Deepanjana Pal's Blog, page 7

Wave goodbye

I got the news not from family, but from a hashtag. (That tells you everything about how far I’ve drifted.) #RIPNabaneetaDevSen popped up on my Twitter feed and I realised what it meant. Just for a moment, everything stopped and my head was filled with rasgulla.

Before I knew Nabaneeta Dev Sen, I knew stories of her. Like the one in which she carried rasgulla and mishti doi to America — this would have been in the 1970s, I think — but was stopped by customs officials. She was told that she couldn’t carry food into the country and certainly not dairy-based food. But these were delicacies, she protested. They’ll just rot if they’re kept quarantined for 40 days. The official shrugged, disinterested. Fine, she said and (allegedly) plonked herself down on the no-man’s land that was the floor of the airport, out of the theoretical reach of the customs official, and started opening up the pot of rasgulla. If this can’t enter America with me, then it will enter America through me, she said as she declared her intention to eat every damn rasgulla rather than let the sweet rot in quarantine. Also, she told the official, let’s hope they had an ambulance handy because she just happens to be highly diabetic.

That, for me, will be one of the abiding images of Khuku Mashi — radiating challenge, eyes twinkling, and holding in her hand the challenge of a rasgulla.

Or at least I think it will be. Right now, my head is a jumble of so many images of her that I’m certain I must be making some of them up because it’s been a while since I saw her. Her laughter — heartfelt and hard-won from the breathing ailment that made every intake of breath a small and crucial victory. The giant disc of her bindi, larger than her shining eyes. Her face lighting up as we talk about the Ramayana and she tells me about Chandravati’s version. Her bickering with Chhoto (her youngest daughter, Srabasti) and then laughing with her. Her feet — tapering and delicate; nails painted in a rich, glossy colour. Her reading using a magnifying glass, peering at the font as though it was tiny even though it was actually so enormous that each line was made up of one or two words. Her hair, thick as monsoon clouds. That striking, strong bone structure with the high cheekbones that gave her face a sculptural quality. The rasp of her voice, determined to be heard; gentle in tone and rough as a cat’s tongue in its tenor. Her being simultaneously unreasonable and endearing. Her looking me straight in the eye and seeing so much more than I was ready to share.

Nabaneeta Dev Sen — Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi award winner writer and teacher — was Khuku Mashi to me. She and my mother were cousins. Khuku Mashi was known for being the eccentric one, which is saying a lot given the collection of lovable cuckoos in that side of the family. We’ve got a lot of bright people in our brood, but I think Khuku Mashi and my mother stand out because they’re just dazzling. You’d never guess the two were related from their appearances, but scratch the surface and they had a lot in common: a ferociously-active brain, indefatigable energy, the ability to turn outsiders into insiders with the force of their affection, a determination to be joyful and an enviable work ethic. Khuku Mashi’s last published article is from October 9, 2019 (I think).

[image error][image error]From the Sunday edition of Pratidin

Frequently mentioned alongside her mother Radharani Devi as a writer, she quickly developed a distinctive voice as a writer and she was prolific despite a relatively late start. She wrote essays, novels, short stories, poetry and plays, and won awards for some of these. I haven’t read her enough, but whenever I’ve found her essays, they’ve drawn me in. There’s a fluency to her writing in Bengali — and English — that is so difficult to achieve. Writing so that the prose is insightful and elegant without becoming wordy or losing the easy lilt and rhythm of everyday poetics is a monstrous challenge. It’s easy to write simplistically and impossibly hard to write simply. Bengalis take pride in their language, like so many communities in India. Often, you can see showboating (a beautiful but impossible mouthful of a word here; an elaborate and laboured metaphor there; and so on). But not in her writing.

Khuku Mashi was born in Calcutta and British India, in 1938. Her name, Nabaneeta, was given to her by Rabindranath Tagore. Imagine growing up while a colony roils to unshackle itself and become a country. Her parents filled their home with books and conversations, which she listened to and took part in. While India pieced itself together into a country, she grew into herself and became the woman and writer who studied, spoke up and wielded words with grace. She’d always been beset with different kinds of ailments, but she’d also outwitted them with her willpower. The cancer, though, was different and she knew that. Uncannily, it surfaced in her around the same time that toxic conservative politics infected India.

Over the decades, she’d travel around the world, always returning to the home that was Bhalo-Basha (it’s a pun in Bengali. Bhalobasha means love. Drive a wedge between the two component words, it still has meaning. Bhalo basha means the good home). I’ve always thought it was the perfect place for her micronation because even if you had only known her for a moment, you couldn’t help but fall in love with her. I’m going to regret all those times that I’ve scuttled past Bhalo-basha without ringing the doorbell.

Newspapers and websites will probably refer to her as Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen’s ex-wife. It’s true, she was. Just as she was mother to three remarkable women. I’ve always found it curious that so many people found her divorce more fascinating than the way she built her family of choice. I always felt it was the latter that showed how radical she was — she was trying to reshape the family into a more supportive and adaptable construct than it traditionally is, especially in India — rather than the former. She was also a beloved teacher, a celebrated writer and a pillar of support to many. An alumnus of Presidency College, Jadavpur University, Harvard University, University of California at Berkeley, and Cambridge University, she had a resumé that was essentially plated in academic gold. Yet she didn’t flaunt these and neither did she make an exhibition of her erudition.

It’s possible that she will not be remembered for being a brilliant stylist or legendary author by future generations. Her writing is unlikely to enter canons. She wrote with the fluid ease of a river, and fluency is not considered artistic. Perhaps what will remain charming and endearing is how she folded elements, people and objects from reality into her writing, and created a record of what we fell just short of in our lives, like irreverent heroines and happy endings. Wittingly or unwittingly, her writing is a subtle record of what we (and she) wished was true of us as a society in these times.

A lot of her work was doomed to have the shelf life of the publication she was writing for, which meant it could be as short as 24 hours (in case of a newspaper) or months (the Puja editions of magazines remain items to be cherished). There are readers who will remember individual stories. There are writers and students who will remember individual conversations. There are others who will remember the things she said to them. We told stories about her when she was alive and we’ll revisit her in them now that she’s become a story.

Someone on Twitter just described her as “LIBERAL MAFIA QUEEN Nabaneeta Dev Sen”. I can practically hear her cackle delightedly.

MAMI 2019: Pain and Glory

Not brilliant, but moving and very beautiful.

Pain and Glory opens with a group of women – one of them is Penelope Cruz – by a river, their laundry by a river. The women take the washed linen and then spread it out on bushes, to dry. All the while, they sing a song and they dance a little, forgetting briefly their aches and pains and chores.

It can’t be a coincidence that a film that is so obviously personal to director Pedro Almodovar begins with a scene in which laundry is being aired. If I remember correctly, the Spanish equivalent of the English saying “washing your dirty linen in public” loosely translates to “airing clothes in the open”. The film’s protagonist, Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) has a fair amount of dirty linen to air, including a long-standing tiff with an actor named Alberto (Asier Etxeandia) and a heroin addiction.

[image error]Sbaraglia (left) and Etxeandia)

Pain and Glory divides its time between two places (urbane Madrid and rural Paterna) and two time frames (Salvador’s past and present). Paterna is spare, mostly colourless, and unaffected. It’s a place of underground homes, whitewashed walls and simplicity. Madrid is filled with intense colours, film screenings, plays and beautiful men. No seriously, it is ridiculous how gorgeous the men in this film are so let’s just get that out of the way. There’s one scene in which Salvador as a boy literally faints because his small self can’t handle the beautiful sight of the light falling perfectly on the handsome tradesman who, after he’s done tiling the kitchen wall, figures it makes complete sense to take all his clothes off. And bathe. In the kitchen. Why the hell not, I ask you? After all, the light is perfect. Also, it’s about time we saw the male gaze directed at men.

Under the circumstances, it makes complete sense that little Salvador, upon seeing him, first faints and then comes down with a fever.

Almodovar does his best to evoke a similar reaction in audiences. Banderas is brilliant as Salvador – more on that later – but with that beard, scruffy hair and wrinkles, he’s also a sight for sore eyes. It takes 24k handsomeness to be able to make wardrobe items like a dark red suit with a maroon, printed shirt look good. Then there’s the delicious Asier Etxeandia, who plays Alberto, an actor with whom Salvador has had a tiff for three decades because in one of Salvador’s most celebrated films, Alberto didn’t play his role the way Salvador had written it. Etxeandia and Banderas on screen together is basically Christmas for straight women and gay men. Just when you think your hormones have acclimatised to the sight of those two, Almodovar adds Leonardo Sbaraglia to the mix and has Banderas and him tangle tongues.

[image error]

Moving on. The story of Pain and Glory is simple. An ageing director, crippled by pain and the need for closure, finds that the only way he can move forward is by looking back at the past. Not exactly novel as ideas go and certainly not as crackling with wickedness, weirdness and provocation as so many of Almodovar’s other films. Yet I found Pain and Glory not just beautiful – which it is, and not only because of how good-looking the men are, but because cinematographer Jose Luis Alcaine’s sense of colour, light and geometry is stunning – but also deeply moving. This is a tender, quiet film and it’s almost unnerving how much of himself Almodovar trusts us with as he opens himself up to an audience.

There’s a lot of Almodovar in Pain and Glory. It’s tempting to imagine the cold war between Alberto and Salvador is a fictionalised version of Almodovar’s relationship with the actress Carmen Maura. Little Salvador is sent by his mother to a religious boarding school like Almodovar was. Almodovar started writing the film while recovering from spinal surgery and Salvador’s back pain is a key element of his chronic ailments (it’s also a nudging reminder of his mother, perhaps, who in the airing-laundry scene says the weight of carrying Salvador is giving her back pain). Banderas as Salvador wears Almodovar’s real-life clothes, lives in Almodovar’s real-life apartment, has Almodovar’s hairstyle. You’re not supposed to miss the resemblance. Banderas delivers the performance of his career in Pain and Glory. He’s pitch perfect in the sentimental scenes, his comic timing is excellent and he changes emotional gears with grace and fluency. If Pain and Glory, despite its contrived bits and impossible beauty, feels real, a lot of the credit for this goes to Banderas who anchors the film with his portrayal of Salvador. The only flaw, for me, in Banderas’s performance was how the heroin addiction was shown – no doubt on Almodovar’s orders – to be a benign and gentle beast. If only addiction was that easy to either break or even channel into art.

When we meet Salvador, he’s underwater, in a pool. The camera goes up close and follows the line of a scar that runs down his torso, reminiscent of a dissection (but for the minor detail that you’re unlikely to confuse a shirtless Banderas with a comatose frog). Salvador is distracted, troubled and carrying the weight of a creative block. He’s plagued with chronic ailments and a functioning depressive whose sadness is obscured by the bright beauty of his artistic apartment, the haze of heroine and his wry wit. The past keeps resurfacing in the present for Salvador. Sometimes, it’s because he makes an active effort, like when he seeks out Alberto with the intention of making peace. At other times, the past sneaks up on Salvador unexpectedly, like when he goes to an exhibition by unknown artists and finds a sketch of himself as a boy, made by the man who made him faint. Or when an old lover turns up at Salvador’s doorstep, having by chance caught a play in which Salvador had written about their old relationship.

