 Hello, can I start? No, you have to wait. I have to introduce you first. Okay, yeah, that's what I was going to say. And people have to come in. Okay, shall we start? I think because we're at 39, so the room is open. Good afternoon and greetings. Wherever you are, it might not be the afternoon, it might be a different time zone. So, welcome to you all to the third day of the Savas Festival of Ideas on Decolonizing Knowledge. My name is Amina Joaquin. I'm the director of the Savas Festival of Ideas and it's a great pleasure for me to welcome you to this afternoon's session with Professor Neelam Hussein, who will be delivering the third and final part of her lecture series that we have been enjoying over the last few weeks. I will just introduce Neelam briefly and then just give you a background into the lectures that she's done so far and then hand over to her. The format of the session will be that Neelam will talk for about 40 to 50 minutes and take questions at the end. I would invite audience members to put their questions in the Q&A box. We won't be taking questions live in the Q&A box but because of time, because we have to finish by 4.45 for the next session. So, we're just going to take the questions in the box and I'll read them out and Neelam will respond to them. So, it would be great if you can keep them coming during the session as it were. So, it's a pleasure to introduce Neelam who did her BA Honours in English Literature from Kenned College Lahore and read for the MA degree at Government College Lahore, followed by an MA from Leeds in the United Kingdom and her postgraduate research at Sussex. She's been a lecturer at Kenned College and as well as she also lectures at Lahore College, I believe. She left Kenned to work at Seymourg Women's Resource and Publication Centre in 1995 and has been there since. Seymourg is a secular feminist not-for-profit organisation and apart from overall oversight as executive coordinator, her work entails direct involvement in both academic and field research including the editing and publication of a journal called Bayan which has got a legal context to it and there are many other publications and her other work includes the production and publication of an annotated selection of Punjabi folk tales documented by British folklorists during the Raj and translation from Urdu to English of two novels in a courtyard by Khatija Mastur and All Passion Spent by Zahidah Hena. She's also the co-editor of two volumes on engendering the nation state which are available in the SOAS Library and as well as the editor of a recent publication Disputed Legacies the Pakistan Papers. Nilam is professor of practice with us here at SOAS and she has been delivering a couple of lectures before today's one so this is a continuation of the conversation on narrative. She has talked so far about the Punjabi folk or wonder tale and followed by Angan or the inner courtyard in Afshatun novels by women writers and today she's going to be talking about oral narratives memories from the margins. Nilam welcome and over to you. Thank you Amna. Today I'll be looking at oral narratives or histories categorized as subjugated or disqualified knowledges to examine the gaps, disjunctions and disconnects between two different knowledge and narrative forms namely the discursive field of erudite scientific knowledge, official history and formal fact based texts and the unofficial unverified non-common sensical knowledges that belong to the domain of orality and people's voices. In order to highlight the importance of and the aim of this is to highlight the importance of dialogic space between the two so as to bridge the distance between official academic discourse and the unqualified knowledges based on what people know at the local level and which according to Foucault derive that power from the fact that they are different from the knowledge forms that surround them. You might object that no that's sorry that I don't want to read the strength of oral history lies in its immediacy in the direct historically positioned open-ended polyphony of the spoken word unlike the terms of conventional academic writing that insists on a chronologically bound sequential relationship between cause and effect and action and impact and which discards all that is extraneous and unverifiable. Oral history or oral narratives rely on the uncertain terrain of memory and emotional recall. They have little respect for sequential logic or even chronological order carried on the different voices and languages of the marketplace the street the intimacies of the domestic enclosure and local gossip. They quicken to life in the dialogic terrain of open-ended conversations and spin out of what Foucault refers to as a singular as singular local knowledges as well as memories and points of view that link the past to the present and anticipate the future. Drawing upon the seemingly unnecessary unnecessary detail and minutiae of life on popular wisdoms people subjugated knowledges and the collective memory of struggles and combats oral narratives capture people's lives not as objects of research but as subjects caught in the inter-determinacy of the spoken word which are also the moments of what Bach then calls maximal open-ended contact with the present. In the process they breathe life into the case studies of mainstream academic discourse which is not to say that this is an argument for oral history as opposed to formal academic research but a recognition of what it elides and the importance of both in tandem with each other. An argument for dialogic spaces between the singular self-referentiality of expert knowledge and erudition and the multi-axial inter-determinate performity of oral narratives. The importance of acknowledging the connection between these two forms of knowledge cannot be underestimated not only as an exercise that deepens the formal academic endeavor but because it draws attention to that which is sub-elided, subjugated, shed as extraneous and unverifiable to that which falls through the cracks of formally accepted knowledge and is rendered invisible by the grand narratives of power of official history and the discursive fields of law, morality, religion and human rights as well as the terms and terminology of negotiation and expediency that shape the political parameters of our world as part of ongoing historical process. The need to recognize, retrieve and engage with the submerged knowledges and unacknowledged lives of the people is important not because it will take us to the truths of history but because this engagement with people's voices with the world as they understand and experience it has the potential of enabling us to see with a critical and objective eye what the orthodoxies of grand narratives mask what they include and what is excluded and what interests they serve. In today's neoliberal world where the right to choose is reduced to consumerist choices and the profit motive takes precedence over everything that is worth preserving as official narratives make and un-make the lives and stories of ordinary people this as I've said earlier is important. I will illustrate my argument with conversations and stories. The first set stems from 1947 when Lahore and I quote here from an official text when Lahore experienced some of the worst rioting during the period preceding the formation of Pakistan accompanied by the loss and departure of the city's Hindu and Sikh populations to India. If there is time the second set comprises stories of sexual violence and the subversion of the male gaze the first set of stories is drawn from fragments of personal memory and conversations and interviews with women undertaken for different research projects in Lahore's walled city over the past 10 or more years. The stories are about relationships and locale not so much as a geographically defined and politically circumscribed place as defined by Anthony Giddens but as a historically and socially circumscribed place of an organically developed mosaic of communities cultures, relationships, values and a way of life shaped in the tangle of streets monuments made homely by the rituals of use, shrines, muhallas, neighbourhoods and havelis that are the walled city. My first story lies on the other side of the official narratives of the rise and fall of kingdoms empires and iconic figures credited with the making of Lahore's history and architectural build. It stemmed from one question in a conversation with a group of women of different ages in one of their homes in the Delhi Darwaza and it took us to a world beyond the bare-bone facticity of the overused phrase Lahore experienced some of the worst rioting during partition sitting with women in Delhi Darwaza sometime in the early 2000s someone had asked who are these Diaz for? Diaz are little clay lamps what Diaz? The ones, the next slide please, the next one, yeah this one the ones in the niches and ledges that taught the streets there are so many of them they're almost in every home