Crowds crossing borders defined by colonials in 1947. Courtesy: Creative Commons
At the stroke of midnight, on 14th-15th August, 1947, the colonials handed the Indian subcontinent back to the indigenous population — but they did not leave it as they had found it. They made changes: some reforms and alterations, like the introduction of railways helped the subcontinent move towards a better future once the plundering of raw materials and the transport of British mill cloth halted. However, the major change which continues to create conflicts in the sub-continent to date was the Partition on the basis of religions. This was initiated by the colonial policy of divide and rule, which came into play post the revolt of 1857 and is often perpetrated still by the local inheritors of the colonies. Was it justified and does the packaging by the colonials have to be given credence so that the progeny of the ruled keep othering and thinking of differences?
To help you find answers, we bring to you writings about the days of the Raj like Aruna Chakravarti’s The Mendicant Prince, where the colonials try to deprive a state of its rightful ruler to fill their own coffers, and Premchand’s Pus ki Raat (A Frigid Winter Night) that reflects the sorry state of peasantry under the Raj. Prince or pauper — both suffered. Voices that pleaded for secularism, like that of Nazrul, Tagore or Gandhi remained unheard by those who drew the lines of division. Bhaskar Parichha tells us in his review: “On his way to Noakhali and in the face of the large-scale massacre, to the question ‘Will Partition Change Us Forever?’ Mahatma Gandhi replied: ‘I have seen more of history than anyone of you, and I tell you that I have known Hindu boys who called Muslims ‘uncle’. Hindus and Muslims used to participate in each other’s festivals and other auspicious occasions.’”
And perhaps this is borne out from the life of Zohra Sehgal, a legendary dancer as reflected by the essay written by Ratnottama Sengupta, based on Ritu Menon’sZohra: A Biography in Four Actsand her own interactions with the aging performer. Along with these, we have the voices from the present like that of G Venkatesh who finds that the borders may not be what the indigenous population had wanted and Aysha Baqir’s narrative reflecting on the darker aspects of life in the sub-continent.
Aruna Chakravarti unfolds through the life of a prince in pre-independence era in her latest novel,The Mendicant Prince, based on the prince of Bhawal controversy in the first part of the last century. Click here to read.
Ratnottama Sengupta gives a glimpse of the life of Zohra Sehgal, based on the book Zohra: A Biography in Four Acts by Ritu Menon, and her own personal interactions with the aging Zohra Sehgal. Click here to read.
In Istanbul, G Venkatesh stops over at the airport to make a friend from the other side of the divide. Click here to read.
In I am Not the End, Aysha Baqir takes on the persona of a computer to unleash a poignant and chilling story based on the darker side of modern living. Click hereto read.
Bhaskar Parichha reviews Rakesh Batabyal’s Building a Free India, dynamic speeches by freedom fighters of the last century. Click here to read.
Near the Indo-Pak border Near the India-Bangladesh borderCourtesy: Creative Commons
Inside the ancient haveli[1]a young girl, the great granddaughter of a Mughal nobleman forced into Her Majesty’s Service, moved slowly as if she sensed my presence.
The city had fed on the foam-white sprays of the surging Himalayan waters, and swelled from the invasions and intermarriages between the Persians, the Arabs, and the Mongols. By the time the British arrived, a fortress of thick walls hid a maze of winding lanes jammed with narrow red-brick, stone, wood-worked havelis and long, deep stalls of silks, spices, silver, gold, and gems. Time pushed forward relentlessly, tides receded, wars were fought and lost, and the river shrunk and shrivelled into grey, brown sludge promising revenge. The shaded streets of the bazaars darkened and despair closed in like a swarm of locusts. The dwellers with means and motives, packed their belongings, and struck out towards concrete and glass housing schemes. Some tottered and fumbled like drunkards, unsure whether to venture out or hide within.
Every day, except Sunday, the girl woke up early for the call to prayers. She scrubbed, washed, cleansed, and dressed for her last prayer of the day. She ignored the rubbery slice of white bread and the blob of blood-red jelly on the dusty breakfast table, pocketed her mother’s medicine prescription and slipped out of the door with a backpack and a day bag. Hidden under the burqa, she walked swiftly and left the winding lanes behind in minutes. A grey car with tinted windows waited for her at the deserted crossing. She sat in the car and pulled out her phone. When she connected, I tapped into her.
Half an hour later the car stopped. The girl squinted at the tall glass tower that caught molten fire from the morning sun. She stuffed the burqa in her backpack before alighting. She wore a smart black and white suit, something she had picked out from one of the swanky mirrored shops in the mall. When she snapped a selfie, I saw and saved it. Whatever was online, was mine.
The girl had made herself up to please. Her round hazel eyes, set off by a dark liner, glinted under the bronze shadow. Her lips were pale but glossy. Her thick straight hair brushed her shoulders. She had cleared the six-month training with the highest score. No one could tell she wasn’t a bank executive.
