Tag: Pakistan

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Essay

From Srinagar to Ladakh: A Cyclist’s Diary

Farouk Gulsara on a cycling adventure through battleworn Kashmir

They say to go forth and explore, to go to the planet’s edge to increase the depth of your knowledge. Learning about a country is best done doing the things the local populace does, travelling with them, amongst them, not in a touristy way, in a manicured fashion in a tourist’s van but on leg-powered machines called bicycles. Itching to go somewhere after our memorable escapade in South Korea, cycling from Seoul to Busan, as the borders opened up after the pandemic, somebody threw in the idea of cycling from Kashmir to Ladakh. Long story short, there we were, living our dream. The plan was to cycle the 473km journey, climbing 7378m ascent in 8 days, between 6th July 2024 and 12th July 2024. 

Our expedition started with us landing in Amritsar after a 5.5-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur. From there, it was another flight to Srinagar, where the crunch began.

Day 1. Amritsar

Amritsar Golden Temple. Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

After a good night’s sleep, everyone was game for a quick, well-spread breakfast and a leisurely stroll to the Harmandir, the Sikh Golden Temple. Much later, I realised the offering was 100% vegetarian and did not miss any non-vegetarian food. As a mark of respect, the vicinity around the temple complex served only vegetarian food, including a McDonald’s there. Imagine a McDonald’s without the good old quarter pounder! Hey, image is essential.

The usual showing of gratitude to the Almighty was marred by the unruly behaviour of the Little Napoleons, the Royal Guards. New orders were out, it seems, according to one guard with a chrome-plated spear and a steely sheathed dagger at his hip—no photography allowed. Then, on the other end of the Golden Pool, it was okay to photograph but only with a salutary (namaste) posture, with hands clasped on the chest. On the other side, it was alright. One can pose as he pleases. The guards were more relaxed there. 

That is the problem when rules are intertwined with religion. People make their own goal post and shift it as they please. When little men are given power to enforce God’s decree on Earth, they go overboard. They feel it is their God-given raison d’etre and the purpose of existence. Since nothing is cast in stone and everyone in mankind is on a learning curve, what is appropriate today may be blasphemous tomorrow and vice versa. We distinctly remember snapping loads of pictures of the full glory of Harmandir day and night during our last visit, preCovid. 

We all know what happened in the Stanford experiment when students were given powers to enforce order. It becomes ugly very quickly. Next, the flight to Srinagar. 

Boat House Dal Lake, Srinagar

Srinagar. Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

My impression differed from when Raj Kapoor and Vyajanthimala were seen spending their honeymoon boating around the lake in the 1964 mega-blockbuster Hindi movie Sangam. Then, it had appeared insanely cold, with mists enveloping the lake’s surface. Serenity was the order of the day. What I saw in the height of summer with a temperature hovering around 30C, was anything but peaceful. Even across the lake, the constant blaring of car horns was enough to make anyone go slightly mad. 

The lake is a godsend for dwellers around it. Many depend on the lake to transport tourists and sell memorabilia and other merchandise on their boats. The rows of boat houses are also popular sites for honeymooners and tourists to hire. Privacy may be an issue here. Imagine small-time Kashmiri silk vendors just landing at the boat house and showing produce to the occupants. They may want you to sample their kahwa, a traditional spiced-up, invigorating, aromatic, exotic green tea.

Day 2. Boat House, Dal Lake, Srinagar

Kashmiri Kahwa, a spiced tea. Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

Early morning starts with peaceful silence until the honking and murmur of the crowd start slowly creeping in. It was a leisurely morning meant to acclimatise ourselves to the high altitude (~1500m) before we began to climb daily till we hit the highest point of ~5400m. This would — aided by prophylactic acetazolamide –hopefully do the trick to keep altitude sickness at bay. 

The morning tête á tête amongst the generally older crowd was basically about justifying our trip ahead. The frequent question encountered by these older cyclists was, ‘Why were they doing it?’ The standard answer was similar to what George Mallory told his detractors when he expressed his desire to climb the peak that became Everest.

“Why? Because it is there!” Mallory had said. 

The cyclists told their concerned naysayers, “Because we can!”

Yeah, the general consensus was sobering. Time was running out, and so many things needed to be done before the big eye shut. There were so many places and so little time!

Lal Chowk. Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

Continuing the easy-peasy stance before the crunch, a trip to town was due. Backed with the symphony of the blaring of honks, we made a trip to the town square, Lal Chawk. After checking out how regular people got along with life, we realised the heavy presence of armed army personnel at almost every nook and corner of the town. Perhaps it was because it was Friday and prayers were in progress.

The return trip to our boat house was a trip down memory lane. After spending most of our adult lives in air-conditioned cars, the trip back on a cramped Srinagar town bus brought us back to our childhood, when rushing to get a place in the bus and squeezing through shoulder to shoulder in a sardine-packed bus was a daily challenge. That, too, was in the tropical heat minus the air conditioning. 

By noon, temperatures had soared to a roasting 30C. So much for cool Kashmir!

Our trip coincided with the Amarnath Yatra, an annual pilgrimage for Shiva worshippers who pay obeisance to Holy Ice Lingam. 

Dal Lake. Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

The evening was the time to familiarise ourselves with our machines, which involved a ride around the city. It was a nightmare of an experience where we had to simultaneously see our fronts, back, and sides. It was jungle fare. Nobody knew from which direction vehicles were going to barge at us. We survived somehow, if ever we were born in India, our most probable cause of death would be death by road traffic accident. 

The ride brought us to the affluent part of Srinagar, which changed our perception of Kashmir as a war-torn zone. What we saw were nicely manicured lawns and neatly painted buildings. The only hint of disturbances is the apparent presence of armed army personnel nearby. It is said that the one single sign of peace is to see people hanging around lakes and esplanades. We did see this on this ride. Young families were strolling along the promenade to a string of shops selling potpourri of delicacies. Kashmir appeared peaceful. 


Day 3. Srinagar…move it, move it…

Sunset at Dal Lake. Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

It was 4am in Kashmir, and all through the night, it had been raining with occasional threats of thunder in the distance. The plan was to start riding as soon as the day broke with the first ray of the sun. That could be 5am or later. And it has probably nothing to do with Indian timing. Today’s ride would be a 90km challenging ride with an ascent of 4.5%. 

All the cyclists survived the ordeal. Starting around 6am, after checking the machines and last-minute briefings, we were good to go.

We did not know that Lake Dal was so huge. The first 20km was all about going around the lake. The first stop was at Mani Gam, a picturesque countryside with a massive tributary of the Sindh River, for an early breakfast of hot milk coffee. 

As expected, the traffic was heavy because of the Amarnath Yatra. But one would expect attendees of a divine voyage like this to want to exhibit tolerance, patience, and softness. Unfortunately, the ugly side of drivers was in full glory. If the rest of the world would blare their honk with all their might just before a head-on collision, here, the same action is synonymous with informing another fellow road user that he is around. 

To be fair, many pilgrims were in chartered vans, and the drivers were quite aggressive, overtaking in blind corners and swerving to the edge of the roads. All in the name of making more trips and making money for the family. 

Sind River at Ganderbal. Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

They say with greater powers comes great responsibility. Apparently, the lorry drivers here missed the memo. Locally, they are known as the King of the Road, with multi-octaved ear drums rupturing high-decibel honks, sometimes to the tune of Bollywood numbers. 

The cyclists continued grinding despite side disturbances that can push any person raving mad; the steady climb was unforgiving. Just when they thought that was the end of the climb, they were fooled for another just after the bend. The most gruelling part was the end of the day’s trip. We rode more than 85 km, climbed a total elevation of 2692 m, and still lived to tell. 

Hotel Thajwass Glacier, Sonamarg 

Along Srinagar…Ladakh Highway. Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

Dinner was entirely vegetarian as a mark of respect to the hotel’s occupants who were there to fulfil their pilgrimage at Amarnath temple. The brouhaha that struck a chord amongst many occupants was the cancellation of helicopter services to the pilgrimage site. The pilgrims were given the choice of either walking a 15 or 22-km track to fulfil their vows or they could pre-book a helicopter ticket to go there. The trouble with the helicopter services is that their feasibility depended on the weather. Weather is controlled by God, the logical explanation would be that God was not too keen to give audience to the so-and-so who were scheduled on flight.

After the light chat with fellow hotel dwellers and answering their curious questions about why able bodies would want to torture themselves, it was time to hit the sack. We could have asked them why fly when they could walk, but we did not.

Day 4. Sonamarg

Sonamarg. Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

We decided to make it a day of light and easy. Everyone was left to their own devices after the spirit-sapping grind the day before. Most took a rain check on the initial hike but went for a long walk instead. 

So, we took a stroll in the Kashmiri Valley, admiring the result of Nature’s choice of colours in His palette: the symphony of rushing cool mountain water and the refreshing cool breeze. 

We met a couple from Chennai at the breakfast table with a sad tale. They had recently lost their only child who was born with cerebral palsy. They had to part from her after caring for their child for many years. They suddenly found plenty of free time on their hands. They decided to spend the rest of their remaining post-retirement lives doing short gigs, earning enough money to tour around and help out other families undergoing the same predicament as they did with their special child. 

When we think we do not have nice shoes, we should not forget about those with no feet. No matter how big our problems seemed, others could have had it worse. 

Sonamarg can be classified as a tourist town with rows of hotels on either side of the road, occasionally laced with souvenir shops and restaurants. The township appears to have been newly built, with freshly tarred roads, loose pebbles on the road shoulder, and unfinished touch-ups. 

Day 5. Off to Drass

On the way… Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

We were off to Drass, the coldest inhabited place in India in winter. A quick read and one might read it as Dr-Ass, rather fitting of a name as one could use an examination of one’s derrière after a climb that was upon us. We will see you in hell. But wait, hell is supposed to be hot, is it not? Or hath hell frozen over?

At one point in the 1947-48, Drass was invaded and captured by Pakistan. Soon later, India recaptured Drass. We were only 12km from the line of control (LOC).

Hotel D’Meadow Drass

As expected, it was a gruelling ride. The first 21km were excruciatingly torturous, with narrow roads that had to be shared with the notorious motorists who thought that without the honk, one could not drive. We had to test our trail biking skills later as quite a bit of the stretch was undone or probably collapsed as a result of downpours. We were left with a sand tract and later fabricated stone tracks, which gave good knocking on our posterior ends. Remember our appointment with Dr Ass?

Zojila Pass. Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

After the 21 km mark, it was generally downhill, but our guide told us to unlock the mountain bike suspension for more comfort due to the violent bumping. The road improved as we entered Ladakh but was interspersed with occasional potholes that shook the machine.

After a short lunch break at a remote restaurant (referred to as a hotel), we were good to go and finally reached Drass at about 3 pm.


We had gone through the gruelling Zojila Pass. A tunnel is currently being built to connect Sonamarg and Drass. It would cut down travel from 4h to 1.5h. 

Point to note: this Pass lives up to its name. When Japan was attacked by many post-nuclear attack monsters, the biggest one was referred to as Gojira. Hollywood decided to christian Gojira as Godzilla, giving rise to the meaning of gigantic as in Mozilla and Godzilla’s appetite. Zojila Gojira, what’s the difference? Both were scary.

