Ijtihad'23

Published in New Delhi by Department of History Lady Shri Ram College for Women Lajpat Nagar – IV, New Delhi Delhi – 110024 © Department of History, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, 2023 The moral rights of the contributing authors are reserved. These are the views of the authors themselves and do not intend to make assertions on the sensitivity of any community or social group. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing from the Department of History, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, New Delhi. Advisory Board Dr Akanksha Narayan Singh Dr Vijayant Kumar Singh History Union (2022-2023) Naina Shukla, President Saniya Sarosh, General Secretary Raahel, Treasurer Chief Editors Ayda Arif Disha Aggarwal Sub-Editors Arya Mishra Chhavi Gurman Kaur Jyotika Tomar Sumedha Das Tanvi Sharma Tarini Agarwal

Description: "Border Rhythms: Harmonizing Hues" is a digital artwork that depicts the iconic USMexico Pink Border seesaw installation, beautifully rendered with impasto-like oil textures. The artist combines organic and abstract elements, resulting in a visually stunning representation of the symbolic seesaws. The composition of the artwork is dynamic and fluid, with vibrant shades dominating the canvas. The bold and expressive brushstrokes create a sense of energy and movement, evoking a lively atmosphere. The impasto-like technique adds texture and depth to the artwork, enhancing the tactile quality of the digital medium. The focal point of the artwork is the symbolic seesaw itself - The seesaw acts as a metaphorical bridge, representing the interconnectedness between the United States and Mexico. It stands as a testament to the shared experiences, culture, and humanity that transcend the physical border that separates the two countries. The vibrant shades employed in the artwork reflect the spirit and vitality of the shared border experience. The palette ranges from fiery reds and oranges to lively greens and blues, creating a dynamic interplay of colours that energize the composition. "Border Rhythms: Harmonizing Hues" encapsulates the artist's vision of a world where boundaries are transcended, and shared experiences create a bridge of understanding between cultures. It serves as a poignant reminder of the power of art to inspire dialogue, challenge perceptions, and foster a sense of togetherness in our ever-changing global landscape. Cover Illustration: “Border Rhythms: Harmonizing Hues” by Vaishu Rai

FROM THE EDITORS’ DESK When the Ijtihad team met this year, there was a consensus on developing an issue dedicated to encouraging undergraduate students to question reductionism, rigid classifications, and restrictions. With an attempt to rekindle the vision of Ijtihad after an unfortunate break due to the pandemic, we embark on a journey of stringing together research that examines the formation and shifting of boundaries in history with an interdisciplinary lens through the theme of “Borders and Transgressions.'' With this volume, we delve into norms that are shaped by us and in turn shape the world around us. Our aim is to question borders in our history across gender roles, issues of war and migration, and platforms of art and literature. Preceding the creation of this volume, Ijtihad’s editorial board organised a writing workshop series. Presenting various aspects of research such as critical thinking, academic integrity, and research methodologies, these sessions were aimed at familiarising inquisitive minds with the skills necessary to conduct valuable inquiry, interpretation, handling of sources and different format styles. Subsequently, the team conducted its Annual Paper Presentation Competition as part of the Annual Department Fest, “Maazi-o-Mustaqbil'' on the theme Histories of Labour and Leisure. This was an attempt to raise pressing questions of who is recorded in the historical archive and who is deemed unworthy of this recognition. Unequivocally, this edition is bound to due credit to everyone associated with it. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to both our distinguished faculty and journal staff advisors for their support and encouragement. This edition would not have been possible without the unwavering support of the History Union and our sub-editors and their persistent efforts to bring this volume to life. Our selection process was extremely competitive this year, and we laud the hard work and perseverance put in by each of our contributing authors. Upholding the spirit of curiosity, volume nine of Ijtihad seeks to give expression to the latent thoughts and creativity of all its bearers. We strongly believe that unconventional questioning and revisiting of what has already been said and written must continue. We sincerely hope you enjoy reading the compelling and thought-provoking pieces curated for this edition of Ijtihad and, henceforth, feel inspired to pursue our own research inquiries. Happy reading!

THEMED SUBMISSIONS: BORDERS AND TRANSGRESSIONS 1. Photography, A Myth: Fostering and Fracturing Divides Sifat Kaur Keer……………………………………1 2. Rebellion is Justified: Examining Ai Weiwei’s work through the lens of China’s Cultural Revolution Pragya Sharma………………………………...10 3. Migration of the Chinese Community into Kolkata: Segregations and Assimilations Rishav Chatterjee……………………………...18 4. Writers of War: Narrativizing the Lives of Sikh Soldiers’ Recruited during the First World War (1914-1918) Devanshi Panda and Tarini Agarwal..….26 5. The Canvas-Space of the Self: Decoding Partition Trauma Narratives in Art History Sara Batool and Aadrit Banerjee…...…...35 6. Partitioning the Mind: Masculinity, Madness, and the Crisis of Identities in Partition Violence Deep Acharya…………………………………...43 7. Stories of Devotion, Marginalisation and Transgression: Tracing the Experiences of Theris and Bhikkhunis in Theravada Buddhism Nivedita Mahapatra…………….....................52 8. Subaltern Shakespeare: Acting, Adapting and Appropriating Shakespeare in Colonial and PostColonial Bengal Pratyusha Chakrabarti………………………62 9. A Perusal of Kishori Lal’s Work on the Mughal Harem Arya Mishra and Sumedha Das.…………71 10. The ‘Trickster’ of Bath’s Tale: Chaucer’s Woman Transgressing Boundaries Kumari Savita……………………………………79 11. Transgressions in Matrimonial Intermediations of Colonial Bengal: Exploring the means of matchmaking. Shreya Ghosh……………………………………86 WINNING ENTRIES: MAAZI - O - MUSTAQBIL ANNUAL PAPER PRESENTATION COMPETITION 1. Beyond Wine and Wisdom: The World of Symposium in Ancient Greece Yashaswi Sagar…………..................................97 2. Dance as a Form of Leisure and Labour: A Historical Perspective on the Chhau Dance Bhavya Srivastava……………………...106 CONTENTS

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 1 Photography, A Myth: Fostering and Fracturing Divides Sifat Kaur Keer Second Year, Department of Political Science Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi Abstract The fostering of divisions between social communities in terms of sexuality can be studied as a direct consequence of how visual arts perpetuated certain stereotypes about the queer community, primarily exhibiting them as a predominantly white and culturally homogenous group, thereby upholding myths and sidelining existing diversities. Operating on a similar level, however, these art forms also served to demystify the prevalent narratives during the McCarthy era and dismantled societal attitudes towards the AIDS crisis, et cetera. The paper dives into the intricate details of the history of queer photography with the assistance of Barthes’ theories to understand its impact in constructing as well as demolishing the borders between humanity. Introduction It is not untrue to say that photographs have been the guiding light for historians for ages. Embodying within itself the power to speak without saying a word, to stir emotions without having a spirit, the practice can only be described as a glittering marvel of technological advancement. To see it weave the threads tying humanity together and cultivate the stories stored within each strand is a worldly wonder of its own. However, its excellence does leave you with a burning question- is that all there is to photography? Susan Sontag labeled photography as a perverse invasion into people’s lives which played its due role in monitoring, and subsequently controlling, the marginalized. She described it as a violative and antagonistic act of manipulating history as well as depriving it of interconnectedness and emotions.1 Roland Barthes replicates these 1 Susan Sontag, On Photography, 14th ed. (New York: Picador, 2010), 14-15. views in his declaration of how art, in any form, is a myth. It perpetuates what the artist believes, and what the society desperately clings to as an act of intolerance.2 Referring to ‘Mythologies’ by Barthes, I aim to unearth how photographs have acted as a doubleedged sword throughout the course of history by examining their complicity in naturalising dominant power structures and their subversion of the same. The paper strives to achieve this by uncovering the essence of queer photography from the 1950s to the 1990s, based in the United States of America, and referencing the duality in the works of Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, et cetera. The first section dives into what myths are and how they are created and impact our understanding of reality. The second section articulates an argument about how photographs operate as a double-edged sword. This section concerns itself with detailing how photography both forms and 2 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, 47th ed. (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2006), 142-145.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 2 dismantles a myth. The last section tries to paint a context in which photographs of queer community had begun to emerge. The period of study I have covered for this paper is from 1950s to the 1990s as these forty years in the USA were emblematic of the infamous McCarthy era as well as the AIDS crisis. Mythologies By Roland Barthes The Barthesian Myth is a concept derived from arguably Barthes’ most significant work, ‘Mythologies’. The book, published in 1957, delves into a socio-political and cultural analysis of things we see around us that have carefully been crafted into myths that are popularly and naively consumed by the public as factual statements. He begins his analysis by drawing out the structure of myth as a speech. This is not simply limited to oral or written language but extends itself to visual methods of communication as well. He states that the myth is not defined by the object of its message, but rather by the way in which this message is relayed to the general public. It focuses on the intention rather than its literal meaning. Furthermore, he equates the process of myth-making to how the bourgeoisie imposes their ideologies on others. Barthes also lays down an intricate layout of this very process. His analysis requires the presence of a signifier, a signified, and a sign. The signifier is the image used to stand for something else while the signified presents what the image truthfully stands for. This goes through a complex process of signification which eventually turns it into a 3 Barthes, Mythologies, 121-126. 4 Barthes, Mythologies, 115. sign. That, in turn, rotates itself into a cycle as a signifier of the signified. The process continues until it completely deforms the original connection between the signified and the signifier to establish a myth that is devoid of reality.3 Perhaps one of the most well-known examples he gives of this phenomenon is that of a photograph of a young black soldier saluting the French flag. Its first signification is that of portraying France as a great empire, one that inspires its citizens to faithfully serve under one flag with no colour discrimination, as a sign of tolerance. However, what escapes the naive eye is the second signification which becomes more apparent with time. The image, by depicting the black soldier serving under the French flag, is a deliberate implication by French leaders to portray themselves as tolerant and liberal despite being violently racist. The sign, thus, becomes something natural to those viewing it. It lacks completely in its original context and becomes a mythical ideology perpetuated through the medium of photography.4 Things that are considered to be common sense have the potential to perpetuate certain ideologies, by undergoing a deliberate process of myth-making and deeming any other meaning as inconvenient and unnecessary distraction from what matters.5 The Myth of Photography Photography not only captures moments of our life, but also portrays a unique meaning of the moment seized. Therefore, no two photographs clicked at the same time, of 5 Barthes, Mythologies, 110-113.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 3 the same object, but with different intentions can have the same meanings. This is where Barthes distinguishes studium and punctum. The former represents the factor that initially draws the viewer to see the art. It consists of the various methods used by the artist in their photograph like composition and texture. Punctum, on the other hand, is how the viewers interpret the art. This is typically based on a more personal and intimate connection with the photograph which connects with the viewer’s life. Despite how innocent a portrait may seem it is anything but; it has connotations as well as the denotations that blend to evoke ideologies in the public. Herein enters the fine line that divides subversion as well as the perpetuation of myths.6 Since photography was extended to other forms of media, and television in the 19th and 20th centuries, there had been a violently racist representation of Black people. It was the favoured rhetoric of those times amongst predominantly white countries.7 The media rarely showed black people and when it did, their characters were represented as the villains, committing crimes and ‘terrorising’ the white families. Alternately, they were depicted as illiterate, bearing the brunt of humiliation. They were the laughing stock, and a means of entertainment in the media. Such signification continued to the point that it became a myth and Black people turned into a sign of malevolence, someone who has to be feared. Naturalisation of such myths 6 Barthes, Mythologies, 128. 7 Condé Nast, ‘The Fetishisation of Black Masculinity’, Magazine, British GQ (blog), 13 October 2020, https://www.gqmagazine.co.uk/lifestyle/article/fetishisation-blackmasculinity. had severely ostracised black people, especially those who were already suffering at the hands of violent discrimination.8 This is just one example of the formation of myth through visual media. The creation of female beauty standards, through photographs of models that saturates our culture, also moves in a similar process. It imposes a mythical standard considered natural by the people and actively oppresses those who fail to fit into and rewards those who do. That is but one aspect of a photograph. It would be untrue to label it as the sole offender without taking into account how photographs captured with a different studium have helped break aggressive stereotypes. A popular theory put forth by Barthes in his book is that of how to demystify a myth, one must create another myth. During the American-Mexican war, several dangerous stereotypes emerged, portraying war in an eerily isolated sense. The photographs usually depicted street scenes, post-battle grounds, countrymen, and generals. They never once depicted the violent aspects of the war. The mass murders, the wounded soldiers and their families, et cetera were conveniently taken out of the spotlight so as to continue the pro-war agenda. However, this changed with the onset of the Civil War in the United States. With more people realising the deadly nature of war, the photographs and the myths associated with it started to change. The Civil War became the most photographed war of its time. It showed fallen soldiers, the masses of 8 Charles Stephens, ‘Sexual Objectification of Black Men, From Mapplethorpe to Calvin Klein’, Advocate (blog), 17 May 2017, https://www.advocate.com/currentissue/2017/5/17/sexual-objectification-black-menmapplethorpe-calvin-klein.