This being an Almodovar film, the sadness comes packaged in laughs. One of the funniest scenes in the film is a question and answer session that takes place after the screening of one of Salvador’s celebrated films. Salvador and Alberto are supposed to be present, but they’re at Salvador’s home, high on heroin. (There’s something particularly beautiful about seeing this at a film festival, where so many film screenings are followed by Q & As.) Cruz as Salvador’s mother is luminous. She knows her son is too good for the bare, impoverished world that is her lot and she’s determined to make sure he will not get trapped here. But while he’s here, she’ll barter his smarts (i.e. his ability to read and write) to score a tiled wall in her kitchen.

Ultimately, Pain and Glory ends up being about the importance of telling your story and taking control of it, even if it is at the cost of realism and historical accuracy. Because rooted as it may be in Almodovar’s life, much of the film is fiction. For instance, the scene where Salvador meets his ex-lover Federico is the closure Almodovar would have liked (complete with a scorchingly-erotic goodbye kiss) but didn’t get. One of the most poignant moments in the film is a conversation between Salvador and his mother, who is by then in her last years. She tells him that she doesn’t like how he mines his own life for the plots of his films. He tells her he’s sorry to have failed her “just by virtue of being what I am”, a reference to the homosexuality that is out in the open for everyone to see but not mentioned openly by mother and son. As he says that line, his voice cracks and there are tears in his eyes. His mother, sadness etched on her face, says nothing. Almodovar didn’t have this conversation with his mother, but as he said in this article, “I had been thinking that very thing since my own childhood.”

You can’t help but remember all those amazing mother characters in Almodovar’s films and wonder whether they are are his way of trying to … compensate? Apologise? Are the fictional mothers reflections of the ‘real’ one or what he wished his mother was like? Because you know how it is with Almodovar’s films. Everyone and everything looks a little (or lot) more beautiful than in real life.     

Pain and Glory ends with Salvador not just above water, but practically floating. He’s behind the camera, filming; and you realise that all the flashbacks that you saw with Cruz as his mother are the film that Salvador is making. The past and the present come together; the lines demarcating the real from the fictional blur; and the only tangible reality is the artistry of a beautiful frame.

QUOTES:

“It’s your eyes that have changed. The film is the same.” (actor)

“…the mythology of the organism…”

“You forget I’m an actor. I suffer very well.” (Alberto)

“The place where I’m going, I want to go in lightly.” (mother)

“Don’t get that storyteller look.” (mother)

The women who read

It struck me when a friend was going through a phase of discovering and rediscovering Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. These were mostly from the Edo period (1615-1868) and so many showed women reading. They read (and wrote) love letters; they held open books and partly-unrolled scrolls in their hands. The women in these prints are more often than not some sort of idealised beauty. Their reading is a performance imagined and captured by a male artist.

This is not to suggest all Japanese women were illiterate at the time and the artists were just imagining them with books for the heck of it. Many women did get an education and even though historically, women were considered inferior to men in Japan, they did have some amount of agency depending upon where they belonged in the rigid social hierarchy (as far as I know. I’m no expert). What struck me while seeing the ukiyo-e prints of women with books and letters was that the idea of a woman reading was considered desirable.

During the Edo period, cities expanded with new people and trades coming in. There were new patrons and new customers. Art shifted from being purely driven by patronage to a more commercial worldview. There was now a general public that could buy prints and for whom, therefore, prints were made. Had the idea of women reading been outlandish or unpopular, it’s unlikely that these prints would be filled with as many women of letters. Whether courtesans or otherwise, there seems to be a preponderance of women reading and writing in ukiyo-e woodblock prints. This is interesting because these prints were often being responding to demands of the market. It’s worth keeping in mind that these were not necessarily cheerful years for women, particularly those who wanted to occupy public spaces. For instance, in 1629, “the government, displeased by the highly profitable after-hours pursuits of the actresses, passed a series of prohibitions against female performers“, transforming Kabuki into an all-male theatre.

But women who read remained in public view, through these prints. This easy flaunting of intellectual ability reminded of this fabulous essay on Marilyn Monroe and how it scared many (men) that she was a bookworm. It also made me Google for images of Indian women reading because I just couldn’t remember a famous painting or sculpture from Indian art that showed a woman reading. Here’s what Google had for me:

[image error]

Of course, a Google search is neither exhaustive nor authoritative, but it does feel indicative. When femininity is performed, reading isn’t what Indian muses tend to do. In contrast, I could think of a million paintings of women immersed in books from European art, and so could Google.

[image error]

Unlike the women in the ukiyo-e woodblock prints, the women in the European paintings are usually immersed in the book they’re reading. They don’t look up, they don’t acknowledge the presence of the artist. You could read these paintings as vaguely voyeuristic or as a polite but decided “talk to the hand” from model to artist.

[image error]Woman Reading a Newspaper,
Paritosh Sen (1992)

The idea of the immersed reader is what we see in the Indian images — the few that pop up, I mean — but there’s more of a sense of performance, like the woman is play-acting reading for the benefit of the artist. Closest to candid seems to be Paritosh Sen’s “Woman Reading a Newspaper”. She’s not looking at the artist, but he does seem to be sitting opposite her, which suggests she’s aware of him. Despite the barely-there sari and the tops of her breasts being visible, this isn’t an erotic or even sexy image. Tears seem to be streaming down her face, and frankly I sympathise. That’s precisely how I feel within seconds of picking up a newspaper these days (don’t miss the name of the publication: “The Nation”).

What’s particularly interesting to me is how Instagram helped to really see how the old images were troublesome when the account Hot Dudes Reading went viral. Now that we were being shown photos of men immersed in books, suddenly there was more awareness of how these photos objectified the subjects and raised questions about privacy violations and consent. Meanwhile, for centuries (literally), women have been used as ‘inspiration’, often without their consent, and no one was particularly bothered.

We’ve also got so many woman-managed depictions of reading thanks to bookstagrammers. Sometimes, the hat tip to the old European masters is obvious. For instance, Na’ia Perkins’s account is @nayareadsandsmiles, which is what most of reading women did in the European paintings. Perkins also keeps her eyes lowered and her smile is frequently demure, but very rarely are the shots candid. She’s consciously (and joyously) performing for the camera. Even when the posing isn’t quite as artful or the photograph aims to be candid, you as a viewer know that the woman in the photo Then there are the bookstagrammers who focus on the books. Much like the artists of yore dressed up their women subjects, these bookstagrammers dress up the book they’re posting about. Clever use of props, careful lighting, paying attention to angles — the tools really the same.

What are the chances that 400-odd years later, someone will circulate these images the way my friend was sharing the ukiyo-e prints?

[image error]By Katsushika Hokusai

A Disruption Called #MeToo

In 2018, Melbourne Writers Festival asked me to deliver an oration on #MeToo in India. Which is how I found myself at the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre, bundled up in sari and jacket, talking about women and disruptions while chugging red wine every few sentences. It went alright. I mean, when Guardian says,

“[Ronan]Farrow appeared before a sold-out crowd at the Athenaeum Theatre, with its first few rows reserved for sponsors and important folk. At a more intimate venue at the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre was a session about #MeToo that proved at least as stimulating.”

…it’s not bad, right? (There’s more about feminists at MWF and my lecture in the article.)

Here’s the full text of my lecture (which could do with a sequel given recent developments like the defamation suits filed by MJ Akbar, Subodh Gupta and Pravin Mishra).

*

I acknowledge that I meet you on the land of the Kulin nations and that sovereignty was never ceded. I pay my respects to the Elders past and present, and acknowledge the pivotal role the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to play within the Australian community.

There’s beauty and power in those simple sentences.
It’s a statement that recognises how insidiously abusive recorded history can
be as well as the importance of culture and storytelling when it comes to
disrupting norms. Following in the footsteps of this everyday resistance, I’d
like to take you back in time and tell you the story of a woman who I would
like to believe would be an elder if Indian feminists were a tribe. 

It’s September 1992, evening, in a village
in Rajasthan and a woman named Bhanwari Devi is being gang-raped. She had been
working in the small field she and her husband own when five men, armed with
sticks, attacked her husband. Then, two of the men held Bhanwari down while two
others raped her.

Bhanwari knows her rapists and the men know
her. Four months ago, Bhanwari had earned their wrath when she reported one of
them for arranging a marriage for his nine-month old daughter. He’s a powerful
man in the village; Bhanwari is a woman, poor and a Dalit, among the lowest
castes in the Hindu social pyramid. If it hadn’t been for the fact that
Bhanwari also worked as a grassroot level social worker for the Rajasthan state
government, her protest against the child marriage would have been
inconsequential. But she had the government’s ears because of her job and
officials paid a visit to the family that had tried to marry the infant off.

Since then, Bhanwari and her family had
become persona non grata in the village. She had to go to the next village to
get water, to grind her grain. The village stopped buying the pottery Bhanwari
and her husband sold to supplement their income. Her children were bullied in
school. Finally, there was the rape.

After the men leave, Bhanwari — bleeding
but not broken — gets up and walks to a police station with her husband to file
a complaint. The police refuse. They tell her she has to submit evidence – the
blood and semen-stained skirt she’s wearing. It’s a tactic to keep her from
registering a complaint. It doesn’t work. Bhanwari gives them her skirt and her
husband unravels his turban so that she can wrap it around her waist as a
makeshift skirt. Then the injured couple walk home.

What they didn’t know was that even with
the skirt in their possession, the police hadn’t filed a formal complaint. That
would happen days later, after women’s groups put pressure on the police.

This was just the beginning. At every level
and at every stage, from police station to hospital to the courts, Bhanwari
Devi faced harassment and resistance. Medical examiners would refuse to conduct
the necessary tests, magistrates avoided her, and even when people grudgingly
cooperated, they did their best to ensure her evidence wouldn’t hold up in
court. Everyone knew what she’d been through and no one wanted to acknowledge
it.

Meanwhile, other women who worked as grass
root level workers in Bhanwari’s area reported they were being threatened by
village councils. “They are circling us like a pack of wolves,” said Kailash
Bai, another grassroot level worker. The fact that these women weren’t being
allowed to do their jobs gave a couple of women’s groups an idea. A public
interest litigation was filed against the Rajasthan government, in the Supreme
Court of India, for failing to protect the fundamental rights of their
employee, Bhanwari. The petitioners argued that Bhanwari had been raped as a
consequence of doing her job — the state employed her to inform authorities of violations
like child marriages so that they could stop them – and given the prevailing
gender bias, an employer must take steps to ensure a secure working environment
specifically for its women employees. 

