Tag: state

‘forgive me for my sins’ (bhool chuk maaf) [microfiction]

27.08.2025

Today, Alfonso had been worried about me. I had ended up in the Accident and Emergency department in the hospital again. I clung to danger. Danger clung to me. Of course, it was the leg. The leg again and again. The scars of love will ache and hurt never goes away. The world did not want me to stand upon my feet. But I stood upon my feet. And I swaggered when I walked. I was Punjabi. I was The Tiger.

It had been touching to see him so worried, with that diamond veneer that he had which was so hard and polished. At times, he could be cruel and dismissive. He had a pretence of insensitivity. But he was like me, sensitive and, ultimately, loyal.

Because it was unclear what the risks were, I had had to cancel my evening plans for working before I had found out. It had turned out to be alright and I had got the all clear. So I had a whole evening free. I had watched the Hindi remake of ‘Groundhog Day’ which was one of my favourite films. Alfonso had asked me to tell him about the film. Who knew India better than me? I was her most loved son. The one that had married her, Mother India. Her son and her most devoted lover.

I wrote:

A common story in India for all, the film is about unemployment. And not only unemployment, but also the unfair demands that the families of women have. Which is that, as a man, you not only have to be working, but that you have to have a top government job to have their daughter. Indirectly, the film is a criticism of the slaves to the state and their corruption, their slavish mentality, their sickening and conformist, selfish and materialistic grasping of the resources of the oppressive, exploitative state and the inhumane bastards that sustain it, those who do not care about preserving life in a world of corruption.

It is not enough that the state steals, pillages, rapes. Worse than that, you have to dedicate your life to its atrocities.

The film explores the nature of altruism, goodness and the preservation of the life force through the lens of the Bhagavad-Gita. The motto that you should do good actions and then not worry about the results or the rewards that you get or the cost that it will take. This is the philosophy of the warrior from thousands of years ago. The philosophy of war. Because Krishna who I am named after persuaded Arjuna to go to war for justice against everyone he knew and loved when he was going to withdraw from the battlefield. And I have been raised on that philosophy and the Mahabharata where those scenes come from. I have been raised in that warrior culture. The film is about us, the warriors.

As I watched the film, I thought about my own youth. I did not want to work in a job where I was making the rich richer. That was not my destiny. I wanted to work in a job where I did service for society. For justice. And so, I could not get married. Because I did not have a high status, high paid job. The unfair demands of other people could not be met.

In the film, the hero is stuck on the day before his wedding. He is stagnating in a life without marriage and love. After all, that is my life. That is the life of the man that does not want to be a slave to the state in a world of slaves to the state, to the rich and the powerful. Instead, this man wishes to be good. To do good things. He wants to be a hero and not a slave.

The woman that he loved, Titli (Butterfly), she spent all of her time arguing with the hero. Her voice was magical. A memory came back to me. But what was she? The one that seduced the man into the evil and oppression of the state. She was a siren.

The story is a comedy. There has to be a happy ending. Yet in real life, if you are not a slave to the state, then you cannot catch the butterfly in your hand. You watch it dancing away in the air, like her, the angel.

However much the warrior craves the sweetness of the siren, however sweet it is to die in beauty, he has to resist. Odysseus was tempted by the siren. He had to impose deafness and silence on his men and get them to tighten his own bonds so that he did not fall into the death in the mouths of the siren. But Odysseus is not Indian. He failed to stop his own ears and accept deafness and silence himself. He is the pawn of the state. When he feigned madness, he was still trapped by the state. He is a slave. Odysseus listens to the song of the siren. He is enamoured by the trap of the state, the trap of the siren. The trap of slavery.

The warrior has to forsake love if love is from the slaves to the state. The warrior has to forsake status if that status comes from the state. In a world of false wars and corruption, the warrior only has one duty. To not only forsake the state, but to destroy the state. Because to do good work, that is the only way. The way of the warrior. When Krishna taught Arjuna in the Gita, it was to go to war against the state, the evil usurpers and oppressors. Arjuna was the son of a god, he was divine. God cannot serve the state, he must be against it. It is our duty to take the power away from the state and to become truly noble, to serve the people and justice. This is warrior culture.

