The year our country was
ambushed by the occupying
troops from the plains. The

first night of broken glass.
Exploding grenades. Eine Kleine
Nachtmusik.

Our house was in an ambulance,
by the clock tower. As soon as
you left, the sirens went off.

Only silence could have brought
you back from the dead.

When they burnt the city library,
I lost my hair lock. The
(only) souvenir from your museum
of innocence.

Then they shot down buildings,
with rockets. My love
came crashing down.

(It was a veiled declaration of war
that rehearsed preparations for a
massacre every year,
each Friday.)

I looked for your
hairpins in the rubble, digging
nails in the blood and shadows.

Your echoes had inhabited
the night. There was enough time
to lie beside you, under the dome
of rock, in death.

The dust settled, at the break of
dawn. Then ash fell
from the skies. Then the dead
of our country fell asleep.

Forever.

Omair Bhat is a poet from Kashmir. His poems have appeared in publications which include Wande Magazine, The Sunflower Collective, Kashmir Lit, and Cafe Dissensus.

Rachelle Bharathi Chandran, Kazi Neel, Karishma Hazarika, Shalim M Hussain, Nzanmongi Jasmine Patton, Nilanjana Bhattacharjee, Changmin Yuan and Nicolas Jaoul.

Most of us grew up with the idea that home is shelter. Those who could not relate to this idea thought there must be something wrong with us. In a practical sense, it is a shelter. It is also revered in cinema, literature and religious texts as ghar ek mandir.

The chaukath of the house is a tired metaphor, neatly dividing the inside and the outside — this side Ram, that side Ravan with 10 heads full of evil thoughts; this side Sita, that side Surpanakha snatching away prized brahmin men.

But home is also its absence. Home isn’t where the feet are, for those who walk on flimsy soil. They aren’t sucked up by the earth but constantly spurned for breathing the air they do not deserve. Madhu Chindaki, whose case still awaits trial, was murdered in broad daylight on February 22, 2018, because he was hungry and thought he had a home. So did the Muslim residents of Dhamaspur village, Gurgaon, who had been living in that locality for years and thought at least video evidence of the mob attack on them would ensure fair investigation.

Then there are those who are forced to respect their homes they did not know existed. Did the people of Manipur know how important they are to the nation that has for decades now kept them under the shadow of the draconian AFSPA?

This issue of our magazine deals with the various meanings of home. And we hope that in our limited space, we have been able to address some facets of it. This issue includes adaptations of Joy Goswami’s ‘Pagli, Tomar Shonge’ into English by Shalim M Hussain and Assamese by Karishma Hazarika and Kazi Neel. We see how the poem leads separate lives in two languages distinct from the Bengali of the original, and cities (Delhi, Kolkata and Guwahati) with political connotations of their own. Rachelle Bharathi Chandran’s poem ‘ Kintsukuroi’ sees the body as home and talks about how the structures of caste and gender give a person ‘a sense of non-belonging both in the outside world and internally.’ The 10 poems by Changming Yuan explores displacement of space and self, and Nilanjana Bhattacharjee’s personal essay documents the life of her grandmother’s kitchen, verandah and staircase.

We are also extremely excited to carry two folktales of the Lotha Nagas, translated for us by Nzanmongi Jasmine Patton. And in our Not Trending section, we have Nicolas Jaoul’s essay that asks why in this age of ‘heritage ❤’ we still look at Dalit architecture, including Ambedkar statues, as vain show of wealth.

Wishing you a fulfilling read.

Debojit Dutta
Co-founder and editor

Poetry

Aubade: My Home is a Hotel, & Other Poems
by Changming Yuanantiserious.com

Kintsukuroi
by Rachelle Bharathi Chandranantiserious.com

Three Poets Recreate Joy Goswami’s Pagli Tomar Shonge in Assamese and English
by Shalim Hussain, Kazi Neel and Karishma Hazarikaantiserious.com

Folktale

The Sesehampong and the Velongvu: A Lotha-Naga Folktale
translated by Jasmine Pattonantiserious.com

Essay

The Ghost in Thamma’s Kitchen
by Nilanjana Bhattacharjeeantiserious.com

Not Trending

Learning the Use of Symbolic Means: Dalits, Ambedkar Statues and the State in Uttar Pradesh
by Nicolas Jaoulantiserious.com

translated by Jasmine Patton

A long time ago, before the time of our human forefathers, all varieties of animals, fishes, birds and plants lived harmoniously with one another. They flourished in carefree abandon, not a care in the world. But then one day, there was a huge wave of darkness that enveloped the entire earth in its shadows. Once darkness took up home with the living, night and day would keep playing hide and seek for days with no fixed pattern or intervals. This interrupted all activities on the earth as darkness and daylight would come and go at their whims and fancies. This uncertainty was taking a toll on all the inhabitants of earth. It created unending whispers of worry between the animals and birds, fish and plants and all living creatures.

The birds were the wisest of the lot. They were the first to call an assembly to discuss and resolve the ‘emung[1] tona[2] wondang[3]’ crisis at hand. As the birds gathered to put their heads together, they unanimously looked at the wise Velongvu[4] and asked him to give his opinion on the best and amicable solution to the disruptive situation which had besieged their unmarred freedom. So the Velongvu stood upright and clearing his throat, he said, “Thank you my dear friends for putting your faith in me. I suggest that there should be nine days of darkness and nine days of daylight. Nine days we will welcome darkness and the next nine days we will enjoy the bright daylight.” He expected appreciation on what he thought was a prudent recommendation but instead all the birds started vociferously opposing it saying, “Hoto mek[5], hoto mek. That cannot be, that cannot be. What kind of solution is this?” The assemblage of birds was so unhappy with the Velongvu’s suggestion that they all smote him on his head. “Zhuvai[6]! If we still have to endure the long periods from each, how does it make it any better for us? This is not at all the answer to our problem,” they all echoed and continued the rhythmic ‘thwack thwack thwack thwack’, the blows kept raining on his head. The Velongvu was hit so many times that his handsome shapely head flattened out. Lothas till today speak of this story and believe that this is why Velongvus have flat heads. The Velongvu met with so much humiliation that he decided to become nocturnal, waking up only during the dark.

After rejecting the Velongvu’s unacceptable proposal, the birds started their search again, “Who will speak next? We need wise interventions. Who among us is wise enough to give us the right solution?” That is when the Sesehampong[7] volunteered saying, “Ana phyovka[8]”. All the voices silenced out at the sheer boldness of the Sesehampong. They lent their ears to listen to what the Sesehampong had to say. Sesehampong said, “Why don’t we have equal amount of daylight, followed by the same amount of darkness fitted into one day? This could be our routine, so that we never have too much nor too less of either. We need to work and we need to rest so this will meet with both our needs. And of course once this is fixed, we will be able to plan everything better.” There was a huge uproar of thumping and excitement on hearing these words. “Hoto ka, Hoto ka[9]. That is a perfect solution, Sesehampong’s suggestion is right.” The birds were so happy with the wisdom of the Sesehampong that they patted and stroked him repeatedly in gratitude. One bird would say “Hey Sesehampong, great answer. You are so wise.” Then another would congratulate him with more pats “You are everyone’s hero. Wonderful idea! We are so indebted to you”. This continued for so long that by the time all the birds had thanked and patted him, the Sesehampong who was the size of a healthy rooster reduced to a small bird. That is why, following their wise and much-admired ancestor, the current generation of Sesehampongs are as tiny as the human palm. As for us, thanks to the wise Sesehampong, now we have an orderly distribution of day and night.

Nzanmongi Jasmine Patton is a professor, a mother of three, and a passionate translator of oral history. She is the author of A Girl Swallowed by a Tree: Lotha Naga Tales Retold, Aadivani, 2017, and is currently working on a series of illustrated children’s folktales. Her book Zeno and Her Song of Naga Hills will be out in 2019.

[1] Night

[2] And

[3] Day

[4] Owl

[5] Not like that

[6] Foolish

[7] Sunbird

[8] I will speak

[9] It should be so

(This article has been republished with the author’s permission.)

The Ambedkar statue stands as a major feature of the Dalit movement. In the media, the Dalit emphasis on symbolic politics has been dismissed as mere tokenism, and the Ambedkar icon has been denigrated as Westernized. Despite attempts at studying Dalit politics since the BSP became one of the key players in Uttar Pradesh, there has been a lack of scholarly attention to the deeper social changes involved in the Dalits’ relationship with the state. This study of the Ambedkar statues in Uttar Pradesh tries to fill this gap by taking three dimensions into account: the iconography, the way in which the statues have spread historically, and the meanings and stakes involved for those who mobilize around them. The assumption is that the Dalits’ struggles for the imposition of their symbol in public places can contribute to an understanding of the manner in which Dalits have imagined the state and engineered strategies towards it. These statues seem to be the focal point for renewed aspirations towards democracy, while the ceremonies organized around them have provided these deprived citizens the opportunities to build some support within the state.

Acknowledgments: The title of this article is inspired by E. Zelliot’s landmark article ‘Learning the use of political means’ (1970). I would like to thank Christophe Jaffrelot, Owen Lynch and Donal Cruise O’Brien for their comments, as well as Patrick Claffey for his careful reading of a previous version. Shorter versions of the paper were presented at SOAS, London; ADRI, Patna; the G.B. Pant Institute, Allahabad; and the India International Centre, New Delhi, between May and November 2004. Last but not least, my gratitude goes to Dalit activists in UP, especially in the region of Kanpur, for generously sharing their knowledge and for their hospitality.

I. Introduction

Political symbols play a major part in the way a nation is depicted and fed into the imagination of its citizens (Anderson 1983). This symbolic work emanates generally from the official realm but, as this study will show, it may also derive from the initiatives of political parties and social organizations. Thus, different actors involved in the public sphere insist on particular symbols or ‘great men’ that express their different ideologies, different ideas of the nation and identity struggles. These political symbols appeal to people at a more private level, reflecting the internalization of a political imaginaire that contradicts the usual notion of fixed boundaries between state and society. Indeed, as this article seeks to show, it testifies to the circular influence of both in the realm of popular culture (Fuller and Harriss 2000).

The Ambedkar icon, which has become the symbol of Dalit identity, provides an interesting case study of the understanding of and strategies towards the state by the unprivileged in India. Attention to the meanings associated with symbols like the Ambedkar statues by those who mobilize around them thus assists our understanding of grassroots perceptions of Indian democracy. In the context of poverty and illiteracy where they operate, such symbolic means have profound political implications, promoting ideals of citizenship and nationhood among the politically destitute where the state has partially failed. This article seeks to emphasize the instrumental importance of the Ambedkar icon and its contribution to what Khilnani has called the ‘deep politicization’ of Indian society (Khilnani 1997).

In a recent study on the politics of a Muslim brotherhood in Senegal, Donal Cruise O’Brien goes beyond the conventional opposition between ethnicity and nationhood to consider the way ‘symbolic confrontations’ by ethnic organizations sustain participation and thus deepen the feeling of nationhood among illiterate citizens. Such increased participation implies fundamental changes in the way the disadvantaged perceive and relate to the state:

Ideas of participation include the idea that one can organize in making demands of the state, that one can bring the state to act on one’s behalf. In this deep process of social adjustment, the symbolic confrontation has a central role, promoting sectional interests, yes, but in a dialogue with the state, engaging people’s loyalties, in the long run probably strengthening the state, as an institution with its place in the citizens’ imagination (O’Brien 2003: 29).

The author emphasizes the pedagogic dimension of the symbol, which ‘is part of the emergence of a political language, enabling larger numbers of people to define themselves in relation to the state, if you will to make sense of the state’ (O’Brien 2003: 26). O’Brien’s argument can be extended to other post-colonial contexts, where the politicization of the lower orders and the use of religious symbols often go hand in hand. O’Brien takes the example of the Indian struggle for freedom, in which Gandhi used Hindu symbols to appeal to the rural masses and bring them together with the Congress against the colonial state. He also notes how this political pedagogy alienated Indian Muslims who were unable to find themselves reflected in a nation defined by Hindu symbols, thus contributing to the communalization process that led to Partition. This argument can also be applied to the case of radical ‘Untouchables’/Scheduled Castes[1], led by B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), who distrusted Gandhi’s charitable attitude towards them. The latter’s reformed Hinduism was still too close to caste hierarchy to be acceptable to those who suffered from untouchability, and whose leaders feared for their future in an upper-caste-dominated independent India (Ambedkar 1945).

Different terms are used to refer to those segments of the population treated as ‘Untouchables’, according to Brahminical standards, because of their ‘unclean’ occupations such as leather-work, sweeping and scavenging, weaving, cremating the dead, and so on.

The term ‘Scheduled Castes’ is an official category, framed by the colonial state in 1935 to implement special policies towards the Untouchables following the Poona Pact agreement between Gandhi and Ambedkar. The term ‘Harijan’ (‘People of God’) was invented by a Gujarati poet of the 17th century and popularised by Gandhi after 1932 in order to promote the acceptance of Untouchables by other Hindus as members of their religion. The term ‘Dalit’ (‘crushed’ or ‘oppressed’) is a less euphemistic term which has been in use since the 1910s. In fact, it was used by the Arya Samaj and later by Jagjivan Ram. (Both are considered as representing the non-radical reformist approach to Untouchability, where upper castes took the lead in promoting reform, though of course both were seen as radical compared to conservative upper-caste Hindus.) The term ‘Dalit’ became associated with radicalism when it was re-popularized in the 1970s by radical Ambedkarites such as the Dalit Panthers and later by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Today the use of ‘Dalit’ has become widespread in many parts of India, including UP. In this article, I use different terms, according to the historical context.

Ambedkar’s relentless and bitter struggle against Gandhi on the question of the recognition of the ‘Untouchables’ as a separate minority left its mark on their collective destiny at several levels. At the social level, the policy of positive discrimination that resulted from the compromise between the two leaders (known as the Poona Pact, 1932) encouraged education and social mobility. At the political level, Ambedkar’s nomination as the head of the Constitution Drafting Committee was a reconciliatory act by Gandhi, designed to involve the Scheduled Castes in the process of nation-building and thereby to sustain national integration (Zelliot 1988). However, despite this momentary and partial reconciliation with the Congress, Ambedkar’s struggles against Gandhi left their stigma on Dalit politics. Even though they were depicted negatively in mainstream Indian historiography, these struggles were remembered in Ambedkarite circles as a landmark episode, because of which a distinct Dalit political identity could be kept alive and nurtured after Independence.

Although Ambedkar had warned his admirers against making a cult of his personality, a move that had started in his home state of Maharashtra even before his death (Tartakov 2000), the statue, perhaps inevitably, became a tool for political mobilization after he died. The little blue statues of Ambedkar wearing a three-piece suit and holding the Indian Constitution have indeed become a common sight in contemporary slums and villages in many parts of the country.

This article narrates the history of these statues in Uttar Pradesh (UP), where the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a political outfit led by Ambedkarite Dalits, has formed several governments since the mid-1990s. The case of Uttar Pradesh is especially interesting as far as Ambedkar statues are concerned. First, the statues have played an instrumental role in the BSP’s successful mobilizations, confirming the popular appeal of symbolic politics in a state where the Ayodhya campaign had already helped the BJP to power in the early 1990s. Second, once in power the BSP put great emphasis on the official installation of statues, which in turn motivated Dalits to install more statues in their villages. The way the state and society have emulated each other brings an interesting perspective to bear on symbolic politics and on the evolution of relations between Dalits and the state. That is, the influence of the official Ambedkar iconography on the popular statues, along with the imitation of official ceremonies in villages, reflects a process of popular learning of symbolic skills.

II. From Parliament to village: Ambedkar’s official image and its appropriation

The practice of setting up statues of political leaders on public sites was introduced into India by the British, who installed statues of soldiers and civil servants of the Raj. After Independence, the practice was continued with the installation of statues of Gandhi and regional figures of the independence movement, as well as historical figures such as Shivaji in Maharashtra. The first official statue of Ambedkar was set up in Bombay in 1962, at the Institute of Science crossing (the former Provincial Assembly) (Tartakov 2000).[2] Ambedkar was represented as an orator, dressed in a three-piece suit, his right arm and finger upraised as ‘a great man lecturing the nation’ (ibid.: 102).

According to Tartakov, the message was both to the nation — on the dangers of caste and inequality — and to his fellow Dalits, whom he urged to organize democratically to secure their rights.

In 1966, another statue made of bronze was set up in front of the National Parliament in New Delhi and unveiled by the President of India, Dr S. Radhakrishnan.[3] This national recognition of Ambedkar was a significant move, as the ‘Untouchable’ leader, despite having chaired the Constitution Committee, had been identified more or less as a traitor in the dominant political stereotype of the ruling party ever since his opposition to Gandhi at the Round Table Conference.

In the new political context of the mid-1960s, the decision to honour Ambedkar was an attempt by Indira Gandhi to woo the Ambedkarite constituency of the Republican Party of India (RPI).[4] At the Ahmedabad convention of the party in 1964, the RPI had adopted a charter of demands, focusing conspicuously (five out of ten points) on problems of poverty, minimum wage and landlessness. This emphasis on the economic demands of the landless peasants, which was designed to build an alliance of the rural poor across castes, is characteristic of the RPI’s socialistic emphasis, but the party’s first demand was for the installation of ‘a portrait of Dr Ambedkar as “Father of the Indian Constitution” in the central hall of Parliament’ (Zelliot 1970).[5] Taking up these demands, massive mobilizations took place in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Maharashtra in December 1964, when 300,000 demonstrators were arrested (Duncan 1979: 246).

According to L.R. Balley, who was the Punjab leader of the RPI at that time, Parliament officially voted to raise the statue around 1964–65, thanks to the support of the Speaker, Hukkum Singh, who had chaired Ambedkar’s welcome committee during the latter’s visit to Punjab in 1936. The Sikh politician thus wished to give Ambedkar the national recognition that he felt he deserved as one of the nation-builders.[6] Even if Ambedkar’s image did not make it to the Central Hall of Parliament, a massive bronze statue was set up outside the premises, representing him in his three-piece suit with the Constitution in one hand, the other arm pointing to the sky. The statue was made by the same official sculptor as the one in Bombay, and its main novelty was that he added the Constitution, probably to emphasize Ambedkar’s contribution to the nation. That is, the Parliament House statue insisted upon Ambedkar’s conformity to the national agenda rather than recalled his hostility towards Hinduism, which he saw as the essence of caste. While the Constitution thus fitted Ambedkar into a secular mould, it is interesting to note that the Constitution was given a radical meaning by Dalits. As Pauline Mahar-Moller has shown in a monograph on a village in western UP, Untouchables interpreted the Constitution as a new law replacing the ‘Hindu laws of caste’ (Mahar-Moller 1958). This attempt at bringing Ambedkar within a national consensus in the name of ‘secularism’ did not prevent Ambedkarites from emphasizing their own radical understandings of Ambedkar. On the one hand, they took this official recognition as a welcome step that gave them legitimacy; on the other, they continued to publish biographies of Ambedkar and other vernacular political pamphlets in which his ideology was unfolded more uncompromisingly.

In UP, the statues recently set up tend to reproduce the iconographic pattern of the statue that stands in front of the Parliament. The official ones, set up by the provincial BSP governments since 1995, are identical, made in bronze and several metres in height. But in villages or slums as well as in roadside sculptors’ shops, one can see smaller stone models, which are painted once purchased. The ones with the upraised arm are relatively expensive (about Rs 3,000) due to the larger size of the stone used by the sculptor. Simple busts made of cement were also installed in the early 1990s, but nowadays people generally have a preference for the full-size stone model, the one with the raised arm and the Constitution. These non-official statues have a much livelier aspect: they are painted in bright colours, the three-piece suit generally light blue, the shirt white and the tiered, with occasional variations. The book is painted red and carries the inscription in the Devanagari script, ‘Bharatiya Sanvidhan’ (‘Indian Constitution’). The statue’s usual iconographic features are the three-piece suit, the tie and the pen clipped in the front pocket, that recall Ambedkar’s excellence in higher education and statesmanship; the raised arm recalls his relentless struggle and his stature as a national leader; and last but not least, the Constitution recalls his contribution as Chairman of the Constitution Committee.

The Constitution is indeed a very important feature which makes clear that Dalit struggles, despite being branded ‘communal’ by their adversaries, are for the implementation of the laws solemnly adopted by the nation. This iconographic uniformity reflects a certain popular emphasis on orthodoxy, perhaps intended to avoid misinterpretation or misappropriation of Ambedkar in a context where nationalist Hindus, trying to attract Dalits into their fold, have sought to emphasize Ambedkar’s ‘Hindu-ness’. During the BJP’s 1998 electoral meeting in Kanpur, for example, the BJP leaders paid tribute to Ambedkar by applying a coloured tika on the forehead of his portrait. Although Dalits sometimes do this too, for garlanding a portrait and applying a tika is a common way of paying tribute to someone’s memory, the Hindu nationalists did not do this innocently, using it rather as a way to root their programme of Hinduisation of Dalits in popular practice. Ambedkarite activists, however, constantly fight such practices among their own because of their ideological implications: garlands, flowers, and incense, which despite their religious connotations are not identified as exclusively ‘Hindu’ (Muslims also use them), are welcome, while tikas have become ideologically suspect. However, despite constraints such as these that enhance control over popular practices and thus create more uniformity, the village models also reflect popular creativity through various details added by the painter. For example, the shoes of a small statue in a Kanpur Dehat village had been labelled ‘Nike’ and ‘made in Japan’, locating Ambedkar’s excellence in the contemporary era by association with foreign names that sound technologically and economically advanced. Another detail contributes to the personality of the statue: probably owing to the technical difficulty of sculpting Ambedkar’s spectacles, sculptors tend to add real black plastic glasses, contributing to the cartoon-like appearance of the cheaper models. All this makes the Ambedkar statue an authentic object of popular art, with creative aspects that often assist the democratization processes.

