मराठी | English
Twenty-five editions. Nine years. We feel happy to have walked this milestone. We stayed with conviction. And, we are happy to have walked this far with support from our writers, artists, researchers and readers. It is not a coincidence but a culmination of nine years of conversation between languages and forms and geographies.
We are a bilingual space — a bridge, we keep saying, between languages that are unique. What we have learned over these years is that to be bilingual is not just a metaphor for tolerance or coexistence. It is about how meaning works: no word perfectly translates, and in the gap between languages lives something irreducible. That gap has been our home. It remains our home. The twenty-fifth edition is both a celebration and a continuation of that dwelling.
Nine years has not been a neat arc. It is more like the journey Samten takes in Lungmying Lepcha’s story, going up and down the sloping hills, chasing the mountains, not always knowing what is waiting at the destination. Through these years, calamities of contagious disease took away something precious that society had. It changed the dynamic of publishing online. People came, stayed, and went. Individual egos, power dynamics, and messed-up interpersonal relationships disrupted the camaraderie we had developed, and cherished . Unforeseen illness and the deaths of loved ones forced us to question our purpose. Still, what remained, and still remains is hope: hope to get up, bundle whatever is left, and start again. Give a call again. Hear someone calling.
The word is call.
As we announced the theme of ‘call’ for the 25th edition, and the nuances arrived through the sensibilities of our contributors. So the word call has been circling through this edition. It appears in a bhakti sant’s cry toward a god who may or may not be listening. It surfaces in a philosopher’s claim that art does not wait to be interpreted but first summons the one standing before it. It moves through the smell of roasting potatoes in a contested field in Singur, through the fizz and static of a PCO booth in Kolkata, through the sound of the Shimga festival recalled by a migrant worker in a Mumbai office who has not been home in years. It lives inside the dial tone of a landline number memorised in childhood, inside the crinkle of a chip packet shared between two schoolboys in a monsoon corridor in Gangtok. It is dispersed across stickers pressed onto European lampposts and bus shelters, tiny paper mouths speaking of wars. Nearly every contribution in this issue operates as such a call. The photo essay, the installation, the personal memoir, the short stories — none of them are merely conveying information. All of them are reaching out, across image and form, toward a reader — a rasik for an encounter.
I won’t try to give you a neat summary of the 25th edition. What I want to offer instead is an invitation to read what this edition has gathered. You’ll find a collection of works that, for all their differences in form, language, geography, and concern, have somehow arrived at a shared space. And let me also highlight a few of the reflections on the theme of call.
In this edition, one of the most intense and rigorous versions of the call appears in Nitya Pawar’s essay. She moves through the poetry of Janabai, Kabir, Mirabai, and Ravidas with a scholar’s precision and a reader’s warmth. Her essay speaks to our own concerns: what does it mean to call out when the one being called may not be there, or may not be anyone definitive at all? We come to realize that we don’t always need a clear interlocutor. Instead, we hear a call through resonance. The call bounces back, changing how we perceive what we say and how we say it, and letting us imagine a response. As Nitya puts it, if we are sensitive enough to be moved by the great Kabir, the call turns inward and blurs the line between who is speaking and who is being spoken to. As in Sant Janabai’s call to Vithoba, a call creates a direct connection that needs no intermediary. Thus, the rhythmic flow between I and you, self and other, is itself an expression and a way of making meaning.
Fariza Farid Memon’s story is written from a distance that is both geographical and emotional. It’s about a daughter left without inheritance in the most literal and layered sense. The story reads as a particular kind of call that cannot be answered because the person who should answer is gone. Or, even when the father was there, he never really answered her call. The will, that most official of documents designed to speak clearly from beyond death, here speaks only in absences. What is not left becomes the story, narrating the turmoil in the caller’s mind. This is writing that understands that what is withheld can be as loud as what is given.
This sits in productive tension with Sneha’s illustrated personal memoir, which describes a different geography of selfhood. Kolkata in her story is a conservative Bengali working class household in the first decade of this century, and the calls that reach her are transmitted through new technologies like the landline number defined as home, the intimate enclosure of the PCO booth, the QWERTY keypad of an early phone, and finally the open flood of the internet. Where Memon’s protagonist turns inward because no visible call is present, Sneha’s narrator is called outward by an identity and artistic practice that her household could not have accommodated. Both journeys are real. Both are about what happens when there is some call, whether present or absent, inward or outward.
We are interested in the broader socio-political contexts of our thematic focus and in the nuanced relationship between the personal and the political. The questions we asked were: how do individuals or societies call out amidst a shifting socio-political landscape? How have calls to events, either small or grand, redefined our sense of self and our relationship with the other? Pritam’s installation, The Roast Potato Party, brings us to a field in Singur, land that carries in recent Indian political memory the weight of a national argument about development and dispossession. Pritam’s response is material: the smell of roasting potatoes, the warmth of fire, and an absence of formal invitation. What the installation documents is how communities can be assembled by smell and warmth and the tacit call of a shared space, before any narrative is imposed. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s insistence that grand narratives are exclusionary by nature, Pritam’s work makes room for the fragmented, the contradictory, the private and protest memories. This is a call that does not presuppose its community but instead discovers, through the gathering itself, who has answered.
Mayur Salgar’s photo essay traces a quieter form of this across European city surfaces. The sticker art documented in his visual essay is small, often overlooked, pressed onto lampposts and shop windows in the Netherlands. The stickers reflect public responses to war and social upheaval in forms that the mainstream cannot quite contain or dismiss. What begins as a casual observation becomes a methodology: a way of reading how cities carry, in their surfaces, feelings that official discourse cannot hold. These are calls from unnamed callers to unspecified passersby, and they work precisely because of that indeterminacy. Anyone who sees them must decide, on the spot, whether to respond.
There is also Marathi playwright Datta Patil’s creative methodology of exploring a playwriting process prompted by the theft of the great poet Narayan Surve’s awards. Like a call given to stolen material, subverted to write a play that comments on society and the individual, on what it means to reclaim what has been taken and speak from that wound.
Which brings me to Vinay Sharma, a poet and theatre-maker whose work I have long admired. His poem the poem tree feels, finally, like the image that holds this edition has been trying to say. In it, a man walks his whole life toward a tree he can always see but never reach. It’s a tree of poems, creativity. Each time he fears the tree may vanish entirely — branches, trunk, root remnants, all of it taking flight — the leafbirds return, as if at some signal he will never be given access to. He is never closer, never farther. And he keeps walking.
We read it instead as a poem about the nature of the call itself. The explorer does not stop calling. The tree does not disappear. The signal he cannot hear is not a barrier but the very condition that keeps him in motion, that keeps the distance alive and the reaching possible. A word, a poem, a creation is a call away, always some distance away, and yet always visible, always approached. Our relation with a call to the self and to the world around is this complex and this faithful. That has been a creative life. That is how it is.
Twenty five editions later, I am deeply grateful to every contributor who has trusted me with work that calls out into the unknown, not knowing what answer might come back. The call never stopped. I hope it reaches you. On a personal level, I owe so much to the team that came together selflessly to steer the twenty-fifth run of Hakara, walking alongside one another every step of the way. I could not have moved forward without Pallavi Singh, Mayur Salgar, Satya Gummuluri, Anagha Mandavkar, Gayatri Lele, and Priya Sathe.
Image credit: Suresh Kumar Singha for Hakara