we've gone to oh therefore the others who live here one of the women had replied what others? For those who did not leave by now we were all listening it's this way during the facade, the conflict the Hindus and Sikhs who lived here went away and we moved into their houses but all of them didn't go many were lost and left behind these Diaz are for them you mean you like them for those who died in the partition riots? no, we like them for the ones who stayed we feel their presence, they're here come on, has anyone seen them? many have sometimes on waking at night there is someone in the room then whoever it is vanishes aren't you scared? no, they're not antagonistic they share the space with us we like Diaz for them it has been said, subaltern discourses show how people engage with history at intense and personal levels not through the lens of official histories and academic tests texts but by individual relationships with places and people and spaces the same may be said of oral narratives and sitting there in the palimpsest of mezi streets and tall crumbling houses of the world cities many layered history where in cautious digging can uncover a lost passage or the floor of a room cave in on an underground chamber with murals dimmed with old dust where even the ground beneath the feet is uncertain the story is certainly believable sometimes in the 1990s when we were collecting partition narratives I asked my cousin Jamil about those days he must have been about 12 then and recalled a small boy's small imperceptible changes as seen by the eyes of a small boy the dropping off of customary greetings between neighbors the cessation of rooftop flirtations the turning aside of once familiar glances my cousin Gogi's memories, next please are less impressionistic, more detailed looking back she recalls the house in Batala now in India and a way of life, the sense of place and permanence the mounting tension, the shock of the Radcliffe Award the redrawing of boundaries, the departure for Lahore and loss of home I called her the next day to thank her and ask if my colleague Sadia Thur and I could have another session to tie up some loose ends no she said abruptly I don't want to talk about that time I thought I'd done with it but you made it live again moving on to 1963 on a family visit to India for the first time in my life I saw two grown men cry my father and Inder Prakash Nanda his friend from pre-partition FC College Lahore they had met after a separation of 15 years he sharpened with the possibility of never meeting again his wife would not see her she had lost her brothers to the flame of Shahalmi and her memories had another trajectory for me the visit to Delhi was strangely disturbing almost uncanny in its experience of entering a familiar world where I knew the streets where I knew the faces, the language, even the humour yet which I could not own and to which I did not belong many years later in the 1990s when my friend Anu came to Lahore from Delhi she had a similar experience I don't know why but I seem to go around with a lump in my throat she said history put paid to the two-nation theory with Bangladesh it also brought about changes in life patterns leaving it to different generations to pick up the threads in other lands of stories severed in 47 and then again in 71 for me it began in Leeds with Shama Fateh Ali from Bombay who kept the connection alive through a string of letters across the border until the end of her life and with Anu Kapoor and Kumkum Sangari whose mothers like me had been students at Kined and where I was now a teacher and Anu's father who had gone to Government College Lahore where I read for my MA degree it was the beginning of a friendship that took me to Delhi and Anu's mother who would say our Lord the Anger Lankari come let's talk about Lahore in a parallel gesture my Khalu my uncle traversed the nooks and corners of Delhi with Anu but when asked to visit replied Delhi was my city I will not go there as a stranger and there was Kumkum and there was Kumkum Sandroop with whom I went a Muslim woman from Pakistan with a Hindu boy who sang the Kavali at the Mazar to pay my respects to Khusra and Nizamuddin and where for his sake I was given a welcome I did not merit did our elders ever count the cost I often wonder of what it would take to carve a new nation out of the living body of the land or were they driven pel-mel by the forces of history over which they had little control, too content anyway from the discontinuities of history let us move on to its continuities which exist alongside it alongside them and point to abiding connectivities to something stronger than the politically created antagonisms and exclusive narratives that divide us that divide us today one such space is represented by the eclectic undifferentiated inclusivity of the Sufi Mazar or Shrine and the popular belief systems that have grown around it and by inference to its role in the making of the subcontinents in the Muslim history and culture where the sacred and profane intermingle and the extraterrestrial jins to rails come together on the same terrain with holy men and ordinary people and shed doubt on the exclusivities of religious, ethnic, national and other differences that set and reinforce the parameters of official history the next story also from the walled city was recounted by my friend and colleague Faridah Sher and is to do with the Mazar culture walking down a narrow street during a field visit to the walled city she and the research team had spotted a tree through an archway it was an unexpected sight in the densely built environment they had gone in and found themselves in a large courtyard with an old named tree scores of the years were placed among its roots and next please Faridah asked who the shrine belonged to and this is where the folktale meets up with the non-common sensical subjugated knowledges a not unexpected phenomenon in what is still a predominantly oral culture to my was the reply who is my you see the heveli on the left it belongs to Alif Shah a churail or a witch woman a shape shifter had fallen in love with him taking the guise of a beautiful woman she proposed marriage to him Alif Shah agreed but as in all fairy stories of folktales on one condition that she would not betray give away the secret of her identity she agreed and they lived they got married and lived happily for many years till one stormy night when Alif Shah was entertaining guests a gust of wind blew out the lamp without thinking his wife who was serving food stretched out her hand to the next room for a wig of light there and then Alif Shah ended the relationship and told her to leave the house bound by her word the churail could not refuse but she could not bear to leave Alif Shah either so she took up residence in the neem tree outside and she's been living there ever since Faridah had asked the Rakhontar and what does Alif Shah have to say to that oh this happened a very long time ago the heveli now belongs to the sons of his sons and the dears girls liked them they come to ask the maize favour for marriage for jobs to pass exams to cast a blight on the other woman whatever they bring the lamps and light them turning to a woman peddler in the corner of the courtyard Faridah had asked do you believe in the maize? the woman gave her a look and said I'm not saying for all I know she may be sitting up there listening in his quite fascinating book genealogy Vivekananda Taneja discusses the shrine culture in the medieval ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi with its extra terrestrial component of jinn saints and he sees it as an encounter as a counter discourse to national historiography written in post partition India portraying the birth of two separate and hostile nation states as historical inevitability and I'll quote directly, I'll read directly from him the images of the past seen among the medieval ruins of India in ritual and dream point to a different relationship between the past to present the saintly visions that persist among the ruins through indexing other potentials of the medieval than those remembered by national colonial historiography destabilized the time of the present the inevitability of things as they are in the here and now this destabilization the presence of multiple pasts in the time of the present is important for the remaking of individuals and communities the potential for future alternatives here the past exists as a field of potential what could have been and what could be again which destabilizes the inevitability of the present state of affairs it gives us what to think it also takes one back to the folk tales and the terrain of the wonder tale where the distinguishing boundaries between the extraterrestrial and the fantastic and the real are obliterated anyway it gives one to think certainly my third story belongs to the terrestrial domain but it is also a partition story based on an interview with Kalpana Devi from Sakhar city in Sindh on the abduction and