Daily Archives: September 10, 2021

Linus Guok is 21 years old, with a compact frame and hair thats cropped short on the sides. He leans over a kitchen counter, using a large knife to chop up a pile of produce.

One of his favorite things is to cut potatoes or sweet potatoes, his mother, Fiona Wong, explains. He actually will cut any and everything like fruits and vegetables that he sees, which is why we no longer have fruits on the kitchen counter. Because one fine day it got all cut up and there was a big grin on his face!

Fiona and Linus live near Berkeley, California with dad Chin, and brother Ethan. Linus has severe autism. With it comes a variety of behavioral, social, and medical issues. Hes nonverbal, which means he can vocalize, but isnt able to use speech, but Fiona says he can understand more than he can speak.

Julia Lee

When I visit their home in late July, Linus and his caregiver, Kevin Bernard, are sitting at the kitchen table together. Linus is eagerly taking a pair of scissors to a stack of colorful New Yorker magazines. Its another one of his favorite hobbies.

Kevins been working in this field since the 1980s, and though he first got into it as a side job, he now feels its his vocation.

Kevin Bernard

Hes only been caretaking for Linus for a few months, but he used to be on staff at an afterschool program Linus attended. So now, after years of working together, the two have developed an unspoken language. Kevin understands what Linus is trying to say from a flick of his head or a subtle gesture.

With Kevin as caretaker, life is the best it's been for Linus and Fiona in 18 months. Only after talking with Fiona did I learn just how desperate things had gotten after their support systems failed.

In her late 40s, Fiona is extremely open almost disarmingly so. Quick to smile, shes the kind of person who becomes fast friends with the grocery store clerk. She also has a tendency to laugh at slightly inappropriate times.

Christopher Egusa

Yeah, I have dark humor and I laugh at these things, she remarks during one of our conversations.

Fiona and her husband Chin immigrated to the Bay Area from Singapore in the late 90s, and had Linus soon after. At two years old he was diagnosed with autism.

There was an education on my part, to understand: what is his trajectory going to look like? she says. There was of course the denial and the ignorance, and then the building of community, and finally the acceptance. It was a long journey.

That journey hasnt been easy. Linus isnt violent or aggressive, but hes extremely strong-willed. His emotions can easily spiral out of control, ending in tantrums.

And, he doesnt just have autism. He also has OCD and epilepsy. Without warning, he can be struck by a sudden seizure. Its sent him to the ER multiple times. The latest was just before the pandemic, when Linus was away at a camp.

Fiona recalls, The camp counselor thought he had settled in for bed, and so he left the room and then when the night person came, found Linus on the floor bleeding from the head.

Because of all this, Linus needs 24 hour care and supervision. Even stepping away for a few minutes like the camp counselor did can end in disaster.

Despite all these challenges, Fiona and Chin eventually got Linus care pretty dialed in.

He attended a special school during the day, and then an afterschool program. Both parents worked full time: Chin as an engineer and Fiona as an occupational therapist. On nights and weekends, Fiona would switch into caregiving mode. It wasnt easy, but it was working. We were, like, being parents and also we wanted time with Linus, she says.

An Endless Pit of Despair

But, in March of last year, the Bay Area announced shelter in place orders, and their lives fell apart. The school closed, and so did the afterschool programs, Fiona says. So we went from having Linus being involved in a program and being engaged and taken care of to nothing at all.

Because Chin needed to keep working full time, the all-consuming task of taking care of Linus fell to Fiona; every waking moment of every single day. Even just using the bathroom was a challenge.

Fiona Wong

As weeks went by and the pandemic showed no signs of slowing down, Fiona realized that something needed to change. She needed help. So, she reached out to the local regional center.

And heres some background on the complicated world of intellectual and developmental disabilities or IDD for short.

Regional centers are nonprofits that are funded by the government. There are 21 of them in the state, and theyre supposed to act as a sort of hub for the over 330,000 IDD individuals and families in California. The regional center that Fiona reached out to was the Regional Center of the East Bay.

Heres how it works: you contact the regional center, and they assign you a case manager who can connect you to the resources you need. So if you tell them you need help with caregiving, the regional center contracts with one of several caregiving agencies in the area to fill that need. At least, thats how its supposed to work.

But my case manager dropped the ball, Fiona says. Because in June, a month later, I emailed her and she had done nothing about it. And shes like, uh oh thanks for the reminder.

At this point, Fiona had already been Linus 24/7 caregiver for three months. Shed quit her job to do it full time. Shed reached out to Linus school and afterschool program about possible solutions, but her questions were dismissed. And, though she didnt know it yet, it would be months more before she got help.

Fionas mental health began sliding sharply. I was not dealing with it very well, she says. You do the daily thing. So, the feeding and caring and changing his sheets and stuff like that. But it seemed like an endless grind. And I got into a dark place of I don't want to live like this anymore.

She describes it as an endless pit of despair, which she sunk deeper into each day with each negative headline and each unanswered call.

