Episode 1
What is the connection between War, Virus and Collective Mental Health?
Punjabi translations available here.
This podcast contains themes that some listeners may find upsetting - listener discretion is advised. Hello listeners, and welcome to 'Spoken Truth to Power' podcast produced by Culture Studio and funded by Arts Council England and National Lottery funding. I'm your host, Daljeet, and in this podcast we'll be exploring timely issues through a south Asian lens.
In this first season, we're exploring the theme of collective mental health and intergenerational trauma in south Asian communities. Spoken word artists from across borders, Shagufta Iqbal from the UK and Megha Rao from India, will be exploring the heart of the issue through their original poems; 'Flooding' by Shagufta and 'Homegrown Blade' by Megha.
In an increasingly divided world, I felt it was important to bring artists together from across borders to discuss the same theme. I sent them both identical briefs and neither of them knew each other prior to the project, and I was delighted that both of them had written about their grandmothers. In Megha's words, 'women will always write about women' and their artistic output proved what the late British MP Jo Cox said - 'we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than the things that divide us'. I'll also be sharing a few spoken word pieces with you that I have written, which will set up the themes that we discuss throughout this podcast.
The artists will help you engage your hearts and selves with the issue and will engage your minds through deeper conversation and reflection with experts from the fields of history and psychology. I had the pleasure of speaking with Professor of History at Royal Holloway, Sarah Ansari, about the partition of India in 1947 and how its impact on collective mental health was not addressed in Europe or south Asia in the same way that the impact of the Holocaust was examined in Europe. I also spoke to Dr. Rima Lamba, founder of Blue River Psychology, and we discussed the current mental health crisis that is unfolding due to the pandemic, as well as the impact of intergenerational trauma on south Asian communities. The final episode of this podcast will be a special one with a special voice message from British MP representing Slough, Tan Dhesi, as well as some voice notes from people in India. Roshni Beeharry - poet, creative writing wellbeing facilitator and former NHS rehab med consultant - will also be voicing a piece about therapeutic writing in the final episode and talk about how it can help people cope with the various anxieties that the pandemic has triggered.
Please try to listen to the episodes in sequence because the aim is to take you on a journey where we use art, history, psychology, and people's voices, to explore a singular theme in a multi-dimensional way. I hope you'll enjoy it.
The first piece which we'll be presenting in this podcast is a monologue written by me, and it's called 'War, Coronavirus and Collective Mind'. Despite the suffering, grief, disruptions and loss of livelihoods, the pandemic also created a space for many people to step back and reflect about their place in the world around them.
In the earlier stages of the pandemic, like many other people, I fell down the rabbit hole of doomscrolling and consuming excessive amounts of news. I noticed a few headlines that I found interesting and my monologue piece, 'War, Coronavirus and Collective Mind' is written through my cultural lens as a British born woman from a north Indian Punjabi heritage background.
War, Coronavirus and Collective Mind
The pandemic hits
My newsfeed is full of articles linking together themes of War, virus, and community
I read how the war shaped the collective consciousness of our nation
just like the pandemic is doing now
I hear about the sepia tinted nostalgic tales
about wartime community spirit
I notice though that when powerful people talk about WW2 and the pandemic
they only focus on the fairy tales of British resolve
Keep calm and carry on
we got through it then
and we can get through it now
If only life was that simple
And troubled minds during troubled times could be soothed by motivational words alone
as I read, I question, am “I” part of this “we”?
Is my story being told through this ongoing metaphor of war?
