Yuri Gripas/Reuters

Reps. Bradley Byrne (R) of Alabama and Jackie Speier (D) of California shake hands before a House Administration hearing on Preventing Sexual Harassment in the Congressional Workplace on Capitol Hill in Washington, Nov. 14.

First it was the military. Then college campuses. Then the media and Hollywood. Now, it’s the US Capitol – where a wave of complaints about sexual abuse and harassment have flooded the stately halls and engulfed a sitting senator, Democrat Al Franken of Minnesota.

Women lawmakers and aides say inappropriate sexual behavior has long been “pervasive” on the Hill, largely kept in the shadows amid an insular, old-boys-club culture that persists to this day. But there’s a growing sense that that may be about to change.

“I was of a generation of survivors that never said a word,” Rep. Ann McLane Kuster (D) of New Hampshire told reporters after she and a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Thursday introduced legislation to make it easier to file sexual harassment complaints in Congress.

By not talking about their own experiences, Congresswoman Kuster said, she felt that she and others were “complicit” in today’s environment of “rampant sexual assault and harassment.”

Now, they are speaking up.

Since Rep. Jackie Speier (D) of California went public last month about being forcibly kissed by a chief of staff when she was a congressional aide in the 1970s, dozens of staffers – former and current – have contacted her office with similar stories.

Indeed, it was Congresswoman Speier’s account, as well as the scandal over Hollywood titan Harvey Weinstein, that compelled Los Angeles radio host Leeann Tweeden this week to publicly accuse Senator Franken of forcibly kissing her on a USO tour in 2006 and groping her on the plane home while she was asleep. 

Ms. Tweeden’s account landed like a grenade in the Senate on Thursday, with Franken apologizing in two separate statements, and asking for an ethics investigation, which both the majority and minority leaders in the Senate have also called for.

Yet a week like this also raises all kinds of questions about how, exactly, Congress will proceed with this issue. Not all allegations are the same, and there are complicated matters of gradations of wrongdoing and gradations of punishment, as well as the relevance of past behavior before people entered Congress.

In Franken’s case, for example, the senator was not yet an officeholder when the events took place. He has admitted guilt and apologized, and Tweeden has accepted his apology. Eight former female staffers in Franken’s office issued a statement in his defense, saying he had treated them “with the utmost respect,” and adding: “He valued our work and our opinions and was a champion for women both in the legislation he supported and in promoting women to leadership roles in our offices.”

An Ethics Committee investigation may still be needed to determine whether other such incidents involving Franken have occurred – but in some ways, calls for an investigation have also allowed lawmakers to put off confronting even weightier issues, such as whether or not Franken ought to step down.  

More broadly, it still remains to be seen whether – if the problem is as pervasive as appearances suggest – Congress is about to face a floodtide of official complaints, or if, in the end, most cases of harassment will remain unaddressed.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky, joined at rear by Sen. John Thune (R) of South Dakota, tells reporters that he has spoken to President Trump and other leaders about the Alabama Senate race and the allegations of sexual misconduct against GOP candidate Roy Moore, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Nov. 14.

A 'tipping point'

In terms of public attention, the issue has clearly reached a “tipping point,” as Speier put it. In testimony on the Hill this week, Rep. Barbara Comstock (R) of Virginia told of a female aide who delivered documents to her boss’s residence and was greeted by the lawmaker wearing only a towel. He then exposed himself. The lawmaker is still in office, and the aide has quit.

CNN reported conversations with more than 50 lawmakers, staffers, and other political types – past and present – nearly all of whom personally experienced sexual harassment on the Hill or know someone who has. They spoke of an unofficial “creep list” of lawmakers to avoid and cautioned against getting trapped alone in elevators with certain members.

And of course, Republican lawmakers this week called for Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore to drop out of a Dec. 12 special election after several women told of sexual advances by Mr. Moore decades ago, when they were teenagers. Moore rejects the claims and is still in the race – despite facing a likely Senate ethics investigation and possible expulsion should he be elected.

So far, the House and Senate have acted unusually quickly, with the Senate last week passing a resolution for mandatory sexual harassment training and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin this week announcing a similar policy.

That’s a good first step, says Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D) of New York, who is advocating for change, but she says more needs to be done to make it easier for victims to bring claims and not fear the consequences.

