Himal Southasian

A still from the documentary ‘Oddamavadi’, where a mourner walks through a burial lot in eastern Sri Lanka. For Sri Lankan Muslims, the terror of forced cremation under a cruel state policy defined the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Politics

Sri Lankan Muslims’ lasting pain over Covid-era forced cremations

Adilah Ismail
The ‘Oddamavadi’ project, comprising a book and documentary film, takes on a shameful chapter in Sri Lanka’s recent history when Muslims were barred from burial in violation of their religious beliefs

Podcast of the week

In her memoir, Zara Chowdhary recounts visiting the Jama Masjid in Ahmedabad with her grandfather, where Ahmad Shah I, the first Muslim king of the Gujarat sultanate, used to pray his namaz. From the fallout of the 2002 Gujarat massacre and of her family’s slow demise, Chowdhary finds fragments of identity and memory, an assertion of who they were and how they had always belonged.

Southasia Review of Books podcast #10: Zara Chowdhary on ‘The Lucky Ones’ and surviving the violence of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom

A conversation with the writer Zara Chowdhary on her debut memoir ‘The Lucky Ones’, exploring the past of her multigenerational Muslim family and reckoning with a sense of unbelonging within one’s own ...
Himal Southasian
www.himalmag.com