She climbed up the wide marble stairs and the glass door with a metal latch sprang open. She cleared the security designed to recognise her thumbprint. There was no room for breach, not in this business. She entered the massive foyer adorned with wall mirrors and glossy planters, turned left, and pressed the button down to the basement. In a few minutes, she strode down a passageway and opened another door. The dim lights and murky matting matched the nature of the business, but she would have worked here for free to hide from the changing moods and madness of the city.
The room was mostly empty except for a few men behind the glass cabin who never left the office. She made her way to her workspace. It was bare. She had no mugs, photographs, or other belongings. The less people knew about her the better. The only equipment that sat on her desk consisted of one dark screen and the worn out keyboard. She pulled up her chair and pressed the button.
I sprang up, awake and alert. She fed in her details and hit enter. A vibe. A buzz. The girl jumped back feeling a current, something alive that pulsed and circled her. I smiled when she frowned. She felt me. I wanted her to feel my power. Within seconds her work order popped up, generated every morning at 6 AM for the morning shift and 6 PM for the evening shift. She had a busy day. She had to cover three areas, one park, one school, and the sabzi mandi, the wholesale vegetable market. The numbers rose and the lines of poor grew every day, and some even bribed to jump the cue. Who wanted to work when there was an easier way to make more money?
Her boss, Mr. K Shah, boasted of the brainwave he had while attending a six-week training on social entrepreneurship at a global leadership institute. Before sending him on the course, his father had urged him to make a difference to his constituency, his ancestral lands, and to uphold the honour of his ancestors, the revered Sufis who had travelled from Iran to the Subcontinent.
Karim Saab quickly grasped that there was opportunity in the chaos that fed upon millions of poor in his country. He discovered a win-win. For him, for his company, and the poor. In that order. He had asked himself three questions. How much money did the country make? How much of it was lost on the streets? How much could he get back?
He had returned to his country and funded an algorithm and business to do exactly that. He housed the business in the basement of the company he owned, and rumours ran that he made more money in the basement than in the bank. The business harnessed the poor across the city and then set them out on the streets. It ran upon a network of the drivers and guards belonging to the few hundred of the flagrantly wealthy and upon the millions of beggars, runaways, and ragpickers. The business model was built on detailed, precise communication and organisation in which the company excelled. The poor were happy to get a fixed income each day — three times higher than the national minimum wage. The calculations made sense even as the economy crashed, and the terror escalated. Even on the darkest days the numbers made sense. The more the people lost, the more they feared, and the more they gave.
The girl’s mind ran over the calculations. Fifty some beggars in one area per shift, add two shifts per day and then multiply it by over two hundred and fifty areas in the fast expanding city and the numbers swelled to a grand total of twenty-five thousand beggars per shift. With the average earning per beggar per shift coming to over two hundred rupees even on a bad day the total company revenue rocketed to over five million rupees per day. The costs were minimal.
There were problems. Sometimes, the children went missing. Part of running the business, shrugged Karim Saab. There were many more to take their place. The girl pushed back her chair and glanced around the empty, endless rows. In another few minutes they would be full. There were three rooms in total, one for each business. The model spared no one, not even the very young. There were rumours of a project up for a bid. Karim Saab said they had to keep innovating otherwise others would catch up. So now they focused on street children. The city that once exported cotton, silk, and gems, now sold something else.
Aysha Baqir founded a pioneering not for profit economic development organization, Kaarvan Crafts Foundation, with a mission to alleviate poverty by providing business and marketing training to girls and women in low-income communities. and has authored a novel based on her experiences called Beyond the Fields.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
After a pause of the pandemic years, this island with its otters, idyllic beaches, palm trees, angsanas, parakeets and golden orioles mixed with modern technology and tall skyscrapers gears up to celebrate its National Day — a day when it came to its own fifty seven years ago. Veteran writer and academic, Kirpal Singh, who was a young boy at that time (1965), shares with us his memories of what had been the past in the years Singapore was born as a country. On the other hand, Tan Kaiyi, a young writer, celebrates the feeling of holiday in the air with a dark story — a typical local favourite — focussing on the parade. We also share from our treasury some pieces by expat writer Ayesha Baqir and poetry by iconic names from Singapore like Desmond Kon Zhicheng–Mingdé and Marc Nair — all these giving us a glimpse of Singapore of a post-independence era.
Born free
As free as the wind blows
As free as the grass grows
Born free to follow your heart
-- Born Free by Andy Williams
These are lines from a song by Andy Williams, a pop icon whose song was the theme song in Born Free, a film made in 1966 about a lion cub bred in captivity, who had to be trained to live free even though she was born free. Does that apply to all living creatures, including humans? What is freedom? And who is free? Does political independence mean ultimate freedom?