Around the same time, the case Bhanwari had
filed against her rapists lurched its way forward. In 1995, three years after
Bhanwari had been raped, a lower court acquitted the men who had raped her. The
lawyer for the accused said that the judgement was “bold and courageous” and
that his clients are “still scared that she will start another campaign against
them,” referring to the media reports supporting Bhanwari that were largely a
result of women’s rights groups campaigning for justice.

An appeal was filed against the verdict. “Since the day I was raped. I have lost all my
options,” Bhanwari told India Today. “The only way ahead is to fight.”

Two years later, in 1997, Bhanwari got the
only victory that she has known so far in her fight for justice. In response to
the petition that had been filed by the women’s groups against the Rajasthan
government, the Supreme Court of India delivered the Vishakha Judgement, which defined
sexual harassment in the workplace and laid down the processes that an employer
must put in place to ensure complaints can be filed and dealt with swiftly. The
Vishakha Judgement was to be treated like a law until actual legislation on
sexual harassment in the workplace was passed, said the court.

That, incidentally, would happen in 2013.
For the intervening 20-plus years, all we had was Vishakha and even in 2018, Bhanwari
continues to wait for a final verdict in the case she filed against her
rapists, who are out on bail (one died a few years ago, of old age).

Yet whatever systems of redressal we have
for survivors of sexual harassment in India are because of Bhanwari and the
Vishakha verdict. The guidelines it offered are the bedrock of every committee
or cell instituted to tackle complaints of sexual harassment, be it in colleges
or offices. Without Bhanwari, there would be no Vishakha Judgement and without
Vishakha, there would be no due process as far as sexual harassment in a
workplace goes.

Whenever topics like sexual abuse or
violence against women come up in India, everyone stresses the importance of
bringing the guilty to book, of trusting the systems that have been put in
place by institutions. If there isn’t an official record of the crime and how
it was tackled by authorities, then it’s very hard to shut up the naysayers who
claim feminists are just women corrupted by the West, banging on about
imaginary offenses. The systems may be flawed, but they do formally acknowledge
the fundamental rights of women, and that has only happened because of the concerted
and determined efforts of feminists and legal activists in most cases.

And there are times when due process works,
which suggests that rather than the law and the processes, it’s the people
enforcing these that are the problem; or potentially, the solution. When they
act responsibly, like Ambedkar University Delhi did, the system seems to work.
In March this year, Lawrence Liang, the dean of Ambedkar University’s law
school, was found guilty of sexual harassment. Even though the allegations were
from the past and no one had complained at the university, the committee ran a
probe and recommended that Liang be barred from occupying any administrative
position for two years.

When the institutional response is callous,
on the other hand, as in the case of the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ), the
system seems broken. Responding to allegations of harassment against Sadanand
Menon, a respected cultural critic who teaches at the ACJ, the college’s
official statement effectively said it wasn’t going to do anything because
“unproven allegations … are not within its jurisdiction to investigate or
enquire into.” Never mind the minor detail that the whole point of an
investigation is to find proof that either verifies or proves allegations to be
false. If it’s “proven”, it’s not an allegation; it’s a charge. The college,
acting almost like Menon’s mouthpiece, also informed us that Menon has
voluntarily decided not to teach at ACJ this year and is considering taking
legal action against “those who have published false and defamatory allegations
against him.” There was no explanation as to why the college believed Menon
over those who had accused him.

I mention Sadanand Menon and Lawrence Liang
specifically because both these names were in The List, a crowd-sourced
document on sexual harassment in Indian academia, compiled by Raya Sarkar who
is of Indian origin, presently lives in America and identifies as a Dalit
feminist. The List is perhaps the loudest shout of #MeToo we’ve heard in India
in recent times. Ambedkar University decided to investigate the claims and
ended up finding Liang guilty; the ACJ chose to ignore the claims and side with
Menon instead.

Raya’s list is one of those incidents that
galvanised consciences across India. The last time this had happened was in a
much larger scale, in 2012, when a 23-year-old woman in Delhi was gang-raped on
a bus. The crime itself was brutal, but depressingly common. What was
extraordinary was the response it evoked. We hadn’t seen such an outpouring of
passion and anger in decades, and certainly not for a rape victim ever. This
was the start of the third wave of Indian feminism and it marked the beginning
of women’s rights becoming a topic of popular, national conversation. While the
victim battled for her life, thousands (mostly women but also some men) took to
the streets. They were mourning the young woman who was fiercely holding on
just long enough to give the police the details they needed to file a complaint
and apprehend the accused. Women gathered to protest the fact that unsafety was
the norm for them in Delhi and that the solutions given to them — come home
before sundown; don’t look male strangers in the eye; dress conservatively –
were useless. Those that came out as protestors after the 2012 gang-rape were
effectively saying “Me too” before the phrase reached India as a hashtag.

The government of the time panicked at the
sight of the swelling crowds, the placards and the slogans. Police attacked
protestors. Water-cannons were aimed at them. Tear-gas was thrown at them. But
the crowds dispersed only to reconnect, and they demanded something more than
platitudes.

What we got as a result was the report of
the Justice Verma Committee, which would form the basis of a major amendment to
Indian criminal law in 2013. The definition of rape was expanded to include
non-consensual oral sex as well as the insertion of any object or body part
into the victim’s vagina, urethra or anus. Fast-track courts were to be set up
for rape cases. Stalking, voyeurism, unwanted sexual advances and touch were
now to be seen as sexual assault rather than actions “outraging the modesty of
a woman”, which was how the Indian Penal Code previously described it. Whether
this reminds you of a Barbara Cartland heroine or the cartoon character Modesty
Blaise probably depends on your reading habits. Neither are particularly representative,
sadly.

Most importantly, the amended laws
kickstarted a conversation about consent, and this would leave enormous ripples
among men and women in India. The question of what constitutes duress and how
to know whether consent is freely-given continues to be a much-debated topic.
Ever since the Justice Verma Committee report recommended that there be an
improved standard of consent, a large group of men have complained that this
leaves them vulnerable. What if a woman pretends she’s consenting and then
later reveals she wasn’t? How’s a guy to know? It’s alarming that so many men
think their performances of romance encourage women to at best fake it and at
worst, feel victimised, but that’s toxic masculinity for you. (Another topic
for another day.) For women, there’s a more serious and problematic grey area
here. Especially when there’s a fear of being attacked or revenge porn, women tend
to sugarcoat rejections rather than be blunt, for their own safety. In a court
of law, however, the documentary evidence — quoted emails or messages, for
instance — suggests the women are agreeable. How do you separate the genuine
fear from the genuine affirmative consent?

For instance, in 2015, an Indian theatre
director and storyteller — a man — was accused of sexually assaulting an
American scholar in India. A lower court found him guilty, and this was the
first instance of non-consensual oral sex being seen as a crime in India. The
accused filed an appeal and the High Court would overturn this verdict, saying
that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove lack of consent. The case ultimately
went to the Supreme Court, which delivered a judgement that deserves to be
framed in the Mansplaining Hall of Fame because it informed us that “a feeble
no may even mean yes”.

Feeble nos and other ambiguous
manifestations of consent would show up when Raya’s list went viral, and those
accused in it tried to clear their names by pointing out that their victims
hadn’t complained to them. The immediate trigger for the list was Huffington
Post taking down American academic C. Christine Fair’s essay in October 2017,
in which she named and shamed a number of people in American academia. Raya,
herself a survivor of sexual violence and someone who has first-hand experience
of not being believed when she spoke up, decided to compile The List as an act
of solidarity and warning. She knew there were whisper networks that cautioned students
off certain professors, but what if you didn’t know the right people? Why
shouldn’t everyone be aware of these reputations?

So on October 23rd, 2017, Raya
wrote a Facebook post in which she said she was compiling a list of sexual
harassers in academia. “If anyone knows of academics who have sexually
harassed/ were sexually predatory to them or have seen it first-hand, PM me and
I’ll add them to the list,” she said. It was, as Raya freely admits, an
impulsive gesture that didn’t anticipate virality.

The response her Facebook post received was
overwhelming. “I was taken aback
that so many women reached out to me with their experiences,” she told me. “I
did not expect them to trust me with sensitive information that was required
from them. But they did – not only did they share their testimonies but sent me
copies/ screenshots of emails, text messages, got their friends and witnesses
to vouch for their narrative.” There was a process of verification that Raya
put in place instinctively and this has been conveniently ignored by those who
have subsequently attacked her and The List.

A day after Raya posted the list of alleged
sexual harassers, some of Indian feminism’s most respected names went on a
warpath. Against The List and Raya.  

Kavita Krishnan, secretary
of the All India Progressive Women’s Association, said that Raya had bypassed
the process of justice, as though a Facebook post was a Supreme Court verdict.
Raya was called a vigilante by some, she was accused by others of being
everything from gullible to a master manipulator.

Nivedita Menon — whose
fantastic book Seeing Like A Feminist deserves to be included in syllabi all
across India — published a statement on behalf of 14 well-respected figures in
Indian feminism. They dismissed Raya’s list as “the initiative on Facebook”,
denying it the right to be considered even a footnote in what Menon claimed as their “long struggle to make visible
sexual harassment at the workplace”. There’s no doubt that these 14 people have
done incredible work for women’s rights in India, but that they would claim
ownership of the movement in a way that excludes other women was disappointing.
“It worries us that anybody can be named anonymously,” read the statement,
ignoring the fact that Raya did have an informal process of verifying claims in
place. The statement also said the undersigned were “committed to due process,
which is fair and just”. No mention of the fact that students rarely press
charges because they’re often intimidated and fear for how their grades will be
affected by such a move. No mention of how barely a handful of educational
institutions in the entire country have active cells for complaints against
sexual harassment. The statement concluded with this: “We appeal to those who are
behind this initiative to withdraw it, and if they wish to pursue complaints,
to follow due process, and to be assured that they will be supported by the
larger feminist community in their fight for justice.”

It’s worth pointing
out that months later, when due process found Lawrence Liang guilty, there was
a terse one-line statement on the same website, which would go on to carry a
long post by Nivedita Menon, who would attack The List again, instead of
offering the support she’d promised in that first response. 

But that was later.
Soon after Raya published her post, a South Asian blogger
and journalist in America named Inji Pennu copied the names on Raya’s post on
to a Google document and started adding to it. Meanwhile, the opposition to The
List grew louder and fiercer. Some of the men on it demanded to be told who had
“nominated” them, which didn’t do much to make the complainants feel their
academic careers were safe, but did underscore the point that anonymity was
problematic in terms of getting redressal for both survivors and those
falsely-accused. Male academics, even those who were not on the list, started
writing to students and colleagues, to establish their innocence. It seemed as
though every other day, there was a Facebook status update in which a male
academic felt the need to point out that he believes in sexual freedom and has
been misunderstood.

The nervous flapping among academics and
the updates on the Harvey Weinstein investigation gave rise to hopes that women
would come forward and name abusers in the Indian film industry, particularly
Bollywood (which is the Hindi film industry in India). Not one person did.

