Maharanis Gone Wild - Migrant Maharanis Issue #1

Behind the Zine

Maharanis Gone Wild is a collection of poetry, essays, and visual art dedicated to highlighting and combating societal expectations within South Asian culture.

When we think about the traditional view of ‘women’ in South Asian cultures, many of us are confronted with feelings of social pressure, judgement, isolation and sharam (shame) knowing we don’t fit the mould.

Maharanis gone Wild is a dedication to uplifting and reclaiming our unapologetic identities, including all things considered ‘taboo’. Gone are the days of letting patriarchal norms and sharam culture be enforced on our bodies.

This is our very first zine as a collective, and we are incredibly excited to share it with you all.

A huge thank you to every talented and inspirational creative who contributed to the Zine.

Cover Art: Our lovely friend and talented illustrator, Samai Azeez (@skylaces)

In response to being called a coconut

In response to being called a coconut I say: thank you. To be compared to such a fruit is praise in itself. Whose roots, though severed, stand firm in all continents except one.

Red soil, coastal, cracked mud and hill stations.

Multipurpose, tender, sweet elixir will soothe any sickly stomach and quench any parched throat. Plush, inner jelly a bountiful surprise. To be eaten with a tough, makeshift husk spoon.

And then another.

Its deliverer never saintly but holy, nonetheless.

Did you know coconuts possess shrifal? Meaning a coconut is your saviour.

Mature now, brown fibres a cleansing scrub. Now next to godliness. Now decomposed.

Now exported.

Coconut oil used for centuries. Descendants sequestered. Its ancestors develop diabetes while adoptive parents glisten from its shine.

I reclaim the name a ‘coconut.’ Its syllables in all its languages. Its forms, its many many forms.

Adaptive, rough, smooth, silky but never malleable.

-Malvika/Maha (@altmaha)

Sari Not Sorry

Yards of woven thread intricately designed bring justice to a woman's curves.

Soft, subtly seductive, and expensive silk.

It smells of tradition, longing, and womanhood.

Sari's have borders, but this one travelled. It stretched from Gujarat to Auckland and wavered across the Indian and Pacific oceans.

Many are left intrigued by the mysterious drapes in their wake.

My mother's sari is rani pink and velvety purple with glimpses of gold.

The fabric sways unapologetically with each step as I walk, wrapped in the comfort of my roots.

The humble pleats gracing all occasions.

Sari not sorry.

- Nilam Patel (@ninetieskineeli)

Karma

I believed you when you said Dad loved me less because of my skin tone
 I believed you when you deemed white beautiful and brown unclean,

That Indian men are greedy enough To sell off their daughters

That my kindness comes from my fairness, and the only part of my ethnic heritage I should adopt are pretty dresses

And since I believed you I cannot wear a lehenga, saree, or churidar

Without feeling ashamed of my european bloodline

- Natasha George (@natasha_george)

I feel fat

I feel fat

And to feel fat correlates directly

To the perception of my self worth,

Or rather lack there of, So no, I will not have a slice of cake

That is 250 calories by the way

That slither of moist dark decadent chocolate perfection, Which used to facilitate endless nodes of mouthwatering adjectives

These days brings only a number and guilt

Calories are numbers that rule my life

Each bite brings me closer to my boundary I no longer eat to fulfil famine, I eat to fulfil figures

Feeling rewarded if I don’t go over my daily limit

Sensing only joy if I throw away half of my apple, because Hey!

I’ve only eaten 50 calories now!

There are moments I don’t count

Moments where quantity trumps quality

So much quantity demolished too quickly to count

Too quickly to realise what’s happening

Too quickly

So when the toilet flushes the evidence is gone from the fridge,

And my stomach lining

It’s control I’m after Chasing that satisfaction of a solid tick

Approval

But, food makes me nervous

You see I have a relationship with food

Only not in the playful sense It’s a senile, domestic violence situation And I can’t leave

I’m bound to food

Like an alcoholic trying to get over their addiction

Whilst having to intake it’s warm liquid three times a day And not go over board

I feel fat.

