Civilisation rests on an agreement so ordinary we rarely notice it. We recognize one another as persons. When I stand beside a stranger on a train, I assume they will not touch me simply because they can. When someone says no, I assume that no has authority. Autonomy is the fact that another person’s body, will, and interior life are theirs to govern, not available for anyone else’s use without their consent. That recognition is civilisation, in its smallest and most constant form.

Rape is among the clearest refusals of that recognition. It is not merely violence. Violence explains pain. It does not, by itself, explain humiliation. Humiliation begins when another person’s autonomy is treated as morally irrelevant, when someone else’s desire becomes, for a period of time, the governing principle of another person’s body.

But that is not the whole humiliation. If it were, the humiliation would end when the assault ended. It does not.

The survivor returns to society. Society often does not return to the survivor.

The assault violates autonomy once. What happens next decides whether that violation becomes the last word.

Sex is one of the few parts of life most people expect to keep private, chosen, revealed only to those they trust. Rape breaks that pattern without the survivor’s consent. A parent now knows something they wish they had never had to imagine. A friend cannot unknow what they have learned. A stranger reading a newspaper is suddenly given access to one of the most private dimensions of another person’s life, uninvited.

That changes nothing essential about the survivor. It changes the position from which everyone else now looks at them.

People do not know what to do with that knowledge, and their not-knowing takes shapes we’ve all watched before. Fear, dressed as caution. Overprotection, mistaking vigilance for care. An inability to see the survivor apart from what was done to them. A search for explanations that make the world feel governable again, which is what the question “could this have been prevented” is actually asking. In many communities these responses are shaped by ideas about purity or honour.. Their origins differ, and so do their moral meanings. What they share is a destination. They make the assault socially present long after it is physically over. The survivor is no longer encountered without the event standing quietly between them.

Parents become quieter. Friends become hesitant. Questions arrive before recognition does. What were you wearing? Why were you there? Could anything have been done differently? Some of these questions matter, justice requires inquiry, but there is something revealing about their order. Before we have fully acknowledged that a person’s autonomy was violated, we begin examining the conduct of the person whose autonomy was violated. That shift is where humiliation grows, not in the act itself but in the sequence of everyone else’s response to it.

A reasonable objection follows immediately. Even if dignity cannot be transferred, can it not be damaged? Does a person’s sense of their own worth not, in fact, take a wound? It can, and it does, but a wound is not a theft, and the distinction matters more than it first appears to. A wound describes an injury to how something is experienced. A theft describes the loss of the thing itself. What the survivor loses, when she loses anything, is her own felt sense of her worth, often for a long time, sometimes for years. What she does not lose is the fact the feeling was tracking. The wager is that worth is the kind of fact that survives being disbelieved, the way a person’s citizenship survives a border guard who refuses to recognize their passport. The guard’s refusal is real. It has consequences. It is not, however, evidence that the passport was never valid.

If it could be, the crime would be dignity theft, and no amount of social recognition afterward could restore what was gone. But dignity of this kind does not behave like property. It survives the attempt to seize it precisely because it was never available for seizure. What can be taken, and often is, is other people’s willingness to keep seeing that survival clearly.

That is what must be restored. The recognition, the recognition that this person remains exactly who they were before someone chose to violate them.

And then he sat next to me. He could have picked anyone, the pretty girl with a braid down to her waist, the cool kids who already had their friend groups, but no, he sat next to the weird new girl with the army boy haircut. And he started talking. Talking like we were already in on something together. He told me how he’d just gotten a new watch from his dad, how proud he was of it, and then how the teacher had taken it away. He was indignant, in that little-boy way, puffed up with the injustice of it all.

And I remember being furious on his behalf. Not in the mild, sympathetic way a classmate is supposed to be. No. I wanted to storm the front of the classroom, grab the teacher by the wrist, and say, how dare you hurt the only boy I will ever love in my whole life that I have only known for five minutes. Because that’s what it felt like. I wanted to take him home with me, tuck him under my arm, protect him from every possible harm, starting with watch-stealing teachers.

It was stupid, and pure, and embarrassing, and true. And I think a little part of me has loved like that ever since. Like a bodyguard without a uniform.

And the thing is, I still love that boy. I love him in the way you love a ghost. Not actively, not in any way that asks for him back, but in the sense that he occupies a permanent alcove inside me. I think I do that with everyone I have ever loved. No matter how it ended, no matter how badly they hurt me, or how badly I humiliated myself for them, there’s always a little space in my memory that stays soft. That refuses to turn mean. Even in their worst moments, I keep them somewhere gentle.

Sometimes it feels like a curse, this loyalty of mine. Like dragging a trunk full of people behind me wherever I go. But sometimes it feels like proof that I was real. That they were real. That once upon a time, something between us mattered enough to ignite me. And I can’t undo that, even if I wanted to.

I don’t believe in clean breaks. I don’t believe in the kind of forgetting people talk about in breakup advice columns. I believe in carrying. I believe in storage. I believe in love as a collection of rooms you never really lock. Some rooms get dusty. Some you visit less and less. Some you only enter by accident, when a conversation or a song cracks the door open. But they’re all still there. They’re all still lit, in some corner.

It makes me foolish, sometimes. It makes me forgiving when maybe I shouldn’t be. It makes me want to text old friends years later, just to tell them I remember the way they laughed at a joke that wasn’t funny, and how that laugh was the only thing that made the day bearable. I don’t send the text, but I keep the memory polished. I hold it like a coin that never loses its shine.

If love really changes form instead of disappearing, and I think it does, then maybe I’ve never truly lost anyone. Maybe I’ve only learned to live with the different shapes of their presence. Maybe this is my version of eternity. Everyone I have ever loved, still living inside me, in small, forgiving fragments.

But the problem with still loving everyone you’ve ever loved is that heartbreak doesn’t leave, either. It lingers. People make heartbreak sound cinematic. Rainy windows, tissues, sad playlists. But when it first happened to me, it felt medical. Like an organ failure. Like my body was still running, but glitching. Every breath felt jagged. Every heartbeat was too loud, like it was screaming at me for being abandoned.

I remember Googling how to stop your heart from physically hurting after someone leaves you. And the answer was so matter-of-fact it made me laugh. Acetaminophen. Because apparently, the brain doesn’t fully distinguish between physical pain and social pain. Rejection, heartbreak, a punch in the gut, the neurons don’t care.

So I did it. I actually did it. Painkillers, every two hours, as if heartbreak could be dosed away. I lined up the little white pills like they were my salvation. Acetaminophen. Over-the-counter heartbreak medicine. Every two hours, for days, I swallowed one like clockwork. Not because I had a headache. Not because I was sick. But because my chest hurt so much I honestly believed I could trick my body into thinking it was fine.

And I think about it now, and it’s so sad it almost feels funny. Like, who does that? Who believes you can outsmart your own heart with a pack of generic painkillers? Me, apparently. Twenty-four little capsules of hope, rattling in a bottle, convincing myself, just one more, and maybe the hurt will fade.

But it never did. Not really. The ache was stubborn, way bigger than chemistry. It clung to me, followed me into sleep, into showers, into classrooms and bus rides. The pills just blurred the edges, like smudging eyeliner, but the face was still the same. The heartbreak was still mine. There’s a special kind of naïve stupidity in that, but it was all I had. I didn’t want wisdom. I didn’t want logic. I wanted to stop being in pain.

Then there was this time where I read that it takes half the amount of time you were with someone to stop hurting. Seven years together. Half of that? Three and a half years. I taped a calendar to my wall, like I was performing some absurd science experiment on my own chest. Every day, I drew a big red X, like each mark could bribe my grief into leaving me alone. I measured everything. How long I went without crying in the shower. How many times I checked my phone. How many slices of toast I burned because I was too sad to care.

I sat on the floor, tracing the Xs with my finger, feeling like a very small, very sad scientist. Sometimes I would whisper to myself, maybe if I do this every day, the pain will obey. Sometimes I would laugh, because it was pathetic. Every red X was both proof and mockery. Look, I am still trying. Look, I am still obsessive. Look, I am still ridiculous.

And then one day, I didn’t look at it. I don’t even remember deciding to stop. I was in another city, doing nothing impressive, walking down a street I didn’t recognize, holding a coffee cup that was slightly too hot, trying not to trip over my own feet, thinking about the weird bruise on my arm from bumping into a door five days ago. The calendar stayed behind in my old childhood bedroom, still taped to the wall, probably judging me. And somehow, my chest didn’t feel like it was being squashed by a stack of bricks, for once. Not gone, not magical, just less heavy.

I don’t know if I’ll ever stop wanting love, the kind that hits you in your chest and makes your teeth hurt and your hands sweat. And there are things we do to be loved, these borderline humiliating things that are too pathetic to be said out loud. You laugh at their jokes even when they’re not funny, timing your giggle like a metronome, counting the seconds before they notice you’re faking it. You skip meals, not because you’re sick, not because you’re dieting, but because surely you’ll be more loveable if you’re skinnier, less flesh to distract them from seeing how awkward you are. You text too fast, too slow, then delete everything, rewrite, reread, panic, delete again, and send something neutral, banal, hoping it lands like you imagined it in your head.

You imagine a timeline where every choice you make suddenly matters. You memorize the exact shape of their laugh, the way their eyebrows move when they’re annoyed, the angle their phone sits at on the table, and you store it all in a mental archive, like a curator of someone else’s life. All of it, just to see the faintest flicker of attention in their eyes. And when they notice, it feels like gravity shifted. Your chest is too small for the size of your excitement, your stomach a hollow drum.