Day 6. Drass to Kargil 

Leaving the ‘Gateway to Ladakh’ and the ‘Coldest place in India’, we headed toward Kargil, which had been immortalised in annal of history when Pakistan and India fought a war in 1999. 

Today’s cycling routine was less enduring compared to our previous rides. Most of the route was a downhill trend lined by dry, stony mountains on one side and the gushing blue waters of a tributary of the Indus on the other. The road condition was pretty good, with recently tarred roads, barring some stretches being tarred and resurfaced in various states. 

After completing the close 60km trip to Kargil, we were told we were the fastest group the organiser had ridden with. Eh, not bad for a bunch of sixty-something madmen! Maybe they were just words of encouragement.

I was surprised to see Kargil as a bustling town with many business activities. Construction is happening here and there. Vendors were spreading their produce. Touters were busy looking for clientele. Hyundais, Marutis, and motorcycles thronged the streets, which were obviously not built to handle such tremendous volumes. Everyone was in a hurry. That is a sign of development. 

We were housed in the tallest building around here. It was a four-story, four-star hotel with a restaurant and 24-hour hot water services. In most places we stayed, hot water was only supplied at short, predetermined intervals. 

Day 7. Kargil to Budkharbu

The day started at about 6:45 am, with temperatures around 9C. This leg was expected to be tough. Two-thirds of our journey would be climbs, and there’d be more. It is expected to be sunny throughout, so we could expect a lot of huffing and puffing. 

Today’s ride was easily the toughest one. Straddling on our saddles for 7.5 hours was no easy feat by any means. The climbs went on and on. The steepest and most prolonged ascent came after 39 km. It was a sustained climb for the next 10 km, hovering between 4% and 12% ascent. 

Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

Nevertheless, we were feasted with some of the most mesmerising views of barren, arid landscapes, as though someone had painted them with hues in the brown range, occasionally speckled with malachite green and a top of sky blue. It was a feeling as if we were at the edge of heaven. 

We pass through a small town called Malbech, which appears to be a Buddhist town with many temples and chanting over its public address system. I guess no one wants to keep their sacred words of God to themselves. They had a compelling desire to broadcast it to the world. 

Many Shiva temples and mosques lined the road of our ride, all showing their presence with specific flags, colours and banners claiming those areas. 

We finally reached Budhkharbu at 2 pm in the heat of summer Ladakh. The temperature was about 22C. The total biking time was 5h 43m. Everyone was shrivelled, depleted of glycogen and energy.  

Budhkharbu is so far from civilisation that the occupants do not feel the need for digital connectivity. Only we, the town folks, were having withdrawal symptoms for not being able to upload our Strava data to earn instant gratification. Foreigners were not allowed to purchase SIM cards, so we were essentially crippled for a day.

Day 8. Padma Numbu Guest House, Budhkhorbu to Nurla

Photo Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

Rise and shine. Rinse and repeat. Breakfast at the Guest House to a vegetarian, sorry, no eggs too, accompanied by the aroma of incense and the tune of ‘Om Jaya Jagatheeswara Hare1‘, we were good to go. I suspect the owners of this guest house were ardent BJP supporters. The keyholder to our rooms carried a lotus symbol. And the BJP mission office was their neighbour. 

We were up on the saddle and ready to move by 7:15 am. The sun was already bright and shiny by then, and we were all enticed by the 26kms steep decline.

After 9 kms, we did not mind the initial steep climb traversing the unforgiving Fotula Pass. At one point, we almost reached 4,200m above sea level. Other than the occasional passerby and military barracks, there wasn’t a single inkling of life there. It was just barren, arid land for miles and miles. 

64 km later, we arrived at our destination, Nurla. Nurla is a no man’s land and is not featured for first-time visitors to Ladakh. Nearby is a self-forming statue of the Sleeping Buddha and a giant statue of Maitreya Buddha. Here, the seed of the Namgyal Dynasty started. It is famous for Tibetan paintings. As temporary sojourners, we just learned and moved along. 

By now, we had learnt how the honking system worked. Even the brotherly advice from BRO (Border Road Organisation) advises using vehicle horns, especially at blind corners and overtaking another vehicle. At a telepathic level, the driver seems to converse with the other, ‘I can take charge of my vehicle as I overtake you. Now, don’t you make any sudden moves, can you?’ The melodious tone of honks, especially of lorries and buses, is just to liven up the monotonous journey, as do music (and movies).

Day 9. Travellers’ Lodge, Nurla to Leh

We were told today’s leg would be challenging, with 85 km to cover and a steep one. Hence, we had to be up on our saddles by 5 am. 

In essence, today’s outing was the toughest by far. We climbed two hills, and just when we thought everything was done and dusted, another climb to our hotel came. Overall, we covered 85km and 1672m elevation in 7h 2m. 

We saw two essential tourist attractions as we approached Leh: Magnetic Hill and gurudwara. Magnetic Hill is believed to create an optical illusion of a hill in the area and surrounding slopes. The cars may be going uphill when they are, in fact, going downhill. 

Sourced by Farouk Gulsara

The Guru Pathan Gurudwara is another curious worship site in the middle of nowhere. Legend has it that Guru Nanak stopped at this place, coming from Tibet and towards Kashmir. It was a Buddhist enclave. While meditating, an evil demon tried to crush him by rolling down a boulder. Hold behold, the stone turned waxy soft and did not injure the Guru. 

An indestructible piece of rock was encountered while constructing this stretch of the highway. The Buddhist monks told the authorities of the legend, and the Gurudwara was erected. The Buddhists revered Guru Nanak and treated him as a great teacher. 

The journey ended with a brutal, unrelenting climb to our final destination, Hotel Panorama in Leh. 

The next journey the following day to Khardungla was optional. Only the young at heart opted for it. A 37 km journey with an inclination of 8% constantly with possible extreme subzero temperatures was too much to ask from my gentle heart. I opted out.  

Thus ended our little cycling escapade from Srinagar to Leh, Ladakh. Few will attempt this journey with SUVs or superbikes; only madmen will do it with mountain bikes. 

P.S. I want to thank Sheen, Adnan, Basil, and Samir of MTB Kashmir for their immaculate planning and supervision of the rides. 

  1. A holy chant extolling the lord of the Universe ↩︎

Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blogRifle Range Boy.

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Review

Remembering the Partition

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: Learning to Remember: Postmemory and the Partition of India

Author: Shuchi Kapila

Publisher: Springer

Shuchi Kapila’s book on Partition focuses on the hinge generation — the one separated by a generation or two from the actual experience of the Partition, but increasingly drawn to analyse its memories in their own lives and its significance for the future. Simply because, the Partition with its trauma and losses remains a huge part of their parental, familial and collective memory.

While Kapila’s book recovers these embedded memories through interesting anecdotes, the fact remains that the historical event of the Partition cast a huge shadow on her parents’ lives, and that of many like her. She, like others (Priya Kumar, Urvashi Butalia) are drawn to excavate and unpack this silence and trauma that impinged upon the parents’ lives and shaped them in umpteen ways.  Such postmemory is described by Marianne Hirsch as “the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (Hirsch 1996, 659, quoted by Kapila). She goes on to write: “It is the largeness of these stories that dominate our psyches even as we often know very little about them, a kind of haunting that is often not understood.”

Like many in this generation, Kapila  was protected from all knowledge of the event by the silence of those who had experienced it directly. At the same time, she strongly felt a compulsion and an ethical imperative to understand the legacy of the Partition on her own terms.

Kapila points out that the flood of writing on the Partition that has emerged since the fiftieth anniversary of independence in India and Pakistan includes scholarly histories, oral histories, feminist studies, and literary and cultural studies of the Partition (which have poured out in a steady stream in the decades after 1997), show a strong inclination to exhume buried and seemingly lost memories. Priya Kumar’s Limiting Secularism, one of the most significant studies of the ethics of remembering, presents a compelling summary of this terrain of ‘return’ to the Partition. She argues that it is not merely that the first generation of Partition migrants is now dying out leading to an understandable anxiety about capturing their voices(as Butalia also voices in her book The Other Side of Silence) but also that the fact that Partition is the “founding trauma” (Dominick la Capra) of the subcontinent to which we must return in constant acts of “avowal” (Kumar 2008, 87).

Kapila’s book then is one such act of return and avowal in exploring again from a post memorial position the travels and travails of Partition memory. The enormity of the Partition— around a million dead, migration of between twelve and fourteen million across the borders of Punjab and Bengal, 75,000 women of different faiths abducted and very few “rehabilitated”– the numbers are mind-numbing.

Given that Partition was a territorial, social, and political division of peoples who had lived together for the previous centuries, there were many who resisted the idea of this division but recognised equally that it was a moment for Muslim self-determination in the formation of Pakistan. A common feeling in this context which prevailed among all communities, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, was a feeling that the departing colonial powers had betrayed them. With these affects,the act of remembering Partition, the author feels, can never be a single, linear, decisive and discrete fact specific to communities but somewhat fuzzy and porous. It is inevitably marked by the recognition of multiple narratives jostling for attention with all communities involved as perpetrators and victims. The Indian nationalist myth that the Indian Congress party wanted a united India whereas Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, wanted to divide India and secure Pakistan for Muslims has been interrogated most famously by Ayesha Jalal who argues that literary narratives have also offered scholars the opportunity to think through the ethics of co-existence, which is the focus of Priya Kumar’s study, Limiting Secularism (2008), in which she considers how literary texts imagine possibilities and histories of productive relationships that seemed to have been irrevocably lost with partition.

Another significant area of research opened up was that of  collecting narrative oral histories, a methodology which has been referred to by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin in Borders and Boundaries(1998) and used powerfully in Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence(1998). These accounts revealed that women’s lives were deeply impacted by the rape and violence visited upon them during Partition and the silencing of their narratives as a patriarchal state was inaugurated. Jill Didur (2006) reads the silences and ambiguities of women’s stories as an important counter-narrative that unsettles Partition, revealing, for instance, how the agency of abducted women was completely eluded even in the recovery operations to establish a benevolent paternalist state. Given that there is a necessary relationship between the public and private realms of memory, it is unsurprising that some of the same themes can be found in testimonials and oral histories as well. This is the case made by Anindya Raychaudhuri (2019) whose attempt to think through Partition as “a productive event” is very much in line with Kapila’s  effort to highlight the different generational voices of  interviewees (Raychaudhuri 2019,13).

The book also considers private family memory and public institutions like the 1947 Partition Archive and the Amritsar Partition Museum. However, Kapila is aware that both these public institutions are relatively recent developments making it difficult to gauge their impact on private memory. Like literature and cinema, oral histories have also expressed themes of loss, violence, home, childhood, and trauma that appear repeatedly in stories of  Partition migrants. Yet,  as Kapila avers, “despite scholars’ clear understanding of the particularity of each oral history encounter, most studies distill them for themes and documentary evidence rather than as specific performances” based on “the subject position of interviewer and interviewee, time, space, social and regional position.” In contrast to this, Kapila is observant about the processual aspect of memory that are constituted by a more expansive understanding of “the filial and affiliative in each encounter as it rearticulates the nature of family, belonging, and community and while Partition literature and film have coloured narratives and tropes which shape how people remember or narrate,” her focus is on the interaction between the subject position of interviewer and interviewed.