“Institutions protect the powerful, and this institution is no different,” she says. 

Washington is in many ways a small town, and experience on the Hill is a critically important item on a resume – whether a person wants to work at a nonprofit, a lobbying firm, or another government job. A lot depends on Capitol connections, and many young people worry their career could be severely impacted if they spoke up about harassment. At best, their name would be forever Google-linked, at worst, they could be blacklisted.

An onerous process

At the same time, the current process for filing a sexual harassment complaint in Congress is onerous, say lawmakers such as Senator Gillibrand. Even before filing a formal complaint, a congressional aide has to go through a three-month process of mandatory counseling and mediation, including signing a nondisclosure agreement – after which they’re forbidden to discuss the case with anyone. 

Backers of the “ME TOO Congress Act” hope to change that process. The bipartisan legislation, sponsored by Speier and Kuster, along with others, makes the mandatory counseling and mediation optional, sets up a counsel for the victim, relaxes the nondisclosure agreement, and in cases where settlements are reached, requires the name of the employing office and the amount of the award to be published by the congressional Office of Compliance, which handles complaints.

In the last two decades, the office has paid out $15 million in settlements involving 260 cases, but it does not name the employing office nor distinguish whether the cases are sexual harassment or discrimination, which are also included in the figures. The backers of the legislation hope it will increase transparency and accountability – indeed, under the bill, if a member of Congress settles a claim as a harasser, the member would be required to reimburse the Treasury for the amount.

Last year, Kuster spoke openly about being crudely assaulted and humiliated in college. Then, as a 23-year-old legislative aide in Washington, a distinguished guest of her boss slipped his hand under her skirt at a business lunch. But she said nothing about these incidents, thinking it was something that her generation of women just had to endure. She also assumed that things would change over time.

“I don’t think Jackie and I, when we worked on the Hill [as aides], ever thought that [in] 40 years...  people would still be going through this.”

When Michelle Bachelet won Chile’s presidential election in 2006, she not only became the first woman to hold her country’s highest office; she ushered in a wave of female presidential victories that shattered glass ceilings across Latin America.

At one point, in 2014, more than 40 percent of the region’s citizens lived under female rule.

But as Chileans head to the polls Sunday to elect their next leader, and President Bachelet prepares to step down, an era is ending: For the first time in over a decade there will be no women presidents, or Presidentas, in the region.

It’s an important shift. In a part of the world known for its rampant machismo, the recent Presidenta period marked a hopeful turning point for Latin America. There have been signs of progress in gender equality in many nations, but some women are disappointed that Bachelet and her fellow women leaders did not do more.

And they are wondering whether the gains since 2006 will outlast the women who fought for them from their presidential offices, as the continent returns to all-male leadership. 

“At one point Latin America had four women presidents at the same time,” in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Costa Rica, says Farida Jalalzai, who teaches politics at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. “It’s spectacular,” she adds, “but it doesn’t mean something will be built on that.”

Other observers are more optimistic.

“The symbolic weight of having a woman president can’t be underestimated,” argues Gwynn Thomas, who studies gender and politics in Latin America at The State University of New York at Buffalo. The Presidentas “really changed the perception of women’s leadership. It may be the end of an era, [but] it’s not The End.”

Progress, of a sort

Latin America had known female presidents before Bachelet, but half of them had taken over from their dead husbands and another, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro was the widow of a martyred Nicaraguan journalist.

Bachelet and other female leaders, however, benefited from the greater role in politics that women carved for themselves in the pro-democracy movements that emerged from dictatorships that collapsed in the 1980s and 1990s.

They also profited from voters’ hopes they would be less corrupt than their male counterparts, and from the blessings they received from their popular male predecessors, such as Luiz Inácio da Silva in Brazil, or Nobel peace prize winner Óscar Arias in Costa Rica.

But once they took office, distracted by other issues, the new leaders did not always make gender equality and women’s rights a priority.

Even Bachelet, who ran on a strongly feminist platform and who did more than any of her sister Presidentas to change policies affecting women, gets only a passing grade from Chilean feminists.

