India at 75 | Contributors S – Z

 

Sita Venkateswar is Programme Coordinator of Social Anthropology at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of Development & Ethnocide: Colonial Practices in the Andaman Islands and has co-edited The Politics of Indigeneity: Reflections on Indigenous Activism and Globalisation and the Challenges of Development in Contemporary India.

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SKB

I am not a true global citizen, equally at home anywhere. The whole world is a feast, but only India flows in my veins in a particular way. India, Maharashtra, aamchi Mumbai. Home. Sublime, tragic, hilarious. Neon rice fields simultaneously soothing and electrifying in the monsoon light. Shrieking and playing Holi with lurid pink potions. Burying my father with an orchid and a feather. Afternoon light playing golden tricks in the banyan leaves where I knew as a child there were secret kingdoms. Itchy school uniforms. The pure, purely demented cry of the Malabar Whistling Thrush. Vada pav and biryani and idli-dosa-hot-samosa-Bombay-meri–hai. Singing hymns, chanting bhajans, reciting duas. The whole 8th standard class sharing one jhoota raw mango with chili powder. India, you color the world, glorious, cruel, kaleidoscopic. The sun sets, the moon rises, painting the sea and polishing the sky. I have bled and broken on your rocks, danced and shouted on your sands.

But now—What is next? Rules may change but I will not. Whether you hold me close or spit me out, I will always belong to you.

 

SKB has published fiction as well as non-fiction books. She hates to be anonymous but feels she must.

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Sonora Jha

Do you long for me, India, the way I long for you? Where once I was your daughter, obedient, am I now the sister who ran away, wild? Or may I be the mother, shaking my head, never quite landing that silly threat of “one tight slap,” loving you beyond love and from within an aching heart that imagined you could be so much more if you’d only get out of your own way? Would I be the journalist who stayed to tell your best stories or the one you threw into prison for telling the true ones? Would I be the feminist unworthy of your protections, not quite the kind of beti to bachao (daughter to be saved)? May we now go in search, you and I, for The Others you burned or denied or drove out?

At 75, my mother, are you worthy of being mine and I yours?

If I come back, will you abandon me again within your own borders?

 

Sonora Jha hails from Bombay and teaches journalism at Seattle University. Dr. Jha is the author of the novels The Laughter (forthcoming Feb 2023) and Foreign (2013) and the memoir How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of my Family (2021).

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Suchitra Vijayan

Age 21
They arrested me
for holding a
blank paper.
No words,
just a blank paper.

The charge:
arrested for standing in silence,
provoking peace without words,
and protesting without a permit,

I stood at a street corner
with a blank paper
held above my head.

Who knew you could censor silence?

Age 32
Protesting for peace
became hate speech.
Arrested for the offense
of demanding dignity.
Bail denied.

Age 55
A government order —G.O.—
proclaimed that they had
no record of deaths,
no one died of anything.
Dead bodies are no longer proof of death.
Data was declared anti-national.

Age 31
Memory became excess baggage.
Record keepers vanished
Writers: disappeared
Poets: disappeared
Journalists: disappeared
Bards: exiled
That’s what happens when you
tinker with reality too much.

Age 46
They accused him of pelting stones
and then bulldozed his home.
No law sanctioned it.
No judge, jury, or facts were
involved in the matter.
Punishment delivered
for a crime he couldn’t commit.
He had no hands.
They called it
bulldozing justice.

Age 57 and 60
The court fined a citizen
for seeking justice,
sent another to prison.
Lordships had confused
vengeance for verdict

Age 71
Then I stood on a street corner
in protest of nothing.
They arrested me.
Inquilab Zindabad!

 

Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, essayist, activist, and photographer. She is the author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India.