In that state, she felt she couldnt reach out to others for help out of fear of being a burden. One day, though, she did manage to pick up the phone.

I did call a friend and cried my heart out, she says. I said things that made her worry I would take my life. And I had thought about that. And I was in a very dark place.

Julia Lee

Sadly, this is a common story. A June 2021 study from the CDC found that 70% of parents and unpaid caregivers of adults suffered mental health issues during the pandemic, including anxiety, depression, trauma, and suicidal thoughts. In fact, family caregivers like Fiona were eight times more likely to contemplate suicide than others.

Fionas friend, now very concerned, called two other friends who are connected to the IDD community, and they immediately had a Zoom intervention with Fiona. They went right into brainstorming mode. Even though they didnt have all the answers, just the process gave Fiona a spark of hope.

She describes their support as life saving. It just reminded me that when I think I'm alone, actually, I do have friends who if I knew to call them, they would step in and try to help me.

With their help, Fiona decided to move Linus to a different school system, and redoubled her efforts to secure a caregiver.

A Revolving Door of Care Workers

Finally, in September 2020 six months after the lockdown began she was assigned someone from the caregiving agency, Maxim Healthcare. She says, We loved her right away. We thought she was a great match. Amazing, life-changing service. From nothing to Oh my God, we have help.

She even planned to go back to work. But it didnt last. After two weeks, the caregiver abruptly stopped showing up. Fiona says, I got a phone call Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then Thursday, no call and no person.

It was another month before the agency let her know what happened: the caregiver had had a sudden flareup of chronic illness, and they were trying to find a replacement. From there, it was a series of false starts. Every time Fiona thought maybe they had found something stable, things would go wrong.

A month and a half went by, and a new caregiver started, but she consistently showed up several hours late. And if a caregiver is late, Fiona cant work.

After a week, Fiona asked for someone new.

Three more weeks; another caregiver. She was great at first, but became inattentive, spent much of her time on her phone, and also started showing up late.

Then, in January, in a cruel twist, the caregiver gave the whole family Covid. Fortunately they all made a full recovery. Fiona can only laugh at the absurdity. So she gets the first positive test on January 27, she recalls. I remember these days, because theyre seared in my mind through trauma.

The final straw was in May, when the caregiver told Fiona she was leaving for Hawaii a few days later. I told the coordinator, I think I'm done. I cant live this way.

But she largely didnt have a choice. Fiona says when the agency assigns you a caregiver, it really feels like luck of the draw.

Some families try to get around this by looking for care workers outside of the system. That method has its own complications, but its exactly what ended up finally working for Fiona. In May, a friend tipped her off that Kevin, who we met earlier, was in between jobs. Its not an overstatement to say that Kevin changed their lives.

He willingly walked into this job knowing how tricky it could be, she says. He's reliable, and when he's on hes on, Kevin is not on his phone. He's like, engaged with Linus. He's actually doing the caregiving and I'm so grateful. I dont even have the energy to do that.

Christopher Egusa

The Caregiving Crisis

Ive gotten to know Fiona as an incredibly upbeat, energetic, and resourceful person. So I had to wonder: what happened in this system? How did things reach such a critical breaking point in Fionas life?

To begin understanding, I reached out to Lisa Kleinbub, the Executive Director for the Regional Center of the East Bay, which serves Alameda and Contra Costa counties, where Fiona and Linus live. She told me, I don't think any of us were prepared for the pandemic in any real way.

She says the first part of Fionas story is really concerning to her the part about the unresponsive case manager and the month wait time. That is certainly not what we want, she says. We can always work to improve that.

However, I will say that the story of having to go through a number of different caregivers before you find the one that fits is not unusual whether there's a pandemic or not a pandemic.

What Fiona and Linus experienced is a look into the caregiving crisis experts say is looming just on the horizon, and some say is already here. Its one that will eventually affect anyone who needs care.

The problem starts with basic math. Changing demographics like an aging baby boomer generation means that over the next decade the US is going to need more care workers. Like, 4.7 million more, according to a report by the Paraprofessional Research Institute. Thats the most of any occupation. more than the second and third places combined.

But the number of care workers is actually shrinking, as workers leave the industry. The reason? Caregiving jobs are of such poor quality. Mostly minimum wage or below, offer few benefits, and provide minimal training. Nationally, one in five care workers live below the poverty line, and over half receive public assistance.

One of the challenges in the Bay Area, says Lisa, is just finding people who want to do the kind of direct service work with people who are going to get paid possibly less than they will get to work at a fast food restaurant.

She says the rates that the regional center can pay caregivers are set by the state legislature, and theyre badly outdated. Some salary levels are still using formulas from the 1990s.

Having a system that depends on many, many minimum wage workers is not a sustainable system to really serve people in the way they should be served, she explains.

Kevin, Linuss caregiver, says he knows plenty of people who have been driven out of the industry simply because they couldnt make ends meet.

There really is no way to make it viable if you're not going to offer us a working wage, he says. And if you're not going to offer insurance things that people need in order to stay in the field. You need to feel wanted.

