HISTORY-TELLING A SAPNA ANTHOLOGY
ISSUE I: 2017-2018
HISTORY-TELLING A Sapna Anthology TABLE OF CONTENTS Editor's Note
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Nihal Shetty Sumya Akkas Fiore Anvita Budhraja Pooja Kathail Varun Varahabhotla Meher Malik Sanchit Jain Aarushi Jain Abhishek Kodumagulla Kelvin Ng Zoha Shahabuddin Akanksha Ashok Mariam Syed
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About The Sapna Project
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Cover Illustration by Sanchit Jain
ISSUE I: 2017-2018
HISTORY-TELLING
Editors' Note From its inception, the Sapna Project has been deeply engaged with questions of history and identity. Discussions about contemporary South Asian and diasporic issues necessitate some understanding of what has come before. Engaging with the protests in support of Rohith Vemula and the ongoings at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) required that we understand the history of Dalit oppression and violence in Kashmir. More personally, discussing the weight our names bear in our lives forced us to think about how history can become baggage that one carries, often through lifetimes or across countries and continents. If this is so, how does the individual tell history? Can the individual tell only their own history? What are the limits to history-telling? Our pieces in this anthology construct visions, distinct and yet shared, of home and of voyage, of memory and of boundary, of family and of self. Asking questions of personal history awakens the ghosts of the past. We encounter the limits of mutual experience as a poet comes-of-age alongside a distant but dear companion, while another visits the IndiaPakistan border only to realize that neither side truly looks at the other. Symbols take on different meanings for the self and for others as we continue to ponder over the rakhi, the turban, or a legendary icon from a shared past. Speech acts are particularly significant in a tradition that has decidedly been oral for the better part of history, be they the words of a music guru or those of the poet, speaking across generational boundaries. Sometimes, history-telling requires taking a step back - a distancing from the personal to comprehend lived experience. One could return to the proverbs of folklore to make sense of violence close to home or to the simple but powerful act of observing and following where the train tracks lead. Personal histories of displacement get couched in terms of not only something one can never forget, but perhaps also something one chooses to not always remember. These works come together to represent a myriad of means of intimate engagement with times past. So, reader, we encourage you to engage with them not only as personal stories of historical worth, but as illustrations of the process of making history personal. We hope you can find themes that span the different pieces presented here, and make your own connections along the way. - The Sapna Project
THE SAPNA PROJECT
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ISSUE I: 2017-2018
HISTORY-TELLING
MICHIGAN (AFTER BRODSKY)
Ten then, my boys, leaning up against the fire, our ankles bitten by mosquitoes where our pants rode up on our legs. And were our fathers, who came to this land, still present on it? No, it was we who made our claims, we who plucked our women from this earth, grew on their nectar. Something falls in the dark, a tree. But no wind? The meaning is unclear. In another time, there might have been some diviner, a sign from Diana, or maybe, Parvati. To prophesize, to drive a stake into the ground, a car through the black woods of soot country, a tongue through teeth. A fear: even here, surveillance, the watcher an apparition. A god, a parent, or a wire tap--and what is the difference? My boys do not think about these things. My boys have fires in their throats, in their cocks. My boys tell me I need to shed my skin or they will shed it for me, like some Marsyas, I with my proud lyre playing too loud. The point is that you must live without compunction, speak without Latin, write without obscurity. I am trying to get closer to my boys. If I write about you the word "about" never loses its locative sense (e.g. "about here is where you will find your sex,� while pointing on a map); meaning: if I write about you I am casting a rope around you, drawing it closer, until it hurts and then some
Nihal Shetty THE SAPNA PROEJCT
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The roosters crowed in front of the house and the crows cawed in the fields. It was time for Asha to wake up and feed the chickens and prepare breakfast for Baba and her brothers. She slowly rose from the bed not to wake her younger sisters and tiptoed along the cool grey floor. She grabbed the cerulean bars of the veranda and pushed her face between them feeling the breeze enter the house and walked over to the pond. It was her morning ritual to sit on the grey crumbling seats next to the green pond and look over at the water and stare at the blossoming shapla pul (waterlilies). She went over to feed the chickens and found them under the palmyra tree. She picked up the palmyra fruit hat had fallen the night before and carried it on her left arm and grabbed a chicken and carried it on her right and the little chicks followed. She put the chicken down closer to the house farther from the trees. Nura, the family servant, greeted her as he walked the cows back to their barn from the fields. She heard the loud roar of her father’s voice inside the house and hoped to make him smile with the fruit. For weeks her father and her brothers have been arguing. Her brothers wanted to join the Mukti Bahini, the freedom fighters. Her father said they were too young and it was too dangerous. What will we do when the Pak Army comes here? They have already killed 20,000 in Comilla and Uncle left for Kolkota yesterday, they argued. Baba