Anjali Gera Roy’s significant work on Partition testimonies works toward an amplification of the historical record, which works by filling in “the personal, sensory, affective memories of both documented and undocumented historical events”(Gera Roy 2019, 24). She describes  her work,  as a “corrective and as supplement” to historical accounts. In the 160 testimonies gathered by her and her research assistants in many cities of North and East India, she unearths the ‘intangible violence’ of Partition.

The questions she poses sheds considerable light both on the processes and workings of memory as well as the methodology of such an enquiry: “How much of my parents’ relationship was structured by a deep and intimate understanding of Partition trauma? How much of their subterranean anxieties about their children were shaped by the experience of Partition? Heeding Marianne Hirsch’s description of postmemory mediated “not by recall but imaginative investment, projection, and creation,” she  asks how we could help in exploring its potential for progressive futures (Hirsch 2012, 5). Family history, though repeated many times and extensively written about is both representative and singular, each experience one more testimony to what millions experienced.

In emphasising a humanistic approach to Partition memory, she explores it not as aggregation of historical or social fact but for the relationship it sets up among post memorial generations and between them and first-generation migrants and the importance of each act of articulation. This book is thus a study of the culture of Partition memory that is being built by post memorial generations through public institutions, research, oral history, and family stories. For these generations, studying Partition is an experience in learning to remember from new socio-political locations not just in South Asia but also in its diaspora in Europe and the United States, and other parts of the world. These acts of memory are significant not only to gain insight into an event, but also ultimately to address the psychological impact of the event.

Kapila’s work is a significant contribution to Partition and memory studies. In revisiting Partition through the lens of memory, her book reminds us about the significance of processing painful memories as a way of approaching the past. The chronology is also significant, coming as it does, more than seventy-five years after Partition. Yet it is precisely this belatedness which makes it significant. In their preface to their edited book on The Psychological Impact of Partition in India, psychiatrists Sanjeev Jain and Alok Sarin (2018), mention the lack of conversation or research material on the psychological impact of Partition in the sub-continent. They flag the urgency of revisiting and processing traumatic memory. Understanding the delayed effects of trauma thanks to their extensive experience as psychiatrists and psychologists, they view the time lapse and belatedness as central to the way memories work.  

Kapila’s book has a chapter on the idea of ‘nostalgia’ for instance and then also on new institutions of memory like the museum. She explores different avenues that have been developing to rectify some of this missing memory of Partition, through extensive interviews.  This is the thrust of the first half of the book—these intergenerational conversations and understandings of Partition. The second half of the book looks more closely at the two physical spaces that have been established to communicate about Partition. These two physical spaces include the Berkeley, California 1947 Partition Archive, which now contains at least 10,000 oral histories of Partition, available for researchers, scholars, and individuals to explore and examine. India has also recently opened the Partition Museum, Amritsar, the first museum of its kind in India. Museums tend to craft particular narratives of events or experiences, and Kapila considers this new museum in that light

Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember is a fascinating interrogation of this concept of remembering and memory, and how we craft narratives of our understandings of events through our memories or the memories of others. Ultimately, Kapila is asking the reader to consider how it is we learn to remember, particularly how we learn to remember complex, political events that shape who we are and how we think of ourselves in the world. Focusing on the centrality of processing traumatic memory in order to negotiate our daily lives, Kapila’s work is deeply interdisciplinary. Her scholarship can also be viewed as a labour of love and a tribute to her parents — and their generation — for the considerable emotional labour  they invested to ensure that their children were able to go beyond their own memories of loss.

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Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is Associate Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.  Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Categories
Essay

 Bottled Memories, Inherited Stories

By Ranu Bhattacharyya

I hear the scents whisper. Familiar fragrances of clove and cinnamon, imbued with spicy notes of pepper and eucalyptus beckon and tease. Elusive murmurs of mysterious oils and herbs tinge the air as I walk along a narrow-paved lane in Old Dhaka, overshadowed by looming walls on either side. I ignore the press of prying eyes and inquisitive bodies that accompany my passage. The call of the scents is irresistible, and I feel strangely unafraid of what lies before the next turn in the path ahead. These were the scents of my childhood — of summer afternoons spent secretly exploring the forbidden depths of my grandmother’s closet, the kaancher almarih[1] where her medicines were stored in shiny glass bottles with peeling labels.

The narrow lane spills into a small courtyard hemmed by buildings on three sides. Everything is closed because it is Friday, the day of prayer in Bangladesh. Peering through grimy windows, I see gigantic iron cauldrons, cavernous kansa kadhais[2], their gold gleaming in glimpses amidst sooty splatters, huge ladles and enormous tongs. Some vessels perch on hand-crafted mud stoves, their sides smoothened and baked by fires. Wooden logs are stacked in the corner along with bulging sacks of coal. Nearby, some large pieces of cloth, perhaps used for straining, are hung out to dry. In the shadowy recesses, shelves stacked with glass bottles glisten with reflected light. It seems almost staged, like a theatrical representation of a medieval kitchen and yet the evidence of daily use is undeniable.

The fourth side of the courtyard has an open doorway. A sudden urge, an inexplicable pull, lures me towards it. I feel I know what lies beyond its brink. Yet how could that be? In this alien city, situated in a land scarred by a brutal Partition, from where does this knowing come? Concentrating on lifting the edge of my saree as I step across the threshold, it takes me a moment to lift my eyes to see what lies ahead. A painting of a pot-bellied man seated cross legged on an asana[3], a sacred thread adorning the vast expanse of his chest, looks solemnly back at me. Before me was the same face I’d seen on countless bottles in that medicine cupboard of my childhood — the same glossy hair, oiled and parted with precision, the same curled moustache, the same narrow bordered white dhoti[4].

The author with her great grandfather’s portrait in Dhaka. Photo Courtesy: Ranu Bhattacharyya

I find myself before a life-size portrait of my great grandfather, Mathura Mohan Chakraborty, founder of Shakti Aushadhalaya, the Ayurvedic pharmacy famed in the streets of Dhaka, Calcutta, Patna, Benaras and Rangoon at the turn of the 19th century. The kitchen behind me was the pharmacy’s karkhana[5] to prepare medicines of his formulations. His portrait hung before the inner sanctum of the temple he had dedicated to the revered Bengali saint, Lokenath Baba. Legend claimed that the mystic had whispered the recipe of the first medicinal formulation to his most faithful disciple — my great grandfather.

Ever since I arrived in Dhaka as an expat, I had been searching for the Shakti Aushadhalaya premises. Everyone knew of the company; yet nobody seemed to know where it was located. I was introduced everywhere as a young scion of the family. And though whispers followed me at gatherings and smiles broadened on hearing I was the great granddaughter of Mathurababu, my questions regarding the whereabouts of the company drew blank stares and confused responses. In horticulture, the word scion, refers to the detached living part of a plant that is cut to be grafted onto another plant. The sundering of this particular scion had been so complete, over so many generations, through such a series of violent events that it seemed my search for the original plant would remain elusive.

It was only through persistent enquiry that I found myself in Swamibagh Road in Old Dhaka where the manufacturing unit of Shakti Aushadhalaya was located. Mathurababu had founded the company in Patuatuli, Dhaka, in 1901. Family lore suggests Lokenath Baba inspired him to venture far from his origins as a schoolteacher in Bikrampur. The ascetic recognised his potential, unusual in those times, as a graduate versed in three languages — Bengali, Sanskrit and English. Starting from humble beginnings in the family kitchen, peddling hair oil and tooth powder in his neighbourhood, Mathurababu’s prescient business acumen saw his enterprise flourish. The company produced and supplied quality Ayurvedic medicines at low prices. Mathurababu also established an Ayurvedic institute, attached to his manufacturing unit to popularise Ayurvedic knowledge. The institute taught Ayurveda and philosophy in Sanskrit. Students were offered free tuition, boarding, and lodging.

Ayurveda, considered the oldest existing health science in the world, is believed to have originated in India 5000 years ago. The journey of Ayurveda from ancient times to its present incarnation is a fascinating story that follows several simultaneous trajectories, embracing geopolitics and history, trade and commerce, science and industry, technology and travel.

It is with a sense of wonder that I encounter my great grandfather’s name in journals and books that describe the history of Ayurveda in India. He was among the earliest entrepreneurs to transition towards production of Ayurvedic drugs for the market. Directly involved in all aspects of his company, Mathurbabu immersed himself in the study of Ayurveda and had an extensive library of rare treatises on ancient Indian medical traditions, including a prized copy of Susruta Sanhita[6].

He noticed that Western medicines advertised their products in newspapers and journals. Following this model, he embraced a similar practice for his own company. An advertisement published in Muhammadi in February 1940 included endorsements from freedom fighter Chittaranjan Das, Lord Lytton, the Viceroy of India, and Lord Ronaldshay, the Governor General of Bengal. In the vintage advertisement, Lord Lytton wrote: “I was very interested to see this remarkable factory which owes its success to the energy and enthusiasm of its proprietor Babu Mathura Mohan Chakravarty B.A. The preparation of indigenous drugs on so large a scale is a very great achievement. The factory appeared to me to be exceedingly well managed and well equipped &c. &c.” In the same advertisement, in Bengali, Chittaranjan Das endorsed that nothing could surpass the production processes for medicines at Shakti Aushadhalaya.

Since the mid-19th century, several eminent leaders of the Indian freedom struggle visited Mathurbabu’s factory in Dhaka. On June 6, 1939, in the company’s visitor’s book, Subhash Chandra Bose wrote, “I visited the Sakti Oushadhalaya[7], Dacca, today and was very kindly shown around the premises. Indigenous medicines are prepared here on a large scale and in accordance with Ayurvedic principles. The institution reflects great credit on Babu Mathura Mohan Chakravarty, whose enterprise has brought Ayurvedic medicines within the reach of the poor. I wish him all success to the institution which he has built up after so much enterprise and hard labour for a long period. The success of Sakti Oushadhalaya, Dacca, means the popularity of Ayurveda throughout the country and this in its turn means the relief of suffering humanity.”

When my parents visited us in Dhaka a year after our arrival, we went back to Swamibagh Road. Our visit included a trip to the shop where the medicines of Shakti Aushadhalaya were sold.

Despite being taken over by the Pakistan government in 1971 and subsequently acquired by a private entrepreneur, the company remains operational in Bangladesh to this day with 37 branches nationwide. Though Mathurababu’s portrait is no longer on the medicine bottles in the shop, the names of the formulations inscribed, are still recognised by my mother.  As we browse through the offerings, a crowd begins to form around her, hailed and welcomed as Mathurababu’s direct descendant. Much to my mother’s delight, the crowd guided her to his house, a now derelict mansion hidden in the by-lanes of Old Dhaka.

