The experience of pandemic and the eventual lockdown has been quite unnerving for all of us. A few days into the lockdown, a Marathi lullaby resurfaced on social media. It was written more than hundred years ago and was sung by my grandmother to my mother and my mother sang it to me, yet, none of us knew what it actually stood for – a devastating memory of the bubonic plague that killed hundreds and thousands at the break of the 20^th century. Preserved in the form of  the lullaby rendering the experience of poverty, destitution and plague, the composition was in circulation over decades keeping the memory alive in an undecipherable form. Its sudden (or maybe, thoughtful?) resurgence in the times of COVID-19 crisis made me contemplate on how would we be preserving this moment of turbulence in future? Can we see this crisis in isolation?

When we began thinking about our new theme for our 11^th open call, a lot was going on around us. The process of selecting a theme for each edition has been exciting. It is a reflection of how we respond to the ‘happenings’ around us – what astonishes us, what we are curious about and what makes us pause for a moment and ponder on, and what we think could be an interjecting statement or a disruptive moment. It is also a personal enquiry, yet it is much more than that as it encompasses different registers – the political, the familial, the methodological, the conflictual, and the collaborative.

This time, it was a bit intense. The canvas world around shifted rapidly in the blink of an eye or before a  butterfly could flap its wings. The shifts had a galvanising effect – from the sit-in protests to the suspension of social gatherings, from the disappearance of political acts from the public spaces to moving to online platforms to express your voice, from the migrant labouring bodies occupying social spaces to the incarceration of political activists, and  from living in isolation to claiming our democratic rights on the streets. It was experienced across the globe from cities in India to Hong Kong and New York. Dissenting voices were being silenced by authoritarian regimes and the nationalist narrative was being imposed on everyday life. The canvas grew bigger and bigger.

Suddenly, it gave all of us a panoramic view. A vaster scale, a large canvas that we hadn’t pictured earlier. The entire world was spinning in a whirlpool – the degree of this turbulence might be different everywhere. It is still spinning, nonetheless. How do we grapple with this turmoil? How do we make sense of such tumultuous times? How do we understand the past and the present turbulence? How do we write about it and most importantly, what should be our response to such turbulence time? What should be our form? 

The memory or the experience of turbulence does affect the ways in which we respond to our present – it may be through different forms of expressions, acts or processes. 

Hakara’s edition brings together these different  expressions. For instance, the Marathi translation of the conversation between between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde is situated within the resurgence of the black movement in recent times. Baldwin and Audre also speak of the complexity that gender brings into within the larger concerns of the movement. Another example is Farhana Latief and Reyazul Haque’s essay that locates Anushka Shankar’s collective musical performance of Land of Gold within the bodily restrictions due to the current crisis. This piece ponders on how this musical work provides us with a sense of freedom and movement – not as a romanticised ideal but as a precondition for any modern society – with the idea of the collective that is built through an ensemble of multiple voices and polyphonic rhythms. 

Memory and our response to the turbulence is one layer in this edition. The other layer is the expansive ways in which one encounters the idea of turbulence or even subverts the mainstream narratives. This edition merges these two parts producing an entangled understanding of the present and the past and what future must behold. The unnamed characters in Asijit Datta’s play produce a tensed shared space as a result of social convulsions where the outside turbulence seeps into the inside, intimate, and familial space.

A few pieces in this edition also tend to disrupt the popular narratives that have caused upheavals in the cultural and public sphere. For instance, Vasvi Oza builds her visuals drawing on the text-productions for educational purpose, In her work, Vasvi has replicated the textbook exercise format in the form of a series of illustrations to question not only the visual and textual language of education but also to probe into the current events related to ultra-nationalist actions. The counter-narratives are also produced by revisiting the archival material, for instance, in this edition, by Anirudh Deshpande. He punctuates the popular nationalist imagination of the war of Panipat, a turbulence event in pre-modern history, by putting forth the complex and polyphonic voices of this historical narrative.

A turbulent moment brings forth these multitudinous voices in Hakara’s 11th edition as this pandemic  opens up the ruptures in the structures – be it societal, economic, cultural or personal. What traces of it would be carried forward, and  what would be erased? What role, as a journal, we would we play in constituting these memories or narratives? These are big, complex questions. The present anthem of resistance, ‘Everything will be remembered’ (Sab kuchh yaad rakha jayegaa) is sung over and over again but this act of remembrance, through creative expressions, will allow us to move beyond. As a journal, we hope to bring together these different forms and expressions in this edition. Rather than trying to go back to normal, rather than refusing to see the rupture, we, through this series of works, wish to take a moment to pause, rethink, and possibly alter the ways in which we have been looking at the world to imagine a different future. Until then, the echoes of these events will keep reverberating.