Though they may pay like entry level jobs, caregiving work is demanding and skill-intensive. Kevin has spent years developing his craft.

You might spend time with Linus and I and not get the nuance of it. If you have no experience in this field, it might seem like we're just cutting potatoes and dribbling a basketball. But if I'm able to understand what the process is and how I'm trying to slow Linus' day down, and get him to be attentive to things and communicate as much as possible, it starts to make sense.

The end result is an industry that experiences shockingly high turnover. Some estimates put it at over 60%. This is a problem when one of the most important aspects of a caregivers work is developing a trusting relationship with their client and learning their specific needs. The revolving door of care workers means that cases like Fiona and Linus get stuck in limbo for months or years, unable to find the consistent care they need.

SEIU Local 2015 is Californias long-term care workers union. In July, President April Verrett spoke at a rally for a national day of action for care workers.

They told us we were indispensable, she says to the crowd. Many of you in this room, you looked death in the face while you put on a mask. And you went out into a plague ravaged nation to care for others.

So I ask you, isnt an essential worker worth more than the minimum wage? Many of us provided care for others during COVID without having healthcare for ourselves or for our families. So I asked you, isnt a caregiver deserving of care?

Care workers are 87% women, 49% POC, and almost a third immigrants, and some advocates argue that the poor job quality speaks to a long history of oppression and discrimination.

Kim Evon is the unions executive vice president. She says, This was jobs done by black women coming out of, you know, slavery. We've got to start reconciling the fact that people make excuses to pay these women less. It's a leftover part of a racist system.

She says health insurance and adequate training are some of their priorities. But the big push? We believe that it is time to make a bold demand. That the minimum floor of any caregiver job, the minimum floor is $20. That it begins to show that you are demonstrating the value of this work.

She says their top priority on the national front is the passage of the Biden Administrations Better Care Better Jobs Act, which would invest $400 billion in home and community based services like caregiving.

It's a huge part of starting to get to this place that we're talking about. This path to $20, training, healthcare, retirement, this workforce that can really take care of this growing population of seniors and people with disabilities.

The goal is for these jobs to be attractive as long term careers.

Care jobs should be seen as an economic engine in our country, she says. And what you reap from it in terms of health outcomes, a growing workforce, a booming economy is to us, all interconnected.

But, its not enough to just pass the national bill. Kim says its also about convincing officials at the state and local levels that this work should be prioritized.

So it's up and down the spectrum. Look, dignity isn't a solo act. We all have a part to play in it, and everybody has a way to lean in to make sure it happens.

Finding a Way to Move Forward

In California, theres a ray of hope. Governor Gavin Newsom recently approved an almost $90M funding increase to help regional centers pay care workers and other service providers higher rates. The number falls far short of the at least $1.8B thats needed, but its scheduled to increase in the coming years.

Ultimately, what all this could mean for people like Fiona and Linus is some semblance of consistency. Kevin has been a godsend for them, but theres no guarantee how long hell be able to work with Linus.

Fiona says if not for him, she would still be in this cycle of maybe having a mismatch of a provider and only having her or him only last a few weeks, you know, and then it's onto the next provider. I would be pulling my hair out.

Years of being the default caregiver have taken their toll. It's a tough place to be for an extended period of time. It's difficult to get self worth and validation, when you're putting others first constantly is exhausting, she says.

Besides using her dark humor to cope, she says she has certain memories that she likes to revisit. One of them is from when Linus was in kindergarten. The speech therapist was trying to get him to nod his head. He couldnt do it, so Linus would take his hands, hold his head and move up and down, she explains as she gestures with her hands. So he had to physically hold his head to nod! she explains.

It's like, it's a funny thing that he did. That makes me smile every time. But it also speaks to his character, his personality, which we have seen through the years. Whether good or bad, he has a tenacity about him to go do the thing. He is determined, yes, it is hard to stop that tornado destined to go that direction.

That tenacity has been the source of so many headaches, exasperated sighs, and frustrated hands flung in the air. But its also what she loves about Linus.

And its a trait that they share. It got them through the darkest months of the pandemic, and shes trusting it to get them through whatevers next.

Christopher Egusa reported this series while participating in theUSC Annenberg Center for Health Journalisms 2021 California Fellowship.

Continued here:

COVID-19 Is Exposing The Caregiving Crisis, Leaving Disabled People And Their Families Desperate - KALW

It has often happened that the most creative works in a medium, at various times, have been made by outsiders to the medium, not by those who have practiced it for many years. This seems very true in the case of Anamika Haksars [film] Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon.

Kabir Mohanty

The title of Anamika Haksars 2018 Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon (Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis) comes from a line of dialogue in the film: when someone off camera asks a horse-cart driver what hes doing, he replies that hes taking his horse to eat jalebis, a traditional Indian dessert more popular with humans than equines. While the drivers answer might seem sarcastic, its very much in earnest. With scenes like this, Haksar welcomes viewers to a world in which laborers speak and dream in ways that one might not expect, creating a realism that goes beyond standard notions of reality.

