BY SHAMSHEER YOUSAF

When tragedy falls on the forest, it falls on us. I feel a lot of pain seeing how our beautiful jungle has been destroyed this way.

—Achchugegowda, 65, Soliga tribal elder.

It takes a while amid the shades of green that cover a forest to spot lantana, the small woody shrub that has colonised the Western Ghats. Once seen, it appears everywhere. It engulfs the floor of the forest, in violet, red, pink, orange, and yellow and rises into dense thickets. A single plant can have several looping outgrowths, tentacles that twine themselves around branches and trees, sometimes reaching as high as 20 metres and forming a canopy. Slowly choking the trees and hogging nutrients in the soil, this ornamental-plant-turned-weed can change a forest forever.

Inside Karnataka’s Biligiri Ranganatha Temple Tiger Reserve (BRT) in the southern Western Ghats, the lantana is so dense that the understorey—plant life below the canopy—is almost completely swallowed by it. Worse, it blocks sunlight, allowing no other plant to survive. Even animals find it difficult to pass through the thicker patches.

The Erikkenagaddupodu (forest village) is home to Achchugegowda, a member of the Soliga tribe. They are a Scheduled Tribe numbering around 21,000, who worship the forests in and around the BRT hills. One of their principal deities, the Doddasampige, is a 600-year-old gigantic champaka tree that resembles Lord Shiva with a braid.

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Before 1973, the year the forest was declared a wildlife sanctuary, Achchugegowda practised shifting cultivation—burning a patch of forest and cultivating for three years before shifting to another part.

He remembers BRT before lantana: “I started going deep into the forest with my parents when I was six. They trained me to collect leaves, roots, fruits and honey for food. What a beautiful forest it was! What a beautiful forest! We had thousands of species of plants, and hundreds of varieties of grass; I can’t even put a number to how many we had.” He talks about 1,000-year old trees, amla (gooseberry) trees that yielded more than 50 kg of fruit, and the tigers, bears, and elephants that he’d come across.

“It used to rain the whole of January and at least half of February. On many days, we had 24 hours of rain.” This was also when the Soligas practised “tharagubenki” (litter fire/ controlled burning), which would spur new growth in the forest.

“The whole forest would look so beautiful… flowers would bloom, new grass would sprout, mango and gooseberry trees would bear fruit. The forest would be full of fragrance,” he says. “In those days, we used to see just one or two lantana plants on the roadside, and that too in parts where we did not cultivate.”

Puttarangegowda, another resident who is a couple of decades younger than Achchugegowda, recalled that even as late as 1976, when his family moved out of the forest, it had all kinds of produce—amla, Indian Kino, teak, matti (Indian laurel), tendu (beedi leaf), and mango. “There was some lantana, we used to eat the fruits when we were young.” But now the forest belongs to lantana.

“There is no grass anymore, and animals that grazed there have migrated to the scrubland downhill. They get drawn to the fields of sugarcane and banana right next to the scrubland. They go there and get killed,” he says.

“All because of lantana.”

***

Lantana camara occupies millions of hectares in three continents outside its native habitat, Brazil. Introduced by explorer-colonisers as an ornamental plant in tropical parts of Africa, Asia, and Australia in the 19th century, it is now identified among the top ten invasive species in the world by the Global Invasive Species Information Network, making it one of the most dangerous plants in history. In something of a parallel to its planters, lantana has spread with such ferocity as to push out and threaten the native species of the region. In India, lantana is estimated to occupy around 13 million hectares, about the size of Tamil Nadu; in Australia, over five million hectares; and in South Africa, two million hectares. Its removal is not easy.

As far back as 1973, Australia was spending $1 million a year to control lantana. South Africa was spending $250,000 a year in 1999. Their efforts extended to legislation. Both Australia and South Africa prohibit sale of lantana; owners have to eradicate lantana on their property.

In India, the prospects are frightening. Using ecological niche modelling, a method to predict the future spread of an invasive species in a particular habitat, scientists have estimated that India is more at peril from an invasion by lantana than any other region.

“Indeed, so broad is lantana’s distribution in India that its environmental niche is broader there than elsewhere in the world, suggesting that solutions that are likely to work elsewhere may not be applicable across all sites in India”, said Geetha Ramaswami in her 2016 paper on how birds aid in the invasion of lantana.  The University of Delhi estimated in 2009 that mechanical extraction would cost Rs. 9000 per hectare. At current rates of conversion, it would cost more than $1.7 billion to remove the lantana. It is found in all types of ecosystems: Tropical evergreen forest, tropical moist-deciduous forest, dry deciduous forest, scrub forest, and subtropical moist-deciduous.

Several protected areas are infested by this predator—BRT, Bandipur National Park, Corbett Tiger Reserve, Rajaji National Park, Kalakad Mundanturai Tiger Reserve, Greater Nicobar Biosphere Reserve, Achanakmar-Amarkantak Biosphere Reserve, Mudumalai National Park, Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary, Melghat Tiger Reserve, Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve. In large parts of the Western Ghats, lantana comprises up to three-quarters of the understorey mass. That number is rapidly increasing.

In Mudumalai, a 2013 study by Geetha Ramaswami and Raman Sukumar showed a tremendous explosion between 1990 and 2008. In a 50-hectare observation plot, part of a large network of worldwide permanent plots, the authors found that total lantana biomass increased by 15 times—from 40 gram per square metre in 1990 to 615 in 2008. Moreover, in 1990, only two per cent of the plots had a “dense” infestation. By 2008, it had risen to 18 per cent, indicating a “rapid intensification of invasion”.

Nothing, it appears, can kill the plant; in fact, the regular killers seem to nurture it—between 2002 and 2004, there were two severe droughts in the region, but lantana density exploded fourfold in this period.

In neighbouring BRT, a study by Ankila J. Hiremath and Bharath Sundaram between 1997 and 2008 found that lantana occurrence doubled from 40 per cent to 80 per cent across 540 sq. km of the reserve in that period; moreover, density proportion of lantana to native vegetation increased sevenfold, from one in every 20 stems in 1997 to one in every three by 2008.

The understorey is the loser—non-woody plants like grasses, forbs, and ferns. Geetha Ramaswami, a research associate at the Nature Conservation Foundation, and someone who has been working on lantana for the last decade, says: “If you go under lantana and measure how much light is coming there, it’s like 10 per cent less than what’s available outside. In the forest it is about 70 to 80 per cent shade, while under lantana you get as much as 95 per cent shade. Species that cannot tolerate 95 per cent shade would surely be affected.”

The understorey hosts some of the largest diversity of plant species in a forest; though it constitutes less than one per cent of the biomass, it contains 90 per cent of the plant species. It also contributes litter to the forest floor, which provides nutrition to the soil.

The biggest impact of lantana is on native varieties of grass. Ayesha E. Prasad, in a 2008 report for the Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore, on the impact of lantana on wildlife habitat in Bandipur Tiger Reserve, notes: “Lantana renders large amounts of forage inaccessible to wild herbivores, which are prey for large carnivores like the tiger. Thus it may have food-web level impacts and decrease the suitability of this habitat for wildlife.”

Elephants, deer, bears, and tigers are being pushed out of the forests in search of food.

***

The story of lantana’s romp across the world is a study in human error. The plant of the lantana genus was first identified and recorded by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, father of modern taxonomy. The culprit who took lantana outside its original habitat is Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compaigne—better known as the Dutch West India Company. It frequently transported plants—edible and ornamental—from Central and South America to Europe which then found their way into botanical gardens across the continent.

Dutch explorers in Brazil are believed to have brought back the plant to their home country in the 17th century. A 1789 catalogue of the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew recorded 10 species, including Lantana camara which was introduced in London between 1690 and 1770. Archival information indicates that they were transported to European colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 2012, Ramesh Kannan (a young researcher who died a year later at the age of 37) from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), with Charlie M. Shackleton, and R. Uma Shanker published a paper seeking to reconstruct the plant’s history in India.

The paper dug into archival records on plant imports by the British East India Company. They studied the Imperial Gazetteers of India, books on Indian flora published by pioneer botanists, and letters between colonial officials stationed in Europe and India to follow its trail across the Raj.

The researchers studied herbarium records of lantana lodged between 1814 and 2000 from the four largest and old herbaria in India—Howrah, Pune, Dehradun, and Coimbatore. They also gathered data from a survey answered by 73 retired forest officials who worked in the Western Ghats between 1950 and 2000.

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It turned out that the botanical gardens were largely to blame. The East India Botanical Garden of Calcutta, established in 1786, had introduced nearly 1,000 species from outside India within 30 years, including some from Central and South America. The British believed they would prove beneficial for both agriculture and horticulture. For the latter, flowering plants were particularly desired.

An example of the diligence behind this endeavour can be seen in the questionnaires the East India Company’s Secretary of Agricultural and Horticultural Society Dr. Henry Harpur Spry sent to various officers across India. They would gather information on soil, precipitation, and plant species in the region, and also sought recommendations for the introduction of exotic species. Economic concerns were as important as aesthetic, and botanists were careful to focus on seeds from similar climes.

The researchers found no records stating exactly when lantana arrived in India. However, the earliest mentions of alien lantana appear to have been after 1800. The first reference can be found in a catalogue of plants, when Lantana trifolia was donated by the Baptist Missionary William Carey to the East India Botanical Garden in 1809.

With the British continuing to establish botanical gardens across India—Pune (1828), Lalbagh (1857), Nilgiris (1874), Darjeeling (1878)—lantana began its march across the colony. Soon enough it spread from the botanical garden to surrounding areas. A book on flora in India by Dr. Dietrich Brandis, The Forest Flora of North-West and Central India (1874), identified lantana outside a botanical garden. A herbarium record of Lantana camara was made in 1887 in the Nilgiris. It was also recorded in Pachmarhi, Shillong, Mussoorie, Camba, Kouduru, Delhi, and Quilon. The Indian Forester and The Gazetteer of India recorded several instances of lantana in that period.

Part of the reason why lantana spread widely was that it was seen as an excellent hedge plant, used to fend off wild animals. It is, in fact, toxic to animals.

***

Old timers in BRT recount how rare it was to see lantana even 30 years back. Now it is all over the forest, strangling native plants. These changes have affected those collecting non-timber forest produce the most.

Chandrigegowda, a resident of Muthudagaddepodu in BRT says he regularly went to the forest with his parents to collect lichen, amla and honey. “We could just walk to the tree, collect it and come back. It was as easy as that.”

Now lantana has covered the entire area. “Walking over the growth is extremely difficult as they have grown as tall as me. At many places, you need to crawl, for over a kilometre in some places, under the dense lantana growth to reach the big tree,” he says. For many, forest produce contributes about half their annual income.

Achchugegowda believes the effects are more insidious. “Today, the scent (of the jungle) is gone. Plants don’t grow well. Even grass doesn’t grow. Today, we girijana (people of the forest) have diseases, even the animals have diseases. Today, you see elephants, they look weak. They are just a bag of bones. They don’t get enough food. There is nothing left in this forest. All we have is lantana.”

***

Lantana was brought to Coorg or the Kodagu region by a missionary as a hedge plant, but it soon escaped into the forests. The invasion was severe. In 1893, a forest officer wrote that hundreds of coffee estates had to be abandoned due to the lantana invasion in Coorg.

Its invasive potential was identified early. The Gazetteer of Mysore noted that lantana grew with “the rankness of weed” in 1897. The Imperial Gazetteer said lantana was spreading in Bengaluru in the 1900s.

Early editions of the India Gazetteers and The Indian Foresters Journal also found that lantana’s spread was facilitated by forest disturbances such as logging and clearing. This has been corroborated by recent research.

In Coorg, the situation had got so bad that mechanical intervention—cutting, burning, and uprooting—became necessary. Between 1911 and 1914, these activities were complemented with planting of bamboo in Savanthavadi, Maharashtra.

An early attempt to eradicate lantana was made in 1893. The cost was huge: Rs. 7,413 per sq km in the first year, and Rs. 2,471 and Rs. 1,235 per sq km in the subsequent two years.

By 1912, it was estimated that lantana had infested 284 sq km of private land, 161 sq km of government waste land, and 299 sq km of forest land. The government drew up an eradication plan but World War I put the scheme on hold. It was a long term plan, drawn out over a decade at a cost of Rs. 4.4 lakh. The government even passed legislation—the Coorg Noxious Weeds Regulation. The forest officers of Mysore, Madras, and Central provinces were worried about the impact on commercial timber such as sandalwood and teak. The Deputy Conservator of Forests in Coorg, A. E. Lawrie, wrote that sandalwood sown with lantana had been completely “smothered” in less than three years. It was the most troublesome in Wayanad and Coorg where it was impeding the growth of grass.

Even in the early 20th century, lantana’s invasion was progressing at a fair pace. In four forest ranges in North Salem, between 1917 and 1931, lantana spread at the rate of 600-1,280 hectares per year. Another paper estimated a spread rate of two km per year between 1911 and 1930.

“They observed that lantana was a light loving plant and thrived in areas where the forest or woodland canopy was incomplete and that it threatened the existence of the forest,” wrote Kannan in his paper.

The interviews with forest officials revealed that lantana was widespread even by the 1950s and 1960s. Around 90 per cent of them reported that lantana was present when they took charge, but the proportion remained consistent—there was no significant increase or decrease in its population in the next two decades. This could have been because lantana had invaded all the suitable areas by the mid-1900s.

Kannan’s paper also mapped the first sightings of lantana across the Western Ghats by forest officers. By 1950, the southern Western Ghats, as the experience in Coorg showed, had been covered by lantana, while the central and northern regions showed only some incidence. But by the second or third decade, these areas also saw increasing sightings, and they now occur commonly across the Ghats.

This was reflected when the inhabitants of these areas were surveyed. In the southern Western Ghats, the Soliga and Palliyar tribes said they had seen lantana even in their childhood, with increasing density over the decades. In the Bimasankar Wildlife sanctuary, the Mahadeo Koli tribe said lantana had not been observed even as early as 25-30 years ago. But the last decade or so has seen a huge proliferation.

***

What makes species invasive?  Over the last 25 years research in biological invasions has led to models that explain the phenomena. One way to think of the invasion is to treat the process as a series of stages. In each stage the invasive species has to overcome barriers before it passes to the next stage. Lantana’s invasiveness in India can also be examined with the aid of these models.

Some stages such as transportation and introduction are easily overcome, as human intervention such as the East India Company’s drive to import plants to India took care of that.

Other stages such as establishment depend on the adaptability of the species. Lantana is an extremely adaptable plant. It grows in a wide range of habitats—from sea level to mountains, rainfall areas between 1000-4000 mm per year, and different kinds of forests. Geetha Ramaswami, who has been studying lantana for the last decade, says it possesses a suite of traits that helps it persist in habitats not conducive for growth.

“Lantana can re-sprout after cutting, right back from the base,” she says. “That’s an amazing trait. Because even if your current plant body is cut, you can still produce shoots that will have flowers and fruits and get dispersed.”

Lantana also tolerates drought conditions better than many native species. Bharath Sundaram, who teaches at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru, and whose research interest includes invasive species management, says lantana has evolved in its competitive abilities outside of its native range.

“It can survive in really nutrient-poor conditions, but probably use even available nutrients in a far more efficient way than native species can. It can maintain some above ground life,” he says. In peak summer in BRT, he says, “You’ll find the upper reaches of the plant are all dead and dried up. But the closer you get to the ground, the plant is very much alive.”

Lantana also has practically no natural enemies, unlike in its native habitat. “There’s nothing that eats it up—no pathogen or herbivore that eats the seeds and the leaves, causing substantial damage so that the plant dies,” says Ramaswami.

The other barrier that lantana needs to overcome is reproduction. And this is the reason it has been so successful. Lantana starts seeding quickly, within six to eight months of planting. Sundaram says, “Lantana is able to produce multiple crops every year, and each crop on an average small plant can produce 1,000 to 5,000 fruits.”

The final stage for a species to become invasive is to be successful in spreading across ecosystems, and here lantana’s large fruit production is a big advantage. The ripe fruit is dark purple in colour and sweet—popular among birds such as Red-vented bulbul, red-whiskered bulbul, rose-ringed parakeet, thick-billed flower-peckers, jungle babblers, cinereous tits, and common tailorbirds.

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Ramaswami’s paper published in 2016 found that even in forest zones where lantana growth is aggressively controlled, it is susceptible to seed dispersal by birds.

Lantana also utilises soil seed banks, which can remain dormant while conditions are unfavourable, but sprout when favourable conditions appear. “Let’s say a tree falls somewhere, or the soil is churned because of uprooting, or a rainfall event. It presents a perfect opportunity for this bank to be used,” says Sundaram. His research found that lantana seeds comprised nearly twice the number of seeds of all other native woody species combined.

***

The relationship between fire and lantana has intrigued researchers. Bharat Sundaram says, “My primary interest was not lantana when I began, it was more on forest fires.”

Fires play a major role in shaping the Western Ghats. The nature of these fires has changed, and the frequency has increased over the years. A study led by Narendran Kodandapani found that in the Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary, frequency increased threefold between 1909-1921 and 1989-2002. It is estimated that in 1989-2002 the average period between fires in a forest in the Western Ghats was five years.

The paper concluded: “The current fire regime of the Western Ghats poses a severe and persistent conservation threat to forests both within and outside protected reserves.”

Forest fires have a tremendous impact on the nature and composition of forests. Before human intervention, forest fires, though infrequent, could be catastrophic, and this process would self-select trees that could withstand fire. Grasslands that have the ability to quickly regenerate, trees that shifted biomass to below ground level to protect itself, and those with thick spongy barks, thrived in these conditions, and became resistant to low intensity fires.

Sundaram’s initial foray into lantana was a paper in 2005 on whether forest fires aided the invasiveness of lantana. The paper, co-authored with Ankila Hiremath, proposed a fire-lantana cycle hypothesis. This theory supposes that lantana is a fire-enabled or fire-adapted invasive species, which regenerates readily in a forest fire. Lantana is an extremely flammable shrub, and—given the plants’ propensity to reach the canopy—can cause a devastating crown fire if it burns.

Sundaram and Hiremath proposed that fires facilitated lantana invasion, and that this created a positive feedback loop. “Lantana, once established, fuels further fires, setting up a self-feeding fire-lantana cycle,” the paper states. It argues that areas with shifting cultivation in the BRT Hills till the 1970s are now associated with high lantana density—an indication if not proof of this hypothesis.

Lantana, they said, has high tolerance to being burnt. Studies showed that re-growth of lantana turned denser in response to being burnt. This in turn yielded more biomass, providing more fuel for future fires. Native species—which can tolerate low intensity fires, but not the high intensity ones that lantana typically instigates—would not survive. “Thus forests colonised by lantana could well fall victim to a fire-lantana cycle, perpetuating lantana to the detriment of other vegetation,” the researchers concluded.

In the next phase of their work, Sundaram and Hiremath investigated what factors affected colonisation by invasive species. “Is there any ecological process that created this pattern, was the next set of questions that we tried to ask,” says Sundaram. Propagule pressure, or the amount and frequency of flowering and fruiting and habitat suitability were among the factors they studied.

But the one that Sundaram’s team looked at in depth was forest disturbances. Invasion theorists have long held that forest disturbances play a major role in the propagation of invasive species. “I was trying to see which of these disturbances play a defining role. Lantana invasion is a monolithic word, which you need to break up. It’s not just one day it’s here and the next day it’s there. There are stages,” he says.

To test this, data on the presence and density of lantana from 134 plots spread across a 540 sq km landscape was mapped against the disturbances for the duration of the study (1997-2008). Each plot was a two by two kilometre grid, and data on each plot’s proximity to lantana and fire maps for the study period were compared.

The result was surprising. Lantana density increased more than three times in this area. But not all plots showed the same pattern. Plots that saw a forest fire in those years either showed very little change in lantana density, or showed a decrease. Change in lantana density and fire frequency appeared to be negatively related.

“So we had expected fires to increase lantana invasion. Because it creates hot fires, it burns everything else, and lantana is able to come back,” Sundaram told me, referring to his 2005 paper on the fire-lantana cycle hypothesis, “More the fire, more the lantana density, because lantana is easily bouncing back from a fire, which is able to produce larger biomass that creates hotter fires, and this would perpetuate a lovely fire-lantana cycle.

“But when we looked at the empirical data, the relationship was exactly in the opposite direction.” Fires were in fact keeping Lantana down. Many plots that had burnt more than two or three times in that decade of study actually showed a reduction in lantana density. It appeared lantana does not cope well with fire as was thought before. “After all if you go to its native habitat in Brazil, it is not fire retardant at all. It’s a very nondescript small plant affected by fire,” he says. “So that means it’s retaining some of that character.”

Sundaram concedes that there are gaps in his research. “We don’t know whether native species went down in these plots or not. And I also don’t know if the fires documented were intensive or not.”

But the results are consistent with what has been observed in Australia—that frequent fires prevent, rather than encourage the spread of lantana. Indian forest management has traditionally regarded fires as detrimental in managing forests, barring certain grasslands in the northeast.

This is where the third piece of Sundaram’s work comes in—a look at how local knowledge views the invasion. Sundaram co-authored another paper in which the scientists interview the Soliga about what they think of lantana and why the invasion took place. They interviewed 47 men from the Soliga community aged 35-65 years.

They attributed lantana’s success to its high fruit production, but they also believed the change in fire regimes after 1973, when BRT was declared a wildlife sanctuary, was a big factor. With that declaration the Soliga practice of shifting agriculture came to an end as setting forest fires became illegal.

The Soliga felt fires suppressed lantana because “fires killed young plants as well as seeds present on the soil surface”. The drying of the soil from the fires also inhibited the growth of lantana.

Achchugegowda explained how these low intensity, low height, quick fires worked.

“We’d do this only in January or February when plants have moisture (which would minimise the exposure of plants). They would slash the plants till about half to one foot and burn them. After rain, the ground is filled with new grass and plants.”

They would not practise it in March or April when the sun is hot and the plants are dry. “It’s dangerous. Except in January-February, burning grass is dangerous. The whole jungle could catch fire,” Achchugegowda says.

Sundaram says in those months there’s a lot of dew in the forest, and the fire is smoky rather than the blaze seen in bone dry forest.

The Soligas believe fires are important to the health of the forest. Native species are unaffected as they have historically been exposed to low intensity fires. Moreover the fires do not burn the saplings of native species, only the litter. These fires clear the understorey, and the Soligas believe a healthy forest needs a clean and clear understorey.

***

But even the Soligas believe it is too late to control lantana by fire. The biomass lantana has added over the years would change the nature of fires. “They burn hotter and longer,” says Sundaram. The Soliga believe their forests can withstand fire every year if it’s of low intensity, but not a high-intensity fire.

But if physical removal is combined with fire control, there is a possibility of success. “In Australia, it’s worked,” says Sundaram. “It’s working. Physical removal plus fire.”

This has to be repeated several years. “You can’t do it just one year and expect changes. Year after year after year after year.  For five, six, seven, eight years, then you might start seeing [results]. You’re talking about a decadal time frame,” Sundaram says.

The initial costs are high—physical removal is very hard. But the fires are cheap. Convincing the government and forest department, for whom fires are anathema to forest management, will be difficult. Government efforts to manage lantana and invasive species are yet to go beyond management at the level of the individual forest. Several cells and schemes have been put on paper, but these efforts are yet to show any results. A special cell set up for invasive species management by the Indian Council for Forestry Research and Education sin 2009 is not much to show for itself. India is yet to have a law dealing with invasive species.

The Soliga point to the controlled burning the forest department itself does on the periphery of forests. “Why can’t it be done a little bit inside the forest? We have been asking the government to experiment [on a small scale]. Give us 1,000 acres, don’t pay us, we will use controlled burning and show you the result,” Achchugegowda says.

Researchers are not optimistic that about this experiment yielding fantastic results, but for Achchugegowda and his tribe it is a matter of faith. “This is a sacred forest. Jadeappa, my family god, resides in the forest.”

He recalls the days when they would offer flowers to their deity. “We never carried garlands from home. After the rain, when the forest was in full bloom, we would go inside the forest, collect flowers,” he says. “Parmatama, where you reside, such a beautiful place it is, what fragrance, the fruits we offer to you, the milk, the water, everything is given by you from this forest”.

Shamsheer Yousaf is a freelance multimedia journalist based in Bengaluru

BY C. S. CHELLAPPA

The Tamil writer C. S. Chellappa (1912-1998) was a great fan of jallikattu. His novel Vaadi Vaasal is the story of a youth who tames a bull at the Pongal festival. In 1954, he went to the bull taming in Madurai armed with an Agfa 11 that he had bought for Rs. 150 to capture the scene. The result was one of the earliest photo essays on an enduring rural pastime of Tamil Nadu.

After returning to Chennai he set up a dark room and learnt how to develop photos. I met him in 1998 and spoke to him about the photos.

Chellappa possessed the skills of a professional photographer. He was able to keep pace with the speed of the bull and despite the primitive camera he got action pictures that should be part of any archive on the sport.

—Snegithan, a photojournalist in Chennai, has preserved the negatives of Chellappa’s jallikattu series.

BY ALICE S. KANDELL

Alice S. Kandell first visited Sikkim in 1965 to attend the coronation ceremony where Hope Cooke, a close friend from Sarah Lawrence College, became the first American-born queen. The chogyal (king) Palden Thondup Namgyal asked Kandell to use photography to document the indigenous cultures of Sikkim and to show how he and Hope were improving education and local businesses. With this special access, Dr. Kandell created a visual encyclopedia of Sikkimese life as it was before India absorbed the kingdom.

She returned to Sikkim many times, while also completing her doctorate in child psychology at Harvard University and establishing her career in New York City. Growing political struggles between India and Sikkim brought the photography project to a close in the early 1970s. During a final trip in 1979, she photographed the wedding of Princess Yangchen Dolma.

Photographs courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Dr. Alice S. Kandell Collection of Sikkim Photographs.

BY ALIA ALLANA

“Shall we have fun?” a junior told constable Aradhya as he put his service revolver to her head. She was inside a police vehicle, in the dead of night somewhere near Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh (UP). The constable had stalked her the entire night at a mela where they were deployed. She was gang-raped by two policemen, the men she served with, and the police driver. After they raped her, the constables discussed whether they should kill her. Eighteen months later there is no case, the constables continue to work in the force, a short distance from her police station.

Just about five per cent (84,479) of the 16.7 lakh-strong Indian police force is made up of women. Almost all the women enter at the lowest ranks, and eventually retire at the same rank. Most are denied active policing roles, except for bandobast—large scale deployment for crowd control and VIP movement—and spend their careers doing tasks the male-dominated force deems fit for them. This includes writing reports, housekeeping at police stations and the houses of senior officers, and other such duties.

Sexual assault and harassment in police forces across the country is startlingly frequent, a Fountain Ink investigation has revealed. It is as a matter of routine hushed up, and even in cases where victims persist—often at a great cost—justice is elusive. Police personnel from the ranks of constable to DGP across five states were interviewed, and case records reviewed in the course of the investigation. Almost all of them refused to be named; they couldn’t be seen talking negatively about the force. Those who spoke did so with great unease.

In the police, there is a minimum-hassle approach to rape or “354” as cops call it after the Indian Penal Code section that defines sexual offences. It is heightened when both the victim and the perpetrator are one of their own.

“You know, men and women, when they are together, sometimes this happens,” said an Inspector-General (IG) of police at the iconic neo-Gothic headquarters of the Mumbai police at Crawford Market. His views on the matter are almost Victorian, perhaps fittingly for the police force which itself is a remnant of colonial rule.

“The police are no different than the rest of society,” he said.

A constable in north Mumbai said male cops often comment about the looks of policewomen they work with. “The problem starts with the uniform. Policewomen feel uncomfortable wearing the fitted pants that draws a lot taunts on their figure. Passing judgment and backslapping are common.” The inspector said this practice was almost universal in police stations in Mumbai.

When a policewoman musters the courage to report harassment or assault, nothing comes of it. In at least five cases that Fountain Ink tracked—three in Maharashtra, one in Odisha and one in UP—the matter was hushed up or the accounts of victims were discredited. Cases are often finished off at the level of a departmental inquiry; sometimes a short suspension may be in order.

“Like a smack on the hand with a ruler,” said constable Kavita who was sexually assaulted at Sewri Port while she was on patrol one evening in April 2016. The cops at the police station tried their best to underplay the matter. They discouraged the filing of an FIR and the constable’s husband backed the superiors to avoid “blackening their name”. She relented, but even departmentally nothing happened. The constable who assaulted her continued to work by her side. He was simply ordered to issue an apology for sexually molesting her. He was finally suspended when a woman officer took charge. When I called the officer to know more about the case, she said coldly, “You’ll find that the girl has retracted her statement.”

In at least two other cases lower-ranked complainants continued to take orders or work alongside men they accused of sexual assault.

A woman police inspector in Mumbai, a statistical rarity, said: “You think it’s easy for us to report sexual assault when we are the victims?” She claimed that of the 94 police stations in Mumbai, “almost all” had tales of sexual assault of a policewoman by a policeman. There are no numbers to back the claim.

In cases from Delhi to Yavatmal, from small towns in UP to Kutch, Fountain Ink found a concerted effort on the part of police to hide the issue. No official statistics are kept and few details of internal disciplinary action are released.

Like any other employer, police are duty-bound to implement their obligations under the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, Redressal) Act, 2013. Every district has an Internal Complaints Committee (ICI) where a policewoman can file a complaint. There is a Central Internal Complaints Committee (CICC) at the headquarters level as well but these committees often exist only on paper.

There are broken, assaulted policewomen across the country, suffocated by the male culture in the force. They continue to don the uniform and report for duty, and enforce laws and protect the system that failed them.

***

It was an unremarkable afternoon in the summer of 1987 when constable Aradhya came across an advertisement in Amar Ujala. The police were recruiting at a time when a woman in khaki remained a novelty.

“I’d always been motivated to do good. Lawyers lied, politicians cheated and so I chose the police,” she told me.

In secret, she filled out the form. A job in the police would be a ticket out of small-town life, guarantee of a future unlike that of her home-bound uneducated mother. A couple of months passed, and just as the thought of being in uniform began to slip out of her mind, two constables came knocking on her door. Her father answered.

“Is your daughter home?” one of them said.

“Has she done something wrong?” her father asked.

Aradhya had been dreading this moment. She had turned 18, the age when one thought of marriage, not ambition. Her father was aghast. A poor farmer with a big patch of land, he belonged to a time when a woman’s place was in the house. They definitely didn’t wear pants and wield power. But she didn’t relent. She was recruited.

At the Shahjahanpur Police Training School, she made a name for herself as a runner. Aside from the mundane—filing FIRs and lodging complaints—she found herself challenged and excelled at physical education. More often than not, she “came Number 1” in the 50-and 100-metre races.

On February 1, 1988, after completing training Aradhya graduated as a constable. When she appeared in khaki before her family, she vowed to her father to always think of her “seniors as her mother and father and the force as her family”.

Her pay was modest—Rs. 3,000 per month—but the pride with which her family and friends looked at her was priceless. The following year her younger brother also entered the force.

***

A 2013 home ministry figure states that women constitute a mere 5.33 per cent of the police force. Of the 15,85,117 personnel working in the state police forces, only 84,479 are women. A 2014 figure released by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D) places the strength of police in India at 17,22,786. The BPR&D is a consultancy under the Centre for police modernisation.

For a population of 122 crore, this is a ratio of approximately one police officer for every 708 people. Out of the 15,000 police stations across India, just 518 are all-women police stations.

State-wise, of the 1,73,341 police personnel in UP, only 2,586 are women while in Andhra Pradesh there are just 2,031 policewomen, 2.27 per cent of the 89,325 police personnel.

Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Chandigarh have better representation, but there are only 5,356 policewomen in Delhi out of 75,169 police personnel (7.13 per cent).

In 2014, the NDA government decided to reserve 33 per cent of seats for women in police in all seven union territories including Delhi, a proposal that was initiated by the previous UPA regime.

Many states have acted on the home ministry’s advisories to adopt a reservation policy for women in police forces. Twelve states, Maharashtra, Bihar, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Sikkim, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Tripura, Telangana, and Uttarakhand have a reservation policy of 30 per cent or more for women in the police.

Several constables I spoke to cited their frustrations with the lack of promotional opportunities and the assumption that they were unqualified or incompetent for frontline postings. Even in the case of a crime against women, a male colleague had a greater chance of landing the case, they said. There is a need for a gender-neutral cadre while several female constables at Thane Jail suggested gender sensitisation workshops for police officials who live and work in the confines of the jail.

Given the gender bias, it is not surprising that despite the reservations and advertising vacancies for women constables in Andhra Pradesh between 2005-2010 quotas went unfilled. The intake of women police in Rajasthan, Haryana and Assam did not match the number of women in the employable category. In some states, there are simply not enough takers for the job.

***

Despite the pride she took in her uniform Aradhya remained shackled by the prejudices of society. When she travelled between house and police station, she draped herself in a large chunni, body and face covered. Only upon scrutiny could one make out the khaki pants that were visible from the knee down. Still, Aradhya found the job empowering.

It didn’t matter that most of the time she sat behind a desk doing what her colleagues thought was “women’s work.” She entered names in the log book and answered the phone, a job she does even today. But policing was also an adventure.

Once a year, she would have the opportunity to travel to different parts of the country, often on her own. She was a member of the cross-country police bandobast team at the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar. The massive crowds made it seem as though “almost everyone from India” had descended onto the banks of the Ganga. The number of people, the rush, made her town of Mainpuri seem like an isolated crater on the far side of the moon.

One day she was assigned VIP duty at a helipad. A flock of bureaucrats and reporters shielded themselves in the dusty field as a chopper descended, but Aradhya stood erect. When Mulayam Singh emerged, she was one of the policewomen who formed a protective ring around the then Chief Minister. VIP duty placed her in front of all sorts. When she saw Hema Malini, she was star struck. Her cousins made her recount the incident over and over again.

“The women of India are coming out,” she had said then. The sense of possibility was tangible as it had never been before when she came face to face with Kiran Bedi, the archetypal police officer, a woman who made it in a man’s world.

But for most of the year, life was dull. She shared a room in the police barracks with her younger brother and when she completed 15 years, she was transferred from Mainpuri to the next town, Etawah. By now, the glamour was wearing thin and even assignments seemed uneventful.

When she reported for duty at the Sangam in Allahabad she kept her eyes open for criminals and VIPs, but spent most of the day looking for the parents of a hysterical child.

“Agra, Aligarh, Jalandhar, where didn’t I go?” she said. Despite the frequency and need for travel, the police provided no facilities, neither transport nor accommodation. There were no temporary barracks for the visiting force. “No woman officer was naïve enough to assume there would be a ladies’ toilet,” she said. Her years of service meant that she knew the drill and when she read her name on the duty-sheet for the Jalvihar Mela in Mauranipur she was, at best, ambivalent.

***

In the summer of 1981, Meeran C. Borwankar became an IPS officer. A no-nonsense woman, she climbed through the ranks. As Mumbai’s first female chief of the Crime Branch she led a 200-man-strong team and cracked investigations into organised crime. Her profile rose when she investigated the infamous Jalgaon sex scandal where local politicians were accused of luring young girls with promises of jobs and loans.

“It wasn’t easy. Thirty years ago, the number of women in police could be counted on one’s hands. I was uncomfortable, as were the men. Back then there were just eight or nine women in the whole district. When we were handling the Jalgaon sex scandal, there was just one female sub-inspector and a few female constables so we’d ask neighbouring districts to send female constables. I was apprehensive and so was the police. Nobody was used to women in a high position. It was a big challenge,” she said.

Years later when a senior police officer tried to act too friendly, she was quick to slam him down. Despite that, there was sexism. “When I became DCP Mumbai, our commissioner asked how will you do night rounds? Men felt as though I needed protection, but as DCP I was meant to protect people. This was patriarchy. Sharad Pawar wasn’t comfortable giving me a district, what if something goes wrong, they all worried? Who is there to secure you? ‘I said, I don’t need support’.”

Borwankar is currently on central deputation in Delhi as Director General, BPR&D. In 2015, she penned a report on the “Gender Friendliness of the Maharashtra Police” by interviewing women officers and constables in a varied sample set.

The report states: “Women constables have reported grave difficulty in balancing family life with a career in law enforcement. Police officers, both constables and sub-inspectors, have reported that male officers do not respect female officers; instead they keep passing remarks/taunting them.” According to the report “19.48 per cent of women constables and 18 per cent of sub-inspectors” spoke of a lack of gender respect in the police.  Six per cent of sub-inspectors and 2.57 per cent of constables surveyed remarked on the “morally incorrect conduct of male officers”.

Borwankar said: “Men in the police, especially in rural areas haven’t seen women in such challenging jobs. They feel that women taking these jobs makes them loose women, that they are available and they take certain liberties. Women who are coming as constables are coming for bread and butter while women as sub-inspectors are assertive, they come for ambition. The more women in higher roles the higher the gender friendliness. The constable-level feel the pain and they aren’t empowered enough to get change implemented.”

At least 1.71 per cent of women constables said that seniors expected “physical favours” from them.

***

It started with an order. Constable Aradhya had been summoned to the Captain’s (SP’s) office. He spoke in a crisp, hurried manner. “Pack your bags, you are leaving tomorrow,” he said.

Aradhya would travel to Mauranipur, a sleepy town near Jhansi that woke once a year for the epic Jalvihar Mela where deities would be taken in procession through the town and submerged in the river Sukhnai. After the ritual, the fair would last for up to a month. The following morning she set off, travelling 277 km from Etawah to Jhansi on her own by train.

Aradhya had made arrangements for accommodation as well. She would stay at an old woman’s house whom women in the force fondly referred to as Ma.

The first thing she did upon reaching Jhansi was register at the police station. She had one night to settle in. The next day she took a bus to Mauranipur. When she reached, lights were being fixed in the market place. At the station there, she entered her police ID number in a log book and was issued instructions:

“Ensure that there is no fighting, no rough behaviour or eve teasing.”

The first three nights of patrol were uneventful. She met female constables from across India, ate in the mess behind one of the stages and on the fourth night, ran into a new recruit, class of 2011, from her district. Constable Rani and Aradhya knew of each other and felt a sense of kinship because of their connection to Etawah.

They decided to spend the rest of the night patrolling together.

***

In police parlance there is a word for the mistreatment of women in the force. It’s simply called “male culture”. It serves as a reminder that though being in the police allows a certain degree of power, policewomen are prone to assault and harassment like women in any other workplace. It is this culture that sees women as inferior, unable to shoulder the same responsibilities as men.

Given the low representation of women, a culture of masculinity dominates the force. In several conversations across police stations in Mumbai, women constables expressed their frustration at being forced to accept working alongside colleagues who harassed them. A constable in south Mumbai said her superior had assured her a promotion if she performed oral sex on him in the police station; another constable in Thane who was routinely harassed by a senior considered resignation because of “improper” phone calls late in the night. Most of the female constables remained silent or were silenced.

When someone speaks out they face retaliation. Constable Pawar, a fresh recruit at Thane Central Jail, had shifted to the outskirts of Mumbai from Nagpur. She was assigned a shared room at Shraddha Building inside the jail. Fifteen days into her new job, where she logged the name of visitors at the control room, she and her roommate were called to the superintendent’s office.

The superintendent sat behind a big desk and waved a piece of paper. He claimed it was an anonymous letter about her conduct.

“Are you conducting illegal activities in your bedroom, entertaining policemen late at night? Is this true or false?” he asked.

The constables were aghast.

“False,” they said.

The superintendent called the female officer in-charge. She assured him the women were of “good character”. While exiting, constable Pawar requested the superintendent to shift her from the Control Room. She was highly educated and could manage a more challenging job. Eight days later, she got a better posting in the female jail division.

Troubled by allegations and rumours that had begun to spread, she asked her mother to come and reside with her. She handed in a letter asking for a room under her name. That evening, the superintendent called her to his chamber.

“I will give you a room but first I want to talk to you personally,” he said. Pawar called him at around 7 p.m. on his mobile but their conversation was cut short as he was driving. He asked her to call back within half an hour and before the time had lapsed, he called her. He asked her about the room application.

“If you want a room, come meet me at Kalwa Circle,” he said. Pawar refused and hung up. A short while later he called again, several times. She didn’t answer. When she did he told her he was waiting at Kalwa Bridge despite there being no plans to meet.

Over the next four days he called repeatedly. On August 2016, after being pressured, she agreed to meet him. She asked a constable with whom she worked at the jail to accompany her. They reached at 8 p.m. The superintendent was waiting in his personal car, a silver Swift.

“Why have you brought him? Have you told him you are meeting me?” he asked.

“No,” she said. It was a lie, but she was afraid.

The superintendent leaned over and opened the door. As he bent over, he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her in. When she tried to leave, he wouldn’t let go of her hand. Eventually she wrestled her way out and rushed back to her room.

Two days later, the superintendent sent her a blank message on his mobile.

“Tell me Sir,” she wrote at about 10:30 p.m.

“You hurt me. Till date, no one has hurt me like you have done,” he wrote back.

He continued to message her until about 1:30 a.m., imploring her to respond. She didn’t. Frustrated and insecure, she filed a written complaint at the office of the IG in Pune and the Deputy Commissioner (Western Zone). She showed them the messages on her mobile. When word spread, other women who had been sexually harassed by the superintendent reached out; women in Kolapur, Nasik, Amravati and the Pune Training Centre.

In this case it wasn’t just the facts of the case but that he was a “habitual offender” with three previous recorded incidents of sexual misconduct. He had been issued notices, undergone suspension but continued to remain in positions of power. After constable Pawar’s complaint, the superintendent has been suspended and told to vacate his bungalow on the jail premises. The case is on at Thane Magistrate’s court. According to the new jail superintendent, Pawar’s former boss continues to “malign her character by setting her up”.

This behaviour isn’t unique to India. A 2012 Guardian investigation found that the scale and extent of sexual abuse by police officers is “more widespread” than previously believed. The investigation has among other things found “a pervasive culture of sexism within the police service, which some claim allows abuse behaviour to go unchecked.”

***

By the fourth day, the crowd at Jalvihar Mela was bigger. After three night shifts, the cacophony, the non-stop music and the bright lights began to grate. Aradhya was assigned near the giant Ferris wheel where the shrieks of children and adults could be heard over the horns tooting incessantly.

In all the chaos, there was one constant: the gaze of a constable who had been lurking around them for a while.

“Why is that sepoy always looking here? Do you know him?” she asked Rani.

“Never seen him before,” she replied. They tried to ignore him.

As the night progressed, so did the sepoy’s boldness. He kept circling the two constables and walking closely behind him was another constable. When he walked close enough for the first time, the first thing Aradhya did was read the name tag: Vijay. The patches on his shoulder indicated that he was of the same rank as she. The other constable had no badge, a violation of the rules. At a safe distance was a shorter man with a handkerchief tied around his face.

“He looked as though he didn’t want to be recognised,” she said.

It was hard to get work done because of constable Vijay’s advances. But they continued to patrol and paused not far from the Ferris wheel where a commotion could be heard. As they approached, they could hear Bollywood item numbers blasting from a sound system. Two women gyrated to the beat. As men in the audience whistled and howled, the women in ghagra-choli thumped their breasts, bodies writhing, hips thrusting. Concerned about the safety of the dancers Aradhya pushed ahead but was relieved when she saw a man in white walking around the stage, quietening the men in the audience. In a bid to get to the front, one man had pushed another and a small scuffle had broken out. Despite this the constables carried on, leaving the women to sway together, arms intertwined.

“This was no place for a woman,” she said.

About half an hour later, Vijay and the other constable walked over.

“What is your ID number?” he asked.

Aradhya and Rani responded. They didn’t think to ask him why he wanted it. He spoke in a rushed, authoritarian manner despite being junior to Aradhya.

“I know the SO (Station Officer) in Jhansi. You are being called to the police station. Come with us,” he said.

She asked for more details but he simply urged them to make their way to Jhansi. By now, both women were irritated and uncertain.

There was no reason to disbelieve a colleague but his behaviour all night had been questionable. There was no transport so Vijay offered a ride. He told them he would be travelling between the two points and would be happy to ferry them back and forth for the remainder of the fair.

“He pointed to his white jeep,” she says.

By now, the number of drunks on the streets had increased substantially. Men walked into the policewomen routinely but this was the norm at all melas for all policewomen.

“Are you going to disobey orders from a senior?” he asked.

The policewomen looked at each other and him in silence.

“My jeep is empty and I am leaving for Jhansi now. Your SO has called you, are you coming?” he asked with force.

The policewomen walked to the toilet behind Mauranipur Police Station. Vijay tailed them and convinced them to get into his jeep. Rani sat in the front next to the man with the handkerchief wrapped around his face. Aradhya sat in the back sandwiched between Vijay and the constable without a name tag. The jeep had barely travelled 50 metres when Vijay offered Aradhya a “cold drink.” She took a few sips.

As the car pulled away from Mauranipur leaving the fair Vijay began talking boisterously.

“Should we have some fun?” he asked.

***

On January 6, 2015, a constable in Kakatpur, Puri, was raped by the inspector-in-charge while she was on night duty at the police station. The incident happened in the inspector’s chamber where he had summoned her. When the constable sought to complain, members of the force tried to silence her. Following an investigation, the inspector was booked for rape. When I spoke to the senior who had investigated the matter he said:

“The inspector has served time behind bars.”

How long? I asked.

“Fifteen days,” he responded.

Later in 2015, a constable with the Wadgaon Jungle police station lodged a complaint of sexual harassment and molestation by an inspector. In May 2016, a female sub-inspector in Kutch East filed a complaint that the Kutch East police superintendent raped her and then forced her to have an abortion.

“Why do you want to rake up old issues?” asked a senior Inspector in Kutch while refusing to say anything on the case.

All the cases mentioned above failed to yield the seven-year punishment attached to the offence. The cases died unremarkable deaths.

***

“What are you doing?” Aradhya asked when he slid his arm around her shoulder and unfastened her clip.

“Cunt,” he barked at her.

He then unbuttoned her khaki pants and when she protested, he dug the mouth of his revolver into her skull. She remained silent until he fingered her, revolver held loosely against her temple.

“Motherfucker, I’ll show you what I can do,” he cursed. By now the cold drink he had offered her made her feel woozy. He waved his revolver around and she cautioned: “No need to shoot anyone.”

After he had raped her, he called his friend. “Bhaiya, your turn,” he said. She lay in a foetal position on the ground next to a tree. Then the other cop raped Aradhya. Then it was the driver’s turn.

“If only I were a man,” she told me and paused. “If only I were a richer woman. If only this weren’t a lawless land.”

***

Once the driver had raped her, the three men assembled.

“What should we do with her?” constable Vijay asked the others.

She began pleading.

“Spare me,” she said.

“Should we kill her and throw her in the river?” Vijay asked.

She pleaded for her life.

The three men nudged her towards the car. They continued this discussion inside the jeep. Constable Rani who had remained silent for much of the ordeal finally spoke up.

“Just drop us at the Jhansi police lines behind the State Bank,” she said.

It was then Vijay issued his threat: “I will take you by your chunni and strangle you and hang you if you utter a word of this to anyone.”

Constable Rani, a married woman, stayed quiet. She had too much to lose. Aradhya felt as though she would faint. They drove in silence until she could see the lights of Jhansi. When the car pulled into police lines, Aradhya began praying.

“Prabhu, help,” she repeated again and again.

When the car stopped, Rani got out and Aradhya jumped from the back seat and ran as fast as she could behind Rani. When they reached the room Rani was staying at, they didn’t speak about what had happened. Rani put out a mat on the floor for Aradhya to lie down.  A couple of hours later, the mat was covered in blood.

The following morning, she returned to Mauranipur and met another constable from Etawah. When she narrated the events to him, he was horrified but helpless. She met the captain and excused herself from duty by saying she needed to return for her “grandmother’s operation”. It was a lie but she was in no condition to work.

She didn’t dare tell the captain what had happened. Vijay’s threats had struck home.

***

“You should have called 100 right there and then,” Ma said.

She hadn’t stopped crying.

“How many girls? How many rapes?” she asked me.

She vowed to herself that she wouldn’t be silenced. What followed were a series of meetings where she recounted the incident. She made notes so that she would remain coherent, so that not even the tiniest detail would be under-reported or misstated. She filled out enough FIRs to know just how cases got botched, how many rapes went unreported.

She first stood in front of IG Kanpur Nagar. He listened in silence. He seldom made eye contact and she did her best not to cry. Often, she couldn’t hold back tears.

After him, she stood in front of SSP Etawah, Manzil Saini, the super cop with a physics degree from St. Stephen’s College. She spoke softly as though it were a dirty secret she was sharing. Aradhya was then directed to the Mahila Police Station where Vinita Sarthi, an inspector, wrote the FIR.

Sarthi will never forget the way Aradhya cried. She will never forget the conversation that didn’t make it to the FIR.

Aradhya wiped her tears with a red chunni. She said: “When I see a male constable, I see my brother but that night, that man did not see me as a sister. He didn’t even see me as an equal. He fingered me. He pulled my pants and threw me on the ground. He fucked me. And then invited two others to do so. Tell me, am I wrong? It is my fault? How do I get justice? Should I send my brothers after him to kill them all? What will that do? Break my family even more? Why is that man still in uniform and not behind bars in jail? Where is the law?

“I wanted to help her. She was one of us. I did everything I could but something happened in Lucknow,” Sarthi told me over the phone.