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Sujatha Gidla

Seventy-five years ago, my uncle Satyamurthy, an untouchable sixteen-year-old and the first in his family to go to college, dressed in his best and joined the throngs on campus celebrating India’s liberation from the colonial yoke. Now that the British have left, he naively believed, there will be no more poverty, no more caste oppression. Many among the downtrodden shared his hopes on that day, even as millions were forced to flee in the bloody partition of the country on sectarian lines. In this year of Amrit (elixir, or nectar) anniversary, India has the highest number of extreme poor, caste violence is worse than ever before, and Muslims and Christians live under existential threat, while activists such as Teesta Setalvad and those framed in the Bhima Koregaon¹“After an incident of caste-based violence in 2018, the government arrested activists, human rights defenders, writers, and lawyers, alleging that they were part of an anti-national plot. The cases have not been brought to trial. Of the 16 arrested, one died in custody and bail has been granted to one activist, but the rest remain in custody, without formal charges being framed against them.” case face severe repression. Indians still await that elusive freedom.

 

Sujatha Gidla was raised in Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, and lives in New York. She is the author of a family history, Ants Among Elephants.

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Suketu Mehta

The Hands From The Trains

The manager of Bombay’s suburban railway system was once asked when the system would improve to a point where it could carry its ten million daily passengers in comfort. “Not in my lifetime,” he answered. Certainly, if you commute into Bombay, you are made aware of the precise temperature of the human body as it curls around you on all sides, adjusting itself to every curve of your own. A lover’s embrace was never so close.

My friend Asad bin Saif works in an institute for secularism, moving tirelessly among the slums, cataloging numberless communal flare-ups and riots, seeing first-hand the slow destruction of the social fabric of the city. Asad is from Bhagalpur, in Bihar, site not only of some of the worst communal rioting in the nation but also of a gory incident where the police blinded a group of petty criminals with knitting needles and acid. Asad, of all people, has seen humanity at its worst. I asked him if he feels pessimistic about the human race. “Not at all,” he responded. “Look at the hands from the trains.”

If you are late for work in the morning in Bombay, and you reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform, you can run up to the packed compartments and you will find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outwards from the train like petals. As you run alongside the train, you will be picked up and some tiny space will be made for your feet on the edge of the open doorway. The rest is up to you; you will probably have to hang on to the door frame with your fingertips, being careful not to lean out too far lest you get decapitated by a pole placed too close to the tracks. But consider what has happened. Your fellow-passengers, already packed tighter than cattle are legally allowed to be, their shirts already drenched in sweat in the badly ventilated compartment, having stood like this for hours, retain an empathy for you, know that your boss might yell at you or cut your pay if you miss this train, and will make space where none exists to take one more person with them. And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or Jogeshwari; whether you’re from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.

 

Suketu Mehta is the author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, and This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto. He teaches journalism at New York University.

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Sumana Roy

Third Molar

‘Infiltrators are like termites in the soil of Bengal … A Bharatiya Janata Party government will pick up infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of Bengal.’ — Amit Shah, April 2019

 

Sumana Roy has published a novel, one work of non-fiction, a collection of short stories, and two volumes of poetry. She teaches at Ashoka University.

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Sunil Amrith

To my colleagues, who have been harassed, hounded, and detained—

In the face of crass brutality, you uphold grace and humor. You confront the erasure of history with the stubborn insistence of memory. Your testimony speaks of lives ruined and communities torn apart. You shine a light on the rivers mined for sand, the forests felled by dams, the species driven to the brink. In your work and in your words there lives another India: an India more just, more fully alive, more open to the world.

 

Sunil Amrith was born in Kenya to Tamil parents, grew up in Singapore, and teaches history at Yale University. He is the author of four books.

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Tabish Khair

The shrinking strip between
The saffron and the green
Still offers space to write
What once was meant by white,
Before three gunshots (loud)
Turned it into a shroud.

 

Tabish Khair was born and educated in the small and historical town of Gaya, India. He remains an Indian citizen though he now teaches in Aarhus, Denmark. Author of thirteen works, he is a novelist, poet and critic. He has published a new novel, The Body by the Shore, in 2022.

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Tanuja Desai Hidier

Sooji, Sakar, Badam, Ghee

75 years ago, my future mother was living in Kolhapur, India. Childhood sun still upon her cheek, taste of that time, her tongue, she speaks:

Of August 15.

Indian Independence. It seemed.

