BIOGRAPHIES

Credits

Conceived by Khoj International Artists’ Association and Zuleikha Chaudhari and developed with lawyer Harish Mehla.

Direction and dramaturgy: Zuleikha Chaudhari

Legal research and first and second draft petition: Stella James and Nayana Udayashankar.

First and second draft petition review: Shibani Ghosh

Final petition: Harish Mehla

Petition vetting: Emilie Gaillard, France (Director, Normandy Chair for Peace) and Tarini Mehta, India (Invited professor, Normandy Chair for Peace)

Lawyers

Harish Mehla is an advocate at the Punjab & Haryana High Court, Chandigarh practicing since 2009. His practice is focused on matters arising on Constitutional Law, Agricultural Laws (Fertilizer Control Order, Insecticides & Pesticide Laws, Seed & Plant Variety Laws), Intellectual Property Laws, Commercial Laws and Criminal Laws. He co-founded the Collective of Lawyers of Punjab and Haryana High Court, a forum that organises seminars and workshops on Judicial Accountability with Senior Advocates and members of Judiciary. In 2016 he worked as special invitee with the High Court Bar Association for restoration of the vintage section of the Bar library. He is a regular panel speaker for various news channels on issues pertaining to Human Rights violations and India and International Disputes

Special thanks: Justice Jayshree Thakur, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry, Prof. Pramod Kumar, Chandigarh Tourism, Elsewhere Foundation, Navkiran Natt, Nandan Nawn, Justice Yatindra Singh (Retd.), Harinder Bindu.

Mannat Anand , Partner at Anand & Sood Law firm, is an Advocate at the Punjab & Haryana High Court, Chandigarh. She completed her LLB at ILS Law College, Pune University in 2015 and is a gold medalist. She handles cases in the field of Criminal, Civil, Arbitration, Matrimonial , Consumer, service matters etc . She has been appointed as Amicus Curiae on several occasions and is empanelled with High Court Legal Service Authority. She is also Vice president of Innerwheel club new gen panchkula (international women’s organisation) and believes in women empowerment.

Manmohan Lal Sarin is a Senior Advocate practising at the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Chandigarh. He joined the Bar in 1971 and was designated Senior Advocate in 1987. He has been the Advocate General for the State of Punjab twice, and once for the State of Haryana. He is also the Founder Secretary of the Sarin Memorial Legal Aid Foundation, Chandigarh, which was set up in 1995 for spreading legal literacy and providing legal aid for protection of the environment and for helping disabled children. He has been the President of Alliance Francaise Le Corbusier de Chandigarh since 1990.

He was knighted by the French Government with the award of ‘Chevalier des Palmes Academiques’ in 1999 and, in 2016, by the second highest French Award “Chevalier L’Ordre National du Merite''.

Artists And Artworks

Eaten Cotton

With the Gram Art Project, Shweta has created a collective space for the people in Paradsinga, Madhya Pradesh, to express their concerns as a part of an average Indian village through forms and media which are socially and ecologically non-exploitative. Their work centers around issues of farmer suicides, land grabbing by developers, ecologically and livelihood damaging technologies like Genetically Modified (GM) crops that are being forced into the farming systems without the involvement of farmers in the decision-making process. Over the past years their interventions have been focused on rediscovering traditional methods of farming by working with the women farm labourers to build a sustainable ecosystem through collaboration.

Shweta Bhattad is a visual artist and performer. She is a trained sculptor, having completed her BFA in Nagpur, and MVA in MS University of Baroda. She has worked across mediums in the past, with a strong focus on issues of women’s safety, education and the female body. She is also a founder member of the Gram Art Project Collective, which is a group of farmers, artists, women, makers. These are people of different ideas and identities but connected together by living and working in and around a village they all are concerned about. This village is Paradsinga, situated in Sausar Tehsil of Chhindwara district of Madhya Pradesh.

Weeping Farm

“Statistically, every forty minutes a farmer commits suicide in India.”

Nearly 75% of the full-time workers on Indian farms are women (OXFAM). Women are both directly and indirectly impacted by these alarming suicides. Weeping Farm looks at female farmers’ distress and agrarian crisis as a running commentary of the current time. Beating the clock, as a player, you will confront distressing situations that narrate the farmers’ ongoing battle of survival against intangible and tangible issues. As one of the women belonging to the Indian agrarian community, you live with overwhelming odds! Which strategy may help you proceed? Should you be part of the system or stand against it? Or should you leave it to fate to hang in limbo? Whichever card you may play, how will you ensure your survival?

Thukral and Tagra are a Delhi-based artist duo comprising Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra. Driven by the artistic methodologies of painting, gaming, archiving, and publishing, their multifaceted studio practice reflects the scope of engagement in the cultural and political landscape of India and the world.

While their early work dealt with the intricacies of consumer culture globally, their recent interest in ecology and climate change is a revisiting of their family histories of migration and farming in the state of Punjab. Their efforts to address ongoing social issues through education and art also include Pollinator, a learning lab, which fosters cross-pollinations across creative fields, and the new publishing and distribution platform andArchive that reconfigures the potential of the print and the archive.

Landless

Landless is a debut documentary film by Randeep Maddoke on the issues faced by Indian Dalit farm labourers in their daily life. The film looks at the issues of land in the state of Punjab and follows the story of the victims of caste-based discrimination, social boycott, and communal attacks by Jatts (upper caste).

Randeep Maddoke is a Punjab based concept photographer and documentary filmmaker, born and raised in the village Maddoke, Moga (Punjab). He is known for his focus on the pains of the marginalised sections of society which are constantly subject to systematic social exclusion. He completed his studies from Government College of Arts, Chandigarh with specialisation in Graphics (Printmaking). He documented the class struggle of Dalits in Punjab, Haryana, and Tamil Nadu to study the practice and effects of caste. In 2008 he went to Nepal to document the making of the democratic Republic out of the monarchical Nepal. There too he located the threads of casteism and the resistance thereof.