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 4 bodies, the families torn apart, lands left barren, etc. The imagery of war, by then, lost its romanticised and idealist aspect and instead moved towards more realistic and deadly portrayals of wars. This is how late 19th and 20th-century war photography created its own myth to demystify the one that existed in the Victorian era. Barthesian Myth In Queer Photography 1. The minimal history of queerness in photography When photographs first came into existence, they severely lacked in their portrayal of marginal communities. One such being the queer community. The society during the 19th century was vehemently homophobic and queerness was never immortalised through the camera. Only vague and mystical depictions were uncovered through depictions of affectionate friendships and the subversion of gender roles. A particular pioneer using this emerged towards the end of the century- Bolette Burg. She, along with her partner Marie Høeg, presented themselves in what can now be called as an androgynous manner. They subverted prevalent myths of being feminine and heterosexual.9 Barring these rare depictions of queerness, gay people were picturized as promiscuous and mentally ill. There were minimal attempts to challenge this myth as queer people living in those times suffered from internalised homophobia and held an intense fear of being their true selves. Positivity in 9 ‘Photography x Queerness: A History’, Darklight Art (blog), accessed 17 April 2023, https://www.darklightart.com/blogs/news/photography-queerness-a-history. any vaguely queer photograph was rare. Those who managed to challenge the constraints of society could not hold their ground long enough to capture a photograph of what it really meant to be queer.10 2. Queerness in the 20th century The 20th century is marked by a revolution led by queer people against the society that actively infringed upon their right to simply exist and love. Apart from prominent historical events like Stonewall riots, the queer community was not given enough coverage in the media. A few queer photographers refused to be silenced by oppressive norms and moral codes but by and large, the means to remember various lives lived in secret have been lost. McCarthyism became widespread in the early 1950s and brought with it the ‘lavender scare.’ The term was popularly used to refer to the fear invoked in gay people because of the rampant persecutions of queer population under Senator McCarthy’s orders. Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Executive Order, the investigation, interrogation, and systematic removal of gay men and lesbians from the federal government became policy, owing to their apparent ‘threat’ to national security, and communist leanings. Several were fired from their jobs, leaving them with no source of income and no support to rely on. Several gay men and women left their country to go seek refuge in Mexico, which highlights the severity of the situation. In times like these, it was not only hard for queer people to exist but they also lost any powerful 10 "‘Photography x Queerness: A History’.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 5 means of narrating their side of the story. The few that raised their voices were immediately shut down or persecuted like Jamie Shoemaker.11 The other significant episode happened in 1969 but left uncovered by popular media– the Stonewall Riots. Led by patrons of a gay bar in Greenwich Village in New York City, members of the queer community fiercely fought the police. Fed up with the criminalization of homosexuality, queer people grappled relentlessly and lit the spark for a revolution that would electrify the gay rights movement. However, the pride did not last long. Nearing the 1980s, the AIDS crisis emerged and gay and bisexual men were violently targeted. It came to be known as the ‘gay plague.’ People relied on flawed and biased ‘scientific’ proof and stayed away from anyone they suspected to be a homosexual.12 Not only were gay men ostracised and fired from their jobs, but they also died in large numbers since they had no access to any treatments or support. It was during this time that photography also gained a larger role in society, and LGBTQ+ support groups started using them to normalise homosexuality. 3. Myths in Queer Photography from the 1950s to 1990s 11 Suyin Haynes, ‘The Anti-Gay “Lavender Scare” Is Rarely Taught in Schools’, Time (blog), 22 December 2020, https://time.com/5922679/lavender-scare-history/. 12 João Florêncio, ‘AIDS: Homophobic and Moralistic Images of 1980s Still Haunt Our View of HIV – That Must Change.’, The Conversation (blog), 27 November 2018, https://theconversation.com/aids-homophobic-andmoralistic-images-of-1980s-still-haunt-our-view-of-hivthat-must-change-106580. 13 Cascone Sarah, ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’s Controversial “Man in Polyester Suit” Photo Sells for $478,000’, Artnet Robert Mapplethorpe is arguably one of the most recognisable artists associated with queer history during the 20th century. His work in the 80s primarily consisted of capturing male nudes in black and white and showing them with glamour and beauty. He celebrated male sensuality and explored themes of alternative gender and sexual expression. He subverted myths promoted by the media that viewed homosexuality as being a vicious and promiscuous sin. His portrayal of queerness has often been described as raw and authentic. His work was not meant to be titillating. Rather, its aim was to evoke a sense of celebration.13 However, his obsession with capturing black bodies as a white man perpetuated a significantly harmful myth, a gross fetishization of black males. Critics like Judith Butler lambasted his work, ‘Man in Polyester Suit’, saying it robbed the black men of their persona and instead drew their bodies in fragments. It connotes that these two races had sexually varying bodies, with black men being the ‘epitome of muscularity and masculinity.’ It allowed the public to intensely scrutinise their bodies and in some extremes, justify the idea that black bodies are anatomically different, continuing the onslaught on the black community.14 (blog), 8 October 2015, https://news.artnet.com/market/robert-mapplethorpepolyester-suit-sells-338631. 14 Pete Sigal, ‘Robert Mapplethorpe: The Commercial Archive and the Sexualization of the Black Male Body’, Art Magazine, Getty Iris (blog), 3 October 2016, https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/robert-mapplethorpe-thecommercial-archive-and-the-sexualization-of-the-blackmale-body/.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 6 Particularly in the 1960s, Kay Tobin Lahusen charged forth as an openly lesbian woman and photographed LGBTQ+ political communities. Her career jump-started with her working for a magazine called ‘The Ladder’ which targeted American lesbians as its audience. Going against the previous patterns of depicting lesbian couples vaguely, like a shadow yet to be revealed to the light of the day, she put a happy lesbian couple on the cover of the newsletter.15 This was revolutionary since lesbians had never been depicted as happy, human, and in love. In doing so, Lahusen broke several myths of those times which made society see lesbians with eyes full of scrutiny. Though the magazine did not reach the general public during those times, it certainly carried forth its legacy to the 21st century to break stereotypes and inspire queer people. She was also one of the only people to visually document the Stonewall Riots and other milestones in queer history of America. Nan Goldin, much like Lahusen, captured the beauty of love in all forms. Though her work is considered controversial due to its idealistic depiction of drug use and abuse, Goldin has still contributed significantly to subverting myths that were harmful to the 15 Daniel E Slotnik, ‘Kay Tobin Lahusen, Gay Rights Activist and Photographer, Dies at 91’, News, The New York Times (blog), 27 May 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2021/05/27/us/kay-tobin-lahusen-gay-rights-activist-andphotographer-dies-at-91.html. 16 Isaac Kaplan, ‘Why Nan Goldin’s Intimate Portraits of 1980s New York Are Still So Relevant’, Artsy, 24 June 2016, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-why-nangoldin-s-intimate-portraits-are-so-relevant-today. 17 Kai Behrmann, ‘Nan Goldin: “The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency’, The Art of Creative Photography (blog), 6 December2013, https://partofcreativephotography.com/ famous-photographers/nan-goldin-the-ballad-of-sexualdependency/. queer community.16 ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ is perhaps her most popular work which was documented throughout the entirety of the 1980s as well as the 1990s. It depicts an intimate relationship that defies conformity, secrecy and shame along with themes of forgetting and remembrance. Her work is revolutionary since it captured the queer community which surrounded herself in the most intimate way, with each of the 700 photographs hiding inside it a life of love, comfort, joy, grief, damage, and companionship.17 Furthermore, the collection also featured her own struggles with being diagnosed with HIV as well as the emotional ramifications the AIDS crisis had on the queer community.18 Breaking down the myth of AIDS being contagious with a mere touch and a dishonourable disease, she showed it in its most honest and vulnerable form. ‘Nan one month after being battered’; showing Goldin with a bruised face after being assaulted during the AIDS crisis, and ‘Tongue on Belly’; portraying an intimate portrayal of how the crisis took a mental and physical toll on queer people, are two of her most raw and honest impressions of what being queer and having a queer family meant in a time of violent homophobia.19 18 Bunyan Dr Marcus, ‘AIDS Crisis Cherry Grove’, Art Blart (blog), accessed 17 April 2023, https://artblart.com/tag/aidscrisis-cherry-grove/. 19 Eva Wang, "The Significance of Self-Exposure and Attention to Content in Nan Goldin’s Photographs," Magazine, Wendy.Network (blog), accessed April 17, 2023, https://wendy.network/the-significance-of-self-exposureand-attention-to-content-in-nan-goldins-photographs/.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 7 Lastly, the Safe/Haven queer exhibit looks upon the gay community in the 1950s, the era that was majorly terrorised by McCarthyism. It depicts the community in Cherry Grove, a secluded beach away from the hustle and bustle of the city where they felt free to express their true selves. It presented itself as a creatively rich recluse accompanied by recorded accounts of the people that eventually settled there. The exhibit reveals how it offered a safe space for gay men and women to unapologetically be themselves and express their nuanced interests and intellect. However, not all that glitters is gold. The exhibition maintained stereotypes of what the gay community looked like and who was a part of it. It was exclusively white people that were allowed to settle in this hidden abode and enjoy the fruits which People of Colour were not privileged enough to grow for themselves. Furthermore, the exhibit distances itself from the harsh realities of the McCarthian era. While black and brown queer people were being persecuted for their mere existence, the inhabitants of the Cherry Grove were unwinding away from the disaster. It portrayed a small part of the queer community that was privileged enough to isolate themselves from the situation. The exhibition, though made with good intent, promoted the myth concerning the existence of white people in a sphere of pleasure and peace while situating queer People of Colour outside it, in the trenches of harsh realities and political resistance. Conclusion All the artists mentioned either subverted or perpetuated myths through their works, and contributed a great deal to queer history. Their perspective, though flawed at times, provided a base for other queer people to stand up for who they are and demand for their rights. Photography is no simple medium of language but it is a powerful tool that helps mould realities into something digestible by the masses. However, more often than not, some will challenge the norms and demystify myths to bring to light the real world and the truth of history. Though it is prone to be influenced by the artists’ own studium, it works to invoke emotions in those who identify with the represented communities. The queer photographs continue to be denied their rightful place in history. The mementos captured by these artists give a familial sense of belonging and pride to the queer community. These voices have shaped our history today, they have demystified myths and created them. They have formed a foundation for us to look back upon, acknowledge the wrongs and the rights and work towards creating a better future for those to come after us.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 8 BIBLIOGRAPHY Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. 47th ed. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2006. Behrmann, Kai. ‘Nan Goldin: “The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency’. The Art of Creative Photography (blog), 6 December 2013. https://artofcreativephotography.com/famousphotographers/nan-goldin-the-ballad-of-sexual-dependency/. Darklight Art. ‘Photography x Queerness: A History’. Accessed 17 April 2023. https://www.darklight-art.com/blogs/news/photography-queerness-a-history. Dr Marcus, Bunyan. ‘AIDS Crisis Cherry Grove’. Art Blart (blog). Accessed 17 April 2023. https://artblart.com/tag/aids-crisis-cherry-grove/. Florêncio, João. ‘AIDS: Homophobic and Moralistic Images of 1980s Still Haunt Our View of HIV – That Must Change.’ The Conversation (blog), 27 November 2018. https://theconversation.com/aids-homophobic-and-moralistic-images-of-1980s-still-hauntour-view-of-hiv-that-must-change-106580. Haynes, Suyin. ‘The Anti-Gay “Lavender Scare” Is Rarely Taught in Schools.’ Time (blog), 22 December 2020. https://time.com/5922679/lavender-scare-history/. Kaplan, Isaac. ‘Why Nan Goldin’s Intimate Portraits of 1980s New York Are Still So Relevant’. Artsy, 24 June 2016. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-why-nan-goldin-sintimate-portraits-are-so-relevant-today. Nast, Condé. ‘The Fetishisation of Black Masculinity’. Magazine. British GQ (blog), 13 October 2020. https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle/article/fetishisation-blackmasculinity. Sarah, Cascone. ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’s Controversial “Man in Polyester Suit” Photo Sells for $478,000’. Artnet (blog), 8 October 2015. https://news.artnet.com/market/robertmapplethorpe-polyester-suit-sells-338631. Sigal, Pete. ‘Robert Mapplethorpe: The Commercial Archive and the Sexualization of the Black Male Body’. Art Magazine. Getty Iris (blog), 3 October 2016. https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/robert-mapplethorpe-the-commercial-archive-and-thesexualization-of-the-black-male-body/. Slotnik, Daniel E. ‘Kay Tobin Lahusen, Gay Rights Activist and Photographer, Dies at 91’. News. The New York Times (blog), 27 May 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/us/kay-tobin-lahusen-gay-rights-activist-and-