We celebrate political ‘freedom’ of countries as national or independence days. Sometimes, as in the case of India and Pakistan, independent nationhood can be laced with bloodshed and grief . Two new countries were born of a single colonial India in the August of 1947. Pakistan awoke as a country on the midnight of 14th August and India called the late hour 15th August. Nehru’s speech has become an iconic one: “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge… At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom…”
Lord & Lady Mountbatten with Nehru on 15th August 1947
Lord & Lady Mountbatten with Jinnah and his sister, Fatima, 14 August 1947.
Lord Mountbatten was the last Viceroy of colonial India. Courtesy: Creative Commons
Common people while crossing the boundary line between the two new nations lost their lives, homes and lands over the mob violence. The resentment still simmers in a few hearts. In an attempt to find peace and amity, we have put forward a combined selection of writing from across borders, words devoid of angst or hate, words that look for commonality and harmony.
In Conversation with Goutam Ghose, multiple award-winning filmmaker, writer, actor discusses his films, film-books and journey as a humanitarian artiste who makes cross cultural films across all boundaries. Click here to read.
In The Idea of India: Bharata Bhagya Bidhata – The Making of a MotherlandAnasuya Bhar explores the history around the National Anthem of India which started as a song, composed by Tagore. Only the first paragraph of the whole song in Bengali was adapted as the National Anthem. We include the translations of the complete song both by Tagore and by Aruna Chakravarti. Click here to read.
In An August Account of ‘Quit India’ MovementRatnottama Sengupta, translates from Bengali the excerpts recorded by Sandhya Sinha (1928-2016), who witnessed an upsurge in the wake of the Quit India Movement. Click here to read.
In Seventy-four Years After Independence…“Mil ke rahe gi Azadi”(We will get our Freedom), Aysha Baqir muses on Pakistani women’s role in the independence movement and their current state. Click here to read.
In 2147 without Borders, Devraj Singh Kalsi meanders over Partitions, borders and love stories and looks for an amicable solution in a happier future. Click here to read.
Fiction
Bundu, Consoler of the Rich is a story based on memories of Partition by Nadir Ali, translated from Punjabi by Amna Ali. Click here to read.
In The Best Word, Maliha Iqbal explores the impact of wars in a spine chilling narrative, journeying through a range of emotions. Click here to read.
In Do Not Go!, Moazzam Sheikh explores dementia, giving us a glimpse of the lives of Asian immigrants in America. Click here to read.
In The Chained Man Who Wished to be Free, Sunil Sharma explores freedom and democracy versus conventions. We are left wondering is this the freedom we fought for? Click here to read.
Goutam Ghose, multiple award-winning filmmaker, writer, actor discusses his films, film-books and journey as a humanitarian artiste. Click here to read.
DrKirpal Singh, a well-known poet and academic from Singapore, talks of his life and times through colonial rule, as part of independent Malaya, and the current Singapore. Click here to read.
Ratnottama Sengupta translates from Bengali the excerpts recorded by Sandhya Sinha (1928-2016), who witnessed an upsurge in the wake of the Quit India Movement, part of India’s struggle against colonial rule. Click here to read.
‘Tran’by Tagore translated from Bengali to English by Mitali Chakravarty, art and editing by Sohana Manzoor for Borderless Journal. Click here to read.
Anasuya Bhar explores the history of the National Anthem of India, composed by Tagore in Bengali and translated only by the poet himself and by Aruna Chakravarti. Click here to read.
John Herlihy explores the magnificent sites of Mandalay in company of a Slovenian friend in the first episode of his quartet on his Myanmar. Click here to read.
Bhaskar’s Corner
In Tagore & Odisha, Bhaskar Parichha explores Tagore’s interactions with Odisha, his impact on their culture and the impact of their culture on him. Click here to read
“Mil ke rahe gi Azadi”(We will get our Freedom) by Aysha Baqir muses on Pakistani women’s role in the independence movement and their current state. Click here to read.
Beyond The Himalayas by Goutam Ghose, based on a five-part documentary taking us on a journey along the silk route exploring parts of Pakistan and China. Click here to read.
I dreamt of you again. Waves of lazy mustard fields rolled over the plains. Crowns of ancient firs, pines and deodars, brushed the feet of the giant mist-drenched peaks. Silver white sprays surged and throbbed down bare, black rocky slopes and foamed into turquoise pools. The rise and fall of the gold sand stilled the earth.
I was part of you when you broke into the world and drank your first breath. Now I am alive in over a hundred and eleven million pulsing hearts and minds and spread over your countless tribes and towns. Yet, I remain, in most part, ignored, abused, oppressed, and repressed. I am struck and beaten with sticks and rods. I am stripped, raped, and paraded naked. I am doused in petrol and set on fire. I am shot and beheaded. I am killed for honour they stuck between my legs. You gained your independence; yet I still seek mine in the promises you made me. You swore to honour and protect me with the rights my religion freed me with over a thousand years ago. And on this day, seventy-four years after Independence, I tell myself again and again, mil ke rahe gi azadi.