We entered the property through an ornamented gatehouse that opened to a large courtyard. On one side was the Baithakghar, the public receiving room with the Nat Mandir, the family temple in front of us. On the other side was the majestic mansion with tall columns, topped with ornate capitals. Next to the Nat Mandir was a small doorway that led to a shaded courtyard with a well, meant for the family’s private use. Beyond was yet another courtyard, enclosed with buildings on three sides.

Parts of the ancestral home. Photo Courtesy: Ranu Bhattacharyya

As I climbed the stairs leading to the second floor, I had a feeling of déjà vu. I felt I had been here before through my grandmother’s stories. Her small feet must have climbed these stairs. There was the arched windows she had said she gazed out of, and the vast veranda with colonnades, where she played with her eight siblings. Wandering through the rooms, I hear her voice narrating tales of her childhood — kite races on the terrace, indolent boat rides on the Padma, and the indulgence of choosing sarees from the weavers who came all the way from Benaras.

The house is now home to several families who regard our arrival with wary welcome. “Where are the Italian painted tiles?” I ask eagerly. The story of the tiles imported by her father from Italy were amongst the kaleidoscope of stories that my grandmother had shared with me. Whisperings and murmurings ensue amidst the crowd and then a hefty cupboard was pushed aside to reveal the tiles in all their faded glory.

Slowly it dawns upon me that the silent bottle in my grandmother’s cupboard had encoded stories that belied its seemingly mundane materiality. To uncover these lost stories, I embark on a renewed search for those old medicine bottles of my childhood. Their fragrance lingers at the edges of my memory, offering tantalising glimpses to fragments of knowledge. The sense of smell is our oldest sense. My memories of stories narrated by my grandmother were inextricably connected to the scents locked in that bottle. Would holding the bottle in my hand peel back the layers of my memory, answer some unanswered questions about my grandmother’s roots, help me map the route of our family’s journey? But alas! Those bottles are lost to time. My grandmother’s generation is gone and I search among Mathurababu’s scattered grandchildren and great grandchildren to no avail.

My grandmother left Dhaka in 1936, never to return. Mathurbabu’s house on Calcutta’s Central Street was completed that year, and it is there he moved with his wife and three youngest unwed daughters, including my grandmother. His older son remained in Dhaka to oversee the factory and drug production, while Mathurbabu focused on controlling the distribution from a central office in Calcutta. Till his death in 1942, despite his ailing health and flagging energy, he visited the company’s distribution centres spread across Calcutta everyday, accompanied by his faithful retainer Nathu. Probing for reasons for this abrupt migration, my uncle gave me a solitary clue. He recalled that my great grandfather had felt his family was unsafe in Dhaka. With this obscure clue in hand, I delved into history books for elaboration. I read about the rise of communal tensions in Bengal from the mid-1920’s. The Dhaka riots of 1930 targeted several well-established businessmen and involved loot and arson of their business and personal properties.

In 1947, there was yet another wave of migrations far more existential and grimmer. After the borders were drawn between the newly formed nations of India and Pakistan, the remaining family fled Dhaka overnight, leaving behind the factory, the mansion, in fact, all their material possessions in a land suddenly hostile to their continued habitation. Unable to exercise control over their properties in East Pakistan, there was an initial attempt by Mathurbabu’s heirs to establish a factory in Chandernagore. Without my great grandfather at the helm, this nascent enterprise floundered and ultimately sank. Cut from its moorings in Dhaka, Mathurbabu’s inheritors could not keep the business afloat in India. Slowly his legacy dissipated. The Shakti Aushadhalaya head office in Calcutta’s Beadon Street closed and the shops in Calcutta, Karachi, Kabul, and Colombo lowered their shutters.

Through generations of migration and resettlement, we are left with only scattered memories and fragmented stories. These intangible remains are my inheritance today. These intangibles are bound neither by form, nor by time. Instead, they offer limitless possibilities for exploration, crafting and archiving. Memory, nourished by the repeated telling of stories, provides continuity. These intangible wisps of legacy — a remembered glimpse of a peeling label, the stories heard from my grandmother, the whispered whiff of a familiar fragrance, open a door to the past and invite me to connect it to the present. “Listen to us,” the scents call. “Let us tell you our story.”

[1] Glass cupboard

[2] Bronze woks

[3] A rug for prayers

[4] A cloth wrap for the lower half of the body

[5] Workshop

[6] Ancient Sanskrit text on medicine, dated to 12th-13th century

[7] Pharmacy

Ranu Bhattacharyya, author of The Castle in the Classroom: Story as a Springboard for Early Literacy, Stenhouse, 2010, is an educator and writer who has lived and worked across the world, exploring and archiving narratives that connect people and cultures.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Categories
Interview Review

A Backpacker’s Diary by Jessica Mudditt

A brief overview of Once Around the Sun : From Cambodia to Tibet (Hembury Books) by Jessica Mudditt and a conversation with the author

Jessica Mudditt

Jessica Mudditt’s Once Around the Sun: From Cambodia to Tibet is not just a backpacker’s diary but also her need to relate to humanity, to find friendships and even love, as she does with Kris, a photographer named after Krishna, the Hindu god, because his parents while visiting India fell in love with the divinity!

The Burmese translation of Our Home in Myanmar was published recently.

Hurtling through Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Tibet, young Mudditt concludes her narrative just at the brink of exploring Nepal, India and Pakistan in her next book… leaving the reader looking forward to her next adventure. For this memoir is an adventure that explores humanity at different levels. Before this, Mudditt had authored Our Home in Myanmar – Four years in Yangon, a narrative that led up to the Myanmar attack on Rohingyas and takeover by the military junta. Once Around the Sun: From Cambodia to Tibet is the first part of a prequel to her earlier book, Our Home in Myanmar, both published by her own publishing firm, Hembury Books.

What makes her narrative unique is her candid descriptions of life on a daily basis — that could include drunken revelry or bouts of diarrhoea — while weaving in bits of history and her very humane responses. Her trip to Angkor Wat yields observations which brings into perspective the disparities that exist in our world:

“I was gazing out at an empire that was once the most powerful and sophisticated in the world. In 1400, when London had a middling population of 50,000, the kingdom of Angkor had more than a million inhabitants and a territory that stretched from Vietnam to Brunei. It had flourished for six hundred years, from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries.

“But somehow Cambodia had become one of the world’s poorest countries, and surely the most traumatised too, following a recent war and genocide. I knew that when we came back down to the ground, there would be a collection of ragtag street kids and downtrodden beggars desperately hoping for our spare change. It was difficult to reconcile the grandeur of Cambodia’s past with its heart-breaking present in the twenty-first century. How did a country’s fortunes change so dramatically? Could the situation ever be turned around?”

How indeed?

Then, she writes of Vientaine in Vietnam:

“I was struck by the fact that sex work seemed to be the consequence for countless young women living in poverty. It made me angry, but mostly sad.”

In these countries broken into fragments by intrusions from superpowers in the last century, judged by the standards of the “developed countries” and declared “underdeveloped”, an iron rice bowl becomes more important to survive than adventure, discovering other parts of the world or backpacking to self-discovery. Travel really is the privilege of that part of the world which draws sustenance from those who cannot afford to travel.

Jessica showcases mindsets from that part of the Western world and from the mini-expat world in Hong Kong, which continue alienated from the local cultures that they profess to have set out to explore or help develop. One of the things that never ceases to surprise is that while the ‘developed’ continue to judge the ‘third world’, these countries destroyed by imposed boundaries, foreign values, continue to justify themselves to those who oppress them and also judge themselves by the standards of the oppressors.

Some of these ‘developing’ countries continue to pander to needs of tourism and tourists for the wealth they bring in, as Jessica shows in her narrative. She brings out the sharp differences between the locals from Asia and the budgeted backpackers, who look for cheap alternatives to experience more of the cultures they don’t understand by indulging in explorations that can involve intoxicants and sex, their confidence backed by the assurance that they can return to an abled world.

Backpackers from affluent countries always have their families to fall back on — opulent, abled and reliable. Mudditt with her candid narrative explores that aspect too as she talks of her mother’s response to her being sick and budgeting herself. Her mother urges her to cut short her trip. But she continues, despite the ‘adversities’, with an open mind. That she has a home where she can return if she is in any kind of trouble begs a question — what kind of ‘civilisation’ do we as humans have that she from an abled background has a safe retreat where there are those for whom the reality of their existence is pegged to what she is urged to leave behind for her own well-being? And why — as part of the same species — do we accept this divide that creates ravines and borders too deep to fathom?

Mudditt with her narrative does create a bridge between those who have plenty and those who still look for and need an iron rice bowl. She mingles with people from all walks and writes about her experiences. Hers is a narrative about all of us –- common humanity. Her style is free flowing and easy to read — quite journalistic for she spent ten years working as one in London, Bangladesh and Myanmar, before returning to her home in Australia in 2016. Her articles have been published by Forbes, BBC, GQ and Marie Claire, among others. This conversation takes us to the stories around and beyond her book.

What led you to embark on your backpacking adventure? Was it just wanderlust or were you running away from something?

It was primarily from wanderlust, but I also didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life. After six years at university, I was still yet to have any particular calling. However, I was also glad I didn’t know. It meant that I was free to go and explore the world, because I wasn’t putting my career on hold. I had no career.

I also had a broken heart when I set off for Cambodia – but the trip was planned before that relationship had even begun. But again, part of me was glad that my boyfriend had called it quits, because my plan was to be away for a very long time (and it ended being a decade away).

What made you think of putting down your adventures in writing? As you say, this is a prequel to your first book.

It was the pandemic that made me realise that backpacking was really special. There was a period in 2020 when it looked like travel may never be so unrestricted again, so it motivated me to document my year of complete freedom. It was also before social media was even a thing. When I was lost, I was really lost, and I had to use my problem-solving skills.

Prior to the pandemic, I sort of thought that backpacking itself was too fun to write about. I hadn’t actually lived in any of the countries I visited – I was just passing through. But that is also a valid experience, and one that many people can fondly relate to. There were also some really confronting and difficult moments.

You have written of people you met. How have they responded to your candid portrayals? Or did you change their names and descriptions to convey the essence but kept your characters incognito?

While I was writing the book, I got back in touch with the people I travelled with – I can thank Facebook for still being in touch with most people mentioned. They helped me to remember past anecdotes and I got some of the back story of their own trips. I have only used first names to protect their privacy, although there are some photos in the book too. Thankfully the world is so big that the odds are small that anyone would recognise, say, an Irish guy from Adam in Vietnam in 2006! Clem from Shanghai has just sent me a photo of her with my book, and Romi from Vietnam actually came to my book launch, which was awesome.

What was your favourite episode in this book — as a backpacker and as a writer? Tell us about it.

I think it was crossing into China and meeting ‘the man.’ I felt so alive with every step I took into China after crossing over on foot from Vietnam. To be chaperoned in the way I was – without being able to communicate a single word – was unusual. His kindness left me speechless, so the anecdote has a nice story arc.

In your travels through China, you faced a language handicap and yet found people kind and helpful. Can you tell us a bit about it?

