ON PRECARITY: A SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS
Chintan Modi, Ranjana Dave, Thulile Gamedze
11 October 2019 at 10:50
Ranjana Dave <gati.ranjana@gmail.com>
To: Chintan Modi chintan.prajnya@gmail.com>, Thulile Gamedze <thulile.gamedze@outlook.com>
Dear Chintan, dear Thuli,
I am not going to spend much time introducing myself or saying hello before we begin this conversation, as I feel this conversation has the potential to do that by itself. In its construction, working towards this year's programme for a university symposium and Indent has opened up new worlds for me. A month ago I spoke to Sheetal Sathe, a singer and activist whose critique of state attitudes and the class divide casts her in an uneasy relationship with the state. Sheetal and her partner, Sachin Mali, were part of a group called the Kabir Kala Manch, a cultural initiative they had been associated with since their college days. In 2011, Maharashtra's anti-terrorism squad booked the group under a draconian law called the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act for their alleged links to Naxalites, forcing them to go underground. In 2013, Mali and Sathe, now pregnant with her first child, arrived at Mantralaya, the home of the Maharashra State Assembly, in Mumbai, to court arrest. While Sathe was granted bail on humanitarian grounds due to her pregnancy, Mali was in prison for nearly four years. Even now, to travel outside the state of Maharashtra, Mali must seek the court's permission.
Sathe, Mali, and their new group are coming to the university symposium to perform. In our conversations, she makes light and nonchalant references to court dates. I can hear my naivete speaking as I say this, but there is something chilling about how normalised this seems, a life measured in court dates.
This brings to mind a series of questions from the framework for the symposium we are organising at the university for this edition.
What, then, are the ‘riks’ we take as artists? What do we put at stake? Our bodies? Our ideas? Our reputations? Our integrity? Our livelihoods? How and why do we put things at stake? What are the recalibrations of thought, practice, hierarchy and socio-political order that we effect to make space for this taking of risks? Is precarity the new normal?
[By way of explanation: When Bombay Hinglish encounters the word ‘risk’, it nudges consonants about with a colloquial sweep of the arm, producing the word ‘riks’. Riks lena, to take risks, is an earnest acceptance of precarity. It is a willingness to acknowledge and perform actions whose outcomes are uncertain or unknown. Riks lena gives an action conceivable form— and in doing so, renders it significant.]
Ranjana.
14 October 2019 at 10:27
Chintan Modi <chintan.prajnya@gmail.com>
To: Ranjana Dave <gati.ranjana@gmail.com>
Cc: Thulile Gamedze <thulile.gamedze@outlook.com>
Dear Ranjana (Hello Thuli!),
Thank you for including me in this conversation. I enjoyed watching the video you sent us of Sheetal Sathe and her mother.
I was struck by what Sheetal said about the duplicity of people who advocate for women's liberation but are unwilling to see it manifest within their own family or community. I think that this can be said of various groups, collectives, movements and political parties that identify as progressive but are reluctant to address gender inequality within their own organizational structures. When the question of gender is addressed, the lens adopted is often binary. They end up speaking only of women and men. Other gender identities are absent from the conversation. I read a book titled No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy earlier this year, and my column featuring that book might be of interest to you: https://www.firstpost.com/living/no-outlaws-in-the-gender-galaxy-revisiting-zubaans-2015-book-and-what-it-illuminates-of-queer-identities-7361921.html
I haven't watched Anand Patwardhan's film on the Kabir Kala Manch but, as far as the video excerpt you shared is concerned, Sheetal's work makes me think about how the state feels threatened by art that is explicitly political and encourages people to challenge or even dismantle oppressive systems. My understanding of caste based discrimination is limited because of my own privilege but I am keen to learn how this particular form of structural violence has an impact on mental health. There is another reason behind this interest. I have been exploring Buddhist teachings and practice for a while, and I am interested in listening to stories of people who have found it empowering to embrace Buddhism for political reasons.