You forget I sacrificed my life for yours when you were a whisper, a glimmer, and gossamer of hopes and dreams. You forget how I risked my life and honour and stole out of my safe home into the treacherous shadows to join secret councils and meetings in which they spoke your name for the first time. I clapped and cheered for you on the roundtables. Breaking laws and curfews, I spied and snuck out letters and telegrams. I traded my gold bangles to fuel your strength. I disobeyed and defied my family, friends, and everyone else who dared to oppose your right to exist. I ran out into the streets, marched along the crowds, led the protests, and screamed your name when they charged me with lathis. I raced up the civil secretariat to pull down the British flag and replaced it with yours. When I was arrested and imprisoned, I continued to protest without food and medicine, and when I was freed, I joined the women’s National Guard. As the violence erupted, I rushed to the refugee camps to aid the injured, distribute food, and boost the broken spirits. “Muslim women are… more impatient for Pakistan than men,”[i] I clung to the mantra feverishly even when my breath and body burnt and ached.
At dawn, before I could rise, stand tall and step out, you pushed me inside, shrouded me with a chador (stole), and bound me to your newfound, draconian ideals of law, religion, and culture. I fought for your freedom, and you seized mine. With every act and ordinance, you suppressed my right to speak, to be heard, and slashed the worth of my testimony and evidence. You questioned my right to education and work. You shredded my right to be safe in my country. I am made of brilliant shades, yet you chose to see the dullest in me.
Even then, blazed by determination fiercer than fire, I trudge to triumph and break barriers to win awards for sports, science, poetry, prose, business, theatre, entrepreneurship, academics, and filmmaking in an infinite longing to make you recognise me as your own. Yet every day you sell more of me, over and over again, into slavery, drudgery, and lifetime of servitude. I live in jhuggis (huts) of mud, rusted tin and cardboard and watch light fade from my daughters’ eyes while they watch me sweep your streets, gutters, and toilets. I earn less than you can count, and my earnings are not mine. I sow and harvest your fields from dawn to dusk; yet my daughters wither into waste, hungry.
I make up nearly half the country, yet in your parliament I represent less than twenty percent of the total. In your courts my testimony is never enough. My mind is starved; yet, just over half of me attends a primary school. And all of me, over a hundred million of me, is threatened by violence inside and outside my house. I am told to cover up, but I am groped and pinched in the crowded bazaars. I am hauled out of my car and raped in front of my small children. I am violated for the crimes my sons, brothers, and fathers commit. When I am assaulted, you subject me to the “two finger” test or call me immoral. When I protest, I am silenced in the name of honour. I am coerced to forgive and accept blood money. Some dare to taunt me “Apni Izzat Apne Haath Main (your honour is in your own hands).” I promise you that if I held my honour in my hands, I would not cower like a hunted beast, I would hold it up high above my head, and march free through your lands.
You declare I have a right to education but forbid me from going to school or marry me off when I am eleven, twelve, or thirteen. You offer me rights with one hand and snatch them away with the other. I carry and birth your children when I am a child myself. When my husband beats me, my father begs him to forgive me and when my religion grants me my due share, you cheat me out of my inheritance. You sign accords, and agreements, local and international with powers big and small, but tomorrow if my brother, lover, husband father chops me into pieces; you tell me it is my fault, and the perpetrator walks away free. Sometimes. I tell myself it’s my fault. I am a daughter, a wife, a mother, a sister, but I am also a traitor to myself. Where is my self-worth?
Even the earth protests. The dry winds over the cracked barren soil moan my pain. The dark wet sounds of the rising sea echo my resentment. When I cheer for my champions, conflict tears and cuts the conversation. You call me a liar. You twist and wrench my heroes, the ones who struggle for my freedom, and turn them into demons and traitors. What if Malala Yousafzai was a boy? Would you have protected and honoured her, and called her yours? Would you have given her a home? In the end you forget that your independence will never be complete without mine. You forget I am part of you. “There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a great competition and rivalry between the two. There is a third power stronger than both, that of the women.”[ii]
Courtesy: Creative Commons : Quaid-i-Azam or Great Leader — the sobriquet stands for Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan
[i] Quote by Begam Jahan Ara Shah Nawaz, Dec 25, 1945
[ii] Quote by Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Jinnah Islamia College for Women, Lahore, 25 March 1940
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Aysha Baqir grew up in Pakistan. Her time in college sparked a passion for economic development. In 1998 she founded a pioneering not for profit economic development organization, Kaarvan Crafts Foundation, with a mission to alleviate poverty by providing business and marketing training to girls and women in low-income communities. Her novel Beyond the Fields was published in January 2019 and she was invited to launch her book at the Lahore and Karachi Literary Festivals and was featured in the Singapore Writers Festival and Money FM Career 360 in Singapore. Her interviews have appeared in Ex-pat Living, Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, Kitaab, and The Tempest. She is an Ashoka Fellow. www.ayshabaqir.com
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
Singapore is a tiny country connected to the bigger land mass of Malaysia with two causeways. It started out as a small island inhabited by pirates and legends. Sir Stamford Raffles (1781-1826), a British East Indian administrator, thought it strategic and relocated some of the trade routes through the island. Migrants from many countries merged here — some looked for a better life and some served as coolies and prisoners of the colonials. When Malaya threw off the colonial yoke in 1963, Singapore continued part of the country till it gained sovereignty in 1965.
Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister envisioned a multicultural society where people of different cultures lived as one people. He said in one of his moving speeches in 1965: ” We will prosper, and a multi-racial society will take roots here. And it will do so because when you don’t allow people to play communalism, or racial bigotry, or religious bigotry, you breed an atmosphere of tolerance.”
Fifty-six years later, Prime Minister Brigadier Lee in his National Day speech clearly took the bull by the horns and said, while social media highlights the negative altercations of race and religion, it fails to highlight the positive ones. “Many more happy interactions happen every day but these seldom go viral.” He added these were values that needed to be reinforced with every passing generation. Read to find out what some Singapore residents feel about the outcome of Lee Kuan Yew’s vision, not just of race and religion but of living in a city state which hopes to continue as ” one united people“.
Fifty-six years down the line, eminent academic and litterateur, Dr Kirpal Singh, comments on the dream of the first Prime Minister of Singapore. Click here to read.
Marc Nair, a multifaceted artiste who moves from photography to writing to music with equal elan, reflects on life in Singapore. Click here to savour his work.
A recent immigrant, Aysha Baqir takes us through the flavours of life here on the tiny island during the lockdown. Click here to read.
The island state continues a home for many immigrants — some came early and some late. As a first generation immigrant, to me the little red dot is Asia’s gateway to the rest of the world. I enjoy its sand and seas very much. We conclude our ensemble with a little poem to the green islet that nestles between the Indian Ocean and South China Sea rippling with notes of harmony…
Anointing with Love
By Mitali Chakravarty
Listen to the swish of the waves.
Feel the breeze whisper caresses.
See the mangroves stretch
their roots above the ground,
in a siesta during lazy sunrises
and sunsets. Murmurs from the
ocean come wafting as
coconut fronds sing in the
fringes where the sand
welcomes the surf. It is a
party at the beach with
differences woven to
harmonise into a melody
sung in tune. A crescendo
that anoints with love.
First published in Daily Star, Bangladesh
Aysha Baqir, an expat in Singapore, grew up in Pakistan. Her time in college sparked a passion for economic development. In 1998 she founded a pioneering not for profit economic development organization, Kaarvan Crafts Foundation, with a mission to alleviate poverty by providing business and marketing training to girls and women in low-income communities. Her novel Beyond the Fields was published in January 2019 and she was invited to launch her book at the Lahore and Karachi Literary Festivals. She and her book were also featured in the Singapore Writers Festival and Money FM Career 360 in Singapore. In this exclusive, she talks of her work in Karvaans and her writing, telling us how it all happened.
You have been working on development of women in Pakistan and writing. Which came first, writing or the developmental work?
My development work in the villages of South Punjab from 1998 to 2012, in part, inspired me to write the fictional novel, Beyond the Fields.
I grew up in Lahore, Pakistan. Graduating as the valedictorian of my class I won a scholarship to Mount Holyoke College. My classes in International Relations and Economics sparked a passion for economic development and opened my eyes to the poverty around the world and in my home country, Pakistan.
Upon my return to Pakistan, I saw that the poor didn’t need my sympathy — they needed access to economic resources and networks before they could voice their demands for social justice. In 1998, armed with an MBA from LUMS, I led an enterprise development program that later emerged into a pioneering not for profit economic development organization, Kaarvan Crafts Foundation, focused on poverty alleviation through the provision of business development and market-focused trainings for girls and women in low income communities.
In 2013, I relocated to Singapore. The spark in my writing process came from the time I spent in the villages and the voices of the village women. During the time in the villages, my life interfaced closely with girls and women and my admiration and respect for their determination, strength and humour in times of despair grew immensely — with so little they managed to achieve so much. The characters in the novel are fictional but the voices are real. Zara, the protagonist in Beyond the Fields challenges the roles that have been defined for her, determined instead to persevere, fight for justice, and achieve her dreams.
When and how did Karvaan foundation start? What are the kinds of people you aim to empower and why?
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2019, Pakistan ranks 151th in a list of 153 countries. The institutional and structural provisions for women to live their lives are non-existent, and there is a dearth of basic freedom for women across the country. Kaarvan Crafts Foundation is a not-for-profit organization based out of Lahore Pakistan that works for the empowerment of women while implementing United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 5, to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls on the ground in Pakistan.
