Riddhi Dastidar

Riddhi Dastidar is an award-winning poet, writer and journalist in Delhi. Their work focuses on disability, gender, culture and environment. They won the 2020 TFA Award for Creative Writing for poetry. Currently they are reporting a series on COVID-19 and chronic mental illness for IndiaSpend's India Mental Health Fellowship 2020. They also write and produce Khabar Lahariya's subscriber series 'Sound, Fury & 4G'. 

Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Catapult, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Himal Southasian, Rattle Magazine, Glass Journal, IndiaSpend, The Wire, Scroll, Firstpost, Skin Stories, The Swaddle, Helter Skelter, Khabar Lahariya and more

If you are an editor looking to commission work or for collaborations, contact dastidar.riddhi@gmail.com. 

Khabar Lahariya (खबर लहरिया) •

Women Farmers in U.P Dream of Land

In Mahoba’s Kabrai, on 8 July, Shobha found herself widowed as her husband took his life due to tension about shortage of food, and the marriage of his young daughters. During the lockdown there was no employment and getting do waqt ki roti (two meals a day) had become a challenge. Despite their near 5 bighas of land, the fields were barren due to drought every year, Shobha said. The family had been running on daily wage labour.
Bright Wall/Dark Room •

Watching Bad TV Near the End of the World | BW/DR

In the season finale of Love Is Blind, a jerky camera follows a woman as she runs crying through bland gray streets after her fiance says “I do not” at the altar. (The camera has left him behind, sniffling and red-faced.) As the viewer/voyeur of reality television, intruding on private moments is the point. But the spectacle of humiliation here is heightened by the sense that we can hear the camera-person’s footsteps literally thumping after her to show it to us. Netflix produces reality TV wit
Helter Skelter Magazine •

Words, Connections, Fences

What does it mean to be brown—a many-hued, many-headed, living, breathing idea? What is this word useful for? As an identity, it’s often used interchangeably with ‘South Asian’—a polysemic term which gained currency as a category of division after the establishment of area studies departments in the U.S. In a 2014 issue of SAMAJ, Aminah Mohammad-Arif describes the connotations peculiar to the term ‘South Asia’: a region where multiple religions interact, thus challenging the idea of (homogenous
Himal Southasian •

Tesu

When we exit the shuttle that evening, we are late. The crowd has already gathered for Evening Address in the hall, and we join them at once. Tardy tributary; we align, wade into our lines. Two minutes in, I feel my reserves waning. I beg off (Warden, migraine). I look sickly enough to seem legitimate. Already, some have begun to murmur about a possible vacancy on the floor. They think I can’t hear. It’s quite wonderful how often they don’t see me – like a rat, I’ve learned the best place is by
POV Mumbai: Skin Stories •

Even under India’s new mental healthcare act, institutionalisation is still a problem

Conversations with several people admitted to mental health establishments around when the MHCA came into force (29 May 2018), showed a strange blurring between independent and supported admissions. Bedatri Mukherjee*, a Delhi-based academic, lives with atypical schizophrenia. In April 2018 while working in the US, she experienced her first psychotic episode. Telling no one and carrying just her phone and passport, she boarded a flight to Bangalore. Once there, she lived ‘between hotels and the
The Life of Science •

Against a Science of Sacrifice by Riddhi Dastidar

This reportage suggests that science academia in India is structured to put research scholars at risk of deteriorating mental health. TRIGGER WARNING: This report discusses student suicides and mental health issues such as depression. In case you need support/relief, here’s a list of resources you can go through. When mice are killed for an experiment, lab-notes officially record them as having been ‘sacrificed’. There’s a certain degree of detachment required to pursue the sciences. Interview
The Wire •

Cancel Culture vs Rape Culture, and the Case for Repairing Harm

After the Harvey Weinstein investigation broke in 2017, I avoided the #MeToo stories for a while. One morning before work, I finally read Asia Argento’s account of her ‘relationship’ with and rape by Weinstein. I read it several times, suddenly nauseous. Then I texted my best friends on our group-chat. Earlier that year, I had been trying to hold on to a dissolving relationship I hadn’t yet fully understood as abusive. My ex and I lived together. One night I woke up to my pyjamas being pulled o
Rattle: Poetry •

"But Hinduism Is Not Hindutva" by Riddhi Dastidar

i don’t mean the bodies swinging at ease, toes skimming the trajectory of those other ghosts, a lineage that is kindred but not mine to claim. i don’t mean some intangible ailment unpredictable and tragic. i mean the strange fruit fed and watered by us groomed to recognise unspoken markers. this is not about me and my heartsickness. this is not about the way the trains keep running, and how protests still don’t make good copy. i mean the baby in the metro with eyes so big they ate the
The Wire •

Interview: Annie Zaidi on the Nine Dots Prize and Chasing 'The Call of Blood'

On Wednesday, Annie Zaidi was announced the winner of the 2019 Nine Dots Prize, with a financial award and a book-deal to develop her essay ‘Bread, Cement Cactus’. In a brief interview, Zaidi told The Wire about her about the origins of her essay, the kind of long-form she enjoys and the craft of writing. Excerpts from her winning entry, and our conversation. “In Muhammadabad, a mofussil village struggling to morph into a town, we trace fourteen generations. The uncle who told me this is now g
Parentheses Journal •

Raktakarabi: Ghazal for my Grandparents surrounded by Flowers

I was taught to call him Dadabhai. First lesson, he said: Never pluck flowers. Tear something from what feeds it — a violence. So I gather only fallen flowers. I don’t remember it; I feel the wordless weeping: grubby fingers failing to stick it back on to the green stalk: I’m not a killer. No language in my mouth. In hand dyed pollen, flower. I remember: afterlunch the big bed — crinkly newspaper sheets, thick magazine, paper hands, thick gla