for reconnaissance and bombing. Nevertheless, it remained a stalemate until the second half of 1912, when the First Balkan War broke out. Forced to confront a joint offensive for independence by the kingdoms of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro, the Ottomans decided to sue for peace in Libya. On 18 October 1912, a treaty signed in Ouchy, near Lausanne, formally ended the war. The Ottomans agreed to withdraw their forces from Libya and have their representatives approved by Italy, in exchange for Italian withdrawal from the Dodecanese islands. The Balkan war continued, and the destabilisation of the international balance of power contributed to the breaking out of the First World War. Italy would complete its conquest and pacification of Libya during the 1930s, under Benito Mussolini.