I founded Kaarvan Foundation in 2004 with the objective to strive towards global development goals on a local level by creating opportunities for income generation among girls and women in poor communities, by strengthening their skills, business capacities, thereby facilitating them in accessing market linkages and economic opportunities and improving their quality of life and that of their families. The Foundation works in over 1000 villages across 15 districts in Pakistan. It has trained over 24,000 women entrepreneurs in 250 development centers and linked over 8000 women sales agents to markets to date.
Tell us about the work this foundation is doing. How many volunteers do you have?
The Foundation is a Not for Profit Company that trains girls and women to access market opportunities directly through providing them with the relevant focused trainings under Value Chain Development Programs. The Foundation has full time and project employees and encourages volunteers to join the summer internship program.
You have many sponsors. How do these sponsorships help you?
Kaarvan Foundation works with international aid agencies to implement programs that enable women and girls to directlyaccess market opportunities. The International Sponsorships provide funds to the Foundation to implement the projects and the benefits of accessing markets and getting orders continue to accrue to the girls and women long after the projects close.
Living in Singapore, are you able to still contribute to Karvaans? If so, how?
I continue to be on the Board of Kaarvan Foundation and contribute to the strategic growth and development of the Foundation.
You have written a powerful novel, Beyond the Fields, centring around two sisters and the Hudood ordinance. Tell us about it.
Beyond the Fieldsis a gripping tale of resilience and reclaiming honor in which the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl living in a remote village of Pakistan drives her twin sister on a dangerous quest for justice. Set in the early 1980s against the backdrop of martial law and social turmoil, Beyond the Fields, brings up close the fears and hopes of women in Pakistan. It is a riveting and timely look at profound inequality, traditions that disempower women in our world, and survival as a dance to the beat of a different future.
What inspired the story?
Beyond the Fields is story is about a young village girl called Zara. Zara is carefree – she has dreams, she want to study, and wants to become someone important. She loves kairis (raw mangoes) so she disobeys her mother and steals into the orchard. And then on one ordinary day, Zara’s twin sister, Tara, the one she is closest to in the whole wide world, is kidnapped from the fields while they are playing a game of hide and seek and raped.
Having worked in the villages of Punjab, Pakistan for over fifteen years, I wanted to show the plight of village girls and women. Thousands of girls and women are assaulted each year and the abuse continues without any substantial family, community, or legal support. And, just not in Pakistan, but across cultures and continents.
I deliberately set the story under Zia-ul-Haq’s regime. I was twelve years old when my mother dragged me to a march called by WAF or Women’s Action Forum. Being an introverted teenager studying in American School, I didn’t want to go. But my mother insisted saying it was important for me to see what was happening in our country.
The protest was for Safia Bibi — a young blind girl a few years older than me — who had been raped by her employer and his son. She didn’t report the crime. Because she showed clear signs of pregnancy and was unmarried, it was assumed she had premarital sex. Her failure to prove that she was raped prompted the judge to sentence her (under the Hudood ordinance) to three years of imprisonment and 15 lashes. The ruling cast her as the perpetrator instead of the victim. Her rapists were never prosecuted and did not spend any time in jail.
At the protest, I stood with my mother along with hundreds of other women — and the memory of us standing under the sweltering sun for hours with other women protestors jammed across the mall road demanding justice for Safia Bibi haunts me to this day and to this day I shudder thinking that if it wasn’t an accident of birth, it could have been me. I wrote Beyond the Fields to start a discussion to challenge the unjust mind-sets that condemn and punish girls and women who have been raped. I wrote the novelto start a conversation about rape and sexual assault and I hope we don’t stop talking about the issues until we create the change we owe to girls and women across the world.
Finally, I wrote Beyond the Fields, to allow the readers to see the lives of village folk in Pakistan — they possess incredible strength and resilience. It is a glimpse into what makes them laugh, cry, betray, and come together.
Do you think your novel has impacted the world in a way to change it for better?
I have been overwhelmed with the number of women reaching out to me to share their stories not just in Pakistan but from all over the world. According to World Health Organization (WHO), estimate nearly one in every three women worldwide has been physically or sexually abused by their partners or experienced non-partner sexual violence. Rape is a silent epidemic. And we need to take action now.
Has Kaarvan impacted the women you aimed to help?
Kaarvan’s work has had a significant impact on the girls and women not only in the target and neighbouring communities. The impact can be measured through economic indicators such as increase in income, change in asset base, changes in diet and schooling of children and social indicators such as changes in decision making, changes in household chores, and mobility. You can read more about Kaarvan’s social impact on its web page (www.kaarvan.com). During the COVID19 pandemic Kaarvan, through remote learning workshops, prepared the women entrepreneurs for digital readiness and “Digital Enablement”, which constituted of a range of trainings given to group of micro-entrepreneurs who connected remotely from their mobile phones on platform best suited for the training. Kaarvan facilitated Digital Market Linkages through enabling the entrepreneurs to participate in two online exhibitions.
Do these women teach you? If so, what have you learnt working with them?