You rehearse conversations in your head until your skull aches. When they actually happen, you stumble over words, misremember, blush where you shouldn’t, and your body collects each humiliation like some unwilling archive. You laugh. You shrug. But every nerve remembers. Every quiet corner of your mind files away the embarrassment, like a proof that you were alive in a world that mostly ignores you.

And through it all, you are aware. Fully aware. Of how ridiculous it is, of how predictable it is, of how little power you have over what they see or feel or care about. Knowing doesn’t stop you. You keep feeling anyway, keep obsessing anyway, keep showing up in ways that won’t be noticed or reciprocated. You are both witness and victim, and the distinction doesn’t matter.

And maybe that’s it. Not worth it, not unforgivable, not heroic. Just this. Awake, inside a body that wants too much, that keeps reaching even when there is nothing to grab. You keep going. You keep hoping. You keep trying. And sometimes it hurts so much it feels like it will break you. And other times, it barely registers. And you don’t know which day will be which.

You don’t know. You just keep moving anyway. Because what else could you do?

I am not sure emergency is the right word. Emergencies have a before. They imply a state of normalcy that was interrupted. The word everyone keeps using is descent, we are watching a descent, they say, a falling away from something. But descent requires a height. And the height, when you go looking for it, turns out to be a story people told themselves about their own comfort.

What I keep looking for, when I try to locate the before that Indian liberal discourse is so convinced existed, is a press that was free in any way that went deeper than the courage of specific individuals who happened to be in specific chairs at specific moments. I keep not finding it. What I find instead is a long history of institutions that performed independence while depending entirely on the willingness of one proprietor, one editor, one owner to absorb pressure that the institution itself had no mechanism to resist. That is not freedom.

That is the appearance of freedom, sustained by people, and therefore only as durable as the people. When those people left, we found out what the institutions actually were.

This is the thing the nostalgia cannot hold. A principled society can produce individuals who make it principled, but if the institution loses all its ethics the moment those individuals disappear, the roots were never robust. You were never looking at an institution with values. You were looking at a person with values, standing inside an institution with none, and the distinction is everything because people retire, people are pressured out, people die, people sell.

The Indian Express could challenge Rajiv Gandhi because Ramnath Goenka was willing to absorb 300 court cases and the cutting of his bank credit. The Hindu broke Bofors because N. Ram decided to. When The Hindu stopped running the pieces under government pressure, Chitra Subramaniam moved to The Indian Express under Arun Shourie, who kept going. The scandal contributed directly to Congress losing the 1989 elections. Two newspapers, one journalist moving between them, two men deciding individually to keep going, that is what Indian press freedom looked like at its best. Remove either man and Bofors does not break the way it broke. The story survived not because the system protected it but despite the system having no mechanism to protect it at all. I do not say this to diminish what those men did. I say it because the celebration of their courage has been used, for decades, to avoid asking the question their courage made unnecessary to ask.

What happens when no one this brave is available?

The grief about this, and there is genuine grief, I feel it too, comes primarily from people who benefited most from what the pre-2014 press was and did. English-educated liberals who read the Hindu and watched NDTV and understood themselves to be living in a country with a functioning press, because the press that functioned was the press that served them. Journalists who built careers inside institutions that are now captured or diminished. People who genuinely do not know enough history to know that this is not where the problem started.

Whether this is self-deception or genuine ignorance depends on the person, and I have stopped thinking the distinction matters much. The effect is the same either way. A class that benefited from an institution calling the benefit justice, and now that the benefit is being redistributed toward someone else, calling it injustice. The English press served a constituency. That constituency experienced being served as being represented. They experienced the press’s silence on everything outside their world, the adivasi displacement, the caste violence, the Hindi belt journalists getting killed for covering land disputes, not as a failure but simply as the natural shape of news. And now they are experiencing the loss of that press as a loss of principle rather than a loss of privilege, which is a very different kind of grief, and a much more comfortable one.

The nostalgia is not wrong about the loss. It is wrong about what was lost. And that wrongness matters, because you cannot replace what you cannot accurately describe. Before the liberalisation of the 1990s, what existed was not freedom.

Doordarshan was not restrained because its journalists had ethics. It was restrained because it had a single master and no commercial incentive to antagonise him. The moment liberalisation removed that constraint, you could see what had been doing the work. Not principle, but the absence of temptation. Within a decade of liberalisation, Indian television had produced both NDTV’s serious journalism and 26/11 being broadcast live as entertainment. The same absence of institutional structure that made the first possible made the second inevitable.

Emergency is where this becomes impossible to argue around. On the night of 25 June 1975, Indira Gandhi declared Emergency. By morning, the electricity supply to Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, where most papers were published, had been cut. When newspapers reappeared, most of them did exactly what power required. Coomi Kapoor’s The Emergency: A Personal History documents how quickly the press folded. Censorship was imposed, editors were summoned, and the machinery of a supposedly independent press went quiet with barely a creak. It was Sanjay Gandhi, not any formal regulatory mechanism, who called ministers to demand AIR put a positive spin on news coverage. Inder Kumar Gujral, the minister for information and broadcasting, later prime minister, a man with liberal credentials, swallowed the dressing-down and stayed in his post. One example is enough. Everyone understands what it means. Everyone adjusts.

A historian could reasonably say Emergency was exceptional, a declared constitutional crisis, not evidence of ordinary press-state relations. That objection would be more persuasive if the press had, in the years before Emergency, built the institutional defences that might have made the collapse less total. Shield laws. Independent regulatory bodies with genuine authority. Public interest defences in defamation law. None of these existed before Emergency. None of them were built after it ended. The press went back to doing what it had always done Negotiating individually with power. Emergency did not introduce a vulnerability. It found one that had always been there.

The Kargil War coverage of 1999 made careers, made a channel, and was treated as evidence that Indian television journalism had grown up. The criticism it generated from within the Army was specific and documented. Lt Gen Mohinder Puri, who commanded the 8 Mountain Division during the conflict, wrote in his memoirs that the army might have got unnerved by irresponsible journalism during the Tiger Hill operation. Brigadier Umesh Singh Bawa recorded that some reporters gave away the Indian army’s position and invited counter-bombardment by sending live reports. General VP Malik’s memoirs raise the satellite phone issue, that its use could allow enemies to track journalist and military locations simultaneously.

Barkha Dutt was the most prominent journalist on the ground during Tiger Hill. She disputed the specific allegations. Malik subsequently complimented her reporting. These facts have been used as exoneration. They are not. A general complimenting a journalist after a war does not retroactively make her live broadcasts responsible. A compliment after the fact is not an exoneration. What the officers documented was specific. Locations disclosed, positions revealed, counter-bombardment invited. Dutt argues she was doing her job as she understood it, and that is precisely the problem. She understood her job in a way that had no account of what responsible conflict reporting required. A journalist operating without institutional guidance in a high-pressure situation, making choices that senior military officers put on record as operationally dangerous. The industry celebrated her for it. That tells you where the industry was.

The industry went into a live war with no protocols for what to broadcast, when, and with what verification. Some informal norms circulated afterwards. The government’s 2025 advisory restricting live coverage of defence operations cited Kargil, 26/11, and Kandahar explicitly as unresolved precedents. Twenty-five years of the same failure before anyone wrote it into a rule.

26/11 made the dysfunction impossible to look away from. News channels broadcast the movements of security forces in real time. They broadcast the locations of hostages. The South Asia Media Commission condemned coverage from both Indian and Pakistani channels. Off the record, government sources told journalists that the crisis management group convened partly because officials received calls saying turn on the TV, the media was the real-time intelligence environment for everyone in the building, including potentially the people on the other side. After 26/11, guidelines were discussed. They were not institutionalised. The conversation happened and stopped.

I am not arguing that what is happening now is merely more of the same. It is not. There is a meaningful difference between a press that occasionally fails to hold power accountable and one that has largely stopped trying. Between a government that sometimes pressures editors and one that has systematically bought, captured, or bankrupted the outlets that would not comply. Between journalists who self-censor out of individual fear and an entire industry that has internalised a horizon of the sayable so completely that the censorship is no longer visible as censorship. It has become editorial judgment. It has become professional common sense. The RSF calls this ambient, and ambient is the right word. It does not require constant intervention because it has already reshaped what journalists think is worth attempting.

The electoral bonds scheme ran from 2018 until the Supreme Court struck it down in 2024. The data, when released, showed companies under regulatory investigation donating hundreds of crores to the party running those investigations. It would have led front pages for weeks in any country with a functioning press. In India, it was covered. It was not pursued. Individual stories appeared. The investigative architecture that would have assembled the full picture, source by source, donation by donation, regulatory action cross-referenced against donation, was not built. That is not an editorial oversight. It is the output of an industry that has learned, over years, where the costs begin.

What I am arguing is that the instinct producing this is not a BJP invention. The Emergency was a Congress project. The killing of journalists in conflict zones happened across governments, through state actors, non-state actors, the local political machines of whichever party controlled the territory. CPJ data on journalist killings in India does not map onto a BJP/non-BJP axis. It maps onto proximity to inconvenient truth.

In November 2020, the CPI-M led government in Kerala introduced Section 118A to the Kerala Police Act, criminalising content deemed threatening, abusive, humiliating or defamatory, with imprisonment up to three years. The Governor signed it on a Saturday. By Monday the criticism, from the press, from within the Left itself, from CPI national leadership, was severe enough that the Chief Minister announced it would not be implemented. By Tuesday a special cabinet meeting had withdrawn it entirely. Four days from signing to repeal. That is a better outcome than most comparable central government actions produce. But the same government reached for the same instrument. A law broad enough to be used against critics, introduced without public debate. The instinct was identical. What differed was the resistance it met. Kerala’s civil society, press culture, and coalition politics create different costs for this kind of overreach. The lesson is not that the Left is more virtuous. It is that structural conditions matter more than the identity of the party in power.