And don’t try convincing me otherwise

I’ve already put myself in the confines of society’s obese box

My eyes haven’t been trained yet to view myself in any other way But large Therefore, unworthy

*Sighs*

I wrote those words when I was 22

And, I don’t know about you But when I was 22 I had an eating disorder

Talking to a therapist Feeling guilt for wasting their time

On a battle involving me versus a fully stocked fridge Body dysmorphia they said

There is only so much skinny tea I can consume

So many hours I can wear a slimming corset

So many pills I can pop before I start to crack

Hindsight brings clarity Passing & policing this ideology

Comparison above all else Can I be blamed for the way I feel?

When all I see is the sample size ideal

When we as a society focus on not loving our bodies insecurity tied into ego and survival Pretty privilege, pretty access, European beauty pretty mindset Then, it’s only natural for fatphobia to exist

There is so much shame here Understanding and releasing my shame has been the most sustainable weight loss I’ve ever experienced

So now, I feel fat

I feel unapologetically thick Taking up space, using my voice

I feel powerful wonderfully voluptuous gloriously strong

I feel free

People often say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, The most liberating thing about beauty Is realizing that you are the beholder You are the curator

For the first time I looked in the mirror Stared deep into my own eyes A pool of luscious brown wonder And rejoiced the entity that is within Fuck the outer shell Fuck the padding

The focus was always on maintaining the husk

Rather than understanding the content The soul

My insides are rich and decadent, umami perfection

Just like that chocolate cake So, you know what, give me a slice

Cause I’m hungry for liberation.

- Amita Kala (@amitakala)

Evolution. Creation.

We remain in constant battle with these two halves. We tell people their faith in a creator is wrong or that the theory of evolution is invalid based on the fact that it cannot be tested or re-created. We forget that spirituality and science are intertwined.

We find sanctuary in spiritualism. We find understanding in science.

Are we bodies or souls? Souls or bodies? But I ask, why is this yet again a debate? Our souls - energy entities - and bodies - physical entities - grow together. Evolve together. Not apart.

Evolution. Creation.

A dialogue.

This dialogue is emphasized in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, which focuses on the evolution of consciousness that in turn governs the evolution of the human body. The philosophy points to an unconditional acceptance of our soul’s evolvement, cyclical in nature through birth and death as it passes through physical beings. Vedanta also takes into account that if the universe manifests, an evolutionary process, then it also unmanifests, a devolutionary process.

To grasp the essential nature of reality, we have to look at the whole picture. Not pick between halves.

So I say this again. Evolution. Creation.

- Ashvini Navaratnam (@ash.shaniah)

Reference:

1. Dean, A. Closing the Loop. The New Inquiry https://thenewinquiry.com/closing-the-loop/ (2016).

An

http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml.

A. A. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay – Unlearning, An interview with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. Análise Soc. 417-436 Páginas (2020) doi:10.31447/AS00032573.2020235.08.

Algorithmic Bias in Content Policing on Instagram (PDF download) | Salty. https://saltyworld.net/algorithmicbiasreport-2/ (2021).

J. South Asian Stud. 42, 219–236 (2019).

2. Sontag, S. On Photography.

3. Vicente, F. L. & Azoulay,

4. Salty. Exclusive:

Investigation into

5. Zakaria, R. Against white feminism: notes on disruption. (WW Norton & Company, 2021).

6. Sharma, K. The Orientalisation of the Sari—Sartorial Praxis and Womanhood in Colonial and Post-Colonial India. South Asia

7. de Zoysa, A. Are we carrying the colonial burden called “Saree” into the 21st century? (2015).

Myths and Brown Girl Legends

1.Maintaining white women’s position as the gold standard of womanhood has always been the central project of white feminism. Supposedly, the white woman’s whiteness represents her purity, affords her a kind of divinity that distinguishes her from the vulgarity and savagery apparently inherent to colonised women.