This iconography, which represents Ambedkar as a man of international stature, rather than in traditional Indian dress (as Gandhi and other Congress leaders are represented), has attracted a wide range of critics from different political backgrounds, from Marxists to Gandhians and nationalist Hindus, all of them sharing a concern for ‘cultural authenticity’.[7] These critics generally dismiss Ambedkar’s Western dress as not genuinely Indian and/or as unfit for a leader representing the poor. Reflecting the irritation of its urban elite readers with the BSP’s symbolic politics, the Lucknow-based English daily, The Pioneer, published several indignant commentaries in its ‘Letters to the Editor’ section. One reader from Lucknow was scandalized by the official celebration of Ambedkar’s birthday under BSP rule in April 1997: a celebration lasting several days, with fireworks, a massive turnout of Dalit villagers in the state capital, and state-sponsored publicity for the BSP. This reader also pointed to the ‘injustice’ suffered by Gandhi, whose statue seemed comparatively neglected, although Ambedkar’s contribution to the nation was ‘much less’, in his opinion. The same reader emphasized that even though Ambedkar had chaired the Constitution Committee, he had not been involved in the freedom struggle and was — according to him — a convert to ‘western culture’. Coming from a reader of the English press, this judgement is somewhat puzzling. The reader’s dislike of Ambedkar, however, reaches its peak over the question of his dress — the suit supposedly epitomizing his toadying relation to the British administration: ‘In his statues he is invariably depicted wearing a three-piece suit. One not fully conversant with Indian history would, on seeing the statue, likely take it to be that of a British governor’ (The Pioneer, 15 April 1997). Such comments show the perpetuation of the Congress annoyance with Ambedkar among the English-speaking elite, who criticize Ambedkar’s assumed modernity as Western alienation, and interpret his critique of Hinduism as anti-Indian. The imposition of the ‘Untouchable’ leader’s image in public space thus creates a general feeling of intrusion and decline among the elite.

A rationalized version of this critique in the magazine India today provides a good indication of the perceptions of the managerial middle class. Titled ‘Exchequer suffers as Mayawati splurges on statues of Dalit heroes’, the article denounces Mayawati’s symbolic politics in UP, ridiculing the Ambedkar project of Lucknow, and casting aspersions on Mayawati’s intellectual ability (India today, 28 July 1997). In sum, the BSP’s politics of symbols has been criticized as a waste of money and energy that hardly benefits the poor. Whether or not such arguments emerge from genuine concern for the poor, they certainly come in handy in ridiculing their political assertion.[8]

Ambedkar’s Western dress has thus become the focus of the Westernized and non-Dalit elite’s disapproval of Dalit efforts at empowerment.[9] Such normative viewpoints, based on intellectual reconstructions of what is truly ‘indigenous’, are not reflected among Dalit villagers, who take pride in Ambedkar’s dress as symbolic of his excellence in education and statesmanship. Instead of dismissing Ambedkar on grounds of ‘cultural alienation’ or ‘false consciousness’, one should rather try to understand the way he was appropriated by Dalits and turned into a device for their assertion. The struggles to impose his statues in public places were a major contribution to this process. The following description of the manner of their initial installation in the cities, before the technique was brought to the villages, will help establish how this culture of symbolic struggle first developed.

III. Setting up statues of Ambedkar in UP: The first attempts

After the important mobilizations of the 1940s (Rawat 2003), the Ambedkarite leadership in UP was to remain at the margins of electoral politics for over four decades, with the exception of the temporary and geographically limited success of the RPI in the mid-1960s (Duncan 1979). The Scheduled Castes were the great losers in the process of land reforms, as they were generally unable to overcome administrative bias (Mendelsohn and Vicziani 1998; Thorner n.d.). Greater progress was achieved in access to higher education and to job quotas in the administration. The Chamars, representing about 60 per cent of the state’s Untouchable population (Mukherjee 1980), gradually came to comprise a sizeable section of government servants. Barred by service rules from active participation in politics, an engaged minority among the latter nevertheless continued to support Ambedkarite organizations, providing the intellectual backbone of the local Ambedkarite movement. But the movement remained confined within geographical and caste boundaries, being evident mainly in the cities of Allahabad, Kanpur, and Lucknow and their rural surroundings, as well as in the western districts of UP, and mostly (although not exclusively) based among the Chamars. In the cities, the leather industry had provided the economic foundation for the emergence of a Chamar elite after the colonial period (Gooptu 2001). Even before Independence, this elite had developed a symbolic strategy through Dalit processions in honour of untouchable Bhakti saints, like Sant Ravidas.[10]

When Ambedkar died on 6 December 1956, his followers in Kanpur took no time to organize a sok sabha (condolences assembly), using the same procession model (Bellwinkel-Schempp 2004). At village Atwa, in the adjoining rural district of Kanpur Dehat, the procession was organized on the pattern of a Hindu procession, with the icon in the palanquin simply replaced by a picture of Ambedkar. The procession was met with stone-throwing by the upper castes.[11] On 14 April 1957, functions were organized on the occasion of Ambedkar’s birthday. These two dates — 6 December and 14 April — became occasions of annual celebration, although the latter, currently known as Ambedkar Jayanti, became far more prominent.

The oldest Ambedkar statue I found in Uttar Pradesh is on the outskirts of Allahabad, by the side of the national highway. I was informed by some elderly men that it was indeed the first Ambedkar statue to be installed in Allahabad. In a house nearby, I was received by the son of the man who had installed the statue. He told me that his father had fought in the Indian army against Pakistan in 1965 and that the Harijan Kalyan Ashram, a Gandhian institution, had rewarded him for his service to the nation by giving him a piece of land, on which he built his house. He decided to install the statue by way of tribute to Ambedkar for what he had done for his community. According to the son, his father felt that he owed his position in life in some measure to Ambedkar’s struggles.

In order to collect money for the statue, he formed an Ambedkarite Committee with Scheduled Castes of the area, including villagers. The committee ordered the statue from a local artisan, who made it according to the prevalent technique — a model of straw covered with cement and painted. The statue was originally mounted on a pedestal of bricks, though it is now almost at ground level because of subsequent road works.[12] Its iconography is different from that of all the others I have seen, in that it has not been influenced by the model in front of the Parliament building in New Delhi. It is a black-and-white, life-size representation of a young Ambedkar wearing the black dress of a lawyer. His arms are by his side and he carries a book in his left hand, which could be meant to be the Constitution though it is not marked as such and is small in size.

A neighbour said that the monument had been installed at the time that Indira Gandhi took over as the All-India Congress Committee president, and before she formed the Congress(R), which places it somewhere between 1966 and 1969. The people of the committee who managed the installation were now all dead, except one, but he, unfortunately, had not attended the inauguration. However, it had been a simple function, according to this man. There was no leader, no big officer, and no plaque: just local villagers, workers from the adjoining Bumbruli glass factory, and other admirers of Ambedkar who came from the city of Allahabad. A building was now under construction for a Bauddh vihar (Buddhist shrine) behind the statue. The statue was in bad shape and I was told that it would be replaced by a new one at the inauguration of the Bauddh vihar. They would not throw this one away but reinstall it in a village. Memory was vanishing, and there would soon be no trace of what could be, if not the oldest, certainly to my knowledge one of the first attempts at installing an Ambedkar statue in Uttar Pradesh.[13]

In 1969, another initiative came from Kanpur, a major historical centre of the Ambedkarite movement in Uttar Pradesh. This one was of a different nature, however, for what the local RPI followers intended was not just to pay their private homage to their leader, but also to gain some official recognition. They had been inspired by the statue set up at the National Parliament building and wanted one erected in their city. They made a collection among the local Ambedkarites and ordered a statue after the Parliament model. It was made of cement and painted white. Their plan was to have it installed on 14 April (Ambedkar Jayanti) on the main road at the Motijheel gate of Kanpur municipality. Having failed to get the authorization from the district authorities even after several requests, the RPI leaders assembled a crowd on 20 April in a nearby park. The demonstrators marched in procession towards the Motijheel gate with the statue on a cycle-rickshaw, intending to install it even without permission.[14] They shouted slogans threatening to destroy Nehru and Gandhi statues if the local authorities did not allow them to instate the Ambedkar statue. The police charged with lathis, while the crowd, now led by Dalit youngsters, hit back at them with bricks they found lying by the roadside.[15] In the pitched battle, more than thirty people were injured, including policemen, and there were thirty-eight arrests, among them eight RPI leaders.[16] The statue, which had been dropped during the fight, breaking its arm, was seized by the police.[17] This event was reported by the press and created a shock among local Dalits. Even Dalit Congress Party supporters, who in their majority did not recognize Ambedkar as their leader, had the impression that this confrontation was mainly on account of Ambedkar’s caste, which made him unfit for public honours in the eyes of the ruling class. The Congress Party, although it claimed to follow Gandhian ideals, thus gave the impression that it refused to honour the maker of the Constitution simply because he was an ‘Untouchable’. Although the attempt to install the statue failed, it was successful in opening a breach in Congress rhetoric by highlighting the authorities’ ambivalence towards Ambedkar and the Scheduled Castes and exposing the casteism that lay behind official secularism.

The changed political context of UP in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought more conducive political conditions for the Congress Dalit leadership, who had until then been relegated to subaltern positions within the ruling party. To compensate for the departure of the north Indian intermediary castes from her party’s fold, Indira Gandhi sought the support of the Scheduled Castes by nominating the Untouchable minister Jagjivan Ram President of the All-India Congress Committee. The RPI leadership from Uttar Pradesh was thus co-opted by the Congress(I). This revived the Scheduled Caste leadership within the Congress, and Untouchable lobbies within the local Party units began to assert themselves by taking up the symbolic issue of Ambedkar.[18]

The political conditions at the regional level were thus ripe for re-examining Ambedkar’s contribution to the nation. The celebration of the silver jubilee of Independence in 1972 provided the occasion. In Lucknow, the Congress Mayor, Dauji Gupta (an OBC whose father had been associated with Ambedkar), decided to install statues of Ambedkar and of the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia (1910–67). The project was approved by most of the Congress municipal corporators (barring a few Muslims with Zamindar backgrounds) and the Socialist Party, but opposed by the Jan Sangh.[19] The life-size stone statue of Ambedkar was ordered from Jaipur (a city renowned for stone sculpture), painted in white, and officially unveiled on 14 April 1973 at the Hazratganj crossing, a prestigious and central location, just across from the Gandhi monument. As on every 14 April, a procession of the Scheduled Castes converged on Hazratganj. The chief guest was a Buddhist monk from Malaysia, who opened the function with incantations in Pali. The Mayor thereafter made his speech. He described Ambedkar as a man whose talent was such that he had been able to overcome the obstacle of untouchability and even become the chief architect of the Constitution. He added that, even though Ambedkar had converted to Buddhism, there was no difference between Buddhism and Hinduism, as the Buddha was known as an incarnation of Krishna. His speech thus emphasized Ambedkar’s acceptability within a secular framework, a gesture which may be seen less as an attempt to dilute Ambedkar’s radicalism than as a strategy to have him acknowledged among the nation-builders. It was, nevertheless, in complete contradiction to Ambedkar’s explicit insistence, made clear during his public conversion, that Buddhism could not be equated with Hinduism and that the Buddha might not be treated as one of the avatars of Vishnu (Jaffrelot 2005). Reiterating the Gandhian benevolent approach towards untouchability, the Mayor also asked the high castes to take a vow to fight untouchability, arguing that it was this that hampered the nation’s progress. Urging society to give ‘Harijans’ a better deal so that they could fully contribute to the building of a socialist society, he also expressed his wish that the government declare 14 April a national holiday. The news article mentions that Ambedkarite leaders and writers such as Lalaï ‘Periyar’ Singh Yadav from Kanpur (popularly known as the ‘north Indian Periyar’) subsequently made speeches. We can expect those speeches to have been more radical in their content, especially in their critique of Hinduism, but these are not reported in the article (The Pioneer, 15 April 1973) and the Mayor’s version was the only one to appear. This in itself is indicative of the interpretation of Ambedkar followed by the media (i.e., the official one). In my interview with him, the ex-mayor, Dauji Gupta, told me that the question of interpretation was not an issue for him: the statue’s meaning was to be found in Ambedkar’s writings and his life of struggle. Official recognition was an encouragement to read this literature.[20]

Gupta’s assessment of the importance of official recognition was also echoed by the Ambedkarites who, having been marginalized after Independence, sought official recognition through such events. The problems in the official interpretation were secondary for them. Ambedkarites indeed gained legitimacy within their own Scheduled Caste circles through the recognition of their symbol, and it became easier for them to speak ‘the’ truth about Ambedkar and his struggles against the Congress once the statue was formally installed and Ambedkar was no longer officially portrayed as ‘communal’ and ‘seditious’.

The official statue that was inaugurated in Kanpur a few months later confirms this impression. Although Ambedkar was reinterpreted in a way that fitted the Congress Party’s ideological framework and political interests, the activists did not contest such dilutions of their radical leader’s ideology. But thereafter they fully re-appropriated the monument, imparting to it their own radical interpretations. The process that led to the installation of this statue needs to be narrated. Scheduled Caste municipal corporators across party lines had formed a group to pressurize the municipal council to add the name of Ambedkar to a list of national heroes whose statues were to be commissioned on the occasion of the silver jubilee of Indian independence. Shiv Prasad Bharti, a Scheduled Caste municipal councillor belonging to the Congress, was prominent in this move. Though not an Ambedkarite himself, the repression faced by RPI activists for the installation of the statue at Motijheel in 1969 had shocked him into asking himself what, apart from untouchability, was the real obstacle in acknowledging Ambedkar’s contribution to the nation (Bharti 1985). The Chief Officer (Mukh Adhikari) of Kanpur Municipality, himself Scheduled Caste from south India and an Ambedkarite, allotted the monument a site behind the gate of Nana Rao Park. This park had been the scene of dramatic events during the 1857 mutiny and was therefore locally regarded as a very prestigious site.

The organizers brought the statue from Jaipur and managed to get Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram to unveil it, on 30 June 1973. The life-size statue mounted on a tall marble pedestal represents Ambedkar dressed in a blue achkan, with his two hands resting on a walking stick, but without the Constitution. Ambedkar wore this dress (of the type associated with Nehru in the popular imagery) when he became independent India’s first Law Minister. It recalls the image of him handing over the Constitution to Nehru and Rajendra Prasad that is widely circulated as a chromolithographed poster. This iconographic representation was a reminder of Ambedkar’s reconciliation with the Congress (though it was brief and partial), and his wisdom and respectability (old age signified by the walking stick), rather than his role as a radical leader of the Scheduled Castes. A local Jan Sangh Scheduled Caste politician (belonging to the Bhangi caste) was sent by his party to create some opposition. He was arrested by the police when he took out his black handkerchief. According to my Dalit informants, Jagjivan Ram said in his speech that Ambedkar had drawn the sketch of ‘Untouchable uplift’ (Achutudhar) which, as a central minister, he had himself filled with colour. He thus presented himself as heir to Ambedkar’s legacy, despite the fact that he had been pitted against Ambedkar by the Congress after the second Round Table Conference. When Ambedkar declared his conversion project in 1936, Jagjivan Ram had even publicly called him a coward who could not lead his people, a statement which Ambedkarites criticized as a sign of his political alienation (Das n.d.).

Some activists who were present at the unveiling ceremony boasted of raising objections during the speech, but others who were also present deny that any such incidents took place. Though many Ambedkarites in the audience may have disapproved of Jagjivan Ram’s speech, it seems that they took it quite seriously, for all of those whom I met remembered in detail what the Scheduled Caste minister had said on the occasion. One of them could even repeat passages he had learnt by heart.[21] What seems to count the most for Ambedkar’s admirers is that their leader’s public image was symbolically rehabilitated through this official ceremony. This inauguration thus gave Kanpur’s local Ambedkarite movement its monument, which continues to be cherished today as the focal site of Ambedkar’s yearly Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations.

The event actually set up a fashion in Kanpur, where two other official Ambedkar statues were inaugurated by local politicians — the first in 1978 by G.D. Tapase, a Scheduled Caste governor nominated by the Janata Party, and the second in 1983 by Mohammad Arif Khan, a Congress Central minister, in the Gudar Basti slum. It is interesting to note that, just as the installation of Hanuman statues or Sufi saints’ graves had been used since the colonial period by slum dwellers to avoid expropriation, the construction of this small Ambedkar park in the long and narrow slum was part of a strategy to counter an expropriation move by the North Indian Railways, on whose former tracks it had grown.[22] The initiative for erecting these statues was taken by Ambedkarite committees composed of educated unemployed youths and government servants, for whom the organization of such events brought prestige and status in the Dalit community. By inviting such prestigious guests of honour, these educated youngsters were able to build and display social capital through the official connections now available to them. Unveiling ceremonies for Ambedkar statues were thus the occasion to build their networks within the administration and political parties.

None of those new statues would, however, match the prestige of the Nanarao Park monument, where Ambedkar processions started converging each year on 14 April. The importance attached to this site combines at least three features: (i) in the light of the 1969 struggle, this installation was a victory, even a symbolic revenge over the administration; (ii) it had a prestigious location and was unveiled by a central minister; and (iii) it represented the achievement of unity by all the Scheduled Caste leaders, whatever their party affiliations. Ambedkar thus stood symbolically as the unifier of Dalits, and through unity their collective status within the nation could be enhanced.

IV. Dalit Panther militancy: Keeping watch on the symbol

In the late 1970s the expansion of education resulted in educated unemployment, which sustained political radicalism among the educated youth of all groups, including Dalits. The countryside of Uttar Pradesh witnessed growing tensions because of the failure of the land redistribution policies that were supposed to have been implemented under Indira Gandhi’s Twenty Points scheme against poverty (1976) but which proved ineffective in face of the inertia of the local administration. The Janata Party government in UP during 1977–80 promoted middle peasant interests and totally neglected the Twenty Point scheme and the interests of the rural poor (Kohli 1987). Rising atrocities against Scheduled Castes were generally provoked by the assertive behaviour of this new generation of educated Dalits who openly defied caste hierarchies. Their assertive attitudes not only worried upper-caste employers who relied on a submissive labour workforce, but also irritated upper-caste youths, who faced unemployment problems and blamed their fate on the quotas in favour of the Scheduled Castes. Conflicts surfaced on symbolic matters, like objections to their wearing neat shirts and trousers.[23] The previous generations used to wear ragged clothes, either because of poverty or because they needed to appear subservient to the upper castes, often for both reasons.[24] In the traditional village economy, old clothes were offered to them by the upper castes in exchange for their services, as were food leftovers. By refusing this degrading custom of jhutha, and by wearing good clothes, the new generation thus contested the caste inferiority imposed on them. Caste/class tension became palpable in everyday life, with conflicts often crystallizing around issues of honour. The Ambedkar icon, symbolizing Dalit pride, became a way to play out such assertions publicly.

On 14 April 1978 in Agra, the Ambedkar Jayanti procession of the Jatavs (Chamars), which carried an Ambedkar statue on an elephant, was attacked while passing through an upper-caste neighbourhood. The upper castes used the riot that followed as a pretext to persuade the administration to change the route of the yearly Dalit procession. In reaction to the administration’s acquiescence, the Jatavs attacked government buildings and confronted the high castes and the police, leading to hundreds of arrests and ten deaths. Peace was restored only when the army intervened and when the administration satisfied the demands of the Scheduled Castes (Lynch 1981).

The new militant Scheduled Caste (hereafter ‘Dalit’) youth in Uttar Pradesh found an outlet in the Dalit Panther movement, which had achieved nationwide recognition during the mobilisation for renaming the Aurangabad university after Ambedkar in 1979. The violent police repression (five deaths in Nagpur) attracted considerable media attention and deeply impressed educated Dalits. A ‘Long March’ in which Ambedkarites from all over India participated was held in December 1979 (Murugkar 1991). Local branches of the Bharatiya Dalit Panthers were thereafter established in the cities of Uttar Pradesh and other states of north India.

In Kanpur, the first Dalit Panther meeting took place in Nanarao Park in April 1981 — significantly, at the site of the Ambedkar statue which had been inaugurated by Jagjivan Ram eight years earlier. The local Dalit Panther leader was Rahulan Ambavadekar, a Chamar and the son of a bus driver. Raised in a labour colony, he had done his MA in political science and was completing his LLB at Aligarh Muslim University where he was a student of B.P. Maurya, the firebrand RPI leader. Soon after the inaugural meeting, a symbolic assault on Ambedkar gave him the occasion to assert the Dalit Panthers’ strength publicly. On 23 April 1981, as the Dalits of Gadarian Purwa (a locality of Kanpur) were celebrating Ambedkar Jayanti, a drunken Brahmin police sub-inspector and his constables disrupted the meeting and kicked the Ambedkar portrait. Those who protested the insult were beaten up by the constables, while the sub-inspector threatened the public at gunpoint.[25] A protest meeting of the different Chamar sub-castes was called, led by the Dalit Panthers. Rahulan wrote a leaflet demanding the immediate dismissal of the guilty policemen. A procession through the city was organized on 3 May, attracting a crowd of 50,000 people according to the national press (Bhu Bharti, September 1981). Such an angry crowd on the streets of Kanpur in an already tense industrial context was perceived as a threat by the local administration. The guilty policemen were arrested and imprisoned to defuse the tension, though they were released without sentence soon after. The Dalit Panthers protested by printing a leaflet, which was distributed in Dalit bastis and sent to the provincial and central authorities. They demanded nationalization of all industries and agricultural land, besides certain symbolic demands. The first of their fourteen demands was that Kanpur district should be renamed ‘Ambedkar Nagar’; the third concerned the erection of a statue of Swami Achhutanand, the ‘Untouchable’ leader of the early Adi Hindu movement; and the eighth concerned the renaming of Marathwada University after Ambedkar (Bharatiya Dalit Panthers n.d.). Symbolic claims were thus given equal footing with material ones. Symbolic assertion had become a major feature of Dalit political culture, and the political efficacy of such skills was soon to be demonstrated.