“Something like what?” I asked.

“The case got buried,” she said.

The case got buried despite the fact that Aradhya was so badly assualted that she spent 15 days in a hospital. It was forgotten despite her recounting the incident before a magistrate even when she had been too afraid to travel to Jhansi alone because of constable Vijay. Her cry for justice didn’t even reach the pile of letters placed in front of Akhilesh Yadav, the chief minister. In her letter to the chief minister she recounted the events of the night, and said she suspected constable Rani of being involved in the plan. She said the perpetrators were being protected by the police department, and that she was receiving death threats.

But nobody in Etawah forgot, nor in Jhansi. When the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) heard of the brutality, they called for a report. A departmental enquiry was conducted and a report by the SSP Jhansi claimed: “On preliminary investigation, no evidence could be found of any crime committed upon the complainant. Hence final report Number 26, dated 12/4/2016 saw the submission of a cancellation of the FIR. It is pending cancellation before the court,” said a spokesperson of the NHRC.

The NHRC has not accepted the report of the SSP. They would like to know whether a medical examination was conducted. The commission also desired the entire record of the case file as well as witness and victim statements and the FIR. “The case is not closed at the NHRC,” he said.

An IG in Lucknow with access to the case and the findings from the departmental enquiry stated that several reasons were given to discredit Aradhya’s account.

The first was that she was unable to decipher the exact location of the incident, which weighed against her. The second was that she reported the case in Etawah when the incident occurred in Jhansi. The third was that she waited for a few days before a medical and was therefore found to be not substantially harmed. The fourth and crucial reason was that constable’s Rani’s testimony as witness didn’t back up Aradhya’s claims. “She simply  denied anything wrong had happened,” the IG said. The final reason was that she was “having an affair with a cook” which meant she was of “loose character” anyway.

Constable Aradhya isn’t the only woman in the police who has been sexually abused, molested or raped by members of the police force.

“I won’t be the last,” she said.

***

Postscript:

Constable Kavita has been off duty from Sewri police station for the past few months. Though the inspector in-charge claims she is suffering from TB, her husband says she is distraught and struggles to come to terms with what happened to her.

Constable Pawar has been a victim of sting operations conducted by the accused ex-superintendent of Thane Jail. He claims she is receiving bribes in order to allow mobiles into the prison, an allegation she denies. The case is in court and a departmental enquiry is underway.

The Investigating Officer in Puri had almost forgotten about the case. “He’s done his time in jail, why should he be there for more than 15 days,” he said. The Dalit girl continues to come to work.

Constable Aradhya continues to work, but can’t get ver the trauma. “My life is ruined,” she said.

(Aradhya, Kavita, and Pawar are not their real names.)

(Published in the March 2017 edition of Fountain Ink.)

BY NANDINI KRISHNAN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SURESH KANNAN

Jovin began to unbutton his shirt, “See, I haven’t yet got my operation done. I tie them up.”

“No, no, there’s no need,” I said and turned away hastily, but caught a flash of the crepe bandage that bound his breasts.

“It’s no big deal,” Jovin said, “Guys sit around shirtless. If I were operated on, I’d be sitting like that, right? I get so bloody frustrated when [Selvam] sits around without a shirt. I want to yell at him and say, ‘Cover up, da!’”

Selvam, who was leaning against the wall, broke into a lopsided grin, like a rock star indulging a groupie.

***

I had first met Selvam in 2006, while making a documentary on transgender women. At the time, the state had allotted land to create a village for transpeople,  called Natarajapuram, and houses were being constructed. Future residents were camping in tents.

When I used the word “aravani” in my piece-to-camera, a transwoman took offence and said she would smash my face to pulp. “You have to walk alone to the bus stop, right?” she said, “By the time I’m done with you, people won’t know whether you were a man or woman.”

I must have looked as terrified as I felt, because one of my interviewees touched my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll send Selvam along to protect you.”

Selvam was six inches shorter than I, slighter than the average schoolboy, and biologically female. He had recently moved his family—parents and siblings—into one of the tents. I heard his parents addressing him as da—an endearment used for boys.

“I’ve told them I’ve changed naturally from female to male,” Selvam grinned, in a high-pitched voice, “I ran away from home because I heard that they’d started looking for a groom for me. Enakku kalyaanam ellaam pidikkaadhu (I don’t like stuff like marriage). So I ran away, cropped my hair. By the time they found me, I’d become a guy, and that’s what I told them. They believe me. My entire village does. But then everyone pesters me about marriage now—they want me to get married and prove I’m a guy…you know, produce a child.”

***

Ten years on, he was waiting for me outside his house, hands in pockets.

“Hello,” he said, in a deep bass. Only his height and smile hadn’t changed.

“I had a super moustache,” he said, with a sigh, “I shaved it because someone told me it would grow better if I shaved regularly. The damn thing hasn’t appeared since.”

He had moved his parents to Kalpakkam, he said, because they didn’t like the way people spoke in Natarajapuram. “You know how they are, swearing and stuff,” he said, with a grin. “I live here with my sister.”

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It was a strange house. The women in the house were born men. The men were born women. None is in a romantic relationship with any other. The women are upset that the men cook; the men are upset that women are the breadwinners.

Aarthi, the “sister” to whom Selvam referred, is not biologically related to him or anyone else in the house. But this quasi-family of transpeople has imposed a complex network of relationships on themselves.

“He was staying with people like us in Kuppathurai,” she told me when I met her. “My mother’s sisters are my chithi, periamma and so on. I call them also amma. One of my ammas in that manner adopted him. So he’s my brother. He came with me when I moved to Chennai.” Several transmen whom Selvam knows have also joined the household.

“Avunga ellaarayum naan madikattitten (I’ve adopted them all),” Aarthi said, “So now I have four-five sons, in addition to my daughters. I look out for them, figure out what’s bad for them, what’s good for them, show them the ropes.”

The sons call Selvam  “mama” (maternal uncle), while the daughters call him  “anna” (older brother), perhaps because  “mama” is also popularly used to address one’s husband.

I would visit the house several times over the next few months. Every time I arrived, one of the “sons” would bring me a vat of water to drink. The “daughters” spoke broken Hindi to me. Sometimes, they danced to film songs. At others, they came up with their own dance numbers. They would offer me food and “cool drinks” even when they knew me well enough not to stand on ceremony. The sounds of teasing and laughter constantly rang out—“Sister, has anna told you about anni (sister-in-law)? Tell her not to torture him like this, he can’t sleep nights!”, “Write about us also, we’re prettier than Selvam!”—but there was something transitory about it all, like these were ephemeral bursts of joy in lives that would never get easier.

***

Unlike transwomen, transmen cannot identify themselves in a historical lineage. In the Middle Ages, transmen appear only as women in disguise, mostly in Shakespearean drama—a ploy that suited actors in an all-male repertory and gave the groundlings cheap laughs at the spectacle of same-sex romance; happily for the characters, a twin of the acceptable sex usually turned up.

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But the earliest documented cases of female-to-male gender transition appear in the 1800s and early 1900s, and the details are vague. The first documented gender reassignment surgeries were performed in Germany, chiefly on the patients of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.

In America, the first surgery recorded was on Dr. Alan L. Hart (1890–1962), a radiologist and tuberculosis researcher who pioneered the use of X-ray photography to detect TB. In 1917, Hart approached Dr. Joshua Gilbert at the University of Oregon, asking for a hysterectomy, identifying himself as a person with an “abnormal inversion” who should be sterilised. Gilbert evaluated Hart as “extremely intelligent and not mentally ill, but afflicted with a mysterious disorder for which I have no explanation.”

The diagnosis is radical even in the context of today, when the desire for transitioning from female to male is classified as a mental illness according to the manual of the American Psychiatric Association—labelled “gender identity disorder” or “gender dysphoria”.

Indian mythology has the Amba-Shikhandi story, and that of Princess Chitrangada, immortalised in Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitra. But the history of female-to-male (FTM) transition is nebulous.

There is no clear enumeration of transmen. The 2011 census claimed the number of people who identified as third gender was 4.9 lakh, but there appears to be some confusion, since 55,000 of those were in the 0-6 years age category.

India’s transman community has articulate representatives successful in their chosen fields—cinematographer Satya Rai Nagpaul, writer-activist Gee Imaan Semmalar, disability rights activist Kiran, among others—but the majority live in hiding for fear of losing their jobs, or even lives. Transmen in the police force were reluctant to talk to me even on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions once the state knew that personnel recruited as women now identified as men. At least one transman said he was unfairly terminated by his employer, an IT major. Another interviewee was threatened with rape-until-impregnation.

In his study Towards Gender Inclusivity: A Study On Contemporary Concerns Around Gender, Sunil Mohan of the community support collective LesBiT says transmen are often expelled from school or college for “gender variant behaviour”.

A community, a support system, is essential, and is beginning to form. Satya Rai Nagpaul, founder and facilitator of Sampoorna, a group for and by trans and intersex Indians, said, “Networks of trans-masculine people are expanding, especially the last two years or so. [They] have found each other in Ahmedabad, Baroda, Delhi, Guwahati, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Indore, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune”, apart from Chennai and Bengaluru. In Tamil Nadu, transmen even have an indigenous name, thirunambi, a male equivalent for thirunangai, as transwomen are known.

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L. Ramakrishnan, from the public health and human rights NGO SAATHII, said there is an increasing number of private social networks, mainly WhatsApp groups, through which transmen can find support. Through these, people who don’t need chest binders any longer, post-surgery, donate them to others. Purpose-built binders are expensive, and using the wrong material could lead to health issues, from bruising to bone displacement.

The idea of a community is crucial for transmen, who are doubly disadvantaged—aside from the obvious challenge, they face prejudice from the larger community of sexuality minorities. With limited funding for trans-healthcare and schemes, there is community gate-keeping, chiefly by transwomen. Activists speak of the “hierarchies of authenticity”, where post-operative transwomen are considered most genuine and deserving; at the bottom are transmen.

***

Selvam only attended three days of school. He was bullied, and decided not to go. His parents did not compel him.

“They were always affectionate,” he told me, “But I was not very attached to them then. I think I was angry because they wouldn’t let me cut my hair after I got my period. My hair grew to hip-length. So I said, ‘Let me go to a temple and get a tonsure done’—it seemed a better idea than to tell them straight out. I’d always wear pant-shirt, anyway, or a veshti at home. I would never wear a paavadai (skirt) unless I was going to work. They never objected. When I said I’d get a tonsure, they said ‘Aiyayo, you shouldn’t do all that!’”—he imitated their shocked expressions, drawing both palms to his mouth— “‘You’re a vayasu ponnu (a girl who has come of age, a nubile woman)’! Vayasu ponnu nu sollarappo evvalavu aathiram varum (Imagine how infuriating it would be for someone to call me a ‘vayasu ponnu’)!”

“Yeah, that monthly thing, I hate it,” Jovin chimed in.

“Mine’s stopped now,” Selvam said.

Jovin sighed, “It’s the worst thing.”

Both Jovin and Selvam grew up hundreds of kilometres apart and are separated by five years in age, but had similar habits in childhood. They wore trousers under their skirts, which they discarded as soon as they were out of sight of family. They joined the boys on the road, first scaling walls and trees as children, eventually checking out—and whistling at—girls in their teen years.

Both started working early—Selvam because he did not want his mother to work and felt guilty staying at home while his father did hard labour; Jovin because of family circumstances.

“My dad was a drunkard,” he said, “A son at home would have got a job and there would have been money. I was the third of three girls. My parents named me Kalaivani. Ten years ago, at 15, as a girl I went to work in a biscuit factory.”

“Not studying was a big mistake,” Selvam rued.

Since he was seven, though, Selvam has been earning money. He accompanied his father, looking for work. He found it mostly in construction, laying roads and loading stones. As he got older, work became harder to come by.

“People hesitate even to give me a watchman’s job because they look at me, think I’m a kid and wonder whether I’ll be responsible. I worked as security at a morgue when I first moved to Chennai. They gave me 100 bucks a day. I spent a chunk on alcohol. You need to down a few to stay there. No one is there. Just corpses.”

But he never held a job for long. He was happiest working with a theatre group exclusively for transgender people, Kannaadi Kalaikuzhu. He met several activists, including Siva Kumar of Nirangal, a Chennai-based non-profit for advancing the rights of individuals with alternate gender and sexual identities. Siva took him to LGBT meetings across cities. Selvam met other transmen, many reluctant to come out.

“I’ve always wanted to do social service. No one has come forward and said ‘I’m a transman’, at least in Chennai. Because all of us think we’re oddballs, one-offs, there is no one like us. If people knew there were others like them, they’d come out. So I’ve spoken on TV, to newspapers, radio, all media. I used to give interviews even when I had a job. I’m not afraid. I’ve never known fear. Of whom should I be afraid? What can they do?”

But sometimes, Selvam felt his colleagues knew he was not what he seemed. Perhaps they had read interviews. Perhaps they sensed he was hiding that he had been born a woman. “Every time I thought there might be a problem, I changed jobs,” he said, “So it was hard to hold on to one job. Also, you can’t keep bunking work to attend meetings and expect them not to replace you.”

He worked at a tailor’s for four years, hoping to learn the craft and start his own business. But they never allowed him to see them cut cloth. He quit and worked in an export factory at a better salary. He made enough money to get his two sisters married off, and put his brother through college.

“See, he bought me this watch,” he said proudly, showing me a shiny, gold-coloured watch. “When I think about how far I’ve come without studying, I feel a sense of pride. There are so many people who have studied a lot and who haven’t done much with it, right?”

Selvam is on the board of Nirangal, but it is not a paid position. He could not work in an NGO, he said. “Set aavaadhu, I’m outspoken,” he said. He had not held a regular job in four years.

***

With the odd exception, every transman I spoke to had a woman in his life who saw him for the man he was. Selvam began to tell me about the only woman with whom he had been in love.

He met her when he was 14, travelling on contract work in and around Theni district, laying roads, for Rs. 110 a day. The contract was for a year. Happily for him, having lived several years in Kerala, his family decided to move to a nearby village, and he could meet her every day. She thought he was a man who wore his hair long. Their relationship was three years old when it met its first hurdle.

“Her family began to speak about marrying her off. She came to me one night and said, ‘Let’s go all the way. Then, no one can separate us, and they’ll have to marry me to you.’ I told her I had some sort of condition that I don’t understand. I’m a guy, but I don’t have a penis. For 2-3 hours, she didn’t understand. Then, she began to cry. But she could not bear the idea of separation. She said she would run away with me. I knew the moment had come to leave home.”

The two of them headed for Kerala. Selvam had spent most of his childhood and youth there, and knew the language and place well. He cut his hair, changed clothes in a “gents’ bathroom”, and for the next six months, they lived a charmed life, staying with friends Selvam had made over the years.

But his father did not give up the search. He borrowed Rs. 2000, and tracked him down. “I didn’t think my dad was that resourceful,” Selvam said.

His father convinced them to return. The girl’s parents beat her to within an inch of her life. But she said, even as the blows rained down, that she would run away with Selvam again.

She left home that very night. Her brother chased her down on his bike, dragged her home, and tried to force poison down her throat. She survived. She then locked herself up in a room for a week, refusing to bathe, eat, or even drink water.

In the meantime, Selvam had convinced the entire village that he had biologically turned into a man during his time away. His parents did not object to his marrying the girl. Her hunger strike had chipped away at her family’s resistance. Her mother, her brother, sister-in-law, and sister tried to convince her father to let her marry Selvam. But the father was worried about what everyone in the village might think.

Selvam promised  he would make money and come back for her. He would build a house. No one could make snide remarks about a groom with a house of his own in a big city. He moved to Chennai, with his family.

“She held out for three, maybe four, years,” he said, “Then her father forced her to marry someone. I can’t go to my village anymore. I feel like killing myself there. I’ve never stayed longer than two hours. I go to my sister’s village nearby, to stay if I have a family wedding or something to attend. Every Pongal, and every Deepavali, I used to wear pant-shirt and dance like a maniac with the other boys. We’d tease every single girl. They’d be scared of us. That was the life.” He sighed. “And then there’s this emptiness.”

“Oh, a lot of girls like Mama,” Jovin said, “It’s just that he doesn’t like any of them.”

“Tell her your story,” Selvam said.

Jovin blushed. “Mama, why, Mama?”

But he didn’t seem to need much encouragement. “This girl in the biscuit factory liked me. So at the time, I found it funny. I thought both of us are ladies, how can we have a relationship, it’s wrong, isn’t it? I didn’t even know that you could do an operation. I didn’t think our relationship could exist.”

But the girl persisted, even attempting suicide because life without Jovin was not worth living.

He told her he had too many commitments to think about a relationship—he had to support his family, build a house, get his sisters married, have an operation done like the friends he had made in Chennai had. If she waited, he would come back. If she couldn’t wait, she could marry whoever her family chose.

“She told me I would only see her corpse if I left her ever again,” Jovin said, “I slapped her. I said don’t talk like an idiot.”

He moved out of Chennai and took up his old job at the biscuit factory. He worked five years. The job wasn’t easy, but he liked it. They were working 12-hour shifts, switching weekly between day and night shifts. In a good month Jovin made Rs. 3,500. The workers went on strike once, demanding eight-hour shifts. The company gave in, and now they had more time on their hands.

“Pay day was like Deepavali for us. We’d run off to the movies, the beach, the park, buy things to eat, I’d check out the girls, the girls from the factory would check out the guys. At the end of the day, we’d see how much money we had left, and figure out what lies to tell at home—how many days’ salary was cut and so on. That girl hated it when I checked out other girls, though. She didn’t even like my talking to other boys, leave alone girls.”

At this point, Selvam held out Jovin’s arm. I saw an initial carved into it.

“I did that for her,” he said.

“Tension party,” Selvam said.

“I got furious when she suspected me of being unfaithful,” said Jovin.

“Veera vilayattu,” Selvam mumbled, “And whose fault was it that she was suspicious?”

“So,” Jovin said, “There was this other girl who liked me. I didn’t know it. She was a lot prettier than my girlfriend. Her skin was so fair that if you pinched it, you could see it redden.”

“You pinched her?” I asked. Selvam grinned.

Jovin looked embarrassed. “Oh, I’d pinch her waist. She used to call me ‘Mama’. She had no thaimaaman (maternal uncle) so I used to tease her like a thaimaaman would have. She had eyes like our Silukku (Silk Smitha). She’d bewitch you with those eyes. And her figure, chance-ey illai, you’d want to grab her if you saw her. Everyone in the company hit on her. But she didn’t fall for anyone except me. And I didn’t even know.”

It came to a head one day. The girls had to wear a shirt with the company logo on top of their clothes. Jovin walked in on ‘Silk Smitha’ removing the shirt one day, and apologised. She told him it was no big deal, she had her clothes on underneath.

“I went about my work. Suddenly, my girlfriend drags me away in front of everyone, takes me to a secluded room, and starts removing her clothes. I said, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ She said, ‘If you wanted to see this so badly, why didn’t you ask me? Why ask her?’ I said I promise I did not see anything. Then, this second girl comes in and says, ‘What he’s saying is true, Mama did not see anything’. And then this girl says, ‘How dare you call him Mama?’ And the two of them are fighting. I tried to intervene. Finally, I slapped my girlfriend, twice on each cheek, telling her not to talk such shit when she doesn’t know what happened. I slapped her so hard it left marks. Her mother called me later to ask me what happened at the factory, why did she have bruises, and I told her, ‘You don’t know how to raise a daughter to be a girl, what kind of mother are you, go and die.’”

***

It was only as I was driving home that I realised I had laughed with Selvam and Jovin when they said things that would not have been acceptable from cis-men. There is some criticism of the patriarchal attitudes of transmen. And it is hard for their partners to find sympathy even in cases of physical abuse, because the responses they get are usually either, “But this is a woman you’re talking about, why don’t you hit her back?” or “He’s been through so much, it is only understandable that he’ll take it out on someone.

A woman who requested anonymity told me about her experience with a transman to whom she was introduced by an activist friend, not to set them up, but because the activist was hoping to find the transman, who had recently moved cities, a wider social circle. “My friendly demeanour was mistaken as an open invitation for attention, to the point of being stalked on Facebook,” she said in an email, “Even upon being told that I wasn’t interested, he continued to send me messages, which is when I decided to block him and report his actions to the greater community.”

Bangalore-based Dharini*, 31, met a transman on Tinder. She found him intelligent and articulate. They had similar taste in music and books. The chemistry was great, Dharini said, though they didn’t do much more than kiss.

They had not discussed exclusivity. He assumed they were exclusive; she assumed the relationship was open. He had also assumed she had quit Tinder after they met, as he had. But Dharini has always been in open relationships, with both men and women. He was unpleasantly surprised when Dharini told him she couldn’t meet him one day because she was on a date. She woke up the next morning to more than twenty nasty messages.

“He called me some really ugly things, like ‘cock-sucking whore’ and ‘loose pussy’…I think I was doubly shocked that someone was directing this at me—someone I liked a lot—and this someone had once been a woman. I got really angry. I called him and we had a fight. He said, ‘Well, next time, I’ll just bring a rod to shove in your cunt’, and I thought, okay, this is a threat. Obviously, I haven’t seen him since.”

Delfina, a member of Nirangal, said misogynistic attitudes are a problem in the community. In a meeting  s/he—Delfina identifies as non-binary and prefers a gender-neutral pronoun—had attended, s/he heard a group of transmen “bragging about how ‘I can flirt with so many girls, so many girls are in love with me’.” Delfina asked one of them if he had a girlfriend. He did. “I asked him how many boys he thinks his girlfriend should flirt with, and he said, ‘I’m a guy, I can check girls out. Let her look at another guy, and I’ll beat her up.’ That’s the type of attitude they have.” When s/he questioned him about this discrepancy in their flirting rights, he said, “She is a girl, after all. I’m the man, right? That’s how it should be.”

“I think most transmen are inspired by toxic models of masculinity,” Delfina said, “which are very extreme, unrealistic, and harmful—the type of portrayal we see in cinema. You typically have a man who overpowers women, is aggressive, who can do anything and everything he wants to, and women are supposed to implicitly obey him. I’m not saying everyone is like that. I do know transmen who are in committed relationships, who treat women in a very loving and caring manner. [But] we need to do away with special consideration on account of transitioning and call out sexism and misogyny as we would with cis-men.”

***

Many transmen have faced extreme violence.

Sunil Mohan, in his study, writes, “I played cricket so I thought I could handle my expression of gender identity in terms of my masculinity in the name of sports. But that also came under fire though my father is a sportsperson. He tore my shirt, snatched away my cricket uniform and burnt it in front of me because I was not behaving like a woman. My father would beat me black and blue because of my gender expression.”

“The first time I went out and cut my hair, my sisters and mother stripped me down to my jetti-baniyan (underpants and vest), bound my hands and legs, and hit me. They all kicked me. My father, my grandfather, my mama, and his son were standing around, encouraging them.”

During his first stint in Chennai, Jovin met people from several NGOs, some of whom asked if he was willing to speak on television on account of how articulate he was. “So I went on TV, and said I don’t have a life. We’re not accepted at home. We’re not accepted in society. Don’t we have the right to live as we want, to come out and be who we are? What we’d like is to be open about ourselves. But if we’re being shoved aside for jobs, how can we live?”

A neighbour told Jovin’s family that their daughter had cut her hair and was claiming she was a man on television; that she had said her family had treated her poorly.

“When I went back home, my father stripped me of everything I was wearing, and tied me stark naked to a pole outside the house, siluvaiyile katti podara maadhiri (like one ties someone to a cross), on display. Passersby were staring. He brought a knife and said he would cut me to bits. I said, ‘Do what you want. What is the point in my living anyway after the entire village has seen me naked?’”

His mother rushed out to drape a cloth on him, but Jovin was so traumatised he attempted suicide several times. First, he drank engine oil. Nothing happened. Then, he downed rat poison. His mother took him to the hospital on time and had his stomach pumped. Then, he ground oleander seeds into a paste and ate it.

“They took me to hospital again. It became a police case. The cops asked me why I’d done this. Was it love failure? Had a man cheated me? I said, ‘Go ask my parents. Don’t blame me for my father’s mistake. I like this life, they won’t let me live. If I can’t live, I have to die.’ The policemen praised me for speaking so bravely. They wrote a case against my father, and went off.”

He tried to run away from home, but his family tracked him down every time. Once, they even tried to persuade a friend who had given him shelter into laying a trap. “They asked her to make sure I stayed home that evening—they would come, tie me up and cart me off to the mental hospital. She told me, and I went elsewhere.”

When his family asked him why he was eroding their honour, Jovin snapped that he was putting food on their plates, which was more than their honour did. They couldn’t argue.

“I’ve done so much work. I have all these skills, and if I need money at a pinch, I can use any of them. I know ironing, I know how to string flowers together, I know painting, I know decoration, I know carpentry. In an emergency, I can earn 200 rupees like that!”—and he snapped his fingers—“And now I’m taking driving lessons. I told them I can’t live for the village, for the world, for society. If my family accepts me as I am, I will live for them.”

Finally, his sister told his mother, after watching several of his interviews on television, that there was no point in trying to change their Kalai, who thought of herself as a man. Kalai had become Jovin.

Eventually, they came round. When his father passed away, Jovin lit the pyre as his son. His mother’s brother told her to accept what Kalai had become; Jovin was a better son than most natural-born boys. He had, even as a child, defended her against her abusive husband—twice, he had given his father a concussion and told him that real men fought men, not women.

***

At a talk for the “TransForm: Transgender Rights and Law” conference organised by the Centre for Law and Policy Research (CLPR) in Bengaluru on December 14-15, 2016, transman activist Gee Imaan Semmalar spoke of the severely limited access to healthcare. The prohibitive costs of treatment and paucity of information are factors. But so is prejudice from medical professionals, the red tape involved in government-mandated procedures, and incompetence at hospitals.

“Initially when hormone treatment was not accessible to me, I used to self-medicate,” he said in the talk, a video of which is available on the website Orinam, “And I think that’s one of the wonderful things about the Third World. You can just buy medicines over the counter and nobody’s questioning you.”

But self-medicating can be extremely dangerous. Chennai-based endocrinologist Dr. Sruti Chandrasekaran said she has had at least three patients in the last couple of months who have begun the transition to male. She believes it is imperative for hormone treatment to be administered by a doctor.

“Testosterone has to be given in the right dose, and in the right route—it can go through various routes, as an injection, an oral tablet, a gel—and we need to monitor them constantly. Every three months, we need to check that the levels are within the reference range, because too much testosterone can affect cholesterol, liver function, increase the blood count, chances of a blood clot.”

Excited by the clinical effects of testosterone, such as a deepening of the voice and the appearance of facial hair, those who are self-medicating may end up taking too much testosterone. The side-effects are acne, hairfall, hyper-muscularity, and metabolic problems.

Most transpeople are convinced about their gender in childhood. But hormone treatment cannot begin at puberty, which is when the natural hormonal surge typically occurs.

“If the desire to change one’s sex persists, we will start treatment,” said Dr. Sruti, “But only after they have been certified by at least two psychiatrists, to make sure they don’t have any underlying condition that makes them think [they want to transition], such as depression, anxiety, or psychosis, and that they have mentally grasped what they are going in for with the transition process.

“Hormone treatment can make them transition beautifully, with the right dose and the right duration. But it’s not for two or three years—treatment is for life. Their bodies are not equipped to make testosterone so it has to be given at least until 50-55 years, when natural testosterone begins to wane. But I’ve never followed a patient that old. Most are very young.”

Interestingly, some patients freeze their eggs. “They want biological children in future, either with a partner, or for themselves.” American Thomas Beatie is famous as “the pregnant man”—he had gender reassignment surgery in 2002, and chose to become pregnant through artificial insemination in 2007, because his wife was infertile.

Patients are advised to wait through a year of hormone treatment before they have any kind of surgery, in case they change their minds. When I asked Dr. Sruti if anyone has changed his mind, she shook her head emphatically, “No. They are very clear about what they want.”

However, parents are often not quite convinced. In some cases, they even ask doctors to brainwash their children into believing hormones are harmful. “Obviously, I would never do that.”

Parental support is particularly important because of the costs involved. Testosterone costs between Rs. 100 and Rs. 150 a shot. A blood test is required every three months, at Rs. 1,000-1,200.

Dr. Sruti also spoke of another injection, GnRH [Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone]. When administered once a month, or even once in three, it removes the oestrogen, so that the effects of the testosterone are more pronounced. Each shot costs approximately Rs. 11,500.

Surgery will set one back by several lakhs. Not many young people have that kind of money.

***

Most transmen want at least a mastectomy. Experienced surgeons are usually expensive, as is a reputed hospital.

In 2008, the Tamil Nadu government created the Aravani Welfare Board for transgender people, with schemes including free SRS (sex reassignment surgery), free housing, short-stay homes, and pension for destitute transpeople over 40. The scheme most in demand is free SRS. But the waitlist is long. Technically, transmen should also be able to access the surgery, but partly because of community gate-keeping and partly because of lack of expertise in handling female-to-male transition surgeries in government hospitals, they rarely get funding.

“The myth of the Tamil Nadu model has to be broken,” said Gee, in his talk, “The reality is that in 2009, a transwoman friend of mine accessed this in Stanley Medical Hospital, and the surgery is the worst I have seen. She paid Rs. 50,000 in 2009. It is not free. They say hospital charges are free, but the medicine, the bed—they just add [various charges], so the bill comes to a big amount. She was bedridden for six months.”

To “transform into a complete man”, Gee said, not without sarcasm, one needs at least five surgeries. If they are botched, corrective surgeries are required. His own mastectomy, in Mumbai, went horribly wrong.

“The nipple graft fell apart and I had craters on both sides of my chest. The ideal recovery period is around two weeks. I was bedridden for six months, and had three more surgeries to correct what was done.”

He considered filing a medical negligence case, but lawyers told him he would be wasting his time—the loopholes are too large.

***

Selvam was relatively lucky. He found a benefactor—who asked to remain anonymous for this story. In 2014, Selvam travelled to Gujarat in pursuit of a mastectomy.

“I was wearing half-trousers,” he said, “The tight ones. I took my shirt off. I went into the room, and took my vest off. They asked me to lie down. They put some kind of injection. I saw what was happening, but then I think I fell asleep. They did the operation. When I woke up, they brought what they had taken out and showed it to me. I remember seeing a bloodied bandage on my chest. Every time I woke up, I would see dried blood from the scabs I had scratched. It was 15 days before I could leave the bed. They told me I could do whatever I wanted. The doctor said I could lift weights.  It would be a good idea to go to the gym. Of course, I can’t afford a gym.”

When he came home, he liked looking in the mirror. He did not have to bind his breasts any longer. He could roam about in a vest, even bare-chested if he wanted to. No one could tell he had been born female. It was the freedom he had wanted for nearly 30 years.

But it came at a price. It was three months before sensation returned to his chest. He had not been taught exercises at the hospital, and he made up his own. He massaged his chest, hoping he would one day be able to feel his hand against it.

“When I lifted my arm, it hurt so much, it would feel like someone was tearing my flesh,” he said. He thought of stretches he could do. He ate more than usual, and improvised exercises.

“But all this discomfort was nothing compared to the taunts I have endured in childhood,” he said. Now, the world could see him for the man he was. At the time, he thought it was his last surgery.

***

The final stage of transition is the most challenging—the uro-genital surgery. Dr. Antony Aravind, who is part of the Plastic Surgery Group at Apollo Speciality Hospital, has personally handled four cases of FTM transition in the last seven years. Because of the nature of the surgery, patients invariably return for alterations, and the period of transition is at least 8-10 months.

The technique is similar to what plastic surgeons use for the treatment of burns and cancer. But there are not too many experts, because the technique used in FTM gender reassignment is relatively new. “We call it micro-vascular transfer,” said Dr. Antony, “We take a piece of tissue from one part of the body, along with its blood supply, and connect the blood supply to another part of the body. If the blood supply does not get established, you lose that bit of tissue.”

His patients are usually well-informed before they approach him. “It is others who need education,” he said. “The support they get is poor even in the US, Donald Trump being against all of this, and you cannot expect people in a developing country like India to accept it so quickly, perhaps. But society must understand this is about making people comfortable with what they want to be.”

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Even within the community, those who elect not to have surgery are considered less “complete” than those who have.

Jovin’s tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend ended because he could not sleep with her, he said. She was offended when she said she was ready, and he responded that he wasn’t. “She wanted me to prove I’m a man by sleeping with her. I didn’t want that kind of relationship.”

Then, the other girl, the one with the Silk Smitha eyes, told him she liked him. “I said amma, enna Muruganaa aakkidaadheenga ma, thaikulame (Don’t turn me into Muruga, who has two wives)!” Jovin laughed, “She said she would wait for however long I wanted her to. She said my girlfriend didn’t treat me right and that she would. It didn’t matter if we could never have sex. But I felt I would be ruining her life.”

Selvam now said, “I have two more surgeries to do. First, get my uterus removed. Only then can the penis be made.”

***

Many transmen have spoken against the humiliating process one has to endure to access healthcare, starting with a psychiatrist’s certificate that one has a “mental disorder”. Gee said in his talk that he met a doctor who believes transitioning is “messing with god”. Ramakrishnan told me of a doctor who refused to remove “the healthy uterus” of someone who has not “experienced the joys of motherhood”—joys to which no cis-man is entitled.

And then, there is offensive curiosity—Satya has written about a producer who asked to compare “dick sizes” after learning of the former’s surgery. When I asked Satya about balancing one’s right to a dignified life against spreading awareness, he answered, “This is a difficult one. My first instinct is to say that the answer definitely does not lie in being present in mainstream media; I am a greater votary of actual life encounters. Let’s not forget that the existence of the hijra identity or expression in the public imagination is not a product of presence on TV! The second is that patriarchy will never allow sex, sexuality, gender identity and expression to be liberated. Third, no amount of NGO-isation is going to do it for us. What we need is to work towards a public culture where these are issues questioned, reconstituted and owned by the public—not the state, not the law, not the media.”

***

On January 28, I had a voice message from Selvam. He sounded excited. He had just got a job, he said. He liked the work; it was something he might eventually do as the “own business” he had dreamed of for so long—terrace gardening.

The office of Urban Farm Guide (UFG) is an old house, with red oxide flooring, and large windows. Coloured bottles had been used as edging for flower beds. Several plants were standing packed in cases of soil, next to decorated earthen pots.

Selvam was making notes from a class they had conducted. Another transman was arranging pebbles around a flower bed.

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UFG is the brainchild of Arthi Devi, 30. She had always been into terrace gardening—an inheritance from her grandmother, a farmer in Malaysia—and when she launched her own start-up, she initially planned to hire only women from self-help groups. While volunteering with Cheer, an NGO that works for the rehabilitation of transpeople, she understood how hard it was for them to find employment. She began to hire transpeople to man stalls which she organised at exhibitions in Chennai, for farmers with whom she worked in villages, as well as for self-help groups. Selvam was a regular. When she heard he was looking for a full-time job, she called him.

“I’m happy when they find higher-paying jobs and quit,” Arthi told me with a smile, “If they’re interested in something particular—Gopika likes making idols from clay—we try and find employment that suits them. We try to get them into the corporate world, as receptionists, places where the public will interact with them and stop seeing them as the other. Selvam tells me he likes to make handicrafts.”

Before I left, I took pictures of Selvam working in the garden. He looked at one of the photographs and smiled. “My dhaadi looks good,” he said, fingering his sideburns, “Chedi valarkka vandhuttom; seyrthu idhuvom valarpom. (We’ve got into this business of growing plants. Might as well grow this also.)”

***

Ramakrishnan told me of a transman whose employers were initially supportive, but then terminated his employment after his transition, saying they were downsizing. But he was the only one to be let go at the time, and there had never been complaints about his work.

Advocate Poongkhulali Balasubramanian said this could be challenged in court. “I’m sure this can be argued as a case of gender discrimination,” she said, provided the petitioner could prove there was no other likely cause for being singled out for the ‘‘downsizing’’.

The Supreme Court judgment in the National Legal Services Authority vs Union of India case, delivered on April 15, 2014, is considered a landmark in recognising the rights of transpeople. Essentially, it allows one to self-identify with a particular gender, irrespective of what one’s birth certificate, hormones, or surgical history say.

However, there have been problems with implementation, said Ramakrishnan. “Even though the judgment was far reaching in scope, in the popular imagination and, critically, in the imagination of government officials charged with dispensing schemes and identity cards, transgender=hijra. Transmen start with a disadvantage because they have been relatively invisible in terms of national advocacy.”

States such as Karnataka, Odisha, Manipur, and West Bengal are more amenable to changing gender on legal documents, but it is still hard for transpeople to choose a binary status rather than ‘‘Third Gender’’.

“The NALSA judgment got a lot of press as the one that recognised transgender as the third gender,” Ramakrishnan  said, “That’s not the complete story. They also recognised the right of people to identify within the binary, male to female or vice versa.”

Some government documents—passports, for instance—require proof of surgery for gender change. And even then, some surgeries are more important than others.

“We know somebody who applied to a regional passport office and submitted proof of breast reduction, hysterectomy and oophorectomy. But the reply came ‘You don’t have a penis, you can’t be a man’ and he got rejected. That’s very, very cruel,” said Ramakrishnan.

Many transpeople also have objections to the Transgender Bill 2016.

Satya said, “The current version is in violation of the NALSA judgment—it asks for a district screening committee with a Chief Medical Officer and other medical professionals to vet trans applications! We are, together with other groups, pushing for this to be addressed in the upcoming version of the Bill. And yes, based on the NALSA judgment, which is now the law of the land, the option of going to court is always there. But we would like to give the government a chance to chisel the Bill in collaboration with our communities, before we consider that route.”

To avoid the run-around for medical records, it is easiest to change one’s name through a gazette notification, and use that to change identity documents. Again, the eagerness of the government to issue the Aadhaar card makes it fairly easy to get this particular proof of identity with the gender of one’s choice.

“But, unlike the name change provision, which you can do once in a single form and it holds for everything, there is no provision for gender change. That has to be done individually on every proof of identity,” said Poongkhulali.

She said the grey areas would be resolved if someone were to file a case. “If a petitioner takes it up in court again saying that despite the judgment, I’m being asked to produce all of this, then a court is sure to clarify that it’s not necessary in reading the judgment in its spirit.”

When transpeople, and even intersex people, have gone to court to fight for their right to self-identify with a particular gender, they have won. In the case of K. Prithika Yashini vs The Chairman, Tamil Nadu Uniformed Services Recruitment Board, 3 November 2015, at the Madras High Court, Prithika Yashini, a male-to-female transperson was granted permission to write the police recruitment examination as a woman. She became the first transwoman in the police force. Another landmark judgment from the Madras High Court is in the I. Jackuline Mary vs The Superintendent Of Police, 17 April, 2014. Justice S. Nagamuthu quoting the NALSA judgment said, “In my considered opinion, in the case of Females to Males (FTMs) also, such fundamental right is available to them and therefore, it is for them to choose and express their identity either as females or males or as transsexuals.”

Ramakrishnan said the rules on recruitment of transpeople to “gendered” fields such as the armed forces, police, or sports teams are not too clear, since cases are yet to present themselves. Poongkhulali said technically, the judgment does make allowances for people to enter fields which are gender-segregated or restricted by gender.

In the US, Schuyler Bailar made history by switching from the women’s category to the men’s category in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division 1 in November, 2015. As a woman, Bailar competed alongside Katie Ledecky, future five-time Olympic gold medallist. Now, he swims on the Harvard Men’s Swimming and Diving team as a member of the Harvard Class of 2019.

In India, transmen have more immediate concerns. In places like Manipur, said Ramakrishnan, where the CRPF and Army frisk people daily, transmen worry that they may be targeted at security checks on account of their gender.

***

I met Keerththan Shiva, an undergraduate engineering student at IIT Madras, outside his hostel. He had the loping walk typical of teen college boys, enviably long eyelashes, large expressive eyes, and a ready smile that woke two light dimples in his as-yet-smooth cheeks.

Keerththan had the ideal start. From a middle-class family in southern Tamil Nadu, he was sent to an exclusive CBSE school—his parents didn’t mind taking loans to give their only child a good education. The school was a liberal one, and Keerththan didn’t notice that he had mostly male friends. Weekends were spent playing at the sports facility in his father’s office. He didn’t like part of his school uniform—the checked pinafore—but loved the white shirt so much he wore it when he went out to play with his friends, until his mother shouted at him for getting it dirty.

She would not let him keep his hair short. “So I did some jugaad (stopgap),” he grinned, “I told her I had some vendudhal (vow) in Tirupathi, and I’d promised to tonsure my hair.”

But one day would change his life forever.

“I was in eighth standard when I attained puberty. That’s the last day I rode my cycle. The next day, they sold it off. I used to win cycle races and all. I used to go swimming, play with the boys. Suddenly, I could not go out, except to school. They didn’t even like me going out with my girlfriends.”

He spent his time on video games instead. He and his father would fight over the computer—he had got his father addicted to Project I.G.I., he said with a laugh. He has one happy memory of puberty: a grand function was held, and the trauma of being forced into a saree, and a half-saree a few days later, was offset by the number of people who turned up just for him.

He did not realise all this while that he was, in fact, a girl. He had had crushes on three girls through school, but so did other boys. Two of these girls became his “best friends”, and he was so close to each that people would tease them for being a “couple”. When I asked how that felt, he grinned, “That was fun!” He asked out his best friend, Nethra*, in Class 12. “She didn’t realise I had proposed. She thought it was a girly thing. You know how girls get emotional and say ‘dear’ and ‘darling’ and all that?” He thought she wasn’t sure of her feelings, and so hadn’t responded.

It was only when he got to the girls’ hostel in IIT that he realised something was not quite right. “I would feel very uncomfortable when they’re changing their clothes or when they’d come out in towels after a bath. I didn’t know whether I should stay or go out of the room. And then all the girly chit-chat began.”

A group of freshers got together and began to ask each other about their crushes. When Keerththan’s turn came, he said, “Nethra.” They impatiently told him Nethra was a friend; who was his crush?

“That’s the first time I realised okay, they’re telling this is a friend? Then I’m supposed to have a crush on a boy?” he said.

Soon, his hostel-mates began to lose interest in him. He had no interest in discussing clothes or makeup. They could not persuade him to go to the salon. Within eight months, he had no friends, though he shared a room with two girls. So complete was the isolation that when he was burning up with fever for three days, neither his roommates nor their friends noticed he was shivering and crying on his bed. After three days, he called his parents and said he was too ill to move and needed help.

“Didn’t your professors ask why you weren’t in class for three days?” I asked.

He laughed. “The professors don’t really care about you. They come, they teach the class, and they leave. We go to the website to check their names, because some of them don’t even introduce themselves. If you have less than 85 per cent attendance, they fail you with a ‘W’ grade, and then you have to repeat the course.”

But along with the isolation came time to browse the free Internet the college provided. For the first time, he could look up things about which he was curious—his mother would sit beside him when he was browsing at home.

Now he typed little phrases to see what Google turned up: “I like girls”.

“Slowly I got to know about lesbians. At first I found it very awkward, to tell the truth—girl and girl? How is that possible? Even then I didn’t realise I’m a girl,” he said, with a sudden giggle at a younger, naïve self.

One day, he stumbled upon an article about a transman. “He describes how he hates his breasts, and he wears loose shirts to look like what he likes. That’s when I realised oh-kay, this is what I have been doing for some time.” He began to search for stories of transmen. “I realised many things after that. And I thought ‘Oh my god, I can possibly grow a beard’…and I felt very happy.” One of his favourite hobbies, growing up, was to secretly shave with his father’s kit in the bathroom.

He called up Nethra—they spoke almost every day, for at least an hour—and told her what he had found; he also told her that she hadn’t understood he was in love with her.

“She doesn’t feel that way about me, at least not yet,” he said, a note of hope in his voice, “But we still hang out as friends.”

When the excitement over the discovery waned, though, he sank into depression. He knew he was a transman, but could he ever have the life people in the videos from the US and Europe did?

This time, he missed classes for two weeks, and failed five of seven subjects. His parents were worried. They took him on vacation, to try and cheer him up. He could not speak; he could not even smile. Finally, he came out to his parents. His mother’s response was denial—“You’re just imagining things,” she said. His father’s was to buy expensive “girly” clothes.

For three months, he tried being a girl—he wore the clothes, tried to be affected by compliments from his hostel-mates, tried looking at the mirror and feeling good about himself. But the person looking back was a girl who was miserable in these uncomfortable clothes and this uncomfortable body.

“I couldn’t. I stopped trying. I said this is what I am, I have to accept myself.”

He put his efforts into something else—networking. He found the LGBT group on campus. He attended meetings, and then one of the members put him on to Orinam.

“I have friends now.” He smiled, paused, and then said, “I actually just turned 20. On February 11. And for the first time, I celebrated my birthday here. My friends made a surprise visit. I used to get very jealous when [other hostel residents] would celebrate their birthdays. I’ll be the photographer. This time, it was like…‘My god, this is so nice!’”

***

Satya acknowledges that these networks “have been life-giving to our communities, especially in the light of the absolute lack of familial and social support, state apathy.”

However, he warns, “These networks may not sustain their independence for long, as their NGO-isation seems to be round the corner. Just as what happened with the women’s movement, the radical potential of such spaces will be diluted, career activists will be installed and the community divided against each other. It will be crucial to see whether these spaces will finally hold out or be sold out, in the sense, will they remain political at the core, or be reduced to just service provision, again, something that in my opinion took the steam out of a potential gay movement in the wake of the HIV-AIDS crisis.

“I hope we are not going to be reduced to sponsored pride marches, coming out on TV, subjects of sensational ‘before and after’ stories for print and online media, and that the trans discourse can be brought into a life-world of its own and is part of a reality we call ‘everyday life’.”

***

“That girl who liked me, she’s married and she has a child now,” Jovin told me, “I bought clothes for the baby before it was born. I wanted that dress to be the first the baby wore. This girl told me she would tell the baby, ‘Your father gave you this’. I said I’d kill her.”

“You should have given me her number,” Selvam said, “Naanaavadhu correct panneeruppen (I’d have got her). I’d have given the kid my initial and your name.”

“Look at him,” said Jovin, with a shake of his head. “If I’d married that girl, she wouldn’t have the baby, right? I need to think before I marry someone. I need a house of my own. If a girl puts her faith in me, I need to be able to protect her. A hut where the rain could seep in won’t do. She must be happier with me than she was with her parents. I will do everything for her. I won’t let her lift a finger. I’ll work, I’ll earn money. That will be enough to run our household. I’ll cook for her. I’ll feed her with my hands. I’ll make coffee for her.”

“And what will she do?” I asked.

“Avunga jolly-aa kaalaattittu kudippaanga (She will put one leg over the other and drink it),” Selvam teased.

Jovin wasn’t rattled. “That’s enough for me. Every woman who leaves her family for a man does so only because she wants a child. What can I give her, what wealth, what love, that could make up for that sacrifice? I wouldn’t want a single tear to spill from her eyes. I can’t give her a child. But she’ll be my child, and I’ll be hers.”

“I don’t think I’m going to make all that much money,” Selvam, ever-pragmatic, said, “I can’t give a girl the queen’s life our hero’s promising. She needs to work too. Everyone has to work today. But then, I like poor girls more than I like rich girls.” He smiled, contemplating his past and future at once. “It’s hard to curtail so much—my desires, my anger, my emotions. I can’t help but want a girl in my life again, the kind with whom I can settle down. I have so much love to give. It makes me sad that I don’t have a partner. Guys who want to live an honest life don’t get the girls. It’s only the cheats who will ditch them who get the girls.”

*Names have been changed to protect identities

Suresh Kannan is a Chennai-based photojournalist.

(Published in the March 2017 edition of Fountain Ink.)

BY ARPIT PARASHAR

Kewal Kumar, a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) worker from Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh (UP) was in Lucknow when party chief Mayawati addressed the media at her residence after the results of the assembly elections were announced on March 11. While the mood was sombre at the party office as well as among workers, he says the defeat has numbed them. “Everybody present realised that we all got our calculations on the ground realities wrong for the second time after 2014 (Lok Sabha polls), but more than that it was disbelief about the seats we got.”

Mayawati said at the press conference, one of the few she held through the campaign ahead of the polls and during the seven-phase polling, that the electronic voting machines (EVMs) used by the Election Commission (EC) were tampered with to allow the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the biggest majority in the state since the 1980 polls as BJP took 325 seats. The EC has defended the EVMs and said no tampering is possible. Party workers too quietly acknowledge it, Kumar says.

“At most they can assure some victories in some seats where it is possible that BJP workers did indulge in unhealthy activities but the outcome can hardly be challenged as a whole,” he said. The facts support him. While the party claims to be the sole true representative of the larger Dalit community in the state which comprises 21 per cent of the population, its core vote bank has been dented beyond redemption in the last few years. Of the 85 seats reserved for SC/ST candidates, it won just two, while its main rival till now, the SP, managed seven. BJP won 69, with another six going to its allies Apna Dal and Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party, both getting three seats each.

What is worrying, workers say, is that in most seats BSP was relegated to third spot after the SP with even some independent candidates polling as many votes as the party. In western UP for example, in seats where Jatavs, the largest Dalit community, form a sizeable voter base they voted the BJP to power almost everywhere while the SP kept seats where Muslims are in a majority. A senior party leader, who lost from western UP, said on condition of anonymity, “I believe Behenji’s allegation of tampering, but in my seat I can simply say it does not look so. I monitored polling booths with my workers personally and people did end up deserting us, is all I can say.”