The press freedom problem in India will not be solved by the replacement of one party with another. It is older than any electoral cycle. The grief that attaches it only to the last twelve years will produce, at best, the previous version of the problem.

Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent describes five structural filters that explain media behaviour without requiring conspiracy. Ownership and size, advertising as primary income source, reliance on powerful institutions as information sources, the capacity of those institutions to generate flak against critical coverage, and the dominant ideological consensus that determines which questions are even askable. Critics argue the model understates individual journalist agency. The Bofors case is exactly the evidence those critics would cite. Those criticisms are real. What the model does well is insist that the problem is structural before it is personal, that you cannot solve it by finding braver journalists, because brave journalists operating inside structurally compromised institutions produce brave journalism occasionally, at great personal cost, with no guarantee of continuity. Indian media ownership has always been concentrated among people with interests in sectors that government policy directly affects. Real estate, aviation, mining, infrastructure. Editorial priorities travel through hiring decisions, through what a proprietor is understood to require, through the accumulated knowledge of which stories get resources and which quietly do not.

Reliance Industries began its acquisition of Network18 in 2012 through debenture arrangements in the promoter group and completed control in July 2014, the same month Modi took office. The infrastructure of capture was inherited. What changed was the political will to use it. The farmers, the landless labourers, the communities whose dispossession is ongoing, they are not absent from India. They are absent from the papers. Not the readership. Not the advertising market. Not the constituency the press understood itself as serving.

The press being mourned right now is primarily the English-language press. NDTV, the Hindu, the Indian Express, the Telegraph, institutions that served a specific educated, upper-middle-class, largely upper-caste demographic, and that are now mourned almost exclusively by that same demographic. This press had genuine virtues. It produced important journalism. It occasionally embarrassed power in ways that mattered. A press that embarrasses power occasionally is not the same as one that has stopped trying, that distinction is real and I do not want to flatten it.

But the reporters being killed in India are predominantly not English-language reporters. They are reporters working in Hindi belt districts, in Chhattisgarh, in Assam, covering local corruption, land disputes, police brutality. Their deaths are documented by the CPJ and RSF, but they do not generate the grief that the capture of NDTV generated. Because their deaths do not represent the loss of something the mourners personally experienced as theirs. The English press also systematically ignored the vernacular ecosystem it now implicitly holds up as equivalent to itself, the regional press that is more varied, more complex, more locally entangled, more adversarial in some places and more captured in others, and almost entirely absent from this conversation.

Restoring NDTV or the Hindu to their previous standing would not produce press freedom. It would reproduce the previous version of structurally compromised, class-bound journalism that gave way to what we have now. That previous version was worth having. It was not worth mistaking for the destination.

Press freedom, actual press freedom, requires ownership structures not concentrated in the hands of people with political and economic interests in the story. Legal protections for journalists that do not depend on the goodwill of whoever is in power. Economic models for journalism that do not require the continuous cultivation of powerful advertisers. Institutional protocols for conflict reporting, editorial independence, source protection. Not individual courage, but structures that make courage less necessary and its absence less fatal.

The Nordic countries sit at the top of the RSF index every year, and the freedom there is more real than it is in most places. It exists because of conditions that took generations to build. Public broadcasting with genuine editorial independence, legal source protections that are actually enforced, government advertising distributed by formula rather than deployed as reward and punishment. Even there it is not clean. Finnish journalists self-censor on Russia-adjacent stories in ways that are documented. Hungarian media was reasonably free twenty years ago.

Press freedom is less a condition than a direction. India has been moving away from the structural conditions that make it possible for about twelve years, and the RSF number is one measure of how fast. The grief is not wrong. It is aimed at the wrong object, mourning the capture of specific outlets rather than demanding the conditions under which capturing them would be harder.

What is being lost is a partial, improvised, class-serving version of press accountability that was always more fragile than it looked. Fragile because it was built on people rather than on structures, on the willingness of specific individuals to absorb pressure that no institution was designed to absorb for them.

That is a real loss. But the liberals mourning it, the journalists who built careers in it, and the institutions that claimed to embody it are all implicated in the same failure. None of them asked, while it was happening, whether it was built to last. None of them demanded the conditions that would have made it structural rather than personal. They called the courage of individuals the freedom of the press, and they called their own comfort a functioning democracy, and now they are surprised by what they find when the individuals are gone.

A descent from what, exactly. That is the question. And the answer is the indictment.

There was no India before 1947.

It is stated flatly. It is stated often. And it is stated, increasingly, by Indians themselves. Educated, articulate Indians who believe they are being rigorous. Who mistake dissolution for sophistication. Who have confused the dismantling of their own inheritance with intellectual courage.

Let us begin where the argument actually begins. Not in some internet comments section, but in Cambridge, England, 1888.

Sir John Strachey, retired member of the Governor General’s Council, was delivering a series of lectures to the students who would go on to staff the British Raj. He wanted them to understand the territory they were inheriting. And so he told them: “There is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious.”

Strachey was not making a neutral historical observation. He was making a political argument, aimed at a specific audience, in service of a specific project. The intellectual justification of colonial rule. If India had no unity, no history of selfhood, no organic coherence, then the British presence was not conquest but organisation. The claim that India was never real was, from its very first utterance, a tool of empire.

This is the intellectual ancestry of the sentence that gets posted beneath your Threads about the Mahabharata. When someone tells you there was no India before 1947, they are, whether they know it or not, repeating John Strachey. They are recycling the foundational argument of the colonial project. They have taken the empire’s self-justification, dressed it in the language of postcolonial critique, and are now deploying it against the very people that empire sought to subjugate.

Ramachandra Guha, in India After Gandhi, quotes Strachey at length and places him in direct lineage with every subsequent prediction of India’s impossibility. Rudyard Kipling. Winston Churchill. The parade of Western political scientists who declared, decade after decade, that India was too diverse, too poor, too complicated to survive as a democracy. All of them were wrong. They were wrong for the same reason, they applied the standards of European nationhood to a civilisation that was operating on an entirely different principle.

The “no India before 1947” argument is colonial thinking, ventriloquised through a progressive mouth.

The argument, in its more careful form, concedes something. It concedes that a subcontinent existed. That people lived on it. That things happened there. What it denies is that any of this constituted India. That there was any meaningful unity, any shared identity, any coherent civilisational world that could be called by that name.

This is where the argument reveals its deepest confusion. It is applying the wrong test.

Sunil Khilnani, in The Idea of India, navigates this with precision. He acknowledges that before the nineteenth century, no inhabitant of the subcontinent would have called themselves “Indian” in a modern political sense. The constitutional entity of 1947 was genuinely new. On that narrow point, the argument is technically correct.

But Khilnani immediately complicates this. He writes that it is “too simple to see India as pure invention.” The pre-colonial subcontinent shared, across its vast diversity, what he calls “intelligible, common cultural forms.” A storehouse of shared mythic narratives. Aesthetic and ritual motifs that travelled thousands of miles. A sacred geography mapped out by pilgrimage routes stretching from Kashmir to Cape Comorin. The overarching concept of Bharatavarsha, the land of the sons of Bharata, which appears in the Puranic literature centuries before any European arrived on these shores.

A.L. Basham, writing in The Wonder That Was India, makes the same point differently. He describes a subcontinent that was, at most periods of its history, a cultural unit. Torn by internecine war, yes. Never politically unified except in brief and exceptional moments, yes. But coherent as a civilisational world in ways that had nothing to do with the presence or absence of a nation-state. Shared philosophical traditions. Shared trade networks. Shared artistic vocabularies. Shared religious imagination.

Romila Thapar is worth pausing on, because Thapar is the historian the “no India” crowd most likes to invoke. In A History of India she presents the story of the subcontinent as a continuous cultural evolution from the Harappan period through the Aryan migrations through the classical age through the medieval kingdoms to the present. She is scrupulous, rigorous, deeply suspicious of nationalist mythologising. And yet her entire project presupposes what the “no India” argument denies: a continuous civilisational world, evolving across millennia, whose history is worth telling as a single story.

The test the “no India” argument applies is a European one. It asks whether there was a centralised sovereign state, with defined borders, a uniform administrative apparatus, a population that identified itself as a single political community. By this test there was no India before 1947. There was also, by this test, no China for most of Chinese history. No Greece before the modern Greek state. No Italy before 1861. No Germany before 1871. The test proves nothing about civilisational reality. It only proves that the subcontinent did not develop along the specific political trajectory of post-Westphalian Europe. That is not a failure. It is simply a difference.

If we are being consistent, which the argument always claims to be, the logic does not stop at India. France as a unified political community is a product of centuries of violent consolidation that erased dozens of distinct languages and cultures. The United States is two and a half centuries old and built on the erasure of the peoples who preceded it. Germany unified in 1871. Italy in 1861. Turkey in its present form dates to 1923. Saudi Arabia to 1932. The modern Chinese state took its current political form in 1949, two years after India. By the strict logic of “no nation before its founding date,” none of these countries exist either. None of them have the right to a history, a culture, an identity that predates their constitutional moment. The argument, applied consistently, dissolves the entire world. But it is never applied consistently. It is applied selectively, specifically, to India. That tells you everything you need to know about what it is actually doing.