School commenced with prayer: Vande Materam. My little-girl-mother, in khadi sari skirt, blouse, envisioned this motherland a goddess. Bejewelled; abloom. Golden-sari-swathed. Wide wise eyes; sweeping smile assuring worlds of delight.

After: Ah! Teacher distributing laddoos from magic-hat barrel.

Sugar-lipped, salt-skinned, she imagined this boon in the hands of all! The Catholic schoolkids, too, tucking in. Polish children from the nearby refugee camp, with their fascinating faces and beautiful Marathi, in the semolina savoring a hint of the kasza manna from the homeland they’d been forced to flee.

This—no flag-hoist, headline, parade—my mother’s image of Independence:

Sooji. Sakar. Badam. Ghee.

A treasure in her, every, palm.

A taste of sweeter days to come.

In the months after, tragically, that scent, sense, gave way to another: Ash-acrid. Bitter-burn. neighbors’ homes, set afire. Others, too, through Laxmipuri. Kolhapur.

Country/ies.

One day, my future mother and best friend Mumtaz were Hide-and-Seeking when Mumtaz’s brother fetched her away, despite please-let-us-plays.

Increasingly: Hindu families forbidding their ‘issues’ to see Muslim children, too.

Two little girls no longer allowed to meet.

All hide. No seek.

Childhood games tainted. Sides violently delineated.

Why couldn’t we just…be? That laddoo-promise—an India mothering, nourishing, freedom, inclusivity—was given to Mumtaz and me.

Now, that childhood goddess: Hair matted. Sari shredded. Body plundered. Eyes red.

Gone the gold. Sparkle. Smile.

Scent of jasmine, jamrukh, tea? Blood-sweat-tear gas. Artillery.

And we must renew her, come through, allow all to breathe.

Safely. With dignity. Coexisting peacefully.

All rivers to the sea!

The innocence of children at play in the street: Seek.

Speak.

A childhood memory: a metaphor for what still could be?

Please, dear India, this anniversary:

Reach into the barrel, bullet-free.

Sooji! Badam! Sakar! Ghee…

Ring in the sweet.

 

Tanuja Desai Hidier is an author/singer-songwriter. Her pioneering debut Born Confused—the first South Asian American YA novel—was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Sequel Bombay Blues received the South Asia Book Award. Tanuja has also made ‘booktrack’ albums based on the novels. She lives in Maine.

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Thrity Umrigar

I have loved two countries in my life and they have both broken my heart. One bills itself as the world’s oldest democracy, while the other is the world’s largest democracy.

But both nations have been bedeviled by ghosts they refuse to confront and transcend—the U.S. by the original sins of slavery and racism, and India by caste divisions and Islamophobia and anti-Christian sentiment. Unfortunately, the current Indian government is actively ensuring that these poisons spread throughout the body politic, by suppressing civil liberties and making minority citizens feel like strangers in their own country. From the promulgation of the reprehensible Citizens (Amendment) Act of 2019, to the jailing of journalists and activists, the vandalizing of churches by mobs, and the demolition of Muslim homes and businesses by the police, the repression of minorities bears the full imprimatur of the government.

I still hold out the hope that Hindu citizens of India will speak out against policies that target minorities, and work to make modern India live up to its potential and promise, to become the secular, pluralistic nation imagined by its founders.

 

Thrity Umrigar was born in Bombay and lives in the United States. She is the author of 13 books, including The Space Between Us and Honor.

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Tishani Doshi

Cento for India’s 75th

O mystic mother of all sacrifice!
At first, my encounters on the thoroughfares
of your country were quotidian: the threshing
thighs, the singing breasts, the snap
of wheel on rutted stone into that heaven
of freedom. These were my homes then,
though I did not know. As we enter the era
of the assassin, someone says from behind,
You are Hindoo, aren’t you? The land yields
in places, deliberately, knowing there is never
a single point to any story. A mirror shakes
in recognition. All these burning afternoons
later, your room is always lit by artificial lights,
your windows, always shut. I’d like to believe now
I have nothing to do with you. I tried to keep
my nostrils above mud. All of India’s become
like that—bursting like an apple on the table
keenly to be killed. The question of being
drowned or afloat does not really matter.
Badshah, I say, to no one there,
Go quickly and look at your sky.
What can trees do in such a place
except light their own fires?