He says most leaders have grudgingly conceded defeat but Mayawati’s allegations are probably a last ditch attempt to save face, since something had to be said in response. “Most leaders know we have lost fair and square and the fault lies within the party. We took our own voter base for granted while trying to woo others in order to win.”

Kewal Kumar agrees. “The younger voters, who have grown in numbers exponentially, have taken a liking to Modi and believe in his promise to create jobs. Then our leaders judged the demonetisation move wrongly too, opposing it since their own stacks of black money became worthless.” Mayawati has a case of laundering over `100 crore against her. The EC also found unaccounted money in a bank account, ona tip from the Enforecement Directorate, of her brother Anand Kumar.

“We should have supported demonetisation since the poor in villages were not directly affected and are resilient and so recovered from the impact. We should have targeted BJP on how after demonetisation they could claim to create jobs since the economy was impacted so dearly and campaigned on those lines. That would have got us the votes that mattered most,” the senior leader quoted above said.

Although it is common for leaders to turn around and blame campaign policy after a loss of this magnitude, those in the inner circle say resentment within the party has been growing since the defeat of 2012, when the party won 80 seats. Mayawati, they say, might have started to believe in her own hype since her term from 2007 to 2012 was hailed by media and critics alike for being riot-free, and good law and order. The bubble, punctured in 2014, has burst now.

When BSP lost the assembly polls in 2012, the defeat was attributed largely to anti-incumbency and the extensive road campaign by Akhilesh Yadav, who emerged as a young SP leader and next generation of the Mulayam Singh Yadav clan. But a closer analysis shows that even then the core base of the BSP had been severely dented as SP managed to win 58 of the reserved seats while BSP did not win even 20. This was brushed under the carpet then, only to hit the party again in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections when the BSP’s tally was reduced to zero. This time it was attributed to the  “Modi wave”.

Some BSP leaders have consistently warned internally of such complacency regarding the voter base, and that one cannot expect people to vote along caste lines anymore. Such leaders have either been sidelined or pushed to work on the ground rather than being given leadership roles.

BSP’s traditional vote base of Jatavs, comprising 57 per cent of the Dalit population, has been the worst affected. Since Mayawati’s rise to power, they have consistently moved up the socio-cultural-economic ladder in UP. They form a chunk of the workforce in the administrative machinery that comes from the Dalits, numbering many thousands,  since they have benefited from better education and some favouritism during Mayawati’s tenures as chief minister. But this upward movement has also seen them expect more of the party than crony favouritism and political representation when none else would give them that.

This is where BJP managed to turn the tables. Even though BSP cadres are a force to reckon with on the ground, the BJP under Sunil Bansal, an old RSS hand considered close to party chief Amit Shah, brought a large number of them into the party fold in the past few years, especially after the 2014 Lok Sabha polls when it became clear that if the right appeals were made, Dalits could vote for BJP. This was done keeping in mind that 45 per cent of the non-Jatav Dalits had also voted for BJP, apart from a sizeable section of the Jatavs.

This was a turning point since it was earlier thought that Dalits, like Muslims would vote to defeat BJP wherever they could since Mayawati relied heavily on them to do so, making scathing attacks this time, too, calling them the Bharatiya Jumla Party. Bansal made sure booth-level committees were formed for majority of the 1.45 lakh booths in the state and the “sabka saath, sabka vikas” (support from all, development for all) formula was implemented on the ground by including more and more Dalits. This paid dividends; 20 per cent of BJP victories have been secured by Dalit candidates, including the 75 it won with its allies from the 85 reserved seats.

Non-Jatav Dalit sub-castes like the Dhobis, Khatiks, Pasis and Valmikis have traditionally supported BSP, and it seems to have been the case this time, too, since the voting percentage of the party remains significant even now, falling to 22.2 per cent from the 26 per cent in the 2012 assembly polls and slightly higher than the 19 per cent it secured in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. But a great portion went to BJP, as figures suggest.

BSP’s rout cannot be seen more clearly than in Agra district, which has a large Dalit population dominated by Jatavs and was considered BSP’s stronghold until now. While the party managed to win six out of the nine seats in this region even in 2012 when it lost the assembly, this time it lost all the seats, with BJP winning most of them. This trend in Agra was also visible further eastward in the districts of central UP, considered the stronghold of the SP, where BJP won the majority of seats, proving that voter bases of both the parties were dented because they took them for granted without being diligent enough to appeal to their aspirations, as the BJP tried and succeeded.

The BSP, in fact, fared badly in most Dalit-dominated districts, which shows that while it managed a good voting percentage owing to some swing votes from backward Muslims and upper castes persuaded to support BSP, and work by the party workers, it could not pre-empt the slide in its own bastions. In Sitapur, for example, the BSP managed only one seat while in Ambedkar Nagar, which was named so by Mayawati during her rule from 2007-2012, it barely saved some grace as its state president Ram Achal Rajbhar managed to win the Akbarpur seat. An old hand, he also succeeded in ensuring two more seats for the party from the district.

However, it suffered humiliation in many others. The Leader of the Opposition in the assembly, from BSP, Gaya Charan Dinkar, came third in Naraini constituency of Banda district. What is worse, it lost all 19 seats in Bundelkhand, an old stronghold and the base of its leader Naseemuddin Siddiqi where it failed to prevent the onset of drought during its 2007-2012 rule which was later made worse during the rule of the SP as it focused most of its attention in the central districts of Firozabad, Etawah, Etah, Mainpuri, etc. This eventually cost the party as the votes went to BJP, which has promised a reversal of fortunes for the people of the region.

The party also lost all three seats in Kaushambi district, which has a 37 per cent Dalit population, among the highest in the state. Its star campaigner in the region, Indrajeet Saroj, who had won on four occasions previously even when the party did not win in the state, lost from the Majhanpur seat. In fact, BSP lost almost all Dalit-dominated seats in districts like Fatehpur, Hardoi, Unnao, Sitapur, Sonbhadra, Mirzapur, Azamgarh, Auraiya, Rae Bareli, Barabanki, Chitrakoot, Mahoba, Chandauli, Jhansi, Kheri and Lalitpur.

Another so-called star campaigner, don-turned politician Mukhtar Ansari won his seat Mau; Ansari is facing trial in a special CBI court for the murder of BJP member Krishnanand Rai, MLA from Mohammadabad seat, where Ansari’s brother Sibgatullah Ansari lost this time while his son Abbas Ansari lost the Ghosi seat. With the BJP coming to power in the state as well now, Ansari can expect to face fire and if proved guilty.

It will be a big embarrassment for Mayawati who was hoping to corner many more seats with his help by inducting him into the party, which has not happened. In fact, even during campaigning it proved to be an embarrassment, as the only defence Mayawati and the party came up with on his last-ditch inclusion was that he had not been proven guilty yet.

***

While Mayawati was banking big on Muslim votes this time, fielding 105 Muslim candidates, the division in numbers between BSP and the SP of the Muslim vote in most districts seems to have helped the BJP consolidate its votes. This was most evident in Deoband, home to the Deoband Islamic seminary, where the BJP candidate won by a handsome margin thanks to the split of the 1.25 lakh Muslim votes between the SP and BSP candidates. The difference between the votes of the SP and BSP together against the BJP is nearly 26,000 votes more, with BSP’s Majid Ali coming second to the winning candidate of the BJP, who got around 1.02 lakh votes.

“It is clear that Muslims did turn out to vote in large numbers but I feel our own workers failed us by ignoring the trend that a lot of people from our Dalit base deserted us. BJP ne hamaare hi vote mein sendh maar di (BJP grabbed a section of our traditional votes),” Majid Ali said, speaking over the phone.

In the Deoband assembly seat Muslims constitute 27 per cent of the voter base against 71 per cent in the district overall. The Deoband seminary, known for its controversial fatwas and hardline politics at times, hardly has an impact on the politics as it is closed to outsiders and nearly all the people studying at the institution come from outside Deoband.

In most of the seats of western UP the split in Muslim votes helped BJP secure clear victories. The BSP’s plans to garner support from Muslims seems to have worked as it came second in many seats with Muslim support but the split of votes meant both SP and BSP were losers since the votes were divided between them. BJP has eaten away into some of their bases apart from consolidating its own ground. In Sardhana, for example, BSP planned to make sure it defeated BJP’s Sangeet Singh Som by combining the Dalit-Muslim votes. Som is seen as Amit Shah’s man in the region and was one of the accused in the Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013 where he allegedly incited Hindus against Muslims. BSP fielded Imran Qureshi whereas the SP banked on its own Hindu face Atul Pradhan. The result was that together the SP and BSP polled around 36,000 votes more than Som but the BJP still won by a comfortable margin.

This division of votes is most obvious in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts, epicentre of the riots in 2013 but where the BJP has managed to win handsomely. In Meerapur assembly constituency of Muzaffarnagar, SP lost to the BJP by a mere 193 votes. Old BJP hand Avtar Singh Bhadana won with 69,035 votes, while SP’s Liyakat Ali got 68,842 while BSP’s Nawazish Khan got 39, 689 votes. Similarly, in Muslim-dominated Kanth assembly seat in Moradabd, SP and BSP together polled around 44,000 votes more than the BJP but SP candidate Anees-ur-Rehman lost by around 2,300 votes.

Apart from these, constituencies in Saharanpur, Bijnor, Bareily, and Shrawasti districts where Muslims were the majority voters have mostly gone to BJP as a result of the split in votes between SP and BSP. While this shows a clear consolidation of Hindu votes in favour of the BJP, it also shows that BSP and SP have lost their traditional bases, especially BSP, since it could not capitalise on the votes it polled outside its traditional bases.

Social commentators like Chandra Bhan Prasad and others have said BSP lost because of Hindu consolidation by BJP, which did not field a single Muslim candidate, but  that is only partially true; BSP has itself to blame for its losses.

***

The Backward and Minority Classes Employees’ Federation (BAMCEF), formed by Kanshi Ram in 1978 and considered the parent body of the BSP, threw its weight behind BSP this time but could not stem the BJP tide. The reason, members say, is that BJP held on to a niche section of the members from within the federation which quietly supported Modi in 2014. Basant Kumar Saini, a senior member of BAMCEF from Amroha who works as a judicial officer at local courts in the district, says, “We seem to have missed the bus as far as the silent vote that BSP gets is concerned. Our analysis shows that we did manage to get a lot of votes from Muslims, especially the backward Muslim classes and castes whom SP neglected as it has become a party of the upward Muslims only. These gains could have helped us immensely but BJP dented our own voter base among Dalits.”

Members of the cadre, he says, are still in shock but admits that the result reflects BSP’s own failure to keeping its voter base intact. “Also, the ones who supported Modi in 2014, especially from the educated sections of Dalits and other minorities seem to have stuck with BJP notwithstanding our appeals to vote en masse for BSP, which is a reminder that voters’ loyalty should not be taken for granted.”

Even though the Brahman Mahasabha, an organisation that claims to represent a large section of the Brahmins in the state, offered official support to BSP ahead of the elections, the outreach was limited to a single meeting and a press briefing. No real Brahmin leaders were seen during the campaign except for her close aide and legal counsel Satish Mishra, the one who brokered the deal with the Mahasabha in the first place. Although Mishra has come to be known as the Brahmin face of the party, insiders say he does not have much say in deciding candidates or building a Brahmin base of workers, which was not the case in 2007. The party had a strong Brahmin base built based on its “social experiment” to bring in the upper classes and the backward classes together as a voter base.

One of the main reasons for this, Saini and some others feel, is that while BJP presented a clean image, with Modi himself leading the charge in the state after the first few phases, Mayawati could not do so. After the 2014 debacle, senior leaders and confidantes of Mayawati like Swami Prasad Maurya, Jugal Kishore and R.K. Chaudhary had accused her of demanding that contestants pay `2-2.5 core each to the party fund. Maurya eventually quit the party.

“Also, post-demonestisation when most BAMCEF members supported the move, she came out hammer-and-tongs against it, which cost her,” says Vikram Kumar, an employee of the Delhi Jal Board and member of the federation. Kumar says large sections of the BAMCEF supported the move by PM Modi but that Mayawati got carried away by the media hype around it, which she was known to ignore earlier. “It is true that the poor suffered, but it was short-term; they were actually more than happy to see the back money debate unfold and the corrupt rich suffer.” Mayawati had termed the move anti-poor, which Kumar says is not true.

“You see, villagers store grains and essential items like oil and ghee for long-term use. It is a general practice in the hinterland to prepare for bad times. Ahead of Diwali and the winter this (storage of essential commodities) is especially common. She failed to understand that the poor voter will not be convinced by her argument as much as by Modi since the temporary shortage would not affect them that badly. Also, rural folk are used to long queues (in banks/outside ATMs), it is the rich who are not. The media couldn’t have got it more wrong on the move and Behenji seems to have fallen for it.” That Mayawati and her brother Anand have cases of “assets beyond means of income” against them led to attacks on her by local BJP leaders, which convinced many to vote against her, insiders feel.

In fact, Anand has been accused of enjoying the same role in BSP as that of Shivpal Yadav in SP—extortion through various fronts in the real estate market. Although they would not say it on record, real estate bigwigs and police officials admit that both Anand and Shivpal get a fixed share of the money a real estate developer invests on a project beforehand in return for the political “patronage” whenever either of the parties is in power.

BAMCEF quietly also got some exit polls conducted through various agencies while the elections were going on. It was one such survey at the behest of the BJP that was posted on the online portal of a leading Hindi daily, leading to the arrest of its editor. The survey posted on the site claimed that BJP was winning heavily in western UP after the initial phase of polling but BAMCEF rejected it keeping in mind the survey that they got conducted.

“However, this survey too was based on the assumption that our traditional voter base would stick with us and so we only needed to focus on voters from the communities we were relying on to come into our fold and assure us victories. Now after the results we look like fools,” says Jitender Singh, an employee with the electricity department in Noida and a member of BAMCEF. For example, of the 73 seats that went to polls in the first phase, BAMCEF initially claimed conservative estimates said they would secure victories in at least 40 seats, but managed barely five.

One of the major reasons behind these losses is also that Mayawati, despite making some overtures, never openly promised governance for all, which the BJP championed, forcing SP also into a similar approach, even forming an alliance with the Congress towards this end ahead of the polls hoping to stem the slide in its fortunes after the dispute between Akhilesh Yadav and his uncle Shivpal threatened to rip the SP apart, which party chief Mulayam Singh had to quell by stepping in to allow control of the party to his son.  While the distance Mayawati keeps from the media is said to be fuelled by the partisan and unfair writing against her most of the time, this distance from the media did not help either, he feels.

Mayawati did change her attitude towards the media somewhat. She held press conferences at regular intervals and took questions from media persons during some interactions, which is not usual for her, but tokenism could not help get attention in the media. In fact, except for some vernacular newspapers and channels and the wire organisations, hardly any English TV or print organisations—barring a few who did so rarely—gave any coverage to her rallies across the state during the campaigning.

Also, unlike all other parties active on social media, which plays a crucial role in forming opinion in favour or against a party among the younger generation, which uses Internet much more than even during the 2014 polls, BSP did hardly anything on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Zameer Ahmad, a techie from Rampur and part of the BSP social media team during the campaign phase, said, “All we would get was a press release which we were supposed to release when required by the higher-ups. There was no talk otherwise. It did not even seem like a political campaign was going on, more like a government department issuing press releases which were badly written, mostly in Hindi. I have seen even local police in UP do better than them (BSP) on social media.”

Ahmad feels BSP’s campaign had enough steam to rival the Congress and SP, if not the “BJP too”. But failure to capitalise on the space, especially when youngsters who previously supported BSP or whose parents supported BSP traditionally are now all on social media, also played an important part in hurting BSP’s outreach. To top it all, Mayawati’s rallies were hardly publicised and she mostly spoke from written speeches, going extempore only to comments against rivals, which did not help either.

***

Vinod Kumar (name changed), a close relative of Mayawati who fought on his own after forming a small party from Meerut South in western UP, says Mayawati’s antagonism to rising young leaders in the party is the major cause of her humiliation. “I too defected from BSP fold but kept my links with BAMCEF because it forms our core, but BSP has become an authoritarian party run by my aunt (Mayawati). Many young leaders have become discouraged and either moved to other parties or simply left politics. I could not join any other party since that would have been against the Bahujan Samaj principles and decided to fight my own battles; also since I am a relative other parties would have projected me as the face but hijacked the core agenda, which was not acceptable to me.” Kumar lost badly to the BJP, but he says this was a one-off election. “Next time when BJP is the incumbent we will have a level playing field. I hope to make my mark then.”

The BSP, however, will have to reinvent itself to become as relevant as it had hoped to be in the elections. For one, party leaders who refused to speak on record said the plan to divide the state into four smaller states tabled by BSP in the assembly during its previous rule would have to be fought for and proposed again before the next election.

“We could have used this as a development-oriented step in our campaign and explained to the voters that in the end it will benefit everyone, just as the case has been with Uttarakhand’s separation. Had we championed this we could have made gains,” a leader who lost the election from his constituency in Gorakhpur said on the condition of anonymity.

Many other leaders think that if BSP decides to form separate units for the four units proposed to be carved out of UP—Purvanchal, Bundelkhand, Awadh and Paschim Pradesh, and promotes local-level leaderships in all four with Mayawati as national chief and mentor, it would build a base stronger than the party has ever had before.

“Behenji needs to focus on attacking BJP and other parties at the national level rather than keeping the focus endlessly on UP. The cadre has suffered immensely because of her obsession with the state and not developed in other states due to lack of local-level leadership.” Looking at the current performance it is clear that Mayawati will not be able to retain her Rajya Sabha seat, which would only mean that other party members of her party will have to be moved forward to take leadership roles.

Not everyone is giving up on BSP yet. Many party leaders, although silent, and wary of speaking in public or in the media and nervous owing to the prolonged silence of the party higher-ups including Mayawati on the debacle, say the party will rise again as it has after every defeat. “But the solution will be to declare a successor (to Mayawati) and come forward with a new image and vigour. Young blood needs to be infused, just as Kanshi Ram ji did when he promoted Mayawati to the top,” a senior leader said over the phone.

Mayawati’s house in New Delhi, meanwhile, still has a deserted look although people like Kewal Kumar keep visiting in the hope that an announcement regarding a big push will soon be made.

Arpit Parashar is a freelance writer based in Delhi.

(Published in the April 2017 edition of Fountain Ink)

BY NANDINI KRISHNAN

The shade of the trees,

The single hut,

A few flowers,

And a sky,

In the picture

That hangs on the wall.

As my eyes rest on the flowers,

My heart wanders

In search of

The solitude

Of the painted hut.

—Pada Veettin Thanimai, Oru Maalaiyum, Innoru Maalaiyum (2000)

The most enduring memory Salma’s friends in the Tamil literary circle have of her is arguably the sight of her eating dosai. It was the first time most of them were meeting Salma.

Kalachuvadu Publications, which had only published seven books since it was revived in 1994, decided to launch four more to coincide with the World Tamil Conference, Chennai, in 2000. Among them was a compilation of Salma’s poems, Oru Maalaiyum Innoru Maalaiyum. Salma, who was as anonymous as Elena Ferrante at the time, decided to attend the conference on an impulse.

“It was her first exposure to a literary event. Her mother was a hesitant accomplice in this escapade.  To travel alone was unthinkable!” her publisher Kannan Sundaram writes in his introduction to the German translation of her first novel, Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai.

Salma, who is now 48, told me her mother would accompany her everywhere. “It was considered wrong for a woman to go out alone. People in the village would say ugly things. Even later, when people knew who I was, my family would not let me travel alone—it was a question of the family’s honour. I would feel sorry for my mother. It was a traumatic experience for her to be at these literary meetings. She would be so bored, she would start nodding off within minutes of an event. People still tease me about it—they’d say, ‘Just like the mothers of cinema actresses accompany them everywhere, so does Salma’s mother.’” She smiled. “You know when I started travelling alone? When I had to go abroad.”

The famous dosai incident occurred years before that.

Kannan recounted the story in his introduction: “A few of us invited her to walk with us to a nearby restaurant. She glanced at her mother, and then receiving a silent message which we could not interpret, came with us. As we walked, it was obvious she had trouble negotiating the city’s crowded platforms and roads. In the restaurant it was a sight to watch her eat a dosai! Again a first! We teased her mercilessly but she enjoyed every bit of it—to this day she retains that sense of humour.”

Salma began to laugh when I asked her about it. She was not used to eating out. No one in her family liked to eat at restaurants. Before she was published, she would only visit cities when someone had to go to the hospital. They would leave after breakfast, and do their best to return before lunch.

“At the hotel, when they reeled off all these varieties of food, the only one I recognised was dosai,” she said, “So I asked for it. Then it took me an hour to finish eating. There were all these men around me, and I felt a sense of koocham (shyness).”

She was particularly averse to eating in public. Her parents had once taken her to Kodaikanal for the day to cheer her up—it was during the period when Salma was resisting marriage, threatening suicide every time they broached the subject. They thought a trip would do her good, and left for the hill station by the 5 a.m. bus. Salma remembers the smell of frying bajji on the street.

“My father bought a plate of molaga bajji for me,” she said, “I refused, because everyone else on the street seemed to be looking at me. I was so tempted to eat it, this steaming hot bajji in the cold of Kodaikanal. But I couldn’t.”

Now, she was surrounded by strangers who were keen to talk to the poet they so admired. She would not look at them. She stared at the leaf and picked at her dosai.

***

Salma is now described as a “controversial” poet. The “bold” language she uses is seen as having encouraged other young women writers to follow suit.  However, when one knows the story of her life, one understands that she is tackling taboo subjects not to be sensationalist, but because she has lived them. Her language is non-conformist in the sense that the dialogue is realistic, uncensored.

It is perhaps to tell the story behind her work that Salma agreed to British filmmaker Kim Longinotto’s proposal to document her life in 2011.

Speaking on the phone, Kim told me she had first heard of Salma when she was at a film festival in Delhi, showing her Pink Saris (2010), a documentary on Sampat Pal. She had attended a women’s seminar during the festival.

“It was very, very depressing,” she said, “Everyone was being so negative, saying ‘Oh, things aren’t going to change.’ And then suddenly, Urvashi [Butalia] said, ‘Look, girls, there are things happening; we just never hear about them’, and she tells us about Salma, and I thought, ‘Ah! I’ve got to do it.’” Butalia’s Zubaan had published the English translation of Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai (called The Hour After Midnight). Kim left India with copies of every work of Salma’s that had been translated. “You know, Nandini, I love this woman,” she told me, “She’s a brave, brave woman. What she does is this brave thing—talking about very personal things. It’s so easy to talk about politics in the abstract, which is what people normally do, but to actually talk about your own self in that incredibly unguarded, passionate way, it’s so rare. It’s rare enough in Europe, but for this girl from a little tiny village in Tamil Nadu…even when I’m talking to you about her, I’m in awe of her.”

The documentary told the world a story which was known mainly to Salma’s friends, of how she had been pulled out of school, and confined to the house until she agreed to marriage; her husband and in-laws did not like the fact that she wrote, but Salma did not give up. With a little help from her parents, and a lot from her friends, she became a successful writer and politician. Salma’s books had already been translated into several languages. But the documentary catapulted her into a larger arena. She was being invited to film festivals across the world, more translators came forward, and she became a role model, a woman who had defied tradition and constraints.

This came at a price. Voyeuristic details of her early life and her marriage worked their way into every write-up on Salma. Back home, her international fame evoked jealousy in those who believed that she was being judged on merit of her struggle and not her talent.

I first interacted with her at the World Writers’ Festival 2014 in Paris. The documentary was screened, followed by a discussion of Salma’s work. The image of Salma as a formidable woman began to dissolve when someone asked her about her niece Fathima, of whom she is very fond. At the time, Fathima had just finished school, and her parents were keen to marry her off.

“I just want my Fathima…,” she said, in her careful English, and had to pause because her voice was breaking, “…to finish her studies. I don’t want Fathima to suffer.”

Enlarge

Several members of the audience stayed back for a tête-à-tête. Typically, they were more interested in her life than her work. An Indian-origin woman asked me to translate an intrusive personal question, which I refused to. Salma, who had heard the exchange, later squeezed my hand and said, “Thanks. I don’t know how to say ‘no’. Even when I don’t want to answer questions, I do.”

Through the week we spent at the festival, Salma and I spoke often. The organisers had asked her to read her poetry in English rather than Tamil, and she asked me whether her English was passable. She laughed, “At least they didn’t ask me to read in French.”

By the end of the festival, she had begun to address me in the singular, trading the formal neenga for the informal nee. It told me I had been promoted from reader to friend.

“What is interesting about people like her,” Kim Longinotto said, “Is that she has incredible strength, and she knows it, and she knows she’s amazing, and she knows she’s done something unique. But at the same time, she has really dark nights and moments of doubting herself and moments of guilt, and she’s very, very conflicted. I think that’s why it’s so easy to be her friend, because she has doubts like we do.”

Things have changed in the years since the dark nights, and Salma has put it all behind her. But every time her story is told, she is forced to relive those times.

Writer and historian Prof. A. R. Venkatachalapathy, a long-time friend of Salma’s, told me, “She’s become a prisoner of her biography.”

In the author’s note to her latest novel, Manaamiyangal (2016), Salma writes, “I have just one request for my readers. Please leave the creator behind when you enter the creation. I wish to take leave of you here. Please don’t take me inside with you.”

***

Among Salma’s earliest readers was Kannan Sundaram. He is not particularly fond of poetry, he told me, but her work was striking. She would send her poems to literary magazines. When her early work was published under her own name, Rokkiah, it enraged her family. Her husband would ferret out the poems she had hidden in various places and tear them up. So she worked out an elaborate conspiracy. She would write in bits of calendar paper in the middle of the night, standing in the common toilet of the house. A pen was hidden inside a box of sanitary napkins on a shelf in the toilet. She would stuff the paper into her blouse, and then slip them between her sarees in a cupboard. When she got the chance, she would copy them out neatly and give them to her mother, who would have her father post them to magazines. Salma sent some of her poems to Kalachuvadu. She told me Kannan made a phone call to her one day, asking for more poems. She gave a secret notebook of her poetry to her cousin Hameed, who was already making a mark for himself as a poet under the pen name “Manushyaputhiran”. Manushyaputhiran was also an editor at Kalachuvadu.

Through him, Kannan heard her story, and knew that she had not finished her schooling. It showed in the spelling mistakes she made.

“Despite all those shortcomings, her skill came through in her poetry, her fiction, everything that she wrote,” he told me. “I particularly remember her book reviews. They’re so sharp. Where did she get such inputs, what were the sources, where did she find the tools for such insightful analysis, without stepping out of her home? No one can forget them. And people don’t forgive her for them either,” he added, with a laugh.

It was through these reviews that Venkatachalapathy first encountered Salma. He had moved to Tirunelveli, near Nagercoil where Kalachuvadu is based, and would go to the office every week to look at the submissions.

“Once, Kannan produced a review of Thoppil Mohammed Meeran’s novel, Saaivu Naarkaali (which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1997),” Venkatachalapathy said, “It was a hard-hitting review. Kannan asked me what I thought, and I said it’s a fantastic piece—it’s a new voice, a new perspective, it’s not something that I’ve ever heard before. The writing had lots of grammatical slips. But as an experienced editor, I can say there are two kinds of writing—writing which can be edited, and writing which cannot be. The latter is impossible to salvage. You change one sentence and then you have to keep changing the whole damn thing. This person’s writing was so clear, and the most important thing is you could also see it was a fresh voice. Obviously it was not an experienced writer, but there was maturity.”

Kannan told him who the writer was—Manushyaputhiran’s cousin, a young woman writing from Thuvarankurichi without the knowledge of her family.

“Thoppil Mohammad Meeran has never forgiven her for that review,” Venkatachalapathy said, with a smile, “Generally, Thoppil has received velvet-cushioned, kid-gloved treatment, as a new voice from the Muslim community. He couldn’t take the shock. That too from a woman, which is worse, and a Muslim woman.”

He tried to get even with her by reviewing her novel. But he didn’t simply condemn the novel. He chose, instead, to quote provocative passages out of context, including a reference to a lecherous father-in-law.

“He was basically trying to provoke fellow-Muslims,” said Venkatachalapathy, “It is a particularly perverse mind. First, this is what he could read in the 500-600 page novel; and the second perversity was that he should put these passages alone out there.”

Salma reviewed books early in her career, but the animosity she faced from fellow-writers made her decide to stop.

“No one seems to want honest feedback,” she told me, “If you don’t praise everything they’ve written, they see you as an enemy. Now, when people call me to book release functions, I know they want me to compliment their writing, not analyse it.”

Twenty-three years after he read the review, Venkatachalapathy remembers a particular sentence from it. “I had reviewed the novel too, and I remember I’d picked out a very jarring metaphor. Salma, too, said it jars and grates—the writer was trying to suggest that the sun is harsh and bright and scorching by saying, ‘The naxalite sun rose’.”

Readers tried to guess who “Salma” might be. The popular opinion, even among prominent writers, was that this person must be a man writing under a woman’s name, because the writing was too intelligent to belong to a woman.

Ironically, one of the funniest bits in Salma’s Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai is among the most poignant. A woman writes a letter to her husband, who is in Saudi Arabia. On his next trip back home, he laughs and says, “What atrocious spelling! Didn’t you go to school, makku?” He is so oblivious to his own privilege that he doesn’t realise how crippling the lack of an education is.

“My father, even my mother, wanted me to study further,” Salma said, “But no one had ever gone to school after coming of age. The village is like a large family. You can’t defy traditions easily.”

But because she was such a keen reader, she had educated herself in ways that other women from her village hadn’t.

“The spelling mistakes in the letter that Sherifa writes to her husband are not exaggerated,” Salma said, “Girls in the neighbouring houses would write letters to their husbands in the Middle East. They’d sometimes bring them to me to see if they’ve written correctly. These are the kind of basic errors they would make. Some of them had even forgotten to read. They would bring letters their husbands wrote them, hidden in magazines or newspapers, and ask me to read them out. So, many of them preferred to speak and sing into cassettes—their husbands would have bought them tape recorders from abroad—and then they would send those through someone else who was going there.”

***

“You’re so fair, akka,” Rabiya said, “I wish I were fair like you.”

Waheeda laughed. “What do you expect, running around in the sun all the time? When you come of age, you’ll be inside the house like me, and you’ll lose your tan.”

Rabiya imagined herself becoming as fair as Waheeda. She could not wait to get her period.

—Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai (2004)

Salma was telling me how she had nearly lost a ring that was loose, demonstrating how it had fallen off. I noticed how long and slender her fingers were.

“No wonder you keep describing your characters’ beautiful fingers,” I said.

Salma laughed. “We don’t do anything through our teenage years, right? They do so much to make sure we’re beautiful. We don’t go out in the sun. We don’t do any housework. We just sit in our rooms like so many dolls. On the one hand, they want us to be lovely. On the other, no one can see that beauty. Once we’re married, we go out wearing burqa. But until then, we can’t step out of home.”

“What happens to your friendships? You can’t visit each other, right?”

Salma began to tell me about her childhood friends—four girls who used to go to the cinema. They were inseparable. “We were all really tall too. Naalum maadu maathiri varadhunga nu pasanga ellaarum engalai kindal pannuvaanga (Literally, “Other kids used to say look at the four of them, coming along like a cow”). Our houses were very close. But once we all came of age, we might as well have lived on different continents.”

She decided they would keep their friendship alive through letters. She would write in detail about her day, and beg her mother to play courier. But the other three were too lazy to write, she says. They were happy to sleep, cook, and eat. They told her mother they had nothing to say, every day was like every other day. None of them could meet until all of them were married. The bonds had broken.

 “I was just thinking about my brother. It seems I have to wear a dhavani from tomorrow. And I can never get rid of it. Amma told me. My brother will scold me. And he won’t even let me go to the movies from now on,” said Madina.

The recollections of her brother that had been imprinted on her memory reinforced her image of him as an imposing, even terrifying, man. She did not look forward to his arrival. She believed his visit would be thoroughly annoying.

“If you’re sure you’re going to wear a dhavani from tomorrow, I will too!” said Rabiya, cheerfully. “Both of us will give each other company, all right?” she said again, trying to get Madina to lighten up.

As soon as she had said it, Madina’s face glowed with happiness.

“Really?” she said, “I was feeling awkward about having to start wearing dhavani. The women will tease me, and say gross things. I’m so relieved, di!” She tightened her grip on Rabiya’s fingers. In the grip was the confidence that Rabiya would do anything for her, that she belonged to her.

—Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai (2004)

***

Putting a face to the name was not an easy task. Salma’s early work is dedicated to her friend Lalli, a labour inspector in Tirunelveli who came to her house to meet her after reading her poems in a magazine called Suttum Vizhi Sudar. It was Lalli who helped her plan a family tour with a secret agenda. It was an all-woman group, comprising Salma, her mother, her cousins, and their children. They took a train from Madurai, and then got on to a van Lalli had arranged. They did some sightseeing in Kerala, taking the children to the zoo. On their way back, they made a slight detour.

“On a summer morning in 1994, I was working in my newly set-up office of Kalachuvadu, in the front yard of my house,” Kannan writes in a foreword, “A large vehicle pulled up in front of our gate. Several heads were visible, mostly women with their saree dupattas pulled over their heads. They waited outside the gate for others to get out and join them so they could come in as a group. We were expecting them.  I knew one of them was Salma. She was coming to visit my father Sundara Ramaswamy. My father ran an open house, so we were quite used to visitors, a few announced but mostly unannounced coming in, at all times of the day.  Food was prepared in excess, anticipating guests. There were guest rooms upstairs. A literary magazine once ran a box item saying, ‘Don’t waste your money booking a hotel room when you go to Nagercoil. Just go to Suraa’s home!’

“The gate opened and they all walked in, a little hesitant. This was probably their first visit to a non-Muslim household. I could immediately pick out Salma—I had seen a photograph of hers earlier. She wore her saree slightly above her ankles, the way village women wear them, and seemed uncertain in her movements, hinting perhaps of her relatively secluded life.  But in my mind, probably my family shared this feeling too, she was a wonder we were waiting to meet.”

She was equally keen to meet Sundara Ramaswamy. She had read his J.J.: Sila Kurippukkal, and was struck by the language.

“It was the first book of his that I’d read, even before Oru Puliyamarathin Kathai. We speak about post-modernism, but even what we think of as post-modern writing reads like regular stories. His writing was so different. It would surprise you at every turn. I thought he must be very young, maybe 30 at the most.” She laughed—he was 47 when it was published, and nearly 60 when she read him for the first time. After having read his work, and then read about him, she wrote a letter to him. “He replied immediately,” she said, “That was even more surprising. For that great a writer to sit and write a reply by hand and then post it…if I see I’ve got 10 emails now, I postpone replying to them. And he…imagine!”

He would send her recommended reading material. Later, he even visited her house with his wife, and his imposing presence and dignified bearing, along with his formidable literary reputation, would lend respectability to the career she had chosen.

It was at his instance that Salma attended the World Tamil Conference, Tamil-ini 2000, put together by Kalachuvadu in Chennai. The conference had parallel sessions, with more than 250 delegates and attended by a couple of thousand people, said Venkatachalapathy. It was where he first met the writer whose reviews he had so admired six years earlier.

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“The day before the event, I went to Sundara Ramaswamy’s room, and among the people there was a young woman. You should have seen her. She was sitting like this”—he slumped forward, balling his hands into fists—“and I have to show you how she walked.” He stood up, slouched, and trudged forward. “She was barely 32,” he said, sitting down again, “And, you know, she’s an attractive woman. But if you saw her back then, you’d know from her gait, from the way she carried herself, that there was this complete lack of confidence, of self-awareness.”

It is hard to imagine Salma, who now addresses political rallies and travels the word reading from her work, in that avatar. Kannan described how she was once invited to Madurai to address a book club. The event was recorded on audio tapes. Salma’s voice is not on the tapes. She mounted a stage for the first time in her life, and was so paralysed by anxiety that she could not speak a single word in the several minutes she stood in front of the microphone before walking back in defeat.

“I hadn’t begun to think of myself as a writer,” Salma said, with a smile, “When you’ve got some books published, it gives you this confidence, this idea that you’re someone. I remember when my first poetry collection came out. I couldn’t believe it had happened. After all the fuss over my writing for magazines, I didn’t know whether I could continue to write, whether [my family] would let me write, whether I would ever be published. And for me to have written all these poems, and for them to have been released as a book…it felt like a dream when I held it. It was such joy.”

However, at the book release, Salma refused to go on stage. She was worried her photograph would appear in the Tamil press, and her family would learn of the subterfuge.

Venkatachalapathy told me he did not speak much to her at the conference, assuming she would be uncomfortable speaking to men. Ten days later, he received a letter from her.

“It was two sheets of paper torn from a spiral-bound book, I remember,” he said, “And it was a beautiful letter.”

It was the beginning of another of Salma’s lasting friendships. They would not meet for a couple of years. But Kannan kept him in the loop about a big project that was under way—Salma’s novel.

***

Nooramma realised there was no point in pleading with them. She felt an inexplicable sense of liberation. The decision to set her aside from the village would not be reversed. There was nothing she could do against it. But an impulse to protest in some manner raged inside her. Her newfound sense of independence surged through her body and broke through her qualms. “So you dignitaries won’t let me be part of the village anymore? Let it be so. You say it’s a sin for my daughter to have run away with a kafir. Is there a single man in this village who hasn’t slept with a Hindu girl? Let me see. Let a single man in this crowd stand up and say he hasn’t fucked a Hindu hooker, and I’ll admit that what my daughter did is wrong.” She stuck out an arm and looked at each man in the crowd in turn, pointing her index finger at them as she swung round. As they stood, stunned into silence by her words, she raised her voice again. “Can any of you say honestly that you haven’t? Allah will question all of you when the time comes. My Rahman-e! My rab-e! What have you allowed these bastards to do to an old woman? This cruelty will not let you live in peace. Oh, God, oh, God, my heart’s on fire!” With a cry, she bent down and threw fistfuls of sand into the air.

—Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai (2004)

Salma had begun to write Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai in 2000, on manuscript notebooks a friend had gifted her. She finished it within a year, but was apprehensive about the repercussions its publication could have.

But something she could never have envisioned was coming her way. Panchayat elections were due in October 2001, and her husband Malik, an aspiring politician, had planned to contest. But Thuvarankurichi Panchayat was reserved for women that year, and Malik decided to make Salma his proxy. All of a sudden, the woman whose face was hidden from the world had to go out and ask for votes. Malik was happy for her to address public meetings.

The campaign had given her immense confidence. People would ask Malik where his wife learned to speak so well. Realising that her writer image could come in handy, he had encouraged her to reveal her identity. On October 25, 2001, the day she won the election, her first press photograph was taken.

Salma commanded respect everywhere she went. She would meet district collectors and government officials to voice her grievances, and they would grant her an audience immediately, while other panchayat chiefs waited their turns. She once told a collector that there wasn’t enough water in the 15 wards in Thuvarankurichi, and wrote an application for water tanks in each ward. The collector said there was no provision to grant water tanks for town panchayats—they could only be installed in village panchayats. She argued that Thuvarankurichi was more village than town. The collector acceded to her request. Later, Rajya Sabha MP Cho. Ramaswamy, transferred funds to her for the installation of solar-powered lights even without meeting her. Her writing had convinced him of her intelligence and reliability. Malik, who would accompany her on these missions, saw that she was being given special treatment. He also realised she would not be his proxy.

Salma’s newfound confidence emboldened her to agree to the publication of her novel.

“First I’d hesitated to publish it because I had written things no one else had. It was around the time Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen were being persecuted for their work. People now knew who Salma was. Things could turn dangerous.”

Kannan convinced her that he would have trusted editors look at it, and she could rework the novel if she wanted. But there was a catch. She had no copy, and was convinced the courier service could not be trusted.

“I had written it when my husband was not supportive of my writing,” she said, “So it was in three big books, and some loose sheets, and some smaller books, all hidden in a cupboard. This was entirely handwritten. How could I send it? I was terrified it would get lost. I couldn’t even courier it directly, because there was no such facility back home. I’d have to get someone to courier it from Trichy or Madurai. Whom could I trust? Finally, I decided to send it myself, when I had work in Madurai. I went to the courier office, with a family friend. But I got cold feet. The family friend said she would have it photocopied and then courier it. I refused, and took it back home. Finally, Kannan said he would send someone trustworthy from his office to personally deliver it. I had to agree. I could barely breathe until I knew it had safely reached their office. Comedy-aa irundhudhu.”

Venkatachalapathy was among the readers Kannan consulted. They marked out passages that might cause trouble, and Salma removed some sections. The novel was published in December 2004. It was released in the Landmark Book Store at Spencer Plaza, and received unprecedented media attention.

All hell broke loose. Islamic organisations were enraged.

Back in her village, someone told the Jama’at chief that he had been described as a womaniser.

“I had not meant him specifically,” Salma told me, “I was making the point that religious leaders have stringent rules for their followers, but they don’t practise what they preach. But he thought he recognised himself in a particular character. He is still not on talking terms with me. He even worked against me in the elections.”

Kannan had sent a photographer to Thuvarankurichi while designing the cover of the novel. Among the pictures he took was one of two women sitting in a doorway. Kannan asked Salma if it was all right to use the photograph.

“They had covered their heads, so I thought it was fine,” Salma said, “It was my fault. I should not have done it without asking their permission. I was naïve. I didn’t know all these things. When Kim [Longinotto] made the documentary, I saw her getting signatures from everyone who was interviewed. That’s when I realised this is the protocol.”

When the book was released, the women were identified by the house in the picture. They were furious.

“They came and asked me why I had used their photographs in a heretic work,” Salma said, “They said why not use your photo, or the photo of someone in your family? I apologised. I had the cover changed in the next edition. Finally, I gave them a recommendation and helped them get into the quota for Hajj. Now they’re friendly again.”

But the novel did make Salma vulnerable to attacks from conservatives and political opponents. Years after its release, in October 2010, an aspiring politician and writer Aloor Shanawas essentially trolled Salma through a cover story in the Islamic magazine Samanilai Samudhayam.

He took objection to Salma having identified herself as “atheist” on Facebook. In a 10-page article punctuated by images she had put up on Facebook, used without her permission, he bemoans her faithlessness and fame in equal measure.

The piece was purportedly about television programmes during Ramzan that year.

After a long analysis of everything that he believes is wrong with them, Shanawas writes, “Another thing which shocked viewers during the seher special programmes at Ramzan were the clothes and speech of Salma. It was a pleasant shock to see our sister, who appears at literary gatherings in new-fangled clothes, with elaborate hairstyles, makeup and jewellery, covering her head and speaking about religion on television.”

He went on to quote bits from various interviews she had given earlier, out of context. In one, she had spoken of the religious indoctrination of children, recalling an instance of her sons being horrified when they saw her wear a friend’s pottu on her forehead.

“Going by her statements, it appears her sons are better qualified than she to advise Muslims on religion during seher,” he writes.

His magnanimity and open-mindedness had prompted him to attend a discussion on her book in Chennai, he said. He had, at first, been happy for his “beloved sister”, when he saw how well-attended the event was. As it unfolded, though, he was troubled by “certain questions”. His mind raced. He believed he had uncovered a sinister plot by the media and “certain high-caste publishing houses” to defame Muslims by hailing Salma’s atheism as progressive.

“They idolise and encourage her for having renounced her religion, for having defamed Islam in her work, for making public appearances without a veil or other identifiers of her Muslim culture,” he said, and added, “Will India Today set aside pages to speak about writers who are working for the awareness and reawakening of Muslims? Will Kalachuvadu write essays on them? Will The Hindu and Vikatan write about them with photographs? Will websites give them space? Will they be invited to conferences abroad? Without any publicity or laurels, there are Muslim writers fighting against all odds to pursue their work.”

The reason for his resentment is clear soon enough. “For her Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai, Salma has been getting invitations from America, which is on the other side of the world. But [my] Kaithiyin Kathai has not brought [me] invitations even from Andipatti.
The reason for this is that Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai speaks about the liberation of Muslim women by running away with Hindu men, whereas Kaithiyin Kathai speaks about [Abdul Nasser] Madani (accused in the Bangalore serial blasts case of 2008), an exemplary Muslim, and other innocent Muslim prisoners.”

Other detractors would speak about the wantonness of Salma’s women characters, of the obsession with sex in her work.

“In all these discussions on sexuality in the novel, no reference is ever made to the fact that a Muslim man in the novel has an open long standing relationship with a Hindu-Dalit woman,” Kannan said, “It’s not sexuality itself, but the politics of that sexuality that infuriate her critics. Her scathing criticism of the male domination and religious oppression of women in her novel adds fuel to the fire. She was branded as the Tamil Taslima Nasreen.”

***

Najima, as if she had just remembered something, suddenly said, “Hey, Mumtaj, who stitches your blouses? I’ve wanted to ask you for the longest time.  He makes them really well!” In a swift move, she pulled the veil off Mumtaj’s head, swung her around, moved her pallu to take in the cut of the back and neck of the blouse, and then lifted the saree off to stare hungrily at the front portion of the blouse.

“Adiyei!” cried Mumtaj, pulling the saree back over her chest, “Are you out of your mind?” She giggled, as the blood rushed to her face. But Raima understood that she was beet red from coyness, not anger.

“Like you’ve got something no one else has! And is it going to shrink if I look at it?” Najima smirked, “You haven’t told me yet, who stitches your blouses for you?”

“That Battaani Bhai,” Nafisa answered for Mumtaj, “Who stitches yours, isn’t he good?”

“I gave it to some idiot and wasted the cloth. Look at how he’s messed up the front,” Najima said, dropping her pallu so that they could look at the cut, “Hm…what difference does it make whether we get clothes stitched or not? Does any husband appreciate his wife’s beauty? They fall on us like so many animals, fumble around in the dark, do their jobs, and then get up and walk off.” After that frustrated speech, she giggled suddenly and said, “They won’t look at you if you wear a saree, and they won’t notice you if you’re naked, eh?”

Raima felt unbearably discomfited. What would Ayishama’s daughter, who had been weeping by her mother’s corpse and was now listening to all this, think?

—Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai (2004)

One of the characters in the novel, Waheeda, is horrified at how public her biological functions have become after marriage. Her mother-in-law begins to wail when she doesn’t miss her period the first month; the neighbours reassure her that Waheeda will certainly miss her period the next time. As the date approaches, everyone asks her if she has got it yet. When her husband complains that he has married a greenhorn who makes sex an ordeal, her neighbours bring pornographic tapes and adult magazines to impart lessons, with her mother’s blessing. Waheeda remembers how annoyed her mother would be when she went to the cinema.

“We have this unnatural approach to sex,” Salma said, “It is either seen as something pure and procreative, or as something that must be hidden, as dirty and wrong. Sex is a bodily function, like eating. It’s something you need when you cross 18. But we treat it as a sin. We don’t talk about it. Maybe that’s why women are harassed all the time in our society. There is so much restraint, and people don’t know how to break out of it except in the most perverse ways.”

***

“Landmark had just started selling Tamil books in 2004,” Venkatachalapathy told me, and laughed, “I remember, there was some controversy. A popular writer said, ‘I went to Landmark and asked where the Tamil books were, and a security guard came and took me by the collar and escorted me outside.’ Landmark responded saying they would never do that. But the point was there were no Tamil books. Now, they started selling them, and they wanted to do an event to showcase that. That event was Salma’s book launch. Sundara Ramaswamy spoke on the occasion, and Susie Tharu was also there. It was a big event. Four books by Tamil women writers were released.”

Sundara Ramaswamy was a crucial figure in Salma’s career. He did mentor several writers, but was particularly fond of Salma.

“I would refer to him as appa,” Salma said, “I don’t know what to describe him as—he was father, friend, mentor, adviser, all-in-one. It’s a special relationship.”

When she was not sure whether to enter politics, she turned to him for counsel.

“He said go for it, and the rest as they say is history,” said Venkatachalapathy, “It completely transformed her life.”

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Kannan told me how his father used to tease her, especially after she became panchayat president. “He was very playful with her. He once called her up and gave her a task—he said within five years, you have to destroy all the mosquitoes in your panchayat. Then every six months, he’d call her and ask if she’s destroyed the mosquitoes. That’s the kind of relationship they had,” Kannan said, laughing.

When Salma went to their home, Sundara Ramaswamy would take her to Thiruvananthapuram and show her around. As long as he was around, her family was happy for her to travel without her posse.

Salma broke off into peals of laughter when I asked her about the mosquito elimination project.

“He was so funny,” she said, “He would joke all the time.” She remembers a particular incident. One of her short stories had won the Katha award, and she travelled to India International Centre in Delhi to receive the prize. Sundara Ramaswamy was there too, to receive a lifetime achievement award. Salma was escorted by her sister Najima, who in turn was escorted by her son. Najima and Salma spent three days at the IIC—it was their first real lit fest, Salma said—and would sit with Sundara Ramaswamy after the day’s sessions.

“One day, I remember, he suddenly said, with an absolutely straight face, ‘Salma, un akkave mattum padikka vachirundhaa, oorai enna, ulagathaye vithiruppaa. Needhaan appaaviya irukke, avo periya aala irukka. (If only your sister had studied, she’d have sold the world. You’re an innocent; she’s something else).” Salma was almost incoherent with laughter as she recounted it. “Just the way he spoke would crack you up.”