V. The ‘mushrooming’ of Ambedkar statues in villages

The 1980s saw Ambedkarite mobilizations reach areas where the RPI and the Dalit Panthers had previously had little if any impact. Government employees were organized by Kanshi Ram through the Backward and Minorities Caste Employees Federation (BAMCEF) and directed to spread knowledge of Ambedkar in villages.[26] In Kanpur, for example, many Dalit workers had kept in contact with their villages in eastern UP.

They calculatedly attended weddings in their caste circles to talk about Kanshi Ram and his goal of building a political party that would snatch power from the Congress. Early campaigns of the BAMCEF relied partly on kinship networks as well as on personal contacts with co-workers and other educated Dalits.[27] After the formation of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in 1984, the activists became more systematic and started moving out to villages around Kanpur on weekends to incite educated Dalits, teachers and students for instance, to set up Ambedkarite committees.[28] A majority of these Dalit villagers had never heard of Ambedkar, or were at least not conscious that he was ‘one of us’. Setting up Ambedkar statues, motivating fellow villagers to attend the party’s mass meetings and acting as the party’s electoral agents in the polling booths were among the tasks taken up by the Ambedkarite village committees. The iconography of the Ambedkar statues, with the two pens in the front pocket of the suit and the book, was an easy object of identification for educated Dalits. The pen clipped in the shirt’s pocket was characteristic of their way of dressing, proclaiming their education and claims to social status in a modern world. The icon was a suitable pedagogic tool to convey Ambedkar’s message to their uneducated Dalit brethren.

Even though Chamars dominated the Ambedkar committees, the criterion for participation was the level of education, rather than belonging to this particular caste. The main difference from other Dalit castes was that the Chamar activists managed to assert their leadership over their caste. The committees included individuals from all the Scheduled Castes as well as OBCs but, compared to other castes, the Chamar population participated en bloc. This was for several interrelated reasons: (i) the Chamars had a record of Ambedkarite leadership and an Ambedkarite culture had already grown among them in cities and even in certain rural areas; (ii) Kanshi Ram was himself a Chamar; and (iii) they had become more involved in education and had therefore produced more government employees than the other Scheduled Castes. This of course had a direct impact on their early involvement with Kanshi Ram through the BAMCEF, but the other factors also contributed to facilitating the spread of the idea that the Ambedkarite culture was a part of their social and political identity, even though they had mostly voted for the Congress and earlier considered Gandhi a well-wisher.

Setting up an Ambedkar statue in a village was a highly controversial and delicate task. When and wherever it happened, it provided the Ambedkarite village committee with credibility. Celebrating the value of education, Ambedkar gave legitimacy to the social and political ambitions of those radical young men from the Scheduled Castes. The inaugurations, mimicking official unveiling ceremonies, highlighted their authority. The symbolic control of the village’s public space was a daring assertion, which the upper castes perceived as a threat, even an insult, often provoking confrontations, and sometimes even the destruction of the statue. Even if it could lead to bitterness and conflict, one of the major positive achievements as far as political mobilization was concerned was the Dalit unity created around the symbol.

In 1990, a portrait of Ambedkar was installed in the Central Hall of the National Parliament building by the V.P. Singh government. This event had wide repercussions and gave a fresh impetus to Dalit symbolic mobilizations. The year 1991 was celebrated as the Ambedkar centenary at the national level, thus providing official legitimacy to the Ambedkarites. Ambedkar statues were set up by Ambedkarite committees in many remote places. BSP activists cashed in on such symbolic activities to sustain mobilizations, organize public meetings and win visibility in the local newspapers. For example, one BSP committee in a Kanpur slum installed a board renaming the slum ‘Ambedkar Nagar’ and built a pedestal for a statue. Both were destroyed by gundas hired by the local MLA. The BSP district cell then organized a one-week dharna in front of the Kanpur kachehri (administrative centre), the ward committees taking turns to lead the protest on successive days. In villages, material demands were integrated with symbolic politics. The focus was on implementing effective ownership of the communal plots of land that had been promised to landless labourers by the Indira Gandhi government. BSP workers organized cycle processions from village to village with shouted slogans such as: ‘Jo zameen sarkari hai, wo zameen hamari hai!’ (The government land belongs to us!), and ‘CM–PM vote se lenge, SP–DM arakshan se lenge!’ (We’ll take the offices of Chief Minister and Prime Minister with our votes, we’ll take the offices of Superintendent of Police and District Magistrate with our reservations!)[29] What these slogans have in common is their emphasis on the conquest of public space, from the concrete demand for land to the metaphor of the political conquest of state authority. It was common knowledge that anti-poverty measures had failed, largely because of upper-caste hegemony within the administration and lack of political commitment to social change. Therefore, what was needed was the empowerment of Dalits to make the administration deliver on its failed redistributive measures. Dalit villagers found a more direct manner to link the political symbol with economic demands that were omitted from the BSP agenda for tactical reasons. In many instances, Ambedkar statues were erected on communal village land (gaon sabha zameen), which was supposed to have been redistributed to the landless in the Twenty Points Programme against poverty launched by Indira Gandhi in 1976, when land titles for some 1 million acres were distributed in Uttar Pradesh.[30] The symbol was all the more appropriate and meaningful as the constitution held by Ambedkar emphasized the legality of the claim. The concrete demand for the due plots of land could thus be extended to a demand for all the democratic rights that the Constitution stood for, but which remained on paper. The statue thus stood as an incentive for democratic mobilization and became a remarkable tool for the pedagogy of the oppressed.

The Ambedkar statue phenomenon literally exploded after the SP– BSP coalition came to power in Uttar Pradesh in December 1993. The year 1994 was marked by an unprecedented number of ‘Ambedkar statue incidents’ (Ambedkar murti ghatna) reported by the press (Jaffrelot 1998).

The most impressive was the Shergarhi incident, in the urbanizing outskirts of Meerut in western UP, where Dalits installed an Ambedkar bust in a public park that had been targeted by Meerut’s Housing Development Corporation for new (albeit illegal) middle-class housing construction.

As Ambedkar is associated with the Constitution, his statue stood as a reminder of legality, but it also conveyed the threat of a ‘communal’ symbol in a tense situation — touch it, and the whole community will become frenzied. The next morning, as the police reached the village to remove the unauthorized statue, heated arguments between Dalits, the police and the representatives of the Corporation began degenerating into violence. Police constables were beaten up by some Dalits and two of them even suffered bullet injuries. The police fired at the crowd, destroyed the statue and attacked Dalit houses. Two Dalits died and thirty were injured, according to official records. Next day, another Dalit life was lost in a new episode of police firing. Dalits of the whole district then mobilized to defy the curfew orders (Pai 2002) and 600 persons were arrested.[31] Preferring to preserve its alliance within the Uttar Pradesh government rather than side with the Dalits, the BSP failed to support the victims and, ironically, even Mayawati dismissed the installation of the Ambedkar statue as ‘unnecessary’. Ultimately, other incidents of violence, mostly pitting OBC farmers (the bulk of the SP’s electoral supporters) against Dalits, put a strain on the SP–BSP alliance, which finally broke in June 1995.

VI. Mayawati’s symbolic politics and its rural impact

Immediately after the fall of the SP–BSP coalition government, the first BSP-led government came to power, thanks to a tactical agreement with the BJP. Mayawati became the state’s first Dalit Chief Minister. Her politics focused mainly on the posting of Dalit administrators in positions of authority, on the selective development of villages with large Dalit concentrations (‘Ambedkar villages’) and on a symbolic programme of ‘Ambedkarization’ of Uttar Pradesh. The latter can be summed up as the installation of outsize Ambedkar statues and the renaming of districts and universities, as well as the construction of fancy public parks named after Dalitbahujan (i.e., non–upper caste) personalities.[32] An immense Ambedkar park was even constructed in the state capital Lucknow, adjoining the Taj Hotel construction site. The criterion for the size of the Ambedkar statue was that it should be higher than the dome of the five-star hotel under construction. Both projects involved official corruption, which was highlighted by the national media as well as by the opposition parties. Even though the more intellectual Ambedkarite circles dislike her unrefined attitude and language, Mayawati’s popularity with Dalits and her authoritarian personality has become a symbol of Dalit assertion. During her second term as Chief Minister (March–September 1997, once again thanks to BJP support), she gave official recognition to her party workers’ earlier practice of setting up statues in villages.

Thus, not only has a typically official practice (the installation of statues) been appropriated by activists, but the reverse is also the case: the government itself adopted and made official an earlier practice of the BSP workers. The process of state-society influence has very clearly become circular in this case. A Government Order assigned half an acre of communal land in each village for the construction of an ‘Ambedkar Park’. The main practical difference from the former attempts of the village committees to erect Ambedkar statues was that it was now necessary to obtain an authorization from the District administration to do so. Installing a statue now required the acquisition of administrative knowledge.

Despite the fact that the Mayawati governments lasted barely six months each, they made some difference to the Dalits through the enforcement of laws in their favour (Mendelsohn and Vicziani 1998). During her public meetings, Mayawati warned local administrations to pay special attention to her party activists’ demands.[33] A Government Order directed the district police administration to give special attention to complaints falling under the category of the Untouchability Offences Act. Local Dalit activists were instrumental in bringing these complaints to the attention of the administration, as also demands for state bank loans, public distribution licences, etc., improving the lot of the poor as well as consolidating the economic status of relatively better-off Dalit families. There were even cases of local BSP cells organising protest demonstrations (dharnas) to dislodge reluctant administrative officers.[34] Sanctions from higher authorities were therefore engineered from below, countering the administrative blindness to Dalit problems that had long been the unofficial law of the land.

Mayawati’s politics in favour of the poor did not go as far as a general land redistribution to land-title holders. However, her official move to develop Ambedkar parks in villages was perceived as a potential threat by those dominant castes who indulged in illegal cultivation of this ‘surplus’ communal land, leading to conflicts. As in previous cases, the Ambedkar statues were still the focus of contention. I will relate one example from Kanpur Dehat district. Balahpara Karan is a huge village (about 25,000 inhabitants according to the 1991 Census) where the overwhelming majority of Dalits are landless and work on daily wages for upper-caste farmers. Many of the latter have bypassed land-ceiling laws (up to six times for the largest property), which restrict the individual possession of land to 40 acres. Landless families hold official documents (pattas) giving them the right to take possession of small parcels of the ‘surplus land’ meant for redistribution, up to a total of 200 acres for the whole village. In 1995, the night after the Ambedkar statue was set up in the village, the upper castes broke its cement base, leaving the statue lying on the ground. Dhaniram Panther, the local Dalit Panther leader, rushed to the scene with the police, in whose presence the statue was reinstalled. Police constables camped in the village for several months to protect the monument.[35]

The implementation of the official programme for Ambedkar parks involved politicking at the village council level, and instigated conflicts. The cases I reviewed in Kanpur Dehat tend to show that such parks could only be set up where Dalits were in large numbers and where they were able to gather some support from OBCs. This can be explained by the fact that the signature of the head of the village council was needed before the demand could be submitted to the District Magistrate. The Dalits would sometimes fall short of a majority, generally because one or two Dalit council members had joined the opposite faction. These conflicts sparked tension and even violence in many cases, sometimes leading to cycles of murder and revenge. This happened for instance in Rudauli village,[36] which was selected as an ‘Ambedkar village’ by the BSP government in 1997.

Rudauli was entangled in a bitter conflict over communal land with the Yadavs, a powerful OBC community, which degenerated into caste violence. A Yadav sought to encroach on some communal land located at his doorstep by constructing a wall around it. The local Ambedkarite committee, whose members were mostly unemployed educated young men, reacted by destroying the wall and building a pedestal for the installation of the Ambedkar statue, on which they wrote ‘Jay Bheem’, the Ambedkarite call for victory. The Yadavs then called in a group of armed gundas who began terrorizing the Dalits. But a crowd of Dalit villagers, including women, suddenly attacked the Yadav gundas with stones, home-made bombs, and sticks, and managed to chase them away. The next morning, two of the gundas, dressed in saris, were caught in a field while they were trying to escape after having spent the night hidden with some relatives. One was beaten almost to death by the crowd and the other, identified by Dalit women as a rapist, had his arms chopped off with an axe. The police were called and rescued the victims in an unconscious state, though both eventually survived. The Dalits maintain that this incident had a positive impact. Rajesh, one of the BSP activists, said: ‘The people realized that those Scheduled Castes are dangerous and that they have political connections. They are willing and able and they will not give up the fight, come what may.’[37]

To these villagers, installing a statue was a daring act that cashed in on the new power equation. It gave shape to their new status, enacting a political change that would otherwise remain beyond the realm of the local reality. This understanding contrasts with the earlier experience of village inertia, where the social change witnessed by the outside world stopped at the doorstep of the rural world. Like the Constitution, political change needs to be performed here and now, while the government is favourable; otherwise it can vanish like a missed opportunity. Establishing the statue makes the point that the democratic coup de force of the BSP governments has affected the balance of power in the village as well. The symbol thus links wider political struggles to local issues, emphasizing that Dalit progress requires a relentless struggle at every level. Wherever the Ambedkar statue has been installed, Dalits have felt encouraged by this tangible symbol of success. When interviewed about the statue’s meaning, politically aware Dalit villagers in Rudauli recalled their great man’s message: ‘Educate, Organise, Struggle’. While the educated or even self-taught activists could speak at length on Ambedkar’s life and his ideal of a casteless society in India, others, politically less articulate, like a Dalit woman whom I interviewed, simply recalled that ‘he was our messiah; whatever progress we achieved, it was he who gave it to us.’[38]

After the 1999 national elections returned a BSP Member of Parliament from the Ghatampur constituency (one of Kanpur Dehat’s two national constituencies), his BSP supporters in Rudauli planned to have their Ambedkar statue finally installed and officially unveiled by him. Rajesh, the BSP activist already quoted, explained that voting was not enough and that organizing an official unveiling ceremony could do wonders by attracting a Member of Parliament to the village:

Voting should not be considered as sufficient on our part. We want our Member of Parliament to pay a visit to our village now that he has been elected. His visit will only be possible once we have organized an official programme in the village [emphasis mine]. This will have a great impact. People will realize that we are directly linked to the Member of Parliament and that we can get development works done through him. The villagers know how to give their vote, but they also know how to get an MP to act for them.[39]

As Rajesh Ambedkar indicated, official occasions like an unveiling ceremony in the village are used as a technique for building official support. In the Ambedkarite meetings that they organize, the local activists are keen on inviting prestigious Dalit chief guests. The best option for them is to have a Dalit officer, whether from the IAS (civil service) or the IPS (police), or some Dalit politician of high standing. As we have seen in connection with the unveiling ceremonies in Kanpur in the late 1970s, meetings involving high-ranking guests help the local Dalit community to publicly display its administrative connections. The meetings start with flower tributes to the statue/portrait of Ambedkar. In such events, mimicking state rituals, the Dalit elite are induced to perform an act of symbolic allegiance assuring the community of their support. Dalits are thereby assured of benefactors within the administration. These imitations of official ceremonies are therefore a crucial step in the process of empowerment (Jaoul n.d.), showing how such symbols can be used by grassroots activists to involve the subaltern elite. These ceremonies give some special standing to the Dalit elites as ‘great men’ within the community. This involves some degree of flattery, by portraying these elites as successful and committed members of the community whose support and guidance is sought by the unprivileged majority. Ambedkar’s symbol plays a very important part in this: his commitment to the community, alongside his own personal achievements, is opposed to the example of selfish Dalits who distanced themselves from their Dalit origins once they became successful. When he addressed the relatively privileged Dalit government servants, Kanshi Ram thus convincingly turned Ambedkar into a model of moral virtue, which, according to him, could help to bring together social mobility and political involvement on behalf of those caste brethren who were ‘left behind’ (Ram 1982).

It can be argued that these ceremonies provide an audience for the Dalit administrative elites, helping them to establish their patronage over the subaltern community. The replication of official gestures and speeches on such occasions unmistakably points to the influence of state culture on popular culture. But instead of seeing things only from the elite angle, there is a need to acknowledge these popular initiatives by considering them from the popular angle as well. Through the manipulation of the symbol, the local activists manage to engineer such support from the elite. Their symbolic skills testify to a new grassroots ability to take advantage of democratic institutions.

VII. Conclusion

The symbolic skills learned in the process of erecting Ambedkar statues in UP have been shaped through struggles for the symbolic appropriation of public spaces.[40] An image of conquest has pedagogically demonstrated how democratic ideals can be achieved and implemented. In the process, Ambedkar’s image can even be said to have become ‘untouchable’, but this is so in a very positive sense from which there can now be no retreat.

In spite of the negative and brutal experience of the state among the poor (Mendelsohn and Vicziani 1998), popular representations of Ambedkar have sustained a popular image of the state that renews aspirations towards it. The BSP’s rise to power in Uttar Pradesh has made the state appear as the ally of the deprived, demonstrating new possibilities and unleashing new hopes. Though the change of perception of the state should not be overstated, and deeply-rooted negative perceptions continue to be prevalent among the unprivileged, what seems to have emerged is greater ambivalence in an already complex, almost schizophrenic, popular relationship with the Indian state. The positive shift is clearly apparent in the meanings associated with the Ambedkar statues by those who mobilize around them. To Dalit villagers, whose rights and dignity have been regularly violated, setting up the statue of a Dalit statesman wearing a red tie and carrying the Constitution involves dignity, pride in emancipated citizenship and a practical acknowledgement of the extent to which the enforcement of laws could positively change their lives. As E. Zelliot has pointed out, it testifies to ‘a belief that somehow or someday the Government of India — the democracy in which Ambedkar never lost faith — will protect their rights’ (Zelliot 2001). A political message based on a positive understanding of the state has thus induced the deprived sections who have long remained at the margins of citizenship to sharpen their political skills. The relevance of this political work as far as nation-building is concerned needs to be noted. Wherever they are found, but especially in the slums and villages where they have proliferated since the 1990s, the Ambedkar statues testify to a rising consciousness of constitutional rights among the unprivileged, and sometimes even to their ability to motivate local authorities to enforce them. Such popular monuments are a tangible sign of ‘the process of social adjustment to the state’ (O’Brien 2003: 29), whereby the state becomes imagined by the popular mind, and even to some extent ‘tamed’ as a result.

It is nevertheless true that the Ambedkarite symbolic politics have reached a stage of saturation, suggesting the difficulties in the way of the contemporary Dalit movement taking up new challenges in the context of liberalization. Class differentiation among Dalits now stands as the big issue. While symbolic politics have played a significant part in democratization, today this seems a convenient motive for the Dalit middle-class leadership to push issues of class under the carpet and to talk exclusively about issues of dignity. The question remains as to how long a movement that emphasizes the dignity of the oppressed can escape material questions.

In fact, the symbolic struggles of Dalits do carry with them an underlying class dynamic. In the rural context, the statue has unmistakably fuelled class tensions between the marginal and landless peasants and the dominant castes/classes. These have reached a point where the slightest incident of disrespect towards an Ambedkar statue can easily turn into a bitter confrontation. This potential for violence itself speaks of the frustrations of deprived Dalits and their growing anger which, despite the political progress that has come about recently, inevitably accompanies their politicization.

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BELLWINKEL-SCHEMPP, MAREN. 2002. The Kabir panthis in Kanpur. In Monika Horstmann, ed., Images of Kabir. New Delhi: Manohar.

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DAS, BHAGWAN, ed. 2002 [1963]. Thus spoke Ambedkar, vol. 1 (Selected speeches of Dr B.R. Ambedkar). Lucknow: Dalit Today Prakashan.

— — — . n.d. History of the conversion movement launched by Dr Babasaheb B.R. Ambedkar on October 13, 1935 at Yeola, Bombay. In Bhagwan Das, ed., Thus Spoke Ambedkar, vol. 4, ‘On renunciation of Hinduism and conversion of Untouchables.’

Bangalore: Ambedkar Sahithya Prakashana.

DAYAL, HARMOHAN. n.d. Varn vyavastha aur Kureel vansh. Lucknow: Mudrak Paigam Printers.

DUNCAN, R.I. 1979. Levels, the communication of programmes and sectional strategies in Indian politics, with reference to the Bharatiya Kranti Dal and the Republican Party of India in Uttar Pradesh and Aligarh District (Uttar Pradesh). Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sussex.

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TARTAKOV, GARY. 2000. The politics of popular art: Maharashtra. In Shivaji K. Panikkar, Twentieth century Indian sculpture: Last two decades, pp. 100–107. Mumbai: Marg Publications.

THORNER, DANIEL. n.d. The agrarian prospect in India. New Delhi: Delhi University Press. VIRAMMA, JEAN LUC RACINE and

JOSIANNE RACINE. 2000. Viramma: Life of a Dalit. New

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— — — . 1988. Congress and the Untouchables, 1917–1950. In Richard Sisson and Stanley A. Wolpert, eds., Congress and Indian nationalism: The pre-Independence phase, pp. 182–98. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Interviews

Aherwar, S.P. and Babulal Aherwar. Interview by author. Kanpur, UP,

May 2000. Ambavadekar, Rahulan. Interview by author. Kanpur, UP, March 2001.

— — — . Interview by author. Kanpur, UP, October 2004. Ambedkar,

Rajesh. Interview by author. Rudauli, UP, March 2001.

— — — . Interview by author. Rudauli, UP, May 1999.

Bahadur, Raj, Interview by author. Lucknow, UP, March 2001.

Balley, L.R. Interview by author. Jalandhar, Punjab, July 2006.

Bauddh, Tejram. Interview by author. Kanpur, UP, November 1999.

Bharti, Makrand Lal. Interview by author. Kanpur, UP, January 2000.

Chodhry, Madan Mohan. Interview by author. Kanpur, UP, April 2001. Gautam, Siddh Gopal. Interview by author. Kanpur, UP, April 2000.

Gupta, Dauji. Interview by author. Lucknow, UP, March 2005.

Kumar, Vijay. Interview by author. Allahabad, UP, November 2004.

Prasad, R.D. and M.L. Prasad. Interview by author. Kanpur, UP,

February 2001. Sagar, Bhagwati Prasad. Interview by author. Kanpur, UP, April 2000.