The film opens with a shot of a leaky pipe, slowly dripping in the dark. Water collects in a dirty pool underneath, littered with garbage. Two voices argue, cursing each other. But when the camera zooms out, the scene doesnt reveal two people at each others throats, but rather two men sleeping: two workers, splayed out on cramped handcarts under streetlamps. The camera pans vertically over the men and settles on two others, sleeping in an open structure above the handcarts. These men are in shadow; both move slightly in their sleep as they dream. The camera movement is slow and allows us, the viewers, to take in each scene until we feel we are a part of it; the cameras time becomes our own. Suddenly a harmonium strikes up a tune and an animated sequence begins: we have entered the workers dream-space. In the first mans dream, flowers fall onto a silk bed. The camera pans up to show a Hindu goddess seated on a lotus that rises above the bed; the colors are bright and artificial, like gaudy calendar art. The goddess blinks as if to assert that she is real, but then our collective darshan is interrupted: the goddess is poked from the left by an expanding red flag that then envelops the screen. It is a communist flag held high above the ground by Lalli, a trade unionist, the other dreaming man. The two mens dreams are fighting with each other.

In Lallis dream he is rallying the masses for his communist cause. Below him are hundreds of people, flickering like lamps in the dark, accompanied by a soundtrack of the Internationale in Hindi. The red flag ultimately wins out over the Hindu goddess. Then the men themselves wake up to continue their quarrel. The movie works at real and allegorical levels, without reconciling their differences. If there is a theme to the film, it concerns representation itself: what aesthetic form, Haksar seems to ask, can adequately stage and represent the daily lives of the urban precariat?

Continuing a long cinematic legacy from many parts of the world, Haksar wagers that if the lives of the urban poor can be suitably portrayed, then anyone can identify with them. In this sense, Ghode Ko Jalebi is a rigorous cinematic manifesto, told through the lifeworld of workers in the streets of Old Delhi (aka Shahjahanabad).

To arrive at this experience of precarious life in Old Delhi, Haksar conducted seven years of ethnographic fieldwork in the city. Of course, research does not guarantee a good film, nor does it ensure genuine understanding of the context. Making art about a social world far removed from the lives of the audience is perhaps even more challenging than writing an essay or making a documentary about the same world. The urban underclass, scraping together a meagre existence on the wrong side of laws that protect property over people, offers no ready points of identification for middle-class audiences. Prevailing conventions of representation relegate the poor to being negative examples, unless they are objects of charity. In the bourgeois Indian media industry, people like us is a programming category whose self-congratulatory name forbids critique. Those who use it are nurtured and insulated from the chaos and discomfort of the wider world, regarding people like them, another industry term, as worthy of being portrayed in crime and sensational genres, but nothing more.

This industry terminology in India is based on class and caste distinctions that are treated as self-evident. A parallel to this can be found in Hollywoods treatment of race, where white and non-white characters only ever meet in limited representational modes and in specific genres. In most Hollywood films, race, like caste in India, remains a metaphysical distinction that social reforms leave mostly untouched. Caste is like race and class combined, except that the combination creates a surplus, unique to castewhat B. R. Ambedkar, Dalit leader and chief architect of Indias constitution, called a negative sociality, which prohibits ethics from operating across caste lines. In Hollywood, its rare to see story lines that bring black and white people together in forms of solidarity across the segmentations that capital creates, because producers fear that they turn off viewers. Similarly, class and caste discrimination are usually taboo topics in Bollywood; characters in films are typically upper caste, and when social differences are presented in a story, crime or comedy usually enters to thwart further inquiry.

By contrast, Haksars mode of inclusion is aesthetic, not argumentative; her philosophy is expressed cinematically rather than as a set of textual propositions. Her background as a theater director makes her attentive to issues of staging; for the viewer this registers as attention to form as such. The content of that form is the very fact of social heterogeneity.

Haksar portrays what remains of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, the melding of Hindu and Muslim cultures poetically figured in the confluence of the Ganga and Jamuna rivers. But scenes of working-class Old Delhi life clash with an aggressive majority culture powered by another kind of confluence, between politics and business interests. Like the warring dreams of the opening sequence, characters in Haksars film experience discordant temporalities that clash with each other. They navigate ancient traditions while trying to survive in todays brutal market economy.

Tamasha dekhne walon, khud tamasha na ban jaye, sings Chaddami, a street-food vendor and Lallis sparring partner, quoting a line from Laila Majnu, a seventh-century tale of star-crossed lovers, familiar to Hindus and Muslims alike. Roughly translated, it means: O viewer of entertainment, mind you dont yourself become the entertainment! In other words, be prepared to act and intervene in the world.

The film displays the full range of work that migrants from Indias heartland perform to survive in the big city. We witness the slow destruction effected by heavy manual labor (shown in the back muscles of a handcart-puller), the light-fingered moves of a pickpocket, the artistry of a street-food vendor, and the fall of a load-carrier with a heavy sack. The load-carrier, upon falling, is subject to a stream of abuse, but then, in a memorable animated sequence, his boss turns into a lizard trapped in a jar. Daily labor can be playful and generous too, whether it is an elderly woman who distributes rice gruel at her own expense, or the pickpocket Pathru, one of the key characters in the film, who masquerades as a tour guide and discloses wondrous things.