***

Always,

All the things that concern me

Occur in my absence.

Every time,

Before I can touch and feel

These things,

They are over.

I do try

To touch something

On someday

Before it has passed me by.

Yet,

Defeating my attempts,

These things that happen to me,

Happen without me.

This world

With its flowers, people

Is much larger than I.

Must I give permission

For my body to breathe

In my absence?

—Swaasam, Oru Maalaiyum, Innoru Malaiyum (2000)

In Kim’s documentary, there is footage of the two sisters standing at a beach. Salma is in salwar kameez, her hair flying in the breeze; Najima is in a burqa. A lively-eyed woman with a ready smile and a way with words, Najima says, in the film, “When I see her, I think I wasted my life. Why didn’t I write poems and get them published? Why didn’t I seek the opportunities she did?”

Najima was married off at 14, and had a child within a year.

Also seen in the documentary is Salma’s friend Kamila. We can only see her eyes. She is shrouded in black from head to toe, complete with niqab.

“I tell people even now that a girl called Salma from Thuvarankurichi is a big star in the literary world,” she says, as Salma laughs, “I remember all the books you used to give me to read. Sundara Ramaswamy’s short stories, Jayakantan…I still read out to my children from those.”

To hear them talk is to think of all the Rokkiahs who did not become Salma. Salma told me about the women in her own family who are brilliant at things that are seen as male bastions. Some of her cousins are so good at figuring out finances that they could have run their own companies, she said. Her mother-in-law is among the brightest women she knows.

“But their misfortune was they were born in a particular time, in a particular community, where they were shut up and denied opportunities,” she said, “It happens even now.”

In 2006, Salma resigned her panchayat post and stood for the legislative assembly elections. She had joined the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) by then. Karunanidhi was immensely fond of her writing. He would address her in the singular. It appeared certain that she would be given a ministerial berth if she won the seat. She lost by a small margin, and there were whispers about sabotage by resentful rivals. But she was given a prestigious post, the chairpersonship of the Social Welfare Board. She had three official cars at her disposal, was allocated a large flat by the state government, and had the power to bring about the social change she had envisioned since childhood.

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Her biggest achievement in this capacity was to stop child marriages, she said. Even after the DMK government lost the election in 2011 and she had to resign from her post, she was appointed head of women’s welfare within the party, and had the ear of the powers that be.

“Just last month, I told the collector about a child marriage and stopped it,” she said, “The girl’s teachers had told me. She was in Plus 1 or Plus 2. We keep trying to spread awareness. But I find that they’re getting girls married off younger and younger.”

Some families send their daughters to madrasas instead of school. Most don’t send them to college. There is no college in the village. And those who can afford the bus journey worry that their daughters will commit that most heinous crime—falling in love.

Kim Longinotto’s documentary tells the story of two girls in Salma’s village. One is a 20-year-old who consistently topped her school and college exams. Salma tried to convince her family to let her finish her studies, at least by correspondence. “Malik tells me that this girl could become a collector one day,” she says, as they give her the wedding invitation, “Let her not stop studying.” Everyone smiles awkwardly. The other is an 11-year-old girl who was sent to a madrasa by her mother, who didn’t want to stop her education when she came of age. The child was miserable, and kept asking her mother to bring her home. On the day she was scheduled to return, the girl said she was going to change her clothes, and came out bathed in kerosene. As her mother screamed, she lit a match and set herself on fire. After three days battling for her life in hospital, she died.

“I don’t know what to do,” her mother says, trying to smile for the camera as tears course down her cheeks, “My younger daughter is 11 now. I wanted them to study, to achieve something.”

***

“Whatever happens from here on, that is your life,” there was a note of determination in Amma’s voice.

In the vain hope of hearing a word of encouragement, she pleaded, “I will die.”

“There is no shame in dying.”

Neither of them had anything to say after that. In that one pronouncement, she realised she was an orphan who had nowhere to go.

—Yudhdham, from Saabam (2012)

“I worry for Rabiya,” I told her, “She’s 12 when the book ends. But you know she’s going to get married someday. You know she won’t be happy for long.”

“Everything will end someday. That’s how it is for all women,” Salma said, “Childhood is a different ball game. And then there’s marriage. You go live with a stranger. It’s crazy, isn’t it? You get into it, deciding you will make adjustments. Okay, I like Ilayaraja songs; it will be great if he likes them too; then we can listen to the radio together. That’s how you think. And once the children come, no woman wants to break her home. Even with love marriages, I don’t know how much love there is, really. People appear different until you move in with them. That’s why I like the idea of people living together, as they do in the West. It takes a couple of years of living with someone before you understand whether you really get along. It’s because we see it as an affront to our culture that we have all these queues at the family court today.”

Several of Salma’s women characters walk out on their husbands. In Manaamiyangal, one even divorces her husband for marrying a second time.

“I’ve written so many poems that have been lost. I try not to think about them. Some were torn up by my husband. And some by me, in my idiocy. I’d written one on talaq. Loose-u thanama kizhichi pottutten. I was worried I would regret writing it if it was published. Back then, we didn’t have computers, right? Otherwise I could have saved them.”

It is disturbing how much of Salma’s work is rooted in reality. We were discussing the forced suicide of a character in her work.

“It was a story I heard when I’d gone to stay with my grandmother during the school holidays,” she said, “One day, the daughter of a family we knew in the next village had died. They said it was an electric shock. My grandmother and others went to their house. When they came back, they were gossiping about how she had had an affair with a bank employee who was renting the house, and they made her drink poison and kill herself so their honour would not be tarnished.”

***

Your visions of me

As a woman who haunts

The dens of prostitutes

Assault me as I sit here listening

When you point at a friend of mine

And say, “He is your father”,

To our children,

When you claim I resemble

The woman who killed her offspring,

Before our children,

It strikes me

That the reach

Of your show of dominance

Does not end with me

—Ellai, Pachai Devathai (2003)

I interviewed Salma over several days. On the first day I spoke to her for this piece, she was in the middle of several television appearances. It was March 8.

“You know how it is,” she said, “Everyone has a special programme for Women’s Day. I’m on my way to the Sun TV office now. Shall we talk after?”

Her schedule for the month was dizzying. The party had organised a month-long celebration for M. K. Stalin’s birthday. Salma was to give away the prizes at a rangoli competition for women on March 16. Two days later, she had to give a talk at a women’s college in Pondicherry in the morning, and then return for a special function at a school in Chennai.

“The house is falling to pieces around me,” she sighed, “There’s so much work to do, so many things that are not working.”

When I accompanied her to meetings, I saw several people line up to introduce their protégés to her. Not sure who I was, some of them swore they had seen me earlier at political events, and offered me coffee, food, chairs, and “cool drinks” in no particular order.

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Salma’s rise in party politics had necessitated a move to Chennai, in 2006. She brought her sons and her sister Najima along.

Living in the state capital, she got to meet writers and intellectuals far more often than earlier. The same year, she was selected as part of the Indian delegation to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair.

“I tell you, no visa officer in his senses would give her a visa,” Venkatachalapathy laughed, “She is called Rajathi at home. Her official name is Rokkiah Begum Shamsuddin. She is not educated, and she uses the pen name of Salma. She also had a Pakistan visa stamp. So they thought this was some kind of joke.”

When Salma was refused a visa, she was so furious she announced in the consulate that she would return in two days, and leave with a visa.

“She told me she swore to herself if they don’t give me a visa, the Indian delegation will not go. So she called the National Book Trust, which is the nodal agency, and said this is what happened, don’t blame me later if I do something really dramatic.”

She went to Frankfurt. Among those whom she met was U. R. Ananthamurthy.

“It is not easy not to like Salma,” Venkatachalapathy smiled, “A lot of the big names became fond of her, protective of her, encouraging of her.”

Salma does have a way of endearing herself to those around her. Her childish energy is contagious. Kim laughed while speaking of how excited Salma is on her travels. She said, “You know, when we showed the film at Sundance, we took her to this club where they had music and you should have seen her—she was like a little girl, her face lit up, we couldn’t get her out of there, she was in there all day. She didn’t want to move, she just wanted to listen to the music and she said, ‘You go and dance, you go and dance’.”

Towards the end of 2006, Venkatachalapathy received an email from the University of Chicago. They were keen to organise a conference of South Asian literature, named after the Tamil scholar Norman Cutler, who had passed away four years earlier. The conference was to have a featured writer, and they asked Venkatachalapathy for suggestions.

He said he had two names, both writers who had started their careers fairly recently, and who had never been abroad. That would make for a transformative experience.

“I hope I have these mails somewhere,” he told me, “So you don’t think I’m making this up. The names I gave were Salma and Perumal Murugan. But my gut instinct was that there’s no way a Tamil Muslim woman writer, the very first of her kind, would not immediately be picked.”

Salma spoke no English at the time, but the organisers didn’t care. They told Venkatachalapathy they would like to have him along too, and he could translate. At the time, a translation of Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai by Lakshmi Holmström was under way. The University of Chicago invited Holmström too, so an extract from the translation-in-progress and the poems she had already translated would be available.

Venkatachalapathy and his wife Anitha filled out the visa forms. Salma wrote an autobiographical essay, which was also translated.

“We put together a small booklet, and printed about 200 copies to distribute at the conference,” he told me, “Let me see if I can find it here.” He typed ‘Salma’ into the search box of his computer. In my enthusiasm, I was leaning into the screen and saw several folders and files pop up. We began to laugh.

“All these statements of purpose and documents and things I’ve translated,” he said, “Now I’ve told her I won’t do any of this anymore. She’s been to more countries than I have. From Pakistan to Albania to Galicia, I don’t think she’s left anything out. I can’t tell you what a hit she was in Chicago. At that moment, she could have had anything for the asking.”

The university wanted her to be a writer-in-residence. Other attendees extended invitations to conferences. Salma had too many commitments back home to be able to accept, but it was the transformative experience everyone had hoped it would be. Literature had given Salma what traditions had stolen from her.

***

Raima Periamma had been comforting Waheeda. She was inconsolable. She didn’t want to get married. Rabiya found it hilarious. ‘Which idiot will not want to get married?’ she thought, ‘How beautifully you can dress up, in silk sarees, with lots of jewellery, and flowers, and garlands. When I get married, I’m going to be happy!’

“Can you smell the perfume, akka?” she asked, “It’s what the groom is wearing. It’s super, isn’t it? And he looks really good too. You’ll like him very much, I swear. Even his feet are gorgeous, white and clean. It seems he travels by plane! There will be a lot of scent bottles in his home abroad, don’t you think? Maybe he’ll take you there someday!”

—condensed from Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai (2004)

Even before Salma had begun to travel the world, she brought it home through literature.

Kim Longinotto, while telling me what made her want to film Salma, said, “Her story is repeated so many times all over the world, it is a really, really common story in a way, but we never hear about it, because the people that it happened to, they disappear and you never hear from them again. And most girls accept it, and you got the sense very much from Salma that all her school friends had sort of reconciled themselves to it in a way that she hadn’t. She told me that her friends, in the rooms that they were kept in, would have cricket stars or film stars and those sorts of people on the walls. And Salma had Nelson Mandela and Che Guevara…I love this idea of her seeing herself as a Nelson Mandela supporter, because when Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, there were millions of us all over the world, we were demonstrating and there were protests and it was a very public thing. But this was Salma locked away, nobody would have heard about it, and she’s standing up to everybody and everything from this room. All she had were her dreams, and it was a very lonely protest, like Nelson Mandela’s own.”

Salma would get her uncle’s grandson, who had been her classmate in school, to bring her books from the library. That was how she accessed literary magazines, and jotted down the addresses to which her poems were sent.

Her father saw how desperately she wanted to read, and decided to do his bit.

“When I was a teenager, there were gaps between my teeth,” Salma said, “So I had to go to Madurai to get braces put. But the village should not know about this. If a girl who’s come of age goes to a hospital in Madurai, people might begin to gossip. So my mother and I would wake up before dawn and go to the bus stand in burqas and wait. My father would go to pray, and come to the bus stand directly. We must have made that journey 3-4 times. First, I had to get the measurements done, and then the clip put, and then tightened every six months. So we’d go to the dentist, and then have lunch, and then my father would take us to the movies. He didn’t like the cinema himself, but he would indulge me. I remember watching Amman Kovil Kizhakkaale (1986). We could not return to the village until after 10 p.m.,, because that’s when everyone’s asleep. So we had some time in the evening.”

Salma’s favourite haunts were New Century Book House and Bharathi Puthaga Aalayam in Madurai. She would devour Russian literature. Sitting in her room, and immersing herself in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekov, Salma would envision a world where poverty was annihilated and everyone was equal.

“Whether it’s Dostoevsky’s work or War and Peace or Resurrection, even among these great ideas—about what causes war and how a country is run—are these insights into the lives of ordinary people, into human emotions, into what happens to relationships in wartime, for example.”

Her favourite Tamil writers were Pudumaipiththan, Jayakantan, T. Janakiraman, Aatmanaam, Aadhavan, Mouni, and Ashokamitran. When she got in touch with Sundara Ramaswamy, she would read the books he recommended.

On the walls of her room, Che Guevara and Nelson Mandela shared space with Fidel Castro, Karl Marx, and Lenin.

At the conference in Chicago, the delegates were put up at the hostel of the College of Theology.

“These were big apartments, not rooms,” Venkatachalapathy told me, “And the south side is not a great neighbourhood. It’s completely quiet. After dark, there’s no one on the streets. The day after we reached, Salma came and told me she could barely sleep, because she was reminded of all these Victorian novels.”

***

Salma’s works have been translated into English, French, German, Catalan, and Galician.

María Reimóndez, her Galician translator and an author in her own right, recalls meeting her in 2006, through her friends N. Manimekalai and I. Ambalavanan in Trichy. Salma seemed rather shy, she told me.

María said the book was remarkably well received in Galician. While critics admired the storytelling in the novel, and María’s adherence to its nuances and language was appreciated, readers could relate to “emotions, situations, and violences that women often endure in all societies.”

In her introduction to the translated version, she warns readers of the dangers of objectifying the text as “Muslim women’s experiences” or “Indian women’s experiences”.

“I explained how this was a story about a very particular community, and how this door had to be opened from our side, making the effort to go through it without the blindfold that colonial expectations and the current state of Islamophobia promoted in the West/North. Maybe this, and the fact that Salma was in Galicia to launch the novel, helped get readers a different look at the novel and see more similarities than differences. In fact, many expectations, relationships, restrictions and emotions that the novel conveys were close to Galician readers, women in particular. The tongue-in-cheek conversations about sexuality, for example, are very frequent here too. The novel also helped move away from the ridiculous discussions that we witness here often about ‘Islam’ and ‘women’, usually more concerned with specific clothing items than with what the women themselves have to say, with a deeper analysis of politics and place.”

In her introduction, María points out one of the most striking aspects of Salma’s work—the detailing. Calling her a craftswoman, she writes that the ideas Salma explores are trapped with “the small stitches of daily life—the most tiny details, the movements, the preparation of meals, the inclination of a hand, the lives of objects. It goes into the longing for childhood, homesickness, determination. Because, if something is utterly relevant in Salma’s work, is her love for detail and complexity, her attempt to show the roots of how patriarchy makes women its first accomplices, how it closes doors to those who try to rebel due to the danger, so clearly expressed in the text, of being a role model for others and therefore the key to destroy domination.”

“What shall we play? There are just two of us,” Rabiya said.

“The Amma-Aththa game, what else?” Ahmed said eagerly.

He ran to the store room and got the play set. The two of them had bought identical ones at an exhibition in Madurai. He opened the box and gave its contents to her. Inside were miniature plates, ladles, tumblers, pots, dosai pan, and other vessels, carved in wood. He had not lost a single thing. She had lost more than half her set. She was jealous of him, and annoyed at herself. A boy is so responsible, and here I am, a girl with no sense of responsibility, she scolded herself.

Ahmed ran to the store room and brought some rice and murukku. She had arranged all the vessels in the corner of a hall, and improvised a kitchen. She made a show of cooking the rice he had brought.

“Listen up, get me my food quickly. I have to go to the shop!” he said, impatiently.

“It’s ready, come this way,” she said in a timorous voice, as she filled a tumbler with water and put out a plate for him. Then, she used the ladle to scoop out some rice and a few broken bits of murukku on to the plate.

He finished eating in silence.

“All right now, I’m off to the shop,” he said, got up, moved a little further away and then returned, “Phew, there was brisk business at the shop today. Quickly, get me my food. Let’s eat together.” He then ran to the cupboard, dived under it, and returned with a marappaachi doll coated with dust. He wiped it against his shirt, and then handed it to her. “Here, this is our child. Give him some milk too.”

—Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai (2004)

***

In most of her works, across genres, Salma explores certain themes over and over again—extramarital affairs, honour killings, infertility, religious attitudes to family-planning surgery, inter-religious love matches, spousal abuse, illness, and mental retardation. Death is visited several times in her poetry, short stories, and novels. In the forewords to each of her works, she asks the reader to forgive the repetition, but highlights the metaphysical nature of this device. In visiting these issues over and over again, we find ourselves obsessing over dissimilarities within a sameness—and this is the lot of most of her characters, who are unhappy in their own ways under the same circumstances.

She looks at how women turn to each other for support, but usually let each other down. They are not stereotypes, and they are not role models, and they have their foibles and pettiness and generosities and jealousies. Her writing is not sexually explicit so much as it is emotionally honest. In her work, sex is both a terrifying experience and a carnal need, and rarely titillating.

This is why her work is hard to label. To call her writing “bold” or “feminist” or “modernist” is to run into problems, particularly in translation.

“The sensitive reader is moved by the milieu in which these things are written,” said Venkatachalapathy, “But often what happens is that in translation, some things come across as a pathetic attempt to shock the reader. The reader of English is rarely shocked by anything.”

But analyses of Salma’s work have fed into the myth of her “shocking language”, to its detriment. And those who cannot access her work in the original could be put off by what is emphasised in both the translation, and the personal story that accompanies it.

“Salma doesn’t need any concession as a woman writer,” Venkatachalapathy told me, “I know I’m saying something politically incorrect, but a lot of drivel is published because this is the first time women are coming up. Very interestingly, in 100 years of modern Tamil writing, there have been very few real women writers. There have been writers who have come from privileged backgrounds and who have not really extended the frontiers of Tamil literature, who didn’t explore new areas, who didn’t have a new language. Salma’s writing is very sensitive to the power of language.”

Every time,

What my mother says subtly

My sister says angrily:

That the blame

For the discord in the bedroom

Lies with me.

Every day

In the bedroom,

Your first question is:

“What is the matter today?”

It is likely to be

The last word too.

From the shimmer of a million stars

Rises a finger, to point at my hooker’s trade-off

As their counsel floats

Through trembling nights

The lament in

The childlike voice of a cat

Helpless to feed its kittens

Pierces my heart.

You too

May have complaints

My position

Has been determined

By time

And history.

In the hope of a little affection

From you,

And to fulfil the responsibilities

Of being the mother of your children,

And because I need

Sanitary napkins

And contraceptives

And other little favours

From the world outside,

For me to, if possible,

Exert some authority over you

Perhaps even command

A little respect,

Knowing there is a price to pay,

My legs part.

—Oppantham, Oru Maalaiyum Innoru Maalaiyum (2000)

***

As soon as the journey was planned, Nanni had come up to her to speak in private.

“Look here,” she hissed, “Don’t let that woman jabber on in the car. And you can’t make me sit next to her. She doesn’t bathe, and I can’t take the reek. And you can’t switch the AC on. That woman farts incessantly. If the windows are closed, I will throw up.”

What monumental worries, she thought to herself, for how long had Nanni been making this list?

—Vilimbu, from Saabam (2012)

Because of the dark themes in her work, Salma’s sense of humour and the wittiness of her dialogue are often underestimated. She has characters with extreme quirks, many of whom are based on people she knows. In that sense, parts of her novels are comedy of manners. I asked her about the characters who are obsessed with cleanliness to the point of pathological illness.

“When I was a child,” Salma said, “I would find bad smells very disturbing. My mother and sister would yell at me. I would not let people use my towel, or lie down on my pillow. I would hide the pillow cover in my cupboard and lock it so that no one could use my pillow. But, more seriously, there’s this myth that Muslims are not clean. But Islam has given a lot of importance to cleanliness. My mother would not carry my children before her prayers, because she was worried that they would pass urine. She would finish her ablutions, pray, change the saree she had prayed with, and only then allow the babies anywhere near her.”

My eyes fell on a photograph in Salma’s living room. It was a photograph of her with DMK patriarch Karunanidhi. She was wearing a burqa. It was politics that allowed her to discard a garment she had always resented. When she stood for the MLA elections in 2006, the working committee told her that popular opinion among the voters, who were mostly non-Muslim, was that it was not a good idea to vote for a Muslim woman—it may not be easy to meet her. Salma discussed this with Malik, and he saw her point.

“I would wear a cotton saree, pulling the pallu across my shoulder, but with my head uncovered. People saw me as one among them. I felt a sense of freedom I hadn’t since I was a child,” she said.

Her mother-in-law was not happy with her decision. But her husband was on her side.

“Even when Kim asked to interview her for the documentary,” Salma smiled, “My mother-in-law said, ‘How can a Muslim woman appear on television and talk?’ Immediately, Malik snapped, ‘So you’re saying what [Salma] is doing is wrong? You think she’s disgracing the family?’” She laughed.

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Malik, who now heads the gram panchayat back in Thuvarankurichi, visits Chennai every week. Salma goes to her village when time permits. To one who observes them together, discussing politics and family, they appear to be in an equal, respectful partnership, a contrast to the scenes from her work, of a fearsome husband who regularly humiliates his wife.

Venkatachalapathy pointed out that politics helped her liberate herself. The victim was now the decision-maker, more empowered than anyone else in the family. But he and other friends worry about the effect politics has on her writing. “When you move in those circles, meeting rogues and hypocrites and sycophants, you lose all creativity,” he said, “But she’s caught the tiger by the tail. If she left it, what would she do?”

In Aloor Shanawas’ attack on her, he claims Salma told him that her prominence in party politics is not because of her writing, but “a dole given to her by Kalaignar [Karunanidhi] for the backwardness of her community.” He went on to challenge “Salma, who people say has so gutsily documented the hardships of women in the community” to “write boldly about the corruption and nepotism and domination of arts and business in her party.”

“I feel both her writing and her speech are more restricted these days,” Kannan told me, “For about 10 years, she didn’t write much.” In his foreword to the German translation of Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai, he writes, “Though she is able to help many downtrodden women and children and fight for the rights of the transgender community, her career as a writer has suffered. She is now unable to be outspoken on social issues as she has to take into account her position and also the views of the party. One is apprehensive the party will succeed where her family failed—in silencing her voice.”

Salma admitted that politics has forced her to censor herself. But it doesn’t have to do with politics alone, she said. “Look at what happened to Perumal Murugan. He’s not in politics. Books are taken to court all the time, and they’re banned more often than not.”

If she is forced to make a choice between her two careers, she knows which will take precedence. “As a politician, you can bring about change by passing an order or a law. But as a writer, you change people’s mindset over time. Whether it’s Bharathi’s poems, Puthumaipiththan’s stories or Periyar’s writings, they bring about a gradual change in thought and perception, and therefore in society.”

“So, when are you writing a political novel?” I asked her.

She laughed. “I need more maturity to write that, I think. But here’s the novel I’m writing now.” She showed me a file with loose, ruled sheets, filled with her hesitant handwriting. As I tried to decipher it, she pressed a cup into my hands.

“Gulab jamun,” she said, “I made it this afternoon.”

We had been at the meeting for most of the day, and I wolfed it down. “It’s nice,” I said, with my mouth full.

“It’s a ready-to-make mix. I can’t cook.”

“Didn’t your mother give you lessons before marriage?” I asked.

“Yen maamiaar kaytadhaye nee kaykkare (You’re asking me the same question my mother-in-law asked),” she grinned. As I laughed with her, she added, “My father-in-law used to say ‘She’s very good at boiling water.’ That’s how bad it is.” She sighed. “You know, when they marry you off early, you have this sense that you’ve aged fast. That you haven’t really lived. There are so many things I want to learn—to swim, to dance, to drive a car…but I feel I’m too old to learn any of those things.”

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“When you talk like this, it makes me think what would have happened if you’d had those freedoms early on. You’ve got this far with so little,” I said.

“Well, if I’d been able to go out into the world and had that independence, I would not have felt the pain of these difficulties, not experienced them. I don’t know if I could have imagined the suffering of other people and written about it as well. Other people’s experience does work its way into my novels, but I suppose you can tell what has a personal stamp.”

On my way out of the house, I noticed trophies piled almost on top of each other near the shoe shelf.

“You’ve even got some here?” I laughed.

“You should see my home in the village,” she said, smiling, “My akka tells me I should remove the silver and throw all of them away.”

I was reminded of Sundara Ramaswamy’s quip about Najima.

After she was married off at 14, and moved to her paternal aunt’s home, Shahul treated Subaida with great affection. He would buy her something to eat every day on his way back from work; he would bring her earrings, bangles, and various trinkets from the market. She liked him very much. Their mothers would whisper together every morning. Then, they would ask Subaida, “Did you bathe?” Surprised, she would blink, “Yes.”

“Ada! Not that bath, you fool,” they would mumble under their breaths.

That night, she was woken by a rustling sound. She opened her eyes to see Shahul caressing the saree she had hung out to dry on the clothesline.

‘What is he up to?’ she wondered, and observed him in silence. Shahul took the saree and her blouse and disappeared into a room.

She was astonished. Her confusion and apprehension gave her the courage to follow him. The door of the room he had entered was locked. She pressed an eye to the keyhole.

Shahul was wearing her saree and blouse. He was staring at his reflection in the mirror with longing.

Terrified that he had gone mad, she muttered, “Allah!” to herself. She felt dizzy. ‘Aiyo, Allah, has my husband been possessed by an evil spirit?’ she wondered in horror.

—condensed from Manaamiyangal (2016)

(Translations by the author, with permission from Salma and Kalachuvadu)

(Published in the April 2017 edition of Fountain Ink)

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SUDHAKAR OLWE AND HELENA SCHÄTZLE

TEXT BY SHRADDHA GHATGE

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ASHA KAMBLE

“Pahila mala chambharin bolvayche, ata maanane taai bolavtat
(First they used to call me chambharin, now they call me taai)”

A young Dalit widow with two children, Asha Kamble was harassed by a Vanjari man when she refused his advances. Now in her mid-thirties, Asha

established herself as a tailor after her husband’s death 10 years ago. She went to the police four times to complain; every time, she was turned away. Once the man  had, in a drunken state, knocked on her door at midnight and tried to force his way in. Asha didn’t let him in. She tied his hands to the door knob instead.

In March 2013, Asha was summoned by a 10-member village committee (the  Vanjari man was present as well) which accused her 13-year-old daughter, Saloni, of theft and demanded that she either pay Rs. 20,000 or leave the village. Asha knew her daughter admitted to the crime under pressure, so she offered only Rs. 1,000 as penalty. Khadaki is dominated by Vanjaris and Marathas. Only a handful of houses belong to Buddhist-Dalits and Maangs.

“I told them that I couldn’t afford to pay, nor could I afford to leave the village. The next day they went to the cops to register a complaint against my daughter. The cops told me as she was a minor they wouldn’t register it,” says Asha.

Angered by police inaction, the wife of Bansi Chole (one of the accused) asked Asha’s landlord to evict her. She asked for 15 days to wrap up her business, but they demanded that she leave within two. When she refused, they got a few villagers to throw her belongings out of the house, she said.

“As they were doing this, I took my kids and went to the police station. Initially the cops didn’t entertain me. Later they noted the complaint but didn’t give me the receipt,” says Asha.

“After seven days, when police visited the village for the panchnama, I told them some of my belongings were missing.  But they didn’t bother to note that,” says Asha.

Later  police and relatives of the accused requested Asha to withdraw the case. One even offered to return her belongings and give her money. She says even the local MLA met her in this connection.

“They offered me Rs. 5 lakh and even said the house I stayed in would be transferred to my name free of cost. But I didn’t budge,” says Asha.

The police, Asha claims, fabricated statements from witnesses in a way that suggested that the case should be closed. Although they registered the case under the Prevention of Atrocities Act, a court dismissed the case. She has challenged the order.

***

THE KHURSANE BROTHERS

“Tyana raag alay ani ghabarayla jhalay amchi chalwal baghun”
(They are angry and are threatened by our growing activism)

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“Dalit aspirations are a breach of peace,” B.R. Ambedkar said in his 1936 speech “Annihilation of Caste”. On December 7, 2016, around 7.30 p.m., 22-year-old Ajay Khurasane was beaten up by a group of upper caste people in the village square of Pohegaon in Ahmednagar district. When Ajay’s 20-year-old brother Ashok confronted them, they assaulted both with weapons, causing severe injuries. A long vertical scar marks the left side of Ajay’s face.

Although the Khurasane brothers are farm labourers, they were part of a tribal organisation working for the community, in a village dominated by Marathas, followed by Joshis, Maangs, Dhangars and Gondhalis. The upper caste communities in Pohegaon, which has 500-600 families, feel threatened by the tribals fighting for their rights.

Dalit activist Kiran Thakarey explains: “When we founded the organisation, the gram panchayat didn’t give us permission. We went to the police station and then we got permission. Founding it has boosted the confidence of women and the elderly, who have wanted it for the past 10 years but were scared of the bullying.”

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As Ajay narrates the incident sitting in front of his house, Ashok, their mother Chandrakala and other villagers gather around. “I went to the village square from the market. My friend and I were chatting when one of the accused passed us. He thought we were talking about him. He got angry and gathered 20-odd people and thrashed me and threatened to burn my house down,” Ajay said.

Ashok came to the spot in an effort to make peace. “When we went to the accused’s place, instead of a dialogue, he and a few others started hitting us with a gupti (dagger),” said Ajay.

The brothers went to Shirdi police station. “We reached at 10 p.m. but our complaint was lodged only at 3 a.m. They deliberately delayed the process. The police told us that the situation could be blown out of proportion, so we should withdraw the case.”

The accused were arrested but released the following day. A day after that, they told the brothers, “The police cannot harm us. We have done the internal setting.” They are now out on bail. More than 15 people assaulted them, but the FIR named only six. “So far, police haven’t applied the Atrocities Act. We are waiting,” says Kiran.  This was the first time someone had spoken up aginst the dominant family of the  village.

***

MANIK UDAGE

“Maharana lai maaj aalay. Dakhavto tumhala tumchi aukaat, asa amhala mhanale”
[These Mahars are trying to be over smart, we will show you your place—this is what they told us]

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The Udage family in Pune’s Chikali area has been living under threat and 24-hour police protection ever since Manik, the 25-year-old sole breadwinner, was hacked to death for celebrating Ambedkar’s birth anniversary on April 14, 2014.

In 2014, Manik, a local contractor and founder of Samvidhan Pratistha—an organisation established to promote Dalit cultural events—was beaten with a steel rod and stoned to death by four men from upper caste families. The provocation was his decision to organise an event in Morya vasti where the upper caste communities are dominant.

Besides, the four men who killed him, were local contractors threatened by Manik’s growing popularity. They used to ridicule Manik by saying that he should “remember that he is a Mahar”. But Manik was defiant.

One night the four men came to his hut dragged him out in his sleep, and took him away. “After two days of frantic searching we found Manik’s mutilated body,” says Shravan (in picture), Manik’s 22-year-old brother, who is fighting the case.

The Udage family’s struggles continue. Even though the accused are in jail, Shravan says trhey felt they were always being watched. Whenever Shravan passes Morya vasti, he is subjected to cold stares from the relatives of the accused who has been denied bail several times.

It was not easy for the family to get 24-hour police protection.

 ***

MANISHA KHUPSE

“Majha tondavar thukla ani tyacha gharchyansamor majha blouse fadla”
(He spat on my face and tore my blouse in front of his family)

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From death over a land dispute to charges of murder, the Hathagle family of Anandwadi village in Beed district has seen it all in the past couple of years. Anandwadi is a small village with a Maratha majority. There are only 30-35 Maang houses. Manisha Khupse, a member of a Maang family which is not getting money due under the state’s Gharkul Yojana, confronted the upper caste political leader on the matter. The reply was a volley of abuse, she says.

The Hathagle family’s problems began when they got embroiled in a land dispute. The land, says Manisha—who goes by her married name—was bought by her father and uncle in 1983. Theirs was the first family from the lower castes to own a flour mill in an upper caste dominated village. The counter claim is that they encroached on the land. The dispute claimed her uncle’s life in 2013. One person was booked for murder. The environment in the village is tense.

Manisha, a 29-year-old widow with two children, has been fighting the cases since the dispute began. Things have started heading south for the Hathagle family ever since. The other party in the land dispute is Mirabai Baburao Chavan. “She has not only targeted our house, but lodged a complaint against 13 people stating that we encroached on village land, whereas everyone legally bought it and built pukka houses under Gharkul Yojana,” says Manisha. Mirabai’s son is the accused.

The verdict went in their favour and the accused was released after one year. Manisha claims Mirabai hired goons to harass the community. A few months after her uncle was killed, Manisha and nine family members were booked under Section 307 (attempt to murder) in a case she claims is false. “We were falsely booked on charges of attempting to murder Mirabai’s husband.” The family had to stay out of the village till the situation calmed down. The investigation, however, turned out to be a relief as the witnesses spoke in their favour.

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Manohar Chalak, 40, and his family insist Manisha and her family don’t belong to the village and the land is not owned by them. Besides, Chalak claims Manisha got her caste certificate by filing fake documents. This claim has deterred police from lodging a case under the Atrocities Act.

Manisha says that when she confronted Chalak about the harassment he “abused me, spat on my face, tore my blouse in full view of the Georai court. He also said that I (a woman from the Maang community) should be raped in public, only then I will understand their power.”

***

RAJASHREE KAMBALE

“Majha mulicha jiv shulak karanamule gela”
(My daughter died for no reason)

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Ten-year-old Rajashree would have been alive today if the Dalit basti of Bagh Pimpalgaon village in Beed district had got enough water last year, says her father Namdev Kamble.

Namdev holds the sarpanch and gram sevak responsible for his daughter’s death, as they did not release water to the basti for 10-15 days at a stretch. In February 2016, says Namdev, if there had been water in the house, Rajashree wouldn’t have gone to the well where she tripped and injured her head severely. She succumbed to the injury because Namdev, a farm labourer, could not afford the cost of treatment.

“We had to change three hospitals before Ghati government hospital in Aurangabad admitted her as we couldn’t afford the expense,” Namdev says.

Discrimination on the grounds of caste is commonplace in Bagh Pimpalgaon. The incident occurred when the drought in Marathwada had affected water supply. But the sarpanch, claims Namdev, would release water to the village twice a day, with the exception of the Dalit basti, which got it only once in 10-15 days. Despite his repeated requests, the basti was deprived of water.

Although police took note of Namdev’s complaint, no FIR has been filed and no action taken. “We didn’t receive any compensation from the government. I even visited Mantralaya in Mumbai, they said they would look into it. It’s been four months, but nothing has happened.”

Highlighting the lack of drinking water in zilla parishad schools, Dalit activist Kadudas Kambale says, “The schools should have adequate water for the children. After all, they provide them with mid-day meals, so they should obviously look at providing water.”

Rajashree, a fourth grader in the school, was a bright student and active in cultural events. She had eaten her mid-day meal in the school on the day of the incident but was thirsty. Reaching home, she found no water in the house and went to the well.

“This incident could have been avoided if we had got enough water for storage. This is not just a case of death by accident, but also a case of atrocity as the basti was denied water,” adds Kadudas.

Namdev and Kamble tried several times to file a formal FIR against the sarpanch and gram sevak. But “strong political backing” has shielded them.

 ***

ROHAN KAKADE

“Porga kay sairat navta”
(Our son was not of loose character or in love)

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The  day before his 19th birthday, Rohan Kakade, a Mahar boy from Satara, was murdered by five Maratha men. One of them believed his sister was having an affair with Rohan. They beheaded Rohan, burnt his body and dumped it near Jadhavvadi waterfall.

Rohan’s father Satyavan and the young woman’s father Sunil were good friends. On April 30, 2009, Rohan didn’t return home after dropping his sister off at a medical store. The parents started a search when his phone was not reachable. It was late evening when they finally located Ashok, one of the accused, who said Rohan was last seen with Swapnil (main accused) and his friends headed for a swim.

The parents knew Rohan couldn’t swim so they took Ashok and went to the police station. Upon his confession, they found Rohan’s body. His mother Chandrabhaga stayed at the police station the whole night while his father returned with the body the following day.

Rohan was good at studies and the young woman, a family friend, would call him for help with school work. Rohan’s mother once saw a call from the young woman on Rohan’s phone after 1 a.m. Rohan told his parents that Sunil’s daughter called him occasionally.

But the young woman’s family said Rohan talked to her so they suspected an affair was brewing.

“We even showed them the telecom company’s records. This was our evidence that she was the one who called Rohan after 1 a.m. I told them if they thought my son is committing a crime, they could have gone to the police. Why did they kill him? She is Maratha and he is Mahar, this is the reason they killed him,” Rohan’s mother said.

In court proceedings, the defence lawyer argued that Rohan’s father worked as a bonded labourer in the house of the accused and that they were not friends.

“We made a lot of noise against this injustice but I don’t see any results,” says Chandrabhaga. “We even got media attention, but what’s the use when there’s no outcome?”

Two and half years after the murder, Rohan’s father died. His mother continues to fight the case.

 ***

SAGAR SHEJWAL

“Fakta Babasahebanchi ringtone thevli mhanun maarla majha porala” (Because my son had a ringtone praising Babasaheb, they killed him.)”

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 Sagar Shejwal, a 24-year-old nursing student, was killed in May 2015 near Shirdi by a group of nine intoxicated Maratha men because they objected to the phone ringtone. The ringtone had a song in praise of Ambedkar. Shejwal was a Mahar-Buddhist.

In May 2015, Sagar had gone to Shirdi to attend a friend’s wedding. During the celebrations, he and two of his cousins visited a local beer shop where his phone rang a few times. Nine heavily-inebriated men were sitting outside. They confronted Sagar about his ringtone: “Tumhi karaare kitihi halla, lai mazbut Bhimacha quilla (You can shout as much as you want but Bhim’s fortress always stays strong)”. They demanded that he change the ringtone. Sagar refused. A  verbal spat snowballed into a fight. Sagar and his cousins were thrashed. Although the cousins managed to run away, the nine men took Sagar to a forest near the Manmad highway. His naked mutilated body was found here.

Ashwini, Sagar’s older sister, said: “We all thought he had gone to the wedding, but we had no clue where he was at that moment as his phone was not reachable. We were looking for him everywhere. When our relatives went o the police station, the cops said they would not head out in the heat. They needed an air-conditioned car. So the relatives arranged for an air-conditioned car. However, they (police) were still not able to locate Sagar.”

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The body was finally found when one of Sagar’s friends was able to identify one of the accused. When interrogated, the man gave away the location.

All the nine accused have admitted to their crime and are behind bars. The social welfare department compensated the family with Rs. 1,75,000.

A huge portrait of Sagar hangs on the wall along with that of Ambedkar and other smaller pictures from the family album in the hall of their one-room kitchen house at Rahata Phata colony. Anita Shejwal, Sagar’s mother, said: “The main accused was from Maratha community. Why do they have so much anger against us?”

***

SADASHIV SALAVE

“Doctorani janavarala lavtaat tase taake lavle tyana”
(Doctors treated him worse than an animal while stitching his wounds)

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Sadashiv Salave (better known as Salave Guruji), a 69-year-old retired primary school teacher, and his son and nephew were beaten up by upper caste mob with sticks, swords and iron rods when Guruji intervened in a dispute between the two castes in Bagh Pimpalgaon, Beed district in 2009. Digambar Salave, Guruji’s other son who now looks after their farm, sat on a sofa recalling the incident.

It started with a small fight on June 24, 2009, says Digambar. “My nephew Ravichandra Salave had gone to deliver the afternoon tiffin to my father who was working in the field. It was there the perpetrator, belonging to Dhangar caste, started abusing Ravi and threw stones at him,” Digambar says. An injured Ravi then went to hospital to get himself treated. The police, claims Digambar, didn’t take any action against the accused when a complaint was lodged.

The following day (25th June 2009), Ravi’s father, Bhikachand, went to the man’s house to confront him for beating his son. The man and the main accused, Gangaram Vazir, called his men—belonging to Maratha, Dhangar, and other upper caste communities in the village—and started beating  Bhikachand using sticks, weapons and swords. They followed him home and started abusing the Salave family. Hearing the commotion, Guruji came out of the house to resolve the conflict. The mob then dragged him and assaulted him with swords and iron rods.

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“The mob was very violent. No one was ready to listen. Even Pravin, who went to help Guruji, was injured severely. Nobody reached out to help when they started thrashing us,” says Guruji’s wife, Satvasheela. The police stopped the Salave family from going to the hospital and insisted on recording the statements first. Later when they were taken to a government hospital, the injured were not treated properly, claims Guruji’s wife. “Then we moved Guruji to another hospital in Beed. Even there we were denied proper treatment. The doctors didn’t pay attention while stitching the wounds and treated him worse than an animal.”

Guruji died of suffocation. Of the 18 accused, nine were sentenced to 7 years of imprisonment, the rest were acquitted. They have now appealed against the acquittal of some of the accused.

***

THE GANGRAPE

“Ti matimanda ahe mhanun tila sodla nahi tar marun takla asta”
(She was ‘spared’ because of her handicap else they would have killed her.)

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“The 18-year-old deaf and dumb, mentally-challenged girl was not murdered only because her handicap would not allow her to talk about how she was gang-raped or beaten” This is how Dalit activist and National Dalit Movement for Justice (NDMJ) president Harish Kakade described what happened to a girl from Phaltan block of Satara district in March 2015, when she went missing. Her parents were at work and her sisters in school. Only her younger brother and grandmother were at home. She had stepped out during the day, but had not returned by late evening. After a fruitless search, the family went to the police station. They were asked to wait for 24 hours as they suspected the girl had run away. They didn’t take the fact of her mental illness seriously.

In desperation, the family shared her photo and details on WhatsApp and social media. The next day, someone from the Wadgaon police station called to say a girl in a bad state had been brought there. When their nephew Ganesh brought her back, she told her mother using sign language what had happened.

Two men from the Kunchikorave (nomadic) community had taken her on their bike to a field a few kilometres from her home. There they raped her and took her to another nearby field to confuse her so that she would not be able to identify the location. They were thrashing her when a labourer there spotted them. The men had fled. The man called nearby villagers in an effort to identify the girl. Unable to understand what she was saying, they took her to Wadgaon police station. Eventually, they traced her with WhatsApp.

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Her mother said doctors at the government hospital initially thought the blood was from her period, but finally intervened to ensure the cops lodged the complaint. The victim identified the accused in the identification parade.

The Kunchikorave community is influential in the village, Kakade says. One of the accused got a life term, but the other was acquitted. The girl’s family says the police didn’t show her the second accused during the identification parade.

 ***

MADHUKAR GADAGE

“Savarna lokanchyaach baajune jasta karun nyaay dila jaata”
(The discretionary power of the judiciary normally works in
favour of the privileged caste)

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“On April 26, 2007, Madhukar Ghadage, a 48-year-old Dalit-Buddhist farmer of Kulakajai village in Satara district, was digging a well near a percolation tank. The land near the tank—which he had bought—is prized for its high water table. It is shared with four upper caste families who have their own wells here.

“We bought the land under Jawahar Vihir (well) Yojana and even obtained a no-objection certificate from the gram sabha,” says Tushar Ghadage, Madhukar’s son. “They [upper caste families] were not happy, but we were determined to dig it because we were doing nothing illegal.

“We decided to speed up the digging using machines. Around 7 p.m., my cousin Vaibhav and I returned home to get food and water for the rest.” Returning to the site Tushar saw some men throwing stones at the diggers. The workers abandoned Madhukar and fled. Tushar and Vaibhav ran to the rescue, but they too were assaulted. By the time they got him out, Madhukar was unconscious from loss of blood.

“We had to carry my father on a bike for almost 21 km because we didn’t get any assistance from the villagers,” said Tushar. When they reached hospital, Madhukar was declared brought dead.

In 2010, a sessions court acquitted all 12 accused, citing lack of evidence. Tushar challenged the judgment in the Bombay High Court in August 2010. “When the bench saw this case, they were shocked at the judgment,” he said. The case is now pending at the high court.

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The Ghadage family is a pioneer of the Dalit Buddhist movement of 1956. Madhukar’s grandfather Abaji was the first Dalit in the village to get a job in the Railways. The family is relatively affluent and progressive, with many members working in government.

“One of my brothers completed a Masters in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS),” says Tushar, who has an M.A. from the same institution. “One cousin is a civil engineer, another has an M.Sc. in microbiology and another an M. Sc. in Zoology. None of the upper caste families can match the Ghadages. This is a reason of contention and jealousy.”

Tushar says the well-digging only triggered a deep-seated grudge. “If we submit, they win,” Tushar says.

***

NITIN AAGE

“Majha porala vedya kutrayala jasa martaat tasa marla”
(My son was killed like one would kill a mad dog on the loose)

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He was 17 when he died, hanged from a tree in Kharda village near Ahmednagar district’s Jamkhed town for talking to a girl from an upper caste community. Three men, including the girl’s brother, suspected the Mahar boy of having an affair and constantly harassed him in school.

Nitin was a  Class XI student who worked part-time in a motorcycle garage. He was good at studies. On April 28, 2014, the day of his death, he had appeared for the Std XII preparatory exam from Government English Medium school in Kharda village.

According to his father Raju Aage, Nitin was beaten up in school. Neither the teachers nor the principal intervened. Instead they were told to take it outside. “They paraded him naked in front of the village, but no one stopped the atrocity. Most of the onlookers were Marathas. My son was killed like one would kill a mad dog,” says Raju.

Narrating eyewitness accounts, Raju said the three men broke Nitin’s arms, legs and threw him on the floor. Then they ran a motorcycle over his unconscious body several times. They dragged him to a brick kiln and inserted hot iron rods into his private parts. Later they hanged him from a small lime tree to make it look like suicide.

Nitin’s parents searched frantically for several hours before they found him hanging from the tree. “We took him to Jamkhed Hospital where his post mortem was done,” Raju said.

The family of the girl in question said Nitin was only beaten and not murdered. A relative was quoted in The Hindu as saying Nitin was harassing the girl, and was thrashed when her brother found out. “It was meant to be a warning. Nitin must have felt insulted and committed suicide.”

“The teachers are to be blamed. They are Marathas. Why didn’t they stop them? If they had intervened, my son wouldn’t have died,” says Raju Aage.

Although more than 10 people were involved in Nitin’s murder, police registered complaints only against three, including the girl’s brother. Later the others were arrested too. Of 13 accused, three juveniles were released, and three granted bail.

Three years later, the case is still going on.
Sudharak Olwe has been a Mumbai-based photojournalist since 1988. He has worked as a press photographer with some of the leading newspapers in India. In 2016, Sudharak was conferred the Padma Shri.

Helena Schätzle is an award-winning photographer who works as an independent photojournalist with the German media.

Shraddha Ghatge is a journalist based in Mumbai.

(The cover story of the April 2017 edition of Fountain Ink)

The street children of Delhi.

BY SIDDHARTH BEHL

(Siddharth Behl is a photographer based in Delhi. He is a National Foundation of India fellow.)

(The photo story of the May 2017 edition of Fountain Ink)

BY AKSHAI JAIN

It started with discomfort in the stomach, progressed to severe cramps and finally blood in the stool, often lots of it. Nights were sleepless, a roil of urgent trips to the bathroom and soiled clothes. During the day, then 33-year old Manas Shukla verged on incontinence, visiting the bathroom 10-15 times.

A colonoscopy revealed ulceration in the big intestine. The Delhi-based businessman was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis (UC), an auto-immune disorder in which the immune system attacks cells in the gut, leading to chronic and painful inflammation. He was put on an aggressive treatment of steroids and anti-inflammatory medicine, following which the condition gradually abated.

Seven years later, in 2009, a niggling abdominal pain surfaced again. It wasn’t much worse than a bout of gastritis, and easy to dismiss. It stayed that way for a few more years.

Then in 2012, the disease returned with a vengeance. A round of steroids followed. Two relatively calm months later there was a relapse, then another. The medicines were clearly having little effect. Fifteen trips a day to the bathroom meant Shukla couldn’t venture out of the house. In desperation he turned to homeopathy, to little avail.

Steroid use was by now having serious side-effects. This moderately built man started bloating. His face turned puffy, strange itchy patches appeared on his forearms. He says he was “angry, irritated and absolutely not in control of my life”. His business suffered. When he was out, he was preoccupied with where he might be able to find the next toilet. Just to be safe he carried an extra set of clothes.

In the summer of 2014, he woke up one morning to find he couldn’t stand on his feet—the joint pain was excruciating. His UC had led to arthritis. It has been known to happen, though medicine hasn’t deciphered how one leads to the other. Immunosuppressants took care of the pain, but  steroid use led to early cataracts. It was, says Shukla, “a hell of a time. Classic case of Catch 22”.