Sankhvar, Ammaji. Interview by author. Rudauli, UP, May 1999.

Sankhvar, Disaram. Interview by author. Pukhrayan, UP, November 1999.

Sankhwar, ‘Tiwari’. Interview by author. Balahpara Karan, UP,

March 2001. Sharma, Jatan Ram. Interview by author. Patna, Bihar, March 2005.

Tyagi, S.P. Interview by author. Kanpur UP, March 2000.

Party Documents

Bharatiya Dalit Panthers, Uttar Pradesh. Undated. Hamari mang.

Bharti, Shiv Prasad. 1985. Ek sansmarang. In Congress smarika, l885–l985. Kanpur. Ram, Kanshi. 1982. The Chamcha Age: An era of the stooges. New Delhi.

Press Articles

Bhu Bharti, September 1981. Kanpur mein 25 hazar Harijanon ka dharm pariwartan kyon nahi hua?

India Today, 30 April 1994. A new assertiveness.

— — — . 28 July 1997. Statue symbols.

Pioneer, Allahabad. 22 April 1969. Ambedkarites clash with police: 30 hurt.

— — — , Lucknow. 15 April 1973. Ambedkar statue unveiled: mayor’s tributes.

— — — . 15 April 1997. Letters to the editor.

Samta Sainik Sandesh, New Delhi, 1, 5. 24 June 1981. Babasaheb’s portrait desecrated.

— — — , 1, 16. 1 December 1981. All accused in Kanpur Ambedkar Jayanti case acquitted.

Times of India, New Delhi. 28 September 1995. BSP may force early polls: Kanshi Ram.

Nicolas Jaoul is an anthropologist at the CNRS, a member of the IRIS and an associate member of the CEIAS. Based on long field work, his PhD dissertation, defended in 2004, addressed the emancipation movement of Uttar Pradesh’s untouchables (Dalits). He has since developed his ethnographic approach of the underprivileged in India by undertaking regional comparisons of the Dalit mobilization, looking into communist pesants in Bihar, or the relationship between the Dalits and Hindu nationalism or Gandhism.

[1] Different terms are used to refer to those segments of the population treated as ‘Untouchables’, according to Brahminical standards, because of their ‘unclean’ occupations such as leather-work, sweeping and scavenging, weaving, cremating the dead, and so on. The term ‘Scheduled Castes’ is an official category, framed by the colonial state in 1935 to implement special policies towards the Untouchables following the Poona Pact agree- ment between Gandhi and Ambedkar. The term ‘Harijan’ (‘People of God’) was invented by a Gujarati poet of the 17th century and popularised by Gandhi after 1932 in order to promote the acceptance of Untouchables by other Hindus as members of their religion. The term ‘Dalit’ (‘crushed’ or ‘oppressed’) is a less euphemistic term which has been in use since the 1910s. In fact it was used by the Arya Samaj and later by Jagjivan Ram. (Both are considered as representing the non-radical reformist approach to Untouchability, where upper castes took the lead in promoting reform, though of course both were seen as radical compared to conservative upper-caste Hindus.) The term ‘Dalit’ became associated with radicalism when it was re-popularised in the 1970s by radical Ambedkarites such as the Dalit Panthers and later by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Today the use of ‘Dalit’ has become widespread in many parts of India, including UP. In this article I use different terms, according to the historical context.

[2] Tartakov also informs us that Ambedkar statues had been installed in Maharashtra, at non-official functions, by Ambedkar’s own Mahar followers since the early 1950s — even before Ambedkar’s death.

[3] I would like to thank Gary Tartakov for providing me with this important date. A picture of the unveiling ceremony can be seen on the internet at www.ambedkar.org/ images/movement1/target292.html.

[4] The formation of this party was announced by Ambedkar during his Buddhist conversion gathering (14–15 October 1956). It was eventually launched by his followers after his death.

[5] Other demands concerned the implementation of quotas, checking harassment of Untouchables, implementation of the Untouchability Offences Act, maintaining quotas for Untouchables converted to Buddhism, and full implementation of quotas in government services.

[6] Interview with L.R. Balley.

[7] The Marxist critique of depictions of Ambedkar in Western dress seems grounded in some deep-rooted Gandhian influence on the Indian Left. Marxists also criticise the ‘petty bourgeois’ outlook of the Ambedkarite leadership (Mishra 1999). One CPI-ML (Liberation) ideologue in Bihar, however, explained that the idea of cultural authenticity does not match the international credentials of the proletarian movement. He emphasised that such a fake argument could also be extended to declare Lenin or Marx inappropriate for India (interview with Jatan Ram Sharma).

[8] Mayawati’s recent unveiling of a statue of herself in Lucknow, near those of Ambedkar and Kanshi Ram, will certainly give new ammunition to those critics, and to all those nostalgic for a time when the Congress elite ruled and politicization of the lower orders had not created such a ‘noise’.

[9] A critique mixing concerns for a truly proletarian Ambedkarite movement with the requirement of cultural ‘authenticity’ has also been voiced by a Dalit intellectual who criticizes Ambedkar’s Western dress as unfit for a leader representing the poor (Teltumbde 1997). This view is not, however, representative of most Dalit intellectuals, who, on the contrary, take pride in Ambedkar’s dress as a sign of his excellence and statesmanship, and insist on his semiotic opposition to Gandhi.

[10] For example, the early Adi Hindu movement participated in the Kumbha Mela of 1929, where its procession carried pictures of Untouchable saints on an elephant (Jigyasu n.d.). In Kanpur in 1936, the Chamar elite organised the first annual procession to commemorate Sant Ravidas after the construction of a Ravidas temple (Bellwinkel-Schempp 2002), and Lucknow followed in 1940 through the initiative of an Ambedkarite politician, Pyarelal Talib (Dayal n.d.).

[11] Interview with Disaram Sankhvar.

[12] Interview with Vijay Kumar.

[13] There may have been even older statues in western UP, but I did not conduct my research there.

[14] Interview with Madan Mohan Chodhry.

[15] Interview with Rahulan Ambavadekar.

[16] The pioneer, 22 April 1969; interview with S.P. Aherwar and Babulal Aherwar.

[17] Ten years later, a court order returned the statue to the Ambedkarites. A committee by the name of B.R. Ambedkar Navyuvak Sangh had it unveiled by Bikhu Karunakarji, a Buddhist monk, near the Ravidas Temple in Jajmau, Kanpur’s leather centre.

[18] Interview with Makrand Lal Bharti.

[19] Interview with Dauji Gupta.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Interview with Rahulan Ambavadekar, 2004.

[22] Interview with Tejram Bauddh.

[23] Interview with Siddh Gopal Gautam.

[24] On this question of clothes and caste conflict in Tamil Nadu, see Viramma et al. 2000.

[25] Interviews with Rahulan Ambavadekar; Samta sainik sandesh, 24 June 1981 and 1 December 1981.

[26] Interview with R.D. and M.L. Prasad.

[27] Interview with S.P. Tyagi.

[28] Interview with Raj Bahadur.

[29] Interview with Bhagwati Prasad Sagar.

[30] Only 11.6 per cent of this land was effectively distributed, due to administrative inertia (Kohli 1987).

[31] India Today, 30 April 1994.

[32] These personalities may be Dalits from UP (like the Bhakti saints Ravidas and Kabir), the ‘national heroines’ Uda Devi and Jhalkaribaï (two Dalit women who took part in the 1857 revolt), or non-Brahman ideologues from other states (Periyar, Phule, Sahu Maharaj, Ambedkar). Uda Devi’s role in the process of ‘rewriting’ Dalit pasts is highlighted in Narayan (2004). Others include the Buddha, the Buddha’s mother Maya and the Hindu saint Valmiki. The former two are from upper castes, while the latter’s caste (whether ‘Untouchable’ or Brahmin) has become a controversial issue. However, Ambedkar remained the most popular Dalit symbol because of his outstanding educational achievements, his leadership of the Dalits and his role in writing the Constitution. The fact that he belongs to the Mahar caste, which is not represented in UP, perhaps also helped to project him as a symbol for all Dalits. ‘Heroes’ (persons whose fame lies in some exceptional act of bravery) remain in Ambedkar’s shadow in terms of popularity, although some are being promoted by political parties as well as by caste organizations to mobilize the particular caste to which they belonged.

[33] During a public Party meeting in Kanpur, for example, she asked the administration to work in favour of the Dalits (Times of India, 28 September 1995).

[34] Interview with Rajesh Ambedkar.

[35] Interview with ‘Tiwari’ Sankhwar.

[36] The name of the village has been changed on account of an ongoing court case.

[37] Interview with Rajesh Ambedkar, 1999, translated from Hindi.

[38] Interview with Ammaji Sankhwar, translated from Hindi.

[39] Interview with Rajesh Ambedkar, 2001, translated from Hindi.

[40] The conflict over Ayodhya engineered by Hindu nationalists similarly appealed to this collective psyche. For a specific discussion on the popular perceptions and uses of public space of the Dalit movement, see my forthcoming article on Dalit processions (Jaoul, forthcoming).

পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে (Pagli, Tomar Shonge)

by Joy Goswami
 
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ভয়াবহ জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ধুলোবালি কাটাব জীবন
 এর চোখে ধাঁধা করব, ওর জল করে দেব কাদা
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ঢেউ খেলতে যাব দু’কদম।

অশান্তি চরমে তুলব, কাকচিল বসবে না বাড়িতে
তুমি ছুঁড়বে থালা বাটি, আমি ভাঙব কাঁচের বাসন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে বঙ্গভঙ্গ জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ৪২ কাটাব জীবন।
 
 মেঘে মেঘে বেলা বাড়বে, ধনে পুত্রে লক্ষ্মী লোকসান 
 পুষিয়ে তুমি রাঁধবে মায়া প্রপন্ঞ্চ ব্যন্জ্ঞন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে দশকর্ম জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে দিবানিদ্রা কাটাব জীবন।
 
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ঝোলভাত জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে মাংসরুটি কাটাব জীবন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে নিরক্ষর জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে চার অক্ষর কাটাব জীবন।
 
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে বই দেখব প্যারামাউন্ট হলে
 মাঝে মাঝে মুখ বদলে একাডেমি রবীন্দ্রসদন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে নাইট্যশালা জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে কলাকেন্দ্র কাটাব জীবন।
 
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে বাবুঘাট জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে দেশপ্রিয় কাটাব জীবন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে সদা সত্য জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ‘কী মিথ্যুক’ কাটাব জীবন।
 
 এক হাতে উপায় করব,দুহাতে উড়িয়ে দেবে তুমি
 রেস খেলব জুয়া ধরব ধারে কাটাব সহস্র রকম
 লটারি, তোমার সঙ্গে ধনলক্ষ্মী জীবন কাটাব
 লটারি, তোমার সঙ্গে মেঘধন কাটাব জীবন।
 
 দেখতে দেখতে পূজা আসবে, দুনিয়া চিত্কার করবে সেল
 দোকানে দোকানে খুঁজব রূপসাগরে অরূপরতন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে পূজাসংখ্যা জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে রিডাকশনে কাটাব জীবন।
 
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে কাঁচা প্রুফ জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ফুলপেজ কাটাব জীবন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে লে আউট জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে লে হালুয়া কাটাব জীবন।
 
 কবিত্ব ফুড়ুত্ করবে, পিছু পিছু ছুটব না হা করে
 বাড়ি ফিরে লিখে ফেলব বড়ো গল্প উপন্যাসোপম
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে কথাশিল্প জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে বকবকম কাটাব জীবন।
 
 নতুন মেয়ের সঙ্গে দেখা করব লুকিয়ে চুরিয়ে
 ধরা পড়ব তোমার হাতে, বাড়ি ফিরে হেনস্তা চরম
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ভ্যাবাচ্যাকা জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে হেস্তনেস্ত কাটাব জীবন।
 
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে পাপবিদ্ধ জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ধর্মমতে কাটাব জীবন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে পূজা বেদি জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে মধুমালা কাটাব জীবন।
 
 দোঁহে মিলে টিভি দেখব, হাত দেখাতে যাব জ্যোতিষীকে
 একুশটা উপোস থাকবে, ছাব্বিশটা ব্রত উদযাপন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ভাড়া বাড়ি জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে নিজ ফ্ল্যাট কাটাব জীবন।
 
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে শ্যাওড়াফুলি জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে শ্যামনগর কাটাব জীবন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে রেল রোকো জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে লেট স্লিপ কাটাব জীবন।
 
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে আশাপূর্ণা জীবন কাটাব
 আমি কিনব ফুল, তুমি ঘর সাজাবে যাবজ্জীবন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে জয় জওয়ান জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে জয় কিষান কাটাব জীবন।
 
 সন্ধ্যেবেলা ঝগড়া হবে, হবে দুই বিছানা আলাদা
 হপ্তা হপ্তা কথা বন্ধ মধ্যরাতে আচমকা মিলন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ব্রক্ষ্মচারী জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে আদম ইভ কাটাব জীবন।
 
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে রামরাজ্য জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে প্রজাতন্ত্রী কাটাব জীবন
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ছাল চামড়া জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে দাঁতে দাঁত কাটাব জীবন।
 
 এর গায়ে কনুই মারব রাস্তা করব ওকে ধাক্কা দিয়ে
 এটা ভাঙলে ওটা গড়ব, ঢেউ খেলব দু দশ কদম
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ধুলোঝড় জীবন কাটাব
 পাগলী, তোমার সঙ্গে ‘ভোর ভয়োঁ’ কাটাব জীবন।

Pagli, With You

Adapted by Shalim M Hussain

Pagli I will live la vie terrible with you
Pagli I will live sand and dust with you
Will bedazzle someone’s eye, will muddy someone else’s water
Pagli I will walk two steps to make waves with you

Unease will reach a height; hawks and crows will dump us
You will let plates and bowls slip, I will break glass cutlery
Pagli I will live the Partition with you
With you I will live 1942 too.

The sun will grow in clouds; wealth, grain, sons will deplete
You will gather losses and bind a new alphabet
Pagli I will live life tenfold with you
With you I will live a siesta too.

Pagli I will live onion and rice with you
Pagli I will live roti chicken with you
Pagli I will live ignorance with you
With you I will live the alphabet too.

Pagli I will wait outside the Central Library for you
And sometimes for a change at Sahitya too
Pagli I will live Kamani with you
With you I will live LTG too.

Pagli I will live All India Radio with you
Pagli I will live Doordarshan with you
Pagli I will see, hear, touch no evil with you
With you I will live fake news too.

I will carry hope in one hand, with the other you will let it fly
I will race, I will gamble, I will seek out
Ponzi schemes. With you I will play kabutarbaazi
With you I will bet on marbles too

Time will pass, Holi will come, and the world will scatter
I will run from shop to shop for eco-friendly gulal
Pagli, I will live the Diwali special episode with you
With you I will live the End of Reason sale too

Pagli I will evade Facebook ads for you
Pagli I will bear intrusive advertising for you
Pagli I will spend IPL evenings with you
With you I will #instacricket too

Poetry will go for a toss, I will huff for words
Then come home with long fiction on my breath
Pagli, I will live an illustrated edition with you
With you I will live regular columns too.

At the garden of six senses I will find a new squeeze
And lose all my senses under your sandals
Pagli I will live disorientation with you
With you I will live full and final settlement too.

Pagli I will live in sin with you
Pagli I will live piety with you
Pagli, I will live Akshardham with you
With you I will live Nicholson too.

We will run Netflix marathons, visit the same Palmist
Observe twenty one fasts, thirty one day Ramzans
Pagli I will live rented accommodation with you
With you I will live a 3BHK life too.

Pagli I will live Vijaynagar Double Storey with you
Pagli I will live Zakir Nagar with you
Pagli I will live jail bharo andolan with you
With you I will live pinjra tod too.

Pagli I will go over the rainbow with you
I will buy flowers, you will get Surajkund vases
Pagli I will live Jai Jawan with you
With you I will live Jai Kisan too.

Evenings will be for tiffs: beds will separate
For weeks there will be silence and sudden unions at midnight
Pagli I will play chastity with you
Pagli I will live Adam, Eve and Seth with you.

Pagli, I will live Ramrajya with you
Pagli I will long live the republic with you
Pagli I will live skin and bones with you
With you I will live tooth to tooth too.

I will elbow my way, push out everyone else
If one breaks, I will raise another for you;
Pagli I will play ten feet of waves with you
Pagli I will live a sandstorm with you
Pagli I will live perfect calm with you.

পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে (Pagli, Tomar Xote)

by Karishma Hazarika, Kazi Neel

পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে ভয়াৱহ জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে ধূসৰিত কটাম জীৱন
যাৰ চকুত ধূলি দিম, তাৰ কৰিম পানী ঘোলা
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে
নাও-নদী খেলিম দুদিনমান

অশান্তিয়ে চুব চৰম সীমা,
কাউৰী চিলনী দূৰতে বিদূৰ
তুমি দলিয়াবা কাঁহৰ কাঁহী, মই ভাঙিম কাঁচৰ বাচন পাগলী,তোমাৰ স’তে
অসম আন্দোলন জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে ‘৮৩ কটাম জীৱন

মেঘে মেঘে আবেলি হ’ব,
ধনে পুত্ৰে লক্ষ্মী লোকচান
লোকচান সামৰি তুমি ৰান্ধিবা মায়া প্ৰপঞ্চ ব্যঞ্জন
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে নামধৰ্ম জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে দিবানিদ্ৰা কটাম জীৱন

পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে নিমখ-ভাত জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে হাঁহে-মাহে কটাম জীৱন
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে অনাখৰী জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে স্বল্পশিক্ষা কটাম জীৱন

পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে চিনেমা চাম উদেষ্ণা হলত
মাজে মাজে ৰুচি সলাই আৰ্টিষ্ট গীল্ড ৰবীন্দ্ৰভৱন
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে সংগীত নাটক জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে কলাক্ষেত্ৰ কটাম জীৱন

পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে শৰাইঘাট জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে লাষ্ট-গেট কটাম জীৱন
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে নিত্য-সঁচা জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে গোকাট্ মিছা কটাম জীৱন

এহাতে ঘটি আনিম, দুয়োহাতে উৰুৱাবা তুমি
তীৰ খেলিম জুৱাত হাৰিম ডুব যাম সহস্ৰ ঋণত
লটাৰী, তোমাৰ স’তে ধনধানে জীৱন কটাম
লটাৰী, তোমাৰ স’তে বন্ধন-গোট জীৱন কটাম

চাওঁতে চাওঁতে বিহু আহিব, বজাৰে মেলিব পোহাৰ
দোকানে দোকানে বিচাৰি যাম বুটা বছা মেজাঙ্কৰী সপোন
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে বসন্তসংখ্যা জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে ৰাহিমূল্য কটাম জীৱন

পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে অসম্পাদিত জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে পূৰ্ণপৃষ্ঠা কটাম জীৱন
পাগলী তোমাৰ স’তে পুনৰ মুদ্ৰণ জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে ধোঁৱা-চাং কটাম জীৱন

কবিত্ব গ’লে যাওক গুচি, পিচে পিচে নাযাওঁ লৱৰি
ঘৰলৈ উলটি লিখি পেলাম সুদীৰ্ঘ গল্প উপন্যাসোপম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে কথাশিল্প জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে কথাচহকী কটাম জীৱন

নতুন প্ৰেয়সীৰ স’তে লগ কৰিম লুকাই চুৰকৈ
ধৰা পৰি তোমাৰ হাতত লাঞ্ছনা ভীষণ
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে থৰ-কাছুটি জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে হেস্তনেস্ত কটাম জীৱন

পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে পাপগ্ৰস্ত জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে ধৰ্মমতে কটাম জীৱন
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে গোঁসাইঘৰ জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে মধুমালতী কটাম জীৱন

দুয়ো মিলি টিভি চাম, হাত দেখুৱাম জ্যোতিষীক
একৈশটা লঘোন, ছাব্বিশটা ব্ৰত উদযাপন
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে ভাড়াঘৰ জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে নিজ-বাসগৃহ কটাম জীৱন

পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে কটাবাৰী জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে জালুকবাৰী কটাম জীৱন
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে অসম বন্ধ জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ সৈতে নিদ্ৰাবিহীন কটাম জীৱন

পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে আশাব্যঞ্জক জীৱন কটাম
মই আনিম জাপি-শৰাই, তুমি সজাবা ঘৰ আজীৱন
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে
জয় আই অসম জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে
জাতি-মাটি-ভেটি কটাম জীৱন

সন্ধিয়া হ’লে কাজিয়া হ’ব, হ’ব দুই বিছনা বেলেগ
মাহ-পষেক মাত-বোল বন্ধ,
শেষৰাতি আকস্মিক মিলন
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে ব্রহ্মচাৰী জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে আদম-ইভ কটাম জীৱন

পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে ৰামৰাজ্য জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে প্ৰজাতন্ত্ৰী কটাম জীৱন
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে হাড়ে-ছালে জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে দাঁতে-দাঁত কটাম জীৱন

কাৰোবাক লেং মাৰি পেলাম, কাৰোবাক গতিয়াই মোকলাম বাট
এটা ভাগিলে আন এটা গঢ়িম, ঢৌতে খেদি ফুৰিম জীৱন
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে ধূলি-ধুমুহা জীৱন কটাম
পাগলী, তোমাৰ স’তে অৰুণোদই কটাম জীৱন

Kazi Neel is a poet and photographer based in Assam. He is pursuing his Masters in Cultural Studies in Tezpur University.

Karishma Hazarika is a poet and doctoral candidate in the Department of Assamese, Gauhati University.

Shalim M Hussain is a writer, translator and researcher based in Guwahati and New Delhi.

