Awaaz

A Note from the Editor When I started writing for Awaaz a couple of years ago, before I was editorially involved with the magazine, I didn’t know (or didn’t notice) that the full name of the magazine was Awaaz: The Voice of South Asia. But once I registered and began to process the name, I had problems with it. There was, of course, the issue of redundancy—as a bourgeoning Hindi-Urdu speaker, I couldn’t for the life of me figure why someone would call a magazine “Voice”: The Voice of South Asia. It just seemed like sloppy copy writing to me, but I ran with it. Still, it was mostly the presumption of the name that I took issue with.

To think that 80-some flimsy pages a year, much less pages stitched together by the clumsy hands of 20-somethings, could actually call itself The ������������������������������������������������������������������������ Voice of South Asia—it was absurd. It still is absurd. Even the content of the issues rebelled against the title. The bulk of Sharleen Mondal’s piece in this issue (31) is exclusively about the unspeakable plurality of the subcontinent, and most other pieces herein pay homage to that cacophonous diversity.

Originally I thought the editors of this magazine who came before me were trying to cram all of that together into some definitive and cohesive entity, some document that could encompass the whole of the lives of everyone from Herat to Manipur, Srinagar to Male. Given the wide variety of content the magazine solicits— fiction, non-fiction, art, poetry, the full grab bag, some of it academic and inaccessible when first it reached us, some of it dumbed down just a smidge too far—crafting a uniformly accessible magazine was already a tall order.

But making an engaging magazine that was comprehensive… it was impossible, almost insulting.

But in the process of putting this magazine together, I’ve finally come to terms with our name. This magazine could go the route of other academic journals on the region and limit its scope to scholarly analysis. Or perhaps we could embrace the quality and quantity of fiction we receive—it is a flowering time for South Asian diaspora literature, after all. Maybe we should limit ourselves to undergraduate work, or to the issue of religion, or identity, or some other sub-division. It would certainly make the magazine more uniform and, in some ways, more appealing. But it would render the magazine less worthwhile than it is now.

The beauty of Awaaz is that it really is, in the most literal sense, The Voice of South Asia. It is scholars and natives and diaspora and leaders and even goras (like me) meeting in one place. It is the eruption of noise that comes when all of those individual voices collide. It is not pretty, and some voices rise higher than others, some voices seem to overshadow others, some voices may appeal to certain readers more than others. But that dissonance has meaning and value—it prevents these pages from ever being predictable, from ever developing a bias.

It exposes the writers, the editors, and the readers to the other voices in the conversation on South Asia that they would not have heard picking up another journal. And, hopefully, in giving just a taste, it can inspire the ravenous and open-minded consumption of all manner of resources by the reader.

Or perhaps there really is no meaning to the name. Maybe it was just terrible copy writing by some genesis staffer. But even accidents of history can create a dense and unique culture. And this is our culture at Awaaz—the din of voices, the struggle of different styles and ideas, competing freely.

It has been my intentional policy as an editor to present as diverse an issue as is possible, both in terms of voice and in terms of content. If our name is our mission, then it is our job as editors of Awaaz ������������������� to help writers to convey their thoughts clearly, but beyond that not to step on the volume or the intonation with which they broadcast their ideas, or to mute those ideas. With that mission in mind, what you will find in the following pages is helter skelter. But it is lovingly so. And it is my sincere hope that you will enjoy it, gain as much from reading and struggling with it, as I have sitting at a desk and fretting over the argumentation and the commas of it all.

Mark Hay Editor-in-Cheif