Then there is Partition. The counter-argument that arrives before it is even made, heavy with its own evidence. If India was always a civilisational unity, why did it fracture? Why did two nations emerge from one subcontinent, drawing a border through Punjab and Bengal with a speed that left hundreds of thousands dead in the fields it crossed? The honest answer requires looking at what actually produced Partition. Not some ancient incompatibility that the subcontinent’s history refuses to support, but the specific administrative decisions of a colonial state that spent two centuries hardening what had been fluid. The British census categorised, counted and fixed religious identity in ways that made it the primary axis of political life. Separate electorates, introduced in 1909, institutionalised the idea that a Muslim could only be represented by a Muslim, a Hindu by a Hindu. By the time the League was arguing for Pakistan, it was arguing within a framework the British had built. Partition was not the revelation of India’s civilisational falseness. It was the final and most catastrophic achievement of colonial policy. The deliberate transformation of a diverse, syncretic, internally contested civilisational world into two mutually hostile political communities. Guha documents this with unflinching precision. The people who died on those roads in 1947 were not dying because India had never been real. They were dying because someone had decided, for reasons of administrative convenience and imperial exit strategy, to make it unreal.

Rabindranath Tagore understood this with a clarity that none of the historians quite match, because he was not making a historical argument but a philosophical one.

In Nationalism, Tagore writes that India has “never had a real sense of nationalism.” He explains why this is not an indictment but a description of a different and more difficult project. While Europe was organising itself into nation-states, driving out difference, subordinating diversity to political machinery, India was attempting something far more ambitious. Holding together “races ethnologically different” not through the force of the state but through what he calls “social regulation of differences” and “spiritual recognition of unity.”

He traces this project from the Upanishads forward. A series of great spiritual teachers whose “one object has been to set at naught all differences of man.” He points to Nanak, Kabir, Chaitanya. Figures who moved across the subcontinent, across caste and language and regional boundary, building a unity of a different order than the political. Not the unity of a passport or a census category, but the unity of a shared moral and spiritual imagination.

This is what the “no India before 1947” argument cannot account for. How does a subcontinent with no political unity keep producing, century after century, thinkers and teachers and artists who understand themselves as part of a single civilisational conversation? How does Adi Shankaracharya walk from Kerala to Kashmir in the eighth century and establish four mathas at the four geographic extremities of the subcontinent, not because a state told him to, but because his religious imagination was already structured around the idea of the subcontinent as a complete and coherent world? How do the pilgrimage routes of the tirthas map themselves onto a geography stretching from the Himalayas to the southern tip of the peninsula, creating a sacred landscape held together not by law but by devotion?

The “no India” argument has no answer to these questions. It can only look away from them.

Tagore goes further. He argues that the nation-state is not the highest form of human organisation but one of its most dangerous. A machine that produces wealth and power at the cost of humanity. That organises collective selfishness into an ideology. That turns the rich complexity of a people into what he called “compressed bales” with “high market value.” India, in his view, was never trying to be this. A civilisation of human relationship rather than political organisation.

To measure India against the nation-state and find her wanting is a category error.

None of what has been said above is comfortable, and it should not be allowed to become comfortable. The civilisational world being described here was not experienced equally by everyone who lived inside it. For millions of people, the inheritance was not a gift but a sentence. The civilisation that produced the Upanishads also produced the caste system. The sacred geography that Shankaracharya walked was walked by people who were not permitted to enter the temples at its destinations. The texts that moved between Kerala and Kashmir were moved by hands that, in many cases, were legally prohibited from touching them.

Ambedkar knew this better than anyone, and he did not look away from it. He understood that the civilisational argument, deployed without qualification, becomes an instrument of the same violence it claims to transcend. A way of invoking the glories of the past to silence the people that past ground into the earth. His life’s work was a refusal of that silence. His refusal does not disprove the civilisational argument. It complicates it in the way that all true things are complicated, by insisting that the full inheritance be claimed. Not the curated version that begins with the Gita and ends before it reaches the untouchable quarter of the village.

To argue that India has always been real is not to argue that India has always been just. It has not been. The civilisation is real and the violence within it is real and both of these things must be held simultaneously, without allowing either to cancel the other. What the “no India before 1947” argument does, in its eagerness to dissolve the whole, is escape this difficulty entirely. It declares the inheritance void and walks away from the obligation to reckon with it. That is abdication, not critique. The harder position, the more honest position, is to stay inside the inheritance with full knowledge of what it contains, its philosophy and its cruelty, its genius and its shame, and to insist that the reckoning happen from within. Not from a posture of superior detachment that was itself made possible by the civilisation it pretends not to belong to.

There is a version of this conversation that is legitimate and necessary. Regional identities in India are not illusions. Bengali culture is real, distinctive, and ancient. Kerala’s intellectual and social traditions are genuinely its own. The Punjabi has a different relationship to soil and language and history than the Tamil. These are not inconvenient facts to be argued away.

Khilnani is clear on this. He writes that “a sense of region and nation emerged together in India, through parallel self-definitions.” Regional identity and national identity were never opposites. They developed in tandem, each defining the other, each enriching the larger picture. This is the actual texture of Indian civilisational life.

But this is entirely different from what is happening when someone posts beneath a discussion of Indian history that Kerala is not India, or that Bengali culture has no relationship to anything that could be called Indian. That is not the assertion of regional pride. It’s the denial of civilisational coherence.

The person who says “this is Kerala, not India” in response to a post about Indian coastal architecture is not defending their culture. They are dissolving it. Isolating it from the larger conversation in which it has always participated, cutting it off from the shared inheritance that makes it legible. Kerala’s literary traditions, its philosophical schools, its relationship to Sanskrit and to the bhakti movement, its place in the pilgrimage geography of the subcontinent, none of these exist in isolation. They are part of a civilisational conversation that spans millennia and the entire length of the land.

The Northeast complicates this picture in ways that must be named honestly. The communities of Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, many of them of Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic origin, many of them majority Christian, many of them with spiritual traditions that predate and exist entirely outside the Sanskrit cosmopolis, these are not communities whose relationship to the broader Hindu civilisational world is the same as Kerala’s or Bengal’s. To pretend otherwise would be to do exactly what this essay accuses others of doing: flattening complexity into a convenient argument. The Naga did not walk the tirtha routes. The Mizo did not compose in Sanskrit. The civilisational connection here is more lateral, more contested, more honestly described as adjacency and centuries of contact and trade and political entanglement than as shared inheritance in the way Shankaracharya would have understood it.

And yet the political project of India is not undone by this complexity. It is defined by it. India was never a civilisation that demanded uniformity as the price of belonging. That demand is precisely what this essay is arguing against. The Northeast’s distinctiveness is not evidence that India is artificial. It is evidence that India has always been a negotiation, imperfect, often violent, never finished, between a centre and its peripheries. The answer to that complexity is not dissolution. It is the harder work of genuine political inclusion, of reckoning with the specific histories of displacement and militarisation and neglect that have made separationist sentiment in the Northeast not a philosophical position but a human response to real and documented state failure. Those grievances are legitimate. They do not require the “no India before 1947” argument to be true in order to deserve redress.

The Bengali who insists that their culture is not Hindu culture deserves the same careful reading. This may be accurate in certain narrow senses. Bengali culture is not reducible to upper-caste Hindu orthodoxy, and the Bengali cultural tradition has always resisted such reduction. But the assertion, in its usual online form, is not a careful distinction. It is a disavowal. It pretends that the Bengal of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, of Tagore himself, of the bhakti poets and the tantric traditions, has no relationship to the wider Hindu civilisational world. This is not history. It is pure performance.

India has been declared impossible, artificial, and destined for collapse many times. An anomaly. Western political scientists declared it at independence, and then again after every communal riot, every failed monsoon, every death of a prime minister. They were all wrong. India is still here. Not despite its diversity but somehow, improbably, through it.

This survival is not administrative. It is not the achievement of any particular government or constitution, though the constitution matters. It is the achievement of the civilisational instinct that Tagore was describing, the inheritance that Shankaracharya was mapping, the sacred geography that the pilgrims have walked for two thousand years.

From the Harappan seals to the Vedic period to the Mauryan empire to the Gupta flowering to the bhakti revolution to the encounter with Islam to the colonial encounter to the present. Not a smooth or triumphant story. A story full of rupture and conflict and loss and transformation. But recognisably one story, because its subject, this subcontinent, this civilisational world, these people, remains continuous across all its variations.

To say there was no India before 1947 is to say that this story has no subject. It is to take fifty centuries of human life and declare them a void. An absence. A region without inhabitants. It is, in the end, a far more violent act of erasure than anything it claims to correct.

The civilisational argument has a current occupant. The BJP and the broader Hindutva project have spent decades making a version of the claim being made here, that India is ancient, that its civilisational identity is real, that 1947 was a restoration rather than a beginning. There will be readers who assume that this essay is making their argument. It is not. The distinction must be drawn with precision, because the two positions are not merely different in degree. They are opposite in kind.

The Hindutva civilisational claim is exclusive. It identifies the civilisation with one religion, one community, one cultural template, and then measures every other inhabitant of the subcontinent against that template. Finding them derivative, suspect, insufficiently rooted, or foreign. It takes the plural, syncretic, internally contested civilisational world that actually existed and reduces it to a single strand, declared primary, declared originary, declared the standard against which all else is judged. This is not the recovery of an inheritance, It’s the destruction of one. The actual civilisational world of the subcontinent was never the property of a single religion or a single community. It was built by Hindus and Sikhs, by Buddhists and Jains, by the bhakti poets who crossed every caste boundary their tradition had drawn, by the Sufi saints whose dargahs became pilgrimage sites for Hindus, by the musicians and architects and mathematicians and merchants who moved across the subcontinent following routes that preceded and outlasted every empire that tried to claim them. To reduce this to Hindutva is not to honour the civilisation, but amputation.