They told me, I had too much hair.
They told me that my curly black hair was beautiful
on my head
A head full of hair and body too,
I was postmature,
had no wish to leave the womb
They rubbed my body with turmeric
That pre-marriage ritual,
for a baby
Post-mature, indeed
Girls cannot have that much hair, they said
They prepared me for men
Like a sheep reared.
Choice, they say
Where is choice when you are not allowed one?
I must have cried, I cannot remember
for them to stop.
My body resisted
but has persisted
My hair refused to submit.
It rebelled even before me
I still have more hair on my legs, my arms, my fingers, my back
Probably more than the naked male bodies I saw
I can see your disgust
I can feel your disgust
I don’t.
I tried waxing, made my skin angry red
But, the women and men in my life liked it
They affirmed saying that my skin was smooth as silk
Affirmation currency lasted only a few months
Because soon paper casteist gandhi was not enough
They said that it would be that way the first few months
That eventually the hair growth will slow down
They showed me 40 year old ladies
Who spent a whole sunday at the parlour
Waxing, mani, pedi, eyebrow, upper lip, facial, brazilian
They told me that their hair growth had ’slowed’ aging,
apparently age was not taken into factor.
I was not fem enough for the boys
I was masc enough for the tomboys
I always said that I would love anyone.
even as a child
I couldn’t say sex because male leery eyes followed me
even as a child,
Returning from karate
Fuck self-defence classes
Sex traumatized
The only experience of that was rape
They asked me, do I not like boys?
Do I not find men on billboard’s hot?
I liked girls better, crushes
Crushed because I was only for a night
A memory of good times
A memory of rebellion
Not for love, not for relationships
Not for monogamy
Like why be bi if you can’t fuck around
Bi, before I discovered another word
I liked boys but feared them
I would have liked very much to not like them
To not have a physical attraction
But I can’t, I don’t choose it
Because my earliest thought was I would love anyone
And I found a word that would define it
More than bi
Identity politics is the bane, but do they know
Do they understand how liberating it is to find a word
That defines what you felt, all your life?
Pansexual.
And I don’t have to define it.
Non-binary exists in my body
Weird, Alien, they called me +Fat, oh that word
Now, they ask about transition
Yes, I want to abandon the parts of my fem bod
But, not transition
I identify as many things
All valid
All true
But only my fem parts are excitable
That’s the objectification thrust on me
That a man can grope my breasts
when I walk in a dark lane
While I wore baggy pants and baggy jacket
That hid my breasts
He could still cop a feel
Ah, what have you done to stop those things, they say
Have you tried looking less victim-y?
More confident like the men?
Chest out, head up, chin up, straight, proud
The confidence of a cisman whose only vulnerability
Is a dick, only when kicked
And the only penetration he fears is his asshole
Which cannot happen from a woman
Yes, I tried.
Looking confident
I tried classes
I trained harder than any man in my class
My knuckles bleed for days
My arms had blue-black marks for days
That man groped me when I was returning from the class
I still couldn’t do anything
Fuck you if you think classes help
Fuck you if you think confidence helps
You know who can’t have eye contact?
Autistic persons, persons with debilitating social anxiety
You know why we walk with chest closed
A slight curve in our backs
So it doesn’t become easy for men to grab our boobs
Because we are terrified
But it’s easy
Easy for you to dismiss this as trauma lens
The last identity
Dalit
Prima et ultima
They say, don’t use that word
You cannot possibly be that
You speak english
You have education
It’s not the word that is dirty
It’s your thinking
Dalit,
it shall be
Broken, yet whole
Kintsukuroi by Babasaheb

Rachelle Bharathi Chandran is a Dalit, Non-Binary identifying Pansexual person. Zir interests lie in areas of inter generational trauma, sex and gender within Dalit communities, accessible healthcare and support groups for marginalized persons.

South Vancouver

Each evening you step out of your rented
Home, and begin walking backwards around
The block on Cornish street, supposedly
As an exercise for your back; in so doing
You sometimes recall Du Dongpo, and how
He would oppose the trend, ignoring it
By resorting to brush painting, calligraphy
Besides writing poetry at an outpost on Lingnan
When he was exiled by the imperial court
(Or the other way around), inventing ways
To cook pork, joking about a Buddhist Master’s
Donkey face as long as the sidewalk behind you

Other times you look up into the deep blue
What you are withdrawing from is a close-up
A panorama of your future as the past while
You constantly have to turn back, just to avoid
Posing a hazard to other normal pedestrians

That is the Room

That is exactly the room where your wife moves
Beyond her bee-like moment for the first time
Wechatting at Huawei in thickening spring warmth
After dawn falls from heaven

After the wondering if never again heaven
Can send out the warmth, the little streamlet
Of the warmth, can attract your wife to the warmth
Beyond her bee-like moment wechatting at Huawei

Yaleugooli

While nobody has ever been to heaven (or hell)
I can readily go to Yaleugooli, my inner dwelling
More charming than Maui and Palawan combined
With a beach more sensational than El Nido or
Lopes Mendes; in particular, a cave more majestic
Than Sơn Đoòng, where I cannot only get myself
Totally lost in seeing countless wonders of nature
But also take a respite as long as I like; an other
Eden where I can enjoy being one and the same with
Hyperion (from North California?) as my soulmate
Or live an immortal life like the Metasequoia King
Near my native village in central China, if ever I
I so choose when I feel disturbed by earthly winds
Or suffer from insomnia in the heart of winter night

Yes, I am already living in Yaleugook, a true paradise
While they could only wish to enter heaven after they die

Aubade: My Home is a Hotel

You might have stayed up
All night, clicking at every link
To your daydream, searching
For a soulmate in the cyberspace

You might have enjoyed an early dose
Of original sin between sleep and wake
Before packing up all your seasonal greetings
With your luggage to catch the first plane

Or sitting up in meditation
With every sensory cell
Widely open to receive
Blue dews from nirvana

But you did not. Rather, you have just
Had another long fit of insomnia and
Now in this antlike moment, you are
Imagining a lucky morning glow

That is darting along the horizon

A Rented Room is No Home

Everyone has an innerself that actually needs
No housing, be it a well-located apartment
Or a luxurious mansion, for which you have
To toil and moil to pay off the mortgage
And constantly to paint, to furnish, or to
Renovate it as you would do for your outerself

But it does require you to design and construct
A dwelling somewhere or anywhere, on a treetop
Beside a streamlet, under a boulder, or beyond
The horizon, where you can ease your entire inner
Being into anything or nothing, where you can
Uplift your own spirit and your farthest relative
As if in a sociological quantum entanglement

Breaking Out

During the yard time 3 days ago
My other being finally managed to flee
From the prison heavily guarded
With the high walls of my yellowish 
Skin and electrical wires 
Made of my id nerve endings

However, once free wandering
In the endless desert nearby, I 
Felt like a gold fish jumping out of
The glass water jug: shall I return 
To my cell and continue my chained life
Or die a free death in the wild open?

Prison House

for now, they have all stopped 
pretending to be more than chimpanzees 
struggling ferociously for power, sex, fame or money

lying seemingly still on each padded shelf 
under the roof of hardened darkness 
is a bleeding devil 
tightly enclosed within a decent 
human shape, as if in a vast morgue

high above them is squatting a bloated serpent 
with a body of billion eyes all viciously open 
to watch for so many tiny dragons 
chasing and collecting the deformed soul 
trying desperately to escape 
form every fleshy casket

Weekend Walk

On a sunny Saturday afternoon 
I would lead my inner selfhood 
Out of my small rented room 
To the Fraser River Valley Park 
To let it play with other dogs 
Running and jumping wildly 
Catching the ball each time I threw 
Into the air, the tree shade, the ditch 
The bank, the water, and sometimes 
The ridge, where it sometimes stopped and stood 
Looking beyond the horizon, as if to join the wild 
Becoming one and the same with the little could 
Drifting freely around, under the western sky

Mindsetting

Powerful are spoken words; much more so are those working silently in the mind.

Every word is a particle for the prison house
Of the mother tongue, from which the mind
Can never escape
Even for a single moment of yard time

The only window is barred with the net
Of imagination, from which a loose thought
May fly out into the gloam
From time to time

Prison Camp

no, there is no
barbed wire; no
neither stockade
nor watch tower
which are both
unnecessary: this

is a real jungle
on an unmapped
island, where
every untrodden
trail of escape
leads to death only
quick and direct

but if you toil
hard enough
(with your pen
or bare hands)
you might perhaps
survive or succeed

Yuan Changming edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan and hosts Happy Yangsheng in Vancouver; credits include ten Pushcart nominations, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, Best New Poems Online, and 1,429 others across 42 countries.

My grandmother’s kitchen is in Kanakpur Part II in faraway Silchar. To get there, you must undertake a perilous journey through the house, cross a verandah first, then an uthan[i], a staircase with just two stairs, separated by a drain from yet another verandah. My grandmother is no more, but her kitchen, whose rusty-red tin roof you can still see from a distance, lives on. I had promised her that when I get a job, I shall get the kitchen roof redone with transparent tin sheets so that the aalo[ii] would float in. Now, with her gone, and the old roof still in place, I wonder if I have any right to disturb it when its owner and builder is away.

Whose paakghor is it anyway?

Back in the day, when she reigned, there were many other stakeholders in her kitchen. None, however, had her sense of authority or grace in executing cumbersome, monotonous tasks. She chopped and cut maach, choto or boro, with precision as she sat over a bothi-daa[iii] with a bag of ash by her side. She lived her life proud of how well she chopped her vegetables and cut her fish, and now with her gone I can only admire her skills and regret not having paid attention when she was teaching. In my defence, our kitchen was a noisy and ugly place, and I was scared of bothi-daas, anxious that I will fall on to it and lose my neck.

Thamma’s kitchen was always populated. If our house were a civilisation, the verandah that led to the kitchen would be its epicentre. By 8:00 am, the womenfolk would sit to drink tea, munch on muri[iv] or biscuits, and complain about power cuts or people. My grandmother would eventually proceed to read aloud her copy of Shamayik Prasanga, while I quizzed her on the different Bangla words and what they meant. She put up with me for as long as it took her to feed me; after that, she would only focus on her fish and vegetables.

From this verandah, you couldn’t hear the gate creak open or close. Neither could you see my grandfather sitting guard on his rocking chair holding his stick with his right hand, as he dutifully announced the day’s guests with a ‘ke aisey go dekho’[v] with either surprise or annoyance based on who was visiting us. If it were a relative (and we have too many relatives), he entertained them till someone carried tea all the way from the kitchen-island and joined them briefly. We kids, also played our part in this whole charade every time a grandfatherly jethu or worse still a grandfather showed up. We would have to parade out of wherever we were to touch their often disturbingly dirty feet with cracked heels and seek blessings.

Few men visited the kitchen, and when they did, they would sit on a mudha[vi] waiting to be served breakfast and tea. They were always too shy to call for service outright. In our house sophistication (and tradition) demanded they repeatedly enquire or mention the time, implying but not ordering; or walk around rubbing their bellies making small talk, so that you guessed. Yet, when all cues went unnoticed my uncle would growl and state ‘khawa aij Sunil daar ghoro ou khawa lahgabo’, which was laughable as they put so much salt in their food that we dreaded going to their house even during festivities. (Sunil Da or Sunil Kaku, as I called him, was our neighbour, who never really got used to wash basins and always brushed and spat on the road, an event you could witness at 8 o’ clock sharp every morning.)

In joint families, often enough you have to put up with people you don’t like. Say for instance my uncle, Noni Jethu, a man old enough to be a vampire, visited our house each morning at 9 to chit-chat with my grandfather. Since he always visited us around breakfast, we always had to engage in a game of offering him food that he would initially refuse but later accept saying ‘khali tumi banaiso dekhi khaiyar’.[vii]

I never understood why my grandmother felt compelled to entertain every single person who came home. A regular at her verandah was an old man from the ashram near our house, which my grandparents frequently visited. Runu Babu, as thamma called him, was a painful gentleman, full of complaints about the new generation. When he arrived, the three oldies would huddle and talk of places that I couldn’t find on the map. It took me a few years to realise my Sylheti ancestry. I learned to read a map when I was in sixth standard, and it was in an Oxford Atlas that I spotted for the first time, Baniachung and Habiganj, both in Bangladesh by then. If Runu Babu, had it his way, he’d hold the ‘new generation’ responsible for everything starting from inflation to the terrible infrastructure of Silchar: ‘Kail maiya ekjon ailo asromo. Ekla. Pronam-unam korlo, boilo. Dekhiya bakka bhala laglo,’ he once said as he settled on our mura.[viii]

I thought the story ended there and all was good in the world. But then he looked in my grandmother’s direction and continued, ‘Aroti diya awar shomoy dekhlam, sele ek gur loge hashiya hashiya maat. Amarey dekhar loge-loge tara haath dhoriya rowana.’ ‘Kita koitay chain ita re?’ he demanded of my grandmother.[ix]

I don’t remember what she said in response. But I remember her telling my cousin and me, very often, how we must first get jobs and then think of everything else: ‘Chakri naholey kichu hobey na.’

‘Unlike territories, stories cannot be stolen so easily’

As a kid, I was silent, meaning I had to be kept engaged with one thing or the other if one wanted to keep me out of trouble. My grandmother would often tell me stories from her ‘first’ house in Baniachong which too had a verandah that led to the kitchen where everyone gathered to work, and where she learned how to skin a goat. Her brother-in-law would from time to time manage to bring home deer or goats and announce ‘Aij toh khawa jombo’[x], as he would set the dead animal on the kitchen floor and disappear. She and the other women would then go on to skin and cut and cook and serve, a common event in that house before 1947.

She would go on to live in many houses, before finding peace in the 1980s in a government-allotted land meant to rehabilitate the refugee family in ‘India’, more than three decades after they lost their home. Many years later, in Sara Suleri’s Rhetoric of English India, I read that ‘unlike territories, stories cannot be stolen so easily.’ My grandmother died in exile from her desh, but she replicated her previous life in the form of little rituals, so that the upheaval of 1947 could be forgotten. She never missed a Manasha puja, never changed the way she cut radishes into nets before frying them and never let us go for more than a week without dry fish. She imported customs from everywhere she knew and introduced a 100 percent Vaishnav-friendly zero-onion-garlic shutki made with sheem and mishti kumra.

The verandah, however, was not just her country alone. It also belonged to my mother, my aunts, to Cheksie, and me. Cheksie was an old man who lived in our house, since my uncle, a policeman patrolling the streets of Hailakandi at night, found him jaundice-stricken on a pavement. When he mentioned he too was from Habiganj, no time was wasted in getting him home. He did odd jobs for the house between bidi-breaks and getting my grandmother her copy of Sananda and Desh. He was her eyes and ears in the colony, and there was nothing that he did not know about. Cheksie spent more than usual time in the kitchen, too much for the liking of the other men of the house who deemed him not man-enough. They lectured him from time to time on quitting bidis, while they continuously smoked cigarettes in the bathrooms and the garden. Sometimes to assert his masculinity, my uncle would tug at his trousers threatening to pull them down if he wore ill-fitting ones again. It never occurred to anyone to buy him a new pair of trousers, or check why he kept losing weight till he died of cancer.

In the absence of men, the verandah became a ‘free speech zone’, if I can be dramatic about this. When my grandmother stepped into the kitchen or left for shower, my aunts and mother would break into giggles describing the men they saw on screen and off it. They would spend time arguing over who made a better Devdas — Dilip Kumar or Shah Rukh Khan? — and never reach a consensus. They would talk of Kalyan Kaku, my boro pishi’s brother-in-law, who was convinced he looks like Uttam Kumar and deserved a big break in the Bengali film industry. Kalyan Kaku was irritating to say the least and annoying, with his chun and khoyer-stained[xi] nails. It’d make my skin crawl every time I saw his fingers. He received a letter in 2006 from Uttam Kumar requesting him to star in one of his movies. He officially began his ‘movie’ career in a music video, playing a cross between a baul and a sanyasi in Dharmanagar. He ended his career playing Kali in the next album by the same singer, because Kumar again wrote mentioning how true talent was no longer appreciated in the industry and kaku must carry on with his regular job in the PWD Department, a fact that relieved everyone but him. The antithesis to Kalyan Kaku was Jhalak Kaku, my father’s cousin, the most eligible bachelor the women of my family knew. He was young, handsome, fluent in salsa after growing up in different BSF camps across India. He was on his way to become a babu in SBI and bring glory to the family but was very much dead from cancer just after landing the job. Choto-pishi, also dead from cancer, would talk at length about her beautiful cousin who could cook chicken wearing a helmet, and also offer aarti to Dugga Maa. You could tell her loss from how she spoke of him and the times they spent together.

My secret hiding spot

Adults tend to think children are dumb. And, despite their goal of bringing up children with no malice in their hearts, say things they must not. Often enough, my grandmother’s gang would gather and gossip about a person when they were not around. So when my pishis were not around my mother and jethi would talk of how their kitchen was funded by my father and uncle’s salary. I realised after eavesdropping one morning that they were the reason I couldn’t join swimming classes and was getting one piece of pabda for lunch. When my mother was not around they would talk of how she was trying to flaunt my father’s wealth by buying that gold bangle for my grandmother, and when my jethi was not around, they spoke of how she was spending on sarees when she should be focusing on having a child while she still could.

I was a neutral observer, incapable of taking sides, and as I grew older, I chose to be the ghost in my grandmother’s kitchen — collecting all the juicy gossip to satiate my thirst for knowledge because it was the easiest thing to do when all the adults you loved seemed to hate each other. My spot thus shifted from the uthan that led to the verandah to the landing of the staircase that led to the roof. From there you could see and hear everything that everyone spoke about, but no one could see you unless you made a noise. In a household with my brother as my sole playmate, I realised it was in my best interest to keep my hiding spot a secret.

So, when I was a teen with raging hormones and had to phone my boyfriend, or BF as I called him, I would go to landing of the staircase armed with a cordless phone. It was here that my brother and I tried and failed to teach ourselves to smoke, after stealing cigarettes from my uncle’s box of smokes. It was here that we also taught our nephew that his tongue won’t fall if he had chicken before anjali during pujas.

However, it was the verandah, the centre of the world, where I acquired important life lessons. I learnt that while roasting fish was normal, wanting to roast your baby brother was not. I learnt how to get rid of leeches when they stuck to your legs, and that a beautiful boy cousin could make you want to spend more time around them and want more of their attention. And if they denied you that or refused to play with your dough of atta, the best thing to do was pretend they hit you and get them beaten up by howling and complaining to your mother, ‘mereche amake’.[xii]

The place changed as I grew older. We got a wash basin to brush our teeth, the coconut tree grew taller each year, and the betel-nut tree, struck by lightning, fell on the kitchen roof damaging it. I progressed from playing with atta dough to setting up buckets on the corners of the tin roof to collect water, to handing my father bleaching powder and salt to kill snails and millipedes after the rain. The morning ritual of meeting at the verandah to chop vegetables never changed.

When my grandfather died, I was heartbroken and withdrew from the verandah to my hiding spot on the stairs. That was the first time I realised our home was going to change though I initially dismissed my fears. All the adults of the house fought over funeral expenses as my grandmother sat mourning alone. A week later, they all came together to chop and cut and wash and cook till, with my grandmother’s death, this country was lost forever.

Nilanjana Bhattacharjee is an aspiring researcher of oral history. She likes to daydream and tell funny stories, and has an intense love-hate relationship with every city she has ever lived in.

[i]Uthan means courtyard.

[ii]Aalo means light in Bengali.

[iii]It is a cutting instrument, used for cutting vegetables and fish, big and small.

[iv]Muri means puffed rice.

[v] Look, who it is!

[vi]Mudha means stool, which in Assam is often made of bamboo and jute.

[vii] I am eating only because you asked.

[viii] Yesterday, a girl came to pray at the ashram, all alone. It made be really happy.

[ix] As I returned after finishing the aarti, I saw her holding hands with a boy. As soon as they realised I had seen them, they ran away. What to do with these people?

[x] It will be a feast today!

[xi]Limestone paste and catechu, used in betel leaves (paan).

[xii] He hit me.

Rheea Mukherjee, Mangalesh Dabral, Urvashi Bahuguna, Lakshmi Krishnakumar, R. Srivatsan, Gopal M.S., Nasreen Habib, Joe Mills, Glen Armstrong.

I believe it was the Manoj Kumar film Roti, Kapda, Makaan we thought about when we were working on themes for the next set of issues after we were done with the Body trilogy. Roti became Food, which was the previous issue. Kapada was turned into Fashion. Makaan, Home, we will soon start working on.

We weren’t sure of the positioning of this issue. Was it too privileged to talk about fashion, we wondered. What do we even know about fashion? But decided to go ahead with it, because while we may or may not know about high fashion, we decided what we wore was fashion, just as much. But also that fashion can be and is so much more than clothes, shoes, and bags. We were trying to look beyond the kapada (clothes) aspect of it. And we found what we were looking for and more.

In this issue we have some interesting and expansive interpretations of the word from a myriad of writers from India and abroad. We have Lakshmi Krishnakumar writing about the sisterhood she formed through the sharing of ‘bindis’ as a child. We have Urvashi Bahuguna looking at the metaphor of baldness, and how that fits into our everyday discourse. Joe Mills in his short story “Mohawk” explores the inner monologue of a parent as she reflects on the many vagaries of parenthood through a child sporting a mohawk. Mangalesh Dabral’s poem Skin, translated from Hindi by Sarabjeet Garcha, that talks about the skin that is so much more than just the body’s covering.

Rheea Mukherjee through her short story explores the many social media trends, or fads, that come and go like fashion, each one more disruptive than the other. M.S. Gopal gives us a touching photo essay on the many small shops around Mumbai that make and sell their own clothes, emulating much of what Bollywood is selling, creating a parallel universe of its own for the aspirational without much reach or privilege. Nasreen Habib writes beautifully on the kheta, a hand-made recycled quilt, made by the Muslims of Bengal origin in Assam. Glen Armstrong in his three deeply personal poems explores the everyday encounters with ‘fashion’. R. Srivatsan’s essay, which we republish with his permission in our ‘Not Trending’ section, critically analyses how the advertisement showcasing a woman’s body satisfies the hunger of the upper-caste, patriarchal, capitalist establishment.