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 9 photographer-dies-at-91.html. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 14th ed. New York: Picador, 2010. Stephens, Charles. ‘Sexual Objectification of Black Men, From Mapplethorpe to Calvin Klein’. Advocate (blog), 17 May 2017. https://www.advocate.com/current-issue/2017/5/17/sexualobjectification-black-men-mapplethorpe-calvin-klein. Wang, Eva. ‘The Significance of Self-Exposure and Attention to Content in Nan Goldin’s Photographs’. Magazine. Wendy.Network (blog). Accessed 17 April 2023. https://wendy.network/the-significance-of-self-exposure-and-attention-to-content-in-nangoldins-photographs/.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 10 Rebellion is Justified: Examining the Artwork of Ai Weiwei through the lens of China’s Cultural Revolution Pragya Sharma Second year, Department of History Miranda House, University of Delhi Abstract The Cultural Revolution took place in China from 1966 to 1976. This period saw wide scale destruction of items seen as “bourgeois decadence” including artworks, books, and cultural artefacts. Over 1.5 million people including writers, artists, professors, and teachers were harassed, ostracised, imprisoned or tortured to death. This destruction was encouraged by the leader of the Revolution, Mao Zedong, who believed that “without destruction there will be no construction”. This idea was mirrored by the contemporary artist Ai Weiwei, one of the most prominent human rights activists in the world. Ai is known for vandalising and destroying important historical artefacts such as Neolithic vases (circa 3000–5000 BC) and Han Dynasty urns (circa 206BC–202AD). Ai replicates the destruction of antiquities brought on by the Cultural Revolution, while simultaneously subverting it by creating an art piece critiquing the destruction. This paper aims to explore Ai’s work with China’s cultural revolution serving as a background. The Cultural Revolution’s impact on art, more widely, and Ai’s work specifically will be studied in detail, as well as ideas about destruction and construction in the Cultural Revolution and their later interpolation by Ai. Keywords: China, Cultural Revolution, Art, Destruction, Ai Weiwei, Cultural Artefacts Introduction The Great Chinese Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76) launched by Mao Zedong is considered one of the largest political upheavals of the twentieth century1 . The rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution was kept deliberately vague, and a number of people arbitrarily were denounced as class enemies, capitalists roaders, and revisionists. 2 It has been estimated by some officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that around 100 million Chinese, more than 10 percent of the country’s population, were impacted. 3 A mass insurgency was declared which 1 Harry Harding, “Reappraising the Cultural Revolution,” Wilson Quarterly 4, no. 4 (Autumn): 132-141. 2 Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962—1976 (Bloomsbury USA, 2017) 11. 3 Harding, “Reappraising the Cultural Revolution,” 137. 4 Lawrence R. Sullivan, Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Communist Party (Scarecrow Press, 2012) 249- targeted party and state officials, college students, artists, writers, and anyone labelled an intellectual. Victims were subject to brutal and humiliating public “struggle sessions”, 4 beatings, torture, and killings at the hands of student and worker militants. 5 The impact of the Cultural Revolution on science, technology and arts was especially devastating as Mao believed that a “black” or counter-revolutionary line was dominating these fields. This resulted in mass destruction of art, culture, historical artefacts, and literature, and effectively pushed back the intellectual landscape of the country by decades. Contemporary Individuals and groups were grilled, interrogated, and physically abused in violent public spectacles that could last for days. 5 Shelley Drake Hawks, The Art of Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2017) 4.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 11 artists like Ai Weiwei, along with their families were victims of the revolution and have used their experience to create art fundamentally shaped by this unprecedented period in history. Ai’s art, in turn, has been critical in dissecting and exploring the destruction caused by the Cultural Revolution. This mass destruction was informed by Mao’s efforts to maintain control. In order to purge higher echelons of power, he turned to China’s students and gave them the licence to denounce all authority and bombard their headquarters. These students were told by Mao that this “rebellion” was justified. 6 These students eventually established themselves into their own organisation called Red Guards and were directed to rebel against the “four olds”- old culture, ideas, customs, and habits. According to Mao, feudal ideology had fettered people’s minds for thousands of years and now these cultural remnants had to be destroyed. The Cultural Revolution was initially launched as a counterattack in the fields of art. Politics and art were irrevocably intertwined in China. In the 1942 Yan’an Forum, Mao proclaimed that, “There is no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or is independent from politics”.7 According to Mao, art was not, and indeed, should not be an independent means of expression for writers and artists. Instead, the art was the “cogs and screws in the revolutionary machine” which had to be produced by “cultural workers”. 8 All art 6 Richard King Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76 (UBC Press, 2010) 8. 7 Mao Zedong Talks at the Ya’an Conference on Literature and Art (University of Michigan, 1980) 24. 8 King, Art in Turmoil, 5. 9 Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution, 60. was political, and thus should be carefully sanctioned and supervised by the Communist Party. By the mid 1960’s, Mao had begun to relentlessly attack the art prevalent in China. The art was seen as either too heavily influenced by foreign culture, or too traditional, created by artists he deemed as rightists. He held such art responsible for the spread of feudal, superstitious and revisionist ideas. 9 Prominent art academies like the Zhejiang Academy were referred as the base camp of “bourgeois liberalisation” and would eventually become concentration camps for artists10 and art educators were accused of “anti-communist” party activities and labelled “bourgeois rightists”. 11 These artists were often publicly humiliated and denounced and imprisoned in “ox-sheds”- detention spaces where designated “ox-demons” and “snakespirits” were kept. Many were exiled to rural areas for years. These “counterrevolutionaries” were publicly humiliated, beaten and imprisoned. 12 Prohibited or otherwise unable to pursue specialties for which they had trained, few artists would retain the skills or creativity required to resume their work even after they returned to their homes. 13 Red Guards often ransacked houses, and destroyed books, paintings and antiques preserved in private collections as well as public buildings. In August 1966, for example, Red Guards in Beijing Normal University burned teaching material and 10 Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution, 98. 11 Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution, 95. 12King, Art in Turmoil, 8. 13 King, Art in Turmoil, 8.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 12 paintings, and smashed plaster reproductions of Western sculptures at the academy. Their teachers were forced to witness these acts of destruction. Art and writings were either destroyed by others, or the artists themselves, in support of the ideals being propagated by the Cultural Revolution. 14 Impact on Cultural Heritage The Cultural Revolution was also successful in its relentless attack on China’s traditional culture. Many heritage sites as well as objects of historical value were seen as remnants of feudalism and were either neglected or destroyed. 15 Many of these objects, especially antique bronze vessels and coins, had only just survived the Great Leap Forward in which metallic objects found in houses or museums were seized. All over the country Red Guards zealously damaged and destroyed historical artefacts and monuments. 16 Moreover, people who practised and taught traditional artforms, understood and cared for the culture of the past were condemned and demoralised. Staff of cultural institutions were sent for reeducation through labour. The entire succeeding generation, consequently, was taught to ridicule tradition rather than respect it. 17 14 King, Art in Turmoil, 9. 15 Marina Svensson, “Evolving and contested cultural heritage in China” In Reconsidering Cultural Heritage in East Asia (London: Ubiquity Press, 2016) 31-46. 16 Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution, 104. 17 Julia F Andrews, The Art of the Cultural Revolution, Art in Turmoil, 30. 18 Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 (MIT Press, 2011) 6. 19 Sandra Ponzanesi, Culture, Citizenship and Human Rights (Taylor & Francis Group, 2020) 219. Ai Weiwei and the Cultural Revolution It is within this background that we must place Ai Weiwei, contemporary artist and one of the most prominent human rights activists in the world. Son of the poet and intellectual Ai Qing, Ai Weiwei was born in 1957. His father was one of the best-known poets in China. 18 Shortly after Ai Weiwei’s birth, his father was politically debilitated and labelled as the “enemy of the people” in the first Anti-Rightist Campaign. 19 Ai Qing was forcibly displaced to rural labour camps as a part of the Down to the Countryside Movement. Ai and his family were forced to spend their life in great poverty and repression, enduring public humiliation, discrimination, and assault. 20 Ai was given no formal education and spent much of his time working in fields and reading Mao’s “Little Red Book”. After the end of the Cultural Revolution and rehabilitation of Ai Qing, Ai Weiwei returned to Beijing. He was actively involved in political activism from the 1970’s and was a junior member of the Stars group- a loose organisation of artists who were closely associated with the Democracy Wall Movement. 21 Although the government at the time had publicly denounced the Cultural Revolution, themes of political subversion in Stars’ works relating to the Revolution combined with elements of current social issues led to an eventual clamp down on the group, and 20 Ponzanesi, Culture, Citizenship and Human Rights, 219. 21 Ponzanesi, Culture, Citizenship and Human Rights, 219 -This movement centred around a brick wall on Xidan Street, in Beijing's Xicheng District, which acted as a forum which allowed political dissidents to explore, discuss and create publications of intellectual and cultural ideas. The main focus of the group was promoting democracy in all areas of Chinese life

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 13 many of its members, including Ai, left the country. 22 Ai emigrated to the United States to pursue art in 1981, and continued being involved in politics in New York. Ai’s return to Beijing in 1993 marked his rise to prominence as an artist, architect, and activist23. During this time, he produced some of his most iconic artworks including the Han Jar overpainted with Coca Cola Logo and Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. Analysing Ai The Han Jar overpainted with Coca Cola Logo and Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn are two artworks which exemplify best the destruction and dissection of ancient artefacts which typified Ai’s artwork during this time. Examining these artworks from a historical perspective is a highly rewarding task. The works seem to simultaneously reference at least three critical periods in China’s history: the period of the Han dynasty known as the “Golden Age” of Chinese civilization, the period of the Cultural Revolution characterised by its destruction, and the modern China in which these works were created. Both of these works involve Han Dynasty artefacts being destroyed. Dropping the Han’s Dynasty Urn is an artwork in which black and white photographic triptych captures an expressionless Ai looking directly at the camera as he drops a two-thousand-yearold ceremonial urn. His work Han Jar Overpainted with Coca-Cola Logo which depicts a two-thousand-year-old jar on 22 Weiwei, Ai Weiwei's Blog, 4. 23 Weiwei, Ai Weiwei's Blog, 4. 24 Deborah E. Horowitic, ed. Ai Weiwei: According to What? (Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2012) 70. which the logo of Coca Cola is painted which, according to Ai, follows the “shape and form of the vase itself”. 24 The destruction of the artefacts involved in the artwork is not just shocking but feels almost like the desecration of precious history. The artefacts not only have considerable monetary value but are imbued with significant symbolic and cultural worth. The urn and the jar respectively date back to a period long considered defining for China in which significant achievements were made especially in the fields of science, art, and literature. Thus, the destruction of the artefacts which typify progress seem to mirror the destruction brought by China’s Cultural Revolution in these fields. Ai is well familiar with the destruction brought about by the Cultural Revolution as one of its millions of victims. He frequently cites the scale of the destruction in the Cultural Revolution, in “which three hundred thousand intellectuals vanished in one year” and artefacts such as “temples, Buddhist statues and the finest porcelains, calligraphy and paintings were all destroyed in front of the public”. 25 Indeed, when questioned about his work, Ai explained by saying, “Chairman Mao used to tell us that we can only build a new world if we destroy the old one”. 26 His work seems to be an allusion to this destruction, though unlike during the Cultural Revolution, Ai attempts to utilise the destruction in order to construct something new. Ai also points out that many of the cultural artefacts he was destroying had already lost much of the value ascribed to 25 Ai Weiwei, Conversations (Columbia University Press, 2021) 65. 26 Ai Weiwei and Hans U. Obrist Ai Weiwei Speaks: With Hans Ulrich Obrist (Penguin UK, 2016) 80.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 14 them as China had been cut off from its own cultural heritage for so long. Thus, the destruction takes on another layer. When the original meaning of a cultural artefact has been so deliberately and successfully removed, Ai’s artwork confronts this loss of meaning while simultaneously ascribing new meaning to the work in the process. Yet, the artwork cannot be limited to mere destruction. After all, it is the recording of the destruction which constitutes the artwork. This seems to be in direct contrast to the inscrutability surrounding the destruction of the cultural revolution. More than the destruction of countless and priceless artefacts, Ai points out how “people just disappeared” during the Cultural Revolution and how one “can’t even find tombs with their real names”.27 Ai’s careful recording and documentation of this destruction seems to directly contrast with the destruction in the Cultural Revolution. The latter is in no short part a result of a degree of government intervention which actively seeks to prevent the understanding and documenting of the scale and impact of the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, Ai’s recording and documenting of the things that the government fails to disclose has been a key part of his work as an artist. His artwork on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake which documents the collapse of a school and the resulting deaths of schoolchildren, attempts to defy the Chinese State's clampdown on the estimates of fatalities. 