Does that mean Indian film industries are
squeaky clean and shiny in the absence of gender bias? Of course not. They’re
pits of exploitation, prejudice and cover-ups, which is why all we get are
rumours and no one dares talk about it on record. 

If this sounds cowardly, then consider
this. In February 2017, about eight months before the Weinstein exposés were
published, an actress was kidnapped in Kerala. She was in her car, going home
after a shoot, when another car hit hers. Her driver got out to have the
customary shouting match with the other car’s driver and while this was
happening, the men in the other car got into the actress’ car and drove off.
For two hours, she was held hostage, sexually assaulted and filmed.

She filed a complaint and the police
investigations revealed that the plot had been hatched by one of the biggest
heroes of the Kerala film industry and a man with whom this actress has done
many films. His name is Dileep and he says he’s innocent while the police say
they have testimonies, eye witness accounts and call records to back their
claim. He was arrested and is currently out on bail. Even though the media
backed the actress and the police have enough evidence to file a chargesheet, it
was Dileep who had most of the industry’s sympathy. Not the actress.

Meanwhile in Bollywood, which is considered
more progressive and open than most other film industries in India, Ekta
Kapoor, arguably the most powerful person in Indian television and one of the
more influential film producers in Bollywood, said this when asked about sexual
harassment in the Indian film industry: “Well, I think there are Harvey
Weinsteins in Bollywood, but there is 
probably an equal number of Harvey Weinsteins on the other side of the
story, but people do not want to talk about that part. Yes, there are people in
power like producers who use their power to take advantage of people, but at
the same time, there are people on the other side, like an actor or others who
need the job, who would also use their sexuality to get things done. Therefore,
I believe that predators should not be put in a box based on power. It is not
always true that the person who does not have power is the victim.”

You could make a strong argument that Ekta
Kapoor doesn’t really know the meaning of words “victim” and “predator”, but
that isn’t really what we should take away from her statement. When I mentioned
this comment of hers to some film industry professionals, a few explained to me
that Ekta was trying to say that sexual harassment should be considered a
gender-neutral territory, but poor dear, she didn’t have the right words.

Here’s the thing: sexual harassment should
absolutely be a gender-neutral crime ideally, because it has nothing to do with
desire and everything to do with abuse of power. However, we don’t have a
gender-equal society anywhere in the world, so it would be idiotic to turn a
blind eye to the central power imbalance while arguing that sexual harassment
is about power. Also, when your first response to sexual harassment is to
indulge in a spot of victim-blaming, my only response is my resting bitch face.

What Ekta Kapoor’s statement shows is how
normal and accepted harassment and sexism are in the Hindi film industry.
Sexuality, as she terms it, will get people jobs rather than their work
experience or an audition. “Who did she sleep with to get that role?” or “He’s
got the part because he’s the producer’s bitch” aren’t even considered
offensive. They’re just statements of fact. Off the record, assistant directors
and crew will talk about directors and producers who bring actresses into
projects because they’re in a relationship or hope to be in one with the
actress in question. Rumours abound about actors who demand “girls” be sent to
them after a day’s shoot is done. On sets, no one bats an eyelid at offensive
remarks, ranging from “Stop behaving like you’re on your period” to throwaway
sleazy comments that women are supposed to ignore. That’s her test as a
professional. The fact that the man in this equation isn’t behaving
professionally — who cares?

From the people I’ve spoken to on the
subject of sexual harassment, here’s what it boils down to in Bollywood: “No
one talks about it because everyone does it.” “You talk about it and you’ll
never get a call from a casting agent again. There are hundreds waiting anyway.
They’re just looking for reasons to drop you.” “You give one specific name, and
you’ll be identified. Then everyone will say, ‘She’s a slut. She slept with him
and didn’t get the role so she’s framing him.’” “It’s not worth complaining
about because it’s not going to change. They’re too powerful.”

So in terms of victories, results and
concrete change, there’s very little to show for #MeToo in India so far, except
for that solitary guilty verdict against Lawrence Liang. Within weeks of The
List being published, Raya left Facebook, exhausted by the attacks in her
inbox, and Inji took down the document. This was taken as proof of The List
being false and not as an indication of the kind of threats and intimidation they’d
faced. (Raya’s original Facebook post is, however, still up.) The divide within
feminists remains, with the older, more-established lot unwilling to engage in
any kind of dialogue and the younger, furious at being dismissed in this
manner. The film industries in India have kept calm and carried on. The closest
to concrete change could be the way multinational companies in India have
stressed the need to have systems in place against sexual harassment and
communicated to their staff that such charges will not be taken lightly.
Whether this is a threat to the complainant or the accused, depends on the
company’s individual culture.

As a disruption, on the other hand, #MeToo
is a phenomenal success. The 2012 gang-rape brought everyone together. #MeToo
in India isn’t doing that, but it is laying bare the power structures and
inequalities that we’ve tried to paper over for years. In the lack of concrete
results and resolutions, in the stubborn silences, we see the tight grip in
which the pieces are held in place by those who wield power and influence.
There’s also a new collective being formed, steadily and subtly by everywomen
who resist in everyday ways, particularly on the internet. As long as you don’t
keep quiet when you see sexism, you’re a heroine. After centuries of being
forced into docility and poise, this is like a call to anarchy.

At one point, soon after #MeToo started
going viral as a hashtag, Indian women on Facebook swamped the site with
stories of their sexual harassment on the streets, in family functions, at
work. It came as a shock to many men that practically every woman they knew had
faced sexually offensive behaviour and violence of some sort from a man — and
usually, more than once in their lives. It didn’t matter how rich or poor a woman
was, how old she was or where she lived, there were situations in which she was
vulnerable and someone took advantage of her. And that someone was invariably a
man. Statistics became words and turned real, and it was, for many men, a
rattling experience. Because if every woman in India has experienced sexism at
least once, then every man in India has dismissed sexism and been sexist, at
least once.

Since October 2017, one thing that we’ve
seen more and more of is women taking to social media to talk about traumatic
experiences, particularly those of sexual assault. It’s almost like they’re
processing in public. It seems odd to do this on platforms associated with
trolling, but what these survivors have found on the internet are allies and a
sisterhood. For many, this is more valuable and therapeutic than due process.

Take, for instance, the story of K, who
last month took to Instagram to recount a horrific Tinder date from 2015. She alleged
she’d been held captive, raped and photographed against her will by a man she
met on a Tinder date. He was fine until they went to his place. The reason she
couldn’t leave after the first warning bells rang is that it was late at night
and therefore unsafe for her to get out and grab a cab. Her choice was between
the possibility of sexual violence at her date’s house and the possibility of
sexual violence in public transport (on the premise she got a cab in the first
place). Then at one point, her phone was out of battery, her date was
alternating between tender and threatening, and she was counting the seconds
till daybreak. The whole experience was recounted in a string of 15-30 second
videos that made up K’s Insta story. She recounted what happened without any
drama or high-strung emotion. Her story went viral and, unsurprisingly, reached
the man in question.

He started his own Instagram story,
protesting innocence and showing messages K had sent him and photos of hers
which he argued established her claims as false. She said she was being nice to
him because she didn’t want him to put the photographs he had of her online. A
flame war followed between the two. Ultimately, both of them took their stories
down and no one has gone for the legal route. Quite clearly, it’s far less
important than getting the words of their stories out.

More recently, a young woman in Mumbai was
in an autorickshaw when she realised the driver was masturbating. At one point,
he turned his vehicle into a dark alley and pulled out his penis. The woman ran
out. She got the number of the autorickshaw’s license plate and then, once
home, she wrote posts on Twitter and Facebook, telling her readers what had happened,
but that she had no intention of going to the police because they don’t take
such complaints seriously. This time, though, the Mumbai Police did take her
tweets seriously. They convinced her to file a formal complaint and within 24
hours of her doing so, they caught the driver. The woman wrote a gushing post,
thanking the Mumbai Police. Someone sent me screenshots of the posts with a
sarcastic one-liner: “Now that they got this guy, bet all pervy rick drivers
are shaking in their pants.”

I actually wouldn’t be surprised if at
least the pervy rick drivers in that neighbourhood think twice before trying
that stunt with a young woman in their vehicle. That’s the impact that law
enforcement can have when it’s done right. The point, though, isn’t the arrest,
but the fact that this woman spoke up — and that’s got everything to do with #MeToo.
The norm is to keep quiet, feel awkward or even shame and to get out of that
situation as soon as possible, and say nothing to anyone. #MeToo has disrupted this
and made it cool to speak up. For a vast number of Indian women and girls, the
audience that the hashtag guarantees has given them the confidence to speak up,
without fear of being silenced. That’s an enormous gain when you consider how
much stigma has traditionally been attached to being a victim who would almost always
be told that they’d asked for it so they shouldn’t blame the perpetrator.

The conversations that we’re having have also
turned the spotlight on a massive problem in the system as it stands in India:
the onus of bringing about change is upon the person who simply cannot be
expected to carry that cross, the victim. It’s the victim who must report the
crime, suffer the social stigma, relive the trauma repeatedly in court hearing
after court hearing; the victim has to wait, the victim has to appeal, the
victim has to push, the victim has to resist, the victim has to come forward
and change the way people think. It can’t work like this. The heavy lifting must
be done by allies, those who aren’t personally vulnerable but can campaign on
behalf of victims. And the only way to gather allies is through conversations,
like the ones #MeToo has amplified.

We’ve never had as many conversations about
women’s rights as we have had since 2012 and later #MeToo became rallying points.
There are those who will argue that these Twitter threads and Facebook
confessions and Instagram outpourings are frustrating in their hollowness – a
story trends, everyone clucks for a day or two, and then it’s forgotten or
replaced by a new point of outrage. They’re right. There’s an informality to
all this that is unnerving because nothing’s on record and everything is a
story.

Yet in this very same informality is a
strength – stories travel, from mouth to mouth, ear to ear, chipping away at
old conventions by slyly raising questions in a listener’s mind. They’re not
contained in archives, but they tend to linger in memory. If we’re going to
change the way people think, it’ll be through the stories we tell and the ones
we make sure are heard.

The one thing that the blade-like lines of
the #MeToo hashtag have done is cut through the silences surrounding women and
minorities in India. We’re done being quiet, and that is movement enough. For
now.  

“A super-bloom of horror”

Excerpts from this excellent essay by Rebecca Traister, in The Cut.

The image above is from artist Kruttika Susarla’s glorious The Feminist Alphabet.

What is the worth, exactly, of stories that are told mostly by women? To judge the worth, we have to be clear about the cost.

And of course, that’s how everything about the revelations of sexual harassment began: one woman’s story, flowering into a few other women’s (and also men’s) stories, eventually creating a super-bloom of horror.

Those who have spoken up about harassment are often referred to by critics and the men they accused as being part of a mob and even by their admirers as members of a kind of thrilling sisterhood. And some testifiers certainly did speak of the comforts (and obligations) of solidarity as well as how the choice of others to come forward compelled them to do the same.
But many others described isolation and loneliness. The treatment they’ve received — further abuse, insult, blame, guilt — has made some of them leery of human connection.