replied, Your uncle is a coward. We are good Muslims. They won’t hurt us and Allah won’t let them. Now go make up your morning prayers. Asha went back inside the house, which her father had painted a soft pink the week before because it was her favorite color and she was the konna of the house. She left the fruit on the kitchen table, washed her face, combed her hair, woke her sisters, made the bed, and pulled the end of her sari loosely over her hair before making her way downstairs. She could smell the aroma of her mother’s lamb curry and hear from a distance, her mother’s voice singing, like a moina pakhi, a nightingale, “megh boleche jabo jabo (the cloud said, ‘i will go’).” As she walked over to the kitchen quarters, her father stopped her and called her to the dining table, “Esho ma.” He embraced her and kissed her on the forehead. Then, he told her a family was coming to see her later that day. Her mother walked over wearing her favorite red jamdanee sharee with a stack of rotis. She ripped off a piece from the top roti and used it to grab a small piece of lamb and moved her hand in front of her daughter’s mouth to feed her. She gently moved the other hand down her daughter’s hair. That’s when they heard the sound of heavy black boots stomping on the ground. Baba turned red and his face froze. Amma’s eyes filled with tears. Baba mouthed jao. Her brothers ran into the room and the oldest opened his mouth to protest but closed it when he saw Baba’s eyes widen. Her brother grabbed her by the arm and they ran through the little passage between the house and the barn. Amma ran to her room to pick up the baby and carried him on her left arm and grabbed the toddler and carried him on her right and her daughters followed. Baba remained. The footsteps grew louder. They all found each other crouched in the fields behind the barn and sat quietly besides two corpses. Amma clasped her hand over the baby’s mouth. That’s when they heard the first gunshot. Nura cried out, “oh Ma go. Khuda go.” That’s when they heard the second gunshot. They all trembled and tears flowed down their faces. That’s when her mother sang like caged moina, “moron bole ami tomar jibon tore baai” (death says, ‘i am driving your boat of life’).
Sumya Akkas THE SAPNA PROJECT
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SINGING HISTORY
My guru said Hindustani music developed from the sounds of nature. Compositions are related to different times of day, and different notes can even be associated with animals and their particular sounds, he’d say. The voice copied the sounds of nature, and the instrument imitates the voice. That is where the music began. I’d hear explanations like this one as half history, half myth. Without any dates or locations, my imagination was free to color in the history he told, which added to its mythical quality while giving it personal relevance to me. My conception of music’s origins in South Asia lacks the same birds and animals, winds and seasons that existed in my teacher’s mind as he played. But the truth of it isn’t in the details. His metaphor-laden descriptions of style and form convey only one fact: the abstract can only be explained in abstract terms. When my guru said each note is a flower, or that I must be rooted in the tradition, the gharana, like a tall tree, he spoke with a very old voice. It rang with the words of his gurus extending back in time, but with the fragrance of his own life experiences, his own imagination. When he played he upheld his line of teachers, their teaching and the connection to nature they all felt, but he also expressed himself with a directness that words can’t capture. The personal and the historical are fused inseparably and passed down as one in each generation. This is a feature of most oral histories: the bard tells the story and takes part in it by doing so. My guru passed away in March of last year and since then I’ve thought about the things he said. It was easy to raise an eyebrow at his metaphors, but blind skepticism loses as much as blind faith. His stories and explanations were history itself; the truth of “what it was” is in the telling and the hearing. When you realize this, you see that only by making a student imaginative in understanding the art can a teacher show how to be imaginative and expressive in making it.
Fiore THE SAPNA PROJECT
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Anvita Budhraja THE SAPNA PROJECT
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In late August, my family celebrates Raksha Bandhan. A few weeks prior to the holiday, my mom and I go to the Indian grocery store, which has stocked a variety of rakhis for the occasion. These thread bracelets range from extremely simple, with just a few pieces of colored thread, to extravagant beaded creations. I comb through the numerous bins of rakhis and pick out my favorites, enough to send to each of my male cousins. We buy them and head back home, where I begin to write cards to each of my cousins, placing a rakhi inside each one. My mom used to address the envelopes for me, but now that I’m eleven, I decide I’m capable of doing it myself. Later that day, I begin to make a friendship bracelet for my best friend, an ambitious chevron design I’ve never completed before. Making friendship bracelets is a popular activity at my elementary school. Many of my peers proudly display wrists full of zigzag and chevron patterned bracelets. I participate in this trend as well, spending hours knotting tiny loops of thread to master a new design. After about an hour of diligent knotting, the chevron pattern starts to become discernible. I’m excited that I’ll be able to give it to my friend on Monday. My mom comes over to me and sees the now almost completed bracelet. “Wow, that looks great,” she says. “You should send those as rakhis instead!” “That’s a great idea!” I respond, thinking about all of the new designs I’ll be able to try.