28 Thus, Ai strives to “raise people’s consciousness on how we deal with the 27 See footnote 23, 13. 28 Christian Sorace, “China's Last Communist: Ai Weiwei.” The University of Chicago Press 40, no. 2 (Winter): 2014, 396-419. past”. 29 He defiantly attempts to confront the past as well as question the handling of history. Today, while the CCP has acknowledged that the Cultural Revolution was undoubtedly a series of disasters, a detailed study and analysis of this period is largely discouraged. 30 Instead, citizens are encouraged to forget and move on from this traumatic period in the nation’s history and relegate the Revolution to the margins of Chinese history. Thus, even as artefacts are placed carefully in history and their destruction seen as an overwhelming tragedy, millions of human lives were not afforded the same privilege. Indeed, for Ai, the Han dynasty artefacts weren’t damaged or destroyed, but simply broken and given a new form. By shattering them, Ai manages to question the overarching questions behind the Cultural Revolution- What is valuable? Who decides it is valuable? What is worthy of preservation? What is destruction? Conclusion The Cultural Revolution seems extraordinary precisely because its answers to the questions it raises contradict all established expectations. This was a Revolution started by inciting school children in which anyone judged as holding any semblance of authority, skill or talent was declared as the enemy. It was a revolution in which what society now seems to value most- science, art, and literature- were actively sought out and 29 Ai Weiwei, “Weiwei-ism” (United Kingdom: Princeton University Press 2012), 84. 30 Guobin Yang “Days of Old Are Not Puffs of Smoke: Three Hypotheses on Collective Memories of the Cultural Revolution.” China Review 5 (2): 43-63.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 15 destroyed. Briefly, the world seemingly turned upside down. Thus, it makes sense why Ai Weiwei’s artwork, which seems like destruction without justifiable cause, seems nothing short of a travesty. However, Ai’s destruction serves as a reminder of what occurred in the past, and indeed what occurs in the present. He is a famed dissident, and his work is as much a critique of contemporary China and the challenges it faces in the form of mass production, commodification, capitalism, commercialisation etc. as it is known for its examination of the past. Throughout his life, Ai Weiwei has been actively critical of China's autocratic regime, and its violation of human rights such as the right to vote and freedom of speech. This has resulted in Ai Weiwei being detained numerous times by the Chinese government, and eventually forced into exile to Berlin in 2015. 31 Today, Ai Weiwei’s work cannot be found on the internet in China, and he cannot post on Chinese social networking sites. Some people in China, according to Ai, doubt he exists at all. In 2010, Chinese authorities demolished his studio. 32 The Cultural Revolution has ended, but its legacy of censorship and forced invisibility continues. Artists such as Ai Weiwei, who continue to highlight the Cultural Revolution and its impact, ensure that present and future generations remember the horrors inflicted, and learn to reckon with its consequences. Limitations It is important to note that there is a paucity of sources available about the Cultural Revolution due to the government’s policy of discouraging proper analysis and scholarships about this period in the country. Moreover, the scope of this paper is largely limited to examining the impact of Cultural Revolution on art and culture to properly contextualise Ai’s work. Surrounding factors, causes and impacts have not been assessed. Ai, it is important to note, has destroyed similar artefacts for the purpose of his art. Other pieces by him also discuss the trials of the Cultural Revolution. This paper, however, limits itself to the exploration of only two such works of art. Furthermore, despite his fame and notoriety, there is very little scholarship on Ai Weiwei and a considerable lack of a systemic analysis. Most available sources are either of journalistic nature or linked to exhibition catalogues. Ai Weiwei does not seem to have been studied in the context of purely the Cultural Revolution. This has led to information, interpretation and interpolation of this paper being significantly drawn from Ai’s interviews and writings. 31 Ponzanesi, Culture, Citizenship and Human Rights, 216. 32 See Footnote 23, 64.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 16 BIBLIOGRAPHY Dikötter, Frank. 2017. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962—1976. N.p.: Bloomsbury USA. Galimberti, Jacopo, Noemi de Haro García, and Victoria H. F. Scott, eds. 2019. Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. N.p.: Manchester University Press. Gao, Jiti G., Yan Jiaqi, Jiaqi Yan, and Gao Gao. 1996. Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution. Edited by Danny Wynn Y. Kwok. Translated by Danny Wynn Y. Kwok. N.p.: University of Hawai'i Press. Harding, Harry. 1980. “Reappraising the Cultural Revolution.” Wilson Quarterly 4, no. 4 (Autumn): 132-141. Hawks, Shelley D. 2017. The Art of Resistance: Painting by Candlelight in Mao’s China. N.p.: University of Washington Press. Jiang, Jiehong, ed. 2007. Burden Or Legacy: From the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art. N.p.: Hong Kong University Press. Obrist, Hans U., and Ai Weiwei. 2016. Ai Weiwei Speaks: With Hans Ulrich Obrist. N.p.: Penguin UK. Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2020. Culture, Citizenship and Human Rights. Edited by Antoine C. Buyse and Antonius C. G. M. Robben. N.p.: Taylor & Francis Group. Sigg, Uli, Ai Weiwei, Yonghe Zhang, Peter Pakesch, and Yung H. Chang. 2009. Art and Cultural Policy in China: A Conversation between Ai Weiwei, Uli Sigg and Yung Ho Chang, moderated by Peter Pakesch. N.p.: Springer. Sorace, Christian. 2014. “China's Last Communist: Ai Weiwei.” The University of Chicago Press 40, no. 2 (Winter): 396-419. Sullivan, Lawrence R. 2012. “Historical dictionary of the Chinese Communist Party” United Kingdom: Scarecrow Press. Svensson, Marina. 2016. “: Evolving and contested cultural heritage in China.” In Reconsidering Cultural Heritage in East Asia, 31-46. London: Ubiquity Press. Watson, Scott, Sheng T. Zheng, Ralph C. Croizier, and Richard King, eds. 2010. Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. N.p.: UBC Press.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 17 Weiwei, Ai. 2011. Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009. Edited by Lee Ambrozy. Translated by Lee Ambrozy. N.p.: MIT Press. Weiwei, Ai. 2013. Weiwei-isms. Edited by Larry Warsh. N.p.: Princeton University Press. Weiwei, Ai. 2021. Conversations. N.p.: Columbia University Press. Yang, Guobin. n.d. “Days of Old Are Not Puffs of Smoke: Three Hypotheses on Collective Memories of the Cultural Revolution.” China Review 5 (2): 43-63. Zedong, Mao. 1992. Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-49: New Democracy (1939-1941) New York: Routledge Zedong, Mao. 2001. Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung Volume III. India: United Press of the Pacific.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 18 Migration of the Chinese Community into Kolkata: Segregations and Assimilations Rishav Chatterjee Third year, Department of History Ramjas College, University of Delhi Abstract The study of migration has always been an interdisciplinary field of study, vast and vibrant in nature as it borrows from history, sociology and anthropology greatly. People migrate due to changing social, political, technological, environmental or even trade patterns. Migrations can also be triggered by wars and political disruptions which push communities to the periphery forcing them to migrate to neighbouring countries as refugees. While meta-narratives of migration carry with it patterns of groups and communities, each individual within that diasporic community has a unique history, be it local or distant to larger patterns. Thus, migration is a historical, sociological and anthropological phenomenon remaining central to world history. Academic works on India-China relations have rarely focused on the history and experience of the Chinese who began migrating to India over two centuries ago leading to the establishment of South Asia’s first Chinatown situated in Kolkata. This paper is an attempt to study the Chinese migration into Kolkata, their lived experiences and their later deportation after the Sino-Indian war of 1962 through various oral testimonies highlighting the multiplicity, nuances and varied experiences of the Chinese settled in India. Keywords: Migration, Marginalisation, Segregation, Assimilation, Refuge Introduction According to Zhang Xing and Tansen Sen, the migration of various Chinese communities from Hakka, Canton and Shandong must be contextualised within the framework of Chinese migrations in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to various parts of South Asia including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.1 Specifically within India, there was the emergence of various Chinese settlements in Kolkata, Kalimpong, Bombay, Assam and Shillong. The initial triggers for this migration were the Chinese Civil War between Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party, overpopulation and the formation of colonial networks of commerce and labour. The characteristic feature of this migratory demographic was 1 See Zhang Xing and Tansen Sen, “The Chinese in South Asia,” Routledge Handbook of The Chinese Diaspora (2013), 205-226. 2 In 1772, the British East India Company named Calcutta the capital of British India. The Indian port town had in the prior decades had emerged as an important link for the British colonisers for trade with China. Chinese goods, that they were mostly male, skilled and unskilled labour.2 These migrant communities were responsible for setting up various cultural and social organs for their welfare such as Huigangs, native eateries and the Chinese Kali Temple. With the help of these institutions, they were able to etch out various occupational niches for themselves as well get partial political agency. There were multifarious reasons for this phenomenon which included their ghettoised existence in segregated neighbourhoods around central and later eastern Kolkata, lack of demographic strength, economic clout and cultural influence. The labourers gradually migrated from their sugar mills of Achipur to the Bowbazar area of Kolkata where they such as tea and silk, were transported to Britain through Calcutta and, in return, silver bullion was exported from the Indian port to China. Commercial relations between Calcutta and Canton (now Guangzhou) grew rapidly after opium was introduced by the British as one of the main Indian exports to China. Xing, Zhang, and Tansen Sen, “The Chinese in South Asia.” 205.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 19 were successful in setting up a busy Chinatown in the midst of the metropolitan conglomerate that was Kolkata. Later, it was the Hakka shoemakers and tanners who made a further shift to the Tangra area where they owned tanneries. The final and most important reason behind their marginalised existence was their forceful deportation following the Sino-Indian War of 1962. Through the Foreigners Act and Defence of India Act, various Chinese owned businesses were shut down and many Chinese Indians were deported to an internment camp at Deoli, Rajasthan. This incident triggered the systematic dismantling of the Chinese settlements in India leading to their outmigration to Canada, Australia, North America and Europe. Triggers of Migration into Kolkata The history of the Chinese community in India begins with Tong Atchew. According to records in the Public Department,3 he came to Bengal as a tea trader in 1778 as a result of the colonial trade networks. In exchange for his tea, Tong Atchew was granted land to set up a sugar mill by governor-general Warren Hastings about 33 km from Kolkata and is now infamously known as Achipur after Tong Atchew. Within the next 50-60 years, Tong Atchew set up a migratory network pulling in a labour population that would set up a vibrant and bustling Chinatown in and around Bowbazar, Kolkata.4 However, there is evidence to suggest that there were Chinese migrants living in and around Kolkata before the arrival of Tong Atchew. These were mostly migrants 3 Zhang Xing and Tansen Sen, “The Chinese in South Asia”, 205. 4Zhang Xing, “The Bowbazar Chinatown.” India International Centre Quarterly 36 (3/4) (2009): 396-413. 5 Ellen Oxfeld, Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong: Family and Enterprise in an Overseas Chinese Community (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1993), 18. 6 Zhang Xing and Tansen Sen, “The Chinese in South Asia”, 206. who were passengers on the increasing number of ships frequenting between Kolkata and Canton. 5 In his 1857 account, Chaloner Alabaster reports that there was a colony of about five hundred Cantonese and Hakka Chinese living in Kolkata6 . Their occupational roles were mostly that of shoemaking, selling opium, carpentry among other jobs. The expanding commerce between the two countries along with the political disruption in China during the 19th century triggered numerous waves of migration among various Chinese communities from Hubei, Shandong, Canton, Hakka and Guangdong into Kolkata. By 1901, the census recorded 1640 Chinese in Kolkata.7 This phenomenon of trickle migration from the 17th to 19th century led to the development of two prominent Chinatowns in Kolkata:one in Central Kolkata and another in the infamous Tangra. These neighbourhoods were filled with Chinese temples, Huigangs (native place associations) and restaurants which were pioneers in the Indo-Chinese culinary kaleidoscope. These neighbourhoods now lie deserted due to the mass deportation of about 3000 Chinese from India following the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Multiple Micro-narratives for the same Diaspora 1. Yin Sheng Wong Yin Sheng Wong’s account of his family’s experience in Deoli is one that contextualises the blatant racial profiling, brutal internment, harsh conditions within the camp and how the Indian state made no attempt to reinstate many wrongly interned 7 The expanding commercial exchanges between the Indian subcontinent and China after the Opium War in 1839–42 and the subsequent opening of the “treaty ports”in China, the development of steamships, and the devastating rebellions within China during the second half of the nineteenth century led to the increase of Chinese migrant population in Calcutta and elsewhere in India. The 1901 census recorded 1,640 Chinese in Calcutta. Zhang Xing and Tansen Sen, “The Chinese in South Asia”, 207.