[Pollster Tresa] Undem has just completed new polling that backs up that hunch, finding that half (49 percent) of registered voters still say Kavanaugh’s confirmation led them to want to elect more women — a factor that just might be relevant moving into 2020.
These stories may be shaking the ground beneath our feet. Whether the powerful remember them or the details, lots of us have heard, read, and absorbed this particular body of civic literature.

Women’s speech has often been forward-looking, offered up to others who will come after, who will inhabit a world in which we hope women’s experiences, and women themselves, will be worth more. … The women and men who have told their stories are betting on that future and, in speaking up, have left a trace — of themselves, of their lived experience of a world in which power was distributed unequally, in which abuse and harassment were rampant and unchecked. Individually, they have almost uniformly been punished for it, have paid for it to one degree or another. But with their testimony, they have left their mark, an individual sacrifice offered up to a collective future, one in which we should all be worth more.

Excerpts from New York magazine’s series of 25 interviews with people who spoke up against sexual assault/ harassment.

Even when I would completely dissociate and begin crying on the stand, everyone would just sit in silence and watch and wait for me to gather and collect myself. It’s terrible to feel that and to have it answered by nothing, to just be asked more and more questions until you’re completely hollowed out. You can never say stop, you can never say enough, you can never say don’t put up naked photos of my body. … But as I was reading [the victim impact statement], I felt immense power, like everyone was trapped inside the sound of my voice and we were not going to go anywhere until I decided we were done. It was the only time I felt like I had any ounce of control.
~ Chanel Miller (sexually assaulted by Brock Turner in 2015, when she was 23. Turner faced up to 14 years in prison but was sentenced to six months in county jail. In court, she wasn’t allowed to read her whole statement. Later Buzzfeed carried the entire statement, which went viral.)

But if I were to go through the same thing again, I’d speak out again. I never regretted it. For me, the decision I made was always the right decision. In the beginning, I thought that as a migrant, as a Hispanic person, one didn’t have any rights. But after everything we went through, we shouldn’t keep this inside of ourselves, because no one has any right to humiliate or intimidate us for who we are.
~ Anonymous (worked at a Koch Foods plant in Morton, Mississippi, and was one of the plaintiffs in an EEOC case against the company, stating that supervisors openly groped and harassed female workers on a daily basis. One of the supervisors threatened migrant women with deportation.)

I associate my name in print with a fear of retaliation, with a loss of privacy, of losing any sense of agency over the way you might be perceived in the world by strangers or people you know.
… To come forward is expensive in a way I had no idea about and has cost more than double my financial resources. Nine times out of ten, it will involve legal entanglements that cost money. I’ve come to learn how expensive it is to get a photo pulled down or out of print. Therapy is expensive. All in all, we’re talking easily six figures, even with some pro bono representation, and I’m still paying it off. I have questioned whether I would do it over again. It’s also emotionally expensive. There is a literal tax on integrity.
~ Lauren O’Connor, a production executive at the Weinstein Company, wrote a memo indicting a “toxic environment for women” there. Another executive leaked it to the New York ‘Times’ in what became the first story to expose Harvey Weinstein.

I’d wanted to give the investigation a fair shake. That was one of my biggest flaws: believing in the system.
~ Paula Coughlin, along with others, was groped and wrestled to the floor by a group of officers at the Tailhook naval-aviation conference in Las Vegas in 1991.

I am the biggest of hypocrites. I work in a position where I am constantly trying to get people to tell their stories so we can make systemic change. But I’ve worked so hard to amass this small amount of power that I’m so terrified of that being taken away.
~ Anonymous

Candidates will not pick me out to work on their campaigns. People stop including you in things or stop asking you for strategic advice. It’s worth it, don’t get me wrong. But isolation is a really powerful tool.
~ Olivia Garrett says Alaska representative Dean Westlake groped her and made sexual comments to her while she was a legislative aide.

…he said, “Well, I’ve been reading all this stuff in the Globe, and I realize now that you’ve been right all along.” He wouldn’t believe his own son, but he believed the Boston Globe.
~ Phil Saviano, who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Father David Holley when Saviano was a boy.

I’m interested in why so many interviewers want to make me feel bad. Is it because they want to see a woman on television crying because of what a man did to her? Why can’t they just have a woman sitting there matter-of-factly telling her story without bursting into tears or without being sad, sad, sad? I have a theory that they just don’t want to see a woman telling her story in a non-feminine way.
~ E. Jean Carroll wrote that in the mid-1990s, Donald Trump attacked and penetrated her in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan.

I remember being so happy I had boys. I didn’t have any answers for girls. I didn’t have to tell them, “Don’t be particularly ambitious, because this is what it’s going to come down to.”
~ Kellie Boyle was professionally blackballed by Roger Ailes for refusing to “lay with the big boys”.

People always said, “At least you weren’t raped.” It was unimportant, you were unimportant.
~ Terry Karl says she was repeatedly harassed, forcibly kissed, and threatened by Harvard professor Jorge Domínguez in the early 1980s.

I was demoted when I took this case on. I was put in uniform and sent to work in the security environment as punishment. I had to work in a tower over the perimeter of buildings to prevent inmates from escaping, up through midnight. I couldn’t have a radio, anything that would obstruct me from observing the perimeters. One day, three men tried to escape, and I had to use every firearm in that tower.
On three occasions, my fellow officers were found dead. That’s something I was never trained for. It was a constant barrage of emotional and mental punishment. They put me in these positions so I would quit.
~ Sandra Bundy filed a sexual harassment suit in 1977 and eventually won, but not before being demoted to dangerous positions for which she had not been trained.

Section 375: Objection milord

An edited version of this was published in today’s Hindustan Times.

On the evening of May 9, a small crowd gathered at Dadar. Mostly made up of women, the group had staged the protest to show support for the woman who had accused the Chief Justice of India of sexual harassment. The protesters sang songs, chanted slogans and held up placards that read “#SupremeInjustice” (some of which were drawn up on the spot, using the bonnet of a police jeep as a desk). The police – men and women – were present, but they just watched. No one came forward, no one stepped back and after a couple of hours, everyone went home peacefully.

That’s the reality of how feminist protests pan out in Mumbai. (Not so in Delhi and Ahmedabad, where #SupremeInjustice protesters were detained for hours by the police.)

Then there’s the fantasy that director Ajay Bahl shown us in Section 375 – women screaming with rabid rage, people climbing over police barricades and general lawlessness being unleashed because by gods, the rapist shall pay for his sins (insert suitably irate roar here). All this is happening, we’re told, because the Indian public will not let a rich and influential man get away with rape. Pick up that dropped jaw. No one ever said Indian popular cinema is realistic.

In Section 375, a well-known film director, Rohan Khurana (Rahul Bhat), is accused of assaulting and raping a junior costume assistant, Anjali Dangle (Meera Chopra). After a sessions court finds Rohan guilty, his wife (Sree Swara) approaches the high-flying and perennially-smirking criminal defense lawyer, Tarun Saluja (Akshaye Khanna). Saluja has made a name for himself by defending the indefensible (though we shouldn’t judge him too harshly. He tells us that he charges the big bucks for such cases in order to pay for his pro bono work and of course, we believe him. Because hello, he’s played by Khanna and is obviously our hero.)

Tarun finds himself pitted against prosecutor Hiral Gandhi (Richa Chadha), who happens to be a protegée of Tarun’s and is now touted to be the “torchbearer of feminism”. Not that her performance in Anjali’s case betrays any of this brilliance. The torchbearer missed key discrepancies in the case, which Tarun shines a light on during the courtroom drama. Not just that, Hiral clearly doesn’t keep up with the news because otherwise when Tarun claims the juvenile convict in the Nirbhaya episode was the most brutal of the rapists, she should have pointed out that he’s quoting a rumour that the Juvenile Justice Board has refuted.

[image error]Akshaye Khanna in Section 375

Anyway, the point is Tarun is smooth and having done more homework than Hiral, he raises questions that neither Anjali nor Hiral can answer. In the courtroom, Anjali’s story becomes increasingly dubious as Tarun exposes how the police tried to extort bribes from Rohan and that Anjali deliberately hid the fact that some of the bruises on her face were due to her brother thrashing her when he learnt she’d been raped. However, all this is to no avail. With that belligerent and violently-feminist public determined to not give the accused the benefit of doubt, what chance does Tarun have of winning this case? You may now shed a single tear for Rohan. (Anjali does, literally.)

This vision of a man-hating public is not the only bit of fantasy in Section 375. The film would have you believe that the legal system operates in favour of women complainants and that allegations of sexual assault destroy the careers of the male accused. Section 375 also imagines that women can coolly take the stairs and sashay their way out after ramming their crotch into a railing repeatedly. Pain? What pain? We’re strong women. The only thing we feel is (out)rage.

While a psychiatrist could probably write a thesis on Bahl’s apparent fascination for sexually manipulative women – his first film, BA Pass, featured a bored housewife who first seduced the barely-of-legal-age hero and then became his pimp – there’s a lot to be said in favour of the alternative reality in which Section 375 is set. The immunity to pain would come in handy for all of us who suffer from cramps during menstruation, aside from the obvious benefit of making it infinitely easier to file complaints in case of molestation or assault. Ok, so the film does seem to suggest women are either idiotic or manipulative, but on the flip side, it also imagines a world in which being a woman is not a disadvantage; where those complaining of sexual assault are considered credible and men accused of sexual offences have to suffer consequences.

Contrast this with the reality of the Indian film industry. From director-producer Vikas Bahl to actor Alok Nath, director Subhash Kapoor, actor Dileep and lyricist Vairamuthu, the #MeToo accused in the Indian film industry are all cheerfully getting on with their lives with barely a hiccup. Bahl was accused of sexual assault and after the complainant said she was disinclined to pursue the case for fear of victimisation, it was announced that Bahl had been “cleared” of the charges. He was reinstated as director of Super 30, which released in July and is one of the highest grossing films of the year so far.

Earlier this week, actor Aamir Khan said he was returning to Kapoor’s film Mogul. Khan had stepped away from the project after Kapoor was accused of molestation by actress Geetika Tyagi, who not only has a video of him admitting this but she also filed a police complaint.

Writer-producer Vinta Nanda accused Nath of mixing her drinks to render her unconscious and then raping her. After Nanda filed a police complaint and the police registered a first information report (FIR), the case went to court. Nath was granted anticipatory bail by the court, which observed that Nanda “did not lodge the report immediately after the alleged incident for her own benefit” and that the “possibility cannot be ruled out that the applicant [Alok Nath] has been falsely accused in the crime”. Nath continues to act in films like De De Pyaar De.

Vairamuthu has been accused of molestation and sexual harassment by several women, including singer Chinmayi Sripaada. While Chinmayi’s work assignments have dried up, the lyricist is rumoured to have bagged the new Mani Ratnam film for which AR Rahman is doing the music.