Dwelling on your questions about 'riks', I think Sheetal puts a lot more at stake than artists whose work circulates in and through galleries, magazines and performance spaces that are enabled by capitalism and class networks. Her art is deeply intertwined with civil resistance. It does not do the bidding of the powers that be. She does put her life on the line. I cannot even imagine what it feels like to go underground, and be on the run. Why should it be so difficult for an artist to make art, share it, and claim for her community the dignity it deserves just like all human beings do?
When you asked about whether artists put their reputations at stake, I am not so sure. Now I am not speaking about Sheetal Sathe but about various artists who were named as sexual predators by the #MeToo movement but have bounced back with new projects as if nothing ever happened. I do not mean to diminish the personal agony they might have gone through or the steps that they might have taken to repent for their conduct. I am thinking about whether this bouncing back is to be read as impunity for misogyny or as the gift of a second chance. What does reputation mean, and what does it mean to lose it? Is it the same when the market value of a perpetrator's painting goes down, and when a survivor who has spoken up is considered dangerous and therefore unemployable? Is it okay to call someone a survivor when they clearly identify as a victim of patriarchy because our political vocabulary has matured in a way wherein victimhood must be refashioned into agency without allowing it to grieve for as long as it wants to?
These are the thoughts that came to my mind. I would love to hear from both of you.
Chintan
18 October 2019 at 14:26
Thulile Gamedze <thulile.gamedze@outlook.com>
To: Chintan Modi <chintan.prajnya@gmail.com>, Ranjana Dave <gati.ranjana@gmail.com>
Hello Ranjana, Chintan,
Thank you for all of these strands and questions and ideas. I really like this introduction through a question around art and ‘riks’, and I feel this thing is a kinda endlessly cycling enquiry for many of us, who are situated in a strange universe where our practices function both as our ‘politics’ and our ‘career’ - often an irresolvably awkward contradiction… Sheetal Sathe’s forced negotiation with the law really highlights the ugly mechanisms circling around politicised art practices. In my mind, these mechanisms seem to choose either to absorb and aestheticise these practices into something that can be sold in some way, by and to ‘the industry’, or to reject and criminalise them - but either way, the work of ‘the institution’/ state/ industry seems to be in the appropriation of meaning.
In a different context, I suppose we have seen some of this kind of mechanics at play over the last few years in South Africa - most obviously through student movements calling for the decolonisation of the university. On the one hand, we’ve experienced a global fixation with this idea of “RhodesMustfall” (https://jwtc.org.za/the_salon/volume_9.htm), generating conferencing, journals, books, international study opportunities - and thus, an institutional legitimising of politics that once got many of us into trouble, but on the other hand, we have a couple of student protestors who remain in jail, such as Kanya Cekeshe (for damaging public property) and a number who have been rejected/ expelled from the university system, on account of their protest activity.
I was at a conference earlier this year - decolonising this or that - and they had invited the various universities’ Vice Chancellors to engage with decolonisation (one in particular, from WITS, who had been responsible for hordes of policing and private security on campus during protests, students being shot with rubber bullets, teargassed, etc). Of course, the scenario is ridiculous, where these VC’s are becoming the champions of ‘decolonisation’, writing books, and embracing a kind of intellectual celebrity - precisely because this form of engagement causes no friction with pre-existing university/ colonial mechanisms… In terms of the students, there is a similar story. Many of us who didn’t land up in trouble with the law have encountered opportunities to write, speak in panels, give talks, get scholarships, all around this professionalising of decolonial discourse - strange-seeming ‘rewards’ for action that began as refusal, trouble, risk…
I suppose then that the question of risk is always bound in time, in these perpetual escape-attempts from coloniality, whose first impulse is to criminalise anything subversive, until such a time that it is ready to name, categorise, and appropriate the subversion into its web, demobilising its original possibility, and at the same time, appearing to be ‘radical’. It is a terrifying process, and I suppose then the impulse we have to put forth solutions, or to repeat the same forms of resistance can become futile - I’ve been interested in fugitivity as a strategy… remaining unfixed, being available to shifting approaches, and being willing to abandon ideas, as their potential narrows over time, and the spirit of improvisation - maybe some form of guerilla-ness - gets lost. Queer approaches - of refusal of the binary and the impulse towards category, of embodying the unnameable, of chosen family, of fluidity and changeability - are central body-knowledges for me, that seem always to offer space to this kind of open creative labour. I really enjoyed your text Chintan - kinda away from the unending pressure of ‘representation’, and towards (non)structures of identity, that assume nothing about people, except the truths they speak of themselves - and am so interested to check out Zubaan’s book..