Esteban Felix/AP

Supporters of presidential candidate Alejandro Guillier from the Nueva Mayoria coalition wave flags featuring current Chilean President Michelle Bachelet during Guillier's closing campaign rally in Santiago, Chile, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2017. Chile will hold presidential and congressional elections on Sunday.

"The presence of a woman in the highest office in the country extended the symbolic limits in a very conservative society,” acknowledges Perla Wilson, former director of the feminist radio station Radio Tierra.

But, Ms. Wilson says, progress in Chile over the course of Bachelet’s two presidential terms, from 2006 to 2010, and again starting in 2014, was mixed.

Bachelet worked hard to loosen a strict abortion law, provide pension bonuses for women who leave the workforce temporarily to care for their families, legalize the “morning after pill,” and create a Ministry for Women and Gender Equality. She also won approval for gender quotas in parliament, which will be implemented in Chile for the first time during this weekend’s election.

But on other important issues, such as violence against women, she failed to pass any significant legislation, and the rates of such violence have not dropped as a result of her presidency.

“I think she could have done more,” says Maria Elena Soto, a member of the Resueltas, or Determined, feminist collective in Santiago. “Of course there have been improvements made in terms of gender equality, but she really didn’t commit herself.”

In Argentina, Kirchner was more “reactionary, not necessarily promoting womens’ empowerment herself, but not obstructing others’ efforts,” says Dr. Jalalzai, author of the book “Women Presidents of Latin America: Beyond Family Ties.”

Machismo still rules

Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff was seen as  inconsistent, though she did appoint more women to her cabinet, including her chief of staff. She appointed more women justices, and expanded poverty-alleviation policies, framing them as “specific to women,” Jalalzai says.

But her impeachment last year underscored some of the gendered stereotypes – and perhaps higher expectations – that women leaders face in the region.

“We have hopes that women will lead differently, maybe be more inclusive or democratic,” suggests Jalalzai. But, she adds, if they don’t lead strongly, their failures are blamed on their gender.

President Rousseff was impeached for tinkering with the federal budget in an attempt to conceal the country’s economic woes ahead of her 2014 reelection. The practice is illegal, although it is widespread at all levels of government.

The impeachment proceedings put Brazilian sexism on full display. Congressmen, for example, held up signs reading “Bye, dear” when voting to initiate impeachment in the lower house.

“I’ve always been described as a hard-charging woman in the midst of delicate men,” Rousseff said during her impeachment trial, putting her gender front-and-center after years of avoiding the topic. “I never saw a man accused of being hard-charging.”

A clearer path

As Bachelet leaves office, some fear the end of this chapter could also herald a setback for womens’ rights. The expected victor in Chile’s election, Sebastian Piñera, for example, has said he will “review” legislative amendments that legalized abortion.

“With Michelle [Bachelet] leaving power, there won’t be a single woman leader in Latin America,” Jalalzai laments. “It shows that there isn’t a direct positive effect of women” occupying the presidency. “And maybe there’s even evidence that there will be a backsliding or backlash. The work isn’t done.”

But Magda Hinojosa, a politics professor at Arizona State University in Phoenix who specializes in womens’ role in Latin American politics, is more hopeful.

Every country in Latin America except Guatemala now has a law on its books that sets quotas for female members of local and national assemblies, she points out, and the number of female lawmakers has more than doubled over the past two decades.

Bachelet and her fellow Presidentas may not have done everything their feminist supporters might have liked, but at least they have opened a path for the next generation of female politicians.

“Seeing a woman in power, say in the presidency, makes a real difference to women as they consider running,” Dr. Hinojosa says. And such women are credible candidates.  “Latin Americans are absolutely willing to vote for women,” she adds. “If parties nominate women, men and women will vote for them.”

– Piotr Kozak contributed to this article from Santiago.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

House Speaker Paul Ryan (foreground) talks along with other Republican congressional leaders about their proposed rewrite of the tax code for individuals and corporations, on Capitol Hill in September.

Ask Americans what bothers them the most about taxes, and they typically don’t talk about their own tax bill. Their top complaint is that corporations are not paying their fair share.

Polls this year suggest that roughly two-thirds of Americans believe corporate taxes should go up.

So why are Republicans in the House and Senate moving full-speed ahead to do just the opposite?

