Himal Southasian Podcast Channel

In 2019, Anura Kumara Dissanayake contested Sri Lanka’s presidential election against the incumbent Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He won only three percent of the vote. In the parliamentary elections a year later, the National People’s power – the coalition that includes Dissanayake’s party, the Janata Vimukti Peramuna – won only three seats. The JVP was disparaged as the “three percent party.” In 2024, Dissanayake has turned the tables by winning 42 percent of the vote share. Meanwhile, Namal Rajapaksa, the son of former president and prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, secured only three percent.

Dissanayake’s meteoric rise to Sri Lanka’s executive presidency, which marks a landmark shift in the country’s politics, was powered in large part by the people’s struggle or Aragalaya in 2022 and the simmering public dissatisfaction with the political class ever since.

In this episode of State of Southasia, Ambika Satkunanathan, a lawyer and former commissioner of human rights in Sri Lanka, explains how sections of the populace, including the Tamil minority, are wary of Dissanayake, given the JVP’s history of violent insurrections in the 1980s and its leftist economic outlook. However, she says, he has made the right moves in reaching out to business communities and showing an eagerness to work with everyone.

State of Southasia releases a new interview every four weeks.

This podcast is now available on Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple podcasts and Youtube.

On 19 August, the government of the Indian state of Kerala released 233 pages of a report on gender discrimination in the Malayalam language film industry based in the state. The government released the report six years after it was commissioned and more than four years after it was first submitted. The report has come to be called the Hema Committee report, named for the chairperson, the former judge K Hema. The other two members of the committee were the veteran actor T Sharada and the retired civil services officer K B Vasalakumari. The committee was constituted after a group of actors and artists called the Women in Cinema Collective petitioned the government to look into conditions in which women in the industry were made to work. Film journalist Anna M M Vetticad, who has followed the story for years, says that only the persistence of this collective has ensured the report’s release.

The report contains depositions from several senior and junior artists and workers, both women and men. Based on these depositions and their own inquiries, the authors of the report found rampant abuse – sexual harassment and assault, demands of sexual favours for entry into the industry, the lack of facilities like toilets and changing rooms on sets, the lack of security measures in transport and accommodation, gender discrimination in renumeration, silencing women with threats of bans and much more.

Since the report was released, a number of women have made allegations of sexual misconduct against men in the industry, triggering another #Metoo wave. The government has constituted a special investigation team to look into the allegations. But Vetticad points out that the sexual abuse, while horrific, is only a symptom of larger systemic problems in an industry that needs structural change from the ground up. She speaks to Himal’s Nayantara Narayanan in this episode of State of Southasia about the findings and flaws of the report, institutionalised misogyny in Malayalam cinema on-screen and on set, and why this is a moment of reckoning for all of India’s film industries.

This epsiode is now available on Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/HiEyJvoyFBBcVpYM6

Youtube: https://youtu.be/980k0zfDiGM

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4VQxaymMemJdweDZOAGz5z?si=nywQWUvEQtGzNEIAbe2UBg

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/state-of-southasia-09-anna-m-m-vetticad-on-the/id1464880116?i=1000669665201

https://www.himalmag.com/podcast/hema-committee-report-kerala-malayalam-film-industry-bollywood-women-in-cinema-collective

Listeners like you make conversations like this one possible. Become a patron to support the State of Southasia podcast: https://www.himalmag.com/support-himal

In the three years since its return to power, the Taliban have excluded women and girls from almost every aspect of public life in Afghanistan, denying them access to education, employment, even speaking or showing their faces outside their homes. Published this August, My Dear Kabul: A Year in the Life of An Afghan Women’s Writing Group (Coronet, August 2024) is the collective diary of 21 fiercely brilliant Afghan women writers, compiled using WhatsApp messages, offering courageous and intimate testimonies of the fall of Kabul in 2021 and its aftermath, of life under Taliban rule and far from home in exile.

In August 2021 these women were in the process of publishing an anthology of short stories when their world was turned upside down. As they watched their cities fall, schools close, families and friends disperse and freedoms disappear, they stayed connected via WhatsApp messages, and established a space to keep their creativity alive, support each other and bear witness to the turmoil unfolding around them. My Dear Kabul is their story.

My Dear Kabul is an Untold Narratives project, supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and by The Bagri Foundation. Untold is a development programme for writers marginalised by community or conflict. It has been working with women writers in Afghanistan since 2020, where support for writers has been hampered by restrictions on freedom of expression and instability.