What makes Hindutva’s claim particularly illegitimate is not merely its exclusivity but its structure. Hindutva does not think like the civilisation it claims to represent. It thinks like the religions it claims to oppose. The idea that there is one authentic community, one originary culture against which all others must justify their presence, this is not a Hindu idea. It is an Abrahamic one. It is the logic of the Book, of a single revelation, a chosen people, a boundary between the saved and the unsaved, imported wholesale into a civilisational tradition whose entire genius lay in its refusal of exactly that logic. The subcontinent’s philosophical traditions did not produce one truth. They produced a vast, argumentative, internally contradictory conversation about the nature of reality, in which Advaita and Dvaita, Buddhism and Jainism, Shaivism and Vaishnavism, the Upanishads and the Charvakas, all existed in permanent creative tension. There was no orthodoxy to protect because there was no single orthodoxy. There was only the conversation itself. Hindutva, in trying to produce an orthodoxy, a fixed identity, a defined enemy, a border between the authentic and the foreign, has not recovered the civilisation. It has replaced it with a pale and violent imitation of the very thing it claims to resist.

This is the deepest irony of the current moment. The people who say they are defending Hindu civilisation have adopted the epistemological framework of the Abrahamic traditions to do so. The people who say they are critiquing Hindu nationalism have adopted the epistemological framework of the British Empire to do so. Both have borrowed their tools from somewhere else. Both have, in the process, lost sight of what was actually here.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Northeast. For decades, RSS-affiliated organisations have run systematic campaigns to bring tribal communities in Nagaland, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and elsewhere under the umbrella of Hindu identity. Running shakhas in villages. Reframing animist and tribal traditions as primitive forms of Hinduism awaiting their completion. Pressuring communities whose cosmologies, clan structures and spiritual practices have no organic relationship to the brahmanical world to identify with a tradition that is not theirs. This is not the recovery of civilisational plurality. It is its most naked erasure. It is, in the most precise sense of the word, missionary work. The same impulse, the same structure, the same violence of declared arrival into a space that was already full. The Abrahamic logic Hindutva has imported does not stop at the borders of the Hindi heartland. It moves into every space it can reach, declaring the indigenous insufficient, offering completion in exchange for assimilation. That the Northeast has largely resisted this, that Nagaland remains majority Baptist, that Mizoram remains majority Presbyterian, that these communities have held their own identities against both the Hindutva project and the “no India” dissolution, is a testament to exactly the kind of civilisational stubbornness this essay is trying to defend. They are not less Indian for refusing to be absorbed. They are proof that India, at its best, does not require absorption as the condition of belonging.

Both the “no India before 1947” crowd and the Hindutva movement need India to be simple. One needs it to be simply nonexistent, a colonial fiction, an administrative accident, a geographical expression and nothing more. The other needs it to be simply Hindu, a single coherent religious culture, betrayed by centuries of invasion, now in the process of restoration. Both are retreats from complexity. Both refuse the actual texture of what India is, which is not simple, has never been simple, and whose richness and difficulty and irreducible plurality is precisely what makes the civilisational argument worth making in the first place. India is not a myth to be debunked or a myth to be worshipped. It is a reality to be inhabited, fully, honestly, without the comfort of either dissolution or idolatry.

There is something specifically painful about watching Indians make this argument. Not because Indians cannot be wrong, or should be exempt from rigorous historical thinking, but because this particular wrongness is not rigorous. It wears the costume of rigour, the dropped names, the historical references, the contempt for sentiment, while doing something fundamentally sentimental in reverse. The romance of disavowal. The pride of not-belonging. The sophistication of declaring yourself homeless.

Tagore saw this tendency clearly. He wrote of educated Indians who had “lost their faith in humanity” by swallowing Western frameworks wholesale, who wanted to “dam up the true course of our own historical stream, and only borrow power from the sources of other peoples’ history.” The form changes but the impulse is the same. To measure ourselves by a standard that was designed to find us wanting, and then to perform the finding.

India does not need to be defended as a nation-state. It was not always one and the nation-state may not be its highest or truest form. But India as a civilisational reality, as a fifty-century conversation about how radically different peoples might live together, as a sacred geography held in common imagination, as a philosophical inheritance that has shaped the inner life of hundreds of millions across millennia, this is not a colonial fiction to be deconstructed. It is an achievement. An incomplete, contested, often betrayed, sometimes magnificent achievement.

You do not get to inherit it and disown it simultaneously.

You do not get to write in languages shaped by this civilisation, think in frameworks developed within it, eat food it grew, breathe air it sanctified, and then post, with an air of intellectual authority, that the whole thing was invented in 1947.

India was not invented. India was found. Found by everyone who has ever been claimed by it, who has felt the weight of its history settle into their bones, who has stood before a temple or a river or a mountain or a text and understood, without quite being able to say why, that they were standing inside something ancient and continuing and real.

India has survived everything that was certain to destroy her. She has survived predictions of her impossibility, partitions of her body, centuries of extraction, the contempt of empires and the condescension of their inheritors. She has survived, most quietly and most stubbornly, the doubt of her own children. What she asks of you is not worship. She has never needed that. What she asks is simply this, that before you open your mouth to declare her a fiction, you stand still for a moment inside what she actually is. The pilgrimage routes that crossed her length before your nation-state was a thought. The rivers that have carried the ash of the dead for three thousand years. The texts that moved from Kerala to Kashmir and back, passed between strangers who shared no language but recognised everything. Stand inside that for a moment. Then speak.

In The Wretched of the Earth, written from inside the Algerian revolution, Frantz Fanon warned that national consciousness without substance was a crude, empty, fragile shell. That the postcolonial elite, in its haste to occupy the place of the coloniser, would simply reproduce the coloniser’s logic in a new uniform. That if nationalism did not deepen into genuine social and political consciousness, it would lead to a dead end. That the people who had fought hardest for liberation would find themselves governed by men who had learned nothing from the coloniser except how to hold power.

What Fanon described in the context of postcolonial governance, we can now see operating in the context of postcolonial politics globally. The left that positions itself as anti-imperial has not built a moral framework. It has built a positional identity. It knows which side to stand on. It does not know how to think. And because it does not know how to think, it cannot see the people standing inside the categories it has decided matter. It’s also true for other ideologies and governing bodies but this piece is about the left.

There are roughly three categories of suffering in the progressive world’s moral imagination.

The first category is the west’s victims. These are visible, grievable, and the subject of sustained political attention. The framework was built to see them and it does.

The second category is the victims of governments that exist in opposition to western hegemony. Iran. Russia. China. Their populations are inconvenient. The suffering is real but the oppressor is useful, so the suffering gets absorbed into the larger argument. The Iranian woman being beaten by the morality police becomes a variable in the sanctions conversation. The Uyghur in a detention camp becomes a CIA talking point. The Ukrainian becomes caught in the NATO expansion narrative. Their pain is acknowledged in passing and then set aside because engaging with it fully would complicate the alignment.

The third category is the people who disappear entirely. Sudan. The eastern Congo. The Rohingya. The Hazara. These are people whose oppressors have no useful enemies, whose crises involve no imperial villain the framework recognises, whose suffering produces no actionable alignment. They are not argued about or defended or even opposed. They fall outside the available vocabulary of who counts as a victim worth seeing, and in the end they vanish from visible public discourse completely. Not because nobody noticed. Because the architecture of attention was not built to hold them.

In 2024, the United Nations declared Sudan the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, larger in scale than Gaza. Over ten million people displaced. Famine spreading. Mass rape documented as a systematic instrument of war. There is no western imperial actor to organise the attention around. The framework finds no purchase. The suffering continues without an audience. The genocide in Darfur between 2003 and 2010 killed between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand people through a campaign in which the Sudanese government used the Janjaweed militia to systematically destroy Black African communities. What is happening in Sudan right now exceeds even that. The asymmetry between the attention given to conflicts that fit the anti-imperial frame and the silence around conflicts that do not is a moral failure.

The Iranian woman being beaten by the morality police is not a complication in the American sanctions conversation. She is the conversation.

Azar Nafisi taught literature at the University of Tehran. She was expelled in 1981 for refusing to wear the veil. She spent years watching the Islamic Republic do to Iranian women what it called piety and what was control. Female students penalised for running up stairs when they were late for class, for laughing in hallways, for talking to members of the opposite sex. A student sent home with a reprimand for carrying blush in her bag. The colour of a woman’s lips treated as a political emergency. The word wine excised from Hemingway. Brontë removed from syllabuses because she appeared to condone adultery.

Nafisi describes taking two photographs on her last night in Tehran. In the first, seven women stand against a white wall in black robes and head scarves, covered except for the oval of their faces and their hands. In the second photograph, the same women, in the same position, against the same wall, have taken off their coverings. Splashes of colour separate one from the next. Each has become distinct through the colour and style of her clothes, the colour and the length of her hair.

The distance between those two photographs is what the Islamic Republic considers governance.

When the anti-imperial left defends Iran’s regime because America is its enemy, it is defending the photograph in which all those women look the same.

In 1971, the Pakistani army killed between three hundred thousand and three million Bengalis in nine months. The scale is disputed. The atrocity is not. Professors were dragged from their homes at Dhaka University and shot. Students were mowed down in their rooms or as they fled. American consul general Archer Blood, watching from his posting in Dacca, sent cable after cable to Washington documenting the massacres in precise detail. Mass graves. Buildings razed. The specific targeting of Hindus. A cable he tagged “Selective Genocide.”

His cables were met, he later recalled, with a deafening silence.

Nixon and Kissinger were not silent because they did not know. They were silent because Pakistan was an ally, a route to China, a useful piece in the Cold War alignment. As Gary Bass documents in The Blood Telegram, using declassified cables and White House tapes, Nixon and Kissinger actively supported the Pakistani military throughout the slaughter. American weapons, tanks, jet fighters, troop transport planes, guns and ammunition, were used to kill Bengalis. The White House knew this and continued the support anyway. Kissinger spent years afterwards distorting the record, telling demonstrable falsehoods about what the administration had known and done.