forced conversion of Hindu girls to Islam it draws attention to the move from the pattern set by the active conflict of partition to the politics of conflicts that mark the relationship of the nations carved out in 1947 and continues to impact on the lives of religious minorities on both sides of the border where her position as respected human rights lawyer and a member of a mainstream political party enables her to address and take on the issue of forced conversions and speak critically boldly or reflectively on cases of abduction and cross religion marriage her identity as a member of the Hindu minority in a society increasingly polarized on the basis of religion is reflected in the variability of tone and pitch of voice and in the hesitations that mark her speech however it is her silences that are the most telling in speaking about cases of Hindu girls who have converted to Islam either willingly or unwillingly and whose return to their original faith or even interaction with their families is forbidden by the majority community in the name of Islam she is faced with an impasse although there is no statutory law on apostasy in Pakistan and conversion from Islam to another religion is not a criminal offence the power of post-islamization popular belief backed by local feudals and religious terrorism and extremists makes the absence of such a law immaterial to openly condemn or criticize this practice masquerading his law is for Kalpana to lay herself open to mob violence to remain silent is to condone an injustice and ignore the agony of young girls and families caught in an impossible situation so what does she do? she deflects attention to other areas to youthful wave witness and celluloid romance to she may have a point there except that the issue of cross-religion marriages in Pakistan particularly Sindh is not about going astray and love without the gloss of marriage only standing on the slippery slope of the other community she can only suggest palliative measures such as safe houses where girls have time to reconsider their decision and raising the age of voluntary conversion to 18 which is not to say this was a poor interview on the contrary the silences, ambiguities, evasions and omissions as well as moments of emotional intensity that capture the anguished voices of girls separated from their families of girls refused house roam by their parents and siblings for reasons of honour, caste purity and family shame of politics of religion and caste and of girls bought and sold and sold yet again encapsulate an entire history of sexual and gender based violence that peaked with the capture and rape of women and their subsequent rejection by families on both sides of the India-Pakistan border in 1947 and continues to unfold today along a discursive trajectory and non-discursive practices set more than 70 years ago this more than anything else argues not for the replacement of the specialised erudition of academics and experts and the makers of official histories with the subjugated knowledges that subsist in the margins and the value and role of disqualified knowledges that people have but for acknowledgement and engagement between the two for what should be a major global concern today namely the nature and composition of peace in today's world as testified by Palestine, Yemen, Afghanistan the unheard voices of Syria and indeed Pakistan and India these are paradigmatically a move from active war to the politics of war in such contexts the sanctity of human emotions and relationships and indeed of humanity itself have little value driven by the hegemonic interests of capitalist patriarchy that reduce narratives of displacement and loss to collateral damage even as the fetishised bodies of women continue to function as objects of exchange as markers of identity, as signifiers of honour as property to be sold in traffic brought into marriage's labour battered for peace, debased and abused but also on occasion as agents and rebels defiant and therefore potentially dangerous in meriting surveillance oral narratives informed by the emotional memory of displacement and loss unmasks, mask the politics of language of what lies behind words such as refugees, displacement, migration, illegal immigrants they question the grand narratives of nationhood and homeland draw attention to a terrain where multiple temporalities come together as articulations of the absences and scarcities all that is unverifiable and intangible that informs people's lives we need to question existing hierarchies' knowledge and give house room to the disqualified knowledges that people have and in the process we also need to rewrite our stories that's the end of the first lot do we have time for the second Amna? yes you have about another 10 minutes would that give you enough time? I can't hear you very well but I get the signal that I can continue you can and I'd just like to invite the audience to please put your questions in the Q&A feature that is at the bottom of the Zoom screen while Neela is talking so that we can move fluently into that section as soon as she's speaking okay so my first set of stories belong to 1947 the second for the second I begin with a reference it is in fact my second set of stories are framed by a reference to Aminata Forno's article we must take back our stories and reverse the gaze she refers to psychologist Boris Cyrilnik's work on post-traumatic stress disorders among child survivors of the Nazi occupation of France speaking about the difference in response between children who took part in the resistance and who suffered the lowest levels of depression as opposed to others who did not Cyrilnik highlights the link between resilience and storytelling to show that traumatic events are framed by the narratives given to them not only do they impact the subject sense of selfhood but also determine her, his rate of survival I would go one step further and say the way we frame the narrative also determines the direction the narrative can take the significance of the next story which is about a young woman's quest for justice lies not only in the determination with which she pursued her case but in the terms of her struggle in the steps she took to reverse the dominant case and in the reframing of her story the case study, I've drawn the case study from a paper by Afia Zia titled subverting her sex that was published in the Seymour publication on called disputed legacies and was part of a joint regional south Asian regional venture initiated by Zuban in New Delhi the bare bones of the case again in 2011 in Mirpur Khasen 17-year-old Asya Khoso was subjected to gang rape the local police refused to register her case on the grounds that the medical legal report had documented her as a virgin and there was no bodily evidence of a rape crime this is fairly common in the smaller cities where the victim belongs to a lower class and the perpetrator has the power to influence the police to escort the crime it's not an uncommon story but against all expectations Khoso and her father refused to accept the local Jirga decision to resolve the issue by marrying her to one of the rapists they pursued the case with the human rights lawyers Zia Awan in Karachi a high level medical board repeated Khoso's physical examination and confirmed that the victim was not a virgin Khoso held a press conference publicly announced her lap status 17-year-old Khoso reversed the male gaze to reclaim and rewrite her own story in the process she stripped female virginity of its symbolic value shattered the universality of rape as fate worse than death and transformed both rape and virginity into empty signifiers thereby striking a blow at the very foundations of patriarchal systems by reducing the terms to their literal biological meaning she struck a blow at the very foundations of the patriarchal order that uses female virginity as a tool to control and manipulate female sexuality and as the terrain where male battles for power are waged my second story takes us to Balochistan and is based on Huma Faladi's paper for the same publication on forced marriages Saima, the case story is called Saima's story it's a fictitious name for reasons of respecting her identity to break down the story for a quick retelling the first act of violence that triggered Saima's story was the forced marriage she was educated, lived in Quetta but from a respectable but not very well off family her father received a proposal from her for her from a socially better placed family but the young man was not particularly educated Saima gave in to the pressure and married him the second act of violence which then moves her story a step further was the ritual or custom where to prove that the bride is a virgin on the night after the wedding when the marriage has been consummated a bloodstained sheet is displayed to family members Saima failed the test there was no blood on the sheet the result was a series of violent actions perpetrated by her father-in-law by her family members not