After being accused of being involved in the abduction and sexual assault of a woman actor, Dileep was arrested in July 2017. He was in jail for 85 days and then granted bail. When he came out of the Aluva sub-jail, there was a sea of fans and crackers were burst in celebration. Dileep has been working regularly since his release. He is currently working on a project titled My Santa, reportedly a feel-good story.

So much for ‘cancelled’ careers and loss of popularity.

None of these cases are alluded to in Section 375. Instead, to give itself a gritty edge and a veneer of realism, the film references actual instances of public disorder. For instance, at one point, Tarun steps out of court and has ink flung on his face by a furious woman protester. It’s a reference to the Shiv Sena’s ink attack on Sudheendra Kulkarni, a long-time associate of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The scenes of people climbing over barricades is reminiscent of the 2012 Delhi protests that faced police action (water cannons, lathi charge and tear gas). In Section 375, one of the judges presiding over Rohan’s case sees the mayhem from a window and gets nervous. The implication is that the judges are intimidated by public fury. While the film shows a rabid crowd, it’s worth remembering that the Delhi protests were not made up furious women going on a rampage. They were largely peaceful with disruptions being caused by a small minority (of men) which led to the brutal and disproportionate police response.

THERE ARE SPOILERS AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

While the faceless, feminine crowd outside is crazed, inside the courtroom, it’s a contest between men and women. The men’s team has Rohan — a philandering husband and an exploitative colleague who nevertheless gets our sympathy because at least he comes out and speaks the truth (eventually) — and the dedicated lawyer, Tarun. Their opposition is made up of Anjali, whose allegations against Rohan are entirely fabricated and whose body and bruises — particularly those just below her crotch — the camera ogles at repeatedly; and Hiral, who comes across as a shoddy lawyer. While Tarun fields proper arguments, albeit laced with dubious claims like the one about the juvenile rapist mentioned earlier, Hiral is constantly out of her depth and at one point lies to the judges that she advised her client to be selective with facts. All she has in her arsenal are the bruises, specifically the ones on Anjali’s thighs.

You’d think that the “torchbearer of feminism” would take a moment to point out that a director preying upon a junior member of his film crew is a serious matter. You’d think that she’d point out the misogyny in Rohan’s treatment of Anjali as well as his depicting her as a possessive, irrational lover. But no. Tarun is the one who makes these observations and consequently, the script written by two men (Manish Gupta and Bahl) fulfils the stereotype of mansplaining and literally robs the women of their voices. This doesn’t exonerate Richa Chadha for her listless performance as Hiral since actors like Kishore Kadam and Dibyendu Bhattacharya enrich far smaller roles with their acting skills, but it’s ironic that an actor who is known for being feminist and proud ends up playing a part of an inert woman who is blinded by a pro-woman bias. While we get to see Tarun’s home, dilemmas and general awesomeness, of Hiral we know only that she has an unhappy personal life — god forbid a feminist be happy and in a relationship — and that her argument is limited to reminding the court that Anjali has bruised thighs.

While on the subject of bruises — a focal point in Section 375 — the film’s understanding of the human body is questionable, to say the least. For instance, we’re shown a picture of Rohan’s back, which is criss-crossed with scars that look like he’s been flogged. They’re supposed to be scratch marks, made by one woman. Leaving aside the question of how elastic her arms must be to comprehensively cover his entire back, if that’s the state of Rohan’s back, then he has grounds for charging Anjali with assault. We’re also shown how the bruises on Anjali’s thighs happened in a scene that’s entirely gratuitous since it’s the only time we’re allowed inside Anjali’s head. For all of Section 375, Anjali is seen through other people’s eyes and most of the film’s plot is seen from Tarun’s perspective. However, in the middle of the second half, there’s a brief interlude that shows how Anjali inflicted injuries on herself; injuries she would later attribute to Rohan being violent. She goes to the staircase of Rohan’s building and climbs on to the railing at a spot where the staircase curves. Then she slams her crotch into that corner of the railing repeatedly. Because apparently the pointy bit of a railing and an erect penis are pretty much interchangeable. It’s a horrifically violent scene, shot with voyeuristic glee.

It’s not as though Section 375 is a bad film. It’s just regressive. Put that aside, and you have a film that raises some valid issues, like police apathy and the exploitative power structures within work places like a film set where lines separating the personal and professional can get blurred. Until the intermission, Section 375 is almost nuanced despite its obvious sympathy for misunderstood men and contempt for strident women. The second half, however, is devoted to bemoaning the abject state of men who are reduced to victimhood by Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code. Section 375 is not a flawless law by a long shot, but this film’s disgruntlement is less about the law and more at women ‘benefiting’ from rape allegations while poor men suffer. Ok, so Rohan is a bit of a predator, but does he really deserve to lose his life and career over an ickle affair, the film asks while trying to make its version of patriarchal puppy-dog eyes at the audience.

The disappointment is not that Section 375 was made – directors and writers should be free to tell whatever story they wish, however odious or wonderful it may be – but that this is the dominant narrative in our gender conversations in India. It’s 2019, and our critics are still praising films that wear male bias on their sleeves, for being ‘balanced’. Our expectations from commercial cinema are so low that the film’s claim that it’s inspired by true events doesn’t lead to more interrogation. There’s also the minor detail that Section 375 draws upon the credibility and popularity that actors like Chadha and Sandhya Mridul have from being vociferous feminists off screen. This serves to obscure how the film leans in favour of the predatory male and comes across as a subtle con in itself. That these are the roles that feminists are given is almost as much of a shame as the way Section 375 adds credibility to the delusional anxiety that allegations by women can turn men into victims.  

Each night, put Kashmir in your dreams

I wrote this last week and since I haven’t been able to write a column this week — things have been a bit mad thanks to my mother giving Humpty Dumpty a run for his money — I thought I’ll put up the unedited version of the column today. Nothing has changed since this column was published. If anything, the news that has trickled out of Kashmir is becoming more and more horrifying with confirmed reports of children being detained and people alleging soldiers from the Indian Army have brutally beaten them. “They kicked us, beat us with sticks, gave us electric shocks, beat us with cables. They hit us on the back of the legs. When we fainted they gave us electric shocks to bring us back. When they hit us with sticks and we screamed, they sealed our mouth with mud,” a local told the BBC. With 19 lakh people excluded from the final list of the National Register of Citizens in Assam validly dominating the conversation — the state government is unhappy because this number includes Bengali Hindus and apparently isn’t high enough for Himanta Biswa Sarma — Kashmir isn’t as much of a talking point. We constantly hear whispers about how certain news events are orchestrated or released to the press to act as distractions. The idea of 19 lakh people being rendered stateless in order to “distract” the public’s attention from either Kashmir or the nightmare of India’s economy growing at its slowest pace in over six years is as perfect an example of dystopia as I can imagine.

Next week, it’ll be a month since the lockdown was imposed on Kashmir. Yesterday, there were articles like this one from PTI, which transitioned from “Restrictions have been lifted from most areas of the valley on Saturday morning, the officials said” to “However, normal life remained affected across the valley for the 27th consecutive day on Saturday” in a matter of five sentences. So here’s the column from last week, along with a few pictures of the heartbreakingly beautiful “Terrain” by Nilima Sheikh.

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It took three weeks for the news of fires in the Amazon rainforest to reach the rest of the world. You’d think thousands of fires burning through large tracts of the world’s biggest rainforest would be the topic of serious news programmes, but to some extent, the reason the Amazon fires made headlines was that South Korean boy band, BTS’s fan base made a noise about it. The band is currently on a break, but their fans — known as the “Army” — launched a hashtag campaign #ARMYHelpThePlanet last week, to raise awareness about the fires.

Thanks to the phenomenon that is BTS fandom, today if you search for “Amazon fires” online, you won’t see an image of a warehouse owned by Amazon the tech and e-commerce company.

Soon after the Amazon fires made it to the front pages of newspapers across the world, a friend wondered if there was a chance of getting BTS fans interested in the lockdown in Jammu and Kashmir. I advised against bringing the subject to their notice. Frankly, #ARMYStandWithKashmir doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

On August 25, Kashmir (and Jammu) will have been under lockdown for 20 days. Those who have come from the area say only a handful of phone and internet connections have been restored. There are terrifying and unconfirmed reports of children being picked up; of arrested people being sent to the mainland because the prisons in Kashmir are running out of space. Representatives of the Kashmiri people remain under detention, prominent Kashmiris have been barred from leaving the country (despite having invitations and/ or valid visas) and in many cases, it remains unclear under what legal provision they’re being detained. The Supreme Court normalised the current state of the newly-declared Union Territory when it refused to examine the constitutionality of the communication blackout in Kashmir. When the restrictions are lifted, who knows what stories will be remembered and which of them will be forgotten?

[image error]Detail from Terrain, by Nilima Sheikh.

Since August 5, I’ve been haunted by memories of artist Nilima Sheikh’s magical work titled Terrain. Terrain was an enclosure made of eight panels that were effectively embroidered with stories on both sides.

From the jewel-coloured brocade panels that were reminiscent of thangkas, to poetry and prose sampled from all over the world; the motifs that drew upon traditions of miniature art, Buddhist imagery and folklore; the stencilled prints and fine-lined drawings that created a shimmering tapestry of stories; and an intense engagement with history — this was Sheikh at her sophisticated best. Alongside the words and patterns were figures, like the heroine of the tragic love story who swam across the Chenab to meet her lover; the woman who stood, looking neither back nor ahead, carrying on her head a bundle that contained the outline of a village left behind. Mythical birds fluttered and soared. One-winged men lay on red earth and chinar trees held their ground. Unlike some earlier works, Terrain didn’t mention Kashmir in obvious terms, but it was a repository of stories about belonging, unbelonging, violence and upheaval that invited the viewer to remember the traumatic history of the region. It remembered a Kashmir that had survived as memory and was all the more poignant and resilient for this.

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(Details from Terrain)

Susan Sontag once wrote, “Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. … But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering … embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.” Much like the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, Sheikh’s Terrain offers memory as an act of resistance. These are embers of melancholy, glowing in myriad colours and urging you to each night, put Kashmir in your dreams. Because in reality, the ‘normalcy’ that has been imposed upon it is driven by a determination to forget the promises of the past as well as the hope for the future.

A tourist remembers

Last year, in October, a group of us did a little holiday in Kashmir. Everyone tells you that the mountains there are beautiful, but nothing prepares you for just how breathtaking the views are. I ended up taking 800 photos just on my phone and another few hundred on my camera.

I’ve been going through them since last night. On our last day, as we made our way to the mini-fortress that was Srinagar airport, we said to each other that we’re definitely coming back. Terror incidents had come down by some 86%-odd since the 1990s, flights weren’t being cancelled last minute, advisories against travel weren’t being issued by foreign countries — in short, it felt like a delicate equilibrium had been established in Kashmir. It hadn’t struck us that in less than a year, the state of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh would cease to exist in some senses.