I foolishly underestimated the language barrier. It was profound. In Southeast Asia, there was always at least a sprinkling of English, and I sort of just assumed that I’d be fine. I entered China from Vietnam, so my first port of call was Nanning, where there is not even really an expat population. I couldn’t do the most basic things, from finding the toilet or an internet cafe or something to eat! I used sign language and memorised the Chinese character for ‘female’ to make sure I went into the right toilet! In a restaurant, I just pointed at whatever someone else was eating in the hope that they would bring me a bowl of whatever it was. There were times when I was seriously lost and lonely, but I ended up staying in China for two months and saw the comedic side. I was bumbling around like Mr Bean (who is hugely popular in China).

I met a lot of people who were really kind to me, and I was just so grateful to them. I didn’t have Wi-Fi on my phone back then, so getting lost in a massive city in China was a bit scary. I met a student called Mei-Xing who ‘adopted’ me for a few days in Guilin. We had a really nice time together and it was so great to hang out with a local.

What is/are the biggest takeaway/s you had from your backpacking in this part of the world? Tell us about it.

I think it’s something quite simple: the world can be a very beautiful place, and a very polluted place. Tourism can do a great deal of damage when there are too many people clambering over one area. There is also an incredible level of disparity in a material sense on our planet. Some humans are travelling into space on rockets. Others are pulling rickshaws, as though they are draught horses. It is profoundly inequitable.

Having travelled to large tracts of Asia, what would you think would be the biggest challenge to creating a more equitable world, a more accepting world? Do you think an exposure to culture and history could resolve some of the issues?

I think that democracy is key. It slows us down and forces us to act in the interest of the majority, not the top-level cronies. That is definitely also something I witnessed in Myanmar. When a few people hold all the power, the population is deprived of things that ought to be a human right.

I think that travel definitely alters your perspective and broadens your mind, and it is something I’d recommend to anyone. Realising that the way that things are done in your home country is not the only way of doing things is a valuable thing to learn.

Mostly, you met people off the street. In which country did you find the warmest reception? Why and how?

In Pakistan. The hospitality and friendliness was unparalleled. I think it was in part due to not having many tourists there. Nothing felt transactional. I met some fascinating people in Pakistan who would have a profound impact on my own life. I am still in touch with several people I met there.

At a point you wondered if the poverty you saw could be reversed back to affluence in the context of the Angkor kingdom. Do you have any suggestions on actually restoring the lost glory?

I believe that it is beginning to be restored. Pundits have called this the “Asian Century.” I am convinced that the United States and the UK are in decline, and this process will only speed up. India, to me, holds the most promise as the next superpower, because it is a democracy (albeit flawed – like all of them), English- speaking, enormous, beautiful, fascinating and its soft power is unmatched. China is facing headwinds. I blame that on making people sad by removing their agency.

How long were you backpacking in this part of the world? Was it longer than you had intended? What made you extend your stay and why?

My trip was exactly 365 days long. I planned it that way from the beginning. I wanted to travel for no less than a year (more than a year and I might stay feeling guilty for being so indulgent!). That is also why the book is called Once Around the Sun – my time backpacking was the equivalent of one rotation of the Earth. I set off on 1 June 2006 – the first day of winter in Australia – and I arrived on 1 June 2007 in London, on the first day of the British summer. I love the sunshine.

After having travelled around the large tracts of Asia and in more parts of the world, could you call the whole world your home or is it still Australia? Is your sense of wellbeing defined by political boundaries or by something else?

Home for me is Sydney. I absolutely love it. I get to feel as though I am still travelling, because my home city is Melbourne. I go down a new road every other day and I love that feeling. The harbour is beautiful, and the sun is shining most days. It’s very multicultural too.

My kids are three and five, so I haven’t travelled overseas for years. My plan is to travel with them as much as possible when they are a bit older. I hope they love it as much as me. I cannot wait to return to Asia one day. I am also desperate to visit New York City.

What are your future plans for both your books and your publishing venture?

The second part of Once Around the Sun will come out in 2025. It’s called Kathmandu to the Khyber Pass, and it covers the seven months I spent Nepal, India and Pakistan.

My goal is to complete my fourth memoir by 2027. It will be called My Home in Bangladesh (it will be the prequel to Our Home in Myanmar!).

My fifth book will be about how to write a book. I am a book coach and in a few years I will have identified the most common challenges people face when writing a book, and finding their voice.

In the next twelve months, there will be at least 12 books coming out with Hembury Books, which is my hybrid publishing company. I love being a book coach and publisher and I hope to help as many people as possible to become authors.

Please visit the website and set up a discovery call with me if you plan on writing a nonfiction book, or have gotten stuck midway: https://hemburybooks.com.au/.

Photographs from Once Round the Sun, provided by Jessica Mudditt

(The online interview has been conducted through emails and the review written by Mitali Chakravarty.)

Click here to read an excerpt from Once Around the Sun

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Categories
Poetry

In Exile

By Rinku Dutta 

“In exile, you are an uprooted tree. Naked.
 
Leafless.
Bloomless. 
Barren.”
 
She drops words, like tears,
Into the urn of our silence.
 
“Look!” she thrusts forward a tattooed wrist,
“In exile, you are a ghost tree: 
No cicadas mating on your bark. No birds nesting,
No birdlings vying to fly. No squirrels scurrying.
 
No soil.
 
Hugging your roots, no solacing 
Moisture.” 
 
“In exile, you are a fish flung from water,”
She rolls up her sleeve and reveals 
A tattoo of a fish, its skeleton.
 
“In exile, you have been picked to the bone
 By Grief -- 
                 Grief has gouged out your pink flesh.
You have no skin. 
                                 You are left with spare spine
And bones;
                Bones, hanging from your backbone.”
 
Turning, she pulls up her shirt: “But see!
Here’s my real secret.”
 
Nestling in the curve of her back,
Another tattooed fish;
A whole fish this one, shimmering silver.
“See! She’s alive! She’s swimming up the river.” 
Says Hanan (whose name means the warm-hearted one)
 “Like salmon, 
She’s battling upstream.
She’ll return one day to her spawning ground.
Trust me. She will. 
Never doubt that. Ever.”

Rinku Dutta is an educator writing about her experiences. Exploring the Roots of Harmony: India and Pakistan Conflict Transformation is a monograph of a selection of her essays. Her poems have been published in RIC Journal.  

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Categories
Essay

Discovering Rabindranath and My Own Self

Musings by Professor Fakrul Alam

Tagore writing
Tagore performing, 1881
Apnake jana amar phurabe na/Ei Janare shongo tomai chena/

There will be no end to my discovery of myself/And this discovery keeps coming with my discovery of you

On the one hand, Rabindranath Tagore [1861-1941] has been with me almost all my life. On the other, I only began to discover that I had Rabindranath so centrally in me relatively late in my life. In fact, I have now realised that the process of discovering the way he has been embedded in me is part of the process of discovering my own self in the course of the life that I have been leading till now.  Indeed, at this stage of my life, it seems to me that there will be no end to my discovery of the way Rabindranath has become part of my consciousness since I feel that there will be no end to discovering myself till I lose consciousness once and for all. The one thing I can say with certainty, using his words but in my translation is “There will be no end to my discovery of myself.”  For sure, this process of discovering myself endlessly keeps happening with my continuing discovery of Rabindranath.

Surely, the process through which Rabindranath had become embedded in me began in childhood. However, I did not encounter his work in my (English medium) textbooks since I did not learn Bengali in school for a while. How then did I come to remember poems such as “Tal gach ek paye dariye/shob gach chareea/ Uki mare akaashe” (Palmrya tree, Standing on one foot/Exceeding all other trees/Winking at the sky”) or “Amader Choto Nadi chole bnake bnake” (“Our little river keeps winding its way”). How do I remember these opening lines even now? And why do I still associate such palm trees and winding little rivers with these lines even now whenever I am in the Bangladeshi countryside? Surely, it must have been my mother who planted Rabindranath in me in my seed time so that he would become embedded in my unconscious, only to surface in my consciousness decades later. It is surely no coincidence that she taught me Bengali and made me learn Rabindranath’s poems indirectly.

 As a boy growing up at a time when the radio was the main source of entertainment in middle-class Bengali houses, my siblings and I were made to listen to Rabindra Sangeet in our house by my father, who felt that he had to share his favourite songs and singers in the musical genre with us, whether we wanted to listen to them or not. Of course, at that age I would have much rather not listen to those solemn-sounding, soulful songs, and whenever I could put my hands on the radio dials, I would listen to English popular music on Radio Ceylon. My favourite singers were Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, Cliff Richards and—a little later—the Beatles. In school, when we were not playing or talking about sports or girls, we boys would be discussing the pop music we heard on Radio Ceylon. By the end of the 60s, we would be talking about the English thrillers and comedies we saw on Dhaka television. What place could Rabindranath have in one’s life then? If Rabindranath had been placed in my innermost self by my mother through her reading of his poems to us children or my father through his addiction to Rabindra Sangeet, for the moment he was getting occluded deep inside me and, it would now seem, all but forgotten!

But from the middle of the 1960s, our lives in Dhaka began to change as the claims of Pakistan on us East Pakistanis started to loosen, little by little. It was a time when in neighbourhoods and on streets, processions would come out singing gonosangeet—literally songs of the people, but in effect music of protest and patriotism.  First, the Six Points Movement and then the Agartala Conspriacy case were on everyone’s lips and East Pakistanis everywhere were becoming activists in one way or the other. There was no escaping songs like “Shonar Bangla” (“Golden Bengal”) or “Banglar mati, banglar jol, banglar baiuo, banglar phol/Punno houk”” ( “Let the land, the waters, the air and fruits of Bengal be blessed…) and “Bartho Praner Aborjona Purea Phele Agun Jalo” (“Burn the frustrated soul’s detritus and light up a flame”). In my school where we boys now studied “Advanced English” and “Easy Bengali”. There was no way we could have learned enough Bengali to read Rabindranath or Nazrul in the original in any sustained attempt, but how could we escape the call from such songs and poems like Nazrul’s “Bidrohi” (“The Rebel”) or the call from the streets to protest and even burn for our emancipation?  At home, three of my four sisters would be practicing Rabindra Sangeet regularly, since this was what my parents wanted them to do, and so there would be no evading Rabindranath’s songs at home for this reason as well, but I was more interested in friends and sports than staying home and so I would hear the songs only in snatches at this time.

By the end of the decade though, Rabindranath was everywhere in our lives since becoming Bengali became first and being a Pakistani only came later. Even on Dhaka Television, Rabindranath’s songs and dance numbers were being aired fairly regularly then. Outside, one could get to see his plays and dance dramas being performed every now and then in functions and cultural events all over the city. He would soon become an important part of Pohela Boisakh, which itself would become instantly popular amongst us all almost as soon as Chhayanaut[1] organised the first event in Balda Garden as the decade came to a close.  But while Rabindranath was everywhere around me all of a sudden, I was still not reading him at all, preferring English thrillers and westerns initially, and later, when I became a “serious” reader from college onwards, contemporary classics of English and European literature available in English editions.