I mean, I think it’s interesting to use the framework of war to analyse our current situation
after all, that’s what we do in troubled times
we open our history books, dig out our dusty constitutions
and analyse our collective history and our individual place in it
But when I read these news articles, somehow it feels like there is a piece missing
Whilst reading I reflect on how rarely we hear about the physical and psychological damage World War 2 caused the British psyche
I read about civilians panicking after heavy raiding
developing serious psychosomatic conditions
soiling themselves
wetting themselves
crying persistently
shaking uncontrollably
suffering from headaches and chronic dizziness
Whitewashing
the deliberate attempt to conceal unpleasant facts about something
like the concealment of pain and trauma
and the broken and untreated minds that may have been buried beneath that British resolve
The mantra of the stiff upper lip was not to focus on the pain of mental trauma
But to instead focus on the glory of the victory
surely, I thought this buried trauma
would be bad for the spiritual state of a nation
but to be fair there was some concern about the collective trauma of the British people
There was concern that the bombardment of the blitz
might affect workers to develop a “shelter mentality, which would make them anxious
and make them work less hard
and this would have an adverse effect on the economy
Mental health was calculated in a profit and loss sheet
So, World War 2 ended in 1945
British victory helped by the contribution of 2.5 million Indian soldiers
as well as key forgotten battles like the battle of Kohima in Nagaland, India
where 1500 British Indian soldiers from the Punjab regiment fought tirelessly and halted Japanese invasion of British controlled India
OUR collective psyche
(and by OUR I mean – people with roots in the Indian subcontinent)
was to be shaped significantly in 1947
when India regained its freedom from the British
and was partitioned into two countries
India and Pakistan
OUR collective mind had been injured on multiple levels
from hundreds of years of atrocities inflicted by empire and colonisation
finally culminating in the violence of partition and the
displacement and mass migration of 15 million people
my great grandparents being one of the refugees
my grandmother only told me one thing about that time
“don’t talk to me about 1947” she said shaking her head
“there were rivers of blood” referring to the communal violence that followed
my grandparents survived, but over a million people lost their lives
No one spoke about the unspeakable
how women and young girls were captured and raped in the name of honour
how they jumped in wells to save their izzat
fathers murdered their daughters to save their izzat
the saving and the violation of the women amounted to the same thing
murder
the mantra of the fathers of the independent nations
was to focus on the glory of the victory
and keep the morale high so that they could rebuild the nation
cloaks of shame, pain and guilt were stitched for the victims
and held securely in place with the pins of silence
surely, I thought this buried trauma would be bad for the spiritual state of a nation
As I read, I realised how wartime spirit is deeply ingrained in the collective British imagination
we are told to reflect about the resolve that the British people had during wartime and use that as inspiration to get through this devastating pandemic
but there is collective amnesia about the British history of the Partition of India
our stories are missing
and so, I’m not quite sure where to draw my collective strength from
so now, that missing piece makes sense
maybe some things are deliberately forgotten
erased
histories of the global majority squeezed into those tiny boxes we tick on official forms
I hope you enjoyed my monologue piece. The next piece is my poem 'Soil' which explores the theme of the partition of India. Some of you may not know much about this period of history and I'll begin with a short introduction. 73 years ago, the partition of British India into India and Pakistan at the time of independence caused the largest forced migration in human history.
The violence of this era, however, impacted on men and women differently due to the pervasiveness of ideas about izzat, honour, gender based violence and perspectives that viewed women as an extension of the physical territory that was being so fiercely contested. In 2017 to commemorate the 70th year of the partition, I collaborated on an oral history project with Aik Saath to interview some women around the Slough area who had lived through the partition. Working on this project took a toll on my own mental health, and I felt like I was absorbing the pain of these women as they recounted traumatic memories. The partition of India affected my family too, but not a single story about its impact was passed down to me.
I feel we have a duty to unearth these stories and examine, for example, how silence and shame that women experienced during partition has shaped the mental health of subsequent generations of south Asian women. Partition affected the collective mental health of millions of people and I try to explore the impact on women through my spoken word piece.
Soil
When the womb of mother earth was hacked into two
the soil haemorrhaged menstrual blood and love was aborted
Glass bangles were smashed with an axe
on every shimmering speck of glass dust lurk the reflections of tongue less ghosts
On the soil fell the rain of screams
tears of violation flooded every grain of sand, silt and clay
each teardrop frozen in time
The soil became dead dirt burdened by the weight of 15 million displaced feet
vandalized roots broke their bonds with the land of punj rivers
Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Sutlej, Beas
Five rivers perfused with a million people’s blood
There was a time when the trees were nourished by the laughter of the “teeyan”
The sisters and daughters of Punjab tied swings out of ropes high up on the trees
Adorned with twinkling nose studs carved out of falling stars, they sang
“uchay tahve peeng pade jithay aap hulara aavey”
Swinging high they grabbed whole moons in the monsoon
bringing strands of silver back to plait into their parande
they stamped melodies on the earth with the chime of their silver anklets
Those carefree days of friendship, laughter, play and mischief
the feeling of freedom which can only be found in sisterhood
are buried with those pots of unclaimed hidden gold
Our untold stories are our treasures now
Our roots are powerful
there is dormant power waiting to burst through the earth and spread afar
reclaiming the space they deserve to heal and connect
and protect the new seeds
every seed – an embryonic tree
If you have been affected by the themes in this podcast, then please check out the episode description for information, resources, and support links.
Please like, share and subscribe to listen to our bonus episode featuring poet Adrian Earle, also known as Think/Write/Fly. Adrian will be sharing some tips about how to write poetry. Support Spoken Truth to Power by visiting the website spokentruthpowerpodcast.com and click 'support us'.
Spoken Truth to Power is created by me at Culture Studio. Music, sound design and post-production is by Elliot Bulley. Artwork is by Amrit Singh, podcast consultancy by Chhavi Sachdev and marketing support by Katie Bevan. Promotional support was provided by Bobby Friction and Kommune.
You can check out updates on spokentruthpowerpodcast.com and join the conversation on #SpokenTruthPod. If you like what you hear, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe on your favourite podcast app. This season was funded by Arts Council England.