Finally, he decided to try a treatment so experimental, bizarre and odious that it could only be a last resort. At a private hospital in Gurugram doctors took a little lump of his brother-in-law Santosh’s feces, ground it with saline, strained it and filled it in syringes.

The decoction was then transplanted into Shukla’s gut via a colonoscopy. It was India’s first faecal matter transplant (FMT), a procedure that in polite company is also called a “microfaunal” transplant—the fauna being the dense cocktail of bacteria and viruses that feces contains.

This bizarre line of treatment was inspired by a few studies that indicated that the guts of people suffering from UC (and other similar diseases) were different from “normal” guts. Many of these had been conducted abroad, but some had been done in India.

A study at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi had found major fluctuations in six major groups of bacteria that colonise the gut. Doctors treating Shukla hoped that introducing material from a healthy gut would rectify the balance.

It was a long shot, but the results were miraculous. A few sessions of FMT later, his colitis went into remission. His pharmacopoeia of medicines tapered off and for the first time in many years, he did not have to worry about the location of the next bathroom.

The hunch that bacteria and viruses inhabiting the gut play an important role in health is not new. The first inklings came as a far back as the 1960s, points out Gagandeep Kang, one of India’s leading researchers in this area.

Doctors at the Christian Medical College in Vellore, where she now teaches, were at the time working on a gastrointestinal disease called tropical sprue. Patients suffered from diarrhoea, cramps and anorexia in a spiralling cycle that left them malnourished, their bodies unable to absorb nutrition.

The cause of the disease was elusive, but doctors at the institute found bacteria were the likely culprit. Sprue patients had bacteria in their guts where there shouldn’t be any. Further work was limited by technology—in the absence of DNA-based methods, identifying bacteria was a laborious process of growing individual cell lines in the laboratory. But the first probe had been lowered into the fascinating life of the microbiome.

***

The human body is a forest—a complex ecosystem of thousands of genes and millions of cells. But what remained hidden from sight until very recently, underneath the soil, were the 100 trillion microorganisms that inhabit the body, on the skin, mouth, vagina, anus and most densely, the human gut.

Their population is shockingly large, far exceeding the number of cells in the body. And the number of microbial genes in the body is more than 100 times the number of genes in the human genome. We know little of this microcosm of bacteria and viruses, but research over the last few years suggests that it plays a role in everything from diseases like diabetes to obesity, digestion and drug resistance. The genetic contribution of these microbes to the human body is thought to be so significant that this hidden world is now referred to as the “microbiome” or the second genome.

This is nothing short of the Copernican revolution in biology. The human genome, so far considered the arbiter of the body, stands displaced from the centre, giving way to thousands of species of mysterious microbes.

The relatively simple model in which the genome controlled everything from the production of proteins to dispositions to diseases is now complicated by the role of bacteria and viruses interacting among themselves, with the environment, the body cells and the human genome. We now appear to be living in a swamp of microbes that rise and ebb, enter and exit the body.

This web of interactions leads to situations in which some diseases only manifest themselves in the presence of adequate numbers of a certain bacteria. But the abundance of those bacteria is determined by the presence of very many others. It sounds dauntingly complicated, but scientists have, as a precursor to better understanding, started mapping this world.

The enigmatically named Centre for Human Microbial Ecology (CHME) is one of the laboratories at the heart of this endeavour. It’s part of a new institute, the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (TSHTI), established recently by the government as part of a biotech cluster. The goal of this institute, headed by Kang, is to translate health research into clinical practice and applications. This is ambitious and virgin territory, mirroring the institute’s location in the middle of the scrub forest of Haryana’s Aravali range.

Bhabatosh Das’ office looks out over this vast expanse. The landscape is dominated by an orange, multi-storeyed Hanuman statue that beams benignly across the desolation. Das, a professor at CHME, has been cataloguing microbes from different parts of the body and different parts of the country. A hive of imposing machines whirs and hums in the institute’s laboratory revealing various species of bacteria.

Unlike the human genome, 99.9 per cent of which is common to all people, the microbiome differs wildly, depending on age, genetic composition, gender, diet, geographic location and health of a person. While some of these differences are minute or inconsequential, others might be significant. The only way to tell is to compare samples.

So Das’ group took breast milk microbiome samples from 27 women in Punjab, 144 stomach samples from Jammu and Kashmir and Maharashtra, 400 vaginal microbiome samples from Delhi, and gut microbiome samples from 1,535 people from seven states scattered around the country.

This is a very large number given how expensive the DNA analysis of the samples is. “Much larger,” says Das, “than the 242 samples analysed under the U.S.-based Human Microbiome Project.” The diversity of India’s population necessitates the sample size.

Previous studies (in India and abroad) have given a broad picture of the microbial composition of the gut. The gastrointestinal tract is dominated by a handful of types of bacteria—Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Fusobacteria and Verrucomicrobium. Of these the first two comprise 90 per cent of the species in the colon.

The human body has only eight enzymes to digest food. Without these bacteria, we wouldn’t be able to digest most of our food. Bacteroides, a subclass of Bacteroidetes, degrade starch, playing an essential role in carbohydrate metabolism and nutrition. Eubacterium, part of Firmicutes, produce chemicals to degrade vegetables and fruits and play a part in degrading bile acids in the intestine.

These are just two examples from a range of functions the microbiome serves. Lactobacilli, another member belonging to Firmicutes, are known to help fortify skin barriers that protect us from infection. Other microbes have functions that we’re extrapolating in reverse, when things go wrong, as in the case of ulcerative colitis and tropical sprue.

The relationship between the gut and its microbial garden is symbiotic—in return for their myriad services, the microbes get to live in a particularly nutrient-rich environment.

Das’ team found that six types of bacteria were present in the guts of all Indians, while others were specific to different groups—like a unique bacteria that he has recently isolated from a faecal sample that he got from the Andamans. This is found nowhere else in India, opening up the possibility of bacteria being used as geographic markers for populations.

 ***

The question of whether there is anything known as the “Indian” microbiome is however still open-ended, and given the plethora of conditions that determine the composition of the microbiome might not even make sense. That’s not to say that there are no differences. In another study where Das juxtaposed samples from India and Japan he found that the bacterial compositions of the microbiomes were “completely different”. He attributes this to the very great difference in diet.

In Assam, Mojibur Khan of the Institute of Advanced Study in Science and Technology conducted a parallel study of 15 Indian tribal populations from Assam, Telangana, Manipur and Sikkim, comparing the microbiota to data from other parts of the world.

Each of the groups he’d chosen was different in tradition and food habits. Tribes from Manipur and Sikkim consumed more fermented foods, smoked fish and meats. Those from Sikkim consumed more milk products than the rest.

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Not only did Khan find variations in the relative proportions of different bacteria, some groups like the Kolam tribe from Telangana had unique bacteria (Treponema and Gordonibacter). Significantly, he confirmed that there was a core set of bacteria present in all these tribes despite their differences.

This basic descriptive exploration of “Indian” microbiota has been succeeded by work looking at the changes effected by diet, age and nutrition. The most basic division lay between predominantly vegetarian and non-vegetarian diets, with the former being rich in a type of bacteria called Prevotella and the latter in Bacteroides.

The divisions by age were fewer—the microbiome of children less than a year old was in a state of flux, with low diversity and a higher concentration of pathogenic microbes, which are thought to play a role in the development of the immune system. The microbiome matures quickly. Das believes that by two or three a child’s microbiome has matured. Kang believes this happens earlier—by one.

Thereafter the microbiota stabilises, changing significantly only after the age of 60.

A fascinating study by scientists from the National Centre for Cell Science and the Agharkar Research Institute used three generations from two Indian joint families to examine age-related changes. Using members of the same family allowed them to minimise factors like genetics and diet that might influence the results. They found definite age-related changes especially in the ratio of Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes. The changes in their relative populations were very different from those seen in European populations. During the course of the study they also chanced upon six novel species of bacteria.

The clinically most important find, with wide ramifications, has been the relationship between nutritional status and microbiota, especially in children. A collaborative study between scientists from the leading microbiome research laboratories in the country looked at the gut microbes of 20 children of varying nutritional status.

Each of the samples was sequenced completely, at `4 lakhs a sample. The process, called whole genome sequencing, looks not only at the different bacteria but also their functions.

Certain groups of bacteria like Proteobacteria, they found, decreased with improving nutritional status, while others like Synergistetes were positively related. Their results also threw up some surprises—bacteria like Lactobacillus that were thought to be strongly correlated seemed impervious to nutritional status.

Lower levels of nutrition it seemed were due not only to the increase in the number of pathogenic bacteria but a decrease in the number of “good” bacteria like Roseburia and Faecalibacterium.

These descriptive studies gave us a basic understanding of the Indian microbiome, but they were somewhat unsatisfying, There were too many variables, it was difficult to discern patterns across microbiomes, the connections found indicative but far from definitive, and they did not translate into very much more. But these were the stepping stones to a slew of exciting investigations probing the connections between various diseases, conditions and the microbiome.

***

Now that scientists had an inkling of what a normal microbiome and its variations looked like, it was easier to move backwards from disease to microbe. While this is not a replacement for establishing causal connections, it is a much more focused and faster method, which has already yielded clinical applications.

With sprue, scientists showed that the guts of malnourished children had abnormalities. Now there were far better tools and  greater understanding at their disposal.

In the intervening decades the government introduced many feeding programmes to address malnutrition, but their effect was slower than expected. Increased nutrition did not lead to faster growth in malnourished children. In some cases supplementary feeding had a muted effect. In others children regressed almost immediately after the feeding stopped.

According to Gagandeep Kang, data from animal models indicates that the relationship between the microbiome, the immune system and the cells that line the intestine determines how well the gut absorbs nutrients. It’s a complex interaction—when the body’s immunity or ability to control its microbiome is low, the cells lining the intestine step in. This reduces their ability to absorb fat, leading to malnutrition. It seemed evident that while supplementary feeding was necessary, reducing exposure to pathogens (harmful bacteria) was equally so.

What were these pathogens? Kang along with other colleagues compared 10 children with low birth weight with 10 children of normal weight from a slum in south India, tracking them every three months till they turned two. They found that the microbiota of children in the control group were rich in species like Bidifidobacterium longum and Lactobacillus mucosae, while the guts of stunted children had high numbers of bacteria like Desulfovibrio and Campylobacterales, which caused inflammation. These bacteria predominate in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (of which Shukla’s UC is one). The guts of stunted children also harboured Camplyobacteria, a type of bacteria found in the microbiota of patients with chronic HIV.

Another area Kang has worked on extensively is rotavirus, for which she was awarded the Infosys Prize in 2016. Rotavirus causes severe diarrhoea in babies and young children. Unfortunately, vaccines for rotavirus and even the oral polio vaccine are found to have much lower efficacies in developing countries than they do in countries where nutrition levels are higher and exposure to pathogens lower. Scientists suspect that microbiota, given their connection with the immune system, have a role to play.

The results have, however, been equivocal. In a study (published in 2016) Kang and colleagues altered the microbiota of a set of children receiving the oral polio vaccine by giving them antibiotics, while the control group got none. The assumption was that children whose microbiome was modified would respond differently, but “we noticed no difference,” says Kang smiling wryly, “We’re not very good at finding things”.

She was alluding also to another study comparing the microbiota of obese mothers and children in various permutations (obese mother-normal child, obese mother-obese child etc) that had also drawn a blank. They had found no differences in the microbiomes of the different sets.

Other researchers have found connections. A study published in  Nature found that “obese” microbiomes had gene sets that were better at harvesting energy from different sources, while at the other end of the spectrum, the microbiomes of anorexic individuals are dominated by a particular bacteria. According to Bhabatosh Das, results from this study have been replicated in mice where transplanting the microbiome of an obese mouse into a germ-free one has led to the latter turning obese.

The reasons for the differences in result are in part due to the small sample sizes of most of these studies, coupled with the incredible variations found in the microbiome.

***

At the Centre for Human Microbial Ecology, Das and his students have been exploring the microbial underpinnings of a whole range of urgent diseases.

India has the world’s highest incidence of pre-term birth, more than twice that of any other country. The health costs are enormous—pre-term children are more likely to be stunted and have lower IQ. In a project funded by the Department of Biotechnology, Das’ team compared the vaginal microbiota of pregnant women. Could looking at microbiota predict whether the child would be pre-term?

Das suspected that bacterial vaginosis, a minor infection of the vagina, might lead to pre-term birth. In “normal” vaginas, he says, Lactobacillus controls other bacteria by making the vaginal environment very acidic. A disruption of this balance can lead to inflammation, which can affect the placenta leading to pre-term birth. This according to him is the first study in India looking at the microbiomes of pregnant women.

One of the largest studies the lab is currently involved in is an Indo-Danish collaboration comparing the microbiomes of healthy, pre-diabetic and diabetic (type 2) patients. Half the patients are enrolled in India while the other half are in Denmark. The 450 microbiome samples from each country are first grouped according to bacterial composition. From each group a few samples are taken for whole genome sequencing.

“Initially we were going to enroll patients 60 and above since that’s the age group most likely to suffer from diabetes in Denmark. But in India most diabetics are in the 35-50 age group,” says Das, his round face breaking into a restrained smile, “so we changed the age group to 35-65.”

The results are still being analysed but are indicative of groups of bacteria appearing only in certain sets of subjects. The question troubling Das, though, is whether it’s the bacteria that are in some way responsible for diabetes or the other way around.  “It’s a controversial question”. It’s unlikely they’ll have an answer to that anytime soon since there are no good animal models (which mimic the human manifestation of these conditions and situations) for diabetes or the vaginal microbiome.

Smaller diabetes studies in India have found higher populations of Bacteroidetes in patients, an increase in a few other pathogens and a reduction in some common bacteria which produce the acid butyrate.

Neonatal sepsis, a bacterial blood infection in newborns is another condition being tracked back to imbalances in the microbiome. Breast milk, contrary to perception, is far from sterile, containing nearly 70 different types of bacteria. It is a possible source of  infection. Scientists at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, are examining breast milk from 27 lactating women to gauge whether it can be used to predict the chances of sepsis.

Another conundrum that has possible links to bacteria is the prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in India despite the low consumption of animal fat. Shalimar (he goes by one name), a gastroenterologist at Delhi’s AIIMS conjectures that the gut produces a substance that gets transported to the liver. In the first stage of the study he’s looking at the gut bacteria of 17 patients.

Links between microbes and disease have been best established in a set of diseases called inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). Ulcerative colitis is one of these, as is a disease called Crohn’s disease (CD), an inflammatory disease that leads to abdominal pain and diarrhoea. Vineet Ahuja at AIIMS showed UC patients had significantly higher concentrations of Lactobacilli and lower numbers of Clostridium coccoides. In IBD patients the populations of other bacteria like Bacteroides, Lactobacillus etc were also awry.

The most exciting discovery, which would reorient and complicate efforts at understanding a microbiome, came when scientists were looking at stomach ulcers.

Studying stomach microbiota was challenging to start with since it required stomach biopsy samples. CHME managed to get 144 from Mumbai and Delhi. Conventionally, H. pylori had been blamed for stomach ulcers, but many samples did not have any trace of it.

At a partner institution of CHME, the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology (RGCB), Gopinath Balakrishnan Nair had been looking at the same issue. He found that the strains of H. pylori associated with stomach ulcers in Western and East-Asian countries were different from those associated with the disease in patients from West Bengal. There was, however, little information from India on virulent strains of the bacteria.

To complicate matters further, even though nearly 80 per cent of Indians are carriers of H. pylori only 10-20 per cent develop diseases related to it. Of 4,500 slum children Nair studied in Kolkata, he found most healthy despite having a large number of “pathogenic” bacteria in their guts. What was going on?

It seemed that other microbes had a significance influence on the virulence of H. pylori. In the presence of some it was malignant, but in their absence it lingered harmlessly.

In some concentrations and the presence of appropriate microbial ecosystems around the bacteria could be pathogenic; in other circumstances the same bacteria could be beneficial. In other words, there are no bad and good bacteria.

***

One of the most exciting things about the microbiome, which makes it of far greater therapeutic use than the genome is the fact that it can be modified. “Once you’ve identified genes in the genome, then what?” asks Das rhetorically, “you can’t change them”. But in case of the microbiome you can add genes and with the help of medicines like antibacterials, better known as antibiotics, you can take out a few.

The advantage, though, is double edged—its malleability also makes the microbiome a key player in the looming scourge of antibiotic resistance.

It has been implicated in its spread. In 2015, a group of Swedish scientists examined the stools of a group of 35 Swedish exchange students before and after they returned from India and Africa. The results were stark.

Genes encoding for resistance to the sulfonamide group of antibiotics increased 2.6 times; to trimethoprim 7.7 times and 2.6 fold for beta-lactams. Tetracycline and aminoglycoside resistant genes also shot up.  Unfortunately all of these are clinically important antibiotics.

Bacteria from the Proteobacteria group, which are also thought to be associated with UC and chronic HIV, exhibited the largest jump in numbers.

Of the 18 students returning from India, 12 had acquired drug resistant E. coli, which none returning from Africa had. In all, the scientists found 178 drug resistant genes in the students.

None of these students had taken antibiotics or been hospitalised, so the microbes with these resistance genes had clearly come through food and the environment.

Das’ most important work has been in understanding the role of gut bacteria in this transfer and the possible ways of limiting it.

The shelves of a metal cabinet in one corner of his office are lined with array upon array of test tubes, like bees sitting on a hive. Each of these 1,097 test tubes, he says proudly, contains a gut bacteria that he’s examined for resistance to nine different classes of antibiotics. To get a representative sample, the bacteria were isolated from Delhi, West Bengal and Assam. Then the genome of each of them was sequenced.

Simultaneously he looked at 3,700 pathogens found in the gut. These, according to him, have the ability to pick up DNA from gut bacteria and spread it to other bacteria. Was it possible to modify gut bacteria to minimise this spread?

What he found was that antibiotics influenced the transfer of DNA from bacteria to pathogens. This is a process that also happens in nature, but with very low efficiency. The dense microbe-laden environment of the gut compensates for the inefficiency, making the gut a hotbed of antibiotic resistance.

Some antibiotics speeded up this process more than others and made it more efficient—those were the ones most likely to lead to antibiotic resistance. Replacing these with antibiotics that had lower propensity to induce gene transfer could be one way of tackling resistance. Unfortunately some commonly used antibiotics like sulfamides are known to speed up gene transfer, as a result resistance to them in India is widespread. “But doctors continue to prescribe them,” says Das.

The antibiotic project was “huge,” he says, “we even found a microbe resistant to 22 different antibiotics. Where is this coming from? Is it possible to restrict it?” The first order of business, he believes, is to create a rapid detection system for antibacterial resistance.

***

This limited understanding of the microbiome is already throwing up treatment possibilities. Faecal matter transplant is one of them. It’s nothing short of a miracle for patients of IBD and diseases like Clostridium difficile infection in which the namesake bacteria causes diarrhoea and nausea.

Doctors speculate that FMT might help in a whole gamut of diseases—from multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue syndrome to malnutrition, type 2 diabetes and autoimmune disorders like uveitis.

First, though, before FMT can be used widely we need to define a healthy “Indian” microbiome. This will help prevent the introduction of pathogens and ensure that the bacteria being transplanted are appropriate. Vineet Ahuja of AIIMS and his colleagues obtained 55 stool samples from Leh, Ladakh, 25 from rural Haryana and another 25 from urban Haryana.

The best subjects are those from Leh—their guts had few pathogenic bacteria, and their low exposure to antibiotics meant few antibiotic resistance genes. Dietary differences did translate into microbial differences, but could be easily tweaked for transplants.

A simpler and less radical way to address imbalances in the gut is to introduce new bacteria through probiotic foods. Specific probiotics have been found to reduce the duration and occurrence of diarrhoea in children, and help them gain weight and height. Work by the National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases in Kolkata showed that diarrhoea infections came down by 14 per cent among children who received daily doses of Lactobacillus casei.

In Delhi, Nita Bhandari of the Society for Applied Studies examined the microbiomes of 170 undernourished children before and after giving them a regimen of supplements and probiotics. She found that for kids below five recovery rates were higher. These could be improved by the targeted use of antibiotics.

The caveat with the use of probiotics is that Indian microbiomes are very different from those from other parts of the world. What is probiotic there may not be probiotic here. So probiotics have to be selected carefully. That’s not what companies marketing probiotic foods are doing. “For all you know,” laughs Das, “they’re selling placebos.” What might work better he thinks are prebiotics—substances that don’t contain bacteria but promote the growth of specific pre-existing ones.

All of these are tentative forays, revealing only the broad contours of the massive faunal garden that lives within us. Research in India has lagged behind, but is now picking up pace. The results of many of these current studies will emerge over the next few years.

Directions for the next phase of research are already emerging. Exploring the virome, the neglected viral component of the microbiome is the most imperative. Viruses are minuscule in number compared to bacteria, but cause many acute diseases like rotavirus, hepatitis, and are associated with cancers. They can alter bacteria, and potentially be used to engineer microbiomes. Work on them has been limited because molecular sequencing technologies are still being developed for them—a priority for scientists at RGCB.

Das is soon travelling to Japan to work on “molecular signalling”. The idea is to modify bacteria using antibiotics or viruses to produce molecules that can then modulate the growth of other bacteria.

Meanwhile, Manas Shukla has had relapses of UC, but faecal matter transplants seem to work every time. Immediately after his last FMT he did something he’d never imagined he’d be able to do—take a two-day road trip.

Akshai Jain has worked with Outlook Traveller, Mint and Tehelka. He now freelances, and his latest hobby-horse is science journalism.

(From the May 2017 edition of Fountain Ink)

BY ALIA ALLANA

School’s out but she can’t wait to get to the library. In the corner of the room, past stacks of books on biology, is a safe where 9th and 10th graders deposit their mobiles at the start of the day. She signs in the ledger and grabs her mobile, identifying it by the diamante-encrusted initials on the back of the case: LV. Layla V. is a Class X student.

“In the car,” she writes to her mother on WhatsApp. It’s a picturesque drive from the heart of colonial Mumbai in Fort, past the Art Deco buildings that line the Marine Drive and onwards to the big bungalows on Malabar Hill. She doesn’t look up.

Her eyes are glued to the screen. Notifications keep piling up. There are over 50 unread messages on WhatsApp, dealing with the mundane and formal: tuition timings for upcoming exams, after-school practices, and a busy family group that she’s put on mute. There may be the odd alert on Facebook and on good days a few hundred likes on Instagram but the banter, the time-pass takes place on Snapchat.

This week everyone on Snapchat is talking about Coachella, a music festival in the deserts of California. A friend sends a snap suggesting a Coachella-themed house party. The message disappears as soon as she’s seen it. She replies with a 10-second video message that too will disappear into Internet oblivion.

When she’s done streaking—sending one video message after another—Layla clicks on Kylie Jenner’s, the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner brood, story. Kylie has coloured her hair neon-highlighter green, she’s hosting a star-studded party on the sidelines of Coachella with her sister Kendall, she’s zooming in on her breasts while Pia Mia’s hit song plays in the background.

Layla clicks on Alessandra Ambrosio’s story. The Victoria’s Secret model is already in Coachella Valley in the Victoria’s Secret Angel Oasis with a group of models. Then on to Martin Garrix, the superstar DJ who is backstage performing a sound check.

“I feel like I’m there with them,” Layla says.

She clicks on Discover in Snapchat and watches Snapchat’s broadcast from the festival, a series of edited 10-second clips. It reads: “Coachella Festival Fashion: Playing Dress up in the Desert”. Women in barely-there skirts and cowboy boots talk about their outfits, someone with purple hair gives a 10-second tutorial on how to make a French braid, and snaps are accompanied by one-liners: “even unicorns exist here” and “emoji pants are the new flower crown”.

In the spirit of Coachella, Layla embraces her inner bohemian and takes a selfie with Snapchat’s flower crown filter. She scribbles on top of it: “LIT”.  “Saying cool is so passé,” she says and sends the snap to her best friends list, unfettered by whether she looks perfect. It is more real; raw.

“Nothing lasts forever,” she says.

That’s the promise and illusion of Snapchat: A corner of the Internet that’s erasable, that can be forgotten.

***

For the well-acquainted (read: millennial and Generation Z) snapping is simple: the app’s landing page is the camera, an icon in the corner flips the camera for the selfie-generation and snappers have the choice to embellish their selfie with playful graphical flourishes such as bunny ears and voice changers, morph their faces into tacos or face swap with Donald Trump. This led Farhad Manjoo of The New York Times to write that the app was among several that were “creating a charming alternative universe online—a welcome form of earnest, escapist entertainment that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside.”

“Snapchat isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment. It’s about communicating with the full range of human emotion—not just what appears to be pretty or perfect,” wrote co-founder Evan Spiegel in a blog post on snap.com on May 9, 2012, the day the first prototype aimed as an alternative to existing social media was launched. After hearing “hilarious stories about emergency detagging of Facebook photos before job interviews and photoshopping blemishes out of candid shots before they hit the Internet (because your world would crumble if anyone found out you had a pimple on the 38th day of 9th grade),” Spiegel thought, “There had to be a better solution.”

Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy found the answer in ephemerality. They disrupted Facebook and Google’s narrow-minded devotion to the “Online = Offline” culture. In contrast to the merger of online and real-world identities occurring on social networking sites, there was merit in anonymity. In an interview to The Telegraph in 2013, Spiegel talks about the how digital and physical worlds have become one and the same largely due to smartphones.

“One day you log in and you realise this is not me. Everything you’re posting you’re doing it in the context of everything you’ve posted before. Let’s delete everything, save the stuff that’s important and then you only have to organise the one per cent that’s worth keeping,” he said.

It was this streak that led Spiegel and Murphy to develop Picaboo with Reggie Brown (a fraternity brother at Stanford who came up with the now iconic logo and has since been booted out with a $157.5 million compensation) in a Stanford dorm in April 2011. When Picaboo first appeared on the App Store it was described as a game and in a sense it was just that. Users received a point for every message sent and everyone could see the three people whom a person messaged the most. Time and again Spiegel quoted the designer couple Charles and Ray Eames: “Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are preludes to serious ideas.”

***

Snapchat at best attempted to put us in the moment and at worse rewrote the rules of nostalgia and the way we preserved pictorial memories. There was seriousness in Snapchat’s gone-in-ten-seconds frivolity: it isn’t just about disappearing selfies or barfing rainbows but about capturing a moment that can be shared freely without bothering about the broader consequences of an upload. Silliness, even thoughtlessness, would never again be dissected. A snap need not be burdened with the weight of global injustices; it need not be shamed for its privilege, or suffocated by the demands of political correctness. It would remain private for a few seconds and then self-destruct. In a world where everything on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter becomes a permanent part of your Internet persona, impermanence is golden.

The numbers for the five-year-old start-up are impressive. On any day, 158 million people are on Snapchat and on average open the app 18 times a day. This means users are spending 25 to 30 minutes on the app daily. An astonishing 2.8 billion snaps are created and shared; 9,000 snaps are shared every second, images and 10-second videos that will disappear after viewing in a digital magic trick. Sixty per cent of users chat with friends on Snapchat, while there are 10 billion video views every day. Most users are in North America and Europe though the app is growing in popularity across the world. In March it was the most searched-for app on Apple’s universe. Most users are 18-34 years old and engagement levels are higher on iOS than Android. Snapchat claims that more than 60 per cent of ads on Snapchat are viewed on mobile devices with the audio turned on.

***

She was a married woman, a mother of four and lived two buildings diagonally opposite him. He was nine years younger and had recently returned after years in Dubai. He was a man of means and owned a TV store. Often when she came to the balcony, she would see him smoking with a group of men and passersby would stop to shake his hand. Over the space of a few weeks, she caught him gazing upstairs with increased frequency. When their eyes met, she says, she couldn’t break away from his stare.

These were fleeting moments of privacy in the sprawling Agripada in South Mumbai, where well-to-do Muslims live traditional lives, where the mingling of sexes is strictly frowned upon, and where elderly women hold kitty parties to gossip.

It was a cool evening in January when she hurried past his store and saw him standing outside. He was a smooth operator and chucked a piece of paper into her bag. The passing of notes, often called “chits” and “digits”, in the mohalla was commonplace. Agripada is the sort of place where falling in love was a hobby.

For days she laboured over the “digits.” Should she call him? What would she say? When her husband was out one night smoking sheesha with his friends, and their children asleep, she called him but hung up on the second ring. She was scared. What if someone found out? That night when he called her back they spoke for three hours. She hung up only because her husband had returned home at 1 a.m.

Hers wasn’t an unhappy marriage despite the fact that she been married young to an older man. Her husband had always been good to her, their togetherness was a pact of sorts. She had known of his affairs but had never indulged in one though the opportunity had presented itself “two or three” times, she said.

So when she replayed the conversation, of “a WhatsApp that didn’t record everything,” she was excited and nervous. “Even if your husband goes through every single part of your phone, he won’t know a thing,” he had promised. She toyed with the idea of downloading the app for a couple of nights and when she did, he had already devised a strategy. She would stand by his store and open Snapchat. They would both open the “Add Nearby” option. To her it appeared as though he had done this before, a charge he vehemently denied.

It worked and opened the floodgates for one of the most talked about affairs in this conservative society. “How can you catch a cheat when there is nothing to see?” asked a notorious gossip. “First it was BBM then Facebook. But nothing has been as crafty, as sly as Snapchat,” she said.

They eloped. She left her four children behind.

***

From the get-go Spiegel batted away assumptions and accusations that Snapchat encouraged risqué behavior. He told TechCrunch that sexting remained only a corner of the experience; he was “not convinced that the whole sexting thing is as big as the media makes it out to be…I just don’t know people who do that. It doesn’t seem that fun when you can have real sex.” He followed it up with an interview with New York magazine, “It doesn’t actually make sense for sexting…because you see the photo for, what, three seconds?” He told the The New York Times, “It’s not our job to police the world or Snapchat of jerks.”

Others criticised Spiegel for developing a service that was puzzling to anyone born before 1982 and complicated to use. There are no intuitive buttons on Snapchat, just cryptic icons and swipe gestures that trigger different functions. It’s nearly impossible to search for other users unless you know their user names or mobile numbers.

Snapchat kept evolving. By the time 50 million photos were being sent a day, Snapchat introduced video and Spiegel dropped out of Stanford three classes shy of graduating and relocated to his attorney father’s multi-million-dollar mansion in the Pacific Palisades. When Snapchat opened its first office, it chose Los Angeles’ Venice Beach instead of San Francisco’s Bay Area because it was cooler. By May 2013, Mark Zuckerberg had used the app and Al Gore was raving about it and Snapchat was attracting serious funding. Zuckerberg tried to buy Snapchat for $3 billion but was turned away, leading to bitter resentment. The subsequent labelling of Zuckerberg as the “King of Petty”, as he attempted to protect his turf, was born out of this. By the time 350 million messages were being sent, the company introduced stories, short video blogs that had a 24-hour shelf life.

Amid hacking and leaked email scandals that plagued the app and Evan Spiegel, Snapchat debuted the Our Stories feature, a grass-roots look into life at the Oscars, the NFL and pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.

By August 26, 2014, Snapchat had one million users and on Halloween that year they ran their first ad. It was a trailer for a horror movie called “Ouija” and film distributor Universal Pictures said it was viewed by millions.

Techies value disruption and Snapchat was rewriting the rules of the game, it was constantly innovating. Before Snapchat, most online content—be it blogs or tweets—appeared in reverse chronological order, the most recent post appeared first.  Snapchat’s stories ushered in a natural order: a snapper’s first update was viewed first and the rest followed, employing a linear narrative in storytelling.

Prior to Snapchat, the industry default was to save user data that was constantly culled and re-examined in order to learn, second-guess advertising and product preferences. This is how Google and Facebook operate, a practice that Spiegel has called “creepy.” Spiegel also challenged a law held sacrosanct in digital media: virality. Popularity online has come to be judged by the speed and pace with which a post or a tweet travels. Though a snap can be forwarded, its short life does not allow it to become a viral hit.

Unlike Facebook and Google, which focus on technologies that advance material based on what’s popular, Spiegel has moved away from the world of algorithms, of clicks and likes, relying not on software that decodes a user’s interest but placing bets on traditional media and old-fashioned editors. “There’s a sort of weird obsession with the idea that data can solve anything,” Spiegel told Bloomberg in 2015, “I really haven’t seen data deliver the results that I’ve seen a great editor deliver.”

***

“Delete is our default,” claims Snapchat. The truth, however, is more complicated. According to Snapchat most messages sent will be deleted from the Snap Inc’s servers once they are viewed. Unopened snaps are designed to delete after 30 days, and unopened snaps sent to a group chat delete within 24 hours but there is a warning.

“Snapchatters who see your messages can always potentially save them, whether by taking a screenshot or by using some other image-capture technology (whether that be a separate piece of software, or even simply taking a photo of their screen with a second camera),” the company says. Third-party apps such as Poke which are widely available allow users to view and save snaps indefinitely—the auto-deletion function works only in the official Snapchat app. This is how there is an account on Instagram called “kylizzlesnapchats” which contains videos and stills of each and every one of Kylie Jenner’s snaps.

According a complaint by the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2014, Snapchat deceptively told its users that the sender would be notified if a recipient took a screenshot but any Apple device with a operating system pre-dating iOS7 can use a simple method to evade the app’s screenshot detection. The FTC alleged Snapchat transmitted geolocation information from users of its Android app, despite saying in its privacy policy that it did not track or access such information. The company settled with the FTC without admitting guilt and promised to be more forthcoming with its user base in the future. All content selected by the user to be a part of Snapchat Memories is saved.

There is also a particularly thorny update to Snapchat’s Terms and Conditions which said Snapchat has a “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to host, store, use, display, reproduce, modify, adapt, edit, publish, create derivative works from, publicly perform, broadcast, distribute, syndicate, promote, exhibit, and publicly display” any content you upload to the app, “in any form and in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)”.

The same document claims Snapchat “can’t guarantee that messages and corresponding metadata will be deleted within a specific timeframe”. Agreeing to this gives Snapchat the right to trawl through users’ personal data and share it with third parties. Snapchat also has the rights to upload entire contact lists from iPhones without the users’ knowledge. This matter came to the fore when hackers stole the contact information for 4.6 million Snapchat users. It gets even murkier when Snaps are submitted to the Live Stories feature because Snapchat claims that these are public posts and therefore allows them to be saved indefinitely. They can be passed on to third-party sources. Facebook and Instagram have similar terms and conditions but neither has laid claims to a transient Internet in the way Sanpchat has.

***

Shirin J. has had the Internet on her mobile since the age of seven. She may open her laptop once or twice a week but mostly, she’s connected to everyone on her smartphone.

“I use email like once a year,” she says.

In class 9, the app you use matters.

The first app, her Siri suggestion and Top Hit is Snapchat. She first got on it three years ago and reminisces about how much has changed. WhatsApp replaced BBM and then Instagram came along. With that came a lot of pressure to be perfect.

“I once bought a teeth whitening app,” she says. There is another app called a Facetune which makes your cheekbones sharper. There was another to make the colour of your skin lighter but her mother didn’t let her buy that one. Instagram was all about calculation: how to get the largest number of likes. A paper published in the journal Psychological Science shows that “likes” activate the same reward centre in the brain that is involved in the sensation of pleasure and activated by thoughts of sex or money. For the likes, she had a notebook with hundreds of captions and before she posted a picture, she would ask at least five people if she was making the right decision.

In a world full of apps, she is spoilt for choice. Shirin does her homework with her friends on Skype, sometimes they have parties with up to five or six people in an app called Houseparty but for “casual” conversation, there is Snapchat.

“Whereas YouTube is about following other people, Snapchat is about connecting with other people,” she says.

Do you read?

She laughs and flicks her hair. “Do I look like a nerd?”

***

Storytelling is at the heart of Snapchat. Snapchat’s editorial team was creating stories from the Olympics in 2016 to bring its audience a more intimate view of life at the games. Thirty-five million users watched from USA as Snapchat helped expand viewership that had hit a 16-year prime-time ratings low on NBC according to The New York Times.

In 2015, Snapchat live-streamed Ramzan prayers from Mecca and people across the world could see stories of worshippers breaking their fasts over iftar and panoramic views of the Ka’aba where pilgrims performed rituals. Stories were coming from everywhere: New York and Toronto, Dubai and Mosul. But to keep people glued to the app, Snapchat needed a steady stream of content.

With this in mind, Snapchat launched its new media hub: Discover. In an official statement, Snapchat assured viewers that this would not be a click-bait cash grab but world-class storytelling that put the narrative first. “This is not social media. Social media companies tell us what to read based on what’s most recent or most popular. We see it differently. We count on editors and artists, not clicks and shares, to determine what’s important,” Spiegel said.

Snapchat thus encouraged its partners to focus on developing a strong editorial voice for a younger generation that had forsaken TV for the smartphone. The key Snapchat demographics are the millennial and Generation Z. The largest Snapchat age demographic is 18-24, making up 37 per cent of its users. Post college and early professionals make up about 26 per cent of Snapchatters and about 12 per cent are ages 35 to 54. Snapchat is not a player in the Baby Boomer, with only 2 per cent of its users over the age of 55 according to the Statistics Portal.

Discover provides users daily access to stories—text, photos and videos—that are available for a 24-hour period. The company has up to 20 partners including BuzzFeed, CNN, Vice, Cosmopolitan, Refinery 29 and Daily Mail, making Snapchat a powerful platform for distributing media content. Discover partners generally post around 10 videos a day. App users tap on a channel icon to start the stream and tap again to skip to the next one. If they want to read further, they swipe up which leads to a longer version of the article but no matter how they click or swipe, they remain within the app. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, links to the web aren’t allowed. The number of Discover spots are limited and highly coveted. When Yahoo! and Katie Couric, the legendary anchor weren’t bringing in the numbers, they were let go and the spot was given to BuzzFeed. Jonah Peretti, the CEO of BuzzFeed, disclosed in 2015 that 21 per cent of his company’s overall audience came from Snapchat.

Snapchat has made forays into news and appointed Peter Hamby, the former CNN political reporter to lead news. But it’s not been an easy ride to gauge what the viewers want. In an interview with the Fast Company, CNN executive vice president P. Andrew Morse said, “A lot of people just assumed, Okay, this is a younger demo and therefore they’re going to want cat videos but that wasn’t the case. They’re engaging with really smart storytelling, which for us is gratifying.”

Snapchat also ran a BBC Parorama documentary on the refugee crisis that documented the journey of migrants in real-time time in what was called a “day-by-day digital documentary”.

But while there have been important stories, such as CNN’s ISIS coverage, most of the content on Discover is fluff.

This hasn’t prevented the White House from setting up an account on Snapchat. In fact former president Barack Obama appeared on the company’s in-house political show, Good Luck America. For 48 hours in the week before the election, Obama appeared on the app encouraging, urging people to vote for Hillary Clinton. “People, this is Barack Obama. If I can figure out how to Snapchat, you can figure out how to go vote.”

With limited spots and the added cost of specialised teams dedicated to creating Snapchat content, publishers can reach an audience through their own story.

Every week, The New Yorker unveils its latest issue in a classy, emoji-free manner, its tone consistent and content representative of a 91-year-old literary magazine. In conversation withthe magazine’s media reporter Ken Auletta, Spiegel at the Association of Magazine Media’s American Magazine Media Conference in New York, described Discover as a “video magazine” that was the outcome of a departure from desktops that were defined by text to mobile phones that are visual.

Spiegel struck a deal with Vanity Fair (VF) to illustrate how it’s trying to accommodate publishers who can’t produce 20 videos a day but still want to reach Snapchat’s audience. This deal saw the highly anticipated Hollywood cover of the magazine unveiled on the app as well as an exclusive making-of video about the VF photo shoot, a story about dressing for the Oscars and past pictures from Vanity Fair’s Oscar Party photo booth. These weren’t the rehearsed pictures we are accustomed to seeing Hollywood’s leading actresses in, but raw access to stars who for better or worse appeared real.

***

Nobody in modern celebrity culture understands the value of real more than the Kardashian clan. Their meteoric rise coincided with the eruption of social media. And the first family of reality TV has juiced digital in every conceivable way with billion dollar benefits: Kim Kardashian once known for a sex tape appeared on the cover of Forbes titled “The New Mobile Moguls,” an image that she uploaded on Instagram accompanied by #NotBadForAGirlWithNoTalent, Kendall Jenner with an Instagram following of 79.1 million is one of the most sought-after and highest-paid models in fashion, and Kylie Jenner, who was nine when Keeping Up with the Kardashians (KUWTK) debuted, is the most followed person on Snapchat though the exact number of followers hasn’t been disclosed by the app.

kylizzlemynizzl’s snaps have propelled her into the stratosphere as a millennial icon. Her snaps have been emulated, her long stares into the camera as she lip syncs have catapulted obscure R&B artists to international fame. She is like any other 19-year-old, only she is driving a Ferrari, wearing off-the-runway collections and playing with her dogs Norman and Bambi in million dollar mansions that she owns. Kylie Jenner is a true auteur of our time, writing, producing and starring in her own show on Snapchat. Her look—plumped-up lips, heavy makeup and a constantly changing rainbow of hair colors—has young fans in constant frenzy.

She is selling herself. She is selling the Kylie Jenner brand, commodifying herself making use of the most talked about part of her: lips. When Jenner was 17, she injected her lips with the filler Juvederm, though she initially denied cosmetic surgery rumours. In a tweet in April 2014, she said:“These plastic surgery rumors hurt my feelings to be honest, and are kinda  insulting.(sic.)” But by May 2015, she confessed, “I have temporary lip fillers. It’s just an insecurity of mine, and it’s what I wanted to do,” on KUWTK.

The truth was out but it also created a fascination with Kylie Jenner’s pout, kind of like the one with Tina Turner’s legs and Jennifer Lopez’s derrière. And she sold that.

These seemingly innocent Kylie’s Lip Kits (liquid matte lipsticks with lip liner duos)—first  teased on Snapchat in 2015, designed to create the perfect “Kylie lip”, and retailed at $29—have resulted in astronomical success. Fans have stalked her social media accounts, countless websites are dedicated to reviewing them, there is no consensus on the product but one thing is known: when the Lip Kits arrive in a marketing tactic known as “the drop”, they will be announced by a personal message on Snapchat directing fans to her website. All products will be sold, on an average, in less than a minute. Then the process will begin again. Since its launch, the line has grown to include Kyshadows (eye-shadow palettes whose arrival was heralded with Snapchat tutorials), Kyliner, Kylighters. Money Nation, a web site that describes itself as personal finance resources, estimate that Kylie Jenner made $8.7 million from branded merchandise like her Lip Kits.

Attempting to be like Kylie Jenner is what Kylie Cosmetics is all about. She is a natural in front of the camera and a digital native in its truest sense on social media engaging with fans on a peer level. She has set up her businesses and sold products in a totally different way from traditional retail platforms, proving that her Snapchat can be a one-woman home shopping network.

Unlike Twitter, Snapchat doesn’t leave room for a disclaimer like “retweets not endorsements”. Snapchat surpassed Twitter in 2016  making it more popular by the number of daily active users. On Snapchat everyone is selling something. Fashion consultant and style influencer, Mahmoud Sidani, MrMoudz on Snapchat, is pimping out al Maha Resort, mastering the art of opening gift boxes from big brands with one hand, endorsing products without ever explicitly saying so. Huda Kattan, online sensation and CEO of Huda Beauty, who made a career throughmake-up tutorials is thanking Dior for the dress she will wear later that night to a Dior event and talking about her nose job because she wants to be real while Palestinian-born strategy consultant Ola Farhat, Rabitolla on Snapchat, is mimicking Kylie Jenner, lip syncing to songs from 90s, going shopping with her dad in IKEA, taking selfies with supermodel Bella Hadid and living online and letting us into the minutest details of her life. Meanwhile the Victoria’s Secret’s Angels, a gaggle of the most beautiful women in the world, have their own story in Coachella, a series of dizzying snaps from the perspective of one Angel to another.

Product, after product, after product. Buy, buy, and buy.

In this age of consumption, when do we stop selling and when do we stop buying? More pertinently, how do we advertise in this sea of misinformation and abundance?

We’re watching less TV today than ever before. This doesn’t mean we are watching less video though: consumers aged 13-24 watch 12.1 hours of video per week on social media such as YouTube, Netflix and other subscription-video services according to a survey by Defy Media.

The Indian experience has been kinder to the box: the time an Indian spends watching TV increased from 3 hours 15 minutes to 3 hours 30 minutes in 2015 in metros in India according to Mint. Viewership meanwhile increased from 9 billion in 2013 to 11 billion in 2016, an increase of 22 per cent.  Snapchat which claims to jealously guard it’s numbers has been hesistant to release user data, be it in North America or India.

According to Bloomberg, Snapchat’s videos have grown at a dizzying pace climbing as high as 10 billion views a day in 2016. Facebook recently reported eight billion video views though YouTube remains the most-viewed video platform among this demographic.

For the global TV ad market, which is a $213 billion business, there is “tremendous pent-up demand for big brand advertisers to allocate their brand advertising to digital,” says Imran Khan, a former investment banker for Credit Suisse who joined Snapchat as chief strategy officer in December 2016.

At the Video Music Awards (VMAs), 12 million viewers tuned in for Snapchat’s coverage of the MTV VMAs, more than the number who watched the show on TV. MTV’s own Snapchat account attracted 25 million views, whereas MTV the cable network attracted a mere 5 million. It was no surprise that top advertisers such as Cover Girl snapped up the slots on Snapchat despite rates as high as $200,000 per sponsor.

***

Snapchat has managed to do what YouTube couldn’t: it has amassed a TV-sized audience who was logging in within a 24-hour period to consume content that is given to them. “Evan [Spiegel] views advertising as a product, while most Internet founders view advertising as a necessary evil,” Khan said in an interview to Bloomberg.

Snapchat rewrote the rules of the game here as well. It started inserting full-screen video ads from iconic brands such as Coca-Cola and McDonalds that appeared in the feeds in the various media channels’ stories. Rather than the horizontal ads we are accustomed to seeing, ads on Snapchat filled the screen when the smartphone was held vertically. Snapchat claims that users are nine times more likely to consume the content if they don’t have to rotate their mobiles. In a 23-page sales pitch, Snapchat sent to ad agencies in 2015, the company says more than 60 per cent of 13-34-year-old smartphone users in the U.S. are active on the service and together view more than 2 billion videos a day. That’s already about half the number of videos people watch on Facebook, which is seven years older and has 10 times as many members.

Snapchat had a lofty aim, to be the company that would be victorious in the social network battle, beating Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube; to shift traditional advertising to digital, changing the nature of advertising and publishing. But the ads on Snapchat look old school. They resemble conventional TV spots, not some new Internet format.

In other ways too, Snapchat attempts to recreate the feel of 1970s TV.  Discover is like cable TV and the Discover partners are channels. Look at the manner in which we consume content: how often do you log onto NBC to watch The Ellen Show and how frequently do you search for Ellen on YouTube? She has 44.1 million followers on Instagram whereas NBC’s Instagram account has a mere 258k followers. Spiegel is attempting to turn the clock back and revive an older broadcasting model where the channel matters as much as the star.

***

In the heart of Bollywood, on the 13th floor of a high-rise in Andheri, in a very New York like work space, Filter Copy is desperate to get a slot on Discover. To this end, it has hired, Viraj Ghelani, 24 Fifty Shades of Ghe on Snapchat, to manage their Snapchat account. He already has the followers and will redirect them to Filter Copy’s page.

The entertainment industry around them is changing. Traditional methods of auditioning are altered and people popular online are approached. Traditional production houses, they predict, will find themselves in a bind like the print media has done because they are not economically viable anymore.

Ghelani was with Sonakshi Sinha earlier this month as she promotes her new movie Noor. She starred in a Snapchat skit titled “Thoughts you have at work” written for her by Ghelani with two colleagues from Filter Copy. “Can you imagine this happening before Snapchat, that a young kid would have such access to a star?” says Ashwin Suresh, one of the co-founders of the social media house.

The founders claim social media is challenging the existing hierarchy of the film industry. You need not be connected to get to the top in Bollywood.

Since then Sonakshi Sinha has told her followers to check out Filter Copy, has been to the offices of BuzzFeed and shared countless promos of her film Noor. She’s the most natural of Bollywood stars on Snapchat.

There are plenty of others giving access into their daily lives as well. In Andheri, Rohan Joshi, a comedian and member of All India Bakchod, is making millions laugh by writing puns and making waves in the film industry. Anuya, founder of Books on Toast, a community for readers and writers is taking us on a tour of the suburbs as she attempts to get fit. House of Misu, led by two fashion consultants, aims to fill in a “gaping void in the landscape of fashion and styling in the country.” So they are positioning themselves as the Kardashians of India, sharing their glam routine, attending MAC and Mickey Contractor events, enticing users to new stores and products. Miss Malini, India’s social media queen, conducts interviews on Snapchat, takes us behind the scenes at Fashion shows and lets followers live vicariously through her.

“Snapchat is here, it is changing the way we communicate,” says Ghelani.