The irony of this persistent narrative, of course, is that today’s white women suffer from it too. But hacking away at these systems that impose impossible expectations on all of us risks hacking away at white women’s superiority in the existing hierarchy of womanhood at the same time. The modern empowered, ‘feminist’ woman is therefore one expected to be confident and capable despite the patriarchy’s best efforts to subdue her.

2. After sending my photos in to this issue, I spent the rest of my day in a flurry of anxiety and embarrassment. though only a little of my body is actually bare – grainy and blurry at that! – sharing these photos felt incredibly intimate. At the time, I had this idea that if I smothered myself in just my saree, I would finally see a goddess in the mirror. even though I knew my attempts at empowering myself never go as planned.  How do the white girls do it? how do they confront the body they’ve only ever tried to escape, without ending up feeling defeated by it even more?

3.Emerging from the ashes of social media platforms like Tumblr, given new life on Instagram and now TikTok, mainstream empowerment politics found a long-time love in the individualitydriven medium of the selfie. Initially championing a politics of visibility, verification, validation – a project for “affirm[ing] your very existence on your own terms”1 – the selfie only too quickly found itself absorbed into the dominant ideologies it apparently sought to resist. Namely, those that champion the superiority of whiteness. “White feminism, for whom the selfie politic was a wet dream, was first to pick up the scent”1.

So writes Aria Dean in ‘Closing the Loop’, an essay applying a critical eye to the transformation of selfie-based affirmation politics in the cultural mainstream. Dean draws attention to the way these politics proceed from Susan Sontag’s assertion that “photographs furnish evidence”: “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power”2.

Considering photography a companion to colonial conquest,

Ariella Aisha Azoulay writes of how parts of a photograph’s subject are stolen from them when photography is “imposed and institutionalised as a productive practice whose products belong to those who own and operate the means of production”3. Photographs determine from the outside who its subjects are: “the invention of photography didn’t start with the device but with the political regime that enabled photography of what they had and could have had”3. Less a neutral act of documentation, photography constructs subjects and worlds. Immersed in the tides of power, it maintains systems that have already constructed them.

While selfies appear to reintroduce a subject’s agency, many selfies are taken for circulation online, for platforms like Instagram or Tiktok. The power to curate who sees them is therefore in the hands of their operators. But as QTPOC centric magazines like Salty have found, the version of the internet “sold to us as a bastion of free expression” is not the version we actually encounter4.

In a report released in 2020, Salty found that images they posted on social media of plus-sized, Queer women and gender non-conforming people of colour were policed at a

much higher rate than images of thin, cis white women. Given that our algorithms are formulated upon society’s priorities and values, their censorship of who can and cannot be seen online reveals who is wanted and unwanted in society.

White feminism’s blinding narcissism, writes bell hooks, renders it incapable of admitting “that in a capitalist, racist, imperialist state there is no one social status women share as a collective group”. As Aria Dean notes, “selfie feminism likewise claims a universal female experience located in “the female body””, specifically, the (thin, cis, able) white female body.

4. I’m under no impression that my photos empower myself, or others. some will see my body and want one just like it. others will look at it and barf. having a body that occupies that kind of unpredictability is terrifying. sharing it with you, despite? i’m shitting my pants. mine is a vulnerable flesh peering out from behind those flaming pink folds. a yearning flesh. these photos obviously aren’t nudes, but they felt like they were. i underexposed the ones i sent in, because I felt overexposed within them.

5.The way ‘empowerment’ understood today is actually a transmogrification of how it was initially conceived. As a feminist term, ‘empowerment’ can be traced back to a group of Indian women in the 1980s. Led by Gita Sen, Development Alternatives with Women in a New era (DAWN) were a group of feminist researchers, scholars and political leaders that sought to advance the voices of women in global south countries, particularly by confronting impositions and agendas often forced upon them by (white) Western feminists. Fundamental to DAWN’s conception of empowerment “was “political mobilization” supported by education, and the promotion of development “free of all forms of oppression based on sex, class, race or nationality”5

The consistent circulation of ‘empowerment’ in white feminist contexts is that painful reminder of what it once was, what it could have been.