Blood and almost his entire consulate eventually sent a telegram formally declaring their strong dissent, a total repudiation of the policy they were there to carry out. It described American silence in the face of atrocities as moral bankruptcy. Nixon responded by having Blood reassigned.

The western left was largely silent too. Because India intervened to stop the killing and India had Soviet backing, the geopolitical alignment became complicated. Bangladesh did not fit cleanly into the available narrative. So most of the left did not look.

Nearly a million refugees died in camps during the crisis. The Bengalis who survived built a country out of what remained. The world moved on. The slaughter in Bangladesh, Bass writes, ranks in the dark annals of modern cruelty as bloodier than Bosnia and by some accounts in the same rough league as Rwanda. Today it is far more familiar to South Asians than to anyone else.

When Adam Hochschild began researching what became King Leopold’s Ghost, he encountered a footnote in a book he happened to be reading. Mark Twain, the footnote said, had been part of a worldwide movement against slave labour in the Congo, a practice that had taken eight to ten million lives.

Eight to ten million lives. Hochschild was startled. If even half that number was accurate, the Congo would have been one of the great killing grounds of modern times. Why, he asked, were these deaths not mentioned in the standard litany of the century’s horrors?

Leopold II of Belgium ran the Congo Free State as a personal possession from 1885 to 1908. The extraction system was rubber. Villages were given quotas. Those that failed to meet them were punished by the Force Publique, Leopold’s private army, whose soldiers were required to produce a severed hand for every bullet they fired, as proof they had not wasted ammunition. When soldiers fired more bullets than they killed people, they cut hands from the living. Baskets of severed hands became a currency of colonial administration. Hostage-taking was routine, women and children held until the men of a village delivered their rubber quota. Villages that resisted were burned. Populations that could not run fast enough were killed.

The best estimates suggest that between 1880 and 1920, the population of the Congo was reduced by approximately ten million people, through killing, starvation, disease, and the collapse of birth rates under the conditions of terror.

This is not ancient history in the way people use that phrase to avoid thinking. The Democratic Republic of Congo has been in near-continuous conflict since 1996. The eastern Congo is still actively at war. The minerals extracted from its soil, coltan, cobalt, cassiterite, are in every phone, every laptop, and every electric vehicle battery being made right now, extracted under conditions of forced labour and extreme violence. The supply chain of the global left’s smartphones runs through the eastern Congo. This conflict, unlike Darfur, actually does involve western corporate interests in ways that could fit an anti-imperial framework. It still gets almost no sustained attention. Because it is complicated. Multiple armed groups. Regional powers. Corporate supply chains running through too many countries to produce a clean villain. The positional identity cannot navigate complexity. So it looks away.

Anti-imperialism has become a positional identity, not a moral framework. The distinction matters enormously because a positional identity tells you which side to stand on while doing nothing to help you think. It cannot generate genuine solidarity because genuine solidarity requires seeing the person, not the geopolitical alignment. It cannot generate genuine critique because genuine critique requires applying the same standard to all sides, which is precisely what a positional identity is designed to avoid.

The result is a predictable set of double standards.

When America bombs, it is imperialism. When Russia invades Ukraine, it is complicated geopolitics, NATO expansion, Western provocation. Russia’s imperialism, its centuries of violent absorption of neighbouring peoples and cultures, its deliberate destruction of Ukrainian language and identity, its engineered famines that killed millions of Ukrainians in the twentieth century, these are inconvenient complications in a narrative that requires America to be the singular evil. So they are minimised.

When America supports authoritarian regimes, it is proof of American hypocrisy. When China builds detention camps for Uyghurs, installs surveillance infrastructure across Xinjiang designed to monitor an entire population’s movement, speech, religion, and reproduction, and describes this as vocational training, it is treated as a counter-narrative to Western hegemony. China’s competition with America is celebrated. China’s treatment of its most vulnerable citizens is not called out. Because calling it out would complicate the alignment.

When any Islamic state commits atrocities against its own people, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Taliban’s Afghanistan, the response from significant parts of the left is silence, or deflection. “Israel did it.” “America destabilised the region.” “Western feminism is imperialist.” These are not analyses. They are escape routes from the obligation to see the person in front of you. It also aids to not reform and hinders accountability, and hurts the revolution within the people currently struggling under the regimes. You owe solidarity to those people, not an ideology.

You can hold the truth that Israel is conducting a genocide and simultaneously hold the truth that Islamic regimes are committing atrocities against their own people. These are not contradictory positions. The refusal to hold both simultaneously is not solidarity. It is tribalism wearing solidarity’s clothes.

Camus understood this. During the Algerian War, Sartre argued for unconditional solidarity with the FLN, endorsing violence as a necessary tool of liberation. Camus refused. Not because he did not acknowledge French colonial brutality, he did, explicitly, but because he would not endorse violence that might kill working-class French Algerians who were not the colonial elite. Sartre called this a betrayal. Camus called Sartre’s position a willingness to sacrifice real people for ideological purity.

Sartre’s position won. It became the template for left solidarity politics globally. The lesson drawn was that anti-colonial struggle required unconditional support, that introducing nuance was providing ammunition to the enemy, that the demands of justice could be subordinated to the demands of alignment. The people who paid for this template were the ones who didn’t fit the alignment. The Algerians who dissented from the FLN. The Iranians who dissented from the revolution. The Uyghurs who exist inconveniently inside a country the left has decided it needs. The Ukrainians invaded by a country the left has decided is less threatening than America. The Darfuris whose oppressors had no useful enemies. The Congolese whose minerals the world needed too much to look at carefully.

A significant section of the global left has made the west its moral compass in reverse. Whatever the west is against becomes good by default. Whatever the west supports becomes suspect. This is not independence from western thought. It is total dependence on it, with the polarity flipped. The west remains the reference point. The left has simply decided to oppose everything the reference point endorses.

The consequence is that the most urgent questions get abandoned. Is an American attack on Iran likely to fix the internal conflict or only produce civilian casualties? That question requires analysis. “Iran good, America bad” requires only a compass. Does Russian imperialism represent a genuine threat to the people of Ukraine that is distinct from American imperial interests? That requires looking at what Russian imperialism has actually done to its neighbours across centuries. “NATO expansion” requires only a compass. Can China’s treatment of Uyghurs be a human rights catastrophe while Western coverage of it simultaneously serves Western geopolitical interests? That requires holding two things at once. A positional identity cannot hold two things at once.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks but in how it thinks. The positional left has collapsed that distinction entirely. It knows what to think. It has just outsourced the how.

Genuine solidarity is not the same as selective blindness. Solidarity means seeing the person. The Iranian woman in the photograph before the scarves come off. The Uyghur in the detention camp. The Ukrainian in the bombed apartment block. The Afghan girl who cannot go to school. The Darfuri woman in a displacement camp. The Congolese miner whose labour is in your phone. Seeing them not as symbols of their governments’ geopolitical positions but as human beings whose suffering is not made more or less real by who their oppressor is.

Fanon’s warning was not that anti-colonial struggle was wrong. It was that national consciousness without moral depth would betray its own people. That the category of liberation could be hollowed out and filled with new forms of the same domination.

That hollowing out is what we are watching now. The language of liberation, of anti-imperialism, of solidarity, is being used to justify silence about atrocities committed by the right governments against the right categories of people. The framework built to see the unseen has become a framework for deciding whose suffering is visible and whose is not.

The person who cannot criticise Iran because America is Iran’s enemy has not transcended imperialism. They have simply moved their allegiance from one power to another and called it a principle.

The principle was never which side you stand on. The principle was that the human being in front of you is not a symbol of their government’s geopolitical position. Their suffering is not a complication in your alignment.

Every framework that cannot hold that truth is not a moral framework. It is a compass that only points in one direction, mistakes that direction for north, and abandons everyone who falls outside its range.

That is what those comment sections are:

"British please come back."

"Sadly India might never be this glorious ever again."

"Independence actually ruined Calcutta."

India’s share of global GDP when the British East India Company arrived was twenty-seven percent. When the British left, it was three percent. Economist Utsa Patnaik spent years calculating the extraction using the empire’s own trade and tax records. Her figure was 45 trillion dollars transferred from India to Britain between 1765 and 1938.

The mechanism was not complicated. India was taxed. The tax revenue was used to purchase Indian goods. Those goods were exported to Britain. Britain recorded these as purchases. They were not purchases. They were confiscations with an accounting layer placed on top. The colony paid for its own plunder and was told to be grateful for the transaction.

Dhaka’s muslin was described by traders as woven air. So fine it was worn by Mughal emperors, so sought after it commanded prices no European textile could touch. British manufacturers could not compete. So they lobbied parliament to impose tariffs of up to 80 percent on Indian textiles entering Britain while simultaneously forcing Indian markets open to British goods. Weavers who had sustained entire regional economies for centuries were destroyed within a generation. Dhaka, once among the most prosperous cities in Asia, became a ruin. Some weavers had their thumbs cut off so they could never weave again.

Then there was Indian shipping, which the British strangled until it was irrelevant except for minor coastal trade, then temporarily reclassified as British during the Napoleonic Wars when they needed it, then strangled again the moment the war ended. Indian steel, which the British actively suppressed, forcing India to produce a type of steel that was surplus to its own needs, blocking its export to Britain, blocking its expansion, while simultaneously preventing Indian companies from growing within the British economic system. Indian banking, partitioned between sterling companies open only to British investors and rupee companies subordinate to them. Currency manipulated deliberately, the rupee driven from among the strongest in the world in the seventeenth century to a fraction of its value by the nineteenth. During the Great Depression, when agricultural prices collapsed and Indians could not sell their grain, the British restricted India’s money supply to protect the sterling value of British assets in India. The total cash in circulation in the Indian economy fell from five billion rupees in 1929 to three billion in 1938. Indians starved. British assets were protected.