 

with lines from Sarojini Naidu, Bhanu Kapil, Nissim Ezekiel, Vivek Narayanan, Rabindranath Tagore, Vijay Nambisan, Robin Ngangom, A.K. Ramanujan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Adil Jussawalla, K. Srilata, Kamala Das, Jayanta Mahapatra, Meena Alexander, Hoshang Merchant, Srinivas Rayaprol, Mona Zote, Jeet Thayil, Shreela Ray and Eunice de Souza

 

Tishani Doshi is a novelist, poet, dancer, and teacher. She has written eight books, including four volumes of poetry and three novels. She lives in Tamil Nadu.

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Vandana Singh

Freedom Song

They called me Mother. I was forests and grasslands, lakes and rivers, clouds that carried promises to parched earth. Elephants, like mountains, moved to shape the forests; the birds, and slender-footed deer followed in their wake, and butterflies danced in shafts of sunlight. Humans lived in city and village, forest and meadow. There were kingdoms, incursions, wars and confluences. There were ancient oppressions, dividing lines. The land was bountiful and made no distinctions.

Then came the colonizers from over the oceans. Gazing with mechanistic eyes, they carved me up, crisscrossed my body with numbers and lines; this, my verdant body, redolent with life, became ‘resource’ and ‘raw material.’ They caged my humans in prisons of body and mind; deepened rifts to keep their hold. It took lifetimes to drive them out. Mother! You are free, my human children said, drunk with visions of possibility, as they danced in the streets.

Now, too, you call me Mother. You celebrate freedom, my children, as your leaders dismember my body, cut off my limbs to sell to the highest bidder. My craggy crown of snow, my heart, the Hasdeo forest, my outflung arms, Kutch²Desert region in Gujarat, bordering Pakistan. and Dehing Patkai³Forest in Assam, in India’s northeast., my sandy feet, washed by waters of three seas; all for sale! Your billionaires raise phallic towers of triumph on the bones of the poor. Gluttonous greed devours entire landscapes, leaving devastation, dispossession and misery. The elephant cries for the lost forest, the kharchal⁴The great Indian bustard, a rare bird. contemplates extinction with sorrow-bright eyes. And my defenders, the people of forest and desert, grassland and mountain, village and city, the truth-tellers who march with sore feet over kilometers to seek justice; those you silence, entomb them in prison walls.

Is this freedom?

Tell your leaders this: I am more than Mother. I am thunder and avalanche, I am the secret only the deep forest knows. I am the fury of surging water. I am the gale that topples your delusions. I am the flood that uncovers the graves of your victims. I am the truth that burns down your palace of lies. No name, no boundary can contain me. No lines of hatred, no waving pennants, can define who I am. If you wish to know me, my children, you must come to me with empty hands, like a child, to learn. To learn to spell Freedom, you must open the prison gates, you must speak to the grassland, acknowledge the dignity of trees and elephants, rejoice in the variegated colors of human difference, let go of greed and hatred and fear.

Only then will you be free.

 

Vandana Singh was born and raised in Delhi. She teaches physics and climate change at a public university in Massachusetts and writes speculative fiction. Recent work includes a collection titled Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories.

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Vijay Seshadri

My parents left India in the nineteen-fifties—my father first, in the middle of the decade, and then my mother, at the end, with me in tow. They brought the country with them when they left, though—its habits of mind, its customs, patterns, and ideals, especially the moral and political ideals of the young Indian Republic. They were people who took politics seriously, and those ideals and that early high-mindedness might, in fact, have been the most Indian things about them. My father was born soon after the Non-cooperation movement; my mother during the First Round Table Conference. My father was a Marxist when he was young, of a not uncommon Indian scientific and intellectual type of that era. My mother was impatient with theorizing. Instead, she participated and participated. In India as a young teenager, she demonstrated. In America, she volunteered and registered voters, canvassed for candidates, and at election time for over thirty years could be found sitting at a table in a polling station on behalf of the local Democratic club, to record the signatures of voters on voting rolls. Her political activity had a little something to do with American politics. Mostly, though, it had to do with universal democratic work independent of any particular circumstances. This is what grown-up people did. They engaged in making social choices and in exercising their choices in an ordered arena. They didn’t submit to cults. They participated in their communities through rational processes and kept those processes alive and rational by their participation.