unusual, it happens to many girls except that Saima took it for a while and then spoke to her family about it and this triggered off a series of transgressions on her part her father came to her father-in-law and asked that Saima should be sent back to the family and he asked for a divorce Saima's father-in-law refused on the grounds that this was an internal family matter and he had nothing to do, he had no business interfering Saima's father took the case to the local Jirga and raised enough of a fuss for the Jirga to call a meeting at the Jirga where Saima was presented was present, was presented before the Jirga her father-in-law openly abused her and vilified her character Saima again broke the norm and asked permission to speak she said, I mean basically she asked for them to examine she said there was a fault in her husband that he could not have sex she asked them to examine him the Jirga did, they found Saima was right and suddenly the terms of the tale were overturned by claiming voice in agency she had done more than challenge one man's masculinity she had challenged the parameters of patriarchal authority thresholds she had switched places with her husband in the honour-shame dyad and shaken the complacency of the symbolic order the blood stain sheet underwent a double transformation as the absence of the blood stain sheet had been a signifier of Saima's shame by her action it became a visible sign of her honour and a testimony to her husband's shame and the absent manhood which doesn't mean that Saima's issue was resolved happily patriarchal forces gathered together again the Jirga reneged on its first understanding they said no no there was nothing wrong with the man the girl however did go back to her family the marriage ended but Saima's in-laws on the basis of some technical law point refused to give her a divorce I don't know what the current status of the scene is but when last heard of the situation was still hanging fire she could not marry again she could not do anything and she was vilified as someone who had been shameless enough to bring shame to her husband that is as may be but these stories do represent a different step in the normal flow of the stories of patriarchal stories there may be exceptions to the rule but then they do show that the rules can be broken and the direction of history changed I'll stop here I wasn't sure of the time so I mean I could go on but maybe what do you say Amna? Hello I'm here I'm just I think we can stop and take some questions if that's okay with you and then hopefully that will trigger off the conversation with the I think that would be better because otherwise it's just I mean I could come up with another similar story but it could be a surfeit Okay so we have one comment in the comment question in the Q&A box which is asking for reading recommendations about pre and post partition from South Asian non-white perspectives Pardon? You'll have to be a little louder Amna Reading recommendations about pre post partition from South Asian non-white perspectives Can you hear? Let me look at chat If you look at Q&A, look at the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen Okay, reading recommendations Oh, difficult to give suggestions from the top of my head I think Vivekananda Taneja's genealogy is a good read is good to start with Then you could also look at Seymour's Pakistan papers disputed legacies It is not so much, it is colonial heritage and post-colonial narratives really but the linkages are there I'd have to think about it, from the top of my head I mean I just I've drawn a blank What else? Okay, so there's another question which is from Zoya again I also wonder about feminist positions pre-partition as I'm struggling with women in my family suggesting that patriarchy is normal in Pakistani culture and I just can't sit with that So an elaboration of patriarchy Well women are part of patriarchy and they've internalized patriarchy and patriarchy not challenging authority is a safe place to be in and the women in the family are probably opted to be comfortable within the status quo then not I think you'll just have to talk your way through it I mean without I would suggest raising too many hackles but to open up conversations to make them ask questions themselves I mean there are no hard and fast answers to how you deal with family members who are determined to not agree with you or see your point of view I think we've all lived through it and we lived through it still Maybe I can throw in a question as well which is about connecting trying to think through your paper which is fascinating and there's so much in there that you've said that I'd like to chat about but I'll just pick up a couple of points One of the things I wanted to ask you about then is this idea of the oral narrative and uncovering a lost passage So an open end and you referred to Foucault and open-ended conversations and the examples towards the end especially with the sort of I suppose it would be appropriate to call them from the real life stories from the anonymized real life stories Yeah the Mai is a life story I mean I don't know if Mai is sitting up there or not but I've seen the tree and it's very interesting that you should take the lost passage as metaphor actually at the time when we were going around Delhi Darwaza in the old city somebody had, digging is illegal in the old city because there's too much archaeology too many layers of built heritage underground but someone had dug the floor of their house I think maybe to add a basement or something secretly and the floor had caved in and it had revealed a passage and there were murals and it was near Shiramala gate and then the archaeology department came and locked it up and given what the archaeology department does I shudder to think what's happening to it but people are very aware of their own multi-layered history in fact when we'd gone in they were very suspicious of us and then it turned out that there is a belief generally that there is gold hidden in the walls of the old buildings gold left there at the time of partition which residents had not had the time to dig up and take with them and I believe gold has been found but whether there's any still lying around I don't know but they thought we'd come gold digging literally and then by the time we were so there are so many stories that exist side by side half real half popular belief but very entwined with the history of the place and with partition and with the relationships I mean the generation of women we spoke to were too young to have known that time but they spoke of it as if it had happened yesterday and this is another thing about oral narratives the way time collapses Pneja mentions it in his genealogy in Purusha Kotla and I personally experienced it in my village when an old aunt came and said you people shouldn't have done that so I said done what? she just sold that plot of land so I said who sold it? I said your great grandfather did but he was talking as if it had happened yesterday and it was like a telescoping of time in places where the tempo of life is still very slow as opposed to so and again it is how people perceive and experience their world thank you there's a lot there to unpack another question from Eshwaza about romanticizing oral narratives absolutely there's always a danger of romanticizing oral narratives because they are such fun but as I said earlier in my paper in my presentation also that I'm not arguing for a replacement of solid academic discourse with oral narratives but the importance of factoring in people's memories because academia tends to get rather self-referential tends to occupy a discursive space which then moves away from the ground at times but particularly when official discourse is dealing with policymaking with things like peace negotiations then other factors take over and what is forgotten is the people who suffer the displaced, the refugees, the immigrants the loss of home you know it's a horrific situation to be in but when we listen to the brokering of peace in Afghanistan now it is more about what the Taliban want and what about US wants and what about Pakistan what the states want and not about what is happening on the ground to the people of Pakistan who must be devastated after all these years of warfare but as I said they are unreliable and I've said so it is emotional recall it can be inaccurate it is how people remember things and we remember things differently all the time we have another question from Odelia how much of these stories real or not do you think affected the general societal patriarchal culture? well I suppose stories are being told all the time and it reminds me if there is time of Nazish Brohi's story which I had wanted to talk about where she talks about the anatomy of a rumour and this is her experience of a field visit to Swat and she had been working there so she knew the communities she was meeting she had gone there to look at flood relief and there in the conversation one