This issue took a long time to take shape. Because of my rapidly escalating mental health conditions, I haven’t been able to pay it the attention and care it deserved. But I think what we have managed to put together is a fine edition nonetheless. And I am ever so grateful to my supportive and fantastic co-editors Sumana Roy, Shruti Ravi, Debojit Dutta for being there and being patient with me as we slowly read through and worked on the submissions.

Happy reading, everyone.

Love,
Manjiri

Poetry

To Kill a Bald Eagle - Antiserious - Medium
Urvashi Bahuguna's poem looks at the various metaphors of baldness.antiserious.com

Skin - Antiserious - Medium
Manglesh Dabral's poem translated from the Hindi, 'Twacha', by Sarabjeet Garcha.antiserious.com

Cotton Shirts; Rave Reviews; Doodad - Antiserious - Medium
Three poems on fashion by Glen Armstrong.antiserious.com

Fiction

Scary Story - Antiserious - Medium
HER NAME IS Peggy. She lives in an undisclosed city. No one comes close to doing the job as well as Peggy does. If you…antiserious.com

Mohawk - Antiserious - Medium
A kid on the other team, the Broncos, has the worst mohawk Valerie has ever seen. Mohawks are ugly by design, but they…antiserious.com

Nonfiction

I Cannot Remember How We Started Sharing Pottus, It Seems Now that We Always Did
These shops were the domain of women - where we did not mind bumping into another customer, or where one's choice of a…antiserious.com

In Assam, Stitching the Divide Between Kheta and Gamusa
In the popular imagination about Assamese crafts, khetas lose out to their illustrious cousins like the jaapis and…antiserious.com

Photoessay

What's Your Good Brand Name Please? - Antiserious - Medium
MUMBAI IS THE TASTEMAKER of the nation in many ways. The city makes movies, songs, stars, singers and the currency…antiserious.com

Not Trending

The Woman in the Advertisement: Historical Explorations Through a Type
R. Srivatsan in his essay writes about how the advertisement woman's body satisfies the hunger of the upper-caste…antiserious.com

by R. Srivatsan

IN ADVERTISING, ONE of the techniques used to speak effectively to the viewer is that of providing a stable and recognizable type from which the voice will emanate. The type anchors different advertising messages and ensures that familiarity and pleasure, relayed through repeated and subtly varied contact, hold the attention of the viewer. A privileged one, in that it appears often, and in different cultural contexts of advertising, is that of a woman. How and in what manner, against what background, evoking what world does the woman in the advertisement speak to the viewer? Not so much with the message of the advertisement as with her attitude, apparel, and personal style in the phan­tasy narrative within which she is deployed? What is the mode of engagement of this type with the world in which the viewer lives? In this essay, I try to address these questions with respect to a specific period: the mid-sixties, with the hope of bringing out some of the preliminary considerations that would have to be addressed satisfactorily if history writing using photographic images as archival records were to be made possible.’

The woman in the sixties

In matters of dress, the woman in the advertisement of the sixties
 seems surprisingly bold, even to eyes which have witnessed the
 sexual revolution’ in the nineties. The most common variants of clothing are suggestively draped sarees, sleeveless blouses, churidars, tenniswear and the occasional swimsuit. The hairdo is most often a ‘bun’, or a bob, with straight combed hair framing the forehead tightly in many cases. Out of an average of 110 images in a month during the periods sampled, about 40 per cent seem to be erotic in a way that directly addresses a masculine viewer (I generalize based on my response to them as I see them today), but a sexual undertone is present in nearly all of them. The camera focusses on the body most of the time. Though there is a clear voyeuristic intent in the newspaper advertisement image, I would like to argue that the male gaze was not the direct determi­nant for the contours of this woman in any simple sense. Granted that the newspaper would mark a masculine domain, the products these advertisements sold were, quite often, cosmetics and other commodities directed at women. Therefore, if the advertisement had to be effective, it had to address a woman who had access to a newspaper, broadly in terms of different desires that she acknowledged, however surreptitiously, as her own. This kind of ‘fashionable image was deployed within and against a particular convention and practice of ‘being feminine’, which was prevalent in urban India of the sixties. The significance of the woman in the advertisement would therefore also have to be understood in terms of its effects upon, and interplay with, that his­torical convention and norm of femininity.’ It is this interplay that I would like to evoke for the reader here.

In a large number of the advertisements the woman is por­trayed as being concerned with her appearance (such a concern is visible in advertisements for vanishing creams, soaps, shampoos); in cases where this is not the explicit copy, there are stereotypical features to suggest such a preoccupation. Hers was as readily a troubled body, which suffered from minor ailments like rash, headaches and colds, as it was simultaneously a joyous one that was free from troubles of any kind (as may be seen from ads selling talcum powders, headache pills, cough mixtures, fans, holiday trips). In these images (as in any such to this day) desirable femininity is characterised by the primary criterion of visible beauty. This norm of beauty is central to most of the advertisements, and not just to those that sell beauty products. Obviously, the advertisement discourse played a role in refining the equivalence between the concept of visible beauty and imagined femininity, deploying suitable signifiers in the advertising image and shaping them, with a sensitivity to social consensus and with an element of chance.

This attractive woman often adopted the role of caregiver, home manager or hostess. A little less often, she was in search of a man to romance, marry and get away with from the clutches of ‘tradition’. In most instances, however, in spite of a clearly signalled role, the woman in the advertisement had nothing to do, except exist as a being of pleasure and freedom, sometimes in temporary discomfort, but almost always smiling at the viewer. Less than 2 percent of the women in advertising images seemed to work in a profession outside the house, and those who did were secretaries. Only one advertisement directly foregrounded the ubiquitous, yet invisible, profession of the model who posed for these hundreds of images in the newspaper. The phantasy life of the advertising woman can be better understood when set in the schema of the viewer’s imagination which is implicit in the advertisement’s narrative. In this schema, the space of the world is divided into the opposites of the inside (home, comfort, con­sumption, femininity) and the outside (world, risk, production, masculinity); and the time of life is divided into the time of work/pain and that of leisure/pleasure. In this space and time, the woman viewer would clearly be designated as occupying the quadrant categorised by the congruence of ‘inside’ and ‘work’, whereas the male viewer would be made to fit into the quadrant ‘outside’ and ‘work’.

In order to appeal to viewers of both sexes, the woman in the advertisement is imaged in the time of leisure, and occupies both the home, and outside spaces that are marked, clearly, as domains of pleasure. Thus it would seem that the advertisement viewer is encouraged to develop a characteristic (and from a different perspective, definitely peculiar) sensibility which opposes work and pleasure, and aligns with these opposites, the imagined characteristics of masculinity and femininity respectively: femininity equals pleasure in the advertising images and this automatically supports the male dominant position by the equation of masculinity with work. The disparity between what the image constructed as a woman’s lifestyle and living experience for women would result in their responding with a problematised and ambivalent relationship to the femininity that was imaged in a manner that perpetually swung between description of a state of affairs and prescription for utopia.

Description: ‘Women are beings of pleasure/leisure’, to which women would almost certainly respond with anger. Prescription: ‘The most beautiful and desirable aspects of femininity show themselves in the domain of leisure’, to which there would be a less negative response. But in either case, there is a fitment or normalisation of femininity which occurs.

The profile of the woman in the advertisement was a composite of mother, playmate and free body, all paradoxically held together. Her femininity was traditional and did not permit her to support herself, and her prime goal was to attract a man who could support her in a life of pleasure and dependence. At the same time in her characteristic ‘weakness’ as a woman, she was also a staunchly modern and thoroughly Indian being who sought to embrace the world of commodities with a new-found freedom. Obviously, once the reader asks questions about the kind of modernity and the model of freedom imaged, the contour of this stereotypical figure begins to outline, on the ground, the politics of a consumer culture in India.

In keeping with my general thesis that advertisement discourse designates and proposes fictional solutions to contain anxieties, problems and crises at different levels, I would suggest to the reader that the advertising woman signified to and claimed on behalf of the feminine viewer, an imaginary liberation from what were experienced in contrast, as the ‘minor’ oppressions of everyday life in that period.’ This raises the question of what such oppressions were and what life was like for women in the sixties. In my attempt to address this question, I evade, on the one hand, the choice of trying to approach feminine experience in the sixties through memories of women who lived then. Remembering the truth about a past experience is not a simple task because the memory that remains of an event is a result of an experience; it is a recountable and accessible aspect of subjectivity that remains in response to the experience of an event; it is not a simple record. The problem becomes even more complex when a whole past mode of experiencing femininity is to be recalled, because what remained invisible and what was forgotten become as crucial as what was remembered. Therefore, recalling a past mode of experiencing life is an exercise which, rather than telling you what it was like then, alters how you relate to that past today — it changes subjectivity in the present. This does not invalidate the recollection of experience for analysis, but places it in the position of a powerful instrument that is to be used with care: a recounting of experience can only be a critical task, with its own agendas, structures and political fora. While such an approach would require a book of a different kind than this one, it also cannot be denied that in some sense this essay too tries to change some of the ways in which we relate to our past and present lives.

On the other hand, I also avoid the option of trying to describe women’s lives in the sixties through a comparison with self-representations of that period. This is because no archival record of a given period can function as an ‘objective’ representation of the consciousness of that period in a simple way. Thus, as with an advertisement image, so with any other genre like a health column in a women’s magazine; the experience described in a health column cannot be understood in a historical sense unless some attempt were made to account for the way in which the discourse was constructed, used, imagined and directed in its flow by its operators and addressees. This too demands skills well beyond my competence in areas other than those related to the visual image. Instead of these two options, therefore, I essay a guess here, about the power play between the femininity that is imaged in the advertisement, and femininity as it emerged in the lived world of the sixties; a guess that is educated by a logic that is ‘internal’ to the advertising discourse on the one hand and to the mode of visibility that this discourse is forced to encounter in the sixties on the other.

I would like to introduce here, a la Dada, and with a lack of ceremony that is symptomatic of the difficulty that I am trying to address, the notion that caste is a condition of visibility in India. It functions as a screen that without itself being seen makes the world visible in a specific way. Let me suggest in a rather desperate shorthand that caste as a condition of visibility is overdetermined by the history of political institutions, cultural practices and memory, if by this last term we mean the residue of experience that determines both the form of subjectivity and the content of memory. This way of thinking about caste results in some useful effects. Firstly, the term ‘caste’ ceases to be a descriptive category and begins to function as an epistemological condition that must be accounted for reflexively in the description itself. Secondly, it permits me to shift the problematic so that the issue is no longer one of introducing caste as a visible characteristic of the image that may be described, but rather one of describing caste as something that inheres in the process of imaging. My task changes from being one of introducing an invisible caste in a disciplined and seemly manner, to being one of introducing the omnipresent caste of manners, seemliness and discipline that seem to be universal and qualifying characteristics of ‘civilised’ discourses such as advertising. This shift in perspective will at a deeper level, question a theorisation which impedes rather than facilitates a description of the experience of caste oppression. I believe that such an interrogation will, in the longer run, result in an effective genealogy of caste/power/knowledge that does its work against the history of our ‘civilisation’ at the fulcrum of its legitimisation in new territories.

Let us turn to look at the sixties’ images of women in advertisements using this notion of caste as a primary condition of visibility, a condition that is itself invisible. By so interrogating these images I hope to approach the mode in which caste and photographic imaging work together. The invisibility of caste in the advertisement in the advertising world, which I have described with respect to the advertisements of the nineties, is characteristic of the sixties’ images too. It is likely, however, that in the sixties’ case, an aesthetic that eliminated visual signs of lower-caste life in society (to take the most obvious example, the near complete absence of any domestic help in the advertisements for home products, detergents and soap powders had a trajectory and valency that were different from that of advertising today. I would like to suggest that this erasure of caste in the sixties advertisements permitted the phantasy world of the advertisement to address the anxieties of an upper‑caste viewer in a manner that was unique to the circumstances of
 its deployment. When seen from this point of view, it becomes possible to think that the woman in the advertisement of the sixties engaged in a dialogue with aspects of upper-caste practices that became visible as archaic rituals and traditions connected with femininity, ritual pollution and purdah. Thus, the intense visibil­ity, the overt sexual attractiveness, the reassurance that the aches and pains of femininity would be eliminated by modern analgesics, the reference to detergents and scouring powders that would keep the household clean and healthy, could all be seen as narrative devices, that at a level above the sales pitch, addressed anxieties about femininity which were associated with a transition to a modern upper-caste consumer culture. Therefore, it could be said that this masculine visualisation of the feminine body did, in an ambivalent way, make positive sense to women (and, as importantly, to men) who read newspapers — that is, it accommodated a world-view in which a path could be broached for upper-caste cul­ture, allowing it to reorganize and align itself with what was emerging as a modern society dependent on a consumer economy. In my elaboration of this hypothesis of caste as a condition, more, an architecture of visibility, I would like to provide the reader with a focus on the functions this recognizable type of the advertising woman performed and the modes in which she did by proposing three facets of her function, that is, modern­isation, the forging of a cultural consensus, and a redefinition of family space.

Modernisation

The advertising woman operated as an instrument of ‘modern­isation,’ as may be gauged from her different roles in four or five scenes in a day’s newspaper. She gestured towards a shared hori­zon of fantasy against which the new objects of desire could be located, providing in the imaginary world of the viewer, a support which held up and gave meaning to these objects. It is through the visual pleasure she provided that something which may be called life-style was sought to be nurtured in the imagination of the viewer, opening it out onto the world of consumer products.

Simultaneously, ‘life-style’ as imaged in the figure of the advertising woman drew on and elaborated a modern norm of ‘Indian­ness’ in that viewer. This norm of Indianness expressed itself in stereotypical features, such as the clothing, the cosmetics used the activities engaged in, and in the stance of the model in the images concerned. Thus a considerable part of the sense of being , modern Indian man or woman coalesced in dialogue with the woman in the advertisement, within the coordinates of the space depicted in the daily rhythm of the newspaper.

Forging a cultural consensus

The persona of the advertising woman provided a model with reference to which specific practices of ‘living in a family’ could be shaped. The woman in the advertisement who acted the role of a wife (either already one, or a prospect), who took on the responsibility for hygiene in the modern family; who had the need to retain personal attractiveness; who exercised control as the wife in the choice of decorating the home and assumed the responsibility to keep this home attractive, acted as a behavioural model. The leisure time available to the woman in the advertisement was one that resulted from her successfully discharging these responsibilities without labour, either her own or that of servants — that was the phantasy solution to women’s work proposed by the advertisement! However, it would be inadequate if we assume that the model only induced mimetic responses on the part of the feminine viewer; a whole range of positions and relationships could operate between viewer and type. The woman in the advertisement would also have provided a gauge with which the husband, the man of the world, could measure and evaluate the behaviour of the women around hint. In a culture in transition, such a gauge would be necessary to reassure the man that the transformation in his life and within his domain of control is in step with that occurring in society at large. It would measure and permit the adjustment of the mix of anonymity and recognition which functions as a palliative against the stress of change.

The reader would find a hypothetical example of the range of dialogical positions between men, women and images of women in advertisements useful. While a man living in that period would be appreciative of a sexually attractive woman in the advertisement, he would try to enforce a more ‘decorous’ and ‘respectable’ appearance on the part of his wife in public, but at the same time hope for and encourage a more ‘open’ demeanour inside the house. On the other hand, he would in a contradictory fashion, give the glad eye to a woman who carried herself like the advertising woman in public if she were not his wife. In addition he may well expect that the attitude of the advertising woman with respect to the product advertised be wholeheartedly adopted by the wife without her emulating the former’s free and attractive style; these responses were likely to get even more tangled and contradictory in the case of the advertisement for beauty products which make fashionable and desirable precisely free and attractive styles in themselves. For each of these possible responses of the man to the advertisement, there could be correspondingly complex ripostes from the women concerned (which could have been entirely different from, but entwined with, her responses to the advertisement itself), leading to an open range of situations mediated by the advertising type. We may guess that the stereotype of the advertising woman provided a focus with respect to which many dimensions of the relationship between men and women were mapped. The woman in the advertisement of the sixties could therefore be seen as an object of dynamic consensus regarding gender relationships. She was not simply a ‘model’ to be emulated, but was also a political model subjected to and moulded by the full and unrestrained force of the contradictions that played themselves out in the struggles that were undergone in order to arrive at this consensus.

The sixties’ advertisement could be seen as helping to evolve a consensus of viewership regarding the micro-political structure of the community, which was clearly not one between equal, ra­tional and free ‘men’. The inequality between men and women viewers, obviously part of a more general gender oppression, would intensify as an effect of the way in which the apparatus of the advertising business, and the force of masculinity converged on the body of the woman of the sixties. The handicap women faced, then, would play a crucial role in determining the kind of political ‘treaty’ that was continuously being forged with respect to gender relations. At the same time, such a consensus would also have been a working of the diverse and subtle modes of oppression of women against oppressions in other politico-cultural dimensions such as caste. Thus, the kinds of images of the home, the models of domesticity, the depiction of attitudes, the physical features and behaviour of men in the advertisement, and the aesthetic criteria that evolved through the discourse, would work against the cultural practices of lower-caste society, the more public life of the women of that stratum, and (what would seem in contrast like) the lack of decorum and discipline of the men, all of which were cast in unpleasant counterpoint to the beauty and seemliness of the world depicted in the advertisement. The double pleasure the stereotype offered to the viewer, of being sexually attractive in an unprecedented way on the one hand, and of being modern and free of the veils of ‘tradition’ on the other, incorporated the pain of oppression. The imaginary conditions of that double pleasure: the landscape, the narratives and the uto­pian dimensions it invoked, provided no space for that other oppressed: the Dalit.

Redefinition of the family space

The moment of modernisation that the woman in the advertisement provided was linked to a redefinition of family space. The advertisement suggested that the space of the family was a hermetic and private home. While the home did not connect in any functional way with the public world, this domestic family space was always invoked through, and represented in, the medium of public opinion, the newspaper. The advertisement problematised and reinforced the ‘real’ home, as an indirect referent of the visible image it employed. The torsion between the represented space and the real one that was being designated and referred to, set in position shared and contested notions of the space of privacy, consumption, rest and femininity. This ‘contest’ marked out a community of viewers with definite ideas about the existent characteristics of domestic space, and in opposition to these, the desirable ones. The advertisement thus slowly altered the outlines of this ‘real’ domestic space, in order to match the new requirements being placed on a family by the emerging consumerist economy, and these requirements were signalled by the presence of the advertisement itself. In this remodelling, the woman was a crucial instrument that permitted the public sphere to delineate the family space, with a pretext of a limited discourse concerning the use of the objects advertised. The centrality of the woman in the advertisement obviously depended on the consensus regarding the place of the woman in the family. This place was being reiterated in the sixties’ advertisement by a series of conceptual collapses: (a) that the woman is a wife; (b) that a wife belongs in, and defines, a family; © that a family is a domestic unit that has an enclosed space; (d) that the domestic space is defined by its privacy and its congeniality to sexual pleasure, both of which do not have a legitimate space in the public world and (e) this in turn collapsed onto the woman as wife, the function of providing sexual pleasure to the man.

The role of the woman in the new domestic order is evident in the occasional portrayals of the advertisement home, in which, in addition to scenes of overt intimacy, the way in which the background and the attitudes were depicted, covertly or clearly, pointed to and celebrated, a privacy and freedom that provided opportunities for sexual pleasures of a less furtive kind than that available in what was designated as reality. Two observations may be made at this point: firstly, these conflated and hegemonic assumptions regarding femininity, the family and domesticity were certainly not new; they could well have had a long enough history to permit their being read as universal features of most cultures. However, for them to have organic currency and sustainability in a culture, that history alone is not enough; what is required is a continued reiteration of these ‘truths’ in a manner that engages with and productively transforms the dominant force in that culture and this is the leverage the advertisement provides. Thus, and secondly, what were being designated as the wife and the real home by the images in the advertisement were clearly untramelled universalisation of upper-caste desire. The attributes of a world that would be hospitable to capitalism in India were clearly envisioned in terms that established a new upper-caste aesthetic as the dominant one.

It would be worth listing the multiple benefits of such a transformation of ‘wife and home’ to the economy: firstly, the space of the family would become a locus for a decision to purchase. A distribution of such loci is essential because the possibility of expanding business within capitalism has depended on the proliferation of consumer goods that incited the desires and fancies of this decision-making unit: the family. The photographic advertisement brings into being something called the viewer-consumer, without whom consumer goods would be meaningless. Secondly, the bonus of uninhibited sexual pleasure in the ideal family would promote the concept of a limited family size which would increase the wealth available for purchase of consumer goods by reducing the number of members that need survival expenditure. Thus, the power process of the photographic advertisement would seek to work through a modulation of the sexual body and achieve its effects on the demographic pattern. Thirdly, the sexual privacy of the new family space, the concomitant of a reduced family size, and the kind of unequal consensus between man and wife that the advertisement generated within the family, were extremely important to the logic of consumer culture as well. A family of reduced size ruled by a benign patriarchal despot was naturally imbued with a sense of identity that arose out of the hegemonised vision of a desirable life. Such a family would decrease the uncertainty surrounding the purchase of a product, thus making it more feasible to predict how much of what commodity can be sold. This is because there would be reduced scope for extraneous opinions and perspectives that would have arisen with larger, and/or more open, family structures. Fourthly, a wide dispersion of purchasing units of a limited size reduces the political power of the buyer with respect to the corporations and businesses which sold the goods. Thus at a point when capitalist development is most vulnerable, it would become almost impossible to forge something like a consumer’s union which can have a say on what may or may not be a consumable or its attributes.