As the Senate Finance Committee voted Thursday to move its tax bill to the floor, the measure was stirring controversy on several fronts – not least because it makes its tax cuts for average Americans temporary, and it uses that phaseout to help finance a permanent tax cut for corporations.

The political optics aren’t good, and the proposal could face changes when it’s taken up on the Senate floor after Thanksgiving. Yet the reality, many economists say, is that the corporate tax code needs an overhaul, and some of the Republican ideas come right out of a playbook that’s been in mainstream discussion for years.

The basic challenge: Other advanced nations tend to have lower tax rates, while some features of the US code incentivize firms to send capital and jobs overseas. While the Republican tax proposals raise questions of fairness in apportioning tax cuts between the wealthy and average Americans, leaders of both parties have long agreed on the need for tax reforms that keep more investment and jobs in the United States.

“It's a global race ... to attract global corporations,” says Richard Kaplan, a tax expert at the University of Illinois College of Law. “The nominal rate [for US corporate taxes] is 35 percent. There are very few countries at that level.”

If Republicans succeed in their current goal of getting the top corporate income-tax rate permanently down to 20 percent, that would put the US rate roughly on par with top marginal rates European nations, according to research cited by the Tax Foundation in Washington.

Growing the economy

Back in 2015, President Barack Obama was calling for efforts to lower corporate tax rates, with his budget team arguing that “the tax code needs to ensure that the United States is the most attractive place for entrepreneurship and business growth.”

It’s not necessarily that US corporations pay hugely more in taxes than firms in other nations do, Professor Kaplan and others note. Due to a maze of deductions and credits, US firms pay an effective rate somewhere in the 20s, not way off from what firms in some other developed countries pay.

Still, economists generally support the idea of lowering the nominal rate as part of broader tax reforms that could make US corporations more competitive globally and help grow the domestic economy.

“Cutting the corporate rate this substantially is going to draw some additional investment in the United States,” says Alan Viard, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and former senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

US corporations will have less incentive to park their earnings offshore and foreign companies will have more reason to locate facilities here in the US.

But many economists would prefer to have corporate reforms be revenue-neutral and not add to the deficit. Instead, the House and Senate tax plans would add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, much of that going to corporations.

While some Trump administration officials, notably Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, argue that the additional revenue would create enough new economic activity to make up for adding to the federal deficit, most economists disagree.

“I think that’s very unlikely,” says Joel Slemrod, director of the Office of Tax Policy Research at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “The empirical evidence is pretty clear.”

By 2027, the House tax bill would increase gross domestic product by only an additional 0.4 to 0.9 percent, according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, and by 0.0 to 0.8 percent by 2040. One reason the impact is so small is that the resulting growth in US debt puts upward pressure on interest rates.

A broader base?

Tax reform could also make the system fairer by reducing the number of loopholes. That way, tax burdens would be more uniform across industries and the US would collect revenues from a broader base of business activities. But in closing some loopholes, both the House and Senate bills create new ones.

Republicans “have lowered the rate, but if anything, they seem to have narrowed the base,” says Kimberly Clausing, dean and economic professor at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Taxing corporations is tricky because the money that they pay to the government would otherwise go somewhere else. Perhaps more investment in capital equipment or higher pay for workers, more dividends for shareholders, or lower prices for customers. That’s why some experts suggest that corporations not be taxed at all.

But the revenues from corporate taxes are so big, and so accepted as the norm, that Congress isn’t pitching the radical idea of reducing them to zero and taxing individual investors instead.

Instead, by reducing rates, congressional Republicans argue that they are putting money in workers’ pockets. How much money is subject to plenty of debate. A study last month by the White House Council of Economic Advisers suggested that cutting the corporate rate to 20 percent would over several years boost the average household’s income by $4,000 a year and, eventually, up to $9,000 a year.

Many economists are skeptical of that claim, predicting the gains from corporate tax cuts will be reaped by shareholders and managers more than average workers.

Indeed, the Republican bills have also come in for sharp criticism for other provisions that would benefit the rich, notably cutting the top tax rate on much “pass-through” income, by which owners of noncorporate businesses see their income taxed as individuals.

A territorial change

The House and Senate bills do include some elements of reform. Both versions make it easier to deduct new investments in one year rather than over multiple years. But those provisions phase out after five years.

The House version of the bill limits deductions for business interest expenses, which would discourage corporations from relying on debt to make new investments.