“I cried not for the house but for the memories I could have had inside it” – Mohammed ElKurd.

6.My bright pink saree was actually the only one i had at the time. i picked it out with my aunt in Sri Lanka, based on a colour my friend always told me suited me, ever since she saw me in a dress that shade at the junior dance in year 10. i like when people do things with me, remember things about me. i like when they like me, when they want me. i want to be wanted so bad. sooooo bad. can you tell? can you see it emanating from my skin, beneath the gauzy pink cloth? i didn’t know how to drape a saree when i draped this one, i had to look a beginner’s tutorial up on youtube. i tried it bunch of times, and kept fucking it up. it barely held together, but i liked the way it turned out. improper, imperfect. falling over my shoulders, falling over my collarbone, over my breasts, my huge, hairy, brown areolas. falling over and in Love with me.

7.The naked breasts of everyday women are well documented in art and literature across the Indian subcontinent. In various scenarios – from parades to temples – city women, village women, and working women of South Asian history have been depicted and described wearing only fine cloth tied around their waist, occasionally draped across their bare chest and over their shoulders. Though most classifications that assign certain styles with certain castes or regions are categorizations fabricated to sell oriental exoticism to the colonial core6, some historians have even suggested that wealthier women sometimes wore finer cloth7, and therefore may have dressed more transparently.

In any case, the South Asian saree was worn widely, with variation, often without anything to cover the breasts underneath. Before colonial intrusion, female nudity was not worth batting a righteous eye. But where you might find medieval Sri Lankan poetry overloaded with erotic metaphors referring to Pinapayodhara (swan breasts), or Rankumbu (golden pots), colonial interpretations of the South Asian saree were nothing short of disgusted.

As visits to ‘the Orient’ became fashionable with the height of empire, European women who ventured to the continent primarily as teachers and missionaries were less than impressed by the lack of adherence to Victorian puritan values invented in Europe. As one European woman writes, a well to do Bengali woman draped in a barebreasted saree could only be likened to a “savage who had never heard of dignity or modesty”5. For many of these white women, their ardent belief in the benevolence of empire was the only way through which to address local incivility, to “help their colonial sisters reach their potential”5. To help their colonial sisters become just like them.

in each of these determining cycles, in adornment, activism, algorithms, it’s never been us, never been what we want that’s taken in. but in this revelation is the opportunity to ask why. to find that place hoarding what’s kept from us. it is to put ourselves back in the company of those we’ve been cut off from – those that feel the same as us, who want the same as us – and therefore back into a place where we can forge the time and space to fulfil our needs, as well as our dreams.

8.Admitting you want to be wanted, your joy at a saree taking to you like a lover, is so fucking embarrassing. (like i’m literally cringing!!!). but i guess the things we want reveal what we don’t have – what we are not given, what is not available to us, what we are denied. to be a South Asian woman is to inherit an unwanted history – is to inherit being unwanted.

Am I defying algorithms that do not want my body in their midst by sharing it here with my sisters who do? Am I defying a history that has attempted to erase the saree, its wearers, and the breasts it caressed, by documenting it here, declaring its survival, declaring the survival of the women who wore it this way?

I’m at least giving it a go. You can try and try to bury us into the crust of the Earth, try your best, even! But we will still be still here, fucking around, doing what you hate like we’ve always done. As is our right to.

- Dinithi Nelum Bowatte (@notdinithi)

3 ups all purpos

1/2 up orn flou

1 1/2 pin h baking strands saffron

Will you be my Jilebi?

Juicy, crisp and gooey Jilebi

Twisted, orange delights of crunch and ‘diabetic’ sweetness.

Catch that drip as it makes its way down the corner of your mouth

Catch it with your snake tongue

Come. Let's take a bite together and wash it down with hot chai.

It’s tasty, right?