The decision of what is sexually attractive in an advertisement image can never be attributed to an ‘author, but emerges in a delicately balanced aesthetic consensus of a community-in-forma­tion: between copywriter, photographer, creative director, the manufacturer of the product being advertised, his employees, and imagined/actual representatives of the target viewer. The community of target viewers is not a homogeneous one that represents the whole populace, but is one that is marked by a process of self-selection, a ‘raising-in-relief’ of a contour within the population which is able to leverage its hegemony by means of its monopolistic access to different engines of such hegemony, like the stock market, the wireless media, the print media, the fashion industry, the advertising business, cinema, and so on. The difference between the self-developmental process driven by the advertising engine on the one hand, and the modernisation and development programmes of the state in the five year plans on the other, both of which seek to have their effect on demography, emerge primarily in the mode in which the subject of development is articulated. In the first, the viewer is seduced by the new pleasures of a free sexuality and unlimited consumption. In the second, the subject of institutionalised development is one whose body, life, family size and sexuality (especially in the aspect of birth control and the release of her body for unlimited pleasure) must be altered in a planned way for her own good, either with or often without her consent.

In sum, photography in the sixties advertisement engages with a condition of visibility that is upper caste in form with the following effects: (a) it establishes the advertising woman’s body as a site of desire; (b) it privileges a femininity that is dependent and domesticated; © it provides an aesthetic foundation for a hegem­ony of upper-caste masculinity; (d) it naturalises and makes transparent to our gaze, a transformation of domestic space that serves as a sliding hinge between changing forms of caste and class hegemony.

NOTES

1. A sample study of images of the advertising woman was carried out in The Hindu. The month chosen at random was March, in three consecutive years in each decade: 1966, 1967, 1968; 1976, 1977, 1978; 1986, 1987 and 1988. The same month ensured that seasonal variations in products advertised were avoided. The three years in each decade permitted some generalisability about the characteristics being studied in an arbitrarily chosen time period. The gap of a decade between each group of three years ensured that any changes in the type and its function became more clearly visible than if the advertisements were studied in sequential years.

The parameters of the study were: the product sold, its brand, the number of times the advertisement appeared, the page number and the news text surrounding it, whether black and white or colour, the size of the advertisement, the size of woman’s image in the advertisement, the clothing and drape, the props, perspective, posture, expression, direction of the gaze, hairstyle, body colour, bindi, the advertisement text, the narrative and the simplest allusions it seemed to make.

This chapter has drawn on the archival newspaper material made available to me by the ICSSR, Southern Regional Centre (Osmania University). I am grateful to the director and the staff for their gen­erous cooperation.

2. Betty Friedan’s chapter on ‘The Happy Housewife Heroine’ in The Feminine Mystique (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) is a seminal study of the emergence of the housewife stereotype in the American women’s magazine story in the post-World War II political context. A landmark in the powerful feminist polemic against the visibility of the sexualised body of the woman would be Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Screen 16, 3 (Autumn 1975): 17­18. However, in Mulvey’s critique, the body in the gaze is treated as a general characteristic of the film frame. The dialectic between the psychoanalytic concepts of scopophilia and sadism which she uses does not easily accommodate political effects that could possibly de­rive from sources that may not be reducible to Oedipal schemata.

3. See ‘Notes for a Theory of Advertising’, this volume, seventh essay especially the last section, ‘Illusion and Reality’ for an elaboration of this oscillation between description and prescription in the speech of the advertisement.

4. lbid, for an elaboration of the argument that the advertisement states a crisis in a language, and from a perspective, that make sense to the addressee, and proposes solutions to it in the fantasy world.

5. See the illuminating discussions of differences in logic, epistemology and historical effects, between experience used as a method, and experience used as a mode of constructing the truth about a past, in Stree Shakti Sanghatana, We Were Making History: Life Stories of Women in the Telangana Struggk (New Delhi: Kak 1989) pp 30.31, and in Susie Tharu and K Lalita, Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century, Vol. 1 (New York: Feminist Press, 1991), 28.33. see also Johannes Fabian and Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) for an approach to the genre of historical painting, which is reflexive and cautious about the use of experience.

6. When I wrote this essay, I was also not aware of any work dune from a perspective that is compatible with mine, on the lives and experiences of women who lived in the sixties. However, see Susie Tharu, ‘Citizenship and Its Discontents’ paper presented in ‘Rethinking Indian Modernity: The Political Economy of Sexuality, 26th Inter-disciplinary Research Methodology Workshop’ MIDS for a description of the weave of the short story and advice column genres in the work of Saroj Pathak. Tharu problematises the meaning of associated genres by interrogating that association regarding its effect and expression in the subjectivity, the hie and the historical function of the writer.

7. For an experience based critical study of the life practices of upper_ caste women and the differences in the relationship between men and women of upper-caste and Dalit society, see Kancha Ilaiah, I Am Not a Hindu (Calcutta: Samya, 1996). His book also makes it clear why the opposition between inside-feminine, outside-mascu­line is most likely to be strictly specific to the upper-caste sensibility in modern India.

8. Why I Am Not a Hindu has served me as an invaluable reference for critical insights into upper-caste social structure and its negation of Dalit values.

This essay — part of Modernity on a Shoestring: Dimensions of Globalisation, Consumption and Development in Africa and Beyond — has been republished with permission from the author.

by Nasreen Habib

WHEN YOU ENTER DAGAON, one of the nine villages that make up Nagaon district in Assam, you are welcomed by a gurgling river, Kolong which swells in the monsoon but is now dry. A wooden bridge painted in solemn black is the only connect with the outside world. Further ahead is the bustling Erabari bazaar, where engulfed in a cloud of dust, irregular shops line the way. The shops have tin roofs and sturdy bamboo shutters, and mostly sell everyday items of use: utensils, medicines, clothes; the bazaar even has a mobile repairing shop. It does not, however, sell what the women of the village sew: embroidered blankets that keep you warm in the winter and on unseasonably cold monsoon days. For in every household, you will find a woman who knows how to sew the kheta, a handmade recycled quilt.

Running parallel to the bazaar is the Dagaon railway line under Lumding Junction, which has been running continuously for the last 40 years or so. Beyond this are rice fields, warm with the autumn sun, and a cluster of mud huts with tin roofs and encircled by a jute fence. One of them is Jamila Khatoon’s house. It is lunch time and she is making a special hot chutney of dry fish and dry red chillies tempered with mustard oil, locally known as chepa. It is cheap and a good source of protein, which is why it is popular with the workers from the Bengal-origin Muslim community. Her younger child is curled up on a kheta. Rather than a piece of art, it is supposed to be a utilitarian product. It is made by stitching together old cotton sarees and sometimes, to give it that extra fluffiness, a used mosquito net is neatly sewn between the layers of cloth. The stitch is the katha stitch, a running stitch that goes around in equidistant elongated strips. Its name is said to come from the Sanskrit word for rags but the vibrant patchwork upon layers of patterned sarees is more beautiful than its name belies. On the chars (small riverine islands on the river Brahmaputra), as Abdul Kalam Azad , a resident of Barpeta town and a researcher, points out, the stitch runs more closely together while the khetas made in and around Barpeta town have more space between them. In Dagaon village, however, much like on the chars, the stitch runs closely enough.

The kheta in Jamila’s house has seen better days, as the layered fabric is tearing at the seams. It is said that the condition of a kheta can tell you about the prosperity of a household. Jamila’s household comprises of her two young children, her mother-in-law and an absent husband. Since her husband has not been getting regular agricultural work, the whole burden has fallen on her shoulders. Having studied at the Bhakatgaon ME High School till the sixth standard, she dropped off to help her mother with her younger sisters and was married off a year later, at the age of 15 and a half.

Jamila is well-known among the women of her village as a good seamstress, her specialty being the kheta. Earlier, most women of the village stitched their own khetas but many women of economically sounder households have started outsourcing this work to women like Jamila. Arsia Sarkar, 46, says, ‘We have moved to using Chinese blankets now, they are more durable. But our weakness for the kheta remains as its texture and feel is more comfortable, especially for younger children many of whom react to the synthetic fibres used in a Chinese blanket.’

A Chinese blanket costs upward of 1000 rupees, but the stitching of a kheta pays around Rs 100–150. In Victorian England, men stitched/embroidered hankies and other items of use, but with the advent of industrialization in the 18th century, the task was delegated to machines. Around the same time, women took up stitching as a ‘leisure’ activity, and in many English novels of the day, the women are found stitching when they have time while the men work.

In popular culture, Assam is represented by gamusas, japis, mekhela-sadors, finely woven axomiya jewellery and bell metal utensils. But the arts and crafts of the Muslims of Bengal origin are still not a part of mainstream culture, in fact, even within the community, there has been little advancement in this regard. This is a direct result of the community’s fight with erosion as the Brahmaputra has swallowed up most of the char chaporis where a majority of the community lives. Unlike in neighbouring West Bengal, where the katha stitch is seen on almost everything — from saris to bedsheets to coasters and folders, in Assam, the stitch has not made a similar transition. It has remained confined to the kheta as a utilitarian item. Even within this confined space, it has jazzed up bedspreads with its colourful, embellished presence.

Nasreen Habib is a Guwahati-based journalist. She has previously worked with Eclectic Northeast, Oxford University Press, Dorling Kindersley and Katha Books.

Sharing is caring

by Rheea Mukherjee

HER NAME IS Peggy. She lives in an undisclosed city. No one comes close to doing the job as well as Peggy does. If you meet her, you won’t be able to recall the color of her eyes, but you’ll notice the intensity of them.

Peggy stares at you as you talk. Eating every word, computing multiple translations of any one sentence you throw at her. In theory, she’s that active listener the world tells the world to do more of. In truth, no one is comfortable with it.

Peggy has a shoebox for inspiration. But we’ll come to that part soon enough.

Peggy’s idiosyncrasies must be overlooked, because her job is tough. If you had it, it’d knot your gut. Everyday she pulls out the city’s most violent stories and starts to rate them in terms of potential. It’s not just the pedestrian crimes she looks for. She must curate the stories that sting the nerves and hearts of certain factions.

Each faction must feel differently about the same news and respond to it on the internet with hyperbolic emotion and targeted political agenda. She must, for a lack of a more cohesive phrase, orchestrate perceptual disharmony with bad news. It’s a craft. She should know, she’s tracked for her every performance. She’s so good at it, her bosses take big gulps of chalky antacid when they think about losing her to a better job.

Last week her goal was straight forward enough. Make women aged 18–32 paranoid and resolute. But accomplishing it wasn’t that simple. She had to simultaneously instigate men aged 30–54 to become defensive. She pulls out the horrific story of a rape that occurred in the most innocuous of places, Marcos Road. That road even had a friendly coffee shop where poets come and unrhyme each others verses. But at night the terrible thing happened. Peggy is not interested in the exact details, because honestly, the same kind of thing happens all over the place. It’s the same story told a hundred different ways. She must orchestrate. She is being watched and one slip can set fire to a group of people that her company relies on. Unlike the damn poets.

She curates the news on The Space, knowing people are waiting, breaths held, salty sweat pouring out of their fingers, just waiting to type. The morning is here and Peggy updates.

40% of women are now carrying pepper spray in their handbags, it’s not like we have to say it, but no woman is safe. RIP Maria.

She backspaced the sentence and twitched her drying lips. With one tilt of her head she retyped the same exact thing again. It was perfect. There wasn’t too much nuance which was the perfect ecosystem for her favorite trolls. Inevitably they will succumb to commenting

‘not all men are like this’ or ‘men too live in fear’.

Additionally, Peggy relies on data guy who would spout car accident statistics and compare it to rape. Then the feminists would come in and do their thing. She publishes it. The post was lit AF with disharmony.

It was a good thing because the month before she had gotten low scores from one of the bosses. See poverty is not a thing in this undisclosed city. Small enough population in a small enough country, in a small enough city. The generic middle class had enough in their reach to live well. And what was out of reach, well, that was aspirational enough to keep them moving like hamsters on a wheel.

You should know that Peggy has never tried to create disharmony with news that comes from outside the boundaries of the city. It was a waste of time for one, more accurately, it did not fit with the company agenda. But Peggy was a risk taker. At her interview the board of men who hired her were intrigued when she admitted she’d break rules sometimes. Because no one truly knew what ingredients made up content virality.

She hadn’t had to break rules in the 3 years she had worked there. But then last year she had read story about a child locked up in a family’s home, a paid servant yes, but a slave nonetheless. It was from a country where poverty was enough to merit at -scale home labour. Something that happy- middle -class undisclosed city could never think about. They were happy to wash their own dishes, clothes and homes, because they didn’t know better. No monstrous disparities of class, everyone had that same generic respectability.

Peggy already knew this worked in her favour. Any story of people having hired help was of interest to her city. And a story that abused that social culture with a child? Even better. It would of course create polarization in a few seconds. The first being the commenter who would definitely criticize hired help and class disparity across the board. This would undoubtedly lead the way for the moderate cultural relativists. They would spout the definition of relativism and ask the question

‘would it be better for a child to earn his living to eat or better to just ignore the reality and let that child be squashed by the system of poverty just so you can feel better about your social delusion?’

This type of commenter would also make sure to say that this particular story was terrible and should have never be published on The Space. After all, criticizing child labour without accounting for the economic and social realities of the world encourages people to float in their la-la privileged swimming pool.

But you see, none of these predictions happened. The content brought up only one response and that was unanimous city pride.

All I can say is how proud I am to live in a city where this could never happen.

No cultural relativism remarks. It stayed solely on the city and how the possibility of this happening here could never take flight. And wasn’t that a good thing? One corner of the world where this one bad thing could never happen. Even the trolls agreed.

The Company was not happy. They pulled Peggy in the room and gave her a warning. Stick to the city and the plethora of specific bad things that happened here.

Peggy was shaken but she went back to her usual top scores within seven days. There was suicide, murder, and even story on rabbits being blinded to test eye drops that could improve human vision.

Now about that shoebox. She has one for inspiration. It’s tucked into her sweater closet, nestled between woolen blues and striped whites. Every couple of months the anxiety ripens. She feels the need to take a peek inside the box, but she know how terrible she might feel. In truth she’s only looked inside of it twice in the 7 years she’s had it.

The first time she peeked into her shoebox wasn’t too traumatic. There was a chinese woman in the box, shrunken and tired. She was sewing a lacy bra with pink ribbons on the side. A heap of other bras lay on her side. Peggy intrinsically knew the woman had hours and hours of work left. At least 12 more. You can’t touch things in the shoe box, but Peggy makes do by hanging her finger over the woman, soothing her fatigue. She shut the box and didn’t think too much about it.

The other time she peeked in the box, she saw a tied up dog, It had been tied up for at least 16 hours, near it was a puddle of urine and a lump of fecal matter. It’s eyes looked hopefully at her. She shut the box immediately and threw up in the bathroom. Oddly, it didn’t further effect her, she had broken up with a man she loved deeply that week and all her feelings had to go to that.

She wanted to rid herself of the shoe box, but it was a family heirloom passed down to her by her grandmother. ‘You don’t have to look, but you must keep it’ was the family rule. Her mother had never looked and had simply passed it down to her when Peggy was 21. There was always something in the damn box, and Peggy was always waiting for something to gnaw at the numbness that built in her chest. She sought refuge in the possibility of opening it at any time.

Nowadays Peggy and The Company are only threatened by the Good News company. They are pulling up happy generic things people do and spouting them as changemakers. It’s the ‘every drop in the ocean adds up’ kind of narrative and nothing irritates her more. It is the exact kind of news that one can’t orchestrate, the one that feeds the soul and makes people who are regularly defined by their world view pause for a second and feel happy about something. The phrases are too candied, stripped of words like patriarchy, misogyny, abuse, and systems of oppression. With no trigger labels and terms, people start to go soft and find too much in common.

She starts to lose her footing. The trolls, objective rationalists, the vegans, and the feminists start to blur together. She sees some of her favorite factions start to comment and respond happily and generically to the Good News company. She even loses two reliable trolls to The Good News Company.

To soothe herself she peeks in the box for the third time. It will be the last time she promises herself. Inside the box is man who is all alone sitting in the corner with only a metal bed next to him. He is scraping the floor with his fingernails out of boredom. He hasn’t read anything in months. He hasn’t talked to anyone in a year. He tried to harness the power of the man to imagine a life outside his confinement, but it ended only in hallucinations that made him scream. Now he only finds peace in scratching the floor with his bleeding broken finger nails. She closes the box and weeps, at first for the man, but then for the dog, and then for the Chinese woman. Then for herself.

Thirty two days later It’s unanimous and no fault of her own. The men at the company say so candidly, they are going under and there is nothing they can do. It’s not your fault, peggy, people have no spine anymore.

They let her go, but she doesn’t have to worry. The Good News Company with their nauseating goodwill and hope for humanity offer a job, after all they could use a good community manager.

Peggy has no other skill to offer and takes the job. It’s quite strange for her to realise that after she started working there all the bad things started to dwindle. Without any discourse on how things ought to be, the factions dissolved into a melting pot of sorts, rational enough to work for the greater good. Now they could pull out many other articles from the world and add it to their list of things that could never happen here. All her old commenters come to the Good News and don’t argue much. A good thing, is a good thing.

And so Peggy keeps pulling out good things from the city and publishes them on the wall without much thought. The Good News company has commended her on her ability to find the best stories. Peggy, after all, does what the job calls for.

In the evenings she goes home and looks up the bad things in cities elsewhere. Her heart only starts to fasten then and a slow predictable thrill starts to rise in her chest. She pulls her shoe box out but never opens it, instead she reads articles of bad new to it. See it could be worse for you, whatever or whoever you are in the box right now, she whispers.

But the shoebox is not good enough, and she misses her old job.

She imagines the various ways to position bad new articles in the evenings after work. Then she types out responses on a blank word document. She imagines herself a zealous patriarch and then a lonely troll. She writes another comment from the perspective of an academic ( and backs it with research). Every evening the high diminishes by a fraction. Until she’s left with aching bones, sweating hands, and a raging headache that just won’t go away.

Until she’s left in bed, a flapping fish out of water, cold flesh that shakes with shivers. Even her teeth hurt. No one notices when Peggy doesn’t come in to work one day. You see, The Good News Company does not notice when bad things happen.

Rheea Mukherjee is a writer in Bangalore. Her forthcoming novel, The Body Myth, comes out February 2019 by Unnamed Press. She is the co-founder of Write Leela Write, a design and content laboratory. She spends most of her spare time eating and making vegan hipster things.

They don’t have secret identities, just outdated ones, people they used to be.

by Joseph Mills

A kid on the other team, the Broncos, has the worst mohawk Valerie has ever seen. Mohawks are ugly by design, but they should seem to be deliberate. This one looks as if the kid either did it himself or changed his mind after it was too late. It isn’t stylish or impressive or scary. It wouldn’t strike fear into the opponents, or make them think twice. It’s just…weird. It’s weird for a ten-year-old to have a hacked-up head. Had he been trying to emulate some player he knew? Pro soccer players have the funkiest hair in sports. Or is something going on with the parents? Would a psychologist look at that and say, “Come see me right away.” Had the parents approved, been upset, or shrugged? Valerie knows that after a while, you simply stopped fighting, even caring, about certain things. Like what they wore. What they ate. You get perspective about what’s important which is to say you get tired. Look at that kid who clearly had been wearing his jersey for a while even though this is the first game of the season. White uniforms are nightmares for parents — the mud and blood and grass — but she can’t even tell what those stains are. The parents must have thrown up their hands and resigned themselves to having him wear it until it falls off his body.

The mohawk would get the award for worst hair although there is some competition. The pink stripes. The shaggy dog look. The white girl with corn rows. That’s expensive, and for what? For who? How had that girl possibly known to ask for that? Or wanted to?

Some kids are allowed to go feral, and some seem to be living dolls for their parents to dress up and accessorize. Look at that one wearing his uniform like it has a bow-tie. Shirt tucked in. Socks pulled up and at the same level. Everything aligned. Not a stain. Not a smudge. He looks like a fashion model doing a soccer-themed shoot. The coach should run every play right at that kid. Someone looking like that isn’t going to tackle or challenge for the ball.

And that kid over there. Is that a tattoo? What’s the minimum age for a tattoo? 16? 14? Is there a minimum? It must be a birthmark, a sticker, dirt, something he has done with a magic marker. Sometimes Sean came home from school with his arms covered in ink because they drew all over one another in the art room and lunch room and playground. It was a type of flirting. But that kid’s mark is so defined, dark, and well-done. Like someone knew what they were doing and had good equipment. It looks legit. Just like a Nike swoop, and the kid is wearing Nike cleats. This might be the winner for the day’s bad parenting contest and it isn’t even noon. Valerie finds it satisfying. Didn’t somebody say every drunk needs a friend who is more of a drunk than them? Every bad parent wants to see someone who’s worse. She might lose her temper, say horrible sarcastic things, simply ignore danger like water glasses about to be broken because she doesn’t have the energy to have yet another argument, but at least her kids don’t have any tattoos. At least not yet. It might be setting the bar low, but it makes her feel good.

She isn’t against tattoos. She isn’t that hypocritical. She has hers. On the back. Before the phrase “tramp stamp” became popular, or at least before she had known about it. At the time, she had thought it was cool. She and Melinda had heard about prison culture, Mexicans getting Virgin Marys on their backs to protect them, and the idea had appealed. Someone watching their backs, keeping them safe. Melinda had gone for a Hello Kitty. Something she loved that could be seen as ironic. Valerie had gotten her animal totem. A raven. At least what she thought was her totem at the time. At the time. At the time. That is always the key phrase, isn’t it. Everything seems good At The Time. Another drink. Having a kid. Getting a tattoo. At the time it had seemed the thing to do, but everyone makes mistakes. Marriages. Mohawks. It definitely hadn’t kept her safe.

Now, there is no danger of anyone seeing it except the doctors and physical therapists. Sometimes she even forgets about it herself. Sometimes she wonders if she hadn’t had the accident if she would have gotten it removed. Everyone has tattoos now — arrows, anklets, Maori symbols, kanji, sleeves — until not having one has become the cool thing. But it wouldn’t have been worth the trouble. It’s like the crap they shove into the backroom or garage, stuff that had been useful at one point, but now they move out of sight and don’t think about. The way most parents deal with their past lives. They don’t have secret identities, just outdated ones, people they used to be. Of course, with her it’s not the tattoo that makes that obvious. Her daughter Vera had once told a therapist with a shrug, “Everyone is working on something.” Yeah, and everyone is recovering from something whether you can see it or not.