of the women had said that you know and this is the time when the army had defeated pushed out the Taliban and were there as a friendly entity and projecting their image as such and someone had said you know when we've heard that when women go for aid or relief they are asked to strip naked before they are given anything so after her first natural reaction of shock, horror and anger Nazish when she was thinking about it that night she could quite believe it it didn't make sense why would the army at a time when it wanted to build a positive image of itself act in this way so she had dropped her the fieldwork she'd gone for and gone from village to village trying to track the rumour and she'd gone to the men and she'd gone to the women and she'd gone to the army also and it was a violence that had not happened and her dilemma was what do you do in a context where violence is happening to its absence at the moment when someone is insisting on its presence because so many times violence against I mean most of the time violence against women is brushed against the carpet it didn't happen she asked for it and here she is in this double kind of a bind but and then she investigated it further and the men who knew it to be not true had not killed the rumour because they felt it was something that would intimidate the women and keep them in the house and for women they said we've grown up all our lives with the fear of rape if we step outside although most of the rape and violence that happens is in the home and not from strangers but this was also the time when aid money had been coming in and in order to promote women's rights aid agencies were giving money to women because they also felt that women would spend it on the homes and not waste it so women were requiring a new prominence they were getting ID cards they were getting a voice they were stepping out of the house so while women are negotiating space and asking for safe spaces to facilitate their entry into the public world men are using the same rumour to keep them at home so that is the way oral narratives also work I mean it depends on who's using them and what angle he or she picks up so we have a couple more questions that have cropped up there's one by Esh Shahzad again would you say that our eastern sensibilities make us more susceptible more open to oral narratives I missed the adjective what sensitivities eastern eastern I don't know I'm a bit wary of stereotypes of eastern and western I think you'll find all sorts everywhere but I think our I think the fact that we are still an oral culture the fact that we our education system is in a shambles the fact that we are no longer a reading culture and the facts that wrote learning as pedagogical approach impedes our development for critical thought may have something to do with that I don't think it has anything much to do with our being eastern I think I mean the east has produced scientists like Salam and then in ancient history who was it who discovered zero that was an oriental also although from the other religion and so no I'm very wary of stereotypes I think there's something it's a convenient ploy again to fit you into a box and keep you there and we live in interesting times when it comes to critical thinking and reading culture even here in the UK because you find when states wish to pursue a particular political agenda education can play a very interesting role in that kind of narrative and the wrote learning as pedagogical approach is actually quite useful whether you're in the east or the west I'm trying to manipulate I'm all for learning chunks of text by heart which you can then cite I mean it's necessary for literature certainly to be able to quote accurately but I think another thing which is now I'm going off at a tangent talking about education and the critical capacity I think the internet the twitter the tweet the emojis I think they are eroding our capacity globally of complex for complex thought I mean if you can express everything like the again the Lacanian child whose crisis everything or nothing I mean if an emoji with a smile can express all your emotions then it doesn't say much for the complexity of those emotions it's a new idea of diplomacy maybe I'm old fashioned well it'll be interesting to have the young people in the audience speak up about this but we have more questions Ruchika Gurung and apologies if I'm mispronouncing names working says working on a project based on oral narratives of women in regions of conflict fight for a separate state in India in this case one of our concerns has been the question of authenticity so the question is around authenticity whether that might be and the space that counter narratives occupy could you comment on your challenges of documenting oral narratives well the challenges are there I mean to begin with when you go into the field and I think anyone who has done that will have experienced it nobody tells you the truth first time you wouldn't either and I wouldn't either if a stranger walked in and asked me to tell them my most favorite secrets or even ordinary details of my life so then again it depends on context and situation I mean it's a question of gaining trust it's a question of time it's a question of maintaining confidentiality and we found this not so much in the oral narratives that we encountered but in our work on sexual and reproductive health where we were entering a rather sensitive area for Pakistan tangentially because we hadn't gone in for reproductive health we had gone in to give child sexual education and there it was amazing what we uncovered not so much from from both parents and and the children and because I think we touched a nerve and a need with the children it was a very simple question of tell us what makes you happy and tell us what makes you angry and it was a group of young boys and they went on to good and bad touch and the fact that they could not speak to their parents about it because their parents would scold them and hence their greater vulnerability which we saw to abuse and then when we took the issue to the parents their initial response was their fear but again the cultural inhibition of we feel awkward discussing these matters with our children or they are too young to know but once that block had been removed then it was like the flat gates opening and there was a sharing and I think that was the point where I mean obviously one can't swear with one's hand on a holy book that every word we heard was the truth but then every word we read in an official history or academic you know qualified academic discourse is problematic also you don't take it for you know you do question and challenge it but I think up to a point you can get a sense of what may be closest to what's happening but I don't think with any exactitude there are moments of insight and moments of understanding that's a really interesting question and I like the answer a lot and I was also this morning attending the theatre master class with Eileen Conant and one of the things that I missed it no that was the film one yesterday so that was great as well but it was with the theatre director this morning and one of the things with regards to this kind of translation that question came up about cultural translation and also just about how which I think connects with this point about how do you translate people's narratives which even in a kind of national space those narratives are so varied and different and you're even if you speak the same language you're still translating across a variety of positions and translations and she was talking about body language and the visual being very important in terms of of sort of piecing together a story by those people who are the players in that sort of performance piece and I was just wondering in the act of collecting data and in the act of collecting information and oral narratives to what extent do those who do that take that into account take those kind of body languages those conversations that happen within a group or is it just more one-to-ones? Well Farida Sher who trained me and trained our field team also used to insist on field diaries and take keeping note of body language expressions tones and pitch of voice was part of the thing that the moment you got home you noted it down I mean obviously we didn't sit there taking notes in front of the people nor did we record their stories because that would have been a violation of their privacy so that we do but language is a problem class is a problem I mean if somebody who even though Punjabi has grown up in Urdu speaking home in Selahor goes to a village she is not going to understand a lot of things then again there is the two nation theory at home between the very elite schools and the public sector schools and increasingly the children who go to the high fee paying schools are insulated from the rest of the the people I don't know it's a greater class consciousness or what I mean I remember I mean I went to the convent but the