According to The Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill, which was passed earlier today after Section 144 was imposed at 6am in J&K, the erstwhile state is now two Union territories. Ladakh is a UT (which they’ve been wanting for a while) without a legislature. J&K, like Delhi, is now a UT with a legislature. Article 370, which contained the special privileges that were the terms of J&K becoming part of India in 1947, was effectively revoked, which is possibly a death knell to Kashmir’s demands for autonomy. Now only the states covered by Article 371 — Gujarat, Maharashtra, Assam, Manipur, Andhra Pradesh, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Goa and Karnataka — have certain special powers and privileges (none of these are as far-reaching as what Kashmir was promised with Article 370, which it didn’t really get to enjoy in the first place thanks to militancy and the resulting presence of the Army). What exactly being a UT will mean for J&K, the Kashmiris will find out in coming months. First they have to find out that they’re no longer a state and they no longer have their own constitution (one of the provisions of Article 370).

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As of yesterday, there is neither phone nor internet connection in the region. At least two of its ex-chief ministers — Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti — are in detention because, as per the order issued by a Srinagar magistrate, their activities are “likely to cause breach of peace”. Right now, peace is presumably being maintained by the information blackout as well as tens of thousands of troops and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel who were sent to J&K last week after the Army and J&K police said that they suspected Pakistan was plotting a terrorist attack along Hindu pilgrimage routes (the Amarnath Yatra was closed down two weeks early and tourists as well as non-local students were pulled out of the region following these announcements).

The Home Minister said in Parliament that J&K would be restored its statehood as soon as things return to normal.

Most people who do the Amarnath Yatra begin at a spot near Pahalgam, which was one of the places we visited last year. It was very empty when we went since the window for the Amarnath Yatra had closed months ago. On our way, we’d briefly met a shepherd whose herd included a few lambs. One of us had cuddled the wobbly little creature and all of us, while cooing and aahing, had taken photos like we were paparazzi. The shepherd was very perplexed by our excitement and more than a little amused. He’s in one of the photos I took, along with my friend. The lamb looks a little confused too.

We actually walked along some of the paved path that the Amarnath pilgrims take. The mountains were craggy, with deep grooves and gashes lining its stony surface. We saw lambs and sheep on the next mountain, which was on the other side of a gurgling stream that had water that was clean and blue. At one point, we saw one vulture and then another swoop to a spot on the next mountain. They’re not precisely photogenic as birds go, but vultures are so incredibly graceful when they fly and when they land upon their chosen spot. Not a stumble or an awkward tilt to be seen. Five or six vultures showed up eventually. It was the zoom of my camera that revealed why: two horses had fallen on that slope.

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While we were walking on that path cut through the mountains, it started snowing and the hills were alive with the sound of grown, giggling women. It was magic. On the day we left Pahalgam, by chance we ended up meeting the young woman who had embroidered a shawl I’d bought the day before. Her name is Naseema and she was very patient with our many questions about how she comes up with the designs and general adoration. Her sister and father arranged a quick cheese tasting (the girls’ father works with Himalayan Cheese, which is founded by a Dutch gent who works with locals to make delicious artisan cheese). The girls’ father to tell us how to cook Kalari, a local cheese made by Gujjars in the area and described as “the mozzarella of Kashmir”. Place on a hot tawa, sprinkle a little salt, and the cheese softens inside while turning crisp on the outside. Delicious. I recommend sprinkling a little paprika along with the salt.

Before Pahalgam, though, we’d gone to Sonamarg where we saw the blue-green waters of the river Sindh and tasted delicious goshtaba at a little hotel run by a man whose home is in the Lolab Valley. He was a little flustered at one of us being vegetarian, but he gamely rustled up some vegetables. These mountains are nice enough, he told us with a grin, but his home is where the mountains really show off how gorgeous they can be. It’s just that you can’t go there, he said, because you know the border trouble and all that. He goes home for a few months, runs this restaurant during tourist season, and works in old Delhi (in a restaurant) during winter when Sonamarg shuts down. He also doesn’t want Kashmir to be a part of India, he’d told us, but he does want the highway that’s being built to connect Sonamarg to Jammu. Winter cuts Sonamarg off from everything and everyone. Locals are used to stocking up on food and supplies. It’s tough, but it’s really beautiful too, said one man who took us for a little walk around a village near Sonamarg. The owner of the hotel we were at urged us to come back in winter. Nunchai — the pink, savoury tea that is staple in these hills — in winter, by the river, is a different thing entirely, he said.

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He and his brother have made a hotel that is right next to the river and even though the water wasn’t anywhere close to full spate, its rushing sound filled the rooms day and night. Everything about the river — from the colour of its water, to how it leapt and curved, and the way it turned pebbles into shiny, subtle-hued glassels* — felt like it was a gift from the mountains. It is my talisman and when anything feels off-kilter, I close my eyes and remember that river. At any point when you look out of the window, the peaks are there. Even at night, when the sky doesn’t feel as dark because of the crushed glass of countless stars, you can see their outline. The day we arrived, the peak was dark and imposing. The next morning, it was white and even though it didn’t snow where we were, just the sight of that bright whiteness made all of us feel fluttery and happy.

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While there’s greenery lower down, these peaks we saw when we went a little higher than Sonamarg are the colour of hardened earth and weathered granite. You know how romance novels keep describing heroes as “rugged” or having “craggy” faces? It wasn’t until I saw these peaks that I got what those clichés are trying to convey. Now that I have seen those mountains, I get it. Snow softens them, hiding their sharp, angular slants and crevices under its white cover. Still, the mountains here are jagged, forbidding and impossibly charismatic. They’re both inviting and daunting. Not that I would ever have the application to do such things, but I understand why mountain people take it upon themselves to scale peaks. How can you not want to be closer to their immense beauty? There was one moment when we were in the car and we had to pay a toll. The guy at the toll calmly haggled with our driver for change, waited with a bland expression as we scrounged the money for the toll, and then, just as he gave the ticket, he said something in Kashmiri that we didn’t understand but we could tell from the way he tilted his head that he was referring to something behind us. We turned around and it was like time stopped. A Himalayan peak, dark as shadow but with snow-bright streaks, a fringe of coniferous trees and a sky so thickly blue that it could be painted. It rose so high, so proud. All of us gasped and the toll guy laughed delightedly. He mimicked the sounds of awe that we didn’t even realise were coming out of us. This, clearly, was what made his otherwise lonely day — seeing how outsiders react to the beauty that they’d probably miss if he didn’t suggest they turn around.

One of the days that we were in the Sonamarg area, we decided to do walk up to the base of the Thajiwas glacier. I’m not sure if you’re allowed to go up to the glacier itself anymore. You certainly can’t take cars there, which is a good thing. Till the base, horses are an option, but none of us were comfortable with the idea of putting any animal through that ordeal. So we walked. It was slow going not just because I’m unfit but because the scenery was beyond anything I could have imagined. The skies changed, the light shifted, and through it all these mountains stood — resolute, magnificent, immovable.

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We sang songs from The Sound of Music while walking around. We got lost as we tried to return to the main road and then followed a horse that went through a hole in the fence, and found ourselves back on track. I remember looking around and feeling incredibly safe because of the way the mountains encircled us. I felt safer here than on the highways and in Srinagar, where tanks and armed soldiers appear after every few blinks of one’s eye. I remember thinking what a blessing it would be to call this home and to know that here, surrounded by these mountains, is where you belong. It struck me there that maybe this was the feeling that artist Nilima Sheikh was trying to capture with the 16 painted scrolls of Terrain: Carrying Across, Leaving Behind. It’s one of my most favourite works of art ever because the work is so intricate and layered, literally and figuratively. When it was shown at Chemould Prescott Road, the scrolls were arranged in an almost circle that you could enter. Outside, you walked around it, like it was a sacred object; reading and tracing visual connections between the motifs and poetry that spoke of loss, memory, violence, survival. Inside, you would be surrounded by the words and images painted on the scrolls. That idea that being encircled is to be safe, rather than cornered, is a precious one.

It’s impossible to not notice the signs of occupation, particularly in Srinagar. Yet locals still laughed and made brutally funny jokes that you didn’t know if you should laugh at as an outsider. Everyone we met was generous with their time and help. We walked around (and ate. so. much.) while we were in Srinagar. We bought things that we definitely didn’t need (I still have two packets of saffron, allegedly plucked near Pulwama). We stood under chinar trees and looked up, and said little prayers. We got conned a little (a lot? Who knows?) and we marvelled at how ridiculously good-looking everyone was. We stood out — women, from different parts of India; big-eyed, full of questions and loud laughter; inclined to say things like “shoot” instead of “click” and then cringe visibly — and despite everything, we felt welcome.

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We went at a time when there wasn’t much sunshine in Srinagar, but there was calm. Despite the bleak weather, Srinagar remains in my memory as a city of colour — dark wood, brightly-painted walls, the turning leaves of the chinar that stands so impossibly tall, the blue flash of a kingfisher taking flight, gleaming windows, jewel-toned flowers, sparkling water and skies that would suddenly flare up at unexpected moments, blasting colour past grey clouds.

There was one day when I decided to stay at the hotel instead of going out for a walk with some of the others. I regret that now. No one knew then that the city and the state was at a cusp. The old Kashmir was long gone and for all the nostalgia that one might feel, people seemed to know that and had accepted it. Of the past, there were only shards while the future was uncertain, the present had established a tentative new normal. Things follow a well-established pattern here, said one shop assistant to us. The city had vivid memories of disruption. There were streets lined with derelict houses that made sure even if you didn’t have personal memories of those times, you would not forget what had happened. Yet it also had also found its own rhythms and stability despite orders being imposed and freedoms being restricted. Mobile phone services being suspended was a regular occurrence so you rely on landlines and broadband. Though Srinagar looked like little had changed in the past couple of decades, there were kids playing Jenga and using Snapchat in the pretty café that we stopped at for a snack. Alongside this was the one point everyone told us — make sure you don’t arrive in the city on a Friday because during the day, downtown Srinagar becomes the site of protests. But do catch a sunset on the Dal lake and yes, hire a shikara; let that poor man earn a little.

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When I think of our Kashmir trip now, I remember the chatter. Between ourselves as well as those of the locals we met who were mostly from the hospitality sector. Mostly, we spoke to men, but the few women were always full of stories. The women seemed to always have something to do, something that they were setting aside to talk to us. The men, on the other hand, seemed to be looking for things to do. A man whose business had failed had twinkly-eyes and an edge of desperation to him even while he regaled us with stories. The driver who had taken us around Srinagar and seemed to constantly be setting up car rentals with cousins, invited us to his home. We met his wife, his sister and his parents. His sister told us about her studies and her plans to get a good job. We asked about the beautifully-patterned silver crockery in the kitchen and they offered to bring it down for us to see properly. Our conversations were a little awkward, all of us stumbling over words to make sure the other person understands. I wish I’d written more of those stories down. Everyone had opinions and anecdotes and advice and questions. Even the silences were filled with words — like when our car drove past graffiti that demanded freedom for Kashmir. None of us said anything, but unspoken words filled the car. I remembered what an Iranian protestor had written in 2009, on a forum that is now forgotten — “You can call it ‘Freedom Square’ but Azadi sounds different. Freedom sounds wide, like you’re holding your arms open. Azadi feels like you’re raising your first to the sky.” (I paraphrase.) In one page of my Kashmir notebook, I have this line, complete with the double quotes: “The point is not when it will end, but how many will be failed and how much trust will be broken in the process of reaching that end.” For the life of me, I can’t remember who said it or where I heard it.