Despite the red flag and the Internationale, the film doesnt offer a workerist or ideological message in the conventional sense. Rather, Haksar invites us to build on her film, which falls somewhere between ethnographic documentary and magical realism. The range of persons and stories she assembles suggests Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris multitude: a plurality that does not yet have a name, a collective subject whose potential propels emancipatory politics in the postcommunist era. This subject seeks to emancipate itself politically without necessarily knowing in advance what it will become. The multitude thus points beyond existing politics, towards a global form that has yet to crystallize.

Several enthusiastic reviews were published after Ghode Ko Jalebis release, but they barely touched on what is distinct about the film. This might be because Haksar is doing something unprecedented. She is addressing a problem of representation that haunts Indian cinema: How to portray a stratified society to itself? She bypasses conventional narratives and prevailing social codes to address the constellation of new and ancient cultures taking shape around her. While the composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, with its old-world charm, is prominent in Haksars film, her aim is anything but nostalgic. She tries to render the archaic and the new in equal terms, such as Mughal architecture amidst urban detritus. Labor, whether fugitive or entrenched, whether of cunning, craft, or muscle, is both epic and ephemeral.

Since Haksars film portrays manual labor, Dalitswho belong to the lowest caste in Indias systemfeature prominently. But Haksar circumvents what Anupama Rao calls the caste question, eschewing shock or shame as a mode of expression. Haksar rather is of a generation whose secular convictions have led them to treat caste as a moribund category, rather than as something to be actively dismantled. The politics of Haksars film are found elsewherenot in any explicit program but in its depiction of what Kristin Ross calls communal luxury. For Ross, the urban underclass, usually regarded as the detritus of history, can instead offer the energies of the outmoded [and] one way to think oneself into the future. Communism too might be regarded as outmoded, but if it can still inspire progress, then the flow of history itself might have to be refigured, decentralized in Rosss words. At a time when history and politics join to present a sense of no exit from powerful regimes, Haksars film invites us to embrace the flamboyant idiosyncrasies of [the world of the urban underclass], as Kabir Mohanty writes, with an artistic rigour that makes the individuals, the situations, and the mise-en-scne resonate with a grounding almost never seen in mainstream cinema.

Despite its many obvious differences, Pier Paolo Pasolinis Accattone (1961) offers a reference point for the way Haksars film grapples with inequality. In both cases, the filmmaker focuses on the milieu of the subproletariat but without using the language of class or class struggle. And in both films the religious context of everyday life provides an iconography and a normative ethos that become artistic weapons.

Accattone is set in postWorld War II Italy, when the Italian Communist Party and the Catholic Church were both influential. Pasolini, whose unorthodox Catholicism and Marxism caused his expulsion from the party, saw the relationship between the two as necessary, if difficult. Italian Communists were the party of the future, he felt, but like Gramsci, Pasolini believed Catholicism had to be accommodated, due to its deeply rooted presence in Italian pre- and postwar culture.

Pasolinis method for addressing the pervasive hold of religion on the populace was one of negative affirmation, through heresy and profane expression mixed with a profound interest in Catholic iconography. Thus, the film centers on a defiant wastrel, Accattone, who despises work, holding it as no less objectionable than slavery. For a living, he pimps his girlfriends and abuses them for their troubles. Eventually he dies during an attempted robbery, in a motorcycle crash. But in the figure of Accattone, Pasolini sees not a degenerate but a martyr.

Throughout the film, scenes of violence, sorrow, and humiliation are accompanied by classical music by Bach and Vivaldi. The final scene shows Accattone hurt, lying on the ground, assuring onlookers that hes fine, followed by a close-up of his face and the word FINE as the credits roll. Pasolinis portrayal of Accattone commemorates a people, an underclass who in his view had never been colonized, whether as Southern peasants migrating into the city or as the subproletariat of Rome.

Phrased differently, Pasolini registered the absence of any ethical relationship between the Italian underclass and those above them in the social hierarchy. Accattones unethical behavior indiscriminately affected almost everyone around him, but he was hardly alone in his transgressions. Pasolinis audience in fact understood they were viewing the indirect reflection of a larger crime whose explicit acknowledgment was forbidden: an elite that cared nothing for the poor, and suffered nothing for their transgressions. To mirror their violations in a lumpen figure, a hero who could not be celebrated, was to compound rather than to resolve ironies, to shock rather than soothe audiences. Pasolinis enormous popularity, as well as the controversy he provoked, points to the fact that his methods were, at the time, effective. The sign under which I work is always contamination, Pasolini once remarked.

It has been said that when art no longer has the power to shock, then the social fabric has frayed so badly that even its violation evokes no response. Andr Breton invoked this view when he once lamented to Buuel that they could no longer create a scandal. However, there are always dividing lines between the permissible and the impermissible; the point is to identify them.

