Kumar Shahani’s ‘Maya Darpan’

Elroy Pinto

Edited by Ketaki Zodgekar

Artwork by Camilla Anvar

Kumar Shahani is one of the finest film makers in the post-Independence era of India. He was born in Larkana, Sindh in Pakistan, and raised in Mumbai after his family lost their ancestral home after Partition. In 1966, he joined the Film and Television Institute of India under the tutelage of Ritwik Ghatak, the great Marxist film maker from West Bengal. Ritwik Ghatak’s own preoccupations had been with the idea of Myth, folk tales, and the layering of sound, music, and noise within the cinematic realm of melodrama. Shahani spent time learning with the finest polymath from India – D.D. Kosambi. In later years, Shahani was to learn music first from Neela Bhagwat and then rigorously under Pandit Jal Balaporia. In sum, Shahani only made four full feature films, a handful of documentaries, several short films, and Khayal Gatha, a film which was never fully realised as a complete documentary or feature in categorisation. However, Shahani’s ambitions stretched beyond this: his primary concern was to formulate a vision of cinema that explores the Epic form. In the years that followed, Shahani’s work continued Ghatak’s practice; eventually leading him to master his own Idiom.

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The Gypsy Goddess

Vaishali Bhargava

Edited by Muireann Crowley

Artwork by Kelechi Hafstad: Kelechi Anna Photography

“Remember, dear reader, I write from a land where people wrap up newborn babies in clumsy rags and deck the dead in incredible finery.” (Kandasamy 24)

Literature encompasses several paths of inspiration for me and I tread one of them in the Indian author, Meena Kandasamy’s debut novel The Gypsy Goddess (2014). This is a whimsical fictional narrative based on the bloody massacre of 1968 in the Kilvenmani village, located in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, India. Without striving hard for authenticity she inspires me to write dramatically in the right parts while holding reader’s attention. Her pen isn’t afraid of unveiling that which decorum usually hides and carries “the tales of their cunts and their cuntress and their cuntentants . . .” (Kandasamy 67) for she is on a fearless mission.

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The Inner Courtyard by Lakshmi Holdström

Avani Udgaonkar

Edited by Ketaki Zodgekar

Illustration by Olivia Prenderghast: https://liviprendergast.wordpress.com/

TW: sexual violence mention

The study of Indian literature in Western universities has always been disappointing. Even in the best of courses, Indian literature is still limited to the Salman Rushdie – Jhumpa Lahiri – Vikram Seth (if you’re lucky) trifecta that is as irresponsible as it is exhausting. While the works of second-generation and diasporic writers are important, to use their limited voices as representative of an entire subcontinent with hundreds of languages and cultures, hardly constitutes an education. The depiction of Indian women, in particular, from Slumdog Millionaire (2009) to The Satanic Verses (1988), are hardly more than one-dimensional stock caricatures of stereotypically oppressed “third world” women. Individuality, independence, rebellion, and cultural nuances, all vanish against this overwhelming backdrop of Bollywood tropes and toxic masculinity.

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The Road To Wanting by Wendy Law-Yone

Isabel Lwin May Khine

Edited by Ketaki Zodgekar

Art by Livi Prendergast https://liviprendergast.wordpress.com/

TW: Suicide, Sexual assault

The study of migration is interdisciplinary. Despite this, I have not come across much discussion in literary studies about the role that contemporary human migration plays on the way we read and what we choose to read. While universities would like to present themselves as progressive through a nod to Postcolonial Studies, in the arts we fall into the trap of discussing migration as if it is a static thing of the past and not alive today. This is because most discussion in the arts about migration is retrospective and looks to history for examples of human migration and migration crises, rather than looking at the situation today. I would like to move away from the institutional focus on the history of human migration. Instead, through analysis of The Road to Wanting by Wendy Law-Yone, I will be focusing on what the migrant has to say about themselves, their own existence, and their experiences in a contemporary context. By doing so I hope to centre conversation on the migrant’s agency and personhood.

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The Master’s Tools by Audre Lorde

Mayowa Omogbenigun

Edited by Veronica Vivi

Art by Zoë Guthrie http://zoeguthrie.com/

‘For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change’. – Audre Lorde (‘The Master’s Tools’ 19)

My four years at university have led me to a simple conclusion: universities are bastions of white supremacy. From my first-year at university, it was clear that I would not belong in the proverbial ‘Master’s House’ (Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools’ 19). It was micro-aggressions by students and academics alike. It was ignorant comments about the ‘Third World’ and the backward people living in it. It was learning everything from a Eurocentric and Western point of view and as postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty explains, Europe was the silent referent in everything I was taught (42). The imbalance of power was clear by the content of what I was taught and by the language used to teach. Throughout my first two years at university, I struggled to find language to express how I felt and was deprived of any courses that discussed people of colour. In my second-year, I remember an ill-conceived course simply called ‘Asia and Africa 2a: Societies, Cultures, and Empires, c.1600-1880’ and ‘Asia and Africa 2b: Nationalisms, Liberation Movements and the Legacies of Colonialism, c. 1880-Present Day’. As you can imagine, the course lacked nuance and was far too vague to offer any real insight into either ‘Asia’ or ‘Africa’.

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Postcolonial Climate Change: John Akomfrah and a discourse of difference

Clara de Massol

Edited by Muireann Crowley

Art by Sarah Summers https://www.instagram.com/ssssummers/

This article considers the ways in which postcolonial studies are integral to understanding climate change. Our planet is warming at an alarming rate; islands and coasts all around the planet are slowly drowning; and species are disappearing in the thousands each year as a result. In less than 100 years, climates and ecosystems will be completely altered; this will have profound implications on humanity in terms of our survival as well as our collective identity. In the last few years, the discussion around ecology and identity has crystallised around the concept of the Anthropocene, the name given to the geological epoch superseding the Holocene, in which human activity on earth becomes the main geological force. Confronting anthropogenic climate change involves destabilising the dominant cultural narratives regulating societies to understand and formulate the intersection of ecology and postcolonialism.

The Anthropocene was introduced by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 and urges us to rethink our relationship to our planet and to the life forms inhabiting it. The Anthropocene debate, along with concepts of globalisation and cosmopolitanism create the illusion that ‘we are all in this together’ (Braidotti, 2017), that with the advent of climate and ecological disasters, a kind of planetary citizenship and solidarity has formed. But this apparent interdependence and planetary empathy is in fact a neoliberal system of differentiation and hierarchy. Butler explains that in this climate, ‘some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, which kind of subject is not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human’ (2004, xiv).

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