Reading Room at the Conflictorium Ahmedabad, Gujarat- India Sarah Lawrence College Anushka Joshi Home country: India My project was to create a reading room in the Conflictorium, an interactive museum which promotes dialogue on conflict. The Conflictorium is located in Mirzapur, a working-class and religiously diverse area in my hometown, Ahmedabad, in India. There is a dearth of accessible libraries in Ahmedabad: the libraries which do exist in the city either have prohibitive membership costs, or are dark, musty, unwelcoming spaces affiliated with academic institutions, where gaining a membership often requires going through an intimidating tangle of red tape. There is no such thing as a public library in which people of different socioeconomic identities can find a common ground. My aim was to create a space in which people could access a carefully curated collection of fiction and nonfiction in both Gujarati and English. I decided to house the reading room within the Conflictorium because the other goal of my project was to create a place in which diversity was acknowledged and welcomed. The Conflictorium is a haven of pluralistic, secular values in a city that has always struggled with these. Ahmedabad was the site of a brutal pogrom in 2002, in which nearly two thousand people were killed.1 The legacy of this is the rise of religious polarization and segregation, a tendency to label all those who question the status quo as “anti- national” and a rise in a militant, exclusionary sense of what being “Indian” means: upper-caste, Hindu, and economically privileged. In the books I selected, I wanted to place an emphasis on works which addressed both this specific reality, its historical precedents, and the larger global pattern it is a part of. As someone who, as an “upper-caste” Hindu of the middle class, fits into the algorithm of acceptability created by the state and society, I wanted to center the collection around books about and by those who do not. My project began at a later date than I had anticipated because of a delay in my Greencard’s renewal, without which I could not leave the country and be guaranteed to be allowed back or retain my permanent residency. Instead of beginning in the summer, as I had hoped, this pushed the start date of my project to the very end of August. My partner in the project, Margaux, had to opt out of the project due to health reasons, but I incorporated many of her suggestions for books into my final list. My project is still in the process of being realized, and I will be following up this report with photographs of what the space looks like at the end of the month. The proposed design budget is tentative, and I have been working with the designer to lower the costs of this, for example by installing more basic lighting and cheaper plywood for the shelves, in order to preserve the bulk of the funds for books. To save on boarding and lodging costs, I have been staying with my parents at home, and we will contribute fifty of our books at home to the library. Initially, I had imagined that the core of the project would be teaching the children of the Mirzapur neighborhood English language and Gujarati reading skills, but the bulk of the time was taken up getting the reading room in place. With the Conflictorium team, I started to plan out the reading room’s design. The three people who I worked with most closely were Ms. Sethi herself, Ms. Anuja Vora, and Mr. Divakar Venkatraman. Throughout the project it was a privilege to work with the Conflictorium team. They were doing much-needed work during the time I was there; hosting events that addressed the Indian government’s recent violation of Kashmiri rights, and opening up a dialogue on Article 19 of the Indian constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and which is increasingly imperiled these days. In spite of these commitments, however, the team was consistently helpful, giving me design ideas, book recommendations, and while staying true to the Conflictorium’s mission and ethos, the liberty to push boundaries in both. The process of working in collaboration with them taught me the that the goal of promoting diversity is best achieved through teamwork, and incorporating the vision of others into your own. For example, the team provided me with a list of recommended independent publishing houses, such as Zubaan Books, Yoda Press, and Seagull Books. Although I am still waiting to hear back from Zubaan, a feminist publishing house based in Delhi, Yoda and Seagull were immediately responsive, with Seagull agreeing to send me ten to fifteen books gratis. Due to the Conflictorium team’s idea, we will be able to ally with smaller publishing houses and be guided by them to determine the best and latest books which might be additions to the reading room.