convent was open to I mean A it wasn't that high fee paying maybe the fee was high in those days according to that time but we had a lot of cultural and religious mix we had Parsis obviously Christians the odd Hindu and the rest so we didn't know who was she or Sunni at that time that was to come later but that is missing and I think those who are I mean this is what I call the poverty of privilege really don't know what it is like to step out onto a dusty street and if they go out then they miss and they miss out and there isn't that they can't achieve that level of trust either because they don't have the language they don't have the understanding they don't understand the nuances they don't understand the utensils you know the jute manji or cot or some utensil or the hand pump even so they are very distanced for them it's all exotic if you go with that mind or that limitation then it's going to be difficult it's easier if you know the language and if you are used to walking the streets where people walk and that makes a difference so we have another question which is really interesting and something that we haven't talked about at all from fozia kain she says I am a descendant of the indentured diaspora are there any stories recorded outside India Pakistan of memories or existing connections family connections kept over the years I am sure there are I mean I know there is in my village the africa valiant who has now moved back after many many years but apparently that part of the family moved to Kenya a couple of generations ago and one of them has come back so that kind of connection remains but no to my personal knowledge I I don't I mean if I dig around I am sure I will find out but off the cuff I can't think of anyone I am aware of some stories but they are not in my head at the moment there is a couple of novels I don't know if you are looking for novels or archival stories fozia if you have any suggestions perhaps you can put them or recommendations you can also put them in the q&a so we still have time for more questions if people want to put them in the q&a box we would be it would be great to hear them but I think that question about storytelling and about memories and family connections and what stories get told and what stories get heard that is really important and I wanted to ask you a little bit more you started with the story that looked back to the family and look to Lahore and that story of migration what is the motivating factor in going back to that moment for you because it is often I find I don't think for me and I don't know why it should be because my memory of partition is very dim it has always been an unresolved issue it continues to be an unresolved issue my early memories are of my grandfather was in the railways of trains full of refugees I didn't know there were refugees they were just trains full I must have been about three or four at that time of trains full of people clinging to the doors on the roof tops on the station on the platforms and somebody saying refugees and then because we were a political family my father was involved in the freedom movement at home there was constant talk and in fact who said their say your father's gone too to push down the British rule and I used to think British rule was some kind of a wall which he was pushing down but somehow it I don't know my early childhood was in Simla and in bits of Delhi and Allahabad but I mean nothing earth shattering happened there what can happen to a child of three or four but I don't know it has always remained an unresolved issue which I think experienced on my first visit to Delhi it was uncanny it was a sense of belonging and not belonging of wanting to own and not being able to own and it was felt by Anu when she came to Lahore I mean two different women two different histories she was much younger and I think the cross-border friendships of family of my father of my aunts which persisted and then the forging of links ironically in the colonizers country in England between Anu, Kumkum, Ania Loomba Firdosa Zimabdhaka and I think it was my supervisor who said we were sitting there and he's chatting and he said you know it's very strange that in this tiny England I'm two steps away from my house I'm not sure who my neighbour is and in this vast subcontinent people are sitting there writing not only do you know each other's families do you never having met before until this moment you also know scandals about each other's memories I think it is something to do with the south subcontinent it doesn't let go I think the organic roots are very deep I don't think I'm the only one who feels this way yeah that's that's I think those stories are really fascinating to hear and to I suppose psychologically if you think about it from the perspective of somebody and now that we're living in a time of the pandemic I mean a very different kind of time a very different kind of trauma for many people in terms of what they're experiencing in their parts of the world it's important to think through you know the cycles of trauma and how generations and how it affects the younger generation in terms of it might not be the direct occurrence of the event that impacts on you directly but indirectly how does it sort of have a long term I think it is also something to do with where things have fanned out if we had become our two separate nation states and lived happily ever after you know but things are in a mess in both countries economically in terms of peace and India which set out to be secular has turned out to be not so secular after all so it is a kind of a battle that is not ending and you wonder what was the end to it all all the killing all the mayhem all the destruction all the uprooting all the wrenching I mean each story is more horrifying than the next and what have we got out of it I mean common sense would say let's stop fighting we have common economic issues we have common class issues let's sort them out we have a common pandemic let's deal with it I mean so much energy is wasted on just badmouthing each other and on building hatred and I think and I think hatred is divisive we started with India Pakistan hatred there was a splitting of East Pakistan we were using them as a colony but then once India was out of the way then we started fighting amongst ourselves now that we stopped I mean non-Muslim minorities are not enough we are now fighting the shears trying to make them into a minority so I think hatred and antagonism and divisiveness generates more and more of that so in a sense I think you've answered the question that nationalism needs an enemy an enemy within to fight all the time be it the Muslim in India be it the Shia in Pakistan or some other minority so perhaps the broader question to think about also is the national framework I mean in Britain we've had Brexit I mean I don't know who will hate after Brexit probably another minority community somebody so nationalism seems to work within very limited frames in that sense when the nation state is inherently violent it is built on exclusivities it is built on control it is built on compliance okay the nation state says I'll sign a contract with you but that contract is very easily reneged upon the moment authority thresholds are threatened or challenged then you raise security issues you raise you cry treason you do whatever you want to and I think your paper very nicely brought up those issues within the nation state in terms of law and sovereignty and how those work or don't work for people and the different kind of levels of justice systems that people are operating within and then the sexualities and gender which paper are you talking of this paper that you've just been talking about with regards to you were talking about okay have I said all that society in terms of how when the women are when a woman is raped and she does rely on a particular system the legal system and how there are loopholes within the legal system which is not just over there I mean in terms of the legal system with regards to rape is quite problematic globally as well so those sorts of things are also that sense of giving you rights within the nation state how do those rights play out it's quite important to see those frictions and how they impact people which your paper brought out but there are more questions and comments coming up in the chat function so I'm going to turn to that there's a suggestion from Esha Azad for a book veiled I think it is for with regards to the indentured diaspora question veiled voyages by Siobhan Lambert non-fiction and I have remembered the fiction book that I was thinking of which a student of mine pointed me to a year ago Cooley Woman by Gayathra Bahadur I can put that in if you have the names by email because I'm going to forget them in half a second my age is sure of course we'll do that and Fosya has also put a link in there in the Q&A so guys with the links and the suggestions for references please feel free to put them in the chat box for the Q&A