It feels important to land in a conversation that begins with the precarity of bodies that (who) are acting to produce some form of liberation, and are simultaneously encountering the mechanisms they attempt to resist. The question of mental health, I think, has always been at the centre of these enquiries/ this work. I know that myself, and many of my friends suffered some serious breakdowns in different forms 'after' the work of 2015 RhodesMustFall in Cape Town. These experiences, in some cases (like mine) were experiences through very privileged lenses (experiencing minimal friction with normative gender, and being middle class), where access to care, and being able to take time off were possibilities, whilst others’, predominantly queer Black (of colour) women had to negotiate their trauma, layered with the violence of a heavily gendered healthcare system, and less access to resources like money and time.
It was of course not by chance that those most traumatised by the activist space were gendered people, in large part queer women, and most prominently, trans people (https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/western-cape/trans-collective-trashes-rmf-exhibition-1996847). These internal critiques surfaced in many forms, over time, highlighting what Chintan was thinking through in some way - what does it mean to put oneself at risk against a system/ state/ institution, when the community in which the mobilisation takes place poses a simultaneous risk to the body? There is a lot here that I’m still thinking on, particularly when it is often the (men) heroes of a movement, who end up being exposed in MeToo-like scenarios.
The question of ‘art as riks’ (maybe?) is such an unending one, but I am really appreciating the space this conversation gives us to imagine contexts and spaces through which we can engage it… Once again, thank you so much for this sharing.
More soon, and my very warmest,
Thuli
20 October 2019 at 19:54
Chintan Modi <chintan.prajnya@gmail.com>
To: Thulile Gamedze <thulile.gamedze@outlook.com>
Cc: Ranjana Dave <gati.ranjana@gmail.com>
Dear Thuli
Reading your email made me feel a sense of kinship that I am grateful for. Something from your first essay really stayed with me -- "the general tendency or trend of colonial education is: the higher one climbs up the ladder, the greater the distance between the climber and those holding up the ladder. The more receipts (often referred to as degrees) one receives from universities - the more ‘qualified' one becomes, the greater the degree of alienation from one's people. This alienation takes many forms: where we live, how we live, how we speak, what we say when we do speak, how we think, and, perhaps most importantly for us, what we think, speak and write about."
I have been wrestling with the idea of pursuing a doctoral degree in the United States, and some of my hesitation has to do with this fear of alienating myself from who I am and where I come from. I know that I could 'fit into' the academic-industrial complex if I tried hard enough but I am not sure if that is a life worth leading. I have begun to notice that the American dream is intertwined with whiteness and Christianity -- both of which have been central to colonization. Anti-blackness is part of that dream. I would have dismissed this very idea if someone else had suggested it to me even two years ago but I have begun to see how my appreciation of F.R.I.E.N.D.S and Sex And The City, exemplars of American popular culture, has been unmindful of the racism encoded in those shows. It is astonishing to realize how brown people like myself and others do not 'get' this at first sight.