Pooja Kathail THE SAPNA PROJECT
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As a child, I would hear tales of the Rani of Jhansi and Lala Lajpat Rai and the tremendous acts of bravery they displayed in the face of adversity. Though from different eras, they were role models within my house who were looked up to for their ultimate sacrifice to the cause they both believed in, an autonomous India. Many of the tales of the freedom fighters I would hear would often be romanticized, used to establish the ethos of a patriotic national identity but to also teach us as children of courage, standing up for your beliefs and of protecting the oppressed from the oppressor. Growing up in America though, these individuals may as well not have existed. Their contributions unknown and uncared for. While the fight for freedom from the colonial British had many analogies to the struggles faced by America, they could hardly care less about the challenges of a nation a world away. Thus, as a naïve child, this created the idea of a very binary form of history. If my teachers didn’t even know that these people existed then in the mind of a child, a false equivalency is created that their accomplishments were worthless or even over exaggerated. I’d go home and argue that what the founding fathers of America did was, in fact, brave and the false tales of the freedom fighters paled in comparison. How could what these individuals accomplished be virtuous if I was the only one to know these stories?
Varun Varahabhotla THE SAPNA PROJECT
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ISSUE I: 2017-2018
HISTORY-TELLING
Bari must have been only a couple of years older than I When we were younger that didn't feel like much at all But that gap seemed to grow ever-larger over the years. When I was 8, Bari and I might as well have been the same age, Throwing pebbles at a white wall, rapt. At 12, she was an older sister: Buying me candy and playing board games while it thunderstormed outside. At 13, she was "street smart": Beating my brother and me at monopoly time and time again. At 15, the gap intimidated me and I kept my distance, sending her a gift instead. Bari came to my birthday party and sat with the grown-ups. At 16, I suspected Bari was Involved with my cousin. He was, in my eyes, an adult (at 20). Suddenly, the years between us seemed to multiply. Bari had been stolen by the world of hidden affairs and hands held under tables. At 18, I came to Padrauna to find that Bari was to be married off (and not to my cousin). When I came back to India, a freshman in college at 19, working my first proper internship, Bari had had her first child, living in a town three hours away from us. It was then that I realised that the difference between Bari and I wasn't just an age-gap. We inhabited two different worlds. Mine was the world I'd known all this time, monopoly in the rain, parties in the garden, cakes brought in from Gorakhpur. But I'd seen Bari in my world during brief excursions from her own. I hadn't seen her helping her mother in the kitchen, feeding her 7 siblings. I hadn't seen her sewing out in the blistering heat to make a few hundred rupees on the side. My story was in the pictures I took, the childish rhymes I wrote; Bari's history-telling was a series of deviations from this, a story of quiet hardship waiting to be read, if I only stopped to notice. Her world was one of responsibility, Where time is of the essence Too busy writing the story to tell it 21 years in Bari’s world merited motherhood. 19 years in mine welcomed the realisation.
Meher Malik THE SAPNA PROJECT
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THE SAPNA PROJECT
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Sanchit Jain THE SAPNA PROJECT
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About 23 million people use the Indian Railways system daily. It is the largest rail network in Asia and also the world’s second-largest network. It's also one of the world's largest employers (employing around 1.4 million people). It is home to the oldest functioning steam engine in the world (Fairy Queen - locomotive, manufactured in 1855). There are 8500 railway stations in India - this is one of them. Jind Junction, Haryana, India.