I'll go to the next question from Elena Khan how do you feel the collection of historical oral narratives has shaped you as a person or the way you think over the years that's for you Neelam well there's no single factor that shapes one I think stories have shaped me starting with Grims I think and stories oral stories heard as a child and that was all part of the fantastic and then I think elders telling us about their childhood or their youth or their pre-partition lives I think many factors shape one I don't know if what part I mean it's I don't know what role oral narratives may have played in my life except for fanning the love of reading stories and listening to stories and maybe wanting to go into the field and collecting more folk tales before the folk tale dies out and looking forward to reading Harry Potter once this is over I've been looking forward to it all of yesterday okay thank you there's another question from an anonymous attendee how can we ensure that oral narratives collected from people won't get used by the hegemonic elites for nation building or other political purposes for example so that the liberation narratives collected from one ethnic group won't get used for oppressing other ethnic groups it can happen one has to be very careful and especially in these days of the internet and instant communication I think one has to be very careful about the information one passes off on frequently and because there are security factors globally I think the security scene is getting tighter and information can be misused I think one just has to be cautious and if one puts a narrative in motion I mean you respect privacy but you also place them in a context which explains how you are reading it or how you are saying it so that it is difficult for the other person to decontextualize and take it out so it won't stop them from doing it I mean Neelam could you potentially give us an example from your work in Seymour because I'm just extending this question beyond the oral narrative collected from people within the sort of nation but also to what extent do you think global partners or the global north plays a role in what kinds of narratives get collected through funding and resources that might not be available in countries and could we also think about the question with regards to that I think Seymour has a lot of raw data on GBB basically on how there was a time when we were looking at how women perceived violence and what we saw as violence was taken as fate by them and so there is a lot of material which has to be processed and sorted out but I think it has been important for us to respect privacy and to change names where we can because we may come in and write a nice piece of research but somebody out there may get it in the neck for having spoken out of turn the other thing with donors is one has to be careful I mean this is not donors so much as I'm now talking of the 90s journalists from Europe and the states coming to me and saying can you introduce us to the LGBT groups in Pakistan so I said no I mean not without their permission I mean I'm not going to and they were quite offended because they thought I was being uncooperative but it's a question of maintaining privacy and that is important and again to cite a donor this was somebody who had come here and they were interviewing young men and women on sexuality and their sexual experience and then went and made the whole thing public and it was very wrong because one young man approached us he said this woman came through you and we trusted you and there's my name there and what if my mother sees it that kind of thing because culturally I think we are not very we don't go public about our private lives at least about our private sexual lives and here was this I think she was from Canada giving chapter and verse including name and giving details which was I mean we yelled at her but that was all we could do but we've learned to be very ever since and I think people also are less open because of this fear that's interesting to hear because in one of the panels that we had on the first day of the festival my colleague was working on this great project on African screen worlds was talking about the co-production of knowledge and also the funding that they received to try and change the perspective from capacity building from the pressure to do capacity building in the global south and to disseminate funding through that kind of model to try and make the global south partner a more equal partner in terms of how that relationship is negotiated and how the landscape for us as well is like we have to change it as well in terms of how we as researchers are getting the funding from here and to in what way we develop the relationships and work with the groups because I think that question about sharing information across their groups and what gets used from one group to the next is also it's not just a local question it's also a global question because it's definitely the case that there is so much that's involved in that so I think it's really interesting to hear your perspective in terms of how when I mean you've talked about journalists coming in and donors I suppose you haven't mentioned and maybe also this increasing religiosity which is becoming problematic because any comment can be taken as anti-islamic or as irreverent so really what is happening is that critical thought and reflection is being blocked and so is critical discussion because half the time you're looking over your shoulder to see am I being misunderstood because what you mean as a straightforward academic question the other may see as an insult so that is a problem that is increasingly a problem so great the culture of offences is definitely something that we could talk a lot more about but I'll pick up some more questions from the chat box the comment by I think this is again going answering that thread from earlier about narratives and he says there are also pages on facebook dedicated to recounting personal narratives of people from all walks of life from various cities of south east asia modeled on humans of new york so brilliant please feel free to send us any links for asia says good to hear and we have a question from mad mad I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that right you said that most responses are of avoiding telling partition stories because they don't want to relive the trauma Do you have stories which ended up being therapy facing the past? Very interesting question. Yeah, yeah. No, with my cousin whom I cited, when we started talking, she got into the flow of it and there was a lot of, I mean, Sadia and I had gone there for a short interview. We were there for, I think, five hours. And I think somewhere it was getting it out of her system. But you also know that as therapy, once you begin to relive the past, it can be very painful also. And I think while at one level, she said it all, at another level, it was a painful experience because there was too much pain connected with the, even while she was talking. She said when we were leaving Batala, and they had come for a short while, the idea was that once the trouble died down, they would come back, but no point in staying and then they never came back. And she said, there was some sense in me that, some sense of finality because she had gone around the house, touching the walls of each room. Although they came with very little left most of their stuff behind because they thought they'd be coming back. And she said we lost our sense of bearings over here. We had a sense of rootedness in Batala, which they lost here. On the other hand, she then went to college here, which coming from a conservative family, she may not have had a chance of doing while in, if it stayed on. So it's a, but I know that members of that family, there were one or two who after that one trauma of displacement would not leave Lahore, risk their jobs, but would not go to another city if the posting was there. So it did leave its traumas. And I think, I mean, obviously there must have been healing or a papering over. I just feel that it went too deep. It was too much of a wrenching of an organically grown community. I mean, as I said, it's an old city was a mosaic, pieces fitting in. And obviously, if women are still lighting lamps, then something must some, there must be some lack, something must have been left empty, which is still remembered, although this generation would not know partition. And now since the Afghan war and all that, there's a new influx of a new population, which is the localized Afghans who've moved in. So another culture and there's another layer of history being added to the old city. I believe there's a lot of Pashto being spoken there now. So history moves on. Okay. So in a sense, I mean, we, I'm just looking at the time, we have 10 more minutes because it's 435. So I really gave a short piece. I was so scared of going on and on. I couldn't made it longer. Not at all. So this, if you wanted to add anything