Come. You want another one, let me get that for you.

Oh - you want my mother's recipe?

Oh - you want to commodify it?

Oh - you want to profit from it?

Inside my head [Mix white flour, cornflour, baking powder, yoghurt and water.

Mix to get a drip, drip consistency. Mix and leave to ferment for at least twelve hours.

Deep fry, soak in sugar syrup for a couple of minutes and then remove.]

Let me speak to you from the margins, where you place people like me.

Let me say no and yell this to you.

No to my ancestral knowledges and ways of being

No to the seeds my lineage have planted.

In the margins I reclaim my power.

In the margins I reclaim my joy

In the margins I reclaim my body

In the margins - I see you.

You are not for me

Your twisted colonialism is not for me

Let your snake tongue go catch something else

- Ara Alam-Simmons (@brengalinz)

Copenhagen feels like home until it doesnt

Copenhagen feels like home until it doesn't. I feel embarrassed to tell people, especially Danes, that Copenhagen even ever feels like home. But it does. Well, until it doesn't. Copenhagen feels like home until it doesn't. When I'm at the Copenhagen airport, I get sad about leaving things behind in Copenhagen. The things that I think most people, most "normal" people at least, would miss about their home. The small intangible things that let you know that you're in a place. I lived in the same house in Long Island, New York for 20 years, and I never felt engulfed by that feeling when waiting to take off at JFK. Well, maybe that's not entirely true. I've felt that before the long flights to India. India, a country to which I yearn to feel more belonging to than I do. The one I was born in but have been to such a few number of times that I wouldn’t even need all 5 fingers on my right hand to count. I guess that would sound funny to most people. That I'm engulfed by that home-like feeling not by the country that housed my ancestors for countless generations or even

by the country with my childhood home that my parents still live in.

I first came to Copenhagen 6 and a half years ago. I did a semester exchange here with DIS--the infamous program that's only for Americans and sprawls along a couple of blocks of Vestergade. I needed a few weeks to get used to the racial homogeneity, but that wasn't that new for me. Blame it on my dark skin, my social anxiety, or a combination of the two, but I can be a bit annoying in the sense that every time I enter a new space I get fixated on whiteness and need a bit of time to adjust. Most of my friends from DIS were white, and it was their first time experiencing people looking at them and deducing that they weren’t originally from where they were. It was uncomfortable for them, and I could empathize to some extent. But I couldn’t entirely relate. I was comfortable feeling a bit on the outskirts of any place I was in, of being seen as an outsider, a foreigner. Was it even possible to just blend into the background of the place that you’re in? To completely understand everything that’s happening around you, seemingly esoteric cultural references, and all?

Copenhagen because of its physical distance from the US and India, absence of my parents friends to keep an “eye” on me, and Denmark’s generally feeling less elitist than the US, was liberating. I had space to explore my identity in a way that I never had before.

Copenhagen feels like home when I walk hand-in-hand with my boyfriend of 5 years along the windy side streets. Copenhagen feels like home when I stop by Lygten Bazar and stock up on the same spices that amma has in her spice dhaba in New York and that ammamma has in Hyderabad. Copenhagen feels like home when I bike back to my apartment after a night of beers at Café Svejk and a smoky bodega.

But like I said, Copenhagen feels like home until it's not. Copenhagen feels like home until I give myself an elaborate pep talk about my intelligence, charisma, and worth to order a cappuccino in Danish. Copenhagen feels like home until I walk into Normal and see that they don't have anything remotely close to my foundation shade. Copenhagen feels home until a man at a bar insists that the paint on my face that I had

haphazardly done while dancing and tipsy at Vega, thus rivaling the sophistication of a toddler's painting, must be for Deepavali. Copenhagen feels like home until a man yells at me when I'm stopped at a red light on my bike, and he tells me that I should fuck off back to India. Copenhagen feels like home until I remember that my favorite pocket of the city--despite its richness in bazars and delicious food from countries like Eritrea, Lebanon, India, and Syria—is classified as a ghetto.