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 20 families like the Wong’s. He recalls that “I was sixteen that year. I was born in Calcutta and had gone to Shillong when I was thirteen.”8 On 20th November 1962, around eight soldiers went to their house and asked his entire family (father, mother, four brothers and twin sisters) to take a select few belongings and money as they would be arrested for a short amount of time. After four days in Shillong jail and five days in Guwahati jail they were put on a train that would take them to the Deoli internment camp. This train would stop at several stops where cooks could prepare meals for the interned. However, at one of these stops, Wong clearly remembers that a herd of 150- 200 chappal holding villagers shouted at them to go back to China whilst throwing stones at the train. It was only after several years that Wong would come to know that the vessel taking them and numerous other Chinese Indians to Deoli would be marked as “Enemy Train”. Reaching Deoli, the Wong family found that the situation of accommodation was not at all conducive. They had been instructed to pack too little and were made to live in military tents amidst the freezing November cold of Rajasthan. Similarly, the nutrition provided to the prisoners was also suboptimal as the camp used contractors to cook who had no knowledge how to cook for a crowd. Thus, as a result the rice often went uncooked and the vegetables were usually burnt. This would be a time when the various internees would solidarize to negotiate with the camp commander to allow them to cook for themselves. As a result, families would volunteer to help in the cooking with the already provided weekly rations of eggs, fish and mutton. Milk was provided to the old and newborn. Pork and milk were often bought by families who were wealthy 8 Dilip D’Souza and Joy Ma, The Deoli Wallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Internment (New Delhi: Macmillan Publishing India Private Limited, 2020), 37. among the prisoners. Additionally, the prisoners would also utilise the conditions of the camp to provide nourishment for themselves. Wong recalls numerous dogs coming into the camp in the initial months through the barbed wires who would only disappear in a few weeks. Later when dog skulls and bones marked with blood would be found around the camp it was assumed that the camp internees had cooked and consumed the meat of the dogs. Similarly, when frogs would clog the drains of the camp, many internees would cook them and eat them. The internees had to resort to such methods for survival as the five rupees for ration given to them monthly by the government would not be enough for their sustenance. The health arrangements at the camp were also not satisfactory. There was a small office within camp that would dispense medicine and vitamins for minor health problems. For more serious problems, the prisoners were taken to the hospital outside the camp. In May 1963, Yin Sheng Wong’s father fell seriously ill and was taken to the hospital. Yin Sheng Wong’s father died on 5th May and he remembers that there was no ice to preserve the body when it was 40 degrees in the hospital where his father’s body was melting before his sons could dress him. Wong recalls “It was the most horrible experience of my life. I still remember it as a terrible dream.”9 One can argue that all of this happened as a result of the state not being able to provide sufficient medical facilities to citizens which it had arrested without any legible reason barring the fact that they looked hostile to national security. Entertainment and censorship went hand in hand in the camp as per Wong’s account. Films like Sangam, Bees Sal Baad, and Chitralekha were shown to bring about an illusion of normalcy but at the same time, 9 D’Souza, The Deoli Wallahs, 15

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 21 the newspaper provided to the prisoners would be filled with the sensitive stories being cut out. Personal letters within sealed envelopes would take an abnormal time to reach the recipient as they were first sent to Delhi to be censored. Thus, there were concentrated efforts to sabotage any forms of communication or knowledge that the prisoners could have with the outside world. For the Wong, the harassment and humiliation did not stop even after they were released. They had to report to the Foreigner Registration Office (FRO) daily for several years. They returned to Shillong after two years of imprisonment without any money or belongings. When they managed to go to the Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property, they heard that most of their items were either stolen or misplaced. Their property was mortgaged and they could have it back for three thousand rupees. He says ‘If the government had given us a small, low-rate loan for six months, we would not have felt this pain and suffered so much’. 10 After being robbed of whatever social, political and economic agency they had, the Wong family emigrated to Canada in 1993 where they played an active role in setting up the Association for India Deoli Camp Internees (AIDCI).11 2. Yeeva Cheng Yeeva Cheng’s account helps to underline the many layers of the Deoli experience and how it percolated into the next generation in extremely subtle ways. Yeeva’s father Michael was the only person in the family to be taken to the camp. After his release, they moved to a small town in 10 D’Souza, The Deoli Wallahs, 22. 11 Association for Indian Deoli Camp Internees (AIDCI) is a not-for-profit corporation registered in Canada in accordance with the Ontario Corporations Act. As a global alliance of the Deoli Internment Camp survivors and their families, the mission of AIDCI is to raise public awareness of their historical plight by developing a network of survivor contacts and by ensuring that those who tragically lost their lives at the camp are not forgotten. North Carolina. Her fathers experience in the camp always found ways to express itself within the setup of their family in subtle and hostile ways. She recalls: My siblings and I, whenever we mentioned the Camp or if my mom would mention it, we would all go silent because we knew it was something very serious…it’s like they would trigger flashbacks for my dad.12 The experience of being in a constant state of alert, and sacrificing leisure and rest was a big part of Michael’s life. Even after he was released and settled comfortably with his family, he would continuously remind his children, “Whenever you’re in a building or a situation, make sure you can find a way out.”13 Yeeva, as a toddler was always reminded to have a travel bag ready to go in case of further emergency. Thus, the experience of one man interned is essentially isolating him not only from himself but his family who are also victims of the experience. Michael would also not shy away from weaponizing his camp experience to silence others and assert his dominance within the family as Yeeva recalls: His knowledge about the Camp could be wielded as a weapon ... If they didn’t do something right or he didn’t like their attitudes, he would remind them how lucky we were, thereby reminding us of what he had to go through at a young age. 14 His experience also made him stoic and derided him of sensitivities. He would never apologise for his wrongdoings as 12 D’Souza, The Deoli Wallahs, 105. 13 D’Souza, The Deoli Wallahs, 87. 14 D’Souza, The Deoli Wallahs, 89.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 22 nobody apologised to him about his experience. His demeanour would put the women of the family in a false position to always be sensitive and caregiving, as it was an exclusive domain for the women. Yeeva says, “We’ve talked about how, especially for the women in our family, we’ve always had to put on the hat of compassion and be able to forgive.”15 However, Yeeva believes that over the years, the AIDCI has been successful in providing him a space to articulate his thoughts and experience. She also believes that it helped her father manage his emotions better around his loved ones. Yeeva’s father’s experience would also shape her own in various ways. She believes, “It (Michael’s experience) turned into something that was a barrier that separated me from being able to connect with peers or people my age.”16 It would be very taxing of her to recount to her peers who they were and how they ended up in the United States. It would also be traumatic for her to gauge people’s reaction to her experience, she recalls one American insensitively tagged their experience as “Exotic”. Thus, entire identities were changed as a result of the interment. Yeeva’s account shows how the Deoli experience was not a self-contained one. It percolated and penetrated various lives and ushered silences in the lives it percolated. She remembers that: We carried ourselves very quietly, and if people pushed and bullied us in school, we didn’t say anything…It made me aware that there’s this delicate balance, of Western values, of speaking up and being vocal, and Eastern ones, of being reflective, of recentring yourself.17 Michael went back to India with members of AIDCI and it was then that he finally felt heard by someone. He still 15 D’Souza, The Deoli Wallahs, 89. 16 D’Souza, The Deoli Wallahs, 90. recounts his trip as a life changing one. 3. Steven Wan Steven Wan’s experience highlights the difficulties the Chinese faced in crossing boundaries over to India as well as out to other countries. His family lived in Kalimpong until 1962 where they ran a dried goods and variety shop selling churpi (hard cheese cubes) and brick tea from Tibet. They also sold whatever Chinese items they could source from Calcutta such as soy sauce, incense and gold paper money. His mother made sausages and sold preserved meat that she brought from Calcutta. Steven’s father had migrated from Sichuan province during the Japanese invasion of China. He first settled in Shilling and used to work as a cook in a Chinese restaurant. His mother’s family was from Guangdong province who migrated to Burma where she was born. Except for his oldest brother, Yung Chiu, who was working in a jute mill in Calcutta, Steven’s entire family was taken from their house in Kalimpong at midnight on 19 November. There were eleven of them – his father, mother and nine siblings. They went from Kalimpong jail to Darjeeling jail and then finally to Deoli. In these jails, categorisation and segregation were the first things to be done. The police registered their names, birth dates, address and confiscated all the money they were carrying with them. Steven’s father was put in solitary confinement for not declaring the exact amount of money they had. They never got the money back from the staff. After this, the women were separated from the men and sent into spectre sections of the jail to break. Steven distinctly remembers the wave of confusion that swept his contemporary inmates. They did not know why they were imprisoned or where they were going. They felt completely lost. Steven says, “It was 17 D’Souza, The Deoli Wallahs, 92-93.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 23 most likely ten days after they arrived. At that time, they did not know what day of the month it was, much less that they were going to Deoli.”18 This sense of confusion was not an unconscious tool but a conscious ploy used by the jailers to maintain the status quo of power hierarchies. A deficiency of knowledge for the inmates would create lesser chances for them to organise and agitate. There are obvious parallels here to Yin Sheng Wong’s account where she recounts the widespread censorship that was unleashed within the camps. Steven provides a very detailed account of the very geography of their confinement when he recalls: Deoli Camp was divided into five wings…There was one room with and one room without a roof. There was a small area for the kitchen and a water tap for bathing or washing dishes. The toilet had no roof. If it rained, water came down into the toilet.19 Amidst such conditions, the inmates had to etch out little acts of resistance and recreation to spend time. One of the small victories recounted by Steven was the families coming together to cook. Petty theft was another act of resistance as Steven remembers that whenever they used to visit the canteen in groups, people would nick things of daily use, “Since they were already in jail, and already labelled thieves, what was the worst thing that could happen to them?”20 Such was the deep psychological effect of the internment that civilians who were innocent were made to feel comfortable and fit into their new identities as criminals. Even their freedoms came with various conditions and restrictions. After being released on 9th September, 1964 they were 18 D’Souza, The Deoli Wallahs,78. 19 D’Souza, The Deoli Wallahs, 64. 20 D’Souza, The Deoli Wallahs, 65. 21 D’Souza, The Deoli Wallahs, 66. told they could not go back to Kalimpong and had to go with the others to Calcutta. The Wan family and the other internees were dropped off by the roadside in Calcutta’s Chinatown. At 2 a.m., some of them went to sleep in a funeral home. They were woken up at 5 a.m., when the staff brought in a dead body and were thrown out onto the roadside again. Somehow, Steven’s father negotiated an arrangement for their family to settle down in a temple in Tiretta Bazaar. Their sense of mobility was heavily restricted even after their supposed release. When they finally got back to Kalimpong after getting permits they saw all their properties were looted. Their house was gone so were the goods in their godown. It was the first time Steven saw his father crying. He says, “When I left Kalimpong that time, I felt I was never going back. Why would I go? How could I go? I had to get permission to visit my hometown!”21 After being released, the state unleashed widespread suspicion on the lives of these migrants. When Steven applied to emigrate to Canada, he learned that multiple Crime Investigation Department (CID) officials were following him. Even after such blatant state-backed repression Steven left for Canada in 1969. Until 2015, no one from the family had gone back to Kalimpong. He is the only one who made that journey back to the town where he was born. Conclusion The Chinese migration into Kolkata and their consequent out-migration satisfies and answers most of the theorisations of free and coerced migration as laid down by David Eltis.22 This was a cohort that came in through colonial networks of trade and commerce, negotiated their agencies in a 22David Eltis, ed. Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 5.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 24 foreign land, and through a generation of menial jobs could be mobile enough to be called “pariah capitalists”. Their outmigration did not happen due to any abstractions, it was a deliberate, coerced and state enforced out-migration. Their neighbourhoods now lie deserted due to the mass deportation of about 3000 Chinese from India following the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Through the oral accounts of Yin Sheng Wong, Steven Wan and Yeeva Cheng, the layered history and experiment of Chinese migrants in India gets a personal albeit detailed angle. Through their accounts the complex networks of migration from various provinces of China to Kolkata and later to places like Shillong, Assam and Kalimpong gets highlighted. There is considerable data about their occupational and family history within these accounts. The above-mentioned accounts also provide nuanced experiences of migration, imprisonment and isolation. The conditions within the camp such as provisions of nutrition, health care, recreation and widespread censorship added to the compound and complicated times which these individuals and their families had to go through with numerous parallels and differences within the accounts. Yeeva Cheng’s account is a unique one as she highlights the intergenerational effect of the Chinese diaspora within a familial setup. However, the literature dealing with the Chinese presence and migration in general are substantiated enough to answer why people migrate but they fall short of answering “why do certain people not migrate and choose to stay back?” This is a unique area of interrogation where more inspection is needed.