In the early seventies, however, you could not be in Bangladesh without imbibing Rabindranath at least a little, for there was a process of osmosis at work at this time. Glued as we were to Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendro[2] during our Liberation War[3], we kept listening to his patriotic songs on our radios; the promise of Shonar Bangla seemed alive and possible then. The years after liberation, my generation was exposed to Rabindranath in new ways; we would get to hear and view singers like Kanika, Debobroto and Suchitra Mitra on stage in Dhaka; their songs became freely available in tapes in our shops; and Satyajit Ray’s film version of Rabindranath’s fiction and Ray’s documentary on him became staples of Dhaka’s film societies. I was finally growing up intellectually and was hungry for culture, and so how could I have escaped the poet’s works totally at this time?

But the Rabindranath that I was imbibing thus was almost entirely coming to me aurally and visually. Because he was becoming embedded in my consciousness through songs and the silver screen as well as television, he still inhabited the surface of my consciousness. And I was certainly not making any conscious bid to savor him. The seventies and the eighties were, in fact, decades when I was becoming an even more “serious” student of English literature than before and getting “advanced” degrees in my subject and acquiring expertise for my teaching career; where would I get the time to read Rabindranath then? As an expatriate student for six years in Canada and as a visiting faculty member for two years in the USA, I would be getting small doses of Rabindranath in those countries through the songs I kept hearing in the cassettes I had brought along of my favorite singers and in the occasional film versions of his work that I would get to see because of campus film societies, and I suppose nostalgia played a part in my yearning for him then, but I had no time to spare for him and not enough exposure to his works to let his ideas and his achievement resonate in me in any way.

To sum up my encounters with Rabindranath till then, I was discovering Rabindranath in small doses all the time and experiencing him directly here and there, but my knowledge was all very superficial and my understanding of him too limited. And nothing much had happened that would allow me to tap into the unconscious where all the memories of poems and songs by him I had first come across through my parents’ enthusiasm for his works were hidden.

“Dekha hoi nai chokkhu melia/Ghor hoite shudhu dui pa felia”/

“I haven’t seen with my eyes wide open/what was there only a stride or two away from my house”

In the 1980s, I became smitten by theory, especially the works of Edward Said, and suddenly questions of postcoloniality, ideology, power and location became all-important for my understanding of literature. I was coming around to the belief that I could not be a good and truly advanced student of English literature in Bangladesh, let alone a good teacher of the subject here, unless I sensitised myself to my roots and look at the world around me. And now I remembered some lines I had been hearing since childhood without realising their relevance for me and everyone else around us then: “Dekha hoi nai chokkhu melia/Ghor hoite shudhu dui pa felia” (“I haven’t seen with my eyes wide open/What was there only a stride or two away from my house”). Rabindranath had been all around me and yet I had not opened my eyes wide enough to learn from him. I had not read his works with any kind of sensitised attention at all and I had not been able to arrive at any kind of appreciation of his achievements except the smug sense of self-satisfaction at the thought that this Bengali had once won the Nobel Prize.

Towards the end of the 1990s, for the first time really, I plunged into Rabindranath and found—to quote Dryden on Chaucer— “here was God’s plenty”. Having opened my eyes to him I realized that there was so much to him than one could take in at any one time. He had once said in a song about the infinite contained in the finite and I now thought, “How appropriate of him!” He had said in one of his most famous poems, “Balaka[4]” about how one must not succumb to stasis and how the essence of life is motion and I thought, “how inspirational!” He had written in a song about viewing the Ultimate Truth through music and I thought “Exactly!” He had looked on in amazement in a starry night at how humans have a place in the cosmos (Akaash Bhora Surjo Tara[5]) and I thrilled at the idea now. He made me see the monsoonal kadam flower that I had passed every year without blinking an eye as immensely lovely. Every poem that I read enlightened me, every song lent my soul harmony, every short story or novel took me to eternal truths about human relationships. Who would not learn from a man who had been given some of the highest honors the world has offered any human being, when he says with such unambiguous humility, “Mor nam ei bole khati houk/Aami tomaderi lok…” Let this be my claim to fame/I am all yours/This is how I would like to be introduced.” And so I kept reading him in between teaching and writing, finding him an endless source of inspiration, creativity and wisdom. I strove to learn about nature, the universe, people, relationships, beauty and the dark side of humans through his works.  And soon I felt compelled to translate some of them.  

Rabindranath, then, opened my eyes not only to the world I lived in but also helped me discover my own self as a product of forces that had taken our nation past 1947 to true liberation. He helped root me in Bengali and Bangladesh as never before, making me discover myself not merely as a Bengali but as a citizen of the world, a product of a certain history but also of the history of mankind. My discovery of him and my place in the world was furthered by the work I did in co-authoring The Essential Tagore and authoring a collection of essays on diverse aspects of his work.

But Rabindranath truly contains multitudes. What I now realise is that it is impossible to discover him fully in one life, especially when one embarks on the process of discovery so late in life. By now, therefore, I have despaired of knowing the whole man and feel I will get to know only parts of him. But I also know whatever I read of him will enlighten me and make me know myself better in every way than before. And so I’ll keep reading him and translating him, if only to know him and myself better in the days left for me!  

[1] Centre for promotion of Bengali Culture established in 1961

[2] Free Bengal Radio Centre

[3] 1971 Bangladesh was liberated from Pakistan.

[4] Swans

[5] The Star-Studded Sky

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Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibonananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).

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Categories
Poetry

‘Only Endings and Beginnings are Real…’

By Shahalam Tariq

JANUARY: DECEMBER 

December and January
are not real months – they do not seem to be;
They are like translucent blurs
in the puddle of the whole year’s colours.
But,
Perhaps it’s the other way around
and only December and January
are real.
Maybe our lives are translucent
colourless blurs.
And all the colours are just
our assumptions, expectations,
our dreams and hopes,
which we fill into our days ourselves
– so that life may seem a bit bearable.
And maybe,
only endings and beginnings are real.
Perhaps, that’s why
beginnings always seem so difficult,
and endings are so heartbreaking.

Shahalam Tariq is a writer and student based in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. His writings on history, theory and literature have appeared in The Friday Times and Bazm e Dana. His poems have appeared in The Writers Sanctuary, an anthology of poetry.

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Categories
Essay

Where the Rice is Blue and Dinosaurs Roar…

By Ravi Shankar

The Kuala Terengganu Skyline. Photo courtesy: Ravi Shankar

The lighting was subtle but magnificent. The transparent minarets glowed red, green, pink, and blue in turn. We were at the Masjid Kristal on the island of Wan Man at Kuala Terengganu in the state of the same name in northern Malaysia.

Majid Kristal

The mosque is among the most photographed monuments in the Islamic Heritage Park, and we could easily guess why. This is the first intelligent mosque in the country with an IT infrastructure and wi-fi connection. We were glad we came. The reflection of the mosque lights on water was enchanting. Getting around KT — as Kuala Terengganu is lovingly called by the locals — could sometimes be tricky without your own vehicle. Ride hailing services may not work optimally in the peak hours of the evening. We were informed by one of the cab drivers that Maxim is the most popular e-hailing app in the city.  

The population in KT loves to eat out and in the evenings the restaurants are usually crowded. We were staying at the Intan Beach Resort at Pantai Batu Burok and the eating places by the beach were always crowded. The beach is popular with locals with several attractions and rides during the evenings. There is a three-kilometre walking path by the side of the beach. As we stayed right by the beach, we could enjoy early morning strolls on the soft sand.

Panti Batu Burok: Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar

The Kuala Terengganu state museum was huge and is located on over 23 acres of land. The museum was officially opened in 1996 and was designed by a well-known Malaysian architect, YM Raja Dato’ Kamarul Bahrin Shah, who also happens to be related to the royal family of Terengganu. The building is designed in traditionally Malay style and the outer façade was left undecorated. There are nine different galleries, and these include the Royal gallery, the historical gallery, the textiles gallery, the Islamic gallery, the handicrafts, the natural resources, the shipping and trading and the marine resources galleries.

Tha Batu Bersurat. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar

The ‘Batu Bersurat’ (lettered stone) is the museum centrepiece and of great significance to the state. The stone is estimated to be 700 years old and mentions the position of Islam and the application of Islamic laws in the state. The stone is written in the Jawi script using Arabic characters. Jawi script is still used in Terengganu though in many areas Malay is written mostly in the Roman script. In the museum grounds, there is a good collection of different old cars and other vehicles used by the King and Chief Ministers of the state.  

The Islamic Heritage Park is a major attraction located on the island of Wan Man. The park has small scale replicas of famous global Islamic monuments. Among the monuments represented are the mosques at Medina and Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Dome of the rock in Jerusalem, the Taj Mahal in India, and a mosque in Aleppo, Syria. The national mosque of Malaysia and mosques in Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, China, Tatarstan, Uzbekistan, and Iraq are also on display. Replicas of these famous monuments were displayed in the vast gardens of the monument. I liked this concept, and the monuments were well maintained except one or two that may require more attention.

The Floating Mosque. Courtesy: Creative Commons
Details of the Floating Mosque. Courtesy: Ravi Shankar

The sun was hot, and I had to drink copious amounts of water.  In the evening, my friend, Binaya, and I went to the floating mosque situated in Kuala Ibai Lagoon near the estuary of Kuala Ibai River, 4 km from Kuala Terengganu Town. The mosque combines modern and Moorish architecture, and is a white structure situated in five acres of land. There is also a floating mosque in Penang.

The next morning, we went to the Science and Creativity Centre. The centre is housed in a huge, modern building. There are multiple galleries to explore. I was fascinated by the stainless-steel exhibit showing the structure of DNA, the blueprint of life. The encounter with the dinosaurs was the highlight of the trip. The dinosaurs were colour coded in red (dangerous), yellow (exercise caution) and green (safe). Tyrannosaurus Rex was the highlight. Raptors, allosaurus and other dinos filled the hall with their cries and screams. The Stegosaurus had scales on the back. When I was young, I was a big fan of Phantom comics created by Lee Falk and Phantom had a stegosaurus as a pet. The inflatable dome on the top floor had a delightful cosmic show and you can see the universe projected above your head. The museum had plenty of things to see and do and is a big hit with children.

Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar

The Masjid Sultan Ismail Chendering has delicate artwork and is built entirely in white. The simple design and the beautiful artwork had me mesmerised. The mosque has a long history. The small Lebai Zainal Mosque which could accomodate150 people was first built near the current location of the mosque before being replaced by the Raja Chendering Mosque and then replaced again by a new mosque which is the Sultan Ismail Mosque.

Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar

Soon it was time for lunch. There are plenty of food options near our hotel. I enjoyed nasi kerabu, a Malaysian rice dish, in which blue-coloured rice is eaten with dried fish or fried chicken, crackers, pickles and other salads. The blue colour of the rice comes from the petals of Clitoria ternatea flowers, which are used as a natural food colouring.

In the evening, we went to see the Abidin Mosque which is Terengganu’s old state royal mosque built by Sultan Zainal Abidin II between 1793 and 1808. The Royal mausoleum is located next to the mosque. Istana Maziah, the official palace of the Sultan of Terengganu is located close to the mosque at the foot of the mountain, Bukit Puteri. The palace is the official venue for important functions such as royal birthdays, weddings, conferment of titles and receptions for local and foreign dignitaries. We wanted to climb Bukit Puteri, but the place was under renovation and closed.