Contamination, heresy, profanity, and sacrilege: these remain methods of representation that remind audiences of the power and the limits of deeply shared frames of reference. They also highlight twisted and knotted problems for which no easy answer is available. Haksars approach is to avoid explicitly flagging or invoking contamination even while immersing viewers in life experiences that they might normally regard as contaminating or beneath their dignity. What worked for Pasolini will not necessarily work in the fragmented social context Haksar operates in, where religio-political consolidation has balkanized the culture. So Haksar foregrounds the persistence of a still inclusive and tolerant culture that survives against all odds, portraying it in a way that will resonant with viewers from different walks of life.

Haksar approaches the lives of her characters as an intimate space that is imagined differently from how it is physically lived. Just as people inhabit diverse historical temporalities, their imaginative worlds are multiple too. We are very far indeed from the poverty porn of popular Bollywood films like White Tiger (directed by Ramin Bahrani, 2021), where the mere spectacle of the poor is held as adequate critique.

Haksars characters are enmeshed in each others lives in ways that are not explicitly explained. Her cinematographer, Soumyanand Sahi, renders this existential interweaving as embodied and felt. We seem to experience space in the first rather than in the third person, moving freely and spontaneously.

Like Pasolini, the main touchstones for Haksars film are religious tradition and communism. What Haksar aims to show can only be assembled through fragments, reconstructed from witnessing, testimony, and the work of imagination, since all possibility of self-representation by her characters, and thus any comprehensive positive account, is structurally inhibited and risks becoming a fetishizing narrative of marginality.

Communism returns towards the end of the movieit is the films political thread after all. In a final dream sequence, the activist and wage worker Lalli ascends to a high perch and addresses crowds gathering beneath him, while the red flag extends above rooftops and unfurls across the city. There is no indication that he is dreaming.

Decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the triumph of capitalism, Haksars invocation of communism, long treated as a marginal presence in India, warrants discussion. Scholars once treated India as peripheral to Cold War conflicts, but that picture is changing. For example, Nehru, despite his anticolonial work and his socialist tendencies, became a favorite of Western powers for his steadfast opposition to Soviet communism. In supporting a left-leaning figure like Nehru, the rationale of the US was that the Non-Communist Left (NCL in official parlance) would be critical in stemming the tide of Soviet communism. That understanding was briefly tested when Nehrus daughter and successor, Indira Gandhi, formed a strategic alliance with the Soviet Union in 1971. (The architect of the 1971 friendship treaty between Mrs. Gandhis government and the Soviet Union was P. N. Haksar, the directors father.) Communism was no mere figure of speech. It enlarged the political options in a nonaligned country like India, and the Soviet support underwrote this possibility.

The tangible threat posed by communism in India is most clearly registered by the fear it provoked in big business and Hindu nationalists. The fall of the Berlin Wall was greeted with relief by Indias captains of industry, auguring the end of Nehruvian socialism. Communisms defeat meant that Nehruvian secularism was on its way out too. Nehrus achievement had been to attempt a third way, a nonaligned path between fully fledged capitalism and fully fledged communism, while advancing a program of secular development. This certainly won him praise, but the cost it entailed is less discussed. Nehruvian secularism was in fact part and parcel of an accommodation with a larger geopolitical context, one that depended on the Soviet counterbalance to Western capitalism. Once the Soviet Union was gone, secularisms time was up too.

Haksars idea of communism is thus not arbitrary or idiosyncratic. It is not a casual synonym for progressivism but rather has real historical resonance in the Indian context, one that the presently ruling BJP was the first to perceive and to denounce after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Haksars quiet suggestion is that Indian communism was not only crucial in inspiring pro-worker politics and attitudes of equality in the Cold War era. It remains important today as a way of signaling the potential of such attitudes and politics even after the eclipse of Soviet communism.

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The following conversation with Haksar took place online in 2020. Much of it centers on her training in theater in New Delhi and Moscow. After this training she produced a number of plays (Indian, Russian, and Western European) that established her at the forefront of the Indian avant-garde. Haksar discusses her struggle to include urban consumer culture within a notion of the folk, as propounded by her teacher B. V. Karanth. Karanth was a major theater and film director who, along with Ritwik Ghatak, pioneered the adaptation of indigenous artistic traditions for progressive theater and film.

Arvind Rajagopal (AR): Youre experimenting with the medium of film as a newcomer, doing things that the old-timers are not thinking about because thats not their background. What traditions are you bringing to this encounter, and how can we understand their relation to your current work?

Anamika Haksar (AH): I was a student of B. V. Karanth. He had huge talent and understanding of music, of folk stories, of theater. It was like being with someone like Ritwik Ghatak. It was huge, like a banyan tree. Karanth had a very rich journey, coming from Bangalore, going to Banaras Hindu University to study Hindi literature, and then doing very varied theater. I dont think Karanth was very good in terms of methodology, but he insisted that as contemporary practitioners, we have to travel. We have to go from village to village to do the work we want to do. In our third year, he actually made us go and stay with folk drama practitioners or traditional theater practitioners, and each of us had to interview them, get to know about their lives, their practices, watch their performances. So, I think that kind of practice was very, very important.