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 25 BIBLIOGRAPHY D'Souza, Dilip, and Joy Ma. 2020. The Deoli Wallahs: The True Story of the 1962 ChineseIndian Internment. New Delhi.: Pan Macmillan Publishing India Private Limited. Eltis, David, ed. 2002. Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fisher, Michael H. 2014. Migration: A World History. N.p.: OUP USA. Hall, Stuart. 2019. Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora. Edited by David Morley. N.p.: Duke University Press. Hasan, Ali. 1982. “The Chinese in Calcutta: a study of a racial minority.” Aspects of society and culture in Calcutta, 85-89. Oxfeld, Ellen. 1993. Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong: Family and Enterprise in an Overseas Chinese Community. N.p.: Cornell University Press. Xing, Zhang. 2011. Preserving Cultural Identity Through Education: The Schools of the Chinese Community in Calcutta, India. N.p.: Manohar Publications. Xing, Zhang. 2009. “The Bowbazar Chinatown.” India International Centre Quarterly 36 (3/4): 396-413. Xing, Zhang, and Tansen Sen. 2013. “The Chinese in South Asia.” Routledge Handbook of The Chinese Diaspora, 205-26.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 26 Writers of War: Narrativizing the Lives of Indian Soldiers Recruited during the First World War (1914-1918) Devanshi Panda and Tarini Agarwal Second year, Department of History Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi Abstract This research paper is an attempt at unearthing the experiences of the Indian sepoys employed during the First World War through the examination of the letters they wrote. Feelings of nostalgia, desperation, heartbreak, and longing for the homeland spill out of the pages of these poignant letters. These letters reveal a trove of information about the hardships these soldiers faced in a war-torn, hostile environment. While on the one hand, they tell us about the harrowing conditions of war and the racial prejudices the soldiers endured, on the other hand, we find evidence that they “frequently transgressed the empire's racial boundaries” to integrate into local economies and societies. The authors of this research paper recognise that these letters are not unadulterated iterations; these were doubly censored, by the British officers-in-charge and by the sepoys themselves. The former published censor reports, which translated and preserved extracts from the letters while deleting seditious information, preventing the shipment of certain letters altogether, and monitoring the morale of the regiments. By using letters and censor reports as primary sources of information, this paper seeks to take a bottom-up view of the First World War and shift focus to hitherto marginalised Indian sepoy narratives. Ultimately, however, it is imperative to consider these letters as more than mere factual documents and recognise the deeply human texture of feelings and emotions they embody. Introduction Santanu Das in “Race, Empire and First World War Writing” considers the censored mail of Indian sepoys the most “substantial source” despite the “scattered archival records, some interviews, and the voice recordings of Indian POWs in Germany.”1 He mentions in his recent work that the First World War “produced, among other things, a sudden and irrepressible bulimia of letter-writing”.2 Between March and April 1915, Indian soldiers from France were writing 10,000 letters a week. Today, we barely have any access to the original letters. What we do have access to are 1 Santanu Das, ‘Indians at Home, Mesopotamia and France, 1914–1918: Towards an Intimate History’, in Race, Empire and First World War Writing, ed. Santanu Das, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 70–89, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511973659, 82. extracts from these letters, translated into English, for the purpose of inclusion into censor reports. Yet, these extracts are treasure troves in themselves. There is much that has been wiped off the memory card of the contribution of Indian soldiers in the First World War, but these extracts, no matter how ‘original’, provide information for the historian seeking to uncover the complex lives and contributions of Indian soldiers in the war. David Omissi’s excellent collection of these letters in his “Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18” and the British Library’s digitisation of the 2 Jock Phillips, ‘The Quiet Western Front: The First World War and New Zealand Memory’, in Race, Empire and First World War Writing, ed. Santanu Das, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 231–48, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511973659.013, 238.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 27 original censor reports have greatly aided us to make the discoveries that follow. Writing the Sepahi Between the 1910s and the present, the global geopolitical scenario has undergone massive shifts as a result of which the construction of the historical record of the War too has altered. Within schools of historical writing, the rise of the postcolonial has been accompanied by the acceptance of non-traditional sources of history. The contours of the past additionally, have increasingly come to be viewed through a socio-cultural lens in comparison to early emphasis on military and political perspectives. Any attempt to trace the changing nature of engagement with Indian participation in the First World War must be contextualised within broader historiographical trends. Writing on the First World War began to be published even before its culmination. These documents, often produced with a top-down, military-driven, propagandacentric approach, attempted to justify the government’s "conduct in their decision leading to war." 3 Prompted by antigovernment sentiments in England and the Fischer debate in Germany, 4 the 1960s and 70s witnessed a shift from such perspectives to the discovery of new vantages that emphasised concerns of economic importance and labouring classes. The third phase5 of World War historiography saw a new focus on social 3 Alan Kramer, ‘Recent Historiography of the First World War: (Part I)’, Journal of Modern European History 12, no. 1 (February 2014): 5–27, https://doi.org/ 10.17104/1611-8944_2014_1_5. 4 Kramer, 15. 5 Ravneet Kaur, ‘Review of Historiographic Approaches to the Sikh Participation in WW1’, JETIR 8, no. 5 (May 2021), 238, https://www.jetir.org/papers/ JETIR2105830.pdf. and cultural histories which was pioneered by the works of Paul Fussell6 and John Keegan.7 Even such avant-garde histories, however, accorded little recognition to Indian participation in the conflict. Any mention made of the colonial effort was dominated by racial stereotyping that typecast the sepoy as "brave to the point of fanaticism… but… less consistent fighters than more dogged northerners."8 In other writings, Indian soldiers were invoked to justify and further imperialist policies. Deafening silence, however, dominated the discourse. With growing interest in global histories that view different parts of the world as interconnected sub-units shaped by larger historical processes, the 1990s ushered in hitherto unexplored research on the relationship between the European empires and their colonies as well as the role of the latter in shaping the course of the Great War. Such a changing framework was accompanied by polemic engagement that questioned the Eurocentric nature of history writing. Santanu Das’s "Race, Empire and First World War Writing" and David Omissi's "The Sepoy and the Raj" employ nontraditional sources including songs, poetry and most importantly the letters written by sepoys serving in Europe and West Asia to reconstruct their experience of the War. Other works by scholars including 6 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 7 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). 8Kaur, ‘Review of Historiographic Approaches to the Sikh Participation in WW1’, 234.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 28 Christian Koller and Philippa Levine have sought to study the intersections between race, gender, and colonialism in the context of the Indian experience in Europe. Enveloping Lives on Bits of Paper: The Soldiers’ Letters The letters written by Indian soldiers during the Great War were world travellers; carrying back and forth human emotion and feeling, with words spelt with the rust of war. The places from which these letters were written vary considerably. Many were written in France and England. The letters from England have frequently been written from hospitals, reflecting the wounded state of the soldier who was writing. Hospitals that feature prominently are the Brighton Hospital, the Milton Hospital and the Kitchener’s Indian Hospital. Soldiers seem to have been treated exceedingly well in these locations, and many of them mention visits by the king himself. Despite being in a hospital, a Subedar-Major wrote to his friend in India “I have never been so happy in my life as I am here”. 9 However, the decision of the British to send back wounded soldiers to the battlefield after they had healed was deeply unpopular among Indian soldiers.10 Many lamented that only those who had lost an arm or a leg were permitted to go back home. We also find letters being written from Hong Kong, China, Ceylon, and Mesopotamia. Letters from Germany were written by those who were taken prisoners of war. Letters were also written from hospital ships and military depots. Soldiers often wrote back to their families in India 9 David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters 1914-18 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1999), 27, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27283-9. 10 Jarboe, Indian Soldiers in World War I, 16. and to friends posted in other regiments. The languages used in the letters are numerous; letters were penned in Urdu, Hindi, Gurmukhi, Marathi, Garhwali, Pashto, Gujarati and Gurkhali. What is immediately noticeable in many of these letters, is the immense loyalty towards the government or “sirkar”. A Muslim officer wrote to his brother in December 1914, “What better occasion can I find than this to prove the loyalty of my family to the British Government? Turkey, it is true, is a Muslim power, but what has it to do with us? Turkey is nothing at all to us”. 11 Many Indian Muslims were caught in a religious dilemma when Turkey entered the war since it was the home of the Khalifa. However, except the Pathans, most Indian Muslims like the one mentioned above, decided to fight the Turks if required. Soldiers mentioned that since they had eaten the salt of the sirkar, they ought to perform their duty with utmost loyalty. Religion for most of the soldiers was a core part of their identity. Sikhs prayed to the Guru and mention taking his name before plunging into battle and Hindu soldiers compared the war to the Mahabharata. Many even go on to say that the World War was much greater than the battle of the “Pandevs and Kauris”. 12 mAeroplanes that drop bombs from the sky have been compared to the great bird of Vishnu, Garuda. Muslims compared the war to Karbala. They also frequently made urgent requests to obtain copies of the Qu’ran13 and would ask their families back home to consult the maulvi regarding how 11 Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters 1914-18, 51. 12 Omissi, 1914–18, 51. 13 Omissi, 1914–18, 116.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 29 the prayers should be read. 14This is not to say that the strict boundaries of religion were never transgressed; we have instances of men consuming meat not allowed by their religion, upper-caste Hindus accepting food from sweepers, 15 and of liaisons with white women which are on the whole considered “shameful” acts as it “blurred” the lines of caste. White women were frequently encoded in terms such as fruits and flowers and the men wrote back to their friends saying that they could send white women back for marriage. A Sikh writing to (presumably) a friend compares the lovemaking style of the white women to the local custom in India.16 Letters containing references to white women were frequently censored and such letters either did not pass or were edited to delete such references. As is common with human nature, these soldiers compared the places they came from to the place they were posted in. They compared the good manners and etiquette of the English folk to Indians and talked about the fine nature of English buildings. England’s newspapers were considered excellent, while the newspapers of Punjab were described as “quail-fighting” ones. 17 The fixed prices of goods amused and impressed many soldiers, perhaps due to the bargaining tradition that they were accustomed to in India. Children are often found “pretty” and “well-mannered”. France is described as beautiful and the men and women are described as honest and 14 Omissi, 1914–18, 112. 15 Omissi, 1914–18, 155. 16 Omissi, 1914–18, 114. 17 Omissi, 1914–18, 33. 18 Omissi, 1914–18, 157. 19 Omissi, 1914–18, 357. 20 Omissi, 1914–18, 61. very polite. The time in France is in fact called the “golden age” by a soldier.18 Many were even inspired to adopt European customs once they cross the border back to India, such as the freedom for men and women to choose their own spouses.19 As awestruck as the men were by the sights and services received abroad, they frequently incited their relatives to not enlist. It is interesting to note that these letters bypassed the censor. According to one censor, this was because the sentiment was not considered to be anti-British; it was considered to be a simple desire of the soldier to save his loved ones from hardship. “For God's sake don't come, don't come, don't come to this war in Europe,” a letter urgently pleads, written by a Havildar from France in 1915.20 However, by 1917, this sort of discouragement became sparse. ‘Intoxication’ was deemed an offence for Indian soldiers in the army, but some men wrote letters requesting drugs such as charas and opium.21 Drugs may have served the purpose of alleviating both physical and emotional pain, alleviating combat trauma, and strengthening the bonds between companions to lessen the fear of battle.22 That the soldiers were aware of censorship and still made such requests is intriguing. For obvious reasons, these letters were withheld. Though a surprising exception to the rule is present in one of the letters requesting opium, as it was passed.23 21 Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 41. 22 Łukasz Kamieński, ‘Drugs’, ed. Peter Gatrell et al., 1914-1918-Online International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 2019, https://doi.org/10.15463/IE1418.11347. 23 Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters 1914-18, 144.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 30 Perhaps the most significant, though not entirely useful way in which the soldiers attempted to transgress the borders of the empire was by using coded language. The most common code words were ‘black pepper’ and ‘red pepper’; with the former referring to Indian soldiers and the latter referring to British soldiers. This was deployed to relate information about which race at a given point in time was employed more in battle and was also used to gain information regarding the “market” for Indian soldiers back home. Many soldiers would weave tales and make up characters to represent the warring nations.24 Of Clandestine Correspondence: The Censor and Sepoy The Censor Office was established in the early months of the war with the aim to monitor the morale of the troops. A shift in the formatting of reports is discernible. While the earliest reports, published between the end of 1914 and the middle of 1915 are censored by hand, with comments written on margins, the activity becomes more systematic by the end of 1915 with each letter being appended with comments as well as verdicts of passage or failure. Censor reports are followed by detailed indexes that provide insight into the letter and its content. By 1917, as the war picked up speed, however, a return to early years was noticed. By the end of the war in the autumn of 1918, short reports were followed by handwritten letters. Greater assurance of a British victory in the months preceding the end of the war may have 24 Omissi, 93. 