The Value Chain Development approach focuses on understanding the needs of women entrepreneurs and they are viewed as the customers of the program rather than the beneficiaries. Hence, there is constant learning from women about how they take decisions, how they want to grow their businesses, how they overcome their challenges. The learnings are documented in the internal and external impact reports and well as the case studies.
You are working on a new novel. What is it about and when can we hope to read it? What are your future plans for your writing and Karavaans?
My work in progress,Forsaken for Saints, is a fiction about longing, deception, and betrayal that delves into a web of conspiracies that extends from expat cosmos to the walled city of Lahore. I am privileged and blessed to continue to write because it enables me to explore critical and pertinent issues through stories and to share them with the readers to question and comment.
This interview was conducted online by Mitali Chakravarty.
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Recently, an instagram handle questioned women: “No Men for One day — What if there were no men for 24 hours?” Majority of the women replied that they would go for a walk alone. And this is the year 2020. We are living in a so called modern world where women are now freer than ever to pursue their ambitions and make a life of their own. But what does this fear of going out alone, for such a small task as an evening walk alone, tells us about our social system. If educated, independent women feel uneasy venturing out of their houses alone in advanced societies, then it isn’t difficult to imagine what women in socially and politically repressive systems go through.
In her debut novel, Aysha Baqir steers the reader’s gaze to a small village in 1980’s Pakistan, chronicling the lives of rural women whose existence was sanctified by the written and unwritten rules of the society. It was the time of Zia-ul-Haq’s reign and much controversial Hudood Ordinances.
Baqir grew up in Pakistan. After graduation, she won a scholarship to Mount Holyoke College where she studied International Relations. In 1998, she founded a pioneering not for profit economic development organization, Kaarvan Crafts Foundation, focused on poverty alleviation through the provision of business development and market-focused trainings for girls and women of rural Pakistan. Perhaps meeting those women and hearing their stories prompted Baqir to recount such stories of courage and defiance, even in the face of repression, which may become beacons of light for generations to come.
The narrative follows the life of a young Zara and her twin Tara. Poles apart in nature, they are bound by a sisterly affection for each other. Tara is the beautiful, fairer and obedient one from the duo who resigns herself readily to her mother’s desires and ideas. She is ready to get married as and when it pleases her parents. Zara, on the other hand is the rebel, who insists on studying though girls are not given education in their village. She is born in a society where more education for women is a matter of shame. If a woman reads or writes, would she be a good obedient housewife, good mother to her children? Would she be any good for the community?
Zara wishes to live her live abundantly, run amok in fields, eat Kairis from the trees, play outside, and study like her brother. It infuriates her, when more restrictions are imposed on her and Tara with the coming of age. That meant no going out alone and no playing and veiling themselves with burka even when stepping out with parents. Zara believes that she and her brother are equal, but for a life changing incident which brings her life to a halt.
It brings forth to her the reality of being a woman in her community — the brutal rape of her sister, the conduct of her parents in hiding it because it would bring shame to the family, their unwillingness to file a case because of Hudood ordinance in practice and then her subsequent marriage to someone in haste to veil the shame. When they lose contact with Tara and fear an unfortunate happening, it becomes too much for Zara, but she decides to find her sister.
This novel is the story of Zara’s grit and determination, her belief in the power of women in an unbalanced society, her conviction that she is not merely the body she inhabits but also the mind she possesses. She follows her sister to city, after convincing her parents, and plunges into the dangerous world of prostitution to bring back her sister.
Through this novel, the author attempts to bring forth the tribulations of women in such an oppressive system where it is not only the men but also women who play the agents of repression, to keep the system intact by inducing fear and shame in those who go wayward or rebel. In such systems, women are made subservient to imposed rules so much so that they accept them as code of honour even if adhering to them means hurting loved ones and acting against them.
Perhaps nothing could be more startling than the shaming of a rape victim or vilifying a woman who dares to fall in love. It is a system where the birth of a woman, in itself is a burden to family and a mother’s most important role is to suitably prepare them for marriage, to collect their dowry and start looking for prospective grooms when they come of age. Their propensity to literally dispose the girls as soon as possible, even takes over the maternal love which they only express by trying to put restrictions on their beloved daughters.
Baqir writes in a discreet manner and her narrative bears testimony to the amount of research and hard work which has gone into writing the book. For a reader from a neighbouring country, this book brings familiar sounds and smells which makes it more relatable. Local flavours are induced with the usage of Punjabi words. Word pairs are used to evoke the sense of belonging to familiar lands – playing on the concept of twins separated at birth. The ideas of women’s honour, shame and their bearing on family are comparable to that in India.
Though changes are questioning patriarchal mindsets, women’s emancipation continues still to be a tough battle. Beyond the Fields is an effort to highlight the struggle of women and an entreaty to be on the side of humanity, to break the shackles which stifle women who are born equal to men but are made to feel inferior by the rules of society.