In connection with this, I want to share my interview with an American man of Afghan heritage who identifies as gay and ex-Muslim. His name is Nemat Sadat, and he has written a novel called The Carpet Weaver. I had asked him: "As the discourse around queer rights expands around the world, would you say that there is a danger of American queer history occupying centrality in a way that erases global and local queer histories? Are foreign consulates and multinational corporations shaping queer politics in ways that are culturally uninformed, promoting homogenity in the name of solidarity, and also weakening community spaces and networks by pumping in money?" His response was long and interesting. I would encourage you to read it here: http://gendersecurity.redelephantfoundation.org/2019/09/looking-for-queer-love-in-racist-america.html
He is critical of racism in the US, and of homophobia in Islam. Since you speak of 'fugitivity as strategy' and the 'inevitable salon of Western knowledge structures', I would love to hear your thoughts on what Sadat has to say. In speaking from his lived reality, would you say that he has internalized Western knowledge structures? Is it possible for these structures to use his critique against his own people in the context of where American-Afghan relations stand at the moment? I am also keen on sharing my interview with Dr. Ketki Ranade, an academic in Mumbai who taught me earlier this year on a course called Queer Affirmative Counselling Practice. They are interested in questioning Western psychological models of gay, lesbian and bisexual identity development https://prajnyaforpeace.wordpress.com/2019/06/20/coming-out-in-india-questioning-western-psychological-models-of-gay-lesbian-and-bisexual-identity-development-with-dr-ketki-ranade This decolonizing of knowledge is the kind of queer labour that often goes unacknowledged when corporate-owned media outlets reduce the queer rights movement to a spectacle of colourful photographs from pride marches.
How do some of these concerns and questions play out in your context? What do people think about using 'Western' vocabulary to describe queer identities and struggles, about using 'Western' funding for such projects, and about the practice of stating preferred pronouns? I have never been to South Africa, and I am delighted that I have the opportunity to learn from you through these exchanges.
Thank you for this, Ranjana. It would be great to hear from you as well.
Good wishes to both of you!
Chintan
25 October 2019 at 08:11
Ranjana Dave <gati.ranjana@gmail.com>
To: Chintan Modi <chintan.prajnya@gmail.com>
Cc: Thulile Gamedze <thulile.gamedze@outlook.com>
Dear Chintan and Thuli,
I'd like to apologise for the time it's taken me to respond. But I also notice that the anxiety I have never felt around letters manifests itself in emails, where an unread email is constantly reminding me of things to do. As deadlines loom around, I find myself rather captivated by the temporality of the long letter. Sometimes, I have begun a letter in one year and ended it in another. So I deeply appreciate this exchange. Thank you both for all the ideas you bring into it.
Thank you, Thuli, for speaking of the precarity of bodies that are acting to produce some form of liberation. The image that this statement conjures up is that of student activists during a hunger strike at JNU, my alma mater. Hunger strikes used to be set up in the corridors of the main administrative building. I imagine this was built in the 70s or 80s, a model of 'sarkari' (bureaucratic) design. Its contours are cold and uninviting, reminding you that they'd rather not have you visit. During a hunger strike, this corridor running along the length of the building is inhabited by student activists. They come with bedding, water carafes, and a few changes of clothes. The casual intimacy of this scene reinforces itself when I see the checked covers of mattresses peeking out from under dishevelled sheets. Sometimes, the administration would attempt to push students to end the protest by blocking easy access to bathrooms, forcing students who had spent days living on water to walk a longer distance to go to the loo. It still astonishes me to think that someone inside that cold and uninviting building thought they could quash resistance by denying people the right to use a bathroom.
But in some way, human needs become performative actions in spaces of resistance. I know that my privilege (in some spaces) allows me to distance myself from the primacy of human need, from having to worry about these needs being met. It is important to me, however, to recall this 'need' in spaces of resistance, to acknowledge the intimacy and the frailty of these situations, to remember that we are sentient beings, and also finite beings.
Are we allowed to be weary of precarity?