25 Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars, 68-70. 26 Singh, 68-70. allowed for the loosening of controls over Indian correspondence. While ideals of izzat, dharm and shaheedi are often invoked in the letters of these soldiers, British officers did understand that this loyalty was at least in part motivated by the desire to return home safely. As Gajendra Singh suggests, loyalty thus may have been "internalised" or may have been "a simple economic exchange of labour".25 In fact, juxtaposing ideals "could have occurred, as if, in the same breath."26 Despite such a sense of loyalty, racial stereotypes coloured the vision of censors. Each letter translated for the Censor Report mentions the ethnicity (Pathan, Dogra, Gurkha, Punjabi, Afridi etc) and religious affiliations (Hindu, Muslim, Parsi or Sikh) of soldiers. A weekly censor report from 16th January 1915 for example, claims that Dogras are more prone to despondency while Sikhs and Muslims are praiseworthy of government efforts. Morale too, was gauged on racial lines, with one report suggesting that the Pathans are affected, as "expected". The letters, however, themselves testify to the complexity of Indian identity, with the weekly report published on 30th January, 1915 suggesting that newly arrived Parsi soldiers are "happy with being treated as equals".27 Despite their racial overtones, these censor reports and the extracts they forwarded to their senior officers provide insight into the emotional experience of war. British censors observed that the letters of these soldiers give a "melancholy impression of fatalistic resignation to a fate 27 ‘Source Records: Historic Sources to Help You Research Sikhs WW1’, Empire, Faith & War, accessed 10 March 2022, http://www.empirefaithwar.com/tell-theirstory/research-your-soldier/source-records.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 31 that is regarded as speedy and inevitable".28 Letters from the trenches arrived irregularly for much of 1915 and early 1916 but even those received were plagued by an "undeniable sense of depression". 29 Upon an examination of 220 letters written by wounded Indian soldiers in military hospices by David Omissi, it was revealed that less than 1% of these letters were written with an "admirable spirit".30 While more attention was drawn to those letters that expressed happy sentiments, the censor officers admitted that even though letters of both praise and despondency were written, those that displayed sentiments of the latter kind had increased. Soldiers from various regiments echo this sentiment. One letter speaks of no hope of survival and suggests that those who have been captured are saved from the "tempest".31 The war, it lamented, brought "the whole world to destruction".32 Officers were also greatly concerned with the growing use of poetry and assigned it to "mental disquietude".33 A part of the letter, written by Basant Singh to a friend in India reads- "despair has struck us dumb".34 Another letter, written by Sham Sher Bohre to Chandan Singh claims that the soldiers were stuck "between the devil and deep sea."35 Sant Singh, writing to his wife testifies poignantly, "We perish in the deserts…Our life is living death. For what sin are we being punished?"36 For the British, the censoring of these letters was crucial to curtailing unrest in the colonies. Spread of such views may have hampered the war efforts and demoralised 28 ‘Source Records’, Collection: December 1914-1915. 29 ‘Source Records’. 30 Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters 1914-18, 115. 31 ‘Source Records’, December 1914- August 1915. 32 ‘Source Records’. aspiring recruits. Yet, these letters have been inconsistently withheld. Dated to 1916, a letter from a soldier in the 38th CI Horse which complained of the abuse and severity of camp as well as the tyranny of his superiors was passed at the regimental office but flagged as "dangerous" later.37 It is likely that the receipt of a large amount (the British Library alone has digitised several hundred letters) made it impossible to analyse them fully. Along with the Censor Report of 16th January, 1915, is attached a copy of a card issued by the YMCA. The card, inscribed on which is a psalm for the Bible, evidences that even as Indian soldiers languished in Western trenches, efforts were being made to convert them. These cards were brought to the attention of the Censor General immediately and while these efforts are praised as being "kind and wellmeaning",38 a request was made to stop the circulation of these cards. The British, it is apparent, were fearful of angering Hindu, Muslim and Sikh soldiers, and thus paid close attention to the passage of missionary correspondence. Suspicion was similarly raised when letters carried requests for items to be sent from India. Correspondence with demands for charas and opium were deleted or withheld and a similar approach was used when requests were made for seeds like bhailawa, the consumption of which could induce inflammation and allow soldiers to leave the trenches for hospitals and give them a chance to return to India. Attention 33 ‘Source Records’, April- May 1915. 34 ‘Source Records’, September- October 1915. 35 ‘Source Records’. 36 ‘Source Records’. 37 ‘Source Records’, December 1915- January 1916. 38 ‘Source Records’, December 1914- August 1915.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 32 was paid to attempts at espionage with unfamiliar signs being erased off letters. It is important to ask if soldiers were aware of such censorship. While early letters are unsure but alert and often use phrases including "it is suspicious to write more"39 and "we cannot write a word",40 later letters confirm that soldiers knew they were being censored. In several instances, letters were addressed to censors themselves. A letter by Niser Muhammad Khan dated to late 1916 states clearly, "Now look at you, what strict orders there are against our writing. Our letters are inspected by a Saahib. If it were known, we would get seven years rigorous imprisonment."41 An examination of these letters and censor reports reveals to us the myriad ways in which engagement with censorship both personal and institutional, shaped the voice of the sipahis. Conclusion: Of History and Memory Nuanced research has helped to ease the collective amnesia around the global impact of the First World War. Yet, the recognition that these soldiers have received is marginal. In many British schools, a lacuna overshadows histories of crime and colonisation. “At present, Empire is a hidden part of the history syllabus”, commented Pepe Hart, a former head teacher at a school in Bath, in an article by the Indian Express. 42 Efforts to fill the gaping hole must be made, but an opposite danger in this attempt is the unconditional valorisation of these soldiers. In an attempt to memorialise these soldiers, it must not be forgotten that they were complex humans, responding to alien conditions in a foreign land. Such contextualisation should not simplify our understanding of their lives; instead, we must recognise the complexities of their realities. These soldiers were at once “victims and killers”.43 Consider the blogger Sofia Ahmad’s take on the ‘order of merit’ her great, great-grandfather received. “The fact that he (her great, greatgrandfather who was a Subedar-Major) was probably fighting on the Mesopotamian campaign against the Muslim Ottoman Empire, doesn’t exactly fill me with ecstatic pride”, she wrote on her blog in 2014,44 when the ‘Poppy Hijab’ controversy occurred. This paper is a sincere attempt at reconstructing the lives of those previously relegated to the margins. Their letters shed light upon a complex tapestry of human emotions that recorded an exemplary moment in human history and thus, these individuals and their extraordinary lives cannot be ignored any longer. 39 ‘Source Records’. 40 ‘Source Records’. 41 ‘Source Records’. 42 Adrija Roychowdhury, ‘Why History of the British Empire Is Not Taught Enough in UK Schools’, News, The Indian Express (blog), 16 December 2022, https://indianexpress.com/article/research/why-historyof-british-empire-is-not-taught-enough-in-uk-schools8327905/. 43 Santanu Das, ‘Introduction’, in Race, Empire and First World War Writing, ed. Santanu Das, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–32, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511973659.001, 13-14. 44 Sofia Ahmad, ‘Why I Won’t Be Wearing the ‘Poppy Hijab’, Media Diversified, 5 November 2014, https://mediadiversified.org/2014/11/05/why-i-wont-bewearing-the-poppy-hijab/.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 33 BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahmad, Sofia. ‘Why I Won’t Be Wearing the ‘Poppy Hijab’. Media Diversified, 5 November 2014. https://mediadiversified.org/2014/11/05/why-i-wont-be-wearing-the-poppy-hijab/. Das, Santanu. ‘Indians at Home, Mesopotamia and France, 1914–1918: Towards an Intimate History’. In Race, Empire and First World War Writing, edited by Santanu Das, 1st ed., 70– 89. Cambridge University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511973659. ———. ‘Introduction’. In Race, Empire and First World War Writing, edited by Santanu Das, 1st ed., 1–32. Cambridge University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511973659.001. Empire, Faith & War. ‘Source Records: Historic Sources to Help You Research Sikhs WW1’. Accessed 10 March 2022. http://www.empirefaithwar.com/tell-their-story/research-yoursoldier/source-records. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. 25th anniversary ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Jarboe, Andrew Tait. Indian Soldiers in World War I: Race and Representation in an Imperial War. Studies in War, Society, and the Military. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Kamieński, Łukasz. ‘Drugs’. Edited by Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson. 1914-1918-Online International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 2019. https://doi.org/10.15463/IE1418.11347. Kaur, Ravneet. ‘Review of Historiographic Approaches to the Sikh Participation in WW1’. JETIR 8, no. 5 (May 2021). https://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2105830.pdf. Keegan, John. The Face of Battle. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Kramer, Alan. ‘Recent Historiography of the First World War: (Part I)’. Journal of Modern European History 12, no. 1 (February 2014): 5–27. https://doi.org/10.17104/1611- 8944_2014_1_5. Omissi, David. Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters 1914-18. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27283-9. Phillips, Jock. ‘The Quiet Western Front: The First World War and New Zealand Memory’. In Race, Empire and First World War Writing, edited by Santanu Das, 1st ed., 231–48. Cambridge University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511973659.013.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 34 Roychowdhury, Adrija. ‘Why History of the British Empire Is Not Taught Enough in UK Schools’. News. The Indian Express (blog), 16 December 2022. https://indianexpress.com/article/research/why-history-of-british-empire-is-not-taughtenough-in-uk-schools-8327905/. Singh, Gajendra. The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 35 The Canvas-Space of the Self: Decoding Partition Trauma Narratives in Art History Sara Batool and Aadrit Banerjee Second year, Department of English Ramjas College, University of Delhi Abstract The Partition of 1947 did not only split the two nations apart but also led to the division of hearts, inflicting a deep sense of trauma upon the individual and community — the tremors of which could be felt even today. The memories of Partition that ruptured the coherent sense of space and self, otherwise repressed, found their expression in trauma narratives of various kinds. This paper delves into art history as a means of narrativising the trauma of Partition: examining the artworks of Tyeb Mehta, Anjolie Ela Menon and Zarina Hashmi, in the view of recent trauma studies, and feminist works, attempting to understand the artist's personal rencontre with the Partition, the relationship of the personal with the political, and the effect of the space upon the self. Introduction India’s emergence as an independent nation was marred by the horrors of a Partition drawn on sketchy lines that split the country apart, and led to what is commonly described as the division of hearts, inflicting a deep sense of trauma upon the individual, and leaving entire generations of communities fraught with a sense of social as well as psychological instability. The memories of Partition that severed the coherent sense of space and self — otherwise repressed, undocumented and otherised — found their expression in trauma narratives. This paper delves into art history as a means of narrativizing the trauma of Partition, focusing on how the canvases of Tyeb Mehta, Anjolie Ela Menon, and Zarina Hashmi, become the medium of expression of the artists’ personal rencontre with Partition, and reflect their fragmented-sense of self and search for a coherent identity. The canvas function as mnemonics of the “personal 1 Jasmeet Singh, “Painting the Trauma of Partition”, Academia, accessed June 21, 2022, element intrinsic in public pain”1 that helps the artists to come to terms with their trauma that they could not have accepted or elucidated upon otherwise. It becomes a space whose severing creates a crisis for the self, and shows it trying to weave back the pieces together to initiate a process of recovery. By examining the artworks in view of Urvashi Butalia’s ‘feminist’ work, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India and Cathy Caruth’s Unacclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, this paper looks at Partition as seen in art to increase our understanding of trauma and memory, spaces and their relationships with the self. These artists, having had such close experiences of the Partition that have been imprinted on their minds as indelible traumatic memory, “carry an impossible history within them or they become themselves the symptoms of a history that www.academia.edu/30477238/Painting_the_trauma_of_p artition.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 36 they cannot entirely possess”. 2 Their art coalesces at the same “specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet”. 3 At the heart of these paintings “is thus an enigmatic testimony not only to the nature of violent events but to what, in trauma, resists simple comprehension”. 4 It is through representation that it is “traversed and ... crossed” and thus the non-verbal medium of painting helps these artist-victims “to process what has happened”. 5 Development of such a trauma narrative in turn becomes a significant step in trauma recovery, as through each stage of painting, there is an increase in the sense of control over the response to traumatic events which “produce profound and lasting change in physiological arousal, emotion, cognition and memory”. 