1 (India: A Decade On, Gujarat Justice Incomplete." Human Rights Watch. April 17, 2015 The Conflictorium team and I decided that the reading room would be located in the second-level corridor of the Conflictorium. The reading room will stay true to the Conflictorium’s ambience: since the building is converted from a Parsi household, the design of the room would retain the old-world charm of Parsi interior design. Ms. Sethi wanted to ensure that the room did not disrupt the old-fashioned look of the museum, which can be seen in its use of dark wood, traditional toran design on balcony roofs, and stained-glass windows. To help me in realizing this, I was aided by an interior designer, Mr. Anjan Thakur. Since the visitors who usually frequent the Conflictorium are English speakers and either young adults or adults, we decided that the English books in the reading room would be for those age groups. The Gujarati books, on the other hand, would be for the primary school level, since the people of the surrounding area are most comfortable in Gujarati (as opposed to Hindi and English), and the literacy level of adults and teenagers in this group is at this level. There will also be books in Urdu, which is often stigmatized as the language of radicalization, a narrative which we wish to challenge. The nature of the project changed as I realized that most of the time would go into creating, rather than using, the space. For example, my focus shifted from designing an English curriculum for the children of the community or finding ways to involve the children from my own high school, to something else: how to make even the least privileged visitor to the reading room feel a sense of belonging and ownership of the space. Comfort was a key part of this: we decided to put in an air-conditioner in the reading room, and to create a designated seating area. My three main sources for books were the Granthaghar (a small Gujarati language bookstore), Crosswords (Ahmedabad’s main, multi-lingual bookstore, which is part of a wider chain), and, for the many books that were otherwise inaccessible, Amazon India. The English books I chose, which were intended for the more privileged readers who had access to the language, focused on instilling a sense of responsibility and empathy. These included works on global atrocities, such as Elie Wiesel’s Night, Phillip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Wendy Pearlman’s We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled and Adam Hocschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. Some were works of fiction that nonetheless addressed reality far more powerfully than many nonfiction accounts would: books such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Joha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies. Other books, both nonfiction and fiction, focused on South Asian conflicts, especially the legacy of the Partition and the rise of militant religious fundamentalism. These included Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s oral history of gender-based violence during the Partition, Borders and Boundaries, Sadat Hussain Manto’s short stories, Bitter Fruit, Khushwant Singh’s novel, Train to Pakistan, and a compilation of journalism on the Gujarat pogrom, Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, edited by Siddhartha Vardharajan. These books maintain accessibility without sacrificing scholarly depth or literary insight. For the Gujarati readers, I focused on works that would bring to them both the outside world (through books that had been translated into Gujarati) and the rich literary tradition within Gujarat, with a special emphasis on Dalit and Muslim writers, whose contributions are so often written out of school textbooks. The former sort of book was difficult to find primarily because not many books have been translated into Gujarati, but the ones I included ranged from a translation of Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, Malala Yousafzai’s I am Malala, the autobiography of Charlie Chaplin, and an encyclopedia of Urdu and Hindi poetry. I also drew on Amar Chitra Katha, a series of nonfiction narratives written in the graphic-book style of Mira Jacobs’ Good Talk, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Marjorie Satrapi’s Persepolis (all of which are also included in the reading room), but which are written for much younger readers. Of these, I chose biographies of the Dalit leader Babasaheb Ambedkar, the freedom fighters Lokmanya Tilak and Chandrashekhar Azad, the playwright Kalidas, and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, whose secularism is much maligned in the current climate of religious polarity. As the project progressed, I broadened the scope of books included by selecting classics, poetry, and more fiction. I realized that books I would not have thought of as “political” in the narrow sense of the word proved to be so when one delved deeper into what they were addressing. Books like Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Great Gatsby, which are often dismissed as being the more established and obvious selections of the literary canon, proved to be as subversive as any other book, and perhaps as relevant to our society today as they were to their own. As an aspiring writer, this also reacquainted me with the power of fiction, poetry, and drama to resonate with reality. During the early days of the project, the head of the Conflictorium, Ms. Avni Sethi, sent me a recently published article by a journalist that was a response to a legal controversy.2 On August 29th, 2019, (a day after I landed in India) the Bombay high court had questioned an activist, Vernon Gonsalves, on why there was a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace on his bookshelf.3 The article Ms. Sethi sent me was a mournful satire on the increasing peril of censorship in the country, and included a list of titles which the government might take issue with in the future. Would books by any Marx- whether it was Karl or Groucho- be deemed suspicious? What about the provocatively titled Crime and Punishment? Or the slew of true crime and mystery books which the journalist enjoyed? The tone was jocular, but the picture it painted was bleak. In an atmosphere in which the written word is suspect, reading is a small act of resistance. Perhaps my greatest learning about peace through this project can best be summarized by a line from a talk by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose work is, of course, included in the reading room. In a 2009 TED talk, Adichie points out the “danger of a single story.” A single story is the reductive stereotype we hold of the other, a stereotype which fosters prejudice. By establishing the reading room, we hope to introduce to our visitors- people of all classes, ages, and identities- to the multiple stories that we are all made of. Nothing can quite make us step into someone else’s shoes as a book can, and nothing can bring together people of diverse backgrounds like a free and public space can. By creating a place where both intersect, we hope to achieve the healing born of understanding, and overcome the hatred born of ignorance.

2 “My Anti-National Bookshelf Could Get Me Into Trouble.” The Wire. Accessed September 8, 2019. https://thewire.in/rights/books-police-raids-pune-activists-arrests. 3 “'War and Peace' Is 'Objectionable Material'? Pune Police, and Even Bombay HC, Say It Is.” The Wire. Accessed September 8, 2019. https://thewire.in/rights/bhima-koregaon-tolstoy-bombay-hc.