My parents were pacifists and internationalists. They were strongly pro-labor. Their notion was—or at least this was the way they expressed it to me when I was a child—that the government of a country was meant to represent its poor people in the inevitable scrum of competing interests of a democratic society. Though they were orthodox South Indian Vaishnavites, they knew that the place of religion in politics should be small and carefully circumscribed, and that communalism was by far the greatest danger India faced. They were proud of the India of the Independence movement and the early Republic—threadbare and struggling materially but rich in ideas and ideals and destiny, with a sense of its own dignity and profound historical depth, a dynamic (however inconsistently applied) progressivism, and an astonishingly sophisticated (the sophistication most fully apparent in the Ambedkar Constitution) accommodation of Indian complexity and variety and multitudinousness.

I’ve lived out of India for over sixty years now. By my estimates, I’ve spent during those years about ten months in the Subcontinent, five of which were in Pakistan, in Lahore, on a grant to study Urdu, and almost all the rest of which were in Bangalore, at the other end of the land mass, where I was born. An Indian living in India or someone out of India but much closer to the country or, even, a detached observer could make a case that people like me don’t have any standing to criticize or deplore Indian political developments. While I don’t buy this argument, I understand its reasoning. But though I might or might not have the standing to speak for myself, I can definitely speak for my parents. If they were alive, they would be appalled at what’s happening in India now—the harassment of writers and the suppression of dissent; the encouragement, the positive embrace, of communal identity and antagonisms; the encroachments on and manipulations of the judiciary; the tone of anger, frustration, resentment, even rage, that underlies and poisons political discourse; the growing violence. What might most dishearten them is the willful repudiation on the part of Indian “leaders” of India’s inherent and inalienable complexity and subtlety for the sake of a single, simple-minded, primitive story about the country. For them, an India that wasn’t complex, that wasn’t too complex to be subordinated to one idea of it, too complex to be grasped except by the most vigorous effort of the mind, wasn’t India at all, and never could be.

 

Vijay Seshadri is the author of five books of poetry and many essays, memoir fragments, and reviews. His work has received a number of honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Vishakha Desai

When India achieved freedom from the British rulers in 1947, the whole world was in awe of the ancient culture and an infant nation. It was not because India was rich; the colonial masters had made sure that the country was far poorer than when they rushed to it. Troubled as the region was with an ill-planned partition, all eyes were on India because of the moral authority of the Gandhian principle of Ahimsa, freedom through non-violent means.

Growing up in a household of Gandhian freedom fighters in the early years of Independence, I was proud to know that my young country aspired to live up to the famous Vedic verse inscribed at the entrance of its parliament, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, treating the whole world as family. It was important that respect for cultural diversity and protection of minorities was a fundamental part of the country, as enshrined in its new constitution.

Seventy-five years later, how sad it is that such noble ideas and actions are conspicuous only by their willful and persistent erasure in the land that birthed them.

 

Vishakha Desai is Senior Advisor to the President and Chair of Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. She is the author or editor of five books, most recently, World as Family: A Journey of multi-rooted Belongings. Raised in Ahmedabad, she lives in New York.

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Vivek Menezes

India’s smallest state didn’t get that famous “freedom at midnight” in 1947, because the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar refused to countenance decolonization, and the 451-year-old Estado da India was invaded and conquered only in 1961, after Jawaharlal Nehru finally sent in the Indian Armed Forces.

It’s a great pity it had to happen that way because—as Salazar was repeatedly advised—Goa overwhelmingly supported Independence, and diaspora Goans were already contributing mightily—far out of proportion to their minuscule numbers—to the grand experiment of the Republic of India. Nonetheless, instead of the appropriate negotiated merger (as happened with French India), there was only annexation—the official legal term—with all terms imposed directly from New Delhi.