I can live a life in sickness and without love knowing that I am not a slave to the state and knowing that I have not killed my humanity. After all, it is better than the alternative.

In this film, there is the spirit of The Tiger. Of Krishna, the liberator and the revolutionary. I am not alone. India courses through us. I am India. Six thousand years of knowledge and war are in us. We are the Revolution and the days of the state are numbered. The state is a mere blip and dead end in human history.

Inquilaab zindabaad! Inquilaab saada zindabaad! Jai Maa Kaali! Long Live the Revolution! May the Revolution live forever! Hail the Dark Mother!

Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest

ACTS OF RESISTANCE: PHOTOGRAPHY, FEMINISMS AND THE ART OF PROTEST

8 MAR – 9 JUN 2024

FREE EXHIBITION, The South London Gallery

https://www.southlondongallery.org/exhibitions/acts-of-resistance/

When I did my PhD and then got my doctorate published as a monograph, I showed that, just after the invention of photography, Victorian authors associated photography with women and a challenge to the patriarchy and its law. Because of this, throughout the novels of Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Henry James and Wilkie Collins, photography was belittled and there was an attempt to exorcise it from the text. They associated photography with a woman’s supposedly superficial and legally ignorant gaze in The Moonstone (alongside the Indian gaze of the Idolater). The reason was because photography was used to photograph the body and women were seen as bodies rather than minds. Therefore, the denigration of photography was the denigration of the body in Judaeo Christian culture and the repressed times of the Victorians. The most obvious equation of photography with women and their bodies is in She, where Ayesha, the epitome of feminine beauty and physical attractiveness is able to make telepathic mental photographs of the male heroes through her surveillance in her feminine empire and as an expression of her womanly power.

It was the feminine body of photography that was thought of as such a challenge to the male body of the law in these novels that I studied. A usurper to the throne. The medium of revolution.

Almost two hundred years after that equation of the photographic with women, I walked into a feminist protest through the means of photography at the South London Gallery. It was an exhibition space where women were fighting against injustice, state regimes and the law, like the laws controlling abortion. These women were trying to extend the meaning of protest photography. It was a fight of the truth of women against the ideology of the patriarchal state.

The exhibition label calls this ‘the fourth wave’ of feminist protest which is about the empowerment of women, uses internet tools and includes factors such as intersectionality, where there are overlapping oppressions such as misogyny, race and class (Wikipedia). The exhibition is organised in four different sections:

– Body as Battleground

– Institutional Failure

– Revising Histories

– Feminist Futures

Here, in this review, I am going to consider the photography that I had a particular interest in.

Sofia Karim, Ihtijaj (Resistance) (Delhi, 2019)

This photograph is part of a series against anti-Muslim citizenship laws in India which have gone against the ideals of cosmopolitanism and acceptance that Indian descent people like me have grown up on. The title of the series is Turbine Bagh, which is a woman’s resistance movement intended to go against the oppressive laws. The image is printed on a samosa packet made out of newspaper – Sofia was served a samosa packet with court hearings on it once. The image is something that is being fed to the recipient of the law, of news. It is food, nourishment. For the women’s resistance movement.

What strikes me in this black and white photograph is the relationship between the active body of the woman holding her hand above her head to make a gesture and the seemingly passive bodies of the other seated women around her. This is what is apparent at first sight: the movement towards resistance, the action. The active woman’s mouth is forming words. She is communicating, acting. She is energy in the face of passivity. And you look closely to the woman in the right that creates a relationship to this action – her hands are clasped in seeming prayer. The resistance is the prayer of the people, of women. The active woman is the heroine that they are praying for to overturn the injustice of the modern day state. And then, the passivity of the other seated women becomes something else. It is the gesture of waiting. Patient waiting. For the revolution. For the fire that burns and sears the world.