We continued along the waterfront to the Shah Bandar jetty. A cool breeze was blowing, and many people were strolling along the promenade. We were moving toward the Kuala Terengganu drawbridge constructed in 2019 inspired by the London drawbridge. We waited for the sky to darken so that we could see the lights on the bridge.

Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar

Buses from KL take the highway to Kuantan and then bypass the town. The journey continues to the town of Paka and then takes the coastal highway through Dungun. Some parts of this state reminded me of my home state of Kerala in South India. Plenty of coconut trees were seen. Coconut trees grow so well in Kerala and in many areas along the west coast of India.

The expressways in Malaysia are well-designed and maintained. Traveling on these are usually a smooth experience though they get very crowded during major holidays when people leave Kuala Lumpur for their hometowns and villages. KT is about 400 km from KL and takes around eight hours by bus. Malaysia’s northern state on the East Coast can be a good getaway. The town and the state has culture, history, natural beauty, delicious food, and serene beaches. The islands off the coast were still closed. Redang island was mentioned to be one of the most beautiful islands in the world. Hopefully, we will visit these during our next trip. God willing, we shall!  

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Dr. P Ravi Shankar is a faculty member at the IMU Centre for Education (ICE), International Medical University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He enjoys traveling and is a creative writer and photographer.

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Categories
Interview Review

Hyderabad’s History Retold by Common People

A brief introduction to Remaking History:1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, published by Cambridge University Press, and a conversation with the author, Afsar Mohammed

Afsar Mohammad

In a world given to wars and fanning differences, an in-depth study of history only reflects how we can find it repeating itself. In Remaking History:1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad, academic and writer, Afsar Mohammad, takes us back to the last century to help us fathom a part of history that has remained hoary to many of us.

On 15thAugust, 1947, when India and Pakistan ‘awoke’ to a freedom amidst the darkness of hatred and bloody trains and rivers, there was a part of the subcontinent which remained independent and continued under the rule of a Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, Asaf Jah VII. This was Hyderabad. Later, in post-Jinnah times, when India decided to integrate the independent kingdom, which had even found a name for its independent existence — ‘Osmanistan’ — what broke out was an episode called Police Action, code name Operation Polo. Mohammad’s book is an exhaustive relook at the integration of a people into the mainstream nation of India, using the voices of common people.

There were strands of communists in the Telangana movement and the mercenaries we know of as Razakars. His own family was involved in the events, and he had an uncle arrested for the performance of Burra Katha, a form of theatre used by Left to educate the audience, somewhat like a musical street theatre. Mohammad has interviewed survivors extensively and knitted into his narrative findings which make us wonder if religion or nationalism were used as a subtext of power play and greed. For, we have the local cultural lore where the people despite differences in faith had a tehzeeb or a way of life, where Hindu writers wrote in Urdu for the love of it and Muslims used Telugu.

Afsar Mohammad interviewing an activist from a basti in Old Hyderabad. Photo Credits: Sajaya Kakarla

Hyderabad was perceived by some as a sanctuary, like writer Jaini Mallaya Gupta. He contends: “Like me, many leftist writers and activists had migrated to the city at that point and they became popular by using pseudonyms. Hyderabad was like a sanctuary as it could hide us in its remote neighborhoods where we were supported by local Muslim community too. But we all became really closer to each other and more connected to the Urdu literary culture that indeed provided a model for our activities.”

But did things stay that way post Operation Polo? Razia, a witness to the police action, states: “It was a phase of unfortunate turns—everything so unexpected! Not about the Razakars or the Nizam, but most of the ordinary Muslims (ām Musalmān) whom I know fully well since my childhood had a hard time. Particularly young Muslim men and women … all suddenly became suspects and many of them from their homes leaving everything. They just wanted to live somewhere rather than dying in the bloody hands of the Razakars and Hindu fundamentalists.”

That cultural hegemony has a tendency of typecasting languages based on political needs is shown as a myth by Mohammad as both Hindu and Muslims used Urdu and Telugu in Hyderabad. His book revives Hyderabadi tehzeeb as the ultimate glue for defining a Hyderabadi. This is somewhat similar to what Bengal faced which had been divided along religious lines in 1947. Professor Fakrul Alam, a well-known academic, essayist and translator, tells us in his essay on the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, “The key issue here was language and the catalyst was the insistence by the central government of Pakistan that Urdu should be the lingua franca of the country…” Bangladesh emerged as a protest against linguistic and cultural hegemony. Eminent writer, Aruna Chakravarti, goes further back in history in her historical novel, Daughters of Jorasanko (2016), and shows how Tagore was involved in preventing the division of Bengal proposed by Lord Curzon in 1905. However, despite these historic precedents, we are seeing the world suffer wars from such divides and common people continue to be affected by the violence and bloodshed, losing their homes, livelihoods and often, their lives. What happened in the last century continues to reiterate itself more virulently in the current world. In times such as these, Remaking History surfaces as a book that has much to offer, perhaps if humanity is willing to learn lessons from history.

Your book is focussed on a small group of people, the common people of Hyderabad who suffered during the integration into a nation. Why would this be important in a larger context? How would it assimilate into stories of the world? By stories, I would mean plight of Rohingyas, Muslims, Jews … more or less plight of minority groups of people. Do you see any emerging patterns in all these stories?

In this work, I’ve consistently used the category of ordinary people as related to Hyderabad and Deccan. I needed this term to speak about both Hindus and Muslims as I was constantly reminded of the divisive politics persistent in this region and throughout South Asia. Despite the focus on the Muslims of Hyderabad, this work emphasises the inseparability of Hindus and Muslims when it comes to the violence and trauma of the Police Action of 1948. According to many interlocutors, the violence had inflicted the entire community — mostly the ordinary people of the Deccan.

I started writing this book with a primary idea that this lens of ordinariness helps us to not just this 1948 violence in Deccan, but many other religious conflicts now rampant through the globe. The examples you just mentioned above are not an exception. Since we’re blind to an ordinary person’s approach or emotional life, we totally failed to capture many dimensions of these violent events. Most patterns, either subjective or objective, that emerge out of this violence and trauma have their origins in this search for ordinariness.

Along with a few interviews, you have brought up the issues through writings of great Telugu and Urdu writers of that time. Can you tell us if literature actually translates to real life situations?

To be honest, being a writer and poet by myself, I’ve always believed that literature is half-truth which is filtered by multi-dimensional subjectivity of a writer. Specifically, when there’s a political situation, literary writings also tend to project a partial reality. However, these gaps could be filled by empirical evidence that we gather from the stories of ordinary people who not only witnessed the violence, but also suffered many setbacks caused by such violence. Yet, we require a balanced perspective to level these oral narratives and written materials. In this way, rather than relying fully on a singular story, we can explore the possibilities of multiple stories of a singular event.

Your family and you profess Leftist leanings. And yet, you write of religious minorities. Historically, the Left professes to be above traditional religions, like Hinduism and Islam. How do you integrate religion into communist ideology? Would you agree with Harari that Left is a religion unto itself?

One of the major critiques in this work is to contest the left-centric approach to 1948 and even the Telangana armed rebellion of 1946-1951. As I argued in this book, leftist writers, poets and ideologues completely failed to capture the reality of the day. I’ve presented evidence for this argument from various writings and witness narratives too. Since their high emphasis on economic determinism, many key social and religious dimensions remained their blind spots. Various religious and caste developments during the periods of the 1930s and 40s were determining factors of modern Indian history. Yes, of course, I still believe in the Leftist ideology, but never worship it though! To put it simply, I’m a critical Leftist and critical Muslim!

‘Popular understanding is largely shaped by what exists in circulation. This is what we see in the form of how people understand the Police Action across India as well as folklore, including the reconstructed folk narratives such as Adluri Ayodhya Rama Kavi’s burra katha. Such popular representations further reinforce the larger narrative peddled by the state.’ What exactly is burra katha? And what was your family involvement in it?

Burra katha was a popular storytelling and music genre in Telugu utilised by the leftist organisations to circulate their idea of resistance against the status quo in Telangana and elsewhere. Shaik Nazar was an icon of this radical narrative tradition and he also trained hundreds of disciples in this genre. Most artists and writers from the leftist camp were busy producing stories based on the Telangana armed rebellion and other resistance movements to gather the people in the public meetings between 1946 and 1952. My family also had some role in the production and circulation of this genre. However, it’s a story beyond my family’s history and had numerous political and performative implications that I’ve discussed in my book. I already have a detailed narrative of these personal and professional connections in my book and I encourage my readers to access them directly from the book. Just a brief note, many performers were arrested and put in prisons for months and months during this armed rebellion and they also suffered heavily due to the oppression of the Nehru’s government.

A burra katha performance

Do you see a parallel between what was happening then to such performers and protest writers in more recent times? Do you find still that popular opinion is being shaped by stuff circulating in media?

I see many parallels between the past and the present conditions of performers and writers who speak out against the hierarchies and status quo. Recent times, we see more strategic ways of silencing such protest and performance genres. Various apparatuses of the state have become extremely powerful and most writers/performers are being cleverly trapped into a governmental system. Nevertheless, there’re always exceptions. This book captures such intense moments that stubbornly contested the government-led media or privileges. We need more such strong voices to change the current state of things.

Were Razakars the Nizam’s army? I had been under the impression that they were mercenaries — irrespective of religion. But you say they were volunteers. Can you explain who were the Razakars exactly?

During the earliest phase of the Razakar activism, this was not Nizam’s army. It was supposed to be a group of young Muslims who volunteered to initiate radical changes in the Hyderabadi-Deccan Muslim community.  In that sense, Razakar was a “volunteer,” the actual literal meaning of the term. Later, when Kasim Razvi became the president of this group, it took on a totally different manifestation. Razvi promoted a version of the Razakar activism that eventually served the military needs of the Nizam. I actually tried to show these different faces/phases of Razakar activism by collecting evidence from various writings and oral histories.

Before the Indian government ‘integrated’ the state of Hyderabad, there seems to have been a simmering of resentment against the Nawabi lifestyle and the common people, irrespective of their religious beliefs as you have shown. Do you find in the world context such reactions against wars or cultural hegemony currently?

Before, during and after the integration of the state into the Indian national government, it was an extremely complicated situation which we could name it as a “transition” period. It was similar to many states in India, but Hyderabad state had a peculiar situation due to its local politics and Deccani identity. Of course, there was a resistance to the Nawabi lifestyle as the new generation Muslims were engaging with many facets of modernity and embracing a reformist version of Islam. Nevertheless, these changes were not merely the products of local Muslim life. As I argued in the book, local Islam and Muslim sense of belonging was in constant dialogue with the larger networks of Islam and Muslim politics. I see similar thread continuing in contemporary Muslim discourse since 1992 when Hindu nationalism became a defining factor for many identities.

Did and do common people resent the “integration” as they did the Nawab? What would be the cause of that? Was it religion or economic and social discontent that becomes the focal point of riots then and as of now?