at this moment in time, this is, would you like to give more time to the case studies, because there was Nazish's case study, which I wanted to look at, and another one to give a kind of a broader view. I just thought there wouldn't be the time and there was no point in trying to squeeze in too much. I think we've had a very interesting wide range in conversation because it's gone from excuse me, from the subjugation of memory at a very personal level to the more broader national, regional, local exchanges and journeys that you've had in your work as an activist and as somebody who is also an archivist in many ways, collecting these stories and collecting the memories. And I think I was thinking of your first slide where you had the reference to Foucault and that sense of subjugated knowledges that underpins your overall lecture with regards to the how sort of knowledges are subjugated through kind of this idea of common sense or how a narrative is constructed and I liked that story of going to the city of you picking up that story in the city, in the inner city, in the space, in the architectural spaces of the city, using oral memory, but also using the physical city spaces to dig out an archive to try and think I think of those knowledges that are buried literally. I mean it was fascinating to hear that, you know, to kind of think what is the tunneling out that we need to do. I think next time you come we'll go to the city. The city more or less takes over and narrates its own story. The streets, the markets, the people, the language, the dialect, and its own particular culture. I'm not saying it's a fantastic culture and I agree with every word that is said. I mean it's conservative people at one level, but it's also a younger generation which is where things are changing. Girls are going out for work, girls are getting jobs, girls are bringing in money. So that dynamic is changing and generating its own own tensions and its own breed of violence also where men are willing to accept the earnings but not willing to accept the mobility and the freedom that it has with it. And there is that kind of sort of oppositional pull which is pretty dangerous also at times. Well I think there's a great connection between your paper and Meenu Gaur's multi-class yesterday on Zindabhag, the film which I would recommend for everyone because that is a lovely film. It's a lovely film. And why I'm recommending it and why I'm saying this is a great companion to Neelam's lecture is because she was talking about it yesterday with Iftikhar Dadi and emphasizing that it's about a crisis of masculinity as well and that need to flee the city, to migrate outside, to go to the Middle East or wherever because there is an intense pressure from the family on the men to make the money and that in itself engenders a kind of familial violence that puts pressure and that pressure gets translated in so many different forms and I mean it was really interesting how she done it through humour but also- Can I get a recording of that? Yes, yes absolutely. It's actually we've live streamed it on Facebook so you can I will send you the link. Okay, do send it. Because I wanted to yesterday I just couldn't link in. Oh sorry to hear that. But I think it's a fantastic, like your paper and hers that conversation links up really nicely with regards to how we think about gender and storytelling within this this kind of creative storytelling, sociological storytelling, anthropological narratives through the oral storytelling framework and the creative stories that you've also spoken about in the earlier lectures from the oral culture that's around that people grow up with and respond to and then the written tales. So lots, you've given us a lot of food for thought. Do you have any, I don't think we have any more Q&A questions. Do you have some final thoughts to give us before we say goodbye? Talking about the old city and Zindabad is very much in the old city also or around it. So it does go into Punjab club also. But one of the things we did in the old city was watching television with women. Because they at that time were watching these two Star Plus soaps. I don't know if you've heard of them. I watched them for two years. It created a tremendous bonding amount of bonding between me and my mother. But since then I've not been able to watch television actually sort of. But there's a lot of violence in them of mothers in laws striking out at daughters in law and daughters in law putting poison in mother in law's soups. And we said how do you, I think the women found it cathartic. They enjoyed the fashions. They knew those fashions were not for them. A, because of the expense. B, because of the unsuitability. I mean in the old city you don't go around in a black, blackless blouse or a sleeveless, you know, though they're all wearing jeans one sense like their homes are going off to work. But it was the gratuitous violence which they enjoyed. And I think that was cathartic. Because most of them do have mothers in law who were nasty. And most of them have do have daughters in law with whom they don't get on. So anyone giving a resounding slap to one or the other was somewhere felt good. And what they also enjoyed was the occasional slap given by the mother to the son. And I think that also appeased a lot of heartburn in many breasts. But it was a kind of a voyeuristic at one remove kind of engagement. But they watched them all. I mean from and there were patterns from six in the evening to 10 at night. Then the men came home because there's a big retail market over there in Shahalini. Men come home and the TV is handed over to them. And the women go around getting food ready and things. And then the men watch wrestling and news and things that the women are not interested in. So it was very interesting the patterns. That's great. I mean I'm thinking of my own household and the struggle over the remote control who controls it in the evening. But that's just sort of trivializing it a little bit. What you're saying which is very important. There are a couple of comments that have come in and there's a question which unfortunately we won't have time to get into from AG which is it's important to get such narratives into civic space as they contribute to a sense of nationalism cultural values and historical layers which build a society. How can we use these cases and narratives to positively impact civic space. So question about civic society. How do we build a sense of sense of that through storytelling. If I've understood correctly. I think storytelling which engages people with the lives of others and takes them beyond their own on on spaces. I mean when you empathetically engage with another even if it is through a story. You have stepped out of yourself a bit and maybe you're no longer the center of your own. Your self-referentiality is diffused. I think to empathize with another and stories do help that literature does it. I mean that's a fantastic thing about literature. Under the skin of a lady Macbeth and and understand her and also of a Macbeth or an Ophelia or here or a Ranjha or a Sony or a Mahiba or whatever or the ordinary girl in the street. The little girl I mean like the girl in the again in the old city who was talking about these are poor people. Most of it's a low income area. They were talking about their social life and a lot of them said no we don't go out too much to weddings and things. So somebody said why do you father doesn't let you. And they said well that's what we say but we don't have the clothes and rather than admitting that we don't have the clothes as you know we can't go on wearing the same dress to five different occasions. We say father won't let us. Father doesn't stop us. It's other things. So and suddenly you get an insight into a life of scarcity of economic lack and of youths and aspiration and wanting to look pretty and wanting to party and not being able to and and and I think it some of the stories do humanize one or should at least. I don't know what about civic space but I'm sorry I'm cutting in because I can sort of feel the pressure from my tech team coming in now. Thank you Sunil for patiently waiting for us to wrap up a big thanks to Sunil and to other members of the team. I'm not sure who is in the background with him. So thank you for supporting this session and thank you to everyone attending. Thank you to Neelam and I will quote Kevin who has expressed his appreciation of the panel saying what an amazing insight. So Neelam more power to you and so also from Yasir Peracha who expresses his enthusiasm for the talk. I think we definitely have to talk again and the next time it has to be about weddings and soaps and all sorts of things that are sort of such big major parts of people's lives. That should be fun. Okay thank you. Thank you Neelam it's been an absolute. Thank you so much. I enjoyed the chat. But was I audible? I've been so nervous about it ever since I heard the first recording and I can't hear myself.