Warmly,
Ranjana
2 November 2019 at 00:57
Chintan Modi <chintan.prajnya@gmail.com>
To: Thulile Gamedze <thulile.gamedze@outlook.com>
Cc: Ranjana Dave <gati.ranjana@gmail.com>
Hello Ranjana (and Thuli),
Are we allowed to be weary of precarity? Yes, and No. I think the answer might depend on two questions that follow from the original one. Who are we seeking permission from? Why are we seeking permission to be weary? I ask these questions because they take us to the heart of self-care practices that I hear people speak of in academic, activist and artistic spaces. It seems like there is tremendous exhaustion from having fought, and having to fight. Is this coming from a resistance to capitalism, patriarchy, nationalism, heteronormativity, racism, and their assorted cousins? Is it rooted in a lack of connection that we feel in relation to our bodies and to nature? I think these questions need our attention, as individuals and as beings who participate in groups and communities.
Your invoking the right to use a bathroom takes us back to queer and trans struggles, which we talked about earlier in this email exchange. It amazes me that some people would try to withhold this basic right from other people just because they do not fit into binary gender categories. Imagine what it must feel like to have to justify your existence to a stranger so that you can pee or shit in peace. It would be so humiliating. They too must be weary of precarity but giving up the resistance might feel akin to death or even worse for many who can thrive only if they put their lives on the line. I wish sentient beings would care a lot more about each other. One way to make that happen is by recognizing, affirming, and continually rediscovering, our interconnectedness so that we do not see ourselves as finite but as gorgeously intertwined and extending into each other.
Chintan
5 November 2019 at 17:22
Thulile Gamedze <thulile.gamedze@outlook.com>
To: Chintan Modi <chintan.prajnya@gmail.com>
Cc: Ranjana Dave <gati.ranjana@gmail.com>
Hey Chintan, Ranjana,
So nice to have the chance to think through this stuff with you. Chintan, you are an amazing interviewer - I really enjoyed the detail of these questions and the answers that they unfolded. Particularly, I loved the interview with Dr. Ketki Ranade on the huge complexity of the idea of ‘coming out’. I feel that something happens in that interview, where we are lead to acknowledge queerness as a much wider, more social thing than what we may see through the false western categories of ‘out’ versus ‘closeted’. Because what Dr Ranade says about family in India holds something that is in itself, quite queer to capitalist, nationalist mechanisms:
We don’t have a solid social security net, so it is difficult to get out of the family fold. Family is default for everything. If I am ill, if I suffer a loss in my business, if I have to deal with the death of my lover, if I have depression, family is the answer to everything because the state is not doing much. Economically, socially, politically we are organized so much around family.
For me, this idea of family brings with it all of these queer politics of autonomy and self-organisation/ self-determined community. There is this governmentally-induced imperative to find social infrastructures outside of the state, and so in many ways, the family acts as the queered subject, and, like anything queer, it exists in infinite diversity, with families separately negotiating rules and boundaries, particular to their own identities and position in society. Of course, this idealism represents an optimism of family, while what is being talked about here is much more complex. That queer identities are usually the minority within a family, and are thus rejected or ignored, is an indication that the family, whilst perhaps holding the potential to operate as a queered mechanism of social life, often mimics the larger power structures of the state. So - we kinda negotiate, on the one hand, this socially queer structuring of society according to the family unit and autonomous organising, but on the other, the family as often representing a more intimately repressive extension of larger violent beliefs around queerness. Something about these layered articulations really gives life to the reality of ‘coming out’ in formerly colonised spaces, where underdeveloped social structures have lead to a certain queering and crowdsourcing of infrastructure - the making of the commune, the ‘despecialised family’, who answers to every need, the understanding of identity as primarily social… I think acknowledging how being on the wrong side of capital is an inevitable queeredness is the first step in unpacking the most interesting and creative processes of coming out.
