This edition of “From the Archives” asks how South Asians navigate a literary and cultural landscape that is largely white, western, and English. What stories do we tell and why? Whose stories? Which language do we use when the colonial tongue weighs heavy? 

In “My War Against Racism” Manisha Singh is “consumed by a hatred for everything Indian”—from her accent, food and skin to her mother and all her kind. She longs for the “cold embrace” of whiteness that can starve her “Indian self” and turn her “white just like the rest.” But white “nourishment” leaves her starving and silent. That “silence is suicide.” Decades later, in “Cast in Place: Srinivas Kuchibhotla” from CURB, Divya Victor returns to white supremacy and premature death. She writes about motherhood’s relation to trauma—real, imagined or prophesized—and the migrant’s will “in any skin, [to] live.” Victor begins with song, “लुका छुपी” from Rang De Basanti, where a mother mourns her son, taken too soon. But “लुका छुपी” offers us more than tragedy—the son turned martyr sparks a revolution. In what is said but unsaid, in a language past English, past oceans, past time, Victor tells us, let this one death be the last. 

In “name me rebel” Amal Rana turns to Punjabi poetry to find a Punjab before Partition, where every pind is a melting pot for rebellion in every religion. Ancient myths of “suleiman” meld with real martyrs under the British Raj—“all the ashfaqulla khans, bhagat singhs”—and, through each, Rana reminds us of the “forgotten sisters”—the “bilqis” and the “durga bhabhi” who “fed the men who made the history books.” By remembering the ancient and colonized pasts, we breathe “life into new flames of ghadar [mutiny/rebellion]” in the present. Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal looks back from this life made possible by that burning resistance in “Making a bowl for sweetness.” She gives thanks for every moment found in community, from “taking off your shoes” to “seeing a family member/who no longer speaks to you.” She praises and prays to rivers, lands, teachers, martyrs, to family by blood and all of us joined in solidarity across continents—connecting Sikhi to the struggles and joy of Black and Indigenous life and liberation. 

In “Scheherazade’s Dream” Hana Amani casts aside words to unveil the rebellious women that old stories hide. She etches them in beautiful gold, rendering them in sensuous undeniable detail, to imprint onto the old—with the old—a new template and way of being. Renée Sarojini Saklikar moves beyond time in “Arée, Arée, Lakhan/Lachlan” from THOT-J-BAP, the Gujarati Fragments. She mixes language, place and old myths to create a new “epic fantasy in verse.” The Gujarati language, interspersed throughout, acts as a conduit—partially translated and transliterated, and yet unexplained—lingering like a ghost from our collective past carried into a possible future. 

– Rishi Mittal

Manisha Singh / My War Against Racism

From Issue 2.6/2.7 (Fall 1991)

Renée Sarojini Saklikar / Arée, Arée, Lakhan/Lachlan –

From Issue 3.32 (Summer 2017)

Divya Victor/ Cast in Place: Srinivas Kuchibhotla

From Issue 3.37 (Winter 2019)

Hana Amani / Scheherazade’s Dream

From Issue 3.39 (Fall 2019)

Amal Rana / name me rebel

From Issue 3.42 (Fall 2020)

Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal / Making a bowl for sweetness

ti-TCR 20 (October 2024)