The Republicans are calling, moreover, for the US to shift its whole theory behind how multinational firms are taxed. The current system is called a “worldwide” approach, where the US Treasury seeks to levy the same tax rate on a firm no matter where it earns its income or what the tax rates are in those nations. 

The rest of the world doesn’t operate that way. Other advanced nations use versions of a contrasting “territorial” approach, where firms essentially pay taxes country by country, based on the tax rates in each locality. Surcharges from the home country aren’t the rule.

Many tax experts support a territorial shift, while the Obama plan refused to do that.

A challenge under any system, however, is how to keep corporations from seeking tax shelters by creatively gaming differences among national laws.

Both Democrats and Republicans have cited the goal of bringing back some $2 trillion-plus in money that US-based firms have parked overseas, but it’s not clear that either side has realistic ways of drawing the bulk of that money into job-creating investment back home.

In 2005, the last time the US held a tax holiday so corporations could repatriate their offshore profits, researchers concluded that most of the influx went to shareholders rather than new investment or workers.

Still, some analysts see the idea of lower rates, coupled with a territorial approach, as positive shifts that would help the economy. 

As Republicans gird to push a tax package through Congress, with likely the thinnest of margins, they will also face plenty of critics who say that, overall, the changes don't represent a major or lasting overhaul of the tax code.

“This is not tax reform,” says Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a Washington-based nonprofit research group. Early proposals for some big reforms were dropped in both houses, he says. “What they’re left with is a big corporate tax cut.”

Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

Participants encourage each other during the final stage of the 'Games of Heroes' crossfit competition, in Kiev, Ukraine, in December 2016, for Ukrainian servicemen who became disabled after getting wounded during a military conflict in the east of the country.

As he approaches the finish line of the Marine Corps 10K race, Vadym Svyrydenko breaks into a broad smile: He has picked out the blue and yellow of his country’s national flag amongst the red, white, and blue.

Mr. Svyrydenko, a Ukrainian, stands out, too. He’s running on “blade” prosthetics, having lost parts of both arms and both legs while fighting Russian-backed separatist forces in 2015. Back home he is spearheading a campaign to bring people with disabilities out of the shadows where they have long been hidden, and to help them carve out new lives.

He has chosen sport as the best way to do this. “We are getting more boys who were severely wounded and are showing them that rehabilitation through sport is effective,” the 44-year-old former soldier says as he recovers from his race. And Ukrainian veterans’ success in international athletics competitions has captured the nation’s imagination, removing some of the stigma from physical disability.

As Ukraine enters its fourth year of war, the growing number of wounded veterans returning from the frontlines is forcing the country to upgrade its rehabilitation programs, and to look afresh at how it treats people with disabilities in an urban landscape that is still largely Soviet.

“It’s good if attention turns to this issue not just for the people who were injured in the war, the wounded warriors … but also for people who were born with disabilities,” says Pavlo Mamontov, a former soldier who overcame his combat injuries to win a bronze medal in rowing at September’s Invictus Games, an international competition for veterans. “It’s cool that we can help others, not just ourselves with these competitions.”

Ukraine’s team of men and women veterans won 14 medals in at the Toronto Invictus Games, a multisports competition open to injured serving military and veterans created by Britain’s Prince Harry, himself a former British Army officer. Their success drew wide press coverage at home, and some veteran sportsmen have become minor media stars in Kyiv.

From taboo to fashion plate

The phenomenon has drawn closer attention to people with disabilities. Earlier this year a glossy magazine devoted an unprecedented amount of space to fashionable portraits of veterans, each missing one or more limbs. The national online investigative newspaper Ukrainskay Pravda recently published an article about what daily life is like for popular TV news anchor Ulyana Pcholkina and her partner, who both use wheelchairs. Characters with disabilities have also started appearing on TV drama shows.

This is all a stark departure from Soviet times, when people with disabilities were “taboo and highly stigmatized,” says Sarah Phillips, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington who has authored a book on disability rights in Ukraine. In those days, she recalls, parents were encouraged to institutionalize their children out of public sight. “There was a lot of denial that problems of disability even existed in Soviet society.”