You ask a big question, Chintan, about whether Sadat has internalised western knowledge structures in his articulations around homophobia, and his own language of strategic self-identification. I suppose, to me, this internalisation of western knowledge structures (and practices!) is inevitable in some way, and for that reason, I think it is so important to question our primary impulses for resistance. When we deal with oppression in some way, the modes we choose for resistance are often already in-built into the structures we are living in - for instance, as you’ve explored, ‘coming out’ is read as the natural mode of resistance to queerphobia. But of course, we can easily get lost in a game of binary-making and individualism if this remains our only focus… On the one hand, self-identifying pushes some kind of language of representation, and helps to make space to encourage others to be themselves, and work towards a kind of pride - the importance of this can’t be systematically denied in any way. But, to me, there is an immense power in the refusal to identify, and to remain opaque, occupying the space of ‘neutrality’ whilst embodying whatever kind of queer life you want. A refusal to be marked, counted and categorised as different, a refusal to give up intimate information that is only ever required of ‘the other’, and thus a refusal to explicitly enter into a position of double-consciousness, where one is forced to see themselves as they are seen by an incredibly boring, straight colonial imaginary. I believe we can sometimes do both, to identify and also refuse identification in other instances - but I believe that the second aspect, the opacity of our identities, the wordlessness and inexplicable nature of the self is by far the most important and exciting and beautiful project for queerness. Identifying is never going to be enough, and accepting the onus to show ourselves as other is such a painful imperative of western culture.
In the SA context, our absorption of western values is pretty extreme. Compared to much of the continent, who experienced colonialism following the Berlin Conference of 1884 - 5 (which drew random borders throughout Africa, dividing it into states for western european imperial rule), SA was already disrupted by colonial power from 1652, and so has experienced the extremity of both British and Dutch settler colonialism over a looooong time. We also somehow missed out on the independence era of the 50s and 60s, and instead gained apartheid rule - and interestingly, even in the transition to democracy of the 1990s, the notion of ‘independence’ has never surfaced in SA as a national agenda. This is likely because independence and decolonisation often meant the ousting of settlers and push towards nationalisation of resources - processes that SA has not undergone (and I believe is the reason it is so appealing to white tourists!). So, its complicated, because we navigate using infrastructures that remain divided between highly resourced and westernised, and highly underdeveloped by the colonial and apartheid governments. In this regard, healthcare and education access remain racialised, with whiteness and private ownership equating basically to one and the same thing, and Blackness and landlessness operating similarly (the segregation of living areas remains largely unshifted, white people owning majority of land and resources, etc). So then whiteness in this context, and then the access that proximity to it grants us, is also access to western knowledge systems and cultures.
So as much as we may attempt to resist these systems, it is of no surprise that, for instance, something like intersectionality manages to land at the forefront of our imaginations of how to achieve (some form of) equality in our organising spaces, and how to resist oppression. But intersectionality, of course, sort of sets out this path of clear-cut self-identification, defining identity as a group of characteristics that collect when we acknowledge where we are plotted on various spectrums of privilege or dispossession. This kind of consciousness (seeing people as entireties, complex, and scarred by various forms of oppression) is endlessly important but I feel its articulation appeals to something kind of mathematical - I believe that Crenshaw’s having first written around these ideas as an appeal to US law is significant. In this way, I think of intersectionality as a site and time-specific theoretical intervention, whose language strategically appealed to the legal system, one that only recognises certain modes of identification and category. Picking it up now is great because it allows us to recognise ourselves as inevitably enacting prescribed colonial identities, particularly in areas where we have privilege, but it can be unfortunate as well, because it seems to forget to talk about the really interesting and subversive socialnesses - impossibilities, queernesses - that are at the centre of radical movements. Again, it feels like this thing of our first impulse towards resistance is often the one that is already woven into the fabric of the thing we resist - at an SA western university, when we look to resist, we come across Crenshaw, hooks, Hartman, Morrisson (who we love, but perhaps we need to look less faraway, less aspirationally, and more towards recognition of our own social/ cultural resources, where the familial, the communal, the non-individualistic can be found more easily where western resources are scarce).