Even then, there was huge optimism. The tiny territory, which became a full-fledged state in the Indian Union in 1987, voted in the first government with the Bahujan Samaj as its main base of supporters in modern Indian history, and implemented a remarkable raft of land, healthcare, and education reforms. Unfortunately, none of that proved sufficient to stave off the cynical depredations of the 21st century, as the politics of division have taken root in dark and dismaying ways. At this point, the future does not look good at all.

 

Vivek Menezes is a widely published photographer and writer, columnist for the 120-year-old O Heraldo newspaper, and the co-founder and co-curator of the Goa Arts + Literature Festival.

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Yashica Dutt

What does freedom look like? To a people whose sovereignty lives on borrowed time, when anyone walking by, can clank our metal cages they named caste, rattling our very belonging in this country they declared free a long time ago.

In ‘47, we heard freedom was fought for, hard-earned, won. Ours was still at bargain, with a republic, whose zeal to be the ‘world’s largest, brightest, newest’ couldn’t conceal the chains of caste they never considered breaking.

Freeing us too, would make us all free, with no one left to look down beneath, from above the slippery ladder of caste they sit on, defining their world, and ours. Redefining their existence, rearranging the illusion of ‘upperness’ that gives their life any meaning, would be excessive. We must wait for our turn for freedom. Asking for it too soon makes us greedy. Always asking, always demanding, to rupture the only order that ever made sense to them.

They say things are worse now. They’re right. Illusory, phantom or evident, all freedoms now lie at stake. Freedoms fought, won and bargained evaporate as we watch. Like a brass tap dripping through the night, and then, all at once. We have been here before. WE have always been here. It’s worse for some, not all. It never is.

“Will she lose it again?” Ambedkar had asked about India, months before he declared her, and her Dalit children truly free, with democracy. She is losing it now. But freedom, even at a bargain, is priceless, worth striving for. As people in waiting for 75 years to be free, we’d agree.

 

Yashica Dutt is a journalist and award-winning author of the best-selling memoir on caste, Coming Out as Dalit. She is a leading anti-caste expert and lives in New York.

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Zia Jaffrey

Memory, Delhi, 2014:

We were on the lawn. It was warm, though winter. You turned, in your light blue sari, and said, All the trouble in the world today has been started by Muslims, hadn’t I noticed? And then: We just want them to sign a piece of paper to say they will abide by our laws—this is a Hindu country—we are the majority—and if they don’t, they can leave.

How could you utter such words so casually? In front of your grandchildren, who are part Muslim? In broad daylight. When you know my last name. Do you not see that I am shaking now? I am so terrified, I cannot speak. Do you even believe these words? Or are they the words of a Mrs. Jones, the Joneses, said almost amiably, without consequence? Are we in Rwanda? When did it become permissible to speak this way? I must say something. But where are my words? I cannot find them. It’s an old position from childhood. That is not true, I say, feebly. I am still shaking. I don’t hear what she says next… In this moment, though I identify with my mother’s side of the family, culturally, which is Hindu, I am Muslim. I am Muslim.

The lawn, the light, the people—they feel sinister now. I seek out a familiar face. Or perhaps his eyes find mine. Her in-law. It feels conspiratorial. What’s wrong? he says. I explain. How do you stand it? I ask. He shakes his head softly. We just agree to disagree. We try not to speak of such things at family gatherings.

In the car, I cannot stop speaking. Someone says, she means, those other Muslims. The religious ones.

Who is ‘our’? Who is ‘they’? Who is ‘we’?

I am reminded that in Rwanda, people were ‘primed’ for genocide. There were phases, over the years, in which it became possible to kill. The radio, the media, helped. Will today be my day to die? So that when it came, the negotiation was not about the fact, but about the manner of death. How well will you kill me? Will you kill me well?

 

Zia Jaffrey is the author of The Invisibles, a book about the hijras of India. She has written cover stories, features, and reviews for many publications. Her work has most recently been anthologized in Toni Morrison: The Last Interview. She has covered Israel/Palestine, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, and AIDS. She is writing a book about Palestinian-Americans. She teaches in The New School’s M.F.A. program.

 

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