Efrem Lukatsky/AP

Sergiy, a Ukrainian soldier who suffered a serious head injury in the anti-terrorist operations in Eastern Ukraine, kisses a dolphin during a dolphin-therapy session at an aquarium in Kiev, Ukraine, in March 2016. Ukrainian movement 'Alliance soldiers and volunteers' organizes sessions for the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers.

 Now, very visible veterans are coming back from the front, and last year Svyrydenko was appointed President Petro Poroshenko’s commissioner for the rehabilitation of men and women wounded in the war. That allows him to advocate for veterans’ needs, such as modern rehabilitation centers, greater funding for prosthetics, and an increase in the number of medical specialists.

Though the government last month extended disability rights laws to war veterans, a presidential decree ordering more rehabilitation centers for people with disabilities has yet to be fulfilled. One such center, in the Carpathian mountains, teaches veterans and civilians how to build new lives. Lviv’s military hospital became the country’s first to have an occupational therapy kitchen, and the cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv both host prosthetics centers. But such facilities are scarce.

Ukraine ratified the UN’s Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities in 2009, but a report by the Coalition of Organizations of People with Disabilities in 2011 found that only 30 percent of people who needed rehabilitation and transport equipment actually had it. The same group found last year that public transport remains a problem.

Access “is still an acute question,” says Svyrydenko, and local officials bristle defensively when he brings the issue up. But he keeps pushing, and encourages veterans to take municipal administrators with them on tours of their cities, to see what life is like in a wheelchair. “The system needs to be disrupted and we are disrupting it,” Svyrydenko declares.

Meanwhile, the national education system is adapting, and medical schools are stepping up courses in physical and occupational therapy. The problem says Renata Roman, a Canadian physical therapist who has been volunteering for more than 20 years in Ukraine, is that “the profession of occupational therapy does not exist per se” yet in Ukraine.

 A journey has begun

However slowly, though, the situation for people with disabilities in Ukraine is changing. Yaroslav Hrybalskyy, chairman of the Lviv branch of the Rehabilitation of Disabled People, a local nongovernmental organization, is happily surprised, for example, to find that he can get into the cafe where we meet, even though he uses a wheelchair.

And Mr. Mamontov, the Invictus rowing medallist, is planning with his wife to open a cafe in Kyiv with a social mission that will employ people with disabilities and older pensioners who have difficulty finding jobs.

High-profile sporting events and their attendant media coverage cannot disguise how far there is to go before the average Ukrainian fully accepts people with disabilities, or before society fully takes their needs into account, says Professor Philips. But the journey has begun. “I have seen an opening up of people’s hearts and minds in terms of thinking about this type of difference and having true concern for … equal rights and disabilities,” she says.

As for Svyrydenko, sweating at the end of his 71-minute 10K, he says that he runs in memory of his dead comrades, but also to encourage those who survived their injuries and now find themselves in hospital. He does it, he explains, “for them to see that through sports you can continue to pick yourself up physically, psychologically, and this is necessary to do. It’s not easy for us to do, either, but we do it so it can be an example.”

In a dimly lit gallery at Mumbai’s premier museum, visitors admire a 17th-century cloth painting depicting characters from a Muslim court in south-central India. An Ottoman trader feeds a bird; a Central Asian merchant holds a Chinese vase; and in one corner, a yogi sitting cross-legged on a deer-skin contemplates a wondrous new object: a pineapple brought to India from the New World by the Portuguese. 

Such intriguing juxtapositions, unexpected stories, and global connections form the essence of an ambitious new exhibition that recounts India’s history and its engagement with the world through 200 objects. In doing so, it offers a counterpoint to rising intolerance and nationalism in India and elsewhere. 

Its purpose is “to present India’s glorious past through iconic objects ... while allowing people to become partners in a world narrative,” says Sabyasachi Mukherjee, director of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj museum which is presenting the exhibition “India and the World: a History in Nine Stories.”

It seems to have worked. “When you read textbooks, you don't see these connections,” says Rukhsana Tabassum, a children’s filmmaker visiting the new show one recent afternoon for the second time.

The exhibition helped her see history as a whole rather than in fragments, she adds. “We see the global context, how people were doing similar things in different places ... [and] how we’ve been interacting with the world for so long.” 