I guess with RhodesMustFall, there were attempts to pry ourselves out of being consumed by the west, but also, because many of the students were from Black working class families, there was a situation already where ways of being that have historically been rejected by these white institutions, were now forcibly occupying the centre of administration. So, I think that while often we were reading about the trans-atlantic and of ourselves through the lens of Black scholars who are part of the diaspora, our actions - the culture of the space - was situated very much in some flow of a communally determined ‘locality’, that attempted to centre what the university usually marginalises. The culture was very specific to the collection of people who were around (a huge range of class, language, and cultural backgrounds, as well as gender identities and sexual orientations) and the pedagogy, in this way was very situated and read through this range of experience. I suppose in some way, this could be seen as an appropriation, or site-specific regurgitation of Black western knowledge into forms that make more sense to the spaces where they operate. So, to answer your question Chintan, in simpler terms, I think that here, we are heavily influenced by the west, and I think that our queerness in particular maybe - and just the way we communicate it - is in danger of being made more boring by this socialisation. (Towards queer anarchy, perhaps.)
Wow, I’ve said a lot here, and there are so many interesting ideas hanging around that I have yet to attend to. It’s all on my mind, especially thinking through hunger striking as a practice of resistance, via exaggerated presence of precarious bodies.
precarity,
precarity,
precarity
I definitely believe its important to remain weary of it, and to always to be seeking spaces of love and rest for our bodies, as much as we seek to push against toxicity and violence. Those soft spaces are what its all about :) I was really reminded of this during this trip to Munich, where my brother and gave a talk on decolonising institutions, and I couldn’t help but wonder why we would place our bodies so far from home, and so open to gratuitous and undigested european racism. This kind of precarity is (usually, at least) no life and death scenario, but perhaps a push to also acknowledge the brand of precarity that goes less acknowledged in the ‘progressive’ west, where we assume some level of tolerance, but in real life, end up encountering some of the deepest failures of imagination and care. That the shortage of western culture and imagination insists that if we are to remain ourselves and refuse assimilation in these spaces, that we accept a certain kind of precariousness here too. This has been on my mind - characterising precarity of home vs precarity of the west.
Anyway, more on this all soon.
Sending my warmth,
Thuli
9 November 2019 at 23:12
Ranjana Dave <gati.ranjana@gmail.com>
To: Thulile Gamedze <thulile.gamedze@outlook.com>
Cc: Chintan Modi <chintan.prajnya@gmail.com>
Dear Thuli and Chintan,
Thank you both for these conversations. I resonate with what you said, Thuli, about them being full of so many ideas, and somewhere I relish bring able to engage with one, and then perhaps return to another. Our conversation about precarity takes on fresh meanings for me in the wake of what has happened today, with the Ayodhya verdict, where the Supreme Court ruled that the land on which the Babri Masjid stood until 1992, when it was demolished by Hindutva activists, should be used to build the Ram temple activists have claimed lay below the foundations of the erstwhile Babri Masjid. While the SC acknowledged that the 1992 demolition was "a calculated act of destroying a place of public worship", it still ruled that the temple belongs on the existing land, and that land should be allocated elsewhere for a mosque.
I was 5 in 1993, the year following the Babri Masjid demolition, when the Bombay riots happened. In magazines and newspapers, I remember seeing pictures of people clambering all over the dome of the Babri Masjid with their little, brutal implements, like ants on a mound. I would have laughed about this on any other day, but one of the plaintiffs is the deity Ram, represented in court by a 'next friend'. While reading updates from the ongoing judgement, for a moment it felt like they were acknowledging the fraught history of the land in Ayodhya. But in vain, it turned out, as they then proceeded to rule in favour of a temple at the disputed site.
If courts of law are now making their decisions on the basis of faith and belief, then there are so many other cases they could apply this understanding to. How about some faith and belief when it comes to ruling against a metro shed that is eating up Mumbai's last green patch, given that the adivasis who have made their homes in the Aarey belt vest the forest with cultural and spiritual significance? Can faith and belief open up the posh apartment complexes in Powai to low-income residents, the very people for whom the housing was originally intended to be built? That land was leased at 40 paise per acre (which amounts to about Rs. 1/ 0.21 ZAR per hectare). The average cost of a flat in these complexes is in the vicinity of two crores (2,0000000). Will faith and belief give the residents of the Narmada Valley their homes back, which lie submerged thanks to an indiscriminate number of dam projects? How about some faith and belief in the fundamental rights of the citizens of Kashmir? In the land of Khajuraho, some faith and belief in the civil rights of queer folks?