Whereas the Nawab’s resistance had his own political and private reasons, as I noticed from the evidence, the resistance from ordinary people had more to do with the common good and also, there was a protest against the way the entire military invasion was initiated and promulgated. People were concerned about the atrocities of the military which were aimed at wiping out the leftist movement on the first hand. At the end of the day, the Nawab and the Nehru government remained safe and friendly, while thousands of people were killed for this power sharing. Despite several different viewpoints, most of the public opinion was against this military invasion and the killings.  

Why is evolving a Muslim, or for that matter any religious identity, important in today’s world? Will these not lead to conflict as we are experiencing in the post-pandemic twenty first century?

It’s not about a specific religious identity: now it’s high time for any identity to be discussed and disseminated. I see this more as a conflict resolution so that we become aware of our differences and learn the limits of our discourses. We’ve bigger issues that the pandemic. We’ve caste, religion, gender and regional issues that we need to sort out gradually. Many conflicts around us are due to our failure to acknowledge these identities and their role in the making of our community.

“The nationalist/textbook version of history is determined by the nation-state as is seen in how a nascent India emphasized and celebrated the ‘integration’ with an utter disregard for native opinion or the costs people paid associated with the bloody event.” Is this true not just in the Indian context but in context of the battles we see happening in the world?

Yes! Absolutely! The desire for “integration” is a product of hegemonic politics and turning into global phenomenon and we’re all plagued by the idea of nationalism and we’re forced to declare a singular nation, culture and language in many instances. We’ve too many examples right now to prove this and I don’t have to rehearse everything here.

Can you suggest a solution to finding and enforcing, peace, love, kindness and forgiving?

At first, we need to realise our mutual desire for such love and compassion. Our sheer dependence on political parties and making their goals as our own goals is a self-defeat by all means. I see community as a larger concept and we need to acknowledge its real sources of being and belongingness.

Thanks for your time and the comprehensive book.

.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

Categories
Interview Review

The Gendered Body

In conversation with Meenakshi Malhotra and a brief introduction to The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle (Scopus Index), edited by Meenakshi Malhotra, Krishna Menon and Rachana Johri, published by Routledge

Dr Meenakshi Malhotra

Why would one half of the world population be seen as evolved from the rib of the first man, soulless or as merely subservient to fulfil the needs of the other half? This is a question that has throbbed for centuries in the hearts of that half that suffers indignities to this date, women. While feminism became a formalised idea only in the 18th-19th century and things started improving for certain groups of women around the world, in some regions, like Afghanistan, the situation has deteriorated in recent years. Their government, recognised by world leadership, has ensured that women do not have schooling, cannot work in senior positions, have to be accompanied by men if they go out and remain covered as the feminine body could tempt bringing shame, strangely, to the female but not to the man who has the right to be tempted and hence to violence and violate her body and her mind.

Given this ambience, any literature voicing protest for patriarchal mindsets that accept situations like in current day Afghanistan passively, should be celebrated as an attempt to shard the silence of suffering by one half of the world population. The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle, edited by three academics, Meenakshi Malhotra, Krishna Menon and Rachana Johri, does just that. At the start, we are told: “This book situates the discourse on the gendered body within the rapidly transitioning South Asian socio-economic and cultural landscape.  It critically analyzes gender politics from different disciplinary perspectives…”

Featuring 22 writers, the narratives take up a range of issues faced by women in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Srilanka. The Pakistani implementation of Islamic law, under the Hudood ordinances, has been addressed in a powerful essay by Aysha Baqir, subsequently by Anu Aneja, in her discourse on Urdu poetry. It was interesting to read how the ghazal form started as a male-only art form where women were depicted as mysterious houris or pining with sadness. Birangona — a phrase that was given to rape victims of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War — has been explored by Sohana Manzoor through a classic, Rizia Rahman’s novel, Rokter Okshor[1](1978), written about such women driven to prostitution. Women’s voices in the Sri Lankan LTTE have been explored by Simran Chaddha. Nayema Nasir has taken up decadent customs in the progressive Bohra community in Mumbai and shown how things are moving towards a change. Colonial and Dalit voices have found a hearing in Malhotra’s essay on Mahasweta Devi’s short story, ‘Draupadi’, set against the Naxalite movement of 1970s.

Dotted with women’s responses to a variety of current issues, including the Anti-CAA-NRC uprisings (Tamanna Basu), Shaheen Bagh (Meenakshi Gopinath, Krishna Menon, Rukmini Sen and Niharika Banerjea), and the pandemic (Krishna Menon, Deepti Sachdev and Rukmini Sen), there is even a case study by Shalini Masih dealing with psychiatric trauma where both the psychiatrist and the patient, who might have evolved into a stalker or a rapist without the therapy, heal. A certain sense of hope echoes through some of these narratives, a hope to heal from wounds that have sweltered over eons.

The flow of words is smooth and the ideas should be able to rise against the tide of erudition to touch our lives with lived realities. There are responses that transcend the heaviness of academic writing for instance the impassioned start made by Giti Chandra in her narrative: “A woman’s body is a story that men tell each other. When it is full-hipped, it is a tale of their healthy children; when it is fair, it speaks of their wealth; when it is narrow, it proclaims their access to gyms; and when it is tanned, it flaunts their ability to vacation on sunny isles. If its feet are not small enough to convey a leisure that does not require walking, they are bound and made smaller and more childishly submissive; if its legs are not long enough befitting its trophy status, bone-crippling heels are added to them. When it is raped it is an assertion of power, a chest-thumping; when it is raped it is an aggression over its owner; when it is raped its womb is stolen from the enemy…” Chandra points out some things that make one think, like quoting Rahila Gupta, she suggests victims is not the word we should use for women, but we should refer to the sufferers as survivors.

This collection of essays questions social norms and niceties to realise what early woman’s rights activist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, drafted, that “all men and women [had been] created equal” in July 1848. While the struggle continues through centuries and the discourse of these narratives, the last essay by a man, Brijesh Rana, attempts to give a broader and more inclusive outlook to the whole human body. The book comes across as a tryst — of academic and feminist voices — to speak up for mankind to equalise.

To further understand the intent and scope of this book, we have in conversation one of the editors— Meenakshi Malhotra, who teaches gender studies and literature, has to her credit two Charles Wallace fellowships and a number of books. She reflects on the bridge that is being attempted between scholarship and activism.

How and when did you conceive this book? Tell us a bit about your journey from the conception to the publication of the book.

This book was originally conceived due to the positive response my co-editors and I received after presenting a panel at an American Association of Asian studies (AAS) conference back in 2017. We were approached by an international publisher who encouraged us to take forward the work with a focus on South Asia. We were unable to take it forward at that time, however we revived the project a few months into the lockdown in late 2020 when we felt we had a little more time. Also, along the way, we were able to reach out to fellow travellers, working in and on Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Three of you have collaborated to compile and edit this book. Collaborations to bring out books are not easy. Tell us about this collaboration.

As we three had presented on the same panel, the collaboration was a natural corollary since we had a sense of being fellow travellers and sister academics/scholars. That worked well for us because each of us were engaged in research and research guidance and wanted to showcase the recent work in this area. Both the co-editors, Krishna working on gender and its intersections with politics and Rachna on gender and psychology are very well-established scholars in the field of gender. I work on gender and literature, had my own network and I must mention that in the course of writing for Borderless Journal, I was able to access the work of others on that platform.

Explain to us the significance of the title of your book.

I think we arrived at the title through two processes-one was the immediate situation of Covid which left us in a state of precarity. However, we felt that even within the context of the contagion, women — and other genders — were endangered in specific ways. Second is the understanding that the body is always already produced by multiple matrices of gender, race, caste etc. The human body is also always a gendered body.

We had initially suggested that we call it ‘The Gendered Body and its Fragments’ to connote the bundling of several discursive strands on gendered bodies, but the idea was vetoed (by the initial reviewer) since “fragments” had   resonances and nuances which we did not have space (or expertise) to go into, at that point.

You have a variety of contributors, some of who are non- academic. What did you look for when you chose your content?

Variety as you point out, is the key term. We were looking for something new, something interesting, flagging the variegated cultures of South Asian societies. The book comprises a mix of experienced researchers and some researchers whose essays are their preliminary forays into publishing.

Your book is divided into different sections ‘Negotiation’, ‘Struggle’, ‘Resistance’, ‘Protest’, ‘Critique’, ‘Representations and New Directions’. Can you tell us the need to compartmentalise the essays into this structural frame?

Just to give it a structure, organisation and coherence. Having said that, there are also frequent overlaps.

Would you call this book feminist? Feminism is as such a human construct. Why would this construct be essential for treating people equally? What is the need for feminism?

It is feminist in its orientation to the research areas as well as its methodologies. The key concept here is collaboration and therefore we have two conversation as an expression of feminist epistemology or knowledge-making.

Feminism, like other modes of affirmative action — like reservations, quotas — are an attempt to create a level playing field for historically disprivileged groups  and oppressed minorities.

Having said that, I/we would like to point out that feminism has become inclusive and an umbrella term that also includes the work on masculinities and trans-identities since the 1990s.

Isn’t feminism the forte of only women?

Not at all and that is why we have the term feminisms. We hope to do more work subsequently on masculinities, on trans bodies in the future.

You have 21 women writers who write of women’s issues. Yet the last is an essay by a man — not on feminist issues— but more to create a sense of inclusivity, if I am not wrong. Why did you feel the need for this essay?

It is not so much about women’s issues as much as about gendered bodies in contemporary South Asia, about identities, subjectivities, bodies in motion gearing up for political action(the conversation and the essay on campus movements are instances).

Also, the last essay which articulates a post-humanist perspective, I felt, would take us beyond the materialities of gendered bodies and flag the way recent research/scholarship has looked at the Anthropocene. It was attempting to give a meta perspective, to bring in a way of seeing, which probably will have an impact on how we understand and conceptualise human bodies.

Your book blurb says: “Topical and comprehensive, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of gender studies, sociology, political sociology, social anthropology, cultural studies, post-colonial studies and South Asian studies.” Why would you limit the scope of your book when you have some essays that should be read by many and are like eye openers, like the ones on Hudood, Birangonas, Bohras, even your own on ‘Draupadi’ and more?

I think Routledge as an academic publisher, probably does this routinely, to highlight the academic terrain any new book covers.

Having said that, we would definitely want the book to be of general interest. Some of the essays discussed issues which were possibly eye-openers for us as well.

What is the difference between academic writing and non-academic writing? You do both, I know.

Academic writing has often a thesis and an argument underpinning it, which is not to say that non-academic writing — especially the essay — cannot have them.

Also, many of the essays were based on student papers/MPhil and even PhD dissertations. The panel we were a part of was an academic conference on South Asian studies.

Would this book be classified as women’s writing as majority of the writers are women and have written on women’s issues… and yet there is a man? Is it necessary to have such classifications? Would it rule out male readers?

Not at all to every question. It just happens that many of our contributors are women, but I would like to dispel the idea that “gender” is about women only. It is about boxes, stereotypes and role-based expectations, which are to be questioned. 

Thanks for giving us a powerful book and your time.

[1] Words of Blood

(The online interview has been conducted through emails and the review written by Mitali Chakravarty.)

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International