Cold SnapDragon

1. Spared by Fate, Bound by Duty    My grandparents, Taru and Mahesh Chandra Das, with my mum, Korobi. The pic's been colourised and edited to include only the three of them. My mum lost her father a few months before losing her maternal grandfather who had written encouraging letters while her father was unwell even though he was near the end himself.  Her paternal grandfather died long before she was born. He had been the sole survivor in his family after a black fever epidemic struck; a maternal uncle took him in as a baby. He grew up with seven cousins, his uncle's sons. Of them, I'm told one joined a bank, one emigrated to the US as a scientist, and one joined the ICS. I don't know of the others.  The child who survived the epidemic, my great-grandfather, went on to become a doctor but after a case didn't go as planned, he retrained as a vet. He apparently enjoyed acting in Shakespeare's plays, and got his clothes from Calcutta; stray details which have som...

Last year, after learning how to crochet (or, at any rate, after learning how to hold a crochet hook), I promised myself that I'd introduce myself to a new craft each year. So, I've been very pleased to have had jewellery-making creep upon me unexpectedly. All of my own everyday jewellery was stolen a few years ago; not a significant monetary loss since all of it was ‘fake’ but a disappointment nonetheless since it had been carefully curated and was irreplaceable.  I found that I didn't quite like what I saw in the market. Or liked it, and found that I was too miserly to buy it — I'd wanted a painting-in-a-pendant to start off with, and found some truly lovely pieces being sold but they cost significantly more than I was willing to pay for them.  My solution was to buy a pack of bezels, and stick pictures into them. The first, an Indian miniature cut out from the page of a book.  I used Fevicol instead of varnish — should anyone ever need the information: there are diff...

Thomas Waterfield with Korobi, Bikram, and Nandita Saikia (Pune, early 1990s) A mention of the British officers of the Raj does not necessarily send one into raptures. However, there are exceptions. Thomas Waterfield, affectionately called Dada , who fought to acquire Indian citizenship after independence, was one of them. He was finally granted Indian citizenship in 1950, and lived in India till his death on the fifth of this month, his final years having been spent at a riverside home in Warje. In later life, he used the surname, 'Gay', as it was easier, he said, for Indians to pronounce.  Dada was born in Devonshire, England, 96 years ago and grew up in a luxurious home. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and first came to India as a young Indian Civil Service officer, as had his father and grandfather before him, in 1928. During the Raj, he served as a Magistrate, an Assistant Collector, a Judge, as the Registrar of the Bombay High Court, and as a Commission Chairm...

(A version of this piece was originally written upon request in 2020 for the Times of India although it was withdrawn because of suggestions to change it in ways the author, Nandita Saikia, was uncomfortable. Although it was written when fear of COVID-19 was especially high, with good reason, the pandemic seems to have merely brought pre-existing issues into sharp relief, issues which, sadly, have not yet been resolved ensuring that this piece is not yet irrelevant although it could, perhaps do with some updating.) We know with reasonable certainty that the pandemic we're currently in the midst of has not enhanced women's safety in the least. There's not a day which goes by without horrific reports of violence against women in the media, and anecdata suggests that domestic violence has been increasing exponentially although addressing it is difficult and, perhaps understandably, does not appear to be anyone's highest priority even though it may be a life-and-death issue...

I critique the rule of law with reference to violence and its own history, pointing out that it has often been 'the voice of the immensely privileged codified in statute and subordinate legislation' in a piece that was published by Smashboard and later by Firstpost . Extracts "...the rule of law is not an egalitarian concept and its history demonstrates that it not underlain by gender neutrality. It may be possible to force it into another, less discriminatory mould more mindful of equality and individual rights but that would require recognising our current understanding of the rule of law for what it often is: an idea perpetuated by white men living in sexist societies themselves and forming the theoretical basis for the racial hierarchies which plague all of us today, often with their ideas being used to support economic drain and worse of countries primarily populated by non-white peoples. [....] The Constitution of India promises individuals equality and dig...

( Note:  This post is primarily about the intersect between the raid/rescue model & NRPFesque policies in the context of DV and the shape which laws governing the field could be made to assume in the future.) ~*~ Indian trafficking law is a complex mix of constitutional law guaranteeing the impermissibility of the practice of human trafficking, criminal law, and labour law. It is consolidated nowhere but finds mention piecemeal across a number of statutes. Criminal laws in the field have tended to try to protect trafficked persons (questionably, sometimes from themselves by refusing to acknowledge their ability to consent to acts in relation to themselves) while labour laws have generally tended to attempt to realise the hope of being able to engineer a more equitable society through the instrumentality of the law (with varying degrees of success, to put it mildly). In consequence, Indian law has not thus far single-mindedly pursued a strategy of removal a...

The Supreme Court is currently hearing a matter in which it is expected to determine the Constitutionality of Section 497 of the 1860 Indian Penal Code. This provision is popularly understood as one which criminalises adultery, and the IPC itself supports this understanding by calling the offence ‘adultery’. However, if the particulars of the offence it describes were considered, it would emerge that the provision is, more accurately, one which can criminalise a man who knowingly has sex not amounting to rape with a married woman without her husband's consent or connivance. Making the provision as it now stands truly gender-neutral, as many demand, would not allow unfaithful wives to be jailed at their husbands’ behest. Instead, it would allow wives to have their unfaithful husbands’ women lovers jailed. Although much public discourse treats IPC Section 497 as being discriminatory towards men since it cannot currently be used to jail women, it is quite firmly emb...