The humble samosa packet which contains the greatness of the revolution.

Hoda Afshar, In Turn (2023)

Tehran’s ‘morality police’ killed twenty-two year old Mahsa Amini for not wearing the hijab under government standards. These photographs are one with the protest against that legally sanctioned murder of a woman’s freedom and choice over her body.

The photographs are staged images that utilise the imagery of the doves, birds that are released at the funerals of those that have lost their lives in the protest. The birds stand for martyrdom and peace.

The women in the photographs are largely anonymous because anonymity protects the protesters on social media. These protest photographs show women plaiting each other’s hair and discarding their veils. The hair is plaited as respect is given to women freedom fighters fighting in Kurdistan against the Islamic state. They plait their hair before battle.

These monumental photographs are impressive and powerful. They give a body to the protesters and, with it, humanity. A community is formed around hair and the freedom to show it. The large format itself is a celebration of women and female bodily display, the ‘exposure’ that photography gives. Because, despite the fact that most of the models are anonymous, in the final images as we walk through the space, as you journey through the images and the story they are telling, you see the full frontal body of the woman with doves and her face is completely visible. And on the reverse, you can see the profile of a woman that braids the hair.

The plaited black hair of warfare and the white doves of peace tell a story. To have peace, you have to have the war first. Peace is the aim that can only be achieved through fighting for the rights to have choice and freedom. In the final photograph, a pair of hands braids the hair Another pair of hands superimposed on the back of the woman whose hair is being plaited holds the dove of peace and martyrdom. A reminder that freedom costs something. The fight.

These photographs are an inspiring celebration of heroism.

Sheida Soleimani, ‘Tulip Poster’ from the Series To Oblivion (2016)

This poster is a tribute to the Iranian women unjustly imprisoned and killed by the state. The tulips reference an Iranian revolutionary song that sees the flower as revolutionary hope – because although it is fragile, it is resilient and it regrows every spring. The numbers on the back of the poster show current published data of those arrested and killed by the Iranian state.

The redness of the flowers. Blood. Against the mountain in the background. With their stalks, the tulips are the ladders up to the peak. They are the scaffolding that can even go above the peak. To ascend the ladders, you have to have the revolutionary hope. Which no sword can cut down. Which no gun can diminish. The tulips are the beauty of hope. The beauty of the revolution. They transcend death with their growth. They have the beauty of growth, nature, resilience. To ascend the ladder of hope is the ascent into heaven. In the religious context of the photographer’s background, this is the image of faith in the revolution and eternal justice. Like Antigone, the photographer promotes the eternal laws of justice rather than the man-made laws of the earth.

Wendy Red Star, Amni (Echo) (2021)

This is a tribute to the matrilineal clan membership of the Appsalooke Nation which was erased by colonialism and its patriarchal laws. The artwork gives power back to the women in her family (the photographer who is Wendy Red Star, her daughter and her great-great-grandmother). And the power back to the names of the women of the Nation.

This was one of the most moving of the artworks in the exhibition for me. They called them Indians when they are Native Americans. They took their land and tried to destroy their culture and their people. They are us. We also have clan membership through our mother – Mother India is our mother and the religion of my mother is the Mother Goddess. It is this which the patriarchal, colonising state wishes to destroy and, with it, difference.

The names of power call out in the background, behind the photographic sculptures. And the photographs themselves build power. Out of the small photograph at the base, a greater entity is formed through the use of overlapping photographs. If you look carefully, you see that the aura is extended into the names of power behind, with the use of negative white space.

One of the ideas around photography when it first came into widespread use was that it could take away the soul of the sitter. Here, that idea is reversed through resistance against the patriarchy.

Because the photograph of the great-great-grandmother is there and the different generations, the photograph scultptures build up the matrilineal history which the law and the colonising state wanted to end. In the face of erasure, we have the form that has come back to us, become literalised in word and image. The phoenix has emerged from the flame.