I guess it's a feature of being a part of a daughter of a diaspora. I have a collection of homes that bear semblance to what I imagine a “real” home is. Copenhagen feels like a home. India is a distant home because of my ancestral heritage. New York is a tangible home because it holds my childhood house. When I was a little kid, I always wanted to be the kind of person that collected things— marbles, stickers rocks, anything really. I guess I finally have a collection. A collection of “homes.”

- Anuhita Basavaraju (@anuhitaaa)

Remembering

Care of my mother I turn to Soft singing and poetry Coconut oil and silken hair

Between her legs, I am now sat

Embraced by ancestors, I know not

Whispers of laughter, health and happiness Great village feasts in abundant supply Everyone getting together so all can thrive

Tales of my grandmother, how brave was she Being in service to friends and family

A name well known, a village seen

Manaakitanga key

There is no struggle here, only joy

Of ancient ways and chores of tending land

Tikanga of care was paramount

Like oil to hair being massaged throughout

Grandmother's laughter and lost teeth Red hair and beetlenut mouth

Come here; she’d say, held tight close to her breast

Ignore those fuckers; your heart knows best

Come help me make fish masala

By the riverbank, stone steps and grit See how it tastes when fish is pushed into my mouth This is to know she says

This is to taste she says This is to remember she says

Remember me when I am long gone

This day by the river with your mum

I remember I say, and with that

Tears escape my face

This is my love, my magic and life.

- Ara Alam-Simmons (@brengalinz)

Golden Phool (ফুল)

Golden Phool was created as a timestamp during a period where I started to embrace my self identity. The painting’s title is a play on words. Golden alludes to this golden age where I started to form deeper relationships with my cultural identity after years of hiding it. Phool (“ফুল” meaning flower in Bangla), represents the diverse choice of flora (from Aotearoa, Bangladesh & Sri Lanka) with the double meaning of being a fool. A fool for holding onto the past but choosing to embrace it into my identity.  Golden Phool (ফুল) was my second attempt at reinterpreting Mughal miniature art. The tiny details of this painting style compliments my ideas as it allows me to include many elements that I wouldn’t have been able to include at a normal scale. This is how I also see my own identity; a jumble of disparate elements crammed into one person.

Being subjected to racism and discrimination in my childhood and even in today's world I’ve always found it difficult to express and be proud of my cultural heritage. This disrupted my experience of learning and practising my cultures because I was more focused on pertaining to western norms. I’ve had trouble trying to visualise this experience, but the miniature art style allowed me to do just that. In this painting, I was figuring out how to convey my identity as a South Asian and Kiwi. I decided that painting flora was appropriate to visualise this tension in my identity because it is recognisable which flora corresponds to which identity. With a stern look on my face and a hookah in my hand, I am depicted in the centre, wearing a mix of South Asian and western attire. Representing my uncertainty about how these two aspects of my identity may come together in harmony.

- Sahana Rahman (@shannyszn)

DHAN Y AVAD

ABOUTMIGRANTMAHARANIS

Migrant Maharanis isdedicatedtocreating asafe space of cultural relatability and community for those feeling stuck between the two worlds of Eastern & Western culture.

We create zines and digital content focused on amplifying and empowering South Asian voices to share their cultural experiences in a space that promotes progressive ideas, self-expression and individuality.

We are open to contributions from all migrants of colour, however, we aim to prioritise the voices of South Asian women and marginalised genders in the space.

ABOUT MIGRANTZINE COLLECTIVE

Since 2017, Migrant Zine Collective has aimed to amplify, celebrate and share the voices of migrants of colour throughself-publishing, community arts and activism.

In recent years,we have hosted various zine workshops and community events for pan-Asian women to release their pent-up anger and emotions from their experiences of sex, love, relationships and dating to actively burning down the white supremacist capitalist cishetero patriarchy.

We hope to continue using DIY self-publishing to build communities and spaces to have critical conversations. We hope you enjoyed reading the zine!