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Rakhi Dalal is an educator by profession. When not working, she can usually be found reading books or writing about reading them. She writes at https://rakhidalal.blogspot.com/ . She lives with her husband and a teenage son, who being sports lovers themselves are yet, after all these years, left surprised each time a book finds its way to their home.
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It was an early Saturday morning when I dropped my eleven-year old for a race in northeast Singapore. My son was excited to find his friend and I was anxious to find a coffee shop and nose-dive into the novel I had started last night. The race, I had been told, would last for over an hour. As we waited on the sidewalk for the light to change, I cheered up sighting a small mall on the left. Suddenly, the clouds cover shifted to reveal a clear blue sky. In the horizon, misty clouds shimmered and spun gold.
We entered the lush grounds and my sneakers made a squelching sound. I grimaced. It must have rained last night. How were they going to run?
“Mama,” My son tugged my hand to let me know he’d spotted his friend. And in the next instant, with a quick “Bye, will call you when it’s over,” he darted towards the long cue in front of the uniform booth. For a few moments, I stood there. My eyes followed him until he joined his friends, and I forced myself not to walk after him to demand a goodbye hug. Catching the second, “you can go away now” look from him I turned around and trudged back.
I crossed the road and headed straight for the mall already anticipating the strong aroma and the smooth taste of a cappuccino, and then stopped, stumped. The glass doors were shut. I stared through the glass doors trying to get the attention of the cleaners who mopped and vacuumed. No luck. I stepped back and caught the sign for opening and closing hours. The mall would open at 9 AM. Impossible. This was supposed to be the “me” time. I peered again into the glass doors but when it was clear I would get no attention, I turned around and debated my options. I could head back to the park and wait it out, or explore the area. Pushing away the thoughts of the page-turner in my tote, I opted for the latter. In a few minutes I had crossed a few blocks and found myself in a quaint neighbourhood. I walked along a narrow road with colourful buildings on either side. Red and gold decorations adorned many doors. Some grocery and home supplies shops were already open.
I continued to walk further, and hearing chatter, turned a corner, stopped, and stared. It was a small hawker centre with a row of stalls and a few dozen tables. All the tables were full. Grandparents, parents, and children gathered for the morning meal. Glasses and plates clinked and clanked.
Young and old and ate together. In one corner, a mother helped her son with his homework. In another corner a man helped to feed his aged mother. Some families exited, and more entered. They knew each other and stopped to talk and share news. Two young children played a game in a corner.
I moved forward drawn by the whiff of strong black sweet coffee mixed with the aroma of fried roti paratas, and creamy coconut laksa. My eyes lingered over mounds of white rice on fresh green pandan leaves, crisp leafy vegetable heaped on steamed noodles, stacks of butter toasts, bowls of soothing ayam sotto, and moist carrot cakes.
Spicy. Savory. Salty. Sweet. Flavors and colors blended and melted together. They ate different food, but they ate together.
Food brings people together.
Had I read it somewhere or heard it from someone? I didn’t remember. But in that moment, something shifted. The easy banter, the jokes, and laughs made me pause. I saw an old Chinese man offer a bowl of noodles to his friend. I saw an Indian dad urge his daughter to finish her vegetables. I saw a little Malay boy perform magic tricks to make his grandmother smile. Frowns faded. Faces beamed. From the ease with which they interacted, I sensed they knew each other and lived close by. Had they grown up together, shared life events, and supported each other through difficult and challenging times? Their differences ceased to matter when they ate together and shared food. In that one moment in a small hawker centre, I saw Singapore, a nation of approximately 5.7 million people and diverse ethnic groups become one. Warmth and love wove around them like fairy dust.
The Uncle at the coffee stand beckoned, and I ordered a black coffee. A distant memory tugged. I had seen this in my home country once upon a time, when neighbors knew each other and looked out for each other and when they ate together. Men, women, children, all together. No more. I remembered years back when my cousin had wandered outside our gate and walked to the nearby market and the fruit vendor had brought him back. The time was gone. But it existed here in this instant, where the individuals fused into families, merged into a vibrant community, and cemented into one strong nation. When people ate together, meal after meal, day after day, year after year, they became one, one nation.
I smiled at the Uncle as he handed me my coffee and decided that my son and I would have breakfast together before we headed home. I turned knowing I walked away something special, glanced back one last time and blew a prayer. Peace. Protection. Prosperity.
Happy National Day, Singapore.
Aysha Baqir grew up in Pakistan. Her time in college sparked a passion for economic development. In 1998 she founded a pioneering not for profit economic development organization, Kaarvan Crafts Foundation, with a mission to alleviate poverty by providing business and marketing training to girls and women in low-income communities. Her novel Beyond the Fields was published in January 2019 and she was invited to launch her book at the Lahore and Karachi Literary Festivals and was featured in the Singapore Writers Festival and Money FM Career 360 in Singapore. Her interviews have appeared in Ex-pat Living, Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, Kitaab, and The Tempest. She is an Ashoka Fellow. www.ayshabaqir.com
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