***

Spiegel is everything Mark Zuckerberg is not. Whereas Zuckerberg is a tech nerd in a hoodie, Spiegel is the fur coat wearing, puppy hugging cover star of Vogue. Zuckerberg allows us access into his life on Facebook, Spiegel has never tweeted, his Twitter feed is empty, and his Facebook page doesn’t exist. This restraint makes him one of the most-talked about men in the tech world, gossip magazines run stories about his relationship with Miranda Kerr, the former Victoria’s Secret supermodel. Indeed it was she who shared snaps of Spiegel and Chief Technology Officer Bobby Murphy when they rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange in March. On its first day, Snapchat shares hovered at $25 before closing at $24.48, valuing the company at more than $34 billion on its stock debut making Spiegel the youngest chief executive of a company listed on Nasdaq or the NYSE. But controversy follows Spiegel.

After a series of leaked emails from his days at Stanford that contain commandments such as “put your large kappa sigma dick down her throat,” to the more recent controversy where a former colleague alleges that Spiegel said that Snapchat is an app for “rich people” and that he doesn’t want to expand into “poor countries like India and Spain,” shares of Snap Inc. fell by 1.5 per cent that led it to close at its lowest level in nearly a month.

The larger question though is how Snapchat will survive in Facebook’s world of two billion users?

What Zuckerberg couldn’t buy, he copied. Fifteen times. Facebook-owned Instagram and WhatsApp have already gotten “Stories” update before Facebook rolled it out to its users. Now Facebook users can share content to a Snapchat clone called “Facebook stories” that appears above News Feed on mobile and works similar to Instagram’s 24-hour slideshow.

Mark Zuckerberg has been careful with timing, making crucial announcements such as unveiling Snapchat-like features a day after Snap received positive ratings, including a buy rating from Goldman Sachs when it debuted its IPO at $30 billion. After Zuckerberg’s announcement, shares of Snap Inc. fell by 5 per cent. But Snapchat has kept innovating, recently launching Spectacles. These funky sunglasses have cameras embedded in them and attempt to succeed where Google Glass failed. Khloe Kardashian has already tried them while working out at the gym. Spectacles aren’t sold in stores but rather in vending machines that pop up in random places. Users keep an eye on the Spectacles website and rush to locations, fuelling “the drop” culture. This is the same technique Kylie Jenner employs when she wants to sell her Lip Kits.

The number of users on Instagram’s Story section outnumber the users on Snapchat. But just the fact that Instagram, a site for perfect curation would engage in something as transient as Snapchat, is indicative of a broader trend in social media. As Casey Johnston writes in The New Yorker, “… the app’s introduction of an expiring highlight reel is more than a shameless grab for one of Snapchat’s core features. It’s a response to a demand: on an Internet that always remembers, we are fighting for places we can go to forget.”

Snapchat lets us do just that, in theory.

(The cover story of the May 2017 editon of Fountain Ink)

BY GOVIND KRISHNAN V

Aadhaar, the 12-digit number linked to the fingerprints and iris patterns of most Indians, the key to unlocking government for the citizen, is a security nightmare in a world where big data and a handful of global defence contractors control the technology for biometric solutions. If information warfare is the way of the future—as Brexit and the Trump campaign show it need not be rooted in facts—select companies and the small circle of protagonists behind them have proprietary tools and the world’s best expertise to access, mine and manipulate data belonging to governments and citizens for desired outcomes.

In the post 9/11 world, the west’s military-industrial complex, fed by wars across continents, is stronger than ever. It is funded in part by America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), the mass surveillance behemoth; billionaires with agendas; and populated by a revolving-door of key American security and intelligence personnel. Cambridge Analytica, Palantir Technologies and the Chertoff Group are among these corporations.

The Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) in 2010-2012—its inception phase—awarded contracts to three US-based biometric service providers (BSP): L-1 Identity Solutions, Morpho-Safran, and Accenture Services Pvt. Ltd. These companies, all with proprietary biometric software, were responsible for profiling 60 crore Indian residents; developing protocols for avoiding de-duplicating of user details and supplying devices to enrolment agencies.

An investigation by Fountain Ink shows that the companies contracted by UIDAI to process the information are connected to both Cambridge Analytica and Palantir Technologies through business dealings and individuals involved in their affairs during the period of the contract. L-1 Identity Solutions, Morpho-Safran and Accenture have scores of business contracts with American, French and British intelligence and defence agencies through direct contracting of services or services provided by parent corporations and sister companies. Several individuals who worked at these companies have held top positions in the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US military before making the switch.

Following the business links, partnerships and associations, investments and cross-holdings of the individuals and companies involved, situates biometric technology and persons involved in delivering Aadhaar in the midst of a labyrinth of interlocking relationships and conflicts of interest within the intelligence-industry complex. In an ecosystem where intelligence analysis is increasingly outsourced to private firms, these relationships fudge the distinctions between government and corporate, private and public, civilian and military.

This includes dealings and relationships with companies that work with NSA, and at least one involved in online monitoring of data for the US Secret Service as part of the PRISM programme exposed by whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. UIDAI, as far as is known, did not do a background check on these companies or their business, professional and personal associations. Or as shown by the contracts given to these companies and accessed through RTI, insist on technological safeguards against the possibility of illegal data theft, destruction or manipulation by foreign State actors through back doors or malware.

Fountain Ink has reviewed the contract between the BSPs and UIDAI and found that they had access to unencrypted biometric data as part of their job, contrary to UIDAI’s public stand that the data is always encrypted and inaccessible. A set of written questions sent to UIDAI and its top officials didn’t receive any response.

After Edward Snowden’s revelations that NSA is collecting data from Google, Facebook and Yahoo, Bloomberg News reported that thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies shared  sensitive data with US national security agencies in exchange for favours. The Bloomberg report said that the arrangement was so sensitive that it was brokered in direct meetings between company CEOs and the heads of intelligence services and implemented by a handful of people. The NSA has been known to spy on other nations.

Investigative journalist and the author of the 2008 book Spies for Hire: The secret world of intelligence outsourcing, Tim Shorrock said he has so far not found any evidence of intelligence agencies leveraging their revolving door connections with private players for information. “However, given the connections to US intelligence of these former high-ranking US officials, I would say it is very risky for India to be turning over such a vast database to private companies, particularly from a foreign power. Many of these former officials keep their security clearances after they leave government and often have access to highly classified intelligence information that ordinary executives do not have. When Indian and US national security interests diverge, as they often do, these revolving door figures could make decisions about their biometric contracts that could be detrimental to India and favourable to the US. India would be better off depending on its own technology and technology companies,” he said.

***

On May 7, The Guardian published a story that connected the dots in a hazy picture which started emerging gradually in the months after the shock of Brexit and Trump. Drawing upon months of investigations by British, German and American journalists, the story revealed how a reclusive American billionaire used a network of influential friends and associates in tech firms, political parties and far-right news outlets to drive electoral results in favour of two desired outcomes—a British vote for exiting the European Union, and a victory for Donald Trump in the US election. The story pointed to a level of coordination between the players involved, the Trump campaign, the Leave EU campaign, Nigel Farage, the head of UKIP, and Robert Mercer, hedge fund billionaire and computer scientist.

At the heart of the revolution in the global order that this motley group of anti-establishment allies brought about is a data analysis company that Mercer funded. Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Trump’s election campaign and the Leave EU campaign, married data gathering and artificial intelligence with psy-ops—psychological propaganda techniques developed by the US military to change enemy behaviour. In this case, the targets were US and UK citizens.

What gave Cambridge Analytica the power to profile entire populations? Facebook. Every time any of us like a picture or video that a friend shared, show support for a cause by liking that clever meme, or disliking a snarky comment by a troll, we leave digital footprints that say something about our personalities. In 2014, Cambridge Analytica built an algorithm based on research it contracted a Cambridge scientist to conduct. Aleksandr Kogan paid Facebook users to take a personality test that allowed him to mine not only their data, but also of everyone on their friends’ network. Using this, Kogan built what the company calls “psychometric” profiles of users. Cambridge Analytica then combined this data with voter data they bought from other commercial sources: email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses. This purportedly allowed the Trump campaign (and in UK, the Brexit campaign) to target ads at individuals based on their psychological traits and to find key emotional triggers. People high on a neuroticism scale, for example, could be targeted with messages about immigrants taking away jobs.

Cambridge Analytica claims that it has psychological profiles of 220 million US citizens based on 5,000 separate data sets. While experts debate the extent to which Brexit and American presidential votes were decided by the data company’s psy-ops, what is undeniable is the potential for such technology in two elections determined by wafer-thin swing votes: Trump won the electoral college by 80,000 votes in three states and two per cent of UK voters decided the EU referendum .

Cambridge Analytica and a partner are now being investigated by British regulatory authorities for breaking campaign finance rules and possibly breaching data privacy laws. Two other alarming threads emerged from newspaper investigations that brought together politics, big data and the world of government intelligence. Mercer and friends’ campaign for a plutocratic takeover of the western liberal order was not limited to Cambridge Analytica and millions of dollars of campaign funds to conservative candidates and thinktanks. Mercer is part-owner of Breitbart News, the extreme right-wing white racist website run by Steven Bannon, the White House chief strategist. Bannon was on the board of Cambridge Anlaytica and, according to reports from The Observer and The Guardian, was vice-president of the company before he joined the Trump administration. Breitbart News has been consistently accused of publishing fake news and conspiracy theories to create an alt-right bubble; a self-contained ecosystem of news propaganda consumed by supporters of Donald Trump. It  appears Breitbart tailored its news and search keywords based on analysis from Cambridge Analytica.

The technology used by Cambridge Analytica as well as the company itself emerged from the military-industry complex. The young company is a subsidiary of Strategic Communications Laboratory (SCL), a British psy-ops company Guardian called “effectively part of the British (and now American military) establishment ).”

The second thread, one unearthed by the Guardian story, is even more alarming. Information from former employees and emails showed that Cambridge Analytica was in talks with the US data monitoring company Palantir Technologies, and had discussed the possibility of collaboration.

Palantir is a dark word today in circles concerned about mass surveillance by government. Started with the money from the CIA’s venture capital fund,  Palantir developed state-of-the-art data-mining technology that can combine thousands of differing databases on hundreds of millions of individuals gathered by intelligence agencies and mix it with real-time information to spot patterns about individuals, organisations and events. The company works for and has access to data with NSA, CIA, FBI, GCHQ, the US military, as well as dozens of other intelligence, defence, and law enforcement agencies in contracts amounting to more than $1.2 billion since 2009.

Its biggest investor is co-founder Peter Thiel, who also founded PayPal, is on the board of Facebook, and has been the most vocal Trump supporter in Silicon Valley and a big contributor to his campaign. He is known to have had great influence in Trump’s transition team in its relationship with Silicon Valley, and is expected to be a major influence in the administration’s policy towards the IT industry. The Guardian report states “we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.”

***

Before Cambridge Analytica started working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, it was involved with the campaign of Senator Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination. Cruz was then Mercer’s man for president: he was one of the biggest fundraisers for Cruz and his daughter Rebekah had a significant role in running it. When Mercer, who is an investor in Accenture via Renaissance Technologies,  brought Cambridge Analytica to the Cruz campaign, its chairman was a Texan, Chad Sweet. A former Goldman Sacchs executive, he had started his career in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. After his private sector stint he returned to government in 2005 as a special adviser to then secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, rising to chief of staff. Roughly comparable to the Indian Home Ministry, the DHS oversees domestic security agencies from the coast guard to the US Secret Service. In 2009, when Chertoff left government, Chad Sweet co-founded the Chertoff Group with him. Chertoff is also one of the authors of the Patriot Act which opened a whole new world of surveillance post 9/11.

In 2009, Safran, the part government-owned French defence conglomerate, acquired Morpho, a US company that offers biometric solutions.

In August/September 2010, UIDAI signed contracts with Morpho and L-1 Identity Solutions, a competitor. The contract with L-1 was signed on August 24. On September 20, Safran announced in Paris that it would acquire L-1 Identity and merge it with its subsidiary MorphoTrust. In effect, UIDAI gave two different contracts to the same company. Chad Sweet on behalf of Chertoff acted as strategic adviser for Safran in effecting the deal and was directly involved in the acquisition.

The Chertoff Group has other connections to Morpho, L-1 Identity and the biometric industry in the US. L-1 was incorporated into MorphTrust USA, which consists of various divisions of Morpho’s security consultancy. In November 2010, exactly a week after UIDAI signed the contracts, Jay M Cohen, principal at the Chertoff Group joined as chairman of the board of Morpho Detection. Cohen, a retired US Navy rear admiral and head of naval research served under Chertoff in DHS as undersecretary of the science and technology division. In May 2010, then owner and founder of L-1 Robert La Penta invested in the acquisition of Clear, a bankrupt company that developed biometric identification cards for US air travellers. Chertoff, fresh out of heading DHS, which controls the TSA, joined the board along with La Penta. Press reports from the period portray Chertoff as central to the new company’s business efforts. As head of DHS, Chertoff had pushed for biometric identification as a secure form of identification.

L-1 Identity was not only a biometric solutions provider and security firm, but also had an intelligences services arm that had several contracts with US agencies. L-1 sold its intelligence arms to BAE, the British aerospace defence contractor in February 2010. It is not known that the Chertoff group played any part in this acquisition but Michael Chertoff joined BAE USA’s board of directors in May. In 2012, he was made chairman of the board of directors.

The proximity of companies tasked by UIDAI with processing the biometric data of Indians to Cambridge Analytica and the heart of an emerging data empire is troubling enough. But the significance of the Chertoff Group and the intricate web of intelligence, military and government contacts involved becomes clear only when we look at how the world of intelligence gathering was transformed post 9/11.

***

That intelligence failure led to rethinking within government on how American intelligence agencies functioned. Unlike in the Cold War where human intelligence was the main source, SIGINT or Signal Intelligence became the primary tool of the “war on terror”, while analysis based on data-mining supplanted human analysis. The Iraq war created a massive demand for intelligence support and the CIA, NSA and GCHQ massively expanded the hiring of private analysts. The DHS was created to deal with domestic security. A bureaucratic behemoth, it pulled in 22 agencies from other departments.

In his book on the cyber-intelligence complex, investigative journalist Tim Shorrock calculated that 70 per cent of the US intelligence budget was being spent on private contractors. A study by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence gave the more conservative figure of 50 per cent. According to internal government figures accessed by Shorrock, in the two years after 9/11, the worth of intelligence contracts jumped from $22 billion to $43.5 billion. It also led to unprecedented access for private employees to state level intelligence.

Shorrock writes, “The National Terrorism Council (is) the electronic hub of the US intelligence community and the heart of the national intelligence State established by George W. Bush in the aftermath of September 11… Its analysts have at their disposal more than 30 separate government networks, each carrying more than 80 unique sources of data. As they go about their task they draw upon human intelligence from the Central intelligence Agency, communication intercepts from the National Security Agency and domestic reports from the Department of Homeland Security (and) the FBI. More than 50 per cent of the people working there are private sector contract employees.”

Shorrock has been a vocal critic of what he calls the cyber-intelligence elite. Along with a section of US and British journalists who cover national security, he believes that the post-9/11 technological capabilities deployed by the US and UK governments has created a surveillance state where citizens as well as foreign nationals risk constant monitoring. In this world, information is quite literally power. The revolving-door policy followed by western governments allows a handful of this elite to simultaneously inhabit government, corporate and intelligence communities, using their knowledge to push the agenda of whoever is employing them at the moment. Or who will employ them in future, when the door revolves again.

***

After becoming head of the DHS, Chertoff increased the involvement of private contractors. After starting the Chertoff Group, he continues to be on a number of important bodies that advise the US government on cyber-security and intelligence. He has been accused of advocating policies that benefit his own investments or the investments of clients that the Chertoff group advises. In a story published in The Nation, Shorrock wrote “The Chertoff Group doesn’t disclose its clients. But one of its most important functions for both the state and its contractor allies is as a broker of mergers and acquisitions. These aren’t just ‘deals’; they also represent significant reorganisations within the intelligence community…Using its team of NSA, CIA, and DHS veterans (who have deep classified knowledge of their agencies’ contracting histories and future needs), the Chertoff Group has brokered dozens of deals through its subsidiary, Chertoff Capital.”

Shorrock writes that within months of the Obama administration taking power, Chertoff and Chad Sweet had recreated the national security team that advised President George Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Instrumental in this was the hiring of Michael Hayden, who first served as NSA director and then CIA director under Bush. Hayden put together a team that Shorrock called a “Shadow NSA”.

Charles Allen, an almost legendary CIA officer, Paul Shneider, who worked under Hayden at NSA and later was deputy to Chertoff at the DHS, and Sir John Scarlett, chief of MI6 under Tony Blair. When The Independent reported on the revolving door in the intelligence community it talked of how within six months of leaving MI6 Scarlett joined in advisory positions to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Morgan Stanely and Chertoff.  On the Chertoff group, the report said that “The group’s roster of former US intelligence officials has earned it the nickname of America’s “shadow” homeland security agency.”

Going through Chertoff’s website shows that these are not exaggerated claims. Among its executives and senior advisers are at least 13 former top or senior CIA officials, seven NSA officials and 13 DHS officials. Other important power-brokers are former officials from the department of defence and department of justice.

***

L-1 Identity was one of the major suppliers of fingerprint and iris scan machines to Aadhaar enrolment agencies. Together with Accenture and a consortium formed by Morpho and Satyam they also acted as biometric solution providers. The three organisations (L-1 Identity, Accenture and Morpho-Satyam) processed the data of 60 crore people the various enrolment agencies provided UIDAI. By the terms of the contract, each organisation was allotted 20 crore, unless the UIDAI felt dissatisfied with the quality of the data they supplied. In that case, enrolments would be redistributed to other providers. L-1, Morpho-Satyam and Accenture not only provided biometric proprietary software to authenticate enrolments and queries, they designed, configured and maintained these systems for UIDAI. The contract period was for two years, from 2010 to 2012, after which these companies continue to maintain and give service support.

From the contracts it appears that apart from enrolments, the bulk of the Aadhaar project, including processing, system building and de-duplication was carried out by the three biometric vendors. All the data was stored in UIDAI’s data centre in Bengaluru and the Central Identities Data Repository of India (CDRI) in New Delhi. While these sites are owned by UIDAI, the contracts signed with the biometric vendors indicate that the work carried out by these companies as well as the systems involved in it, ran as independent and self-contained units with only minimum supervision by UIDAI. In that sense, it was no different from an IT contract, even though the information accessed and processed was biometric records of Indian residents.

The technology used, consisting of proprietary biometric templates and algorithms have been developed by these companies. L-1, Morpho-Satyam and Accenture also carried out the process of weeding out duplicate applications from the initial 60 crore enrolments. This involved the complex task of comparing the biometric data of 60 crore individuals against each other. De-duplication makes it necessary that these companies had access to the biometric data of all individuals enrolled.

UIDAI spokespersons have often made claims to the effect that private companies that handle Aadhaar data do not have access to unencrypted biometric data. A “Facts About Aadhaar,” section on the UIDAI website says:  “During de-duplication, UIDAI software application (running within UIDAI managed data centres within India) simply “uses” the biometric software (procured from market) to de-duplicate. Interestingly, even within the UIDAI data centres, demographic data and biometric data are partitioned into different databases to ensure no single database has both sets of information. That means, even within the UIDAI data centres, the Biometric de-duplication subsystem does not get resident demographic details and the data it sees is fully anonymised.”

But contracts signed by UIDAI with the BSPs indicate this may not be true.  For enrolment and de-duplication processes, the algorithms work on unencrypted biometric data. The personnel of the companies involved have access to the photographs, demographic information and biometric information that people submit for getting Aadhaar. They are also able to tag all these sets of information together.

For example, the biometric solution provider is entrusted with ensuring the quality of biometric data received by UIDAI. Section 9.8.2 of Annexure E of the contracts UIDAI signed with L-1 Identity and Accenture says: “Data quality of capture would be received with the image. Image would be received in the raw form.” Later, in the same section it says: “The solutions being offered by the BSP (Biometric Service Provider) should have adequate safeguards, and validations to ensure that all data relating to an applicant, together with the photograph, biometrics (sic) get tagged together and that there is no mix-up of the particulars relating to one applicant with those of the others.”

Section 4.1 says “Face photograph is provided if the vendor desires to use it for de-duplication. While certain demographical information is also provided, UIDAI provides no assurance of its accuracy. Demographic information shall not be used for filtering during the de-duplication process, but this capability shall be preserved for potential implementation in the later phases of the programme.” The data is stored by the vendors’ team in encrypted form in the data centres and the key is shared with the UIDAI.

The main precautions apart from the legal that UIDAI has taken to ensure the safety of data are: a log that would serve as an audit trail every time anyone accesses the data of an Aadhaar enrollee. No one from the biometric service provider’s team is allowed to carry storage devices and hardware out of the data centre unless they obtain written permission. The teams’ access to internet except for Aadhaar authentication is restricted. For the 20 crore enrolments each biometric operator processed at the data centres, UIDAI supplied the computer hardware and equipment, except for the first one crore enrolments, where vendors were contractually obliged to install their own hardware free of cost, with UIDAI providing only storage space and internet connection. The contract does not specify any measures from UIDAI to check or investigate the hardware, except the list of minimum specifications they should conform to.

The task of protecting systems from external attacks or hacking attempts and of overall security lies with L-1 Identity, Morpho-Satyam and Accenture. UIDAI and its former chairperson Nandan Nilekani have repeatedly assured the public that data stored by UIDAI is absolutely safe from hacking attempts. Cyber-security experts have questioned how such categorical surety can be provided against the possibility of data-breaches.

L-1 Identity on the other hand has admitted that data breach is always a possibility. In 2010, after signing the contract with UIDAI, L-1 Identity in its financial filing before the US Securities and Exchange Commission said “Many of the systems included in L-1 solutions manage private personal information and protect information involved in sensitive government functions. The protective security measures used in these systems may not prevent security breaches, and failure to prevent security breaches may disrupt business, damage reputation, and expose L-1 to litigation and liability. A party that is able to circumvent protective security measures used in these systems could misappropriate sensitive or proprietary information or cause interruptions or otherwise damage L-1 products, services and reputation, and the property and privacy of customers. If unintended parties obtain sensitive data and information, or create bugs or viruses or otherwise sabotage the functionality of systems, L-1 may receive negative publicity, incur liability to customers or lose the confidence of customers, any of which may cause the termination or modification of contracts. Further, insurance coverage may be insufficient to cover losses and liabilities that may result from such events.  L-1 may be required to expend significant capital and other resources to protect the Company against the threat of security breaches or to alleviate problems caused by the occurrence of any such breaches. In addition, protective or remedial measures may not be available at a reasonable price or at all, or may not be entirely effective.”

At the time L-1 signed the contract with UIDAI it had on its board an assortment of former US government and military officials. One of the directors was Admiral James M. Loy, former undersecretary at DHS. From 2005 to 2008, the most high-profile director of L-1 Identity was George Tenet, director of the CIA from 1997 to 2004,  the second longest term any director had at America’s premier spy agency. When he left the CIA he  joined the board of four major defence and security companies: L1 Identity, and the British multinational defence firm called QinetiQ among others. The online newsmagazine Salon reported in 2007 that Tenet received at least $2.3 million up to that point from these companies in compensation and stock options.

L-1 Identity acquired contracts for providing facial recognition software used by the US to identify terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also received contracts from the CIA. In 2008, Tenet left these companies to become managing director of Allan & Co (A&C), a secretive New York boutique investment bank.

***

In 2009, QinetiQ acquired Cyveillance, a cyber-security company. The Cyveillance website lists Tech Mahindra and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) as its partners in India. Cyveillance says it offers threat intelligence solutions and related services to its partners. Tech Mahindra is the parent company of Satyam, part of the Morpho-Satyam consortium, one of Aadhaar’s biometric service providers. PwC has been employed by UIDAI to carry out security audits of its servers and of other partners in the Aadhaar programme. Cyveillance is one of the companies known to be working on behalf of the US Secret Service to monitor online data. According to documents submitted by the US Secret Service in court, Cyveillance trawls the internet for data that includes personal data of individuals. The data collected by Cyveillance is fed into PRISM, the NSA online spying programme that Edward Snowden uncloaked.

To a set of questions on Tech Mahindra’s links with Cyveillance, a spokesperson for the company said on email: “We don’t work with Cyveillance.”

A spokesperson for PwC said:“PWC India has no association with the body (Cyveillance) you mention. Since your query is about Aadhaar, please contact the UIDAI.”

***

In 2005, Peter Thiel teamed up with his former roommate and geek extraordinaire Alexander Karp to start a data analysis company. They called it Palantir, after the magical seeing stones in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which allows the user to see across vast distances of space and time and track people. Karp was an unusual choice to head a technological company, having done his doctorate under Jurgen Habermas, one of the 20th century’s  great sociologists and philosophers. But the success of Palantir was the story of how a Silicon Valley start-up conquered the upper echelons of the military-industrial complex, where a group of geeky engineers who believed they could help catch terrorists with superior technology broke into the domain of big time defence players like Booz Allen Hamilton who worked with intelligence agencies, corporates and politicians and spent millions of dollars on lobbying. It was a bottom-up insurgency, where the product they had to sell was so game changing that in a few years Palantir become the hottest property in the intelligence community; an indispensable analytical tool that left intelligence agencies gushing, and privacy activists  alarmed  at the combination of Big Brother and Big Data.

But all this was still in the future. In 2005, Palantir could not interest any big investor in their product. What saved the company was $2 million in funding from InQTel, a strategic venture capital firm owned by the CIA. As CIA director in 1999, Tenet co-founded InQTel, with the idea that the CIA would invest in research by commercial companies that would be useful for the agency’s work, a recognition that innovation in technology has moved from the government sector to Silicon Valley and its start-ups. Tenet has been a trustee of InQTel since he left the CIA.

As Palantir starts to take off in the world of intelligence analysis, A&C, the bank for which Tenet worked, became an investor. Tenet became advisor to the data surveillance company. Alexander Karp is reported to be personal friends with both Tenet and the owner of Allen & Co.

Palantir started out as a company run by idealists who wanted to help the government catch the bad guys. Karp in particular was big on protecting data privacy. But as it became more and more embedded within the state intelligence apparatus, the potential for misuse of its  technology started to become obvious. In early 2011, leaked emails showed that a Palantir engineer had agreed to a plan by another security firm—HB Gary—to attack and bring down the WikiLeaks site. The mission was to help Palantir’s clients, Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce. WikiLeaks announced that it would be releasing documents about the Bank of America. The plan also sought to target journalist Glen Greenwald who had revealed Edward Snowden’s information about the NSA’s massive secret surveillance programme. The CEO of HB Gary Aaron Barr resigned in disgrace. The attempt to target Greenwald destroyed Palantir’s claims about protecting citizens’ privacy from Big Brother, showing how easily surveillance technology can be used to target dissidents and those questioning the State.

In March this year, a group of protestors gathered outside Peter Thiel’s mansion against Palantir building software for the Trump administration that can mine massive amounts of data to identify illegal immigrants whom the administration wants to deport. One of the signs said “Don’t build software for Mordor.” The reference is to the castle of Sauron, the dark lord of Tolkien’s fantasy world. Commentators who have watched Palantir’s relationship to America’s national security state, have often remarked about the irony of Thiel and Karp’s adoption of the magical artifact “Palantir” as  their company’s name. The Palantir is a perfect metaphor for the double edged relationship Silicon Valley has with the national security state. For in Tolkein’s world, the Palantir is ultimately controlled by Sauron, and those who gaze into it in the hope of gaining information, get corrupted and captured by the power of Sauron’s all-seeing eye.

Fountain Ink sent a detailed questionnaire to UIDAI chairman J. Satyanarayana, CEO A. B. Pandey and deputy director-general Y. L. P. Rao, asking whether the UIDAI knew about the relationship of L-1 Identity and Morpho with American and British intelligence agencies and the US-European military-industrial complex. The questionnaire also asked about access to biometric and demographic data of Indian citizens the biometric vendors had. The UIDAI was also asked about any security measures in place to check for malware or backdoor access by state actors in the software and hardware used by the biometric companies to implement Aadhaar. There was no acknowledgement of the mails from UIDAI.

Update, June 3, 2017: Responses from Tech Mahindra and PricewaterhouseCoopers added.
Correction: The print version of the story identified Chad Sweet as Ted Cruz’s campaign manager. He is, in fact, the campaign chairman. 

The cover story of the June 2017 edition of Fountain Ink.

BY TAHA AHMAD

MMukaish Badla is a form of embroidery that reached its peak in 18th century Lucknow. The art form travelled to different parts of the world, but is now restricted to a few narrow lanes of the old city. It was introduced by the Nawabs to beautify “chikankari” but Mukaish became an independent style. It initially used precious metals like gold and silver to make metallic wires. The artisans are the Badlas who insert thin gold and silver wire into fabric, eventually twisting it to create intricate patterns.

Sabir Hussein, 75, who has practised this craft for 65 years says they make just 200 rupees from a ten-hour day. Lucknow once had more than 3,000 badlas, but now the number has come down to 20-25, all elderly and in declining health.

These artisans are one of the unknown treasures of the Indian craft world but unless they find a way to pass on their life’s work they are in danger of becoming a footnote in the history of Lucknow.

Taha Ahmad is a documentary photographer based in Delhi. His Mukaish project is under a Neel Dongre Grant for Excellence in Photography. He is mentored by Sandeep Biswas, a Delhi based photographer.

(The photo story of the June 2017 edition of Fountain Ink.)

BY SRINATH PERUR

It is safe to assume that any book of significance is hard to bring into the world. Even so, Kannada writer Vasudhendra’s collection of short stories Mohanaswamy has had a particularly precarious journey to publication. The year in which it was published, 2013, began with the author taking a bus from Hospet to the nearby Tungabhadra dam with the intention of drowning himself. His nerve failed and he returned. “Courage is not always a good thing,” he says, quite cheerfully, when we meet in Bengaluru in late 2016.

At the time, Vasudhendra was struggling with a severe bout of depression. It had begun some years previously when he found himself hopelessly distracted and unable to work. Sleep had been elusive for months. “I knew something was wrong,” he says, “but I didn’t know what it was.” Finally, he went to a psychiatrist, who told him he was clinically depressed and prescribed medication. The depression had returned in force when he made that trip to the dam. “You need food and sleep,” he recalls a psychiatrist telling him then. “You also need sex.”

For nearly 20 years, Vasudhendra had lived in a state of abeyance as far as sex and relationships were concerned. He had realised when he was in his teens, that he was attracted to men, then lived through the confusion and dread of growing up gay in a small town—Sandur in Karnataka. He recalls reading as a young man an advice column in a Kannada magazine that stated that “sarpadosha”—an astrological handicap meaning, literally, “snake-flaw”—was the cause for same-sex attraction in men. The prescribed remedy was to go to a Shiva temple daily, which Vasudhendra did, only to be tormented by nightmares featuring biting snakes.

When he was 20 or 21, he had a relationship with a man that ended in heartbreak when his partner left to marry a woman. In the aftermath, Vasudhendra made advances to a couple of male friends, who distanced themselves from him. “I became afraid I would be left alone in life,” he says. He threw himself into work, resisted social pressure to marry, and made no further attempts at relationships.

Vasudhendra did well in his career. He rose up the hierarchy in his day job at a technology company in Bengaluru, put in several stints in the UK. He grew in popularity as a writer, producing four collections of short stories, four collections of essays and a novel (but with no mention of gay characters or same-sex relationships except for a single short story from 2005). After his first breakdown, Vasudhendra decided he had no choice but to begin embracing his sexuality.

“Coming out should happen at 21-22, but I was almost 40,” he says. He went online to find a community, and began going to the Thursday evening meetings of Good As You, an LGBT support group in Bengaluru. And he finally allowed himself to write freely about being gay. “It was then that I started writing the Mohanaswamy stories,” he says, Mohanaswamy being the name of his gay protagonist who in large measure is a stand-in for the author. The pent-up material was so rich that the first few stories tumbled out quickly—“taka-taka,” as he puts it in Kannada. It was an added source of reassurance that around this time the Delhi High Court effectively decriminalised homosexuality by throwing out parts of the Indian Penal Code’s section 377 which forbids “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”. The ruling came in July 2009. The first three Mohanaswamy stories were written in August.

Still, having people read them was another matter. “I was sitting scared,” Vasudhendra says. It was three years before he allowed one of the stories to be published in the literary journal Deshakaala. It ran under the pseudonym Shanmukha S (after Ganesha’s brother, who in some traditions remains unmarried, or as Vasudhendra puts it: “I always thought of him as a bachelor boy.”) The story was well-received and Vasudhendra began to consider putting out a collection under his own name. Finding a publisher was not an obstacle since Vasudhendra had been publishing his own books since he founded the publishing company Chanda Pustaka in 2004. He prepared a collection titled Mohanaswamy after the protagonist of several of the stories.

The days leading up to a book’s publication are a nervous time for any author, but for Vasudhendra they were emotionally fraught for an added reason: he wanted to come out to friends and family before they read Mohanaswamy and made their own inferences.

“I told my sister I was gay one week before the book came out,” he says. The release date was December 11, 2013. On the same day, as the book became available in shops, the Supreme Court set aside the lower court’s 2009 ruling that can be said to have nudged the book into being. “I ran to a lawyer,” says Vasudhendra, who was doubly concerned as publisher and author. The lawyer told him he probably didn’t need to worry about the book getting him into legal trouble.

***

Vasudhendra did worry, however, about how the book would be received by his readers, who had no warning of what was coming. A much-beloved author of short stories and personal essays who usually wrote in modes of nostalgia or sentimentality, he was putting out a book that depicted gay relationships in domesticity and conflict, that looked closely at what it meant to be a gay man in a society that, when not being actively hostile or violent, reliably failed to create room for him.

This state of affairs was broadly reflected in Kannada writing too. In a 2016 essay, Vasudhendra shows with examples how sex between men in Kannada novels and short stories has usually been treated as depraved; or grudgingly accommodated as something men take recourse to when they lack the company of women, and something that can be redeemed by sufficient remorse and by straightening oneself out. He notes that a few sympathetic portrayals have come along in recent years, but these have often been limited in their understanding. The essay is titled “Gayness in Kannada Literature”, with the Kannada word “geyate” used playfully for gayness. In more standard use “geyate” is the quality of a poem that allows it to be sung, and so Vasudhendra’s larger implication is that Kannada literature loses something valuable by being surly about same-sex matters.

Mohanaswamy is perhaps the first book of fiction in Kannada with well-realised gay characters. As published in Kannada, it is a collection of 11 short stories and a poem, with six stories featuring the title character. In these stories, Mohanaswamy talks about an imaginary girlfriend to a fellow-passenger on a plane while mentally picturing the man he is in love with; he has his heart broken when the man he is in love with leaves to get married; in a moment of desire he feels up a friend, who then begins to blackmail him; he is shown around a model flat by a real-estate salesman who assumes he has a wife and children, and for that brief while Mohanaswamy is transported to a world that might have been; he visits his hometown to find that a childhood friend has been killed by his family for becoming a hijra; as he struggles to climb Mt Kilimanjaro, it begins to represent all that he has endured through his life. The book is dedicated: ‘To Mohanaswamy’s friends/To Mohanaswamy’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren/To Mohanaswamy’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather’.

***

For some years now T. Madhura has counted Vasudhendra among her favourite writers. She is in her 50s, works as a Vedic astrologer in Bengaluru, and mentions several times during our meeting that she comes from an orthodox family. She bought Mohanaswamy soon after its release and began to read it. She was revolted within the first few pages. “What is wrong with him,” she says she thought. “I finished it somehow. To tell the truth, I finished it just so that I could give him a proper scolding.” (Kannada writers tend to be approachable to readers, and as a result are often at the receiving end of swift, spirited reviews delivered in person.) An opportunity to meet Vasudhendra came soon enough. Madhura went to a temporary stall he had set up to sell books he published, and told him she hated the book. She recalls Vasudhendra telling her that in future he would try to write something she liked.

Then, Madhura read a newspaper interview with Vasudhendra where he spoke about how many of his character Mohanaswamy’s experiences were drawn from his own life. She hadn’t imagined that Vasudhendra himself might be gay. After she recovered from the shock, she called him on the phone, full of remorse, and apologised for her reaction. She asked him to give her some time to respond to the book.

“We are old-fashioned,” she says. “We look at everything in terms of what we are used to.” Though she was aware that there existed “people like that” she had not known anyone personally. Her vague understanding, she explains, was that same-sex relationships were a sort of wild indulgence, a result of lust run amok. “But Vasu-sir’s personality is decent. He is a popular writer. He has achieved a lot. It is easier to accept him.”

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She talked to her children—in their twenties—and they both told her they knew people who were gay, that it was not something to be shocked about. She began to read Mohanaswamy again, this time with a more open mind, and with the ability to relate its events to someone she knew. She wept while reading parts of it.

In her living-room, Madhura reaches out for her copy of the book and reads out a passage with great feeling. It describes Mohanaswamy at the wedding of Kartik, a lover who has left him to marry a woman. Mohanaswamy is still attached to him, and while he has to play the part of a happy friend at the wedding, he is in deep pain. “As a woman, I realised that Mohanaswamy loved Kartik genuinely,” she says. “It wasn’t just sex, it was real love. They have feelings too, I found out for the first time.”

And as a woman, Madhura seems to have reflected upon other a few other things because of the book. From the experiences of her late mother, she’s seen close-up the stigma and loneliness that women face when their husbands are no more: “We should remove the word vidhve—widow—from use.” She recalls asking her grandmother as a child if it didn’t cause Draupadi pain when she was told to accept five husbands when she had bargained for one. She demonstrates how her grandmother had put her finger to her own lips and said, “Don’t ask such questions.”

Madhura believes Sita’s character has been depicted unfairly, especially in television, because it’s men who run the show, and they can’t deal with the idea of a strong woman: “They have made her a cry-baby.” By fleshing out some lives allowed limited expression in society, the book seems to have drawn Madhura’s attention to others. She says, emphatically: “The depression that Mohanaswamy goes through—all ladies face this.”

“I am making an effort,” Madhura says. “I need time to accept this as mainstream, but I’ve started.” Still, she says, “I cannot say that word.” (The word presumably being “gay”.) “Vasu-sir has gone through a lot of pain. This shouldn’t happen to anyone. I am traditional, but I want society to change.”

Madhura’s was one among a variety of reactions Vasudhendra saw after the book came out. Some people known to Vasudhendra had praised the pseudonymous story the previous year, but chose to say nothing when they learnt it was written by him. Then, there were others he knew who told him in confidence that they were gay or lesbian. “In three or four cases, mothers came to me,” Vasudhendra says. “They suspected their sons were gay. They asked if their sons can be changed.” Another woman went to Vasudhendra saying her son had told her he was gay, but she feared what her violent husband might do when told.

As publisher, Vasudhendra’s telephone number was on the copyright page of the book. He began to receive calls from strangers—some were propositions, but many were from gay men from across the state with accounts of sexual frustration, of feeling desperately lonely in villages and towns, of being stuck in marriages, of suicide attempts. In many cases, Vasudhendra was the first person they had ever spoken to about their sexuality.

“I realised that what this community needed was counselling,” says Vasudhendra. It was available, but mostly in cities, and more easily in English, which left large parts of the state uncovered. Now that people were coming to him after reading the book, he decided he had to equip himself better to talk to them. He enrolled in a one-year course on basic counselling skills. He continues to talk to dozens of men from across Karnataka—on the phone, and in person when they visit Bengaluru or when he goes to their part of the state for a literary gathering or book fair.

I asked Vasudhendra if I could speak with some of the readers who had got in touch with him to find out what the book meant to them in the context of their lives. He gave me a few numbers with the permission of the people they belonged to. They were willing to talk provided their identities were not revealed.

***

One of those calls to Vasudhendra came in 2015 from N, a man in his late fifties who lives in Hubli with his wife and children. He read a later Mohanaswamy story—titled “Aadabarada Maatu Kaaduvaaga (Troubled by that which should not be said)”—in the Kannada magazine Mayura. N called the magazine’s office at once and talked them into giving him Vasudhendra’s number. He called Vasudhendra and said, “This feels like it is written just for me. Did it come to you in a dream?”

N receives me at home, gives me a cup of tea, then suggests we go someplace quiet where we can talk. He is a compact, slender man, neatly dressed in bush-shirt and trousers. He leads the way to a small temple nearby, where there is no one at this time of the evening. “This is where I came to call Vasudhendra after reading the story,” he says. The story describes Mohanaswamy’s liking for drawing rangoli and wearing mehendi, his occasionally wearing his sister’s bangles, his father’s growing suspicions about his sexual orientation, and later when he’s an adult, his mother feeling him up when he’s asleep to rejoice, “My son is a man.”

“I have always known I was different,” N says. As a child he says he preferred games usually played by girls and he liked laying out rangoli. Other boys used to mock his gait, call him names. He had a few relationships with men in his late teens and early twenties, but they ended in heartbreak. When he was 20, for instance, N went to an RSS camp where he had a fleeting relationship with another participant. N was so taken with him that the pain of being separated after the camp caused him to try to end his own life.

His world was one in which it was hard enough, and risky enough, to find a partner: “If I see a beautiful boy, I feel like seeing him naked, I feel like holding him. Do I dare go and tell him I have these desires? And if I do, what might he do to me?” When he did find someone despite the odds, the relationship was usually furtive and doomed from the start. He attempted suicide thrice as a young man.

For a while, N resisted the pressure to marry. Then, he says relatives began to question his manhood. Life at home became difficult, in large part because of the constant pressure from his mother that he marry.

The parallel with Vasudhendra’s story that N found so striking came one day when she sat him down and asked if he got an erection when he watched what she termed obscene films. “Can you imagine a mother asking this to her son?” N says. Eventually, he cracked. “For my mother’s sake, I sacrificed my life and got married.”

“I feel I’m doing an injustice to my wife,” N says. They have two children, but the marriage is mostly a domestic arrangement. His desire to be with men remains a source of much frustration. And dread—because his attempts to fulfil that desire have to be kept from his family at all costs: “I will kill myself if my wife finds out.” He describes how he’s gone to desperate lengths and spent money he can ill-afford to court men. In the process, he’s been swindled and threatened with violence.

N is sickened by his own vulnerability. Sometimes, when he’s been alone at home, he has flung images of gods to the ground. Then, he says, tearing up, he’s sought forgiveness and reinstalled them. He’s come to think of himself and anyone who’s not straight as a “shaapagrasta gandharva”—a cursed celestial being. “My mental anguish remains till I die,” N says.

After reading the story in Mayura and speaking to Vasudhendra, N got hold of the collection. He says he read the title story—first published as “Mohanaswamy” in Deshakaala, then as “Kaggantu” in the collection—so many times that he ended up memorising it. “I still cry when I read that story,” he says. He travelled to Bengaluru to meet Vasudhendra, who offered him a meal and heard him out. He calls Vasudhendra on the phone sometimes to unburden himself. He says: “If I had encountered a book like Mohanaswamy before marriage, I would have confidently said ‘no’ to marriage. Like Vasudhendra, if I were not married, I would thump my chest and say I am gay.”

***

P is a 27-year-old farmer who lives in a village in Belgaum district and has certainly encountered Mohanaswamy. He’s read the book thrice. He’s attracted to men, but would like to get married, have children, and lead the life expected of him, if only because not doing so seems unimaginably hard from his position. “My family is like a beehive,” he says, explaining the imperative to proliferate. P lives with his parents, his brother and sister-in-law and their children. His sisters have married and left home. The family grows sugarcane, banana, and a variety of grains and pulses on the few acres of land they own.

The village is divided by the road, P tells me after he finds me at the bus-stop. Dalits live on one side and the rest—Lingayats, Marathas and Gowdas—on the other (though he explains that this separation is now followed less strictly, especially among people who moved to the village recently).

P has brought freshly-plucked tender coconuts from a tree on his land. He had planned to use a machete from a friend’s house near the bus-stop to open the coconuts, but the friend’s house is locked. So, he walks into another house nearby and emerges holding an axe with which he proceeds to expertly hack open the coconuts. Everyone knows everyone else here. If people ask, I’m a distant relative passing through. P leads me on a walk of a couple of kilometres, then on a clamber up a craggy hill before we settle on a ledge. Here, P says, we can talk freely without being interrupted or overheard.

P has spoken about his sexuality to three people until now—his former best friend, a psychiatrist in a nearby city, and Vasudhendra. He seems eager to talk—these are things he’s been over in his head many times without having said them nearly enough.

When P was 13, a semi-itinerant sadhu who spent part of his days in the village took him to an isolated place, telling him it was essential to check if he had “dhatu” (semen, in this context). Some combination of pleasure, guilt, shame and fear of exposure led to a pattern where P and the sadhu met at intervals through much of P’s adolescence. Eventually, P decided he had to be firm and avoid the sadhu. He suspects that he developed an attraction for the male form because of the sadhu. “I hate him,” he says.

When P told his best friend of many years that he was attracted to men, the friend took a while to overcome his initial disbelief, then gave his advice: “Kill yourself. It’ll only be a problem for your family.” Eventually he came around. He comforted P by saying that P would somehow find a partner—but added “don’t ask me for anything.” P is rueful now that he went on to proposition this friend. Later, when P grew insistent, the friend grabbed P’s mobile, deleted his own number from it and told P that they were strangers from then on. P believes his secret is safe even if they don’t acknowledge each other now. Still, this former friend’s land is right next to P’s, and it’s painful to have to see him all the time.

P’s parents are keen that he marry soon, and are looking forward to the prospect with some relish since P is considered quite a catch—he’s a hard worker, doesn’t smoke or drink. People in the village sometimes compliment him by saying, “If a son is born, he should be like you.” P says this brings him to tears. “My problem is not something I can share with anyone.” Certainly not with his parents: “Had they been educated, I could have told them something. They might die if I tell them how I feel.”

P has put off marriage so far, but he can’t for much longer. His confusion is intensified by his feeling that if indeed his being attracted to men is somehow the result of his experiences with the sadhu, perhaps it can be reversed, and his problems would vanish. P has trouble sleeping. It’s he who goes out to the field at night when the water-pump needs to be switched on. Alone in the dark, he often breaks down and weeps. His only other outlet is writing out his thoughts. He then burns the sheets of paper so they won’t be found by anyone.

He also reads. The village has a library where the only reading to be had comes from the three Kannada newspapers delivered to it. One of these newspapers has a column by a psychiatrist from Hubli, two-and-a-half hours away by bus. After a recent harvest, P took `3,000 from the proceeds and went to find out if he could be treated in some way. At the psychiatrist’s clinic a counsellor saw him first to ask what he was there for. Unsure about trusting her with his secret, P lied. He said he had been in love with a girl and was in great pain after breaking up with her.

Inside the doctor’s office, he confessed that he had lied to the counsellor, told him his predicament, and said he was there to see if there was any way to change himself. P says the doctor administered an injection that made him feel woozy before subjecting him to questioning. P cannot remember the questions or his answers. When he recovered his senses, the doctor informed him that he could be “cured”.

P says he promised: “I’ll make you such that if you see a woman’s breasts you will be attracted to them.” For the time being, the doctor prescribed two pills used commonly as anti-depressants. P returned to his village and started taking them. When the initial course was finished, he felt it had made no difference to his sexual orientation, so he never went back to the doctor. He says, “Broken glass and a broken mind—they can never be mended.” He continues to take one of the pills because it helps him sleep.

It was again in the village library that P first learnt of Vasudhendra. Vasudhendra had written an article in the newspaper Prajavani about the lighter side of being gay in a society that refused to acknowledge same-sex relationships—a landlord who forbade Vasudhendra from having women visitors, but was perfectly fine with men coming over; a fellow pilgrim to Manasarovar who paid a man en route to massage his tired legs, thought he was being felt up, and grew so paranoid about strangers that he stuck to Vasudhendra for the rest of the trip, sleeping next to him and even insisting they walk out together to the toilet. P learnt about Mohanaswamy from the bio accompanying the article.

An opportunity arose for P to visit Bengaluru. He had applied to the state police for a constable’s job and was to report there for a test. As soon as he could, he went to a book shop in Bengaluru and bought Mohanaswamy. He sat in a park and read much of it. “It came as a mirror to my pain,” he says. He called Vasudhendra, arranged to meet him, and told him about his life, his feeling stuck in the village, the growing pressure to marry. Vasudhendra advised him to accept his sexuality. Since there was little chance of meeting other gay men in the village, he told P he could go online and talk to men from nearby cities.

P explains that while he would like to do this, his English, which he’s supposed to have studied in school but is in reality non-existent, poses a problem. You need some English to get going on the internet, whether you’re looking for information or porn or trying to register on a dating site. P would have to travel 15 kilometres to the nearest town with an internet centre (he doesn’t have a smart phone). And he can’t afford to fumble his way onto the internet because he’s heard from friends that the computer records a history of online activity. He doesn’t know how to get rid of it, and he can’t have it known so close to home that he’s been looking at or for other men, or even educating himself about same-sex relationships.

There doesn’t seem to be much in Kannada off the internet either. Vasudhendra says, “There is not a single book in Kannada about being gay.” He’s planning to write or translate one himself, a sort of FAQ to be made available at low cost. An important area it would address is health. Of the men Vasudhendra counsels, three are HIV-positive. He recalls one of them telling him why he didn’t use protection with the partner he contracted it from: “He was smartly dressed and spoke English, so I thought it would be okay.”