Marie, among the 21 contributors to My Dear Kabul, was born in Afghanistan but her family lived in exile when she was a young child, returning home during the years of the Islamic republic. She studied for her first degree at Kabul University’s Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences before completing a master’s degree in India. In August 2021, Marie was in Afghanistan, working in the marketing department of a German aid agency while running her own women-led counselling service. In November 2021, she was evacuated from her family home to an apartment in Germany; she moved alone. Her story ‘The Café’ was published in Moveable Type in 2023. Marie is also a contributor to My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird (MacLehose Press, 2021) and Rising After the Fall (Scholastic, 2023).

Parwana Fayyaz, a translator and editor of My Dear Kabul, is a scholar and teacher of Persian literature at the University of Cambridge. She is also a poet and translator working with multiple languages. Her poetry collection, Forty Names (Carcanet Press, 2021), was a New Statesman book of the year and a White Review book of the year. Her translations promote the writings and culture of Afghan people around the world.

Sunila Galappatti, an editor of My Dear Kabul, has worked with other people’s stories as a dramaturg, theatre director, editor and writer: at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Live Theatre (Newcastle), Galle Literary Festival, Raking Leaves, Suriya Women’s Development Centre, Commonwealth Writers, Himal Southasian and Untold Narratives. She spent five years working with a long-term prisoner of war in the Sri Lankan conflict, to retell his story in A Long Watch (Hurst, 2016). I should add I’ve had the privilege of working with Sunila at Himal - so I’m thrilled to be speaking with her today.

On 21 August, Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers formally issued “vice and virtue” laws codifying rules of lifestyle and behaviour, entrenching their control over social interactions and the private lives of people in the country. Unsurprisingly, the strictest measures relate to the dress and demeanour of women. The laws say that Muslim women must cover their faces and bodies around non-Muslim women and all men who are not “mahrams” – their husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, grandfathers or uncles. They also deem a woman’s voice to be intimate and say that it should not be heard singing, reciting or reading aloud in public.

The diktat came a week after the Taliban celebrated three years of establishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in August 2021, after the withdrawal of US troops from the country and the fall of a republican government. Soon after the group took power, the Taliban government set up a ministry for the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice, which has issued edicts and enforced them through a “morality police”. A UN report from July said that such decrees had created a climate of intimidation and fear among Afghans. The decrees have disproportionately affected women, who have had severe restrictions placed on their movement, attire and education under the Taliban. Men have also been affected. For example, last week, the morality police dismissed 280 men who did not have beards from the security forces.

The two most immediate and momentous fallouts of the change in Afghanistan’s leadership in 2021 were the drying up of foreign-exchange reserves, leading to the collapse of the economy, and the crackdown on the freedoms of women. In this episode of ‘State of Southasia’, Nayantara Narayanan speaks to Kate Clark, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a research organisation in Kabul, about how the Afghan people have been coping with deprivation under the repressive regime.

Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books Podcast from Himal Southasian, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan, assistant editor at Himal Southasian, speaks to Neha Dixit about her debut non-fiction book The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian.

Neha is an independent journalist based in New Delhi. She has covered politics, gender and social justice in print, TV and online media for 17 years. She reports for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, the Caravan, The Wire and others. She has won over a dozen international and national journalism awards including One Young World Journalist of the Year Award in 2020, the International Press Freedom Award in 2019 from the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Chaameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Woman Journalist in 2017, among others.

In her book The Many Lives of Syeda X, Neha traces the life of one working-class Indian migrant woman, her friends and family over the course of thirty years, spanning from the early 1990s to the present day.

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In this episode of ‘State of Southasia’, Nayantara Narayanan speaks to Ali Riaz, distinguished professor at Illinois State University, who studies democratisation, violent extremism, political Islam, and Southasian and Bangladeshi politics. Riaz details how, after the government displayed absolute disregard for people’s lives, it has further lost legitimacy and seen the political ground shift in Bangladesh.

State of Southasia releases a new interview every four weeks.

Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books Podcast from Himal Southasian, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan, assistant editor at Himal Southasian, speaks to the Colombo-based author Vajra Chandrasekera about his debut novel 'The Saint of Bright Doors' (July 2023) and his second and most recent novel, 'Rakesfall' (June 2024).

In The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra paints a vivid picture of a city on the brink – tracing Fetter’s path from child assassin, raised to kill his saintly father to misguided adult with the ability to see devils, anti-gods and magical traces of their world – like the mysterious bright doors. In blending the mundane and fantastical with violence of colonialism, religious control, and the struggles against these systems – the book captures the complex of the power structures that shape us.

But one lifetime is not enough to tell some stories. Rakesfall is a complex portrait of death and reincarnations. This cross-genre science fiction epic, following two souls as they reincarnate and echo across alternative realities, the mythic past to modern Sri Lanka, its long drawn civil war, to a far-future Earth abandoned by humanity. We see how those in power consolidate their hold on society, even to the point of strangling it again and again. It’s about the rise and fall of empires. How every attempt to make imperial power last forever fails and is always vulnerable to rebellion.