The people who did this are the ones being invited back.

Famines happened before the British arrived. Nobody serious disputes that. What the British did was convert drought into mass death with a consistency and at a scale that had no precedent in Indian history.

Previous rulers had maintained grain reserves, varied taxes according to actual harvests, and banned food exports during shortage. When an El Niño drought hit in 1661, the Mughal emperor opened the treasury, encouraged grain imports, sold grain at reduced prices, and remitted rents. The Marathas subsidised irrigation and kept common lands accessible to the poor. These systems were not perfect. But they were systems whose explicit purpose was to prevent drought from becoming famine.

The British dismantled every single one of them. They replaced grain reserves with free market principles. They replaced export embargos with active export policy. They replaced tax relief during drought with continued revenue extraction. They replaced community buffers with the doctrine that the market would sort it out.

The market did not sort it out. It exported grain while people starved.

An 1878 study published in the Journal of the Statistical Society found thirty-one serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia.

Thirty-one against seventeen across two thousand years. The British did not find a famine-prone country. They made one.

1770 1783 1791 1837 1860 1865 1876 1877 1896 1899 1943

Famine after famine after famine, across nearly two centuries, in a country whose previous rulers had understood the prevention of famine as a fundamental obligation of governance. Mike Davis, in his exhaustive study of Victorian-era famines across colonised territories, estimated that somewhere between 12 and 29 million people died in British India alone between 1876 and 1908. Not from drought. Drought was the occasion. The cause was a colonial economic structure that had deliberately dismantled every system that previously allowed communities to survive drought, and replaced those systems with the principle that the market would sort it out.

Not acts of God. Acts of policy. Policies made simply because no Indian life was equal to one of theirs.

In 1943, between two and three million people starved to death in Bengal. The British government’s own official estimate was 1.5 million. Independent estimates run to 3.5 million.

In January 1943, Churchill’s War Cabinet cut shipping to the Indian Ocean. British food stocks at that moment were between two and five million tons above every estimate of necessary minimum levels. The War Cabinet’s own Statistics Division acknowledged the threat to British rations was exaggerated. The real reason for the cut was operational flexibility. Surplus ships and surplus stocks for postwar positioning and military operations Churchill wanted in the Balkans.

Viceroy Linlithgow had warned in February 1943 that a rice crisis was inevitable. The shipping committee responded that no further diversions could be contemplated. By April, intelligence summaries were recording large numbers of starving people emigrating from Bengal, a formal marker of famine under the Bengal Famine Code, the empire’s own official manual. Officials in Bengal were simultaneously being instructed to preach the gospel of sufficiency. A food minister was appointed who believed a famine was approaching and was not permitted to say so.

Rice was being exported from Calcutta while Bengalis died in the streets of Calcutta.

In the fiscal year April 1942 to March 1943, India exported a net 360,000 tons of grain. After the war had reached India’s borders. After imports from Southeast Asia had been cut off. After hunger marches and food riots had become routine. After a cyclone had damaged the vital winter rice crop. Between January and July 1943, even as the famine intensified, India exported 71,000 tons of rice. Distributed at half a kilogram per person per day, that rice would have kept 390,000 people alive for a full year. The total grain exported would have saved nearly two million.

Shiploads of Australian wheat circumnavigated famine-stricken Bengal on their way to be stockpiled for the liberation of southeastern Europe. Australia had publicly stated it could supply all the wheat India needed if Britain provided the ships. Britain would not. Canada offered 100,000 tons as a free gift. Churchill personally blocked it. Ships were simultaneously traveling to Argentina, twice the distance, to collect wheat for Britain. That day Churchill expressed concern about whether British poultry keepers had enough grain for their hens.

Subhas Chandra Bose offered 100,000 tons of rice from a nearby port. The War Cabinet recognised the offer was genuine. They suppressed all mention of it in the press and declined to collect the rice.

At the War Cabinet meeting of August 4, 1943, with famine conditions documented by the viceroy, the governor of Bengal, American diplomatic observers, and the British military, Churchill demanded forceful propaganda. Secretary of State Amery recorded in his diary that Churchill hated India and everything to do with it.

On November 10, with the death toll still rising, Churchill’s chief scientific adviser Cherwell sent a memo arguing against relief on the grounds that Indians bred like rabbits. Churchill at the following day’s meeting used the same phrase and expressed no intention of letting their dying interfere with operations.

When informed of the scale of deaths, Churchill asked why Gandhi had not died yet.

These are documented statements in War Cabinet minutes and private diaries, now declassified. The policies that produced the famine were his policies. The ships that did not come were his decision. The rice that kept leaving while people starved was leaving under his government’s instruction.

This is what glorious meant.

The British forced India to grow opium, then forced China to buy it at gunpoint, then used the profits to fund the East India Company’s operations in India. The opium trade was not incidental to the empire. It was foundational to it. India was the farm, China was the market, and Indians had no say in either arrangement.

The Arms Act of 1878 disarmed the Indian civilian population while leaving British settlers fully armed. An entire people were legally prohibited from possessing the means of self-defence in their own country. When Bal Gangadhar Tilak protested this, the British used the Sedition Act of 1870, explicitly designed, in its authors’ own words, to suppress criticism of British policies, to imprison him. That same sedition law, written for a subject population with no right to political speech, is still on India’s books today. It has been used to arrest students. It has been used to silence journalists. The colony exported its censorship laws home with it.

The Vernacular Press Act of 1878 regulated Indian-language newspapers specifically because the British were alarmed that Indians were talking to each other in languages the empire couldn’t easily monitor. The premise was not merely control. It was the belief that Indians communicating among themselves freely was a threat.

Before British rule, caste and religious identities in India were fluid, overlapping, locally negotiated. People moved between categories. Communities shared festivals, shrines, customs. The historian Dirks spent a career documenting how the British census hardened these identities into rigid, mutually exclusive, enumerated categories. Once you count people by religion and caste and tribe, once you make those the basis of legal classification, representation, and resource allocation, you make those identities the most politically salient thing about a person. Large-scale Hindu-Muslim violence as a religious phenomenon, as distinct from ordinary political and territorial conflict between armies and kings, began under British rule. Lord Elphinstone advised London in 1859 that divide et impera should be their maxim. The Muslim League was instigated by the British in 1906. The Partition of Bengal in 1905 was explicitly sold to Muslim leaders as promoting their interests. Herbert Risley, its architect, admitted frankly that one of the main objectives was to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to British rule.

The communal violence that people blame on ancient hatreds between Hindus and Muslims was, in very significant part, a British administrative project. Partition, and everything it cost, was the culmination of that project.

The Andaman Islands. The British transported thousands of Indian political prisoners there, to a penal colony in the middle of the ocean, for the crime of wanting their country back. Transported is the clinical word. The reality was that men who had done nothing except resist colonial rule were taken from their families, placed on ships, and deposited on an island from which return was nearly impossible, where they were subjected to forced labour and systematic brutality. The Cellular Jail was built specifically for this purpose. It held prisoners in individual cells designed to prevent communication with each other. Solitary confinement as political punishment, institutionalised.

Section 377, criminalising homosexuality, was imposed on India by the British in 1860. There had been no such prohibition in Indian culture or law before. The British introduced it and left. India spent decades trying to undo it. A colonial-era Victorian moral panic about sex, written into Indian law, persecuted Indian citizens for over 150 years.

The racial apartheid in British Indian courts, where an Englishman who killed his Indian servant received six months and a modest fine. Where an Indian convicted of an unproven attempted rape against an Englishwoman was sentenced to twenty years. Where crimes by whites against Indians were accidents and crimes by Indians against Britons were capital. Where Lord Ripon’s attempt to allow Indian judges to try British defendants, the Ilbert Bill, was met with such furious British settler backlash that it collapsed and Ripon was removed from office. The principle that the law applied equally to all people regardless of race was not something the British empire was prepared to concede in India.

Jallianwala Bagh was one of the darkest and most heartbreaking incidents in India’s freedom struggle. On 13 April 1919, thousands of innocent people had gathered in Amritsar, Punjab. during the festival of Baisakhiand to peacefully protest against the Rowlatt Act. They were trapped inside the enclosed garden with very few exits, unaware that a tragedy was about to unfold. The gathering included men, women, children, and villagers who had come to the city for celebrations.

Without warning, General Reginald Dyer arrived with armed troops and ordered them to open fire directly into the unarmed crowd. The soldiers continued shooting for about ten minutes, firing around 1,650 rounds of ammunition into people who had no chance to escape. According to official British reports, at least 379 people were killed and over, 1200 were injured, though the only thing less trustworthy than their self-written history is their self-written reports.

The railway argument will come up. It always does.

The British built railways using Indian tax revenue, with steel imported from Britain because to use Indian steel would have supported Indian industry and the point was not to support Indian industry, at fares serving British commercial interests, along routes designed to move goods from the interior to the ports outward toward Britain. The railways were extraction infrastructure that happened to also carry passengers. Every piece of infrastructure the nostalgia crowd points to was built to serve colonial administration and extraction. That some of it proved useful after independence is not an argument for colonialism. It is an argument for the resilience of people who took what was built to subjugate them and tried to make something else out of it.

Before 1757, when Robert Clive conquered Bengal, Clive himself described it as the paradise of the earth. One of the richest regions in the world. Two and a half centuries of British sovereignty later it had become synonymous with a basket case. This did not happen after independence. It happened during the empire. It was the empire.

