Hardship & national identity through a Filipino nursery rhyme

Magtanim Ay ‘Di Biro or ‘Planting is not a joke’ is an old children’s song from the Philippines, often sung as a nursery school rhyme. While it is considered by many (including my own family growing up) as a traditional song, the origins of the rhyme are much more recent, as I found out after being inspired by another accession card discussing Surinamese children's rhymes.

Readjusting the Focus: Exerting Agency Through Clothing

In this photograph taken by American photographer Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870-1942), are eight Negrito young men at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis with a statue of King Louis XIV in the background. As they are in an open field, this photograph could have been taken during the “Anthropology Day” games held by the fair committee to show off the indigenous Filipinos’ skills in various sports games to the public. In this case, the boys would have shown off their skills with a bow and arrow, whose straps can be seen over their shoulders.

The Filipino Jeepney: A Dying Art

The first photograph was one taken by Italian actress and photojournalist Gina Lollobrigida in 1975 Cubao, a district within Quezon City, one of the most populated cities in the Philippines. The photograph captures 6 onlookers (including the driver) watch as an artist paints onto the driver’s jeepney a man blowing wind into the mountains while the sun rises. The other photograph, of jeepney artist Vic Capuno in 2018, shows him painting a monster truck onto the side of a jeepney in his San Pedro workshop.

Cloth is a woman (seeker)

Two companion vakhs or ‘utterances’ (# 38 & 39) of the 14^th century woman poet-mystic Lalla or Lal Ded, translated from the Kashmiri by Ranjit Hoskote.

Renga between Past and Present Selves

Clad in polka dots,

Eyes glitter despite wet toes,

Exchanging this love.

After days of rain, the sunlight

shimmers – dappled shadows dance.

Living tradition,

Colors bleed transformation,

An elsewhere awaits.

What do our bodies know that

text cannot articulate?

Shuttling asleep,

Lines collapse past and future.

Who holds the power?

Resisting capture, its wings

flutter, fighting off the pin.

Women mēstiri (superintendent) in indigo firms

In informal sectors, women are never considered to be put in the position for supervising. Mestiri is a tamil term to address the head workman or foreman who supervise a group of workers in informal sectors like construction, agricultural labour and production units. Generally mesthri refers to the supervisor of male gender and no title for female supervisor is found. This explains the patriarchy in work force structure of informal sector, establishing the appropriate role for men and women.

Inquilab Zindabad: A Culture of Debate and Dissent (2)

Ambedkar University is no longer the fairly progressive university space that stood out amongst its counterparts across the country it used to be -- as a space for critical thought and oriented towards social justice. This was because its community - working class, dalit, adivasi, bahujan, queer, disabled, women students, faculty and staff, had fought hard to make it so. As a university that charges an exorbitant fee for a public institution and barely has anti-discrimination policies for marginalized communities, for AUD to lay claim on Ambedkar's radical legacy was already a stretch.

Inquilab Zindabad: A Culture of Debate and Dissent (1)

I initiated this project as an attempt to document what I saw as a thriving culture of dissent and student politics through the graffitied walls of the campus.

Educate, Agitate, Organize: (Not) Ambedkar's University

Far from sustaining a space for engaged, critical scholarship in service of social justice, the university administration has a history of casteism and has left no stone unturned in fostering Brahminical and Hindu-Supremacist ideals in the university. From scuttling affirmative action policies for SC/ST students to coercing sanitation workers to engage in manual scavenging (a caste atrocity and grave human rights violation) to suppressing any criticism of the Indian State, AUD has been an insult to the memory and vision of Babasaheb Ambedkar.

Welcome to AUD! Beware: Rebels, Poets & Artists Ahead