6 Central to this process of representation is also imagination which further aids the victims to gain a “sense of experience”. As Saul Friedlander pointed out, trauma is resolved only “when memory comes”7– in public life these memories, whose residues often surface through free associations according to psychoanalysis, appear through the creation of art. 2 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction”, in Trauma: Explorations In Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 5. 3 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction: The Wound and the Voice” in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press 1996), 3. 4 Caruth, “The Wound and the Voice", 6. 5 Jasmeet, “Painting the Trauma of Partition”, 3. 6 Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery (USA: Basic Books, 1992), 34. 7 Jasmeet, “Painting the Trauma of Partition”, 6. “… in your dream, it is a nightmare” — Tyeb Mehta. Tyeb Mehta, whose works are now considered benchmarks of Indian modernism, grew up in Mumbai in the Dawoodi Shiite Bohra community amidst the violence and upheaval caused by Partition and the anxieties and turbulences that followed Independence. 8 As a Muslim, these experiences were more profound and intimate for him, and Mehta's paintings embody this undercurrent of violence which were elements of his childhood. 9 When he was a child, during the Partition, Tyeb had witnessed a young Muslim man being mobbed, slaughtered and stoned to death in the street below the window of his Mohammed Ali Road-house. He had suffered from fever for days afterwards. 10 The smashed figure had found its way into his art as the recurring motif of the Falling Figure. In the Falling Figure, comparable to Edward Munch's The Scream (1893), Mehta represents this primal fear. The mutilated, disfigured and flayed flesh11 on the canvas, which is hurtling downwards, suspended in immobility, limbs speeding like a projectile and an expression of frozen horror on his face, 12 mirrors Mehta’s self — fractured by his childhood trauma of the Partition. Throughout his life, he would work with images which haunted him. These 8Arani Bose, “Tyeb Mehta (1925 – 2009)” ArtAsiaPacific, September 01, 2009, https://artasiapacific.com/news/tyeb-mehta-1925-2009. 9 Artiana, “Tyeb Mehta”, accessed 21 June, 2022. http://tyeb-mehta.com/. 10 Nina Martyris. “Tyeb Mehta stood for hope over hype.” Times of India, July 03, 2009, https://m.timesofindia.com/city/mumbai/tyeb-mehtastood-for-hope-over-hype. 11 Artiana, “Tyeb Mehta”. 12 Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Last Supper”, in The Making of Modern Indian Art, The Progressives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 218.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 37 obsessional images, autobiographical in import, gradually gained significance as Tyeb externalised them, reflecting them against the wider canvas of society. 13 The plummeting protagonist gravitating towards the metaphorical abyss suggests a more universal and existential human crisis, typical to those who, like Mehta, experience such trauma of dislocation that severs their hitherto sense of identity and belonging. Mehta, fascinated by Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman's monochromatic “Zip” paintings, initiated what was called his Diagonal Series, violently dividing the canvas-scape diagonally – like the country after Partition – thereby creating a dislocation within two triangles and simultaneously disjointing and fragmenting it. 14 This canvas-space15 resembled the new map with the Radcliffe Line zigzagging through it, and the fragmented and disjointed figure symbolized the self-dislocated from its previous sense of wholeness due to the fracturing of the space. To Mehta, the Trussed Bull (1956), another of his vital imagery which he would repeat in several paintings, was associated with the widespread post-Partition sense of disillusionment. The bull became a synonym for that national and masculinist condition of humanity unable to realize its potency and virility and a critical metaphor of the national and the individual self that 13 Ranjit Hoskote, Tyeb Mehta: Ideas, Images and Exchanges (New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2005), 14. 14 Tyeb Mehta, “Tyeb Mehta: Diagonal XV”, Christie's, accessed March 10, 2023, www.christies.com/en/lot/lot6158278. 15 Artiana, “Tyeb Mehta”. 16 Artiana, “Tyeb Mehta”. 17 Shailaja Tripathi, "Early works of Tyeb Mehta and the birth of his key motifs...bull and falling figure", Stir had failed to achieve the stability which the Partition had promised.15 The trauma narrative of Partition in Mehta's expressionist paintings is for him: “my life… my reaction to something I see or experience and is very private”16 — it is his struggle to reflect and find a coherence sense of self, to create a space for that self, wherein he can come to terms with the catastrophic history which is: “so stark that it couldn’t be happening outside that it can only be happening in a dream. And in your dream, it is a nightmare”. 17 “I think we don’t want to remember” — Anjolie Ela Menon. Anjolie Ela Menon was seven years old at the time of Partition, when she fled Rawalpindi with the rest of her family. “I grew up and became a painter,” she once said, “It strikes me as very strange that very little came out of those experiences [of Partition]. I think we don’t want to remember.”18 Menon is part of a coterie of avant-garde contemporary female artists who broke away from convention to chart a new course of freedom and empowerment in their artworks. Her artworks, such as the series Coming Home, depict the feminine face very frequently — shadowed in melancholy, the eyes specifically darkened as if the worldview of women itself has been distorted by patriarchal themes, themes of red interplaying with an World, July 24, 2020, www.stirworld.com/think-opinionsearly-works-of-tyeb-mehta-and-the-birth-of-his-keymotifsbull-and-falling-figure. 18 Moni Mohsin, “‘The wounds have never healed’: living through the terror of partition”, The Guardian, August 2, 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/02/wounds-havenever-healed-living-through-terror-partitionindiapakistan-1947.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 38 indistinct, ambiguous background to suggest the violence that is interwoven into the mundane lives of her protagonists. There are few overt references to Partition in her work; as Menon said, the act of remembering the kind of uninhibited and rampant terror and violence caused by Partition is one that encounters specific resistance. Most of Anjolie Ela Menon’s works are based in the present, marking her position as a contemporary artist, but what is the present, after all, if not a retelling of the past? This is seen most clearly in her work Mataji, in which we see an old woman, presumably a grandmother, who is sitting on a charpai and knitting a red garment. The redness of the garment that her protagonist is knitting contrasted with the pallid dullness of her surroundings, a mnemonic for the trauma of Partition. Knitting is an act that is very closely linked to the way we tell stories, and is generally associated with old age. Fragments of memory are selectively drawn from an experience and layered in a way so as to make cohesive sense out of an overall meaninglessness that surrounds temporal reality, just as threads are woven and interwoven with each other to make a whole garment. This is true for Anjolie Ela Menon herself, whose memory of Partition oscillates between trying to escape violence during riots following Partition, and becoming a witness to the violence meted out to people around her in the process. As Cathy Caruth says, “the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with 19 Caruth, “The Wound and the Voice", 8. 20 “Zarina Hashmi — ‘My Work is About Writing' | TateShots”. Tate. 2013. https://youtu.be/jXJpbpvcMDU. 21 Patricia Waugh, Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (United States: Oxford University Press 2006), 64. another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound.”19 “… it hit me much later” — Zarina Hashmi. “…when you’re young, you don’t get it..it hit me much later”, 20 Zarina once said while speaking about the immensity of the sense of dislocation and homelessness experienced by people during Partition. Paul de Man’s critical theory about reference and impact, as seen through the lens of trauma theory insists, precisely, on the inescapability of its belated impact.21 Zarina Hashmi did not migrate during Partition. She lived through it as a ten- yearold, then left the country when she got married at the age of twenty-one, while her family relocated to Karachi.22 What is significant in her self-description is how living in New York since 1976 as an exile led to a great lose of the language to articulate the truama she experienced. Dislocation and homelessness returned to Zarina, along with the incomprehensibility of what had occurred, over the course of her life. It sprang up clear and stark in her artwork, drawing in thousands of survivors of Partition who had experienced trauma differently, but who connected with the kind of cultural fracture that she depicted. One of her most famous works, Dividing Line, shows a thick, jagged black line running across a cream page, otherwise also dotted with black but of a less defined nature, reminiscent of the Radcliffe Line separating India from Pakistan. The line reappears in the woodcut Atlas of My World, signifying the magnitude of collective trauma it caused by the snaky black demarcation running beyond the borders of South East Asia, rupturing it. 22 Tate, "An interview with Zarina Hashmi," in Smarthistory. December 17, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/zarina-hashmi-my-work-isabout-writing/.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 39 Zarina once talked about how she liked woodblock printing because she wanted to ‘gouge the lines out’, much as boundaries had been gouged out during Partition.23 The violence of the act seems almost contradictory to the structural purity of Hashmi’s lines- a reminder of how cartography elides the violence that went hand in hand with the formation of these boundaries. Zarina Hashmi’s sense of loss of both home and language are frequent motifs in her work. Letters from her sister, written sparsely in the Nastaliq script, find a place between thick black lines.24 One letter in particular is a reminder of immense grief, loss and trauma. The letter conveys news of the death of Hashmi’s mother after their relocation to Karachi, and seems very short- almost brusque. Zarina pasted the geometrical frameworks of a house onto the letter, three walls bordering it and a triangular roof covering it; an attempt to collate all that she had left of a home and family. Maps overlay more of such letters. The minimalism of these designs is both a reminder of how the violent aftermath of Partition has been continually repressed for years in the face of the nation-state and how it has nevertheless structured our lives in the present-day scenario. The letters signify the importance of language in Hashmi’s life, writing as a way to bridge the gulf of distance, geographical boundaries and separation from home, or hijr. Conclusion There has always been a lacuna in art history when it comes to the depiction of trauma as experienced by women coming from female artists during Partition. In this sense, the creative canvases of Menon and Zarina become significant for they manage to portray the turmoil of the female self trying to come to terms with the trauma 23 "Artist Zarina in the exhibition: “Zarina: Paper Like Skin,” Hammer Museum, 2012. https://youtu.be/SDoCSEJOJG0. 24 Tate, "Interview with Hashmi". caused by the Partition of the space. While many aspects of post- Partition trauma, such as dislocation, displacement, homelessness, intergenerational trauma, the incomprehensibility of experience and a background of the violence that surrounds the lives of women have been touched upon by these artists, a far larger history of violence is written upon women’s bodies that is covered up and not easily spoken of by women themselves. Artists, or even writers who are able to perceive the female body as ‘the Other’ can still co-opt the horror of these stories and make it a part of their discourse, as evident by so many male writers and artists who take up the mantle of telling women’s stories. In literature itself, it is only as late as the 80’s when women begin to document the accounts of rape, murder and abduction that have taken place on both sides of the border. A social worker named Kamlaben Patel wrote a part memoir, part documentary book titled Mool Suta Ukhde (Torn from the Roots) in which she recounted nearly 75,000 women having been raped and abducted, and if Kashmir was taken into account, close to a 100,000. When asked why she hadn’t written the book earlier, she said, “I found it difficult to believe that human beings could be like this…I have seen such abnormal things, I kept asking myself, what is there to write, why should I write it…”25 Therefore, an acute feminist lens is needed to study the documentation of the Partition experience, to analyse where the feminine self stands, and how it had since then navigated through the silence, trauma, and crisis of space and identity. Nevertheless, as we achieve more 25 Urvashi Butalia, "Women", The Other Side of Violence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998), 133.

I j t i h a d V o l u m e 9 | 40 distance from Partition, if only in a temporal sense, the hope of being able to revisit the point of violation, the circumstances that led up to it and of going beyond the silence that surrounds the histories of women becomes stronger. Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence and Aanchal Malhotra’s Remnants of a Separation are prime examples of this. As Butalia describes the hesitance that people showed when talking about women who had ‘disappeared’, she says that here, “in this small crack covered over by silence, lay the many hidden histories of Partition, the histories that describe the dark side of freedom.”26 It is by studying this history that we seek to understand how trauma operates today, and intimately look at the violence that has shaped and continues to shape our lives in this subcontinent. As William Dalrymple says: “In Delhi, a hard-line right-wing government rejects dialogue with Islamabad. Both countries find themselves more vulnerable than ever to religious extremism. In a sense, 1947 has yet to come to an end”27 – these trauma narratives thus become contemporaneous; the deep entrenched fear and anxiety of the artists expressed in their paintings seem to echo even 75 years after the horrific convulsions of the Partition, reminding us that the Partition is “ever-present”, that “it could no longer be put away inside the cover of history books” and we “could no longer pretend that this was a history that belonged to another time, to someone else”. 28 The legacy of Mehta, Menon, Zarina and thousand others like them lives on as both the countries move ahead maintaining, and in worst cases further nurturing, the division of the land and the heart, and the self remains suspended in an indefinite sense of instability as the space remains gapingly fractured. 26 Butalia, "Women", 134. 27 William Dalrymple, “The Great Divide: The violent legacy of Indian Partition”, The New Yorker, June 22, 2015, www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2015/06/29/the-great-divide-booksdalrymple/amp. 28 Butalia, "Beginnings", 4.

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