Returning to P, he sees two paths in front of him, both going in entirely opposite directions. A woman in his village has a crush on him and has been suggesting they have a relationship before her marriage is arranged with someone else. (She and P are from incompatible castes, so she’s only being pragmatic.) P is willing because it would let him assess his ability to lead a married life with a woman, but he’s also hesitant because of what he, and possibly others, might find out. He would like to do what is expected of him and marry, but is worried about losing face if he can’t have kids or if his wife ends up sleeping with other men. It might be easier, he says, tearing up, to just have an accident and die so that his family is spared the disappointment.

P has never actually had a relationship as an adult. His other plan, a result of talking to Vasudhendra, is to buy a smart phone with the proceeds of the next harvest, and learn to use Grindr to talk to men in nearby Belgaum. Maybe even move to a city and lead a life independent of all he has known, but he’s aware that that will take some doing.

***

“In a city you need money to live, in the village it’s easier,” A says. He is 21, and lives in a small town in Uttara Kannada district. He moved to a larger place to study but soon life became unbearable. He was living with his brother, who felt he was losing face because A’s behaviour—his interest in dance, the clothes he liked to wear—was unmanly. He started to be physically violent with A in an effort to change him. In addition, one of A’s male class-mates began to stalk him—calling him at all times, following him on a motorcycle, on one occasion even grabbing A’s arm and twisting it. A abandoned his studies and returned home, where people have known him since he was a child. Here he teaches painting and dance to children. “There’s a comfort to being among children,” he says.

During his time in college, A encountered an old essay by Vasudhendra as part of the Kannada syllabus. After learning about the author he bought Mohanaswamy at once. “I have read it many times,” he says. He recalls the story “Tagani” (Bedbug) affecting him particularly deeply. It shows a man’s family feeling so threatened by his behaving like, and then becoming, a woman, that they murder him and pass it off as suicide. “I was very hurt by that story,” A says.

He called Vasudhendra on the number from the book’s copyright page and found him a sympathetic listener. They met subsequently when Vasudhendra visited a nearby town, and they continue to speak occasionally on the phone. As a result, he says, “I’ve learnt to emerge from my small world.” In 2015, he accompanied Vasudhendra to the pride parade in Bengaluru. “I found out there are many others like me,” he says. “There are burning coals coated with ash. We must blow on them.”

***

Just what can a book do in the world? Certainly, it’s done much for Vasudhendra himself. “This is the most that any author can get out of a book,” he says. “My depression came down after I wrote this book.” He still goes into the occasional slump, though not as severely as before. “It is a known devil now,” he says. Vasudhendra and the book came out together. It was only after its publication that he began to have relationships—after more than two decades.

Then there are readers who find their lives reflected in the book—men like P, who says the book came as a mirror to his pain; N, whose reckoning of his own life has been influenced by it; A, who has found a community through Vasudhendra and his participation in the pride parade. When I met them, both P and N independently asked who else I was meeting in the vicinity for this story and if I would put them in touch. N put it poetically: “Nothing like that,” he told me, lest I think he was being opportunistic, “I only want to talk to someone as a companion in the same misery.”

I gave them each other’s numbers and these two men—a middle-aged man who regrets having married, and a young man who would like to marry—spoke on the phone and arranged to meet. N took along his clippings of Vasudhendra’s articles, many of which P hadn’t read. They speak on the phone from time to time. P continues to call Vasudhendra every few weeks, and since we met has started to do the same with me—we talk about how we’re dealing with demonetisation, upcoming village fairs, why it would take me so long to write this article, and so on. It still isn’t clear how P will resolve his quandary, but it’s encouraging to know that the isolation he lived in for years isn’t as absolute anymore.

At least a few people out there are thankful to Mohanaswamy without knowing it. Madhura, the astrologer, told me about worried parents who came to her with the horoscope of their daughter. She had had an arranged marriage only six months previously, but was insisting on a divorce without giving any reasons. Madhura thinks of herself as a counsellor who helps people get through difficult life situations. She usually prescribes a remedy—an offering or a ceremony of some sort. She was about to do the same in this case when she paused. She told the parents she wanted to meet their daughter in private.

When they met, she told the young woman that she could speak freely. It turned out her husband had shown no interest in starting a physical relationship with her, and had refused to discuss the matter or get help. And this wasn’t a subject she could bring up with her parents. Madhura then spoke to the parents and advised them that a divorce seemed the best outcome in the situation. Their daughter had bright prospects for a second marriage, she told them. Madhura thinks she would have missed the young couple’s predicament if not for her somewhat dramatic engagement with Mohanaswamy. She’s now interested in finding an astrological basis for same-sex attraction, and has requested Vasudhendra for his horoscope so she can investigate (though he is having none of it). The stuff of books propagates in strange ways.

Books themselves, too. While I was in his village, P had a favour to ask. He got out his copy of Mohanaswamy from a bag. He explained that he had kept the book hidden in his house so his family would not find it and grow suspicious. As he did with his own writing, he intended to destroy the book after reading it, but Mohanaswamy had come to mean so much to him that he could not bring himself to burn it. He asked me to take his copy with me: “If you know someone who might want to read it, give it to them.”

Srinath Perur is the author of the travelogue If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai and the translator of Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar.

(From the June 2017 edition of the Fountain Ink.)

BY RITAYAN MUKHERJEE

Tibet’s nomadic mountain people known as Ndrogba or Drokpa occupy the higher reaches of the pleateau, living at heights beyond 14,000 feet. They are found in all three traditional regions of Tibet: Amdo, Kham and U-Tsang. They have an estimated population of 2 million and live in tents made of yak wool and move two to three times a year, following the seasons. Most are now only semi-nomadic. Their centuries-old way of life is under threat from China’s “resettlement” policy under which many families have been relocated to permanent colonies at the edge of cities.

These nomads live on the very edge of ecosystems and their every movement is dictated by the needs of their herds. Their lifestyles are delicately balanced on the changing seasons. Their world is a prime example of sustainable pastoralism. At this point they are vulnerable to socio-politico-economic pressures as well as changing climate patterns.

Ritayan Mukherjee is a Kolkata-based photographer working on a long-term project to document the lives of nomadic communities on the Tibetan plateau.

The photo story from the July 2017 edition of Fountain Ink.

BY ARPIT PARASHAR 

Barely days after the Yogi Adityanath-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government took office in Uttar Pradesh (UP) policemen from the local chowki in Noida’s sector-51 visited Anand Mahto’s shop—a small wooden cabinet on which he hangs a LED light at night and some flowers during the day—selling cigarettes, pan masala and freshly prepared pan. The road abuts a green patch next to one of Noida’s major sewage drains in sector-51; this 1 km patch is home to 10 other small and big “khokhas” as stalls that line the street are called. All were visited by the police, as were similar stalls across the city and state over the next weeks and months.

The message to Mahto was that the monthly bribe to the police would be Rs 2,000 from the Rs 200-300 earlier. In addition, he should deposit Rs 10,000 as immediate charge within 15 days, apart from applying for a licence with the Noida Authority for legal permission to operate from the spot. It was a shock for Mahto. The policemen told Mahto, “Yogi ka raj aa gaya matlab kanoon ka raj. Baaki khud samajh jao, samajhdaar ho (Yogi’s rule is here and that means rule of law. You can understand the rest, smart as you are)”.

For the policemen, as one of the constables at the chowki said, this was the opportunity to finally make up for their losses from demonetisation last year. “And we know BJP leaders are ideological winners, not political winners who know the ground realities like we do. We have this window of opportunity to remonetise ourselves, too,” he said. The constable claimed to have lost Rs 25 lakh in earnings, even after using “links” to legitimise the money he had earned through bribes. In all, he could only get Rs 10 lakh converted to new notes.

Mahto paid a bribe of Rs 1,000 at first and asked for more time to cough up the rest. Days later his stall was removed during an anti-encroachment drive by the Noida Authority. He claimed to be registered but was told that old licences were not valid. The police simply put their hands up and said, “Everything as per law.” Mahto settled with the police at Rs 7,000; but he couldn’t sell pan anymore. “That requires a little better arrangement,” he was told.

He got back his shop after paying another Rs 20,000 50 days later to the officials at the Noida Authority as bribe apart from the small payment for the licence application. In all, apart from the bribes, he suffered a loss of around Rs 1.2 lakh over the period, he says.

Zahoor Ahmad, who ran his chicken and mutton stall along the same stretch was not as lucky. Within two days of the government coming to power, when the announcement of closing illegal slaughterhouses and meat shops was made by the CM, policemen arrived at his shop. They manhandled him, throwing kilos of freshly cut meat into the drain and killing many chickens in the cages. They even carried off some of them saying, “Aaj ki payment yeh hai (this is today’s payment).”

Ahmad did not open shop for the next two months, pleading with police, who plainly said that he needed a new licence from the authority as well as Rs 2.5 lakh as initial payment and Rs 10,000 as monthly payment from here on, to keep his shop. He eventually did that, got his licence renewed after paying another Rs 50,000, and now sells meat at a higher price to compensate for the bribes he has to pay. “Customers do complain at times, but they know meat is a prized commodity now; that’s what this government has been telling the people. You have to be rich to eat meat.”

***

In the name of implementing laws and regulations the bureaucracy and police have found a new way of enriching themselves under the present BJP government. The bribe economy is experiencing its best time in the past few years, especially after the previous Samajwadi Party (SP) government implemented some checks and balances that, while inadequate, had an impact on people earning a living from roadside stalls and other minor professions.

The bribe economy is a systemic and systematic problem in India. In March, the corruption watchdog group Transparency International found India the most corrupt country in Asia among the 16 Asia-Pacific countries it surveyed. Its report said 85 per cent of the respondents put police at the top of the corruption table, apart from terming 71 per cent of religious leaders corrupt.

Interviews and interactions with various officials over the past three months show police are happy toeing the government’s line as long as it leaves them free to take care of “law and order”.

***

Vikramjit Singh, an IPS officer who took early retirement from his job two months ago—a decision he had already taken last year—says policemen are incapable of working efficiently unless there is fear of action by the government.

“In this case (of the Yogi government) they (BJP) come with their own agenda which they want police to implement, be it ban on slaughter of cows, illegal meat selling and slaughter or even the anti-Romeo campaign. What most of this does is increase paper work, which is where police find the space to manipulate the system. Ambiguities in various sections of the law let them block a case for years on frivolous charges to make sure they keep minting money from the parties as the case drags on.”

The point Singh makes is that while every government insists on rule of law, paper work by police is according to the social outlook and ideology of a particular government. “Under SP, attacks on minorities were not tolerated but strict action against perpetrators was discouraged except in ‘cut-out’ (clearly violent) cases. But with such an inexperienced CM (the Yogi) who can only rely on police for the so-called implementation of law, the scope for manipulation is huge. Police just toe the political line while making merry otherwise (through bribes, extortion, etc.),” Singh said.

This is evident from the way street politics has taken shape since the Adityanath government came to power. The Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV), formed by Adityanath in his days as a young Hindutva crusader and still led by him, has seen an almost 50-fold rise in membership since he came to power. BJP and RSS leaders do not officially acknowledge it as part of the Sangh Parivar, but it wields immense power on the streets of the state.

In April, for example, a 100-strong group claiming to be from HYV stormed a place in Amroha which housed shops and restaurants selling meat simply because they believed beef was sold there. The police, who mutely watched the rampage, eventually found that not one place sold or served beef, not even buff (buffalo meat), but the area remained shut for 10 days. After reopening, the owners of most establishments are fighting cases in the local court as police have refused to take back the FIRs under pressure from HYV.

Zaman Charagh Saifi, owner of Prince Hotel, one of the famous restaurants on the street, has shut shop. “It was our passion to serve good food, including vegetarian since we come from a family of cooks who worked for various Nawabs in earlier days. But we are focusing on our more profitable line, growing popular export-quality plants and trees. The hotel was the legacy of our forefathers, so we kept it going though the income was not enough for the extended family. That is why we diversified into (urban) farming a decade ago and are going to stick to it now.”

Saifi still hosts lavish dinners every fortnight for friends, the majority of them Hindus, who keep calling and insisting he open the place again. “Some are lawyers and they insist on fighting our case but we will wait for a year or two to see if we can still run it. Otherwise, the entire profit will go as bribe to the policemen and our time there will only mean loss for the family,” he says.

They understand that being Muslims, they will be direct targets of the police and the administration, as the ruling party has a politico-economic agenda against them. The reasons, contrary to popular perception, are not deep-rooted but extremely shallow. Once the police swung into action against illegal slaughterhouses and meat sellers a sense of triumphalism prevailed among BJP workers across the state. “Sar pe chadha rakha thha in logon ko (They [Muslims] were a pampered lot),” says Rajnish Sharma, a BJP worker from Ghaziabad. He meant the workers have simply wanted to see Muslims in the state suffer, and the police have to toe their line now.

For example, during a night raid at a gau shala (cow shelter) in Bulandshahr district on June 9, police found no evidence of slaughter or smuggling of cows. They rather realised that the owner’s only profession was milk and other dairy products. The complaint was made by a rival, a Hindu, who ran his dairy from the same area along Anupshahr road in the city. Nevertheless, the owner Mushtaq Khan was picked up and charged under various sections that the Hindu rival, led by members of the BJP and HYV, had demanded.

While Khan got bail later as the magistrate found that the charges did not hold prima facie, his business is under strain as the customers, a majority of them Hindus, have stopped buying products as they suspect him to be a cattle smuggler and beef-eater. He claims he has never consumed beef, not that it should have mattered in any case. “The case itself was enough to create doubts. I could keep explaining to them but they still won’t believe me since I am a Muslim after all,” he said. Khan said he paid a bribe of Rs 2 lakh to the police to make sure his family members, including a brother and two sons, were not charged.

***

While Muslims have always been a strong voter-base in western UP, it is only in the post-liberalisation era that they moved in substantial numbers to the mainstream. The economy in most urban centres like Meerut, Ghaziabad, Muzaffarnagar and even Moradabad was Hindu-dominated till two decades ago, but with the rising wealth from the meat business and an upswing in opportunities in the service industry, the dynamics have changed. Muslims are active players in the worker-class professions and have cashed in on traditional knowledge and hard labour, coupled with a favourable political environment in general. As a result, most urban areas have seen a dominance of Muslims in elections, disturbing the traditional Brahmin-Baniya combination which helped BJP through decades.

“These people have made money by selling cow and buffalo meat but we don’t want to let it go on,” says Chiragh Chaudhary, a BJP worker from Sardhana constituency in Meerut district. Interestingly, the BJP MP from Sardhana Sangeet Singh Som had stakes in two meat export companies in 2015 even as he gave a call to shut slaughterhouses in the district. While he later denied the charges, documentary proof emerged of his investments in the two companies. He eventually withdrew his investment.

Even though cow slaughter has been banned in UP for decades, and only buffalo can be slaughtered, procured and sold, most of which is exported, the call among party workers is for a total ban on meat products sold by Muslims. Work on ensuring this state of satisfaction is in full swing. BJP offices across UP have dedicated teams to keep track of meat shops in their areas and to file complaints against all for one reason or other, conversations with party workers across the state revealed.

In most cases it is the local leaders who solve the problem by calling in the police and complaining that “rules” are not being followed by meat shop owners. Buffalo meat is not sold in any city market in the districts. It is still sold on the outskirts and around villages, the primary purchasers, since it is the cheapest meat. The modus operandi is to complain about “rules and regulations” which are almost never followed, and a demand to implement them by the book.

Officials, especially police, have no option but to examine all the papers for meat shops against which complaints are filed. They too are in a fix, having never bothered to read the National Green Tribunal (NGT) directions of 2015 and other earlier rules. In some cases, they have beaten up residents from the areas where meat shops were being run.

“When we asked if they had a warrant or if there was even a complaint, they said they do not need complaints anymore. There is no beef sold here and all shop owners have licences yet officials regularly harass us, which is why the strike (by meat shop owners of UP) was called in the initial days (of the BJP government),” says Hanif Qureshi, a resident of Patharwalon Ka Mohalla in old Meerut city. He owns a shop that sells chicken and mutton. All meat shop owners, apart from implementing the rules and regulations which largely focus on basic hygiene, have had to pay Rs 2-5 lakhs as bribe to the police and other authorities to reopen shops and keep them running, several people in the meat business told Fountain Ink.

A senior police official speaking on the condition of anonymity, tried to justify the bribe culture.

“Firstly, policemen lose their interest in strict action so unfair harassment does not happen. Secondly, since the person who pays the bribe is hit economically, at least for some months, the politicians and other groups can be told by us that he has been ‘taught a lesson’, which helps pacify them.”

It has been worse for people from areas where buffalo meat is commonly sold, or served at the local eateries. People who work in various labour-intensive factories depend on these hotels for their meals so the closures have hit them. At the Loha Mandi in Ghaziabad recently, people expecting a restaurant to be open where they could have lunch, launched into impromptu sloganeering when police officials were “inspecting papers”; the inspection went on for many hours.

“It was just to tell us that we would go back hungry and that the hotels would not be allowed to open that day, or anytime soon. This is like depriving us of our basic food,” a customer who had come there from many kilometers away for lunch said.

Hearing a case on delays in issuing a licence for a meat shop, the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court said on April 3 that food and trade in foodstuffs is constitutionally guaranteed under the right to live. The Bench of Justices Amreshwar Pratap Sahi and Sanjai Harkauli noted: “To provide an immediate check on unlawful activity should be simultaneous with facilitating the carrying of lawful activity, particularly that relating to food, food habits and vending thereof that is indisputably connected with the right to life and livelihood.”

The Bench also said, in the context of the complete ban on the sale of meat products in the state, that it was the state’s duty to ensure the provision of sale of food conducive to health. While government counsel pleaded that the state government was acting on rules set by the NGT and the Supreme Court, the judges said government inaction “should not be a shield for imposing a state of almost prohibition.” The court also criticised the crackdown immediately after the BJP government was sworn in.

***

AA Bench headed by NGT chairperson Justice Swatanter Kumar ordered in 2015 that slaughterhouses would have to take permission from the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (UPPCB) and/or environmental clearance from the State Level Environment Impact Assessment Authority (SEIAA) besides permission from local authorities to keep running. While UPPCB and SEIAA permissions have generally only been delayed for some time and were granted eventually for most slaughterhouses, the local authorities have not done so. “They are working under BJP leaders and harassing us in order to warm their pockets,” Fahad Hussian a manager at one of the meat export units said. “Every time we implemented NGT guidelines and rules by agencies like the pollution board (and asked for permission locally they demanded huge bribes to grant them. As the government was supportive of us in general, we continued running our units while licence renewals were pending. Now they have found reason to extort more money by sealing our properties and alleging non-compliance of laws.”

A major reason for the delay in licences is that the ward-level politics in various municipalities is dominated by the BJP. Local authorities receive complaints from ward leaders and local-level in-charges of the BJP and decide to deny permission to small shops, large export units and also slaughterhouses under pressure. “We deny the permission to save ourselves from attacks by ward leaders and local BJP goons. When SP was in power they could not be shut down. Now that BJP has come to power in Lucknow, we have no option but to seal them and go over the process all over again,” a senior Meerut Development Authority official said.

“This is nothing but political backlash which is making poor workers jobless. The BJP tried arm-twisting earlier too but did not succeed. Now that it has won, it will do anything to deprive Muslims of economic benefits and opportunities,” a senior SP leader who won his seat from Muzaffarnagar district in the assembly polls alleged, speaking on condition of anonymity.

***

In the urge to implement the rules “by the book” the government ended up encouraging the bureaucracy to exploit businesses. Even regular and licence-holding meat sellers are asked to cough up exorbitant amounts in bribes. Riyaz Mohammad, who ran his chicken shop in sector-9 of Noida, also called the meat market because of the large cluster of meat shops in the area, was asked to deposit Rs 2 lakh with officials of the Noida Authority to open his shop again though the licence issued by the Department of Food Safety and Drug Administration is valid till 2020. “They said this was a security deposit but that no receipt would be given. It is just to ensure that no action is taken against us and our shops remain open. We know this is just a bribe,” he said.

Apart from the authority, police also came calling, asking him to shell out Rs 50,000 as bribe-cum-security deposit. “Their argument was that the rate to be paid to police has gone up and it would now be backdated to 2014 when BJP came to power at the Centre,” Mohammad said. It entails a monthly payment of Rs 500-1000 per shop, which was only Rs 200 earlier. Police have asked meat sellers to pay the revised rate, which means depositing Rs 10,000-30,000 per shop depending on its size and sales, as well as hefty amounts as security to ensure no action is taken against them in the near future.

Junaid Ahmed, who represents many pockets of Noida and Ghaziabad in the loosely organised UP meat sellers’ union, says, “They have told us no shop will open without these bribes. We fear they will act on the smallest complaint received even if we manage to open on the basis of legal paperwork. Such complaints can be concocted or politically motivated as the BJP workers want to see us suffer. It is extortion.”

Meat sellers across the state, especially in the National Capital Region (NCR) districts of Noida, Ghaziabad and Meerut have held dharnas outside the offices of District Magistrates as well as police headquarters and demanded that extortion in the name of law and order be stopped, but to no avail.

A senior police official from Ghaziabad, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that when “notebandi” (demonetisation) happened many policemen lost their savings. “Many even gave money back to a lot of people and distributed it among relatives or even shop owners from their areas. This is an opportunity to earn some of it back.” So meat sellers simply have to compensate for the empty pockets of the police.

Lokesh Mishra, a BJP worker from Vijay Nagar in Ghaziabad, says, “Under the previous rule these meat sellers openly sided with SP or BSP but not BJP. They would arm-twist the police by opening shops all over the district without procuring licences. Now that police are cracking down they are making all sorts of noises about exploitation. They deserve it.”

Political patronage has allowed police and administration officials to implement their own rules and terms of engagement on the ground.

Most of the meat sellers did get licences from the state government, under the Food Safety and Standards Act 2006. Ahmed, the meat sellers’s union member said, “Very few meat shop owners among the people I know were running their shops without licences. Police are working to extort money despite that.” Among the shop owners from the meat market area in sector-9, for example, 47 have been forced to shut though all have licences and permissions valid till at least next year; many got licences renewed only last year and so can run their shops till 2021, as per the law.

The plight of owners whose licences expired recently is worse. They have been asked to deposit between Rs 3-5 lakh as “security” which is non-refundable. Hearing a petition on the delay in issuing licences to meat shop owners, the Allahabad High Court came down heavily on the government. Pulling it up for maladministration in the civic bodies, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court issued an order on April 3 directing it to ensure that licences of mutton and chicken shops, which expired on March 31, are renewed within a week. The bench also issued orders that the administration must also provide facilities for a slaughterhouse for goats and chicken every two kilometres within 10 days.

***

The bribe economy in India has been a subject of extensive research among corruption-watch groups over many years. The root cause is said to be the vulnerability of people to extortion and delay in action. There is, however, little work on establishing the way police run the bribe economy.

“It’s fine to say that the money goes right up to the top of the ladder but one has to understand that when exchange of large amounts of money is in question, there has to be a systematic approach to the economics, which is where policemen, more than even the various administration officials, have become experts and developed a tier-based system of division,” said former IPS officer Vikramjit Singh.

The first tier is the most efficiently worked out in the police system. It starts at the chowki level, where fresh recruits are posted under supervision of the seniors from the corresponding police stations. The manager who oversees every chowki at the local level is called the “thekedaar” (contractor) and is usually a constable or head constable. In general, senior men with experience of the system are given this role. The job of the contractor is to coordinate with every shopkeeper or vendor or an applicant who comes in with the request for local security check before opening a roadside stall. The thekedaar manages the bribes as per the rates fixed by the corresponding Station House officer (SHO) of the police station and is the head of the chowki-level dealings too.

The contractor is accompanied by young recruits during his rounds where he demands the regular payments due to the police; such trips are usually termed “ugaahi”. The young men are expected to learn the tricks of the trade during these routines as future thekedaars come from among them. During the rounds the money due from every person in the area under the police station is to be collected and accounted for in diaries which are usually maintained on a yearly or bi-yearly basis.

“These books are maintained from Diwali to Holi and then again from Holi to Diwali every year. Sometimes if the thekedaar is a Muslim he chooses to do so between the Eids. Most thekedaars prefer a yearly diary from Diwali to Diwali or as per the economic financial year,” says a constable posted in Noida’s sector-24 police station. He is in training to be a thekedaar. The money collected is usually divided into half, to be kept as reserve in case transfers are ordered and bribes are to be paid at the higher echelons of the department for stalling or delaying them.

Every police station has a “rate” and the SHO usually gets to pick his own team if he can come up with the going rate for a particular police station. This is the second tier of the system, the most ruthless. The money demanded here is from complainants or culprits, even victims. Rameshwar Prasad, who retired as SHO of Surajpur police station in Greater Noida a few years ago, said, “Three things have to kept in mind when deciding the rate for a police station—the demographics and social standard of the location, business and other infrastructure and the number of complaints that come in, which means civil and criminal cases filed per year on average.”

Surajpur scores three ticks on all these parameters: it is the most important police station in Greater Noida, an upcoming mega city with a healthy middle class and upper-middle class population; it is seeing a boom in commercial establishments as the urban space expands; and it is on the edge of old Surajpur town, notorious for crimes, so there are a large number of complaints of robbery, thefts, etc.

While refusing to disclose the bribe he paid when he took charge, Prasad said, “Let me just say it was over a crore (rupees) and has since gone into some crores.” This money, he says, is collected by the SHO during his tenure in previous postings. He and his subordinates, the sub-inspectors, are always on the lookout for cases where money can be made as everyone hopes for a better posting.

“Those happy with the posting, mostly the ones closer to home, settle by making less and their records are automatically maintained as such by the thekedaar. Others who are honest do not take money but policemen gift them some money as bonus during festivals just to keep them in the circle lest they complain against others,” Prasad said The youngest men at a police station are allowed to make money for their “pocket expenses” by deployment at checkpoints on the roads and at commercial establishments or public places like colleges.

The top tier, led by IPS officers, is where big money exchanges hands. There is no limit to the amount that can be transacted in a single deal. Like the police station, there is a thekedaar at the district level, too, selected at the discretion of the senior-most officer. In cases the officer is honest the next in line gets to choose the thekedaar.
“These thekedaars travel with their bosses and get transferred with them, or the bosses develop a team from across the state on recommendations from men they trust. The accounts they maintain have to reserve the bulk of the money for the higher-ups in Lucknow who decide on postings,” said Singh.

***

When the Adityanath government came to power, its first major step, like all new governments, was to place officers seen close to it in senior-most posts in most areas. The government first targeted officers in high posts, especially at SHO-levels across the state. Since a majority happened to be Yadavs or were close to the former SP government, there was a protest within the department on the targeting of officers from a particular community. Naresh Yadav, a sub-inspector at the Greater Noida police station before being transferred, said, “The problem was that this government hardly knew the policemen working on the ground and had no reports on them, neither did they bother to scrutinise their work. Even honest officers who just happened to be Yadavs were given punishment postings.”

But this is no surprise, says Singh, which is why despite reports in the Hindi media on the targeting of Yadav officers, there was no action by the department or the government. In all, at least 100 top-level IPS officers and hundreds other lower-ranked officers have been transferred in the months since the BJP came to power.

Most officers had expected such transfers, which is why immediately after the government took the oath, street vendors, meat sellers, slaughter houses, vegetable sellers, and even shopkeepers were asked to pay up. It was a last-ditch attempt to stuff their pockets ahead of the expected unfavourable transfers. People like Anand Mahto, Zahoor Ahmad and Riyaz Mohammad were the victims of this phenomenon. Immediately after the transfers and the takeover from the new thekedaars rates have again been raised and the new regime has started its extortion drive now.

Arpit Parashar is a freelance journalist based in Delhi.

The cover story of the July 2017 issue of Fountain Ink.

BY KAREN DIAS

The small state of Haryana has the worst sex ratio in India at 879 females per 1,000 males, one of the lowest in the world. Haryana is also known for caste and sexual violence against women and female foeticide, rape, trafficking and domestic violence are common. But a small and scattered community of girls are breaking stereotypes and winning international laurels in sports ranging from hockey to boxing, wrestling to football and rifle shooting. However, the path to pursuing a sport of their choice comes with great struggle. Most of the girls belong to poor families and cannot afford the equipment, diet and upkeep required to play professionally. Most can’t even dream of access to psychologists or medical facilities that their western counterparts take for granted. Facilities have a long way to go and bureaucracy makes it harder for some players to get access to meal schemes, prize money, etc. Besides obstacles on the playing field, the girls battle patriarchy and gender-based discrimination. Most girls realise they may have to give up their careers when their parents decide that they have to get married. But success brings financial freedom and fame, which allows girls to negotiate marriage at a later stage and helps them support their families. The stories of Sakshi Malik and the Phogat sisters have inspired more families to encourage their daughters. These young sportswomen are leading the way in empowering women and helping bring about gender equality in the state.

(Photo story published in the August 2017 edition of Fountain Ink)

(Karen Dias is a documentary photographer based in Mumbai and Goa. )

BY ALIA ALLANA

A drone skirted the three chandeliers in the dining room with infinite mirrors. Four models in chikan paired with tulle and braid fringed shirts and a silk opera coat stared at it warily. Standing beside the cameraman was Tarun Tahiliani, a man who fulfils many roles: designer, director, cheerleader. “Dance and have fun,” Tahiliani encouraged the models so they swayed and spun in Raj Mahal, a palace in Jaipur converted into a Relais and Chateaux boutique hotel. Tahiliani, once called the Emperor of Fashion, the Karl Lagerfeld of India, was shooting his Fall/Winter 2018 collection. Nothing was off limits for his “big foray into social media”. He had spent weeks planning the message that would be put out to his 3,94,000 Instagram followers. In the adjacent room Ipshita Barua who handles Tahiliani’s PR, was having a meltdown. The palace management was  concerned about the drone. There were two unmanned trolleys with decades-old single malt scotch, and the doors to the 1959 Ford Thunderbird were open. “Anything could happen,” she said.

The shoot was a harmonious orchestra with people converging from across India and Dubai to transform Tahiliani’s vision into reality. “India Modern”, he called it. “India is the traditional and the modern in that it is moving.” Everyone repeated it like a mantra. The next night, after another 15-hour day Tahiliani sipped a gin and tonic through a straw. “When you see Pakeezah even today, made over 16 years on a shoestring budget with this alcoholic actress, it is still beautiful. Meena Kumari, Jaya Bhaduri, Nutan, they told real stories. There was a beauty in their lyrics, in their cinematography,” he paused, “Having a drone is like having a new toy. It doesn’t make it better. All it does is allow you to say, ‘wah kya shot hai bhai.’”

He looks back on his decades in fashion, an industry he pioneered, lost his way in and lost friends too. He talks about Isabella Blow, the English editor who committed suicide and Lauren Scott who was with Mick Jagger for ten years and who woke one day and boom: She’d hanged herself in her New York apartment.

“You think, my god, what did she not have? It’s like they don’t believe in today’s mass world,” he said. “True eccentricity developed more in a world where you read and imagined and went with your imagination.”

He was finally inspired and out of the dark at a time when fast fashion threatened art, in an industry where new technologies disrupted centuries of tradition and designers with millions of Instagram followers overshadowed established ateliers.

“What people don’t realise is that chic is not surface embellishment. Real chic is born from inside. Before, everybody had an identity but today we are looking for one. Everything is homogenised now because of society and mass media. I work harder today than I worked 20 years back. The game is harder, the stakes are higher. That’s the reality,” he says as he strides to a private soiree at the City Palace.

***

If the fashion industry were a country, it would have the seventh-largest GDP, bigger than India and Italy. In 2016, the industry was about $2.4 trillion in total value; India and the United Arab Emirates are expected to be the highest growth countries in 2017, though they lag behind China and the United States in size. As Indians become more affluent, they are projected to become the third largest consumer base by 2025 according to “The State of Fashion,” a 2017 report by McKinsey and the Business of Fashion. Of the five household income categories (elite, affluent, aspirers, next billion and strugglers defined by BCG in its 2017 report, “The New Indian: The Many Facets of a Changing Consumer”), the top two income classes are growing the fastest. In less than ten years, wealthy urbanites will be responsible for one-third of total consumption valued at about $4 trillion by 2025. India’s luxury goods market has been growing by more than $255 million a year, on par with the United Arab Emirates (2014). When growth in the global luxury goods sector slowed down in 2015 because of falling demand in China and Russia, India remained a bright spot among Asian and BRIC countries. Metros contribute 56 per cent to the market while 44 per cent of the revenue comes from small towns that have underserved clients with deep pockets. Indians are also changing how they shop. Luxury, once mostly imported, is sought locally as more people are willing to pay extra for made in India products.

A Tahiliani lehenga with hand embroidered French knots, delicate glass drops and shimmering Swarovski crystals can cost lakhs of rupees.

***

“Luxury is driven by the needs and ability of the rich to pay and their patronage. Earlier it was the royal families and the aristocracy, now it’s a wider base of very rich people. Luxury has become a thing of definition and projection, but over time you develop an eye and once you’ve worn something beautiful you are not going to go back to wearing something that is ghastly and polyester. Luxury is not driven by mass needs or problems,” Tahiliani says as we walk to the dargah in Mehrauli where a line of people waits for the charity of others in the holy month.

Tahiliani has a wad of twenty-rupee notes and even before he pulls it out, a group encircles him. A woman calls out to him, another asks after his wife and two sons. A regular here, he gives out note after note.

Tahiliani moves in and out of the lives of beggars and aristocrats, new moneyed Indians and Saudi Royals. “I’m never bored. I can be enthralled with anyone’s stories. People are interesting until they get caught in a projection and then it ceases to be interesting. We get impressed too quickly and that’s why the nouveau riche want to show their wealth so they wear jewels like bibs and that’s not great taste.”

***

Four decades ago, when Tahiliani, 55, was a young boy there was no new money nor was there a fashion industry in India. Ritu Kumar had a boutique, Cottage Industries Emporium was considered a designer store and Nita Ambani would go to Bhuleshwar to buy her bandhani (tie-and-dye work from Gujarat). When Ravissant opened at Kemps Corner Tahiliani’s aunts would go there with awe because they sold chikan kurtas for Rs 2,200. Socialist India was a grim place and even for the moneyed it was unfashionable to be flashy. The only people that sold Levis jeans were the hippies on Goa beaches. Tahiliani wanted Versace, Armani and Prada.

“I didn’t want to be Indian, I thought we were Western. We went to the Jesuit school, we only spoke Hindi to the boys who served us at the Willingdon Club and the drivers in that South Bombay accent,” he says mimicking that accent. When he returned from Wharton Business School, India was warming up to Western capitalism. “People were saying bye bye khadi and hello brocade,” he recalls. The Palanpuris, the Indian diamond dynasties set the bar for Bombay weddings held in stadiums with gold fountains. The bride and groom would descend in helicopters and “it was absolutely vulgar and shocking”. Tahiliani had fallen in love with Sailaja ‘Sal’ Murthy, an Indian economist raised in New York. “Society meant nothing to her, she didn’t know the pecking order nor did she care,” he says. When they married, Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi attended the wedding.

Access to the good life didn’t translate into satisfaction. Tahiliani was stuck in a deadbeat job selling oil field equipment and the couple was “quite broke”. Sal had got into modelling and would often ask why the best Indian products were available abroad. In 1987, he accompanied her to a shoot in Jaipur where he met Rohit Khosla, India’s first haute couture designer. Khosla had “galvanise(d) an entire industry that really had nothing going for it; in the India of the ’80s, fashion wasn’t a profession,” writes fashion journalist Varun Rana. With Khosla’s encouragement, Tahiliani and Sal opened the door to Ensemble at Mumbai’s Lion’s Gate on December 12, 1987. It was India’s first multi-brand boutique that stocked Rohit Khosla, Neil Bieff, Abu Jani, Sandeep Khosla and Amaya.

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Ensemble brought an international way of selling luxury to fashion. In the beginning people were intimidated by a store that looked like an art gallery. “They were used to exhibition-cum-sales. It was bazaar versus high fashion,” Tahiliani says. “Once Shabana Azmi picked up a beautiful Asha Sarabhai garment priced at Rs 8,000 and threw it on the ground because it stung,” he says. Ensemble’s clientele became the super rich and the NRIs but it wasn’t something Tahiliani had planned. The photographer shot the first campaign free because they were making art and “when Mohini Bhullar (then editor of Bombay magazine) saw the catalogue she rang. ‘Who are you, what is going on here?’ she asked.”

The next week they were on the cover of Bombay magazine. It was a creative and wild time. Ensemble hosted India’s first ever fashion show and the ones that followed were like rock concerts. Despite the fanfare, business was bad the first year. “In the first summer we sold brocade and nobody wears brocade in the summer. We had to learn everything by doing it ourselves,” he says. Three years after opening Ensemble, at 29, Tahiliani began to feel frustrated. He had always sketched but wanted training to design. “I wanted to learn to drape because back then nobody could. They could barely make a sleeve in India,” he says. In 1991, Tahiliani enrolled in the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York while Sal worked with her father. A year later he began fantasising about India. He dreamt of Rajasthan and peacocks, of an exoticism that he had begun to see from his travels across the country. “It became clear to me that I wanted to preserve the identity of India at a more cerebral level,” he says taking a deep drag on a cigarette.

“It’s a very privileged life, five star hotels, very rarefied, but after travelling through villages, I began to see beauty in a different way; Indian beauty rather than Indian-speaking Anglicised beauty,” he says. “I began to notice how different people wore textile in a different way and what defined us in India is that we could lavish any amount of care on a piece of textile.” He used to get jamawar (an elaborate weaving style used in Kashmir to make pashmina shawls) done on chiffon that could take more than a year to make, with five people working on it in Kashmir. “They were so exquisite and so weightless and they thought it was normal. They were not spoilt by social media or soap operas. They were self-contained, in the late 1980s,” he sighs.

By then his family were fighting over Ensemble. “I felt Delhi was more Indian,” he says and relocated and started a small studio in Chirag Delhi in 1995.

Around then, Minal Modi (industrialist Lalit Modi’s wife) approached Tahiliani to design her clothes for a society wedding. “I want to look like I am wrapped in a turban,” she said. So he made patterns on her body and that’s when he first understood what couture really meant.

Tahiliani’s star was in the ascendent. Jemima Goldsmith wore Tahiliani couture for her wedding to Imran Khan and he was the first Indian to show at Milan Fashion Week. Bhawna Sharma, one of India’s super models walked that show. “There was a power cut and we did our hair on the streets. The stylist covered our hair in sugar syrup. It was a mad time, those were the days of wilderness,” Sharma says.

Later, Aishwarya Rai, Nita Ambani, Katrina Kaif and just about anybody who could afford him wore his creations. “In India, they think if it’s expensive its couture. It’s total bullshit. People think that if it is bridal it’s couture. I think we have a new definition of couture in this country. They don’t understand the meaning of it. People who make organza shirts call it Bobby and Manju Grover Couture. Just getting it measured and made to fit you is not haute couture,” he says in outrage.

***

Couture is French for dressmaking while haute means high. These garments are one off pieces that are made to measure for a specific client. The term was first formalised after World War II in 1945 to prevent misuse of the name and is a legally protected term—and fashion houses are only granted the designation by the French Ministry of Industry.

To be haute couture, a label needs to maintain a Parisian workroom with a minimum of 20 employees, and it must produce at least 25 outfits per season. These pieces are constructed almost entirely by hand, and prices regularly range in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single piece. Each season the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture (CSHC) meets to decide which guest designers get to show during the haute couture calendar in Paris though these designers are not formally included in the couture club. They merely have the privilege to show alongside the likes of Chanel and Dior.

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The intention of couture is to communicate in the manner that fine art does, to further beauty. The designer conveys the same artistic expression that a painter or sculptor does, thereby justifying the price. Some pieces can cost as much as a Rolls Royce. In 2000 the lines between fashion and art were further blurred by a collaboration between British artist Tracey Emin and British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. The result was an Emin art piece titled “I’ve got it all” in which the artist is grabbing money in a tiny Westwood dress. Westwood used that image as an advertisement that questioned not just art and fashion but the commodification of both. Emin was criticised for degrading art by interacting with the triviality of fashion.

“Fashion is not something that exists only in dresses. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, it has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening,” Coco Chanel once said. Once relegated to the super rich and their soirees, couture is accessible to all in the age of social media where Angelina Jolie’s leg in Versace couture or Jennifer Lawrence’s fall at the Oscars in Dior couture is hashtagged and shared around the world. Despite the visibility, the clientele of these pieces as Bruno Pavlovsky, the president of fashion at Chanel called them, remain “the happy few.”

In India, this translates to Bollywood and business royalty. Tahiliani says, “I’ve never cared about or been enamoured by Bollywood”, but there is a brick wall with pictures of the rich and famous in his creations.

Balvir Nad the “Masterji” or the expert tailor at Tahiliani Design Studio in Gurugram talks about this wall with pride. His work plays a crucial role in dressing some of India’s most beautiful. Tahiliani’s design studio is a red three-story building in the heart of textile land where export houses have plastered signs that read “no child labour employed here”. The studio is sleek and minimal, his office is at the back filled with light that filters in front from the top.

Unlike his stores that are dark and dramatic, his work space is uncluttered and natural. It is as big as a fashion college and inside, Nad slaps his cutting table with conviction. “This is hot couture,” he says.

Upstairs in the Design Lab, models have already started slipping in and out of the new collection, ahead of the shoot in Jaipur. A small makeshift changing room has been erected for the women. The men change in the open. Everyone is waiting for Tahiliani. Aseem Kapoor, the design head, scrutinises each piece. He tugs on a gilet, fixes a concept saree and points out how the kalidar kurtas blend military detailing with aari (an extensive needlework technique using beads) work and metal accents. The end result is statuesque garments from the Hussar range. The collection celebrates the separates, the ease of wearing a draped Tahiliani top with a pair of jeans. He points at a jumpsuit printed with trompel’oeil stripes inspired by miniatures, etchings, manuscripts and carvings from the age of Renaissance. “TT can blend past and present, that’s a gift he has,” says Kapoor. He seamlessly merges artistry with nuanced contemporary silhouettes. A dhoti will retail for over Rs 10,000.

Tahiliani’s arrival amps up the energy. Models rush to kiss him, he offers the women who have been eating apples and bananas a bowl of chips and starts a commentary with statements such as “socialism was bad for the embroidery” and “it’s too stylised, people won’t understand it.” Tahiliani is a big talker with a big personality and a tireless drive. Six hours into the fittings, when last minute alterations are still being made, the initial excitement around the clothes has waned. Instead there is lukewarm enthusiasm as models change in and out of outfits while tailors pin them in what is back breaking unglamorous work. Kanika Gupta brings feathered jewellery. Tahiliani fusses over beaded chokers that cover the whole neck. Rows of shoes are lined up and occasionally a pair goes missing, people get rattled but nobody loses their cool.

When someone screws up, “the team” takes the fall. Tahiliani is painting dyed stockings that aren’t dark enough with a deep blue marker which stains his hand, models struggle to understand how to wear outfits, the intern works super diligently in the hope of getting hired, and someone brings cup after cup of coffee while a runner is walking up and down with a European sized mannequin wearing a very Indian lehenga. On another mannequin is a swatch of a spring print, of the firmament at night with silk thread flowers scattered on it.

A tailor is pinning a drape tulle neck line on to Palak Gupta, the model so that the proportion is just right. “There is a delicate balance of sheer and skin,” Tahiliani says and he never wants skin to win. Dayana Kavernma gets fitted in a panelled gara border contoured dress while the male models, Nitin Gupta and Prabhjot Singh, are smoking downstairs and claim they don’t make enough money to ever afford any one of these pieces and anyway, it is not fashionable to be fashionable. The models take a selfie and Tahiliani orders, “No images on social until the campaign is out,” and everybody agrees.

***

Tahiliani’s customers have evolved and their tastes have changed. “To be honest I’ve never really bothered, I’ve just gone on my own trip but now for the first time I’m trying to get data and there is a vast world,” he says with a wave of the hand. The first focus group discussion he held was in 1990 at the Sea Lounge in Taj where six women were asked what was missing and what could change in the clothes. The second one was held when his son returned from Wharton Business School two years ago. His son was keen to understand the customers. “We were kind of all over the place,” Tahiliani says.

For about a decade, during the early aughts, Tahiliani’s star descended and he moved out of relevance. With the arrival of new designers such as Rahul Mishra, Rajesh Pratap Singh and Masaba Gupta and a slew of others who had technical training and an urban cool, he seemed dated. “It was like when Coco Chanel came back in 1953-54. They booed her for two seasons and walked out. She then chopped the tweed skirt and suddenly she was hot again,” he says.

After spending days in bed, soul searching and meditating Tahiliani addressed reality: “There is a whole world of competition around you now and you got to be cognisant. The Internet and perfect competition has put pressure on us.” Then he came out with a collection called the “New Democrazy” and was firmly back in the game.

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“I love Rohit Bal’s clothes. I mean he stayed static but now it’s kind of the same, similar prints. I like Pero very much, I like Arjun Saluja very much. The younger designers have had a full education, they have had four years in art school, they have learnt the ropes, they have interned, they didn’t need to learn so much by falling on their face. I was a big fan of Manish Arora but his work hasn’t evolved. I liked what Rahul Mishra did in the beginning but it’s much of the same old. He’s trying to be trendy while he’s doing embroidered lehengas so I don’t see the connect. Someone clever like Sabyasachi will take a mangtikka and put it in a way that will make it into a trend that he owns. I don’t own it. You don’t own it. But you can market it to people and make them think you own it,” he says.

The new market has challenged every designer. Tahiliani has become stricter to stop people from pirating his designs. He also has a prêt line—ready to wear, more accessible clothes. “The prices of brands have become much tighter,” he says.“The upper middle class is buying it but how do you define the middle class?” First the lawyers and doctors, professionals in well paying jobs began shopping for his prêt line. “They buy more carefully, they buy one or two things but they will treasure it,” he says. He talks about a “lovely Parsi lady” who bought one customised outfit every year for her birthday. “It was a special treat,” she would tell him.

***

Everyone except for one model turned up at the airport on time for the flight to Jaipur. For Tahiliani, the airport is a place to gauge what India wears. He marvels at women in tight kurtas with a slit that reveals clingy lycra churidars where you can see cellulite. He notices how most women wear similar Swarovski studded chappals. “It’s all heinous and who looks the best, the 65-year-old grandmother,” he says showing pictures on his iPhone as proof. The grandmothers are in kotadoria, (A uniquely patterned saree from Kota) some have flowers in their hair and kajal in their eyes. There are two women on the flight in cotton petticoats, a kurti and a striped kotadoria wrapped around them. “They are big and ungainly,” he says but they look “graceful”. He finds it sad when people become “totally imitative”, when young girls and middle-aged women in short skirts display their bums and their panty lines. “They think they are being very Western and cool and you think poor thing, you have given up something you could look so lovely in,” he says.

***

How did the Indian woman go from her grandmother wearing a sari everyday to today’s pant-shirt world? Writing in 1752 in the Political Discourses, the philosopher David Hume states: “If we consult history, we shall find, that, in most nations, foreign trade has preceded any refinement in home manufactures, and given birth to domestic luxury. The temptation is stronger to make use of foreign commodities, which are ready for use, and which are entirely new to us, than to make improvements on any domestic commodity, which always advance by slow degrees, and never affect us by their novelty.”

Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E Muller write in Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations: “Throughout the underdeveloped world global corporations are thus successfully marketing the same dreams they have been selling in the industrialised world. Stimulating consumption in low-income countries and accommodating local tastes to globally distributed products is crucial to the development of an ever-expanding Global Shopping Center.”

India crossed its own Rubicon in 1991, when the country opened its economy. It allowed global fashion to set up in India; New York and Paris to decide what a section of Indian women wore. It forced ever changing western ideas of beauty and self-image.

“So now it’s all about the ball gowns,” Tahiliani says. Women come in requesting giant trails that almost always get wrecked because India is not “some palazzo in Rome”.

***

The Raj Mahal palace is equal bits divine and disturbing. Tahiliani came across it because someone was “bitching” about it on a group chat saying it was “totally over the top.” “I said ‘oh my God, it’s divinely over the top’. To me it has this lovely blend of the past and India. It is modern and a bit kitschy.”

Tahiliani’s design head, Kapoor echoes the idea as he walks me through the new collection. A kurta isn’t just a kurta, it is the story of India in a kameez, the marriage of different states, of different cultures in one item of clothing. “India Modern,” he says imitating Tahiliani. Kapoor and Tahiliani have been working together 14 years.

One kurta has traditional kamdani (a kind of gold and silver thread embroidery) work out of Lucknow combined with a digitally printed bodice that is draped. There is a touch of Swarovski in a technique Tahiliani has learnt over many years. There are three techniques in one kurta and this is what makes a Tahiliani piece “unique and cool”.

The key, though, is to do it in a way that is production-friendly. “We can really produce hundreds of this,” Kapoor says as he moves through pieces on the rack in the hair and makeup suite. Another kurta is part embroidery and part digital with a mix of different fabrics put together to make one whole. The’re is thread work, computer and handwork. Fringing adds weight and the embroidery is the finest thread work. The gota (an applique technique) is from Hyderabad, the net from Lucknow and the lace from Gujarat. The kurta is homage to the skills found around India. “It will come at a certain price because it’s not one thing or the other,” he says.