Going through these old pictures, I’ve realised I’ve forgotten so much. There are a lot of things that I remember only in fragments, like the smell of walking into an apple orchard while on the way to Pahalgam. I don’t remember what conversation we had with the workers we saw there. I can’t remember where I was when the teenaged boy came up and quoted lines from James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” to me. I just remember rolling my eyes and him valiantly trying out the lines in English that he had polished to something close to fluency. It wasn’t adorable, but neither was it threatening. It was just silly. It wasn’t as though there wasn’t a sense of dread. After all, there are tanks and armed soldiers everywhere, but we didn’t feel unsafe and neither did we face any hostility from locals. If anything, everyday menace targeted others who we considered locals, like when one driver who was ferrying us around was asked where he’s from in Kashmiri. Non-Kashmiris are only welcome as tourists, I’ve written in my notebook, adding that we have felt no hostility as outsiders.

I wish I’d written down more, asked more questions, listened harder, and remembered better.

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Back-burner

I have a post in the Draft folder titled “Wednesday, July 24, 2019”. That’s the day that the lower house of the Indian Parliament, the Lok Sabha, passed the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act Amendment Bill. Among the amendments proposed by this government is the provision to declare an individual a terrorist without giving the accused a hearing. Their properties may be seized and it seems as though the onus is on the accused to clear their name since individuals don’t need to have cases filed against them or arrests to be tagged terrorists. Also, there is no clarity on what is the standard of proof required to clear one’s name of the charge. The new bill also gives more autonomy to the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which now has the authority to carry out investigations and conduct raids without permission from the police (law and order is usually under the state government unless it’s a Union territory). All this led to some concerns about how the new UAPA could be used as a political weapon by the ruling dispensation. However, the Home Minister of the country assured the Parliament that the new UAPA will not be misused. Phew. Perhaps that is why not all newspapers figured the amended law was lead-worthy.

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A day or so before this amendment bill was passed, the Right to Information Act was amended to bring the chief information commissioner (CIC) and information commissioners (ICs) under the Centre. According to the amended RTI Act, the CICs and IC no longer have fixed tenures and their term of office will be decided by the Centre, which will also decide their salaries, allowances etc.

A week later, I have no idea why I thought any of this was worth noting down.

Modus Operandi: Making space for inspiration

An edited version of this was published in the Mumbai edition of Hindustan Times.

From a distance, the corner of the gallery that artist Mithu Sen has claimed as her own seems inviting. There’s a strip of pink running from ceiling to floor. A lamp hangs low, throwing light on a simple table that seems to have pink photo frames on it. Once you come closer, the work (titled “Permanent Past”) threatens to rejig your understanding of pink. Because this is not the colour of baby girls’ dresses, but a fleshy, gummy pink that’s shining as though slick with saliva. And then there are the teeth sticking out of that surface. As if that wasn’t creepy enough, you’ll find that between some of the awkwardly-embedded teeth are tiny human figures. Behind these modified photo frames are a set of tools and glass jars that contain powders as well as (presumably false) teeth. “Permanent Past” looks like you’ve entered the workspace of a demented tooth fairy rather than an artist, and this is a compliment. It’s not every day that an art work can fascinate and horrify you in equal measure.   

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Sen is one of the 20 artists who have taken over Chemould Prescott Road for an exhibition titled, Modus Operandi II; In-situ: An Artist’s Studio. The idea behind it is to allow viewers a glimpse of the processes that bring an art work to life. Some of the participating artists show you the books they’ve read and the objects that have inspired them. Others show you their tools. Some just show you their work, which make evident what ideas have driven the artists to make this particular work. Since the artists talk about their process either through the installation of the work or in the wall text, every work reveals something about how it was made.

Take, for example, the text explaining Kallat’s “Sighting – Gen – Mangifera – D17M6Y2018”: “The colour of the fruit as retinally perceive is its subtractive colour, after the surface has absorbed every other visible wavelength of light other than the colour that it reflects back to our retina. The lenticular reverses this hallucinatory experience through which we experience the world by making visible its very opposite…For Kallat, the fruit becomes a small doorway to deliberate upon its very energy, as an incarnation of this vital stellar power temporarily posing as a fruit, contemplating the macro as manifesting within the micro.”  

Lose the knotty polysyllables and translate to regular English, and you realise that the mango skin that you’ve always known to be a speckled orange contains multitudes. That’s what this lenticular print reveals as it shifts from the familiar orange to a cosmic blue.

Anant Joshi’s untitled installation may not reveal much about the process, but Joshi’s interest in how newspapers report stories is unmistakable since one part of the work is a collage of images taken from newspapers.

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The black and white photographs have their share of smiling people, but there’s little good cheer in them. They’re representations of broken systems and despair that has become mundane. Not even the little square from a daily comic – most of them are frames from Calvin and Hobbes strips – lift the mood. If anything, they emphasise the grimness of this visual landscape. The collage is a background for a set of pigeonholes in which Joshi has placed 24 bronze sculptures. From the front, they look like plants or a melting candle or (if you’re feeling a fondness for Freud) misshapen phalluses. Look behind and each of these macabre faux toys has a wind-up key. There’s something particularly chilling about glimpsing the human faces through a grid of disfigured forms.  

Kulkarni’s space, on the other hand, has her tools, sketchbooks as well as bric-a-brac. It feels like a compact version of an actual studio.

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On the tabletops and walls are her powerful watercolours and sketches, celebrating the feminine body and attacking social conventions – like crossing one’s legs when seated – that seek to attach shame to feminine sexuality. The sketchbook is open to a page that shows an early sketch of what would end up being one of the fantastic sculptural installations that Kulkarni made Of Bodies, Armour and Cages (if you haven’t seen these, please Google right away). Below the art lie the tools of her trade, including a pot of Fevicol and a cheerful, plastic figurine of a little hula girl that offers a pointed contrast to the bodies in Kulkarni’s art.

Another generously open artist is Reena Saini Kallat, whose “Siamese Trees” are on display along with a desk piled with the wires and tools used to make these sculptures. Also on the desk are her sketches of the works and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (an excellent book. Highly recommended if you haven’t read it).

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“Siamese Trees” is a series that I find both beautiful and uncomfortable at the same time. These sculptures look like human lungs and they’re also inverted trees, made of wires. Each tree is a hybrid of the national trees of two countries that share a border. Thailand’s ratchaphreuk and Cambodia’s palm come together to create the Rach-yra Palm. The American oak and Mexican cypress form the Cy-oak together. India’s banyan and Bangladesh’s mango make the Man-yan. North Korea’s pine fuses with South Korea’s hibiscus to create the Pine-iscus. The craft that has gone into making these pieces – the balance of colour, the use of the wire and the illusions of different kinds of texture – is magnificent. But there’s something inherently disturbing about plastic standing in for trees and lungs. Reena has used wires before, emphasising how they are devices used to separate as well as connect. In case of Siamese Trees, the wires are subtle reminders that trees do have their own way of communicating with one another through a underground network. But to me, it’s also a bit depressing that this vision of unity between countries in conflict is only possible as a plastic, artificial figment of the imagination.   

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Atul Dodiya brings part of a shelf from his studio into the gallery, complete with books and kitschy sculptures (including a bust of Dr BR Ambedkar in a pink suit). Below this is a grid made up of his watercolours and framed stills showing villains and victims from old Bollywood films. The paintings are a study in vulnerability and body language. For example, the abject woman desperately holding on to the sari that a villain is pulling off her becomes a heroine in a balletic pose in Dodiya’s watercolour, which focuses on the lines of her form and removes details like the villain, the room and even the sari. 

Gattani’s abstract drawings are hung in a group, turning the wall into a collection of windows that look out onto a hazy cityscape. They’re actually meant to be non-representational studies inspired by stillness, but especially if you’ve been on the Bandra-Worli sea link on a cloudy, hazy day, it’s impossible to not think of our smothered city as you gaze upon Gattani’s drawings. Below the drawings are the tools that she uses to make these delicate works along with curled shavings of paper. Because that’s how these structures reveal themselves to Gattani – through the process of subtracting the paper using a surgical knife.

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As you wander around the hive of studios that Chemould Prescott Road has been transformed into for this exhibition, you may start seeing connections between works and artists. It’s like catching glimpses of the otherwise invisible threads of a spider’s web in sunlight. For instance, isn’t it odd that Jitish made a lenticular print of the mango while Reena used the mango tree for one of her Siamese Trees? Then there’s the visual resonance between the precise lines of Gattani’s abstract drawings and Tanujaa Rane’s almost-impossibly fine etchings. Seen individually, the pieces that make up one of Rane’s works would probably seem non-representational, but they come together like a sophisticated but simple jigsaw puzzle. You can’t help but remember the denture in Archana Hande’s installation when you see the teeth bared in Mithu Sen’s “Permanent Past”. Anju Dodiya and Varunika Saraf both share mood boards with viewers. The two boards are very different, but both artists are clearly fascinated by textures, fabric, different traditions of classical art and femininity. The found objects in Ritesh Meshram’s corner resonate with the objects that Bijoy Jain’s Studio has chosen to exhibit. All these objects urge the viewer to think of utility, construction and the artistic potential lurking within the functional and the mundane.    

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(Left to right: Three exhibits from Bijoy Jain’s Studio; detail from Anju Dodiya’s mood board; detail from Anju Dodiya’s mood board; coral from Aditi Singh’s display; Aditi Singh’s display; detail from Varunika Saraf’s mood board; detail from Varunika Saraf’s mood board; pigments used in Varunika Saraf’s paintings; detail from “Thought Mala” by NS Harsha; detail from NS Harsha’s display; detail from Archana Hande’s display; tools of Lavanya Mani’s dyeing trade; detail from Tanujaa Rane’s display.)

Even if you’ve never heard of Aditi Singh, Anju or Atul Dodiya, Jitish Kallat, NS Harsha, Reena Saini Kallat, Shakuntala Kulkarni or Sheetal Gattani, Modus Operandi is a delight. With elements on display like a delicate fan of dried coral, pigments used to make a particular shade of colour, perfectly-made miniature bricks, a string of tiny heads and a newspaper clipping that asks if actor Biswajeet was a “master impregnator”, inspiration is revealed to a fabulous, varied business.

In a city of cramped homes and limited spaces, where we’ve made our peace with being uncomfortable, Modus Operandi is a reminder that while it may be ideal to have a room of one’s own, sometimes, just 1/20th of a gallery is enough to set your imagination free.