I would also fight with him. Being a urban Delhi person, I would ask, What is all this folk business? I didnt know anything about folk. And when he was almost near his death, he said, you know Anamika, Im going to answer the question you asked me thirty years ago: Think of the people on the streets of Old Delhi or Delhi. Their songs and their memories. Their gaalis (curses). The expressions of people walking on the road are the urban folk. And I find that a very important comment. And somehow, its taken many years to even articulate this.

The Soviet Union was very rigorous in its theatrical training. Of course, we had five years of Marxism, but the whole emphasis there was on ones world outlook. Before you touched literature, before you touched anything, the question was: What do you think of your world? Or, what is the philosophy of your world? We had no idea, we were all twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Our focus was on the self, the self and the home and the region, and the self and the pain.

AR: You studied at the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theater Arts in Moscow, now called the Russian Academy of Theater Arts. Can you explain how this informed your understanding of (socialist) realism?

AH: You cant work with the actor and tell them to move from right to left or top to bottom on a physical plane. The theater implies that the actors inhabit a mental landscape. And therefore, when Im composing, Im integrating the mind, the region, the rhythm of the actor with spatial relationships, and so on. What we were taught was different from, lets say, the Europeans. I think there is a very deeply ingrained link between Soviet intellectuals and their people. So a Tarkovsky or a Dostoevsky, they knew their people, their nature. They knew their writers. I think that was part of the training that we got was to know our writers. Of course, there were many things we disagreed with. I mean, we didnt agree with the way they were talking about realism. Our teachers were trained in Stanislavski and we questioned that.

In Moscow, we learned from the theater director Anatoly Vasiliev, who challenged realism and told us that realism is allegorical and metaphorical. It is not a physical depiction of life. We learned about the Georgian artist Stureva, the Lithuanian artist Nekhroshus, all questioning accepted norms of realism. There had been debates going on. Underground letters between Lenin and Gorky, where Gorky asks questions like: What is the world of the worker? What is it that he or she seeks? What is the landscape in their mind? These kinds of questions ensure that realism doesnt just minimize the workers entire landscape to economic demands, that the artist doesnt judge it according to their own understanding. There were a whole lot of things that my generation was asking of Soviet socialist realism. It was not just about putting up the red flag and so on. But that doesnt mean that they were any less sensitive to the needs of the people. They were all very conscious. And now when I think about it, I know I sound like Im something of a Soviet agent, but honestly, the respect for labor, for working, for understanding people, came from this ethos. And it was very powerful. Everyones tired of hearing anecdotes like meeting your Soviet colleagues in the potato field. An intellectual like me would not pick up a spade and didnt know how to dig. But thats where I met my classmates on the first day of class: in a Moscow potato field.

This brings me to the question of labor and how to represent it. We are looking at the characters psychological landscape rather than merely something physical. For example, in the film, we dont see the characters just sleeping. We see them through the crevices of some other persons space. The bodies are intertwined. The living is intertwined.

AR: It is interesting that over time, the knowledge of traditions in India is being lost, for example of Hindu epics like the Ramayan and Mahabharat, in all their variations. Religious traditions used to require learning and practice; they represent a cultural archive that city dwellers no longer necessarily have. What would you say about that?

AH: We were asking the younger lot, lets say those younger than thirty-five: What do you recall about your villageany stories, any folk stories, or histories? So, in the particular places in Shahjahanabad [aka Old Delhi] we looked at, they were oblivious of history and even of things like Ramayan and Mahabharat, except for the basic story. Now, in the older generation, people would know the epics and recite them. Many of them told stories fantastically and they carried strong memories of their culture.

When I was working in street theater in 1995, we had a little handcart with books from the Soviet Union translated into Hindi: Gorkys Mother, Nikolai Ostrovskys How the Steel Was Tempered, as well as various other classic works. People devoured them. Some of the books were even stolen. Most people then were quite well educated. Today, many are very moderately educated and not as into reading. With the second generation in the city, cultural memory is disappearing. Amnesia is setting in. But still in [less developed parts of the country like] Bihar, they would have their religious songs from their village.

AR: The cinematic images you create do not necessarily reflect existing realities, but you stress the documentary character of this work. Can you explain?

AH: Through allegory or metaphor you can create a dual reality, a philosophical reality, rather than one of just a physical space. You can interpret each frame in many ways. The political connotations are deeply within the frame, and yet youre not actually mentioning anyone. No names are named. Theres simply the juxtaposition that brings out a certain political subtext.

Indian realism, as we received it, mainly from the British school, is naturalistic. My film experiments with an Indian realism use metaphor and allegory and an understanding of the psychology of the human being, the psychological landscape of the actor, to create multidimensional meanings.