What’s interesting to her about the kid’s tattoo is that it seems to be a logo. She looks around to see if there are parents decked out in Nike gear. That sort of brand fanaticism should be obvious. Maybe the company has sponsored infertility treatments or something. Hopefully the family got some money out of the deal, a lifetime supply of shoes and gear. Maybe she should look into it. It might be a way of paying for Vera’s college. Or some of the medical bills. Sell ad space on her daughter’s arms to Xbox or Coke. Or Nike. With the swoop, if they changed their mind, it could be worked into another design, like a cattle brand being changed. The thing rustlers used to do. It left open possibilities. That’s the secret to parenting. Leaving open possibilities. Maybe the kid’s parents are better than she had first thought. Or she’s worse. Or both. Probably both. At half-time, she’ll wheel closer and try to get a better look.

Joseph Mills teaches at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He has published several volumes of poetry with Press 53. ‘Mohawk’ is part of a collection of short fiction titled Bleachers.

Translated from the Hindi, ‘Twacha’, by Sarabjeet Garcha.

by Mangalesh Dabral

only the skin is visible everywhere
dermal bodies dermal objects
all universe made of skin
whose roving and spinning images the TV
flashes night and day
everything devoted to the skin
many kinds of cream unguents foam towels
falling from the sky
men and women are seen bartering
desirable skin
love’s the name of a layer of love
spirituality is like spirituality’s crust
only periphery is spread out everywhere
new miracles being worked on it
beneath a beautiful surface an ugly
thought hides easily
the crowned god appears wearing
a divine skin

this is some other skin that doesn’t sprout
out of a living wakeful pulsing body
becoming its beauty
that doesn’t breathe
whose hair don’t stand on end
that doesn’t feel pain
this is not Kabir’s dead skin
whose deep breath burns iron turning it into ash
this is some other skin that never hears when called out
that doesn’t spout blood doesn’t rend the heart when touched
sorrow lies on the surface
a river of thick skin disappearing into the sea of wrinkles
washes away fragrant toilets towels unguents
this is our skin-suffused time this is our abode
our thoughts dance upon it
look at a poetry devoid of disease grief decay death
it lies here drying up like skin.

Manglesh Dabral is a contemporary Indian poet who writes in Hindi. His collections of poetry includes Pahar Par Lalten, Ghar Ka Rasta, Ham Jo Dekhte Hain, Awaz Bhi Ek Jagah Hai and Naye Yug Men Shatru. Lekhak Ki Roti and Kavi Ka Akelapan are two of his prose collections; he has also written a travel diary Ek Bar Iowa.

The colourful names of fashion brands from Santa Cruz, Mumbai.

by Gopal M.S.

MUMBAI IS THE TASTEMAKER of the nation in many ways. The city makes movies, songs, stars, singers and the currency notes you spend to consume it. Even the new currency notes look like the colours and designs of shirts worn in Jetha Bhai of Tarak Mehta ka Ulta Chashma post demonetisation. What he wears is made in Mumbai too.

It’s no surprise because one of Mumbai’s biggest business is textiles and more specifically garments. Across the city, in its slums are sweatshops that churn put clothes and designs that are worn by people across India. The images here are from a small pocket in Santa Cruz, Mumbai with several workshops with big ambition and names that the creators hope will be the biggest brand, tomorrow.

Gopal MS is a copywriter working for an advertising agency in Mumbai and a photoblogger. Originally from Bangalore and a little slow to keep pace with the madness called Mumbai. He pauses Mumbai, a city that is always on the move as photographs and then finds things are missed in the blur. You can see Gopal’s documentation of the streets of Mumbai with a little camera on a blog called Mumbai Paused. It has images of the city’s people, parks, playgrounds, work spaces, villages within the city or whatever that is missing from the popular imagery that appears of Mumbai in movies and the mass media. He is currently fighting baldness, social media addiction and is exploring other parts of the World Wide Web. He is also a father.

Blog: mumbaipaused.com. Instagram: @mumbaipaused

Three poems

by Glen Armstrong

The world delivers cotton.
Shirts.
I can’t condone its methods.
But the shirts are nice.
I pay two dollars for lemonade.
And understand.
Little about maintaining.
The trees or attracting.
A waitstaff that remains pleasant.
While earning about a lemon.

Ade and a half an hour.
The world showers.
Me and lays out my cotton.
Shirt for tomorrow.
Until then I’m free.
To dream of meteor showers.
Naked.
The world delivers.
A late-summer breeze.
It delivers a change in seasons.

Rave Review

My daughter wears electrical tape.
On her nipples.
At something she calls a “rave.”
People tell me that she’s beautiful.
This I believe.
Though I distrust people.
And their rave reviews.
Concerning all other matters.
It’s like trying to get a laugh.
With wind-up chattering teeth.

When you have no idea.
What a mouth is.
Her mother used to say that the “devil.
Is in the details.”
Which I only understand to mean. 
I’m haunted before I’m doomed.
I could never see her mother’s legs. 
Through the joyful synchronized swimming. 
That they set off. 
As soon as they registered as legs.

Doodad

Everyone has to have it.
The weird little doodad sells out.
In under an hour.
It breaks each child’s heart.
Even if they get one.
Like a purple-haired gun.
That destroys.
The child’s playground rival.
A lightning bolt with a secret.
Pocket.

I need nothing with a red.
Wing falling through it.
It’s an experiment.
In monotony and interruption. 
I need less than nothing.
With a candy swirl.
Bird’s skull.
It takes but a moment.
For plastic to have its way.
And then dissolve.

Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Gartersand has three recent chapbooks: Set List(Bitchin Kitsch) In Stoneand The Most Awkward Silence of All(both Cruel Garters Press). His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit and Cloudbank.

In a childhood marred by passive-aggressiveness and subtle bullying, this pottu exchange gave me an equal footing.

by Lakshmi Krishnakumar N.

ONE OF THE ESSENTIAL RITUALS of an urban Indian childhood was the meeting of cousins during the summer vacations. In my case, all or most of the extended family descended like the heavy monsoon clouds that loomed on the horizon, upon my grandparents’ house in small-town Kerala. However, for most of my early childhood, I had only one other female cousin; this meant, only one other female contemporary whose fashion impositions on me came with the approval seal given by aunts looking fondly at what must have seemed like two sisters playing. Most of our pictures from the 1990s or early 2000s show us — two girls, almost of similar heights, in similar clothes bought for us by our grandmother — wearing plastic bangles, obnoxious beaded earrings, and the ubiquitous pottu — the mark between our eyebrows, which varied from a simple dot of kajal or an elaborately designed sticker. Looking back, these pottus — bindis for the Hindi-speaking population — formed the undercurrents of my relationship with many of my girl cousins and friends. Behind this seemingly simple piece of accessorising lay complex networks and systems of exchange that, though seemingly trivial, was the issue of much consternation for pre-teen girls in my family. This is a small account of the pottu gang of my childhood.

While the origins of the use of the bindi can be, and has been theorised, as a part of the Hindu philosophical and spiritual practices, none of it was of any consequence for the above-mentioned gang which mostly consisted of just me and my cousin, with occasional guest appearances by second cousins and friends. The pottus were the focus of this gang, and every vacation, in addition to the shopping trips to buy fragile white strips of sticker bindis to the nights that we sat on a bed, with our tiny vanity-kits open and sharing comparing each other’s stashes, we would spend hours looking at the designs on the foreheads of the actresses whose photographs adorned the glossy pages of the Malayalam women’s magazines that were littered around the house.

Most of the pottus that we indulged in were the plastic sticker ones. The plain round red or black ones were deemed too simple to be considered in these transactions. What we preferred were the intricate, elaborately designed bindis, most of them in little vertical swirls, and which usually came in multiple colours in the same packet. Some had a matte-feeling to them, some came with a glossy finish, some were just coloured bits of plastic or rubber, some were embellished with tiny rhinestones or miniscule beads; but each was respected and admired in its own right. Only one kind of pottus failed to be graced by our foreheads , the ones which were already falling off from the packets when we bought them — this pointed to weak adhesive; if it doesn’t stick on the packet, it will not stick on our foreheads. This was our only driving yardstick for quality. The age of skin-friendly adhesive hadn’t dawned upon us yet.

Most of the pottus were bought at tiny ‘fancy’ stores in the main shopping streets of Kozhikode. Unlike much of our outings where we were under the supervision of uncles, these afternoon trips to buy clothes or accessories were a solely women and children affair. Rather than depending on someone to drive us, we would take an auto-rickshaw, go to the shops, and spend hours away from the bragging and complaining of the men in the family — men whom we all loved very much, but from whom it was necessary to escape every so often. The afternoon would be spent poring over cloth materials, cheap plastic containers, or occasionally, in a gold jewellery shop. Summers were the times to do this. The two of us — my cousin and I — would wait for the final trip to the ‘fancy’ stores, shops that had glass counters with heavy rings and necklaces glimmering behind them, stores that smelt of beauty creams. Apart from the young men who half flirtatiously slipped bangles on to the wrists of pretty, teenage girls, these shops were the domain of women — where we did not mind bumping into another customer, or where one’s choice of a earring would be vetted by another lady, whose opinion was unasked but accepted with a smile, nevertheless.

Rather than depending on someone to drive us, we would take an auto-rickshaw, go to the shops, and spend hours away from the bragging and complaining of the men in the family — men whom we all loved very much, but from whom it was necessary to escape every so often.

Into this amazing women-only space, two young girls would walk, pull out packets of bindis, compare the prices and the designs, and ask our mothers to pay out of our pocket-money for them. This was treasure. This was repeated in the annual summer carnival too — after the rides and the food, we would come back home at night, beaming with the secret knowledge that when the adults opened their bags or purses, we would be handed out brown paper bags with packets of pottu in them.

Once the procuring was done, the sharing started. I cannot remember how we started to share pottus, but it seems now that we always did. The process was pretty simple — we’d sit on a bed with the pottu packets scattered around us; after the careful inspection of each design and each colour, we would start pulling out individual pottus and sticking them on other packets. This would continue till we each got the same number of pottus and the similar representations of colour. If one particular design could not be shared evenly, we would compensate it with another design. There was always fairness. In a childhood that seems in retrospect marked by passive-aggressiveness and subtle bullying, this pottu exchange seems to be a field which gave me an equal footing. I got an equal say in the choice of pottus, I got an equal share in the final allotment. Even when other girls were involved in this, all of us had the same rights as each other — insignificant now, but in a childhood landscape of easy taunts and unfairness, this was what ensured that I learnt that the world has scope for justice and equity; these are merely withheld by those who benefit from the withholding.

As I grew up, this networking around pottus dismantled, invisibly breaking down into the rubble of other shattered pre-teen souvenirs like fairy tale books and Barbie dolls. When I was 14, with a spurt in the hormones dictating spiritual interests, I started experimenting with reading the Gita and wearing kumkumam instead of the sticker pottus. Even in the conservative Hindu neighbourhood of Chennai that I was growing up in, this was considered weird. This was soon replaced by an interest in atheism and the subsequent changes in my fashion choices. The pottu now figures in my life — when I wear a sari — in the form of the plain round black ones, the very same ones that I had deemed ‘too amma-like’ when I was a child.

So why pottu? Why did we not trade or engage in the same manner with, say, bangles or earrings? I think there were many reasons — the pottu packets were cheap enough for us to afford in multiples; the very form of it ensured that we could share it easily, and it was easy enough for us to carry around with each trip.

Sometime last year, while cleaning out my cupboards, I found a little sequined purse with a broken zipper. Inside it were the final remnants of a bond that I formed with my female cousins during our childhood summer vacations, when we would bathe in huge plastic tubs under a mango tree or try to sell flowers to passers-by. Later we drifted, each to her own group of friends, and academic and career choices. In the midst of all the drama of growing up, somewhere inside a cupboard, a few packets of discoloured, long sticker bindis waited to be discovered and to remind their owner of what they represented two decades ago — a summer ritual which ensured a temporary equality in the face of family hierarchies, and the celebration of a relationship unmarred by grown-up opinions and interventions.

Lakshmi Krishnakumar is trained in sociology, but her interests straddle the worlds of literature, art, medical anthropology, and sociology. Currently taking a break from full-time research, she now teaches sociology for undergraduate students of law. She blogs at Their Relevant Dragonfly.

by Urvashi Bahuguna

(Not to be republished in any form without prior permission of the author.)

Urvashi Bahuguna’s debut poetry collection, Terrarium, was selected for the 2017 Emerging Poet’s Prize by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and will be published late 2018 by The Great Indian Poetry Collective. Her book of essays on mental health is forthcoming in 2019 from Penguin India. Her work has been recognized by a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship, a Sangam House fellowship, an Eclectica Spotlight Author Prize, and a TOTO Award for Creative Writing.

All about our Food issue

The cover illustration of our ‘Food Issue’, as you can see, is an onion — an onion that is gradually unravelling, filling the air with its strong smell that offends upper-caste sentiments. Onion is a strange fruit with multiple layers. The peeling of onion is often the job of the people who do not have the agency to say no to the task. At home, it is the domestic help who is assigned the responsibility if the “owners” are cooking. In houses which are “progressive” and domestic work is “equally” divided, men help with peeling potatoes and matar, but don’t bring them the onion. Onions make first-time cooks cry. Onion is what you would be dealing with in PGs when you are a new member and you cannot cook. Onion propels innovations like wearing helmets and chewing bubble gums with a knife and a chopping board at disposal. Onion is the purveyor of strong emotions; also a marker of inflation, it can bring down governments. As farmers of Nashik, known predominantly for its onion crop, organize and agitate for better policies from the government, we, at Antiserious, bring out our issue on food, which we expect to be as diverse as the layers of the fruit.

This issue contains Nandini Dhar’s essay, “Why My Skinny Book Was Half About Cooking and Half About Mothers”, which vehemently defends writing on food, food blogging and, in the larger scheme of things, writing the domestic space against the cultural establishment that trivializes domestic labour while reaping benefits from it. Pallavi Rao in her essay “Rasam Sadham as (Dis)Comfort Food” provides a rasam recipe that systematically disturbs the Brahmin kitchen. Poet Kiran Bath in her poem “Chai recipes in the Times today” brews a storm of culture in a teacup. Soniah Kamal’s essay, “Chai and Me”, navigates through a world of chai-tea lattes to reach a cup of tea. There’s Madhulika Liddle, who in her essay “Bye-bye, Christmas Goose: We Never Knew You” attempts to shatter stereotypes about Indian Christians and gives us a very innovative, very non-Hollywood/ Bollywood list of Christmas food rituals. Lenny DellaRocca through his poem “Asparagus” connects everyday food to the aromatic violence that lives in our history books; in his other poem “My Father’s Cooking” we get a glimpse of a past, the smell and the taste of which refuses to leave, even after years. Shikhandin’s poem “Cakes” shows us how food crumbs are keepers of bite-sized histories of our seemingly staid, subtly violent, romantic relationships. And, finally, Anamika Dutt in her memoir “My Fish Memoir” writes about her journey and growth as a fish-buyer; using the fish market as a performative space, she writes about how the journey pushed her beyond the identity of a Bengali fish-buyer.

Antiserious would not be possible without its readers and lovers who are always around in various ways. We would like to thank Abhishek Bhattacharjee to whom we owe our logo and cover design, and whose work you can follow on his website. Our team members Manjiri Indurkar, Sumana Roy, our newest member Shruti Ravi, and let’s talk about how I should not praise myself.

We hope you enjoy reading our “Food” issue, first in our series on Domestic Space — Food, Fashion and Home.

Debojit Dutta
Founder and editor
AntiSerious

Essay

Bye-bye, Christmas Goose: We Never Knew You - Antiserious - Medium
Years ago, before we were married, my husband (who's Hindu) was convinced that when Christmas came around, my family…antiserious.com

Why My Skinny Book Was Half About Cooking and Half About Mothers
1 For the last five years, I have taught a class on food, gender and literature. And every year, for the last five…antiserious.com

My Fish Memoir - Antiserious - Medium
There would be a spat. As the blood flowed onto the 'boonti' and the lifeless head dropped on the side while the…antiserious.com

Chai and Me - Antiserious - Medium
When I flew out to college in America from Pakistan in the early 90s, one of the first cravings to hit me as my parents…antiserious.com

Rasam Sadham as (Dis)Comfort food - Antiserious - Medium
For years in my home, the last meal before we set out for any travel has been a rasam saadham ( rasam rice)…antiserious.com

Poetry

Chai recipes in the Times today - Antiserious - Medium
by Kiran Bath This poem has been published in image format to keep the formatting intact. Please respect the poet's…antiserious.com

My Father's Cooking; Asparagus - Antiserious - Medium
Asparagus] transforms my chamber-potinto a flask of perfume - Marcel Proust Stalks could be green intercontinental…antiserious.com

Cakes - Antiserious - Medium
Did Marie Antoinette offer cake to her peasants or was it another slogan making history? True or not, history has its…antiserious.com

by Anamika Dutt

There would be a spat. As the blood flowed onto the ‘boonti’ and the lifeless head dropped on the side while the fishmonger cut the fresh fish and packaged it for my grandfather. It was the familiar sound within the stench-ridden markets which would always have the same culture no matter where I would go. The elation of the blood oozing out, a macabre celebration to indicate the freshness of the fish. The other constant within this elation was my maternal grandfather with his jute bag and I in a frock, mostly mesmerised by the spread the market had to offer. The fish markets of Delhi and Kolkata are a part of that memory.

The market(s) would offer the freshest catch, majorly river fish in the Bengali dominated parts of Delhi and in Kolkata. My grandfather who belonged originally to Dhaka, would narrate his childhood stories of catching fish near his home and sharing a few of the East Bengal fish recipes with his regular fishmonger in either of the cities. I, on the other hand, would be pointing towards the fish and asking the names of the various types showcased for the ardent customer. The fishmongers, the ‘kakus’ as I would call them, humoured me by telling me the names of the fish and asking me which one I would like to serve to my guests during my wedding. In those days, we would carry back the packed fish in that jute bag, I looking at the bag while my grandfather swung it around. It would then be taken to my grandmother who would listen to the request of my grandfather and me for the fish curry we felt like eating that day. More often than not I would be the one getting the preference to style of fish curry being made in the kitchen that day.

Fish with its generic association with Bengalis imprinted its culture in my mind mostly through these trips to the fish markets with my grandfather. At the age of five when I was taught to separate a good fish from a bad one — by looking at the gills, which had to be deep maroon, and by pushing my fingers on the flesh which should ideally bounce back — made me a little excited. More than 20 years later I still manage to get the freshest of the ‘catch’ due to the eye my grandfather honed for more than a decade. My memories of fish is associated more with the markets which I visited as an urban-bred 90s child than with the kitchen it was made in at home.

Years later, when I moved out of my house in 2010 for my masters degree to Mumbai, one of the first thing on my agenda was to find the nearest fish market. A few insistent questions and bewildered frowns later, I managed to find the Govandi fish market, I still remember being disappointed because the familiar river fish I had known growing up with were nowhere to be seen. It took me almost eight years and about four coastal cities (where I have lived) to identify most fishes (if not all). The small corner of the Govandi fish market, to the bigger Colaba market and the huge Sasoon docks — the docks which host the first of the caught fish in Mumbai— I have come a long way in my journey, as a fish-eater.

After my first time in Mumbai for about a year, small office trips to Kerala brought me face to face with kinds of fish I had not even seen in Mumbai. I still remember walking around Thrissur, at noon when the stomach grumbled, I went into one of the small eateries near the round city park, it opened up to this busy looking middle-aged man who could not understand a word of Hindi, so I gestured to him with my hands like a kindergarten kid that I wanted to eat some fish; the man smiled and sent me up to the family room where a rice plate was served to me with an assortment of vegetables and karimeen curry. It was only years after eating this particular karimeen that I realised its actual value in the Malayalee kitchen; I think it has the same importance the Ilish is given at my home during celebrations.

Another such instance was of my rural stint in Sangli, the turmeric city of Maharashtra. Sangli, having no coast of its own, imports all its fresh catch from Ratnagiri which comes in every day. One of my colleagues who was a local took me to the expansive market. For the first time in my life, I saw blue-shelled crabs in a market; earlier, I had only seen them in expensive restaurants in Mumbai who occupy the niche part of the restaurant food chains. These blue-shelled crabs which to my surprise had the best sweet meat in it and made the best ingredient in a sea food broth. The broth became my signature dish, in those few months and made for the best type of comfort food. The relationship that I built with my fishmonger in Sangli, still continues as my recent trip to the city made me go there not as a customer but to meet the man who would call me every week on a Monday for a year to tell me that the fresh crabs have arrived, post which I would hurry back from office on those days to buy them.

These are a few instances that I remember from this long journey with fish and how different it has become from when I was that five-year-old accompanying my grandfather to the fish market. All these experiences have been taken into my kitchen, the space which was once just a stage where my grandmother and mother would cook while I sat in the corner. That space now has become my playground where I showcase how fish as an identity has changed for me. That fish is no longer the Bengali tradition which my grandmother still boasts about in her 70s, it is part of these stories of my life and my interactions with the various communities who have been part of my growing up as an adult. Fish market in my memory has become the space where my various identities intersect: a Delhi-bred Bengali girl becomes an adult traveller around the various parts of the country etching down ingredients, techniques and twists that intensifies and makes anew the flavours of the fish curry.

Anamika Dutt believes that the comfort found through food is the highest form of love. Her love story with food started when her mother gave birth to her after a dinner of lip smacking butter chicken! Her day job is of a feminist NGO practitioner, which often requires her to travel extensively, giving her an opportunity to bite into different kinds of food and indulge in myriad food stories. She publishes the blog, AnaTummy of Food, where she weaves nostalgia with her style of cooking and creating recipes.