Tag Archives: Shaheen Bagh

Mumbai photographer Prarthna Singh’s first solo-book is a walk down the alley called Shaheen Bagh

Mumbai, MAHARASHTRA :

The photo-book ‘Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh’, comprising visual stories of resilience and resistance, isolates individuals from the image of the mass movement as was seen on prime-time news and press photographs.

Portraits from Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh (Credit: Prarthna Singh)

Who is the perfect protester? We imagine raised fists, hurt faces, angry stances. We imagine climbing barricades, braving tear gas. If we go by this visual vocabulary, Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh (Every Evening Belongs to Shaheen Bagh) takes us by surprise. With over 150 portraits of non-violent protesters, the photo-book gently challenges the imagery of contemporary resistance movements.

Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh is Mumbai-based photographer Prarthna Singh’s first solo photo-book (she had earlier teamed up with the authors of Sar: The Essence of Indian Design in 2016). In December 2019, after the Delhi police reportedly assaulted students of Jamia Millia Islamia University who were challenging the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a sit-in protest led by Muslim women started in Shaheen Bagh. Under a tent, with hundreds of women and children on any given day, the peaceful protest lasted for 100 days, until the pandemic struck.

Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh; By Prarthna Singh; 143 pages; Rs 3,300

Singh joined the anti-CAA protest in January 2020, spending most of her time on ground. Known for her women-centric narratives and portraiture work, she taps into her speciality to create portraits in an on-site photo studio, cobbled together with whatever was available at Shaheen Bagh. The result is these portraits of women, either looking directly at the camera or away, but always with a sense of pride. Poised and calm, the unnamed sitters indicate trust in the space, the purpose and the photographer.

Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh is Mumbai-based photographer Prarthna Singh’s first solo photo-book (she had earlier teamed up with the authors of Sar: The Essence of Indian Design in 2016).

Our collective memory of Shaheen Bagh, as is often the case with resistance movements, is of the masses, as seen on prime-time news and press photographs. Indeed, mass resistance movements give rise to the most recognisable images in the documented history of the world. Vulnerability and resilience coalesce into one defining moment — people standing up to power and confrontation, whether it’s one man blocking a row of tanks or a girl offering a flower to an armed soldier. Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh trades the monumental for the intimate, asking us to reconsider what we mean by “iconic”. It isolates individuals from the sea of faces, almost as if to say that a movement’s power lies not in numbers but in the will of its people.

Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh takes the form of a personal diary or a scrapbook.

Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh takes the form of a personal diary or a scrapbook. It contains drawings, a painting by artist Sameer Kulavoor, whose company Bombay Duck Designs has also designed the book, verse and a letter from one of the protesters, available in Urdu, English and Hindi. Some pages are deliberately uneven, recalling the makeshift quality of the Shaheen Bagh tent. While the book’s cost makes it inaccessible to some socioeconomic groups, Singh has shared copies with the protesters. A portion of the book sales goes towards Jeevan Stambh, an NGO working on the rehabilitation of the victims of the Jahangirpuri demolition last month.

During the pandemic, the Delhi police cleared the Shaheen Bagh site, painting over its graffiti and dismantling its art installations. In a country that is determined to erase and rewrite its history, one could say that a photo-book on a citizen protest is as good as an act of protest itself.

source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Books & Literature / by Benita Fernando / New Delhi – May 21st, 2022

Seema Mustafa’s book on Shaheen Bagh to be released on July 15

NEW DELHI :

New Delhi: 

The first comprehensive book on one of the most important civil rights movements in the history of Independent India.

On 15 December 2019, police in riot gear stormed Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University and attacked unarmed students protesting against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), which makes religion a factor in the process of granting Indian citizenship. In neighbouring Shaheen Bagh, mothers and other relatives and friends of the students came out into the streets in outrage and anguish.

They sat on a main road demanding repeal of the CAA, which, twinned with the National Register of Citizens (NRC), could make Indian Muslims aliens in their own homeland. Within days, similar protests broke out across the country. Free India had never seen anything like it.

Shaheen Bagh and the Idea of India examines how the sit-in by a small group of Muslim women—many of whom had stepped out of their homes alone for the first time—united millions of Indians of different faiths and ideologies in defence of the principles of liberty, equality and secularism enshrined in our Constitution.

It also throws up many important questions: Can the Shaheen Bagh protests reverse the damage done to our democracy in recent years? How did the non-violent movement sustain itself despite vilification, threats and persecution by the establishment? Is this movement the beginning of new solidarities in our society? Will it survive the aftermath of the communal violence that devastated northeast Delhi in February 2020, and the witch-hunt that was launched under cover of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown.

This necessary collection comprises interviews with some of the brave women at the core of the protests; ground reports and photographs by journalists like Seema Mustafa, Seemi Pasha, Nazes Afroz and Mustafa Quraishi; and essays by thinkers, writers, lawyers and activists, including Nayantara Sahgal, Harsh Mander, Subhashini Ali, Nandita Haksar, Zoya Hasan, Apoorvanand, Enakshi Ganguly, Sharik Laliwala and Nizam Pasha. It is a book that must be read by everyone who cares about India’s democracy and its future.

About the Editor:

Seema Mustafa has been a journalist since the age of nineteen. She has worked in or written for a number of major Indian newspapers—including The Patriot, The Pioneer, The Indian Express, The Telegraph, Economic Times and Asian Age—and travelled across the globe on assignments. She also worked for a couple of years as the National Affairs Editor for the News X television channel. She has covered conflict in Assam, Punjab and Kashmir; communal violence in different states of India; and was the first Indian journalist to cover the first war in Beirut. She is presently the Founder-Editor of The Citizen, an online initiative.

source: http://www.siasat.com / The Siasat Daily / Home> News / by Sana Sikander / July 05th, 2020