For me this is a way to respond to the inadequacy of the documentary genre; its a way to bring this psychological awareness together with physical reality. We did many factual studies to prepare to shoot the film. We studied the diseases among the citys working people, how many gardens and fountains have now become car parks and malls and flyovers in Old Delhi, and so on. But then again, if it becomes a regular documentary, then no ones ever going to look at it.

One definite rule is that I am not inventing anymore. So even the fictional characters are based on very real people who we know. And all the dialogue is taken from real people. We have used all this as a way of getting into the reality. But reality is not self-evident. In our epics and our folk tales, we always tell a story from an example, from another story. We are never actually direct. The meaning is hardly on the surface.

AR: Folk traditions can coexist with modern representation, but at the same time it is a struggle to unearth them since they are under erasure. How do you address that in your work?

AH: By way of example. In my play Raj Darpan, one of the things I show is that in Calcutta, when the first proscenium frame came up, folk traditions were deemed obscene by the Dramatic Performances Act of 1876, which still holds in Indian law. A preexisting reality, which was multi-perspective and polyphonic, was reduced to a single perspective. For the British there was only one way of perceiving things, to make it naturalistic rather than trying to bring in the dialectics of that reality. Its that kind of multilayered reality that I would like to convey in my work. Its not a simple reality. In one gesture, you connect to sometimes two or three thousand years of history.

For example, when you go to Old Delhi, you see the labor market. Where they are laboring is a medieval spice market. You are looking at old Mughal history. Then suddenly in the middle you find a plaque commemorating the 1857 Mutiny, next to a water storage tank. Someone singing a folk song is from a village. In one scene we have a man having his bath from a plastic bucket standing under a Mughal arch.

You cannot show this through the kind of realism that Indian cinema on the whole uses. You know, Indian cinema does exactly what we used to do in theater, which is a conventional realist approach, with a physical conception of space: the camera goes right to left. Theres no inner dialogue.

One way we respond is with the specific ways we choose to use the camera. If you remember the scene where Pathru [Sahu, who plays the pickpocket Pathru] is against the wall, thats a psychological gesture. He is saying, I loved her, but she went for someone else. And hes against this cracked surface, trying to gather stability. Its not there, hes grasping at a reality that escapes him. I thought it was gorgeous to record. It has a completely different quality than if we had done it realistically.

Convention might consider workers to be poor and deprived. But there are people, friends of mine, folk artists, they will be living in some eight by four room. They may have only two sets of clothes. But there would not be a spot. Their two shirts will be impeccable. They will be ironed. The complete, complete dignity of people.

Im connecting this to Raghubir [Yadav, who plays the character of the street-food vendor Chaddami]. When hes making that kachori hes sculpting it to perfection. For him that itself is a serious act and it is something Ive seen in many people. I feel these are the things that are more important, you know, in teaching us really what labor is about, what life is about. And I feel these details are very important.

I want to also convey that dignity of labor. Very ordinary men are doing extraordinary things. Half of them dont even have muscles. But, you know, theyre picking up hundred-kilo sacks. Theyre earning next to nothing and in some years, will have tuberculosis, arthritis. The compassion and dignity of people living such lives comes through again and again. Whats holding this together? There is something essentially deeply compassionate and tolerant in our society, which is the point I want to make in this film.

And I think that point is coming through. My biggest victory is that a young man whos an RSS guy [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the countrys major right-wing Hindu-nationalist volunteer organization] saw the film and he said to me, Im making you my guru. Im from a village. I understand the traditions and the difficulties that these people are coming out of, and yet theyre very honest. I see what you are doing.

We have to find that idiom in which you cut across and find a way of saying something very important, in a language that has nothing to do with technology, that actually penetrates into peoples psyches.

AR: The all-too-widely-stated notion that the poor are obsessed with their material deprivation is very effectively dismantled in your film. What kinds of dreams did they talk about in your interviews with them?

AH: All the time people who we interviewed were talking about all kinds of dreams and aspirations that were not about subsistence. There was a great utopia and desire for people to do something larger than their own lives, even while being poor. I actually know a trade union leader who Lalli is based on. All his life, he goes to court and fights for someone who is being evicted, or for their unpaid wages. I wanted to bring out this being who is spending all his life in this way. Hes actually dreaming of this new world, theres a dreaming quality of utopia. Thats the best parts of communism in practice.

AR: Its an aesthetic and political dilemma: any attempt to overcome the fragment and make it something more complete immediately runs up against the threat of censorship, so the fragment becomes a way to preserve some possibility of intervention. But it is also necessarily incomplete because you would like to say more than you are able to say.

AH: We are dealing with the street, where every minute something is changing, the police arrive, youre being harassed, youre taken out of your situation. And good things happen toosomeone has suddenly come in and announced their marriage. So why then have a structure that is palpable all the time, telling you all this is going to happen? The lives of the city are very random. So this random structure is something that is chosen.

Link:

Postcommunist Aesthetics: A Conversation with Anamika Haksar - Journal #120 September 2021 - E-Flux