The Calcutta you are nostalgic for was glorious for a very specific set of people. British administrators in houses built by underpaid labour. Indian elites who collaborated and were rewarded accordingly. Not the weavers whose thumbs were cut off. Not the peasants paying taxes they could not afford. Not the two to three million people who starved to death in 1943 while rice left the port. Not the tens of millions who died in the eleven famines before that. Not the political prisoners on the Andaman Islands. Not the people imprisoned for speaking in their own language about their own country. Not the families destroyed by a Partition that was in significant part the long-term result of a deliberate colonial strategy of communal division.

The glory was real. It was just not yours. It was never going to be yours. The system that produced it was specifically designed to ensure it would never be yours.

Ram Prasad Bismil wrote the poem. Bhagat Singh translated it. Both were hanged by the empire you are inviting back.

Bismil was 30 when the British executed him. Bhagat Singh was 23. From his prison cell Singh wrote that he did not fear death, that the question was not whether to die but what to die for, that the only way to make the empire feel the weight of what it was doing was to show there were people willing to pay the price of refusing it.

He paid it.

Matangini Hazra was 73 when she led a procession toward a police station in Midnapore in 1942, carrying the Indian flag. The police shot her. She kept walking, bleeding, holding the flag, until she fell. She died with the flag still in her hand.

These people did not die so that we could post “British please come back” in comment sections.

Ehsaanfaroshi ki tamanna ab humare dil mein hai.

Ehsaan is a kindness so profound it creates obligation. Faroshi is to sell it. To trade away what was given to you in good faith. Ehsaanfaroshi is what is happening in those comment sections. Not a political opinion. Not a difference of historical interpretation. The selling of a kindness that cost millions of people their lives. The trading away of every person who died refusing to accept that the empire was inevitable, permanent, deserved.

The specific horror of where we are is not that some people are wrong about history. It is that the history has become abstract enough to be wrong about. That thirty-one famines in 120 years can become a matter of perspective. That Churchill can be a poster on someone’s wall rather than what he was, a man who asked why Gandhi had not died yet while millions of Gandhi’s people starved to death under his deliberate policy. A man who died with the blood of millions on his hands.

The forgetting is not innocent. It is the last and most enduring colonial project. An empire that cannot be remembered clearly cannot be held accountable. An empire that cannot be held accountable can be missed.

The freedom, that you now think of with the tinted rose coloured glasses, is red from blood, not nostalgia. A price was paid. By people who believed in something bigger than themselves. They believed in your right to be seen as a person. The least you owe them is memory. Precise, unforgiving, unabstracted memory.

Remember with rage. Remember with precision. Remember because the world is counting on you not to.

Sources:

Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis

Churchill's Secret War by Madhusree Mukerjee

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor

People talk about becoming as though it is intentional. As though one day you sit down and decide who you are going to be. But I don’t remember deciding any of it. I don’t remember deciding to be so insufferable that my presence plagues the Tuesday nights of everyone who loves me. As though my existence leaves dirty dishes in the sink overnight.

I am painfully aware of my grimness. Of how I hold onto things long past their statute of limitations. Of how I have never really gotten over anything that has ever happened to me.

It would be easier, I think, to pretend I am better than I am. To be blissfully ignorant. To let other people suffer from my shortcomings without carrying the burden of knowing them first.

But I don’t know who I would be if I were not an object of my own condemnation. Because I think I have spent so long looking at myself through the lens of repair that I no longer know what it means to simply look. I don’t know what remains of a person after you’ve religiously dissected them out of their being, so I keep dissecting.

It’s strange how religion sounds like such a clean word. You say religion and people think of belief. They think of God. They think of prayer, perhaps. Ritual. Morality. They think of something intentional, something a person arrives at after thought and reflection and faith.

But I don’t think religion begins there.

I think religion begins in kitchens. A place where things become themselves. Water becomes tea. Dough becomes bread. Ingredients become dinner. Things enter a room separate and leave transformed.

Maybe people become themselves in kitchens too.

Religion begins long before belief. I think it begins with your mother’s hands doing things out of habit and not care. It begins with rituals repeated so many times that nobody remembers where they came from, with festivals and grief and the way people stand around food and the things people say before eating and after eating and during difficult times.

It begins with ordinary things that have become invisible. much like God.

Ordinary things frighten me sometimes because ordinary things become invisible.

You stop noticing them. You stop noticing that your understanding of love is entering you. You stop noticing expectations entering you. Ideas about women entering you and ideas about men entering you and ideas about what a family should look like entering you.

Then one day you wake up and realise entire worlds have been living inside you this whole time. Ways of speaking. Ways of loving. Ways of belonging. Ways of deciding who belongs.

The strange thing about inheritance is that nobody asks if you want it. Nobody sits you down and says anything at all. Here are the fears your family carried. Here are the silences. Here are the things nobody healed from, the expectations, the old griefs. Please review and sign here.

No. You just carry them. And sometimes you don’t even realise you’re carrying them until they become heavy.

I used to think love itself was a revolution. It was, in my imagination, dismantling systems and changing history. It was two people standing across from each other and crossing the distance. And the world going quieter. Religion would become quieter. Geography would become quieter. I thought all these inherited things would eventually move aside and make room for two people trying to build a life together.

Maybe because all stories quietly insist on this. Love wins. Love finds a way. Love conquers all. I don’t know if I stopped believing that. I think I still believe it a little, which is probably the embarrassing part.

People think geography is distance. Maps. Borders. Cities.

But geography enters people. You grow up somewhere and a place starts living inside you. The weather enters you. The language enters you. The politics enter you. The fears enter you. Even the things nobody says enter you. Especially the things nobody says.

I think silence is inherited too.

Then one day you meet another person who has spent their whole life becoming somebody else somewhere else and somehow you both stand there expecting it to be simple. You don’t account for everything a person carries. You don’t account for how much of another country can fit inside one person. How much of another family. How much of another life lived entirely without you and that left marks anyway.

I didn’t realise how many people could fit inside a relationship. Families fit inside it. Countries fit inside it. Entire histories fit inside it. Sometimes people you have never met fit inside it. Sometimes dead people fit inside it. Things inherited from people who inherited them from people who inherited them from people.

Then suddenly you are not standing in a room with one person. You are standing in a room with generations.

How are two people supposed to compete with generations.

I never thought heartbreak could be political. I never thought I would have to grieve not just a person but an idea I had carried for most of my life. The idea that love was somehow larger than all of it. Larger than the fears people pass down without meaning to. I thought if two people wanted each other enough, the world would kneel to shrine of their their compatibility.

What hurt me wasn’t only losing someone. It was losing the version of love I had believed in. The one that was bigger than inheritance. The one that didn’t arrive with generations attached.

I think women learn disappearance very early. Not directly. Nobody teaches it as a lesson. It arrives in repetition, in atmosphere, in the slow accumulation of small instructions. Need less. Ask for less. Be easier. Be softer. And then when you have done all that, when you have made yourself into something manageable, people tell you to be yourself. As though the years of reduction didn’t happen. As though you didn’t spend them turning yourself into something easier to love. You were half a woman and they tell you to become half a person too.

I have spent the simplest moments of my life conflicted. The ones where I don’t have to do much but exist. Even there I am split between the woman I was supposed to be and the person I am. I always lose half of what I have. Half my womanhood lost to half my personhood. I never arrive anywhere whole.

I don’t remember deciding to do that. I don’t remember deciding any of it. I don’t remember much about who I was and I don't understand who I am. And I want to be forgiven for the cardinal sin of turning into someone I don't recognise. I want to be forgiven at the end of every day.

Someone once said I was too much. I have been thinking about that ever since. Too much for what. Too much for who. I want someone to tell me exactly when I became this. To give me the precise moment so I can go back and fix it. But I am scared I wouldn’t be good at shrinking myself either.

I think I believed them for longer than I should have. I think I went looking for the excess. I think I found it everywhere I looked because that is what happens when you have been told to look for it. You locate evidence. You build a case. You convict yourself of your own abundance and begin quietly reducing.

And I think what I am most tired of is that. Not the heartbreak. Not the loss. But the long project of making myself smaller and still somehow not small enough. Of editing and editing and still being too much. Of trying to become easier to love and losing, in the process, the thread back to whatever I was before I started trying.

I have a happy memory and I am sad even there.

I don’t know how to explain that exactly. I think sadness has become capable of travelling backwards. It enters old photographs before you can stop it. It sits down at tables you remember being happy at. The memory doesn’t change. You just arrive at it differently now. The you that was happy there is someone you can see but not reach.

I don’t know how to not be undone by every memory I only vaguely remember. The ones that are more feeling than image. More weather than event. I think those are the ones that stay longest. Not the things that happened but the atmosphere of them. The specific texture of feeling safe, or wanted, or like the future was something that was going to happen to you rather than something you had to survive.

I don’t remember the last time I laughed so hard I forgot myself. I think forgetting yourself for a few seconds might be one of the nicest things that can happen to a person. To be so entirely somewhere else that the ongoing project of being you briefly suspends. I miss that. I miss it the way you miss something you didn’t know you were storing.

And lately I think I have just been tired. Not tired in the way sleep fixes. The kind that settles somewhere deeper. The kind where you stop asking for happiness and start asking for quiet. Where peace starts to sound less like an achievement and more like the only thing left worth wanting.

Peace would be a kitchen. I still don’t entirely know why.

But it is always November in my memories. And someone is with me. Someone who looks at me and never dissects. Someone who sits with me in the most mundane afternoons without them becoming a graveyard of everything I couldn’t be. And if they are going to be one, I don’t want to walk through it alone.