Midway through the tour de collection, the intern rushes into the hair and makeup room in a state of panic. There is a stain on the kurta that will be shot next. “Take it to the laundry,” Aseem directs her. Things go wrong all the time. A bulb is missing on the chandelier and it messes with the shot, the many framed pictures of the royals on the mantelpiece interfere with Hormis Antony Tharakan, the photographer’s vision, and the lighting is not and can never be absolutely perfect.

Tharakan shoots everywhere, all rooms are open and access is never denied despite the management having meetings in huddles voicing reservations. Models have posed on the stairs, “broken and angled” their bodies near the piano and walked back and forth across the foyer as a drone hovers above them. Countless cigarettes have been smoked at the entrance and a marble ashtray is full of butts. Again the management disapproves and smoking has been moved to the lawns under a tree that provides shade from the mean Rajasthan sun.

In the room where the shoot is taking place Tahiliani sits on the floor and directs the models. In the background an erratic mix of house music, Donna Summers and qawali is playing. Tahiliani is constantly cracking jokes to lighten the mood. The models are getting tired and Sharma, one of India’s most famous older models now working as a stylist orders them to drink water, stay hydrated and take two minutes off. “They are the ones in front of the camera,” she says. “They need special attention.”

Sharma is sharp with jewellery, picking pieces without thinking, transforming a black shirt by adding an embellished elastic armband that makes it look part Victorian and part Rajasthani. The models give it their all, the finest jewellers in Jaipur have brought diamonds and pearls for the shoot, and the management refreshes the beet juice and serves canapés at tea time. The jewellery, like the rooms in the palace, like the clothes being modelled, will be on sale once the shoot is over.

***

Indian style has long oscillated between nouveau riche and neo-royal. One relied on lineage to justify access to luxuries and the other newfound wealth. “Most Indians just want to be royal. How many royal costumes can you look at? There is nothing new in royal India so you are looking at the same hundred portraits. Western fashion changed every century and portraiture documented it. There are a million things to refer to. Our own history besides this period has been destroyed. Being colonised and then socialist we didn’t build a history. The history was fighting somebody off for two hundred years,” he says. Tahiliani is a history buff with an opinion on everything, from Nehru chic to how he would dress Modi. Neo-royals continue to be inspired by the courts, Nawabs, maharanis and courtesans. A Ravi Varma painting is their muse. This is a fantasy that imposes traditional hierarchies by the elite.

The nouveau riche are striving for validation and desire to be among the elite. “I’ll never forget Minal Modi saying, ‘I don’t need a logo. If I put my hand into a bag, my hand knows if it’s luxury or not from the way it feels. When I see someone wearing five logos, I know they don’t know.’ Look at Ralph Lauren. They had a small polo horse and now it’s huge. It covers the man from his pectoral to his rib cage. The nouveau has to scream it,” he says in disgust.

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But the new entrant, the middle class, is changing the game one purchase at a time. This is India’s big prêt-à-porter moment. Prêt or ready to wear is factory-made fashion. It is not necessarily mass-produced but is available to a wide variety of customers and comes in different sizes. These are pieces off the rack and not meant to fit perfectly nor do they require a tailor. They may take inspiration from haute couture but lack its exclusivity.

Prêt-à-Porter collections show twice a year in India at the Autumn/Winter and Spring/Summer fashion weeks and cater to climate as well as economic changes. The most famous fashion weeks where Prêt-à-Porter is shown are the big four: New York, Paris, Milan, and London and are open to celebrities, press and fashion bloggers while haute couture is on an invite-only guest list.

In India, the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI)is responsible for organising the Amazon India Fashion Week. Tahiliani has shown at these since the beginning.  But the fashion weeks have got out of hand as each city hosts its own, over-populating an already confused market.

***

There is no company that can chase trends and fill up wardrobes faster than Zara. It is the reason two mothers in my daughter’s parent-teacher meeting are wearing the same thing, why so many young girls at the mall look like each other, the reason Indian prêt is forced to come into its own.

When Zara, owned by international clothing giant Inditex, opened its first store in Delhi in 2010 retail history was written. The store recorded the largest single-day sale by an international outlet. By 2014, with an annual turnover of Rs 405 crore, Zara earned six times more than the second largest brand Louis Philippe and a bit more than the largest department chain Shoppers Stop. Zara’s success was attributable to its ability to chase fashion trends around the world and to move a catwalk design from runway to shop floor in two weeks.

Tahiliani isn’t blind to this and spoke to mass distributors such as Reliance Trends but didn’t take it further. “The clothes were like a mass pile, it hadn’t gone into the fashion. It was utility with pretence of glamour in a nice air-conditioned environment. The way it was stacked and packed would hurt us,” he says.

Others haven’t taken such an enlightened approach. Designer Raghavendra Rathore, partnered with Shopper’s Stop to launch a new co-branded line as early as 2004.

Dana Thomas, a fashion and culture journalist, in her book Deluxe writes: “Corporate tycoons and financiers saw the potential… and turned their sights on a new target audience: the middle market, that broad socioeconomic demographic. The idea, luxury executives explained, was to ‘democratise’ luxury, to make luxury ‘accessible’. It all sounded so noble. Heck, it sounded almost communist. But the goal, plain and simple, was to make as much money as heavenly possible.”

“Fast fashion is a derivative of prêt, technical differences are nominal but their impact is very different. Fast fashion is for a much larger mass audience than prêt. With the democratisation of luxury that happened ten years ago, prêt has become more luxurious. The main point of difference is pricing and the number of drops per season. Emporio Armani would have a drop every two months, whereas Zara has a drop every two weeks,” says Rana, the fashion journalist. The immediacy that fast fashion has brought has accelerated the luxury sector too. There are more fashion cycles and a greater number of collections. Burberry, a British luxury fashion house, led the change by moving away from traditional seasonal collections and allowing customers to buy off the ramp, breaking with a tradition where collections were only available months after their debut on the catwalk. This pressure has seen unprecedented turnover and changes in the biggest houses, from Yves Saint Laurent, Lanvin, Oscar de la Renta to Balenciaga. The need for speed has led to an increase in allegations of plagiarism.

Employees have stolen sketches from Tahiliani. There was one who would scan the sketches and send them to copycats across the country. In another instance, collections in stores have been bought out and mass produced by cheap spin-offs. To understand how fast fashion companies manage to stay ahead of the curve, Kapoor has travelled to Surat, at the heart of the fast fashion industry, to see how they do what they do.

Factories in Surat are investing in machinery used to copy western and Indian designers. Kapoor noticed new production techniques in the several visits he has made. He learnt about digital printing on a sheeted basic stretch jersey. There was a technique to take a tulle, print it digitally and get it crinkled. Surat’s innovations will come in handy for Tahiliani’s team. “We look at something and think, ‘how can we get a computer to design this’?” he said.

It takes about six months to get the collections to the store, what was envisioned for spring-summer goes to fall-winter. “We’ll always do a craft orientated thing but a little bit of business is good as well. That’s when the computer came in and that started off with Surat. Ready-to-Wear is about numbers, about selling and getting the piece to many people,” he says.

But there is a lot of copying. Rohit Bal, one of the grandest couturiers of India, said, “It is despicable, it’s rampant and people who are doing this are living off other people’s creativity and talent. They are cutting into the business. They are making cheap copies and selling the product at an extremely low price. They are thieves and scoundrels breaking the law.”

***

The shoot started late because of confusion about the hair. Tahiliani has flown in a team from Dubai and despite his fondness for hair with texture, Shin Desu, the hair stylist has blow-dried the hair straight. Once the crisis is resolved, the middle parting is too severe so they have to start again. When the mangteeka is placed in the centre it looks too conventional and is placed on the side. Then Tahiliani notices that one of the models’ nail polish is chipped and he cannot have them photographed like that.

Tharakan, the photographer, is stressed  because there are too many people directing him. He’s looking for Barua, the PR person, who is under pressure because the shoot won’t be done in time. Abshishek Gupta, a member of FDCI, designer, musician and all-round creative mind had been called in to do “interesting things”.

This translates into taking beautiful pictures for Tahiliani’s Instagram feed on his iPhone. The account is a product of months of deliberation. “I’m being told my shoots are too stylised, you need to simplify more than this and I said, if I have to simplify more then it’s not going to work because fashion shoots are very stylised and people have to put them in context.” But that doesn’t work anymore, art and creativity have submitted to Instagram.

In an industry where fusion has lost meaning, Tahiliani asserts that his garments are neither Indian nor western. The flapper dress is a kurta, the dhoti is a pant. “That’s why I have a hard time with the department stores because they don’t know how to display it and where. I’ve said, fuck it, this is who I am and this is what I’m going to do,” he says, “Problem is they are always giving me references from the west. We need to be more knowledgeable about our own history.”

He faults Indian magazines. “Indian Vogue is the only Vogue that doesn’t have a national personality. Italian Vogue looks like Italy, English Vogue is very English. We want to be western,” he says. On another occasion he asks “What does our Vogue magazine promote? What is that black dress of Kendall Jenner in the May issue? It is aspirational. And I reckon that dress is not even available in India. English Vogue can’t carry things unless you have a stockist in the country,” he says.

He wasn’t alone in questioning Vogue’s choice. Social media was aflutter about it and columnists were on it. Vogue India was forced to respond: “In the last 10 years, Vogue India has had only 12 international covers, including Kendall Jenner, in 2017. Therefore, statistically, 90 per cent of our covers are Indian! And we are proud of that.”

Ragini Ahuja, who designs under the label Ikai said: “We are all more global now—well travelled, well read and more aware. The contemporary silhouette could be a classic white shirt with kimono sleeves or a boxy kurta with hard-core leather details. Today, we are all free to dress how we desire. We believe in creating utilitarian art—oversized boxy silhouettes are adorned with geometric graphic illustrations. And we believe in using the traditional/local techniques in the most non-traditional ways.”

She won the country awards at IFS17 in London. One of her pieces was a present-day version of the sheep skin cape inspired by the Drokpa community of Ladakh. Her Instagram is full of stars, Shraddha Kapoor in a pinstriped shirt, Sonakshi Sinha in an Oxblood Stripe Suit and leather fringe bracelet or Jaqueline Fernandes in denim on denim.

***

When the shoot finally started it took place in the darbar room where Adil Ahmad, the creative director of Good Earth’s interior design division had plastered the room with wallpaper. It drew upon India’s rich heritage, when the only people who shopped were the royals. Royal Chic. That’s what the industry called it. It was a tried and tested set. Aishwarya Singh and Dayana Kavernma moved their bodies in the few poses they had mastered. The furniture had been moved back and the team leaned on the sofa as they watched Tharakan direct the models. Tahiliani was boisterous and excited. He had settled in and found his groove. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

Aseem fixed Nida who was in a sari draped gown, while Palak was in a beaded version in thread and bugle beads of vintage silver. Dayana perched on the hand of the chair exposing her entire leg. “Can we sit a little less of that leg?” Tahiliani asked Bhawna. “I’m 55, I’m very conservative.”

Gupta followed the models around. He was a man of few words, and called them by crooking his finger. Nobody knew who he would call or where, and when he shot with his iPhone he did with the same enthusiasm as Tharakan. For an industry finding its identity in fashion, “royal chic was the style statement of India,” he says. “I think it’s passé. I think village chic is very important. You see people who have nothing but have so much style. I think when you are completely covered and carry yourself, that is sexy, more than revealing anything. We are not comfortable flaunting our money or being super chic, everything is so confused in modern India.”

Tahiliani’s aim now is to make clothes more accessible. As ready-to-wear in India improves in cuts and silhouettes, he is getting ready to expand. He has built one more factory where the embroidery is done. They have bought another two plots of land. “One day I’m going to take over the entire block and make it nice. It’s so squalid. There has to be a certain standard of luxury,” he says.

“Everything can be made more mass market. But by definition of mass you have to become simpler and simpler and more A line, less stylised and I like stylised. I’m interested in creatively fulfilling my mind first. So if I have to go to work and do little T-shirts then why do you need me? That’s mass market, I won’t sell something with my name because it’s just plain. So I have to work that out. I would love to do simpler kurtas and simpler dhoti drapes but you know they are intimidated to go into the shops,” says Tahiliani.

He has thought about approaching Fab India. “They have 140 stores and stand for a certain value and have tried a line of clothing called Fables and it’s not really cool. I’d love to be creative director of that and do four days a month or six and it’s something I’ve thought about. They have the distribution,” he says. Such joint ventures have been seen from Karl Lagerfeld (who designs for Chanel and Fendi) and H&M but it has a fair amount of critics.

“‘Fashion,’ in the sense now being co-opted by the high street, used to mean designer fashion; that is, something made by a creator who puts care and thought into what he or she is creating. It means carefully crafted designs made with attention to detail and aesthetic sensibility. But somewhere along the line, the definition of ‘fashion’ shifted. I invite anyone to argue that fast fashion brands produce ‘fashion’ in the original sense of the word. They may sell decent clothing at affordable prices—but not fashion. Providing access to affordable clothing is a noble goal. But, alas, this goal was perverted a long time ago by the rise of irresponsible consumer behaviour that has transformed the act of shopping into a leisure activity. Real style is a matter of taste. And taste is a matter of experience. It takes effort and knowledge. Buying into a style, quickly and cheaply, inevitably leads to the disposability of style. It’s like reading the Cliff’s Notes instead of the book,” writes Eugene Rabkin, editor-in-chief of Style Zeitgeist magazine in the Business of Fashion.

***

India’s big prêt moment—even before Zara—was in 1994. In a July 15 story written that year, “a recent study by the apparel consultancy firm Technopak shows that just 1 per cent of the country’s total 15 to 24 population of roughly 175 million spends Rs 1,200 crore a year on ready-to-wear garments. And it is estimated that this urban focus figure is likely to rise to Rs 1,800 crore by the turn of the century. As of now, designer-wear does form a minuscule segment, but market-smart designers are hopeful of weaning away much of this crowd.”

It took almost two decades for the industry to institute changes that would start catering to a burgeoning middle class. This comes at a time when the branded garments segment will grow to 48 per cent of the overall readymade segment in 2019, from 35 per cent in 2014.

The market for readymade is estimated at $45 billion; the domestic market is around $27 billion. The Indian branded apparel industry is estimated to be $10 billion in size and growing at 10-12 per cent a year. Between 2010-2011 and 2015-16, modern retail’s share has increased from 7 per cent to 16 percent and this is set to grow to 37 per cent of the retail trade by 2021. Even online retail is expected to grow to $44 billion by 2018 from $13 billion in 2014, with apparel accounting for 31 per cent.

Unsurprisingly, some of the country’s biggest designers are launching new, more affordable labels. Rohit Bal boldly said in 2014: “I can’t do cheap clothes for women. I think women should be dressed richly in expensive and beautiful clothes.” Since then Bal has opened new stores across India with a price point at about Rs 30,000. He said people now look for value for money. “We will change as the market changes,” he said over the phone. “We still make beautiful clothes but we tone it down so it does not cut into our look and not take away from quality. But we have noticed that people buying this are still buying haute couture. It’s not that they stop buying it. They want a less expensive alternative. It’s better we do it than someone else.”

Designers such as Manish Arora launched “Indian by Manish Arora X Koovs” on Koovs.com that sells shirts and joggers for Rs 1,965. The Indian aesthetic is prevalent in all the pieces. Raghavendra Rathore, the “king of bandhgala” has launched the Imperial Clothing Company which derives inspiration from the aristocratic styling of Imperial India at an affordable prêt price of Rs 4,000.

***

In a bid to address the problems faced by the sector, Minister for Textiles Smriti Irani launched Textile India 2017, a mega textile fair to showcase designs from across the country. The biggest names in the business, including Anita Dongre, Manish Arora, Manish Malhotra, Rajesh Pratap Singh, Rahul Mishra, Ritu Kumar, Rohit Bal, Sabyasachi, and Tarun Tahiliani took part in the initiative. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the fair.

Tahiliani was dazzled by some beautiful khadi and anti-fit. “There was a beautiful coat by Rajesh Pratap, a young Assamese designer did fabulous draped dresses. Textiles 2017 inspired you and made you think of fabric in a new way,” he said. But there was disconnect between the government’s reading of fashion and the reality of the fashion industry.

“It was a cool show but I didn’t understand the point,” he said. He questioned the timing, “Whose cycle is this, to hold a fashion event in the end of June during the monsoon in Gandhinagar. We were not clear on what this was. But this government is smart to use the designers to project an image. But it could have been better. A designer could have been given a region to work on. There is no connect to the world of luxury fashion.”

***

Cover Story at Infinity Mall in Mumbai’s Malad has one aim: to sell and sell fast. It is a fast fashion brand by Kishore Biyani’s Future Style Lab, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Future Group. The collection is inspired by the big four fashion weeks of Paris, London, New York and Milan. Designs look like they belong on a 20-something’s Instagram feed or in Zara and H&M stores. Cover Story takes a page out of Zara and H&M’s book. It will be refreshing 10 per cent of its collection every week and phasing out 10 per cent as well.

“Our intention is to build stores that are as large as those of H&M and Zara, right now the stores (Cover Story) are smaller,” Biyani told Mint in April.

Does this worry Kapoor? “I think Indian designers will have to get more and more creative. You can’t compete with them in T-shirts, they can do numbers, their turnaround is so fast so the game has to be upped. The customer will not forget the refinement. I can’t compete with a draped T-shirt with Zara but I have an upper hand on a digitally printed T-shirt with Swarovski. I see the biggest celebrities wearing Zara. They are going to Zara for the basics but Zara can never do a refined chikankari,” he says.

***

After a long day of shooting, the doors to the City Palace were opened for Tahiliani and his friends for a private soiree. Canapes and all sorts of drinks were served and for this Tahiliani wore a white shirt. He’s seldom if ever seen without his trademark black shirt and black trousers. “I want a uniform. I do things all day. Fashion allowed you to slip into a role. When it starts becoming problematic, an issue for people and for everyone around is when it starts becoming hierarchical to the point. There are many beautiful things in my cupboard, hundreds of shoes and I wear two. It’s like some terrible museum and I’m giving it away slowly. I don’t want to make choices,” he says.

Colette, one of the most magnificent museums of fashion, a Paris institution, a launchpad for young designers and a shopping destination for industry insiders and tourists alike, will close its doors on the Rue St.-Honoré in December. Ensemble re-opened this year with a brand new store and a carefully curated collection by Tina Tahiliani (Tarun’s sister) with designers from across India.

“People say, why are you still involved in Ensemble, you’re breeding your own competition and that’s not true and there’s a whole world of design. And I have always believed in taking an Indian designer and putting him out there. I’ve never been interested in being the enfant terrible. In our 50s we need to graduate to another role,give back to society in a responsible way,” he says.

That night as people took turns playing house music, Tahiliani danced the most without a care in the world and slipped away before everyone else. “Never overstay your welcome,” he said the following morning as he was back at work.

(Cover story of the August 2017 edition of Fountain Ink)

BY ANKIT AGRAWAL

Indian musical instruments are remarkable for their beauty and variety of forms which, as seen in the paintings at Ajanta, have remained largely unchanged in the last 2000 years.

Among all the classical musical instruments, the tanpura, or tambura as it is called in south India, is special as it crosses the divide between Hindustani and Carnatic music, between dhrupad and khayal, vocal and instrumental, and classical and folk music. This drone instrument is considered the foundation of Indian music, and vocalists and instrumentalists adjust their pitch according to it. In fact, every student of Indian classical music is expected to learn to strum and tune it.

Going by the seminal texts on performing arts such as the Natya Sastra, the Sangitaratnakara, and scholarly commentaries on these works across centuries, the concept of the drone has always remained integral to performance practices. Purandardasa (16th century), the pitamaha of Carnatic music, thus highlighted the importance of the tanpura (“one who plays the tambura has crossed the ocean of bhavsagar”), and composed it in raga Sindhubhairavi. The tambura also finds mention in Sangam era literature like Tolkappiyam and Silappadikaram.

These photographs are a visual documentation of the instrument-making process, from the fields of Pandharpur where the gourds (tumba) are farmed to the artisans of Miraj who make the tanpura. Both places are in Maharashtra. Other important places known for the making of the tanpura are Thanjavur, Rampur and Varanasi.

In the last century or so, Miraj overshadowed the other centres due to a confluence of factors. It had access to good quality raw material and was close to centres of music in western and southern India. The fact that Miraj boasts a railway junction has also played an important role in its growth as a centre for instrument making and repairing.

Also, helpful acts of patronage, a favourable climate, the existence of Khwaja Meerasaheb’s dargah and proximity to the vibrant classical music scene in centres like Dharwad, Pune and Mumbai, many artists settled in Miraj.

The foundation of instrument making in Miraj was laid by accident in the 1850s when acting upon a royal command Faridsaheb Shikalgar repaired the instrument of a visiting musician. The results of Faridsaheb’s success in this endeavour can be seen to this day.

(This work was produced under the aegis of Neel Dongre Award for Excellence in Photography 2016-17 and exhibited at the India International Centre in April-May 2017.)

(Ankit Agrawal is a Delhi-based journalist and photographer with broad interests in human rights, development, environment, and arts and culture. He has worked with Mint and Tehelka and contributed to BBC Hindi, and The Hindu among others. )

(Photo story published in the September 2017 edition of Fountain Ink)

BY ALIA ALLANA

On November 4, Yemen’s Houthi rebels fired a rocket aimed at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital.  It was an audacious move—the rebels had shown that they were willing to inflict mass civilian deaths inside Saudi Arabia. It also showed that the Houthi rebels had weapons that could target Riyadh. The rocket was shot down outside the city by Saudi forces using American-made Patriot surface-to-air missiles. The timing of the Houthi attack couldn’t be more significant. Around the same time Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman had ordered the arrest of 11 princes of the house of Saud including those holding defence portfolios and the billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for corruption. Prince Salman was the architect behind the Saudi-led coalition force that was engaged in battle in Yemen. As he conducted the purge, his country blamed Iran for empowering the Houthis. For Yemen, a country that has seen only war and death since 2015, it was just another day as the Arabian Peninsula’s latest battleground.

***

In Haidan no stone was without the scar of war. A town along the Yemen-Saudi Arabia border, Haidan’s people had started living in caves, cracks in the mountain their only refuge. While death stalked people, Nagda, the sole midwife in Haidan, went about bringing new life. Inside caves, in darkness, she delivered babies. Her kitchen knife cut umbilical cords. The war couldn’t stop her.

“Life doesn’t wait for anybody,” she would tell her husband.

“Nor does death,” he would argue.

Nagda travelled across three districts in Saada to help women. As the attacks there intensified, hospitals and clinics became targets. Each house in each village had its tale of tragedy. She knew of farmers blown to bits by cluster bombs when they took their sheep to graze. An airstrike in Saada had killed 47 people of whom 26 were children.

It was as though the Saudi-led coalition forces wanted to cleanse the rebel heartland of its people. Nagda got pregnant but continued to work. Often people paid her in food but most paid her with duas. When she went into labour, her husband ran from house to house for help. He didn’t get any. Nagda died giving birth.

Her husband named their daughter Eman, because that’s all he was left with: Faith.

***

Mediaeval Arabs used to say “In Yemen, there is wisdom”. It is one of the oldest centres of civilisation in the Middle East and its capital Sana’a has been inhabited for more than 2,500 years. Yemen is the poor tip of the Arabian Peninsula, bordered by oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Oman in the north and across the Red Sea from Ethiopia. It is mountainous and arid, its interior a maze of mud skyscrapers, hill towns and wadis. Yemenis live in skyline villages, isolated and protected, teetering above fertile valleys.

Once known as Arabia Felix, or Happy Arabia, Yemen’s fortunes have fallen. Competing tribes, secessionist movements, civil wars and corrupt governance have made Yemen the poorest country in the Middle East. Since 2015, the country has been the site of a civil war where old foes—former president Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Northern Houthi rebels—have joined hands in a face-off against a US-backed Saudi-led international coalition that supports exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Adding to this is the simmering Sunni-Shia rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the presence of jihadis. Yemen, also, has the second most heavily armed citizenry in the world.

The war has claimed over 10,000 lives and shows no signs of a slowdown. Forty-five per cent of Yemen’s population goes to bed hungry, 20 million—eighty-two per cent of the population—are reliant on aid, and over 2 million are internally displaced. It is home to the world’s worst cholera outbreak as clean water is a luxury. On cloudy days nothing works but the resilient Yemeni joke—at least we are a green country. Civil servants haven’t been paid in months, only 45 per cent of hospitals are operational, and only 30 per cent of the required medical supplies get in. Currently, a child under the age of five dies every 10 minutes of preventable causes. The UN estimates that the country requires $2.1 billion in humanitarian aid this year. The largest donors, America, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain and the United Arab Emirates, are the main actors in the war.

***

Abdo was a sea-hardened sailor and Raghda a Western-educated reporter. He used to smuggle khat and migrants, she used to travel across Yemen speaking to tribesmen. They met one night under a bomb-lit sky. Hundreds had gathered at al-Boraika port in Aden, Yemen’s main port city, and waved $100 bills, determined to leave a city where the dead were piling up on the streets. She waited to board his boat in May 2015.

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A woman with seven children was hysterical because she’d left her husband, a family of Syrian beggars and a broke Indian nurse pleaded for a free ride while Yemenis with British or American passports elbowed ahead. Above, Saudi jets circled the sky in a relentless air campaign against the Houthi rebels. American and British-made bombs hit military installations, homes and markets. Snipers from the Houthi-Saleh alliance competed with militias and loyalist soldiers associated with Hadi. This was a free-for-all: extremists from al-Qaeda and hardline armed Salafis joined the cacophony.

The port was part of the frontline and had already been targeted. The passengers piled on top of each other and when they couldn’t, they simply knelt. Abdo let her sit in his rat-infested cabin and set sail for Djibouti.

Over the 26-hour journey across the Red Sea he spoke about his home in Hodeida, a port on the Red Sea. It had fallen to the rebels, on October 2014, who had lined the shore with mines fearing a coalition invasion. He reminisced of simpler days when the only nuisance was Somali pirates lusting after khat. Fishermen had become suspects now and were often accused of carrying arms sent by the Iranians. Foreign navies soon began appearing at sea. That night the sea was calm. By the morning the calm was shattered when two elderly women were found dead. Couple of hours later a seven year-old-boy died of an asthma attack.

“The sea is a form of suicide,” he told her as they parted ways.

***

On the night of March 26, 2015 F-15s and F-16s from Saudi Arabia headed for Yemen. They were later joined by a nine-country Arabian and African coalition led by Saudi Arabia. The stated aims of Operation Decisive Storm are to reinstate Hadi and repel the Houthi Zaydis.

The Zaydis emerged following Zay’d, the fifth Imam’s uprising against the Ummayah Caliph in 724 CE. Under the Mutawakkilite Kingdon, they ruled North Yemen from 1918 until 1962. It was only under Ali Abdullah Saleh in 1978 that a nationalist and leftist army ushered Yemen into the modern age, severing all ties with the theocratic elite. “Zaydis are often referred to as the Sunnis of the Shia and the Shia of the Sunnis,” says Waleed Mahdi, Professor of US-Arab Cultural Politics at University of Oklahoma. Even in Saleh’s rule, Houthis continued to hold important political and military positions in Yemen.

Modern-day Zaydism started as a grassroots revivalist movement opposed to what was perceived as Saudi-backed Salafi expansion in north Yemen. It morphed into a militia under the leadership of Hussein al-Houthi who was killed in the first round of fighting in 2004. The current leader of the Houthis, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi is both a military man and a Zaydi preacher.

The Houthis are battle-hardened guerrillas who fought Saleh in a low-level insurgency from 2004 to 2010.  The Houthis were present in large numbers at Change Square in the days of the “Arab Spring” when Yemenis demanded the ouster of Saleh in 2011. After he resigned, they participated in the national dialogue but as the political transition faltered, the Houthis reverted to arms. They stormed the capital, Sana’a, in September 2014. A few months later they ousted Hadi, who fled to Aden. Abdel Malek appeared on TV after the bloodless coup and spoke of a second revolution in Yemen: “Yemenis will not allow despots to rule the country again,” he said. His focus was not military but the restoration of fuel subsidies and economic reform.

Their unlikely ally has been their former enemy, Saleh. He saw in the Houthis—strong fighters but poor administrators—an opportunity for revenge on those who turned on him in 2011.  Saleh has lorded over Yemeni politics with a unique blend of savvy and thuggishness since 1978. His 33- year rule has seen every institution gutted. But Saleh is a rare figure: a dictator overthrown by popular revolt who manages to remain in his country, unmolested.

Hadi is not without criticism. Weak and ineffectual, he never enjoyed genuine support among politicians or the army. He was elected to power for two years on February 21, 2012 in what was a one-candidate election. Many Yemenis view his presidency as illegal. He rules from exile in Riyadh while a faction of his internationally-recognised government is based in Aden.

***

When Mazen, a conservationist, was a boy his grandfather would tell him that Aden, built on the crater of an ancient volcano, was as old as human history itself. Local legends claim the city was founded by Cain and Abel. When his grandfather arrived from in Aden India, Arabic songs were sung to Indian music and new residents assimilated into Indian neighbourhoods. He called it “a city of tolerance”.

Temples stood next to churches, Zoroastrians worshipped at the Fire Temple, and synagogues were accommodated. In 1948 things started to change: Jews were the first to move out, temples began boarding up their doors and the church bells stopped chiming. “Preserving ancient sites will be important for the future,” Mazen’s grandfather would tell him. Dark days were coming, he warned as al-Qaeda reared its ugly face with bombings and assassinations. By 2011, al-Qaeda capitalised on post-Arab Spring chaos and settled in the southern provinces.

Five days after Hadi promised to raise Yemen’s flag on Mount Marran in Saada, the Houthi heartland, he abandoned his heavily guarded palace in Aden. The advancing Houthi rebels offered a bounty of $93,000 for the president’s capture on state television while Hadi was seen pleading for assistance to the UN, to the Arab League. There were rumours that he had dashed across the waters to Oman or Djibouti and onwards to Saudi Arabia.

The Houthis took their positions around the mountains. They hid in forts, around 500-year-old walls in the Husseini Mosque. Three men camped in the mosque. Mazen asked them to leave. Not far from the mosque, a group of about 10 men had entered the military museum. It was an old British colonial building. He looked around and couldn’t see weapons anywhere.

Then the coalition attacked. They flattened the mosque leaving just one minaret standing, knocked down the side façade of the museum. In the chaos of war, religious fanatics, al-Qaeda and hardline Salafis were determined to wipe out what they consider idolatry. The statue of Mary on the Saint Joseph Church was destroyed and Mazen appealed to the governor to protect antiquities. No one listened.

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So a group of friends began collecting valuables from the church. A few weeks later, it was set on fire by extremists. They now have in their possession Ottoman weapons and parchments and are keen to return it to their rightful owners.

“When the Christians return I will give it to them,” he says.

What about the government? I asked.

“We don’t believe in this government,” he said. “The flag of the independent South flies all over South Yemen, nobody believes in the legitimacy of Hadi. The only place he can fly the unified flag of Yemen is in his bathroom.”

Hadi rules in exile from Riyadh.

***

SSaudi Arabia has no clear endgame beyond putting Hadi back in power, securing its borders with Yemen and checking Iran’s power in the region. It assumed that given the size and sophistication of its air force and the prowess of Emirati ground troops, this would be a short war. They miscalculated badly.

Behind the Saudi-led misadventure in Yemen is Mohammad bin Salman, known popularly as MBS, the new Saudi crown prince. At 32, he is seen as a long-awaited young reformer with the potential to shake up the world’s most autocratic society, or as an impetuous and inexperienced princeling. The war in Yemen can be seen as an attempt to bolster his standing. Should he succeed and expand the Wahhabi dawah, Saudi’s religious beliefs, southwards he could legitimise himself in the eyes of the ulama, the traditional kingmakers.

But the war is being called Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam, according to experts. In a leaked email obtained by the online news site Middle East Eye in 2017, the crown prince wrote to Martin Indyk, former US ambassador to Israel, and Stephen Hadly, former US national security adviser saying, “I don’t care who wins, I want it to end.” Meanwhile, a UN panel investigating 10 air strikes by the coalition—in which at least 292 civilians were killed—found that most were the result of an “ineffective targeting process” or deliberate attacks on peaceful targets. The 63-page report (2017) claims that the “panel considers it almost certain that the coalition did not meet international humanitarian law requirements of proportionality and precautions in attack.” The panel considers that some of the attacks may amount to war crimes.

“The war in Yemen has produced 3.15 million internally displaced persons. Although the United States government has provided most of the bombs and is deeply involved in the conduct of the war, reportage on the war in English is conspicuously rare,” wrote Julian Assange when WikiLeaks released the Saudi Cables. Journalists have been denied access to cover the war. Recently the coalition blocked BBC journalists from travelling to Sanaa.

The Saudi Cables reveal the extent to which Saudi Arabia goes to monitor and co-opt Arab media. It is meticulous in ensuring that the right message is presented on Saudi Arabia and Saudi-related matters. The policy is “neutralisation” and “containment”. A “neutralised” journalist or media institution is one whose silence and co-operation has been bought. “Containment” consists of active propaganda where journalists and media are not only required to peddle the kingdom’s line but also lead attacks on critics.

The Houthis are no saints. When they took Sana’a in 2014, they shelled Yemen State TV and replaced media professionals with Houthi-affiliated media groups. The rebels used two Yemeni journalists as human shields while investigative journalist Mohammed al-Absi, known for reporting on a number of Houthi-related-corruption stories, was poisoned. A Houthi-controlled court issued a death sentence against journalist Yahya al-Joubayhy for being a “Saudi spy”.

The young leader of the Houthis, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi warned in 2016: “The media are more dangerous to our country than the nationalist and warring mercenaries.”

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the frontlines of this battlefield. Yemen is often referred to as the “forgotten war” because of lack of media coverage. However, even with the destruction of infrastructure, patchy cellular networks remain operational, and the Internet was never switched off the forces. Even as media found it difficult to enter Yemen, the activists and witnesses inside have continued to put out images and updates on the Web.  Leading Yemen’s twitterati is Hisham al-Omeisy who was picked up on August 12 by the Houthis and has hasn’t been heard since. 

***

In a country where Kalashnikovs are fired at weddings and grenades thrown in joy, when the war arrived, Ammar’s neighbour calmed petrified children by telling them it was just a “celebration”. With no electricity, Sana’a was covered in darkness. From the balcony, they’d watch the tracer shells from WWII era anti-aircraft guns light up the darkness. Often the shells would crash down or spray small metal shards. They seldom reached the target, the Saudi F15s. The bombers would target at random: military installations and homes, chicken farms and mountains. No one was safe. Ammar, a film maker, had settled into a nervous rhythm and on October 6, 2016, while he chewed khat with friends in the afternoon, he heard a massive explosion, and then another.

Their phones began to beep and ring.

The Al-Kobra Grand Hall had been hit while mourners gathered for the funeral of the Minister of Interior’s father. “It’s a mess,” he was told. Mourners had been trapped as chandeliers, air-conditioners and the ceiling caved in. Many were buried in the rubble. Under the hall were the guards with RPGs. These exploded. The Grand Hall went up in flames fast.

Videos began to stream into his Facebook feed. People were taking pictures with their mobiles and he was seeing chopped hands, a brain spilt on the ground. State TV didn’t censor anything. Hadi’s channel didn’t censor anything. “Day after day, they’d show horrible images,” he says. He’d hear people talk; someone found a hand in the garden or a head on the roof.

He decided to make a movie about the attack. “It’s my work of art not to show blood,” he says. Instead he spoke to families: to a young woman, a dentist who had just given birth and refused to believe her husband died. They haven’t found his body. To a 10 year-old who was protected by his father’s dead body. BBC was on the scene in a rare appearance. Its segment concluded by confirming that the missile responsible was American and not British. On the seventh day he completed The Great Crime, of Saudi war crimes in his city.

***

The attack on the funeral shook the international community. Initially, Saudi Arabia denied that jets from the coalition had been involved. But in a later statement “about the regrettable and painful bombing,” it accepted responsibility. The statement claimed that the attack which killed at least 140 people was based on “wrong information” provided by an unnamed party.

The US responded quickly. The National Security Council conducted an “immediate review” of its support for the coalition, claiming that “US security cooperation with Saudi Arabia is not a blank check”. America is crucial to Saudi Arabia’s mission: not only does it provide arms and logistical support but provides mid-air refuelling for Saudi warplanes. Without this, they would not be able to bomb Yemen. On June 13, a resolution to stop the sale of precision guarded munitions to Saudi Arabia was defeated by a 53-47 vote in the Senate.

The United Kingdom too is heavily invested in this war. Immediately after the strike at the funeral, the UK said it would present a draft resolution to the UN Security Council which calls for an immediate ceasefire. An earlier draft was rejected by Russia for not being strong enough. The new resolution would counter resolution 2216 that remains the key Security Council decision on Yemen. But the new draft was never circulated, apparently after pressure from Saudi Arabia.

Amnesty International has accused the US and UK of covering for Saudi Arabia. “They have received political support, logistical support, intelligence support and the provision of weaponry from the key allies the US and UK,” says James Lynch, Deputy Director of Global Issue. Since the attack on the funeral, the UK and US have increased arms export to Saudi Arabia during this conflict. In May 2017, President Trump signed an arms deal with Saudi Arabia worth $10 billion on what he described as a tremendous day. He called the bombs “beautiful.” Six months after the funeral strike, the British government approved a £283-million arms sale to Saudi Arabia. This includes combat aircraft components to the Saudi air force, bombs and missiles. New research by War Child UK found that British arms companies have earned more than £6 billion from trade with the Saudis during the war in Yemen.

***

Murad began weaving a narrative even before a bulldozer threw up dust as it cleared rubble from Sana’a’s streets. The façade of the building had been torn and all that remained was a wall. He drew a yellow hourglass but instead of sand he painted skulls.

Concrete, brick and stone skirted a classroom; a tree had collapsed next to a yellow desk in the courtyard of the school. On a wall he drew a mural of a child with a grenade instead of a textbook in his hand. His work appeared across Sana’a, it combined artistic expression with social and political commentary in a country where journalists were under lock and key.

He wanted to get into Taiz, a city under siege. He rented a car and travelled with a woman friend, a photographer. If the Houthi rebels thought they were family they were less likely to be stopped across the many checkpoints. They left Sana’a at 3 a.m. They wanted to get back after sunset on the same day. They took the long road because they had no other option. A four-hour journey took them 19 hours. They drove past bombed out villages and across cities like Dhamar where it seemed as though no building was left unbombed. On the road to Ibb a crucial bridge had been blown up. They took another route and drove through a small river.

Taiz, the cultural heart of Yemen, is a city on its knees under a Houthi siege. Women smuggle medicines under their burqas, cars are prohibited from the ring road and donkeys ply over mountains with essential supplies. Murad wanted to target areas that were destroyed. It was impossible to get in, so he went as far as he could. He painted on a rusted pipe in the al-hwban area. A picture of a young girl in a dress watering a rose that grew out of a mortar.

He tried to keep working. The three art shops of Sana’a remained open. But during war, he said, “It is not one of the important things to care about.” The embargo, the blockade, the siege meant that there was a 100-150 per cent increase in prices. A 5 ml pot of colour used to cost 850 rial and now costs 1700 rial. It’s been four months since he’s made anything. He needs to sell paintings that will support his work on the streets. He doesn’t want anyone to pay for that, he doesn’t want to affect the message’s honesty.

***

Parts of the country are rubble. Rather than moving towards dialogue, the coalition and allied fighters have opened a new front in Saada, the Houthi heartland. Over the past decades both Saudi Arabia and Saleh sponsored Salafi-Wahhabi madrassas and used Sunni Islamists for political goals. The aim was to weaken the Zaydi elite. The attack began on Ashura began in October 2016. Border towns was taken by coalition fighters despite the stiff resistance from the Houthi forces. They moved towards Kutaf, once a site for a popular Salafi madrasa and centre for anti-Shia agitation. Members of Yemen’s Wa’ila tribe, some of whom have adopted the Saudi brand of Salafi-Wahhabism, offered the Saudi-allied fighters shelter. Soon the mercenaries, the “Afghan-Arabs” arrived on the scene. There is footage on YouTube which shows AQAP fighters fighting alongside the coalition forces.

The Wa’ila who had fought wars with the Houthis saw this as a moment to exact revenge and have integrated with Saudi-paid  Sudanese fighters in the offensive against Saada which was under Houthi control since March 2017. The Houthis have not suffered in silence: They have fired Katyusha rockets on a Saudi army stronghold in Jizan. In an intense battle four cars came to a military position and carried off the bodies of four soldiers while Saudi soldiers pulled the bodies of their wounded men. Later in the month, the Houthi snipers killed six Saudi soldiers in Jizan. In June 7 Saudi soldiers were shot at the Alab crossing. The Saudi offensive, however, was met with stiff resistance. Politically this is headed for disaster since Hadi has appointed a Wa’ila tribesman, Hadi Tirshan al-Wa’ili, a dedicated Salafi, as governor of Saada.

***

On May 7, the coalition dropped leaflets warning Saada residents to leave. Ten days later, UN satellites showed that a total of 1,171 structures in Saada city had been damaged or destroyed by air strikes.

There’s no water in the pipes. Electricity was cut on day one of the war. More than 350 trucks with wheat flour, sugar and salt were hit while delivering aid. Most villages on the border have been destroyed and the toll in Saada stands at 3,000 civilians. This is the frontline of the war where Saada’s famed grape farms are targets. More than 50 farms were attacked by airstrikes in one go. Ninety per cent of the population here is displaced.

“The Yemeni flag has never left Marran,” says Loai who works with internally displaced persons. “But unfortunately Hadi flies the the KSA and UAE in Aden and not the Yemeni.”

The Houthis retaliate with long-range rocket strikes and cross-border raids into Saudi Arabia. These have grown more powerful since late May 2017. The arsenal supposedly has BM-21 and BM-27 multiple rocket launchers and advanced Iranian-supplied anti-tank systems such as the Metis-M, Kornet-E, and RPG-29. Saudi homes are pockmarked with shrapnel. Missiles fired by Houthi rebels land in the towns of Najran and Gizan and have the power to reach Makkah according to Saudi Arabia. Between June 6, 2015 and November 26, the Saudi authorities counted 37 missiles fired from Yemen into their territory.

***

In 2013 after Yemen averted a civil war, a Facebook post announced the setting up of a book club at Sana’a’s Coffee Corner. It became a place for heated discussions, got invited by the US embassy, and its fame reached the hinterland. Bashir from Dhamar travelled 100 km to attend the weekly meetings.

In 2014, the book club met at Dhamar’s Bardouni Library, named after Yemen’s most famous poet. They read Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcias Marquez. Clouds of war engulfed the country.

In 2015, the war rained down. Sana’a was bombed day and night; a bomb exploded next to Coffee Corner, which was badly hit. On May 27, a military camp near the Bardouni library in Dhamar was bombed. The windows of the library shattered and the nearby museum that housed 12,500 artefacts, the oldest dating to about 10,000 BCE was flattened.

By 2016, most book club members had fled the country. For those who remain, life is hard. Wages aren’t paid; many flee to the countryside. The airport at Sana’a is shut. Books no longer come in. Over the months, the Bardouni library fixed its windows, and a depleted book club reassembled. “Everyone is frustrated,” says Bashir, the organiser.

In 2017, a country of killing fields, rubble and starvation remains. In Taiz, another book club run by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is set up. The book they read is titled This is Our Message, an al-Qaeda manifesto, and members are invited to join a contest to summarise it in 30 pages. The first place submission gets a brand new Chinese-made automatic rifle, the second place a motorcycle, third place a pistol, fourth place a laptop with mobile phones and cash prizes for the other winners.

***

The coalition’s targeting of weapons storage facilities in areas controlled by the Houthi-Saleh forces has contributed to the scattering of military equipment. Saudi Arabia has played a role in weapons proliferation by supplying arms to militant groups without ensuring accountability. There is footage of weapons airdropped into Aden, which have ended up in the hands of extremists. In Taiz, armoured vehicles similar to those used by the opposition are being used by resistance fighters affiliated to a Salafist group called the “Emirate of Protectors of the Creed.”

America has tolerated this, despite its aim being the defeat of the very people it indirectly is arming. In the January 2017 raid the US targeted and killed AQAP tribal leader Sheikh Abdel Raoud al-Dhahab. In the lead up to the US raid, al-Dhahab was in a meeting with Hadi’s military chief of staff where he was paid $60,000 to join Hadi’s fight against the Houthis.There is a black market for weapons and resistance fighters offer to sell small arms and light weapons on social media.

Armed Salafists have been mobilsed in resistance-held urban areas like Aden and Taiz. Salafist preachers use mosques and Friday sermons to galvanise and mobilise local supporters. AQAP has used the pretext of Sunni defence against the Shia Houthis to blend with local tribes and Salafi sympathisers and get access to weapons.

In November 2014, ISIS entered the Yemeni jihadi sphere through a tweet pledging allegiance to al-Baghdadi. Competition between al-Qaeda and ISIS is building up. ISIS has claimed responsibility for more than 20 operations in Aden, Bayda, Dhamar and Sana’a. In March the group killed 140 people in a double suicide bombing in Sana’a in two mosques used mainly by supporters of the Houthi rebels. In October they targeted government ministers and coalition forces at the Qasr hotel in Aden. In December they killed the Governor of Aden, Major General Jaafar Moahmmmed Saad, in a car bombing. But AQAP is still stronger than ISIS.

A 2017 UN report states, “Terrorist groups such as Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) affiliate in Yemen are now actively exploiting the changing political environment and governance vacuums to recruit new members and stage new attacks and are laying the foundation for terrorist networks that may last for years.”

***

Abdel Latif, a coffee merchant, spoke of an ancient Yemen, of villages perched on mountain tops and boxy mud brick houses etched with white filigree. The locals spoke of a Sufi saint from 1450 who drank a magical potion, a chocolaty, dark, thick syrup and was able to pray deep into the night. Coffee. Soon its trees began to transform the mountains, terraced hillsides thrived as farmers invented new techniques. If Ethiopia was the source of coffee, Yemen was instrumental in bringing coffee to the world through a port called Mokha. The Dutch East Indies Company used Mokha as a bridge between Ethiopia and India and brought coffee cultivation to Indonesia. Coffee from Mokha made its way to destination further west, to the island of Martinique and Central America.

Over time government neglect saw the fortunes of Mokha fall while the famed mocha coffee made way for the more lucrative khat trade. But since the beginning of the war, something has been changing in the valleys. Civil servants who hadn’t been paid for months were returning to their villages and old plantations were back in action. General Suleiman, a career officer from Saleh’s army had been trained in Europe and the US. After a three-decade career in the army and months with no salary, he quit at 50 and returned to his ancestral farm. He planted 5,000 coffee trees this season and was preparing to plant another 5,000 for the next, transforming the village in Anis.

“It is so magical here,” he said. “The war is far from these villages. They are still as they were.”

But the war made itself felt: the blockade meant bags imported from India and America, necessary to pack the coffee, were slow to arrive. A web of checkpoints from Sana’a to Aden hiked transport costs, a journey that would ordinarily take six hours took 12. The delays affected the quality of the coffee. But when the Mocha Haima was brought to the market, it was divine and sold for $280 per kg in Sana’a governorate. This caught the attention of some farmers and thus began Latif’s goal: to replace khat with coffee, to revive Mokha and its coffee.

When he heard about the attack on the port of Mokha, he recited a quote: “But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” from Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea.

***

The Gate of Tears or the Bab al Mandeb is strait between the horn of Africa and the Middle East. With Yemen on one side and Djibouti on the other, it is a chokepoint, a narrow but vital waterway, essential for international maritime trade between Europe and Asia. It links the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean through which million barrels of crude oil on supertankers navigate every day.

In October 2016, the Spanish-flagged merchant tanker Galicia Spirit was attacked by a RPG fired from a small speedboat. Two days later, the liquefied natural gas tanker Melati Satu was attacked in the same area, again with RPGs. It was rescued by a Saudi Arabian naval vessel. Warships USS Mason and USS Ponce, were attacked from the Yemen coastline and responded by launching cruise missile strikes at targets in Yemen. It was only after the attack on HSV-2 Swift, a UAE flagged vessel that was rendered inoperable, that the Houthis claimed responsibility. In January, they attacked a Saudi frigate killing two sailors. In May 2017 a small boat exploded in a thwarted attack on a tanker, while in June an oil tanker came under the fire of three rocket-propelled grenades. An international naval coalition is stepping up its presence in response to what is believed to be Houthi attacks.

Hadi’s government and the Saudi-led coalition accuse the rebel forces of using the ports to smuggle arms from Iran and other suppliers. It is alleged that militias are using Zagar and Hanish islands to smuggle weapons

Security Council Resolution 2216 authorises the coalition to enforce an arms embargo against Houthi forces and those loyal to Saleh but measures have gone too far. Ships have been delayed for up to four weeks before receiving a permit to enter. Ninety per cent of Yemen’s food and 8 per cent of its medical supplies are imported. At the start of the war only 15 per cent of pre-crisis imports were entering Yemen. As fuel for the generator at the main hospital began to run out, the UN began warning about the risk of famine. There is talk of an impending Saudi attack on the port of Hodeida. This next phase of war will make the siege of Yemen complete and leaving its  people with nowhere to flee.

(The cover story of the October 2017 edition of Fountain Ink)

(Update, Nov 6, 2017: The story has been edited to better reflect the changing situation in Yemen’s ongoing war.)