I have been thinking about "being on the wrong side of capital as inevitable queeredness" as creative possibility, but more on that very soon.
On another note, we have until Tuesday to continue our conversations, at least for the purpose of the journal.
Warmly,
Ranjana.
12 November 2019 at 18:24
Chintan Modi <chintan.prajnya@gmail.com>
To: Ranjana Dave <gati.ranjana@gmail.com>
Cc: Thulile Gamedze <thulile.gamedze@outlook.com>
Thank you, Thuli.
I agree with you when you say that there is an immense power in the refusal to identify, and to remain opaque. The colonial mandate to segregate people on the basis of faith, which continues into the post-colonial scenario that Ranjana has described in the context of India under the present government, is essentially an assault on this power which draws from fluidity and confluence. I am going to quickly share with you another piece I wrote recently: https://medium.com/@chintan_connect/cherish-diversity-8e981d0aa168 "Today, my spiritual practice is grounded in Buddhist teachings but I stay open to inspiration from Sufi and Bhakti poetry, Wiccan ritual, Jewish mysticism, and feminist wisdom. The last one might be a surprise for some but, for me, spirituality is deeply connected to social justice." A friend once called me a "spiritual slut" because I "go everywhere". I was offended at first but have learnt to see the humour in his remark over time. This seemingly polyamorous relationship with faith does not bother me as I am able to experience and perceive an interconnectedness that goes beyond labels but is also aware of histories of genocide in South Asia.
Going back to our conversation about Western knowledge structures, and our being embedded in them, I came across something odd on NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/10/778098000/nigeria-s-1st-oscar-entry-lionheart-is-disqualified Apparently, Nigeria's entry for the international feature film category at the Oscars -- a film titled Lionheart -- has been disqualified for having too much English dialogue. In this conversation, journalist Afua Hirsch says, "Countries that used to be in the British Empire speak English. That doesn't make them any less authentically African. But this leaves Nigerian films and many other African films in a bind because this is how life is in Nigeria. People speak a lot of English. And the idea that now Nigerians would have to kind of perform African languages just to appear authentic to decision-makers in Los Angeles seems really, really problematic. It's almost a kind of reverse colonialism, saying that we have to persuade you of our authenticity by behaving in a way we usually wouldn't."
Reading this article took me back in time to my kindergarten classroom. The teacher reprimanded me, a four-year old, for speaking in Hindi at school. My parents did not speak English but had chosen to send me to an English-medium school. I came home crying, and refused to go to school for the next few days. When it was time for school, I used to lock myself up in the bathroom. One day, my parents cajoled me and managed to bring me to school. Instead of comforting me, the teacher reprimanded my mother, and told her that I would grow up to a be a good-for-nothing if I did not learn to speak English. "You will become a servant, and wash dishes in people's homes." I am 34 now, and I haven't forgotten that day or the teacher's face. Her disdain for my mother tongue hurt me at that time. It was a school run by Catholic priests, and many of our teachers were fluent in English. I am glad that I learnt the language but did not pick up her utterly ridiculous idea of determining a person's worth by their proficiency in English.
I'll end here now since Ranjana needs to go to print.
Thank you both for this amazing exchange.
Chintan
Chintan Girish Modi is an educator, writer and peacebuilder who draws deep inspiration from the syncretic traditions of India and beyond, and has a special interest in healing the misgivings between Indians and Pakistanis. He has written widely on art, culture and education for over a decade.
Thulile Gamedze is a cultural worker, based in Cape Town, South Africa, situating her practice between writing, curating, teaching and art production. Thuli is a member of the art collective iQhiya.
Ranjana Dave is a dance practitioner based in New Delhi, who dances, writes, teaches, edits and curates. She is the editor of Present Continuous, the 2019 edition of Indent journal.