THE SAPNA PROJECT
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Aarushi Jain THE SAPNA PROJECT
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To Ajit Pai, Rupi Kaur my lungs smell of chutney and Urdu ah, India—how daily I dream of you I long for the days of hot summer days My tātā wears a lungī and sips hot chāi Why has my life now become a big haze I belong not to America but to India, bhāi It was another day of sitting alone in my room, looking down at the wide empty street below my window. My father was still at the IBM office, my mom on her shift at the hospital. I knew I had about five hours before their return, so I decided to follow in the traditions of my ancestors and smoke some gānjā. I hate when nonIndian people use that word. Pakistanis can use it, I guess. I take a long drag. And I am flooded with the memories of walking down the streets of haidarābād while Appu brought us samosas. They were undercooked, but it’s comfort food. I take in a breath of the fresh haidarābādī air. The heat sustains me. I decide now is a good time to practice my Telugu. "Appu, koncham ēsī veyyi!” Appu, turn on the AC! "Sare sār.” Ok sir. I love the sounds of my language — the mellifluous syllables blend into each other in the Italian of the East. The samosas taste like the longing in my heart. I am glad we have Appu, life is so hard in America without the help. Or maybe they all just end up at City College. A cow moos in the distance. This is what being South Asian means to me. I am part of a proud, rich history. My tātā talks about it all the time, and he says it’s why he votes for Vijay P. --Author's postscript: Maybe this reads as harsh but the point is to get at the more unaware affluent south asian americans who aren’t aware of how caste or class in their families in India affects their ability to afford comfortable lives.
Abhishek Kodumagulla THE SAPNA PROJECT
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ISSUE I: 2017-2018
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At this very moment, in the Andaman Sea, boats of Muslim refugees are fleeing state persecution and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. We might know the 1.1 million Muslim inhabitants of the Rakhine state as “Rohingya”—indeed, the name “Rohingya” is itself derived from Rohang, an early name for Arakan—but not even the nomenclature is without controversy. As the Tatmadaw continues to lead attacks on Rohingya civilians, indiscriminately raze villages, and install mines along the Bangladeshi border, the Myanmar state remains adamant in its refusal to acknowledge this self-identifier, instead referring to them as “Bengali.” This practice of naming itself is one that enacts a specific sort of epistemic violence: by regarding them as Bengalis, the Myanmar state upholds the assumption that the Rohingyas are Bengali arrivistes from the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. They are without history; they deserve no name. The Rohingya, however, have long inhabited the eastern coastal territory bordering the Bay of Bengal, once the historic homeland to Tibeto-Burman Arakanese Buddhists, as well as Rohingya Muslims and Hindus. In a time before national boundaries, they have freely moved throughout the space between Pathein (in present-day Myanmar) and Chittagong (in present day Bangladesh). The kingdom of Mrauk U flourished for three centuries, before losing Chittagong to the Mughal Empire in 1666, being incorporated into the Burmese Empire in 1785, and eventually annexed by the British East India Company—alongside Assam and Manipur— following the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1826. Following 1886, the region was incorporated within the administration division of Ministerial Burma, a province of British India. As the national question took shape in the twilight years of empire, Burmese nationalism increasingly assumed the contours of Bamar identity and the Burmese language—a language predominantly spoken along the Irrawaddy River Valley. Eventually, as the Subcontinent teetered on the brink of Partition, Muslim leaders from Arakan sought to merge with Jinnah’s Pakistan Movement; many Muslims migrated to East Bengal—later East Pakistan—in 1947. Many more followed in 1962, as General Ne Win—having seized power through a coup—ordered a large scale expulsion of Indians. After the 1971 Bangladeshi Genocide, Burma claimed the Rohingyas were fleeing Bengalis, urging the nascent Bangladeshi state to take them back; following the mass arrests and tortures of the 1978 King Dragon Operation, 200,000 Rohingya refugees fled for Bangladesh before being forcibly repatriated. Partition did not begin or end in 1905, or 1947, or 1971, nor was it confined to the imagined geography of “South Asia”—it is continually, presently enacted against the Rohingyas, perpetually imagined as an Other belonging to the other side of the partition frontier, seen variously as Indian, Burmese, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, adrift among/between borders, yet never fully belonging to any community. As the contours of academic discourse and inquiry become increasingly moulded into area-studies assemblages, reflecting American Cold War-era geostrategic interests—“South Asia,” “Southeast Asia”—the voices of the Rohingyas, who occupy a liminal space between the two, are forever lost, their histories forever missing from the historiography of Partition. Historians need to look beyond the terms of the nation-state, but we also need to look beyond the operational framework of “South(/east) Asia” and recognize the interconnectedness of these histories. Beyond Burma, Singapore, Penang and Malacca (the latter two in present-day Malaysia) were variously administered as part of the British Raj; Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Penal Code continues to form the basis of criminal codes of modern Myanmar, Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei; the first significant instance of anti-colonial resistance in Singapore in 1915 was led by British Muslim Indian sepoys garrisoned in Singapore. We can rightfully recognize the nation-state framework as commensurate with the enactment of a certain kind of epistemic violence; it is similarly time to move beyond the imagined geographies we have inherited from American area studies.