At its core, The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall explore the connectedness of struggles for liberation and how they reoccur in different contexts of oppression.

The Saint of Bright Doors has won the Locus, Nebula, and Crawford awards and is a finalist for the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Vajra’s nonfiction, poetry and over 50 short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Analog, Black Static, Clarkesworld, The Los Angeles Times, among others. He has worked as an editor for Strange Horizons and Afterlives: The Year’s Best Death Stories, and as a judge for the Dream Foundry Writing Contest and the Salam Award.

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Youtube: youtu.be/VXuSQtHRDZk

In this episode of State of Southasia, assistant editor Nayantara Narayanan speaks to Harsh Mander, the peace activist and founder of Karwan-e-Mohabbat, a campaign in solidarity with victims of communal or religious violence.

Mander says that over the past decade the Modi regime has normalised, legitimised, valourised and incentivised hate to such an extent that it is difficult to undo despite any kind of electoral setback to his party, and that much more is needed to defeat the social project of hate that is underway.

State of Southasia releases a new interview every four weeks.

At Screen Southasia, we host monthly online screenings of compelling documentaries from the region, including Nepal, India, Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Tibet, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Maldives and Sri Lanka. We present a diverse range of films, both classic and new, that showcase the unique cultures, histories and perspectives of Southasia.

Screen Southasia is a partnership between Himal Southasian and Film Southasia.

Film: Split Ends

Country: Nepal

Released: 2016

Q and A with director: 7 JUNE 2024 (FRIDAY)

Time: 6 pm IST, 6:15 pm NPT, 5:30 pm PKT

Synopsis:

A barbershop becomes a place of refuge for Nepali migrants who travel to Portugal in search of the European dream.

About the director:

Rajan Kathet is a filmmaker based in Kathmandu working in both fiction and documentary films. Rajan's first feature documentary, "No Winter Holidays," premiered in the International First Feature Competition section of Sheffield DocFest 2023 and is the winner of the NATIVA Award at Alternativa Film Awards 2023 in Kazakhstan. His short fiction work, "Bare Trees In The Mist (2019)," was screened at several international film festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival 2019, Tampere Film Festival, HKIFF, Encounters Film Festival, Dharamshala IFF, and Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia.

Rajan collaborates with national and international filmmakers through his production company, Salpa Films. He has worked on projects such as the Taiwanese feature documentary “After The Snowmelt” by Yi-Shan Lo, which premiered at Visions du Réel 2024, and the TV documentaries "In the Land of Machines" by Heo Chul-nyung (South Korea), "Home Street Home" by Alan Lau for Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), and "A Himalayan Endgame" by Deepak Chaturvedi (India), all of which are in post-production.

Rajan is also engaged in film education and mentors young filmmakers through his involvement in local film schools and filmmaking workshops. He regularly contributes to the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival DocLab.

Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books Podcast from Himal Southasian, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan, assistant editor at Himal Southasian, speaks to Siddhartha Deb about his novel 'The Light at the End of the World' and his latest book, 'Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India'.

'The Light at the End of the World', Siddhartha Deb’s first novel in fifteen years, reinvents Southasian fiction for our time.

The novel, beginning and ending in a dystopian future of authoritarianism and climate disaster, blurs the lines between realism and speculative fiction. It captures the puzzle of contradictions that is modern India today, and traces it back to the many moments of apocalypse in the Subcontinent’s history. At its core, the story is also about how certain tragedies and certain kinds of violence are repeated.

Over the past decade and a half, India has pivoted from a seeming success story, revealing itself to be a stranger than fiction-dystopia. In his recently published collection of essays, 'Twilight Prisoners', Siddhartha paints a damning picture of these darkest of turns in India’s recent past. It is a powerful exploration of the rise of Hindu Nationalism and its impact on dissenting voices and marginalised communities. And most importantly, it’s a timely reminder that those who resisted and are resisting – India’s twilight prisoners if you will – are not forgotten. As long as there is resistance and remembrance, there is still hope.

Born in Shillong, in northeastern India, Siddhartha Deb lives in Harlem, New York. His fiction and nonfiction have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and been awarded the Pen Open prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Dissent, The Baffler, N+1, and The Caravan.

Episode notes:

This episode is now available on Soundcloud: on.soundcloud.com/LoWvGocG7fDagxrQ7

Spotify: spoti.fi/3KKdxsf

Apple Podcasts: apple.co/3KMugLF

Youtube: youtu.be/s8QAJGgY6zc