…

The exhibition included many other pieces worth a careful examination and study. My overall impression of this exhibition is that I learnt a lot from it and I was inspired by it. We, our community, we also fight the wars against the patriarchal state and its patriarchal laws. For our way of life. For our culture. The patriarchal law wishes to kill what we are. We, the ethnic minorities, even if we are the men, we are also the women.

And the photographs showed the resistance can take many different forms. There are many dances to learn. Many songs to sing.

Time and time again, the photographs exposed what the patriarchal law of the state is. And why it has to be fought against. Not just in ‘other countries’. In Western type countries like Australia and Poland.

Sometimes, I was disappointed. One video installation said to become a ‘peaceful warrior’ and not ‘an angry warrior’. I don’t believe we should spit out our anger. But the philosophy of India is that everyone has their own path. Who are we to judge? As long as the warrior remains the warrior. That is the point.

The union of women with photography suggested calamity to the male Victorian authors that I studied. It suggested the revolution. The exhibit of feminist protest photography is the natural outcome of the resistance. As a form of truth which exposures the corrupt heart of power, photography has few rivals. These images demand more attention and more thought. Within them, they contain the resistance to the state structure and the patriarchal law. And, within them, they contain the conception of justice that the patriarchal law does not have, with its false claims to universality, timelessness and ‘truth’. By making photography concrete, by giving it the female body, these photographers have fought against the male body of the law with its male subject. They have created women’s – and photography’s – jurisprudence in the present moment.

In the end, the warrior loves the warrior. The exhibition is warrior culture.

Jesus, The Man of Difference and the Revolution

25.12.2021

Today, the world celebrates the birthday of Jesus Christ. When we look back at thousands of years of Christianity, it is easy to reduce all the complexity of that system of thought and the identity of its founder. One almost automatically thinks of how the religion was tied to war, imperialism, racism and the state in modern times. One thinks of the immorality and authoritarianism of organised religion and the Church. The feminist arguments against patriarchal monotheistic religions come to mind too. In this view, Jesus becomes the origin of oppression and conservatism. Because of such ideas, and the relentless march of a scientific reason which denigrates religion, I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say the hostility to religion in general, and to Christianity and Christ in particular, has almost become insurmountable.

However, let us try to be just to Christ. Historically, Jesus was a revolutionary. In many ways, the early version of Christianity was the religion of resistance. Christ went against the Roman state, the biggest superpower in the Western world at the time. This was his achievement, his badge of valour and the reason he holds the place in the minds of men that he has today. Today, this is how I choose to remember him. In many ways, Jesus is the model for the revolutionary consciousness. Against the state, which held the monopoly of power, wealth and men, which monopolised thought and being, Jesus and his small band offered an alternative world. This was a world in which success did not mean territorial expansion, being rich and subjugating other populations. Christ’s world was not an empire. This was an independent and non-materialistic world, a completely different form of organisation which required a completely different identity and character.

Jesus was a model for the revolutionary because he had nothing to offer against a dominant power than an idea. The idea was of a different form of being, living and thinking. Jesus was a world-builder and a builder of the human mind. Throughout the ages, this is how resistance against the superpowers has played out. There is one man or a small group that has that precious, world breaking and making commodity, difference. Jesus was the origin of difference.

Indeed, what marks Jesus and his origin is difference. He was born out of wedlock, the standard model for conception. He went against not only the Roman state, but also the Jewish religion. He aimed to break free of power wherever he found it.

Today, when the state is ever more ascendant and has thoroughly co-opted Christianity for its iniquitous purposes, when the conservatives and blind conformism have taken over society, when a new form of cultural imperialism is at its height, the birthday of Jesus stands as a model for the revolutionary and for the transforming consciousness. Yes, I am not a Christian. Yes, I do not follow the teachings of the Bible. But I judge Christ not as a god, but as a man. The inspiring, pioneering, matchless Man of Difference. And like others, I wait, ever so patiently, to see another coming of this difference into the world.