Kelvin Ng THE SAPNA PROJECT
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I know stories of dry Indian dirt and a mango orchard expanding as far as the eye can see. I know stories of a familial home that has become old and grey under the weight of time. I know stories of a perpetually unlocked front door and a perpetually noisy living room. Though I may know these stories like the back of my hand, these stories are not mine. They are borrowed. These stories were collected by my mother and her mother and her mother’s mother in India over hundreds of years, and geography is a gap I cannot bridge. I have stories too, but they are of a different type. They are quieter. They are fewer. They are more demure. They are the stories of what happens when geography is a gap you cannot bridge. But they are also the stories of continuation and accommodation and adaptation. These may not be the stories I had expected, but they are still something.
Zoha Shahabuddin THE SAPNA PROJECT
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Not fair. Not fair. Not fair. Punctuated with the sobs of a twelve year old. Amma, you don’t understand. Ennaku ang pogandam! Not a word from Amma. She leaves the twelve year old in her room as she resigns herself to a new life across the continent. Amma is cold and unfeeling. . . . Outside the door, Amma shakes her head sadly. Remembers the warmth of sun decades ago, The threat of the snake big enough to eat her in the backyard, Waiting weeks to read a letter from her grandmother, Broken words of Swahili, Leaving a country hers-but-not-hers. She wonders which memories her twelve year old will carry of this home, And how many times she will have to do it again. . . . But, of course, Amma is cold and unfeeling.
Akanksha Ashok THE SAPNA PROJECT
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87 A woman walks out of her room, through the courtyard, and stands at the boundary of the property, edged with dense forest. She wraps her shawl around her more tightly, breathing in the cool winter air. The clamoring in her skull gives way to a calm she has not experienced in so many years. A voice rings out, asking, “What is keeping you? I am waiting.” The woman steps forward in response. The stone of the courtyard shifts to damp grass between her toes. She enters the forest and does not come back. 92 A woman sits in her bedroom and prays istikhara. She folds her janamaz away and waits for an answer to come to her. At night, the sound of the ocean and passing cars seeps into the walls of the house. The woman thinks of her daughter and wonders how to calm her heart. On the edge of sleep, she smells something warm and sweet and burning. A voice whispers to her, “Choose well, and we will bring you peace.” The woman wakes with her mind and heart racing, and she makes a choice. Some months later, she garlands her daughter in gold and flowers, still waiting for peace. 04 A woman waits by the window for her husband to return. The food grows cold on the table, and she is alone in the house, save for the snoring of her children and in-laws upstairs. Feeling restlessness in her limbs, she begins to pace the length of the kitchen. She goes back and forth five, six, seven times. The house feels too large, too empty around her. Hearing an approaching car, she rushes back to the window only to see it speed past the house. A voice speaks as though it were at her side, “What are you waiting for? I am here.” She gasps and pulls away from the window, just as a car rolls into the driveway. 16 A woman steps onto a dirt path that stretches into the woods. She follows the trail for some time as the sound of passing cars fades away. The rain, no more than a fine mist, coats the leaves and grass, making them glow a vibrant green. As she treads through the silence and the mud, she thinks of her great aunt, old and mad, who wandered into a forest decades ago and was never found. The woman wonders what pulled her away, what pulled her in. Soon it gets late, and she decides to go home before it gets too dark. Turning to leave, the woman smells something sweet through the rain, coming from the damp earth and something older. Behind her: a voice, glittering and clear, cries, “O, dear friend, we will wait for your return!” The woman looks back and sees only the trees, green and glowing.
Mariam Syed THE SAPNA PROJECT
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About Sapna Active since 2015, The Sapna Project is an experimental space at Columbia University/Barnard College for the exploration of South Asian identity. This collective provides a mean of gaging how young South Asian people view and act upon their identities. The structure of Sapna mirrors our focus of experimentation: we have a unique structure of rotating leadership, which allows everyone to lead for a period (or chapter) of time. In these chapters, we engage in various discussions, activities, and projects. This allows us to explore and challenge different aspects of the South Asian identity and their implications. Our project works to archive the outcomes of our explorations and functions as a space for reflection and growth.
BOARD MEMBERS Akanksha Ashok '19 Fatimah Alyas '19 Aarushi Jain '20 Sanchit Jain '18 Pooja Kathail '18 Abhishek Kodumagulla '19 Meher Malik '19 Nihal Shetty '18 Zoha Shahabuddin '18 Varun Singh '18 Mariam Syed '19 Varun Varahabhotla '19
thesapnaproject@gmail.com facebook.com/CUSapna
THE SAPNA PROJECT
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