Celebrating the 70th anniversary of India’s independence, the show chronicles nine important moments in the subcontinent’s history, from the Stone Age to the post-independence period. 

The exhibition is a collaboration with the British Museum in London; roughly half the artifacts were sourced from around India and the other half from the British Museum’s global collection of treasures. Items are paired in a dialogue that speaks to the present moment of political strife.  

“The show highlights what unites people, what is at the heart of human development: exchange,” British Museum director Hartwig Fischer told journalists last week. “Yes, there were obstacles, differences, conflicts, but this exchange kept going on. The history of humankind is that of openness. And it’s important to recall that today.”

Museum of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, Goa &The British Museum

The Mumbai exhibition challenges visitors' preconceptions. The Christ figure on the left was carved not in Europe, but in India in the late 16th century. On the right is a late 19th century woodcarving of Queen Victoria from Nigeria, then a British colony.

One of the items on show is especially resonant in the context of racist attacks on Africans earlier this year in New Delhi. It is a portrait of Malik Ambar, an Ethiopian who was brought to India in the 16th century as a slave and rose to become a military leader.

More than 'a Hindu nation'?

The exhibition comes at a time when Indians seem increasingly polarized over questions of history, identity, and religion. In the past year, conflicts have erupted over the use of Hindi as a national language, the consumption of beef, and even the status of the iconic Taj Mahal.  

These arguments have flared up since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, took office in 2014, giving his right-wing allies greater influence in Indian affairs.

Many of those allies see India as a fundamentally Hindu nation beset by foreign cultures; one BJP leader caused a furor in June when he said that the Taj Mahal – an early 17th-century Muslim mausoleum built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan that is the country’s top tourist attraction – did not represent “Indian culture.”

Such views are more than a matter of academic debate. Mobs of “cow vigilantes” have attacked Muslims several times in the past year for eating beef or allegedly slaughtering cows, animals that Hindus consider holy. In April, a mob beat to death a Muslim farmer in north India who was transporting cows. 

Last week, paramilitary troops were called in to ensure there was no violence during protests at the birth anniversary celebrations of Tipu Sultan, an 18th-century Muslim ruler in the southern state of Karnataka. The sultan has been hailed for battling the British – but is reviled by the BJP for having destroyed Hindu temples. 

“What is going on is a resort to instrumental uses of history in the service of religious majoritarianism,” says Sugata Bose, a member of parliament and professor of history at Harvard University.  But there is also a global trend toward nationalism, he notes.

That has not escaped the notice of James Hill, head of research at the British Museum and a co-curator of the Mumbai exhibition.

The first curatorial meeting was held the day after Britain voted to leave the European Union, he recalls. “I was at Heathrow (airport) to catch a flight to Mumbai when I heard.” Curators everywhere must choose which story to tell, he says. “Connection is the human story ... and you have to tell that story in Britain as much as here.” 

Gods on the move

The exhibition offers a vision of an India as a cosmopolitan crossroads culture, at the center of ancient trade networks. The objects on view include a splendid pillar from India’s Mauryan Empire (326-180 BC) decorated with Persian-style rosettes and Greek motifs, indicating contact with those civilizations, and seals from the Indus Valley civilization, located in what is now India, that were found in distant Mesopotamia. 

Co-curator Naman Ahuja says he sought to find a way for Indians to feel “self-pride” while respecting others. “Because we are a composite people,” he insists. “And this exhibition shows that at every step of the way, India has been a creation of multiple forces. There is no such thing as a singular Indian identity.”

An especially thought-provoking display is the juxtaposition of a 16th century wooden Christ next to the Hindu god Ganesh; in a subversion of viewer expectations, it is the Christian icon that was made in India and the Ganesha that turns out to be from another country, Indonesia.

“Gods, like people, have always been on the move,” says Ahuja, “and the marker of your identity, whether that’s religion or cuisine, may be something that’s not necessarily born in your land but may have come from somewhere else.”

One way to help people to understand their culture in relation to others, says museum director Mukherjee, is simply to provide an opportunity to see the cultural treasures tucked away in the British Museum or in other collections around India. The Mumbai museum receives thousands of visitors from smaller towns and villages, including many who may never visit London’s museums, he notes.

One recent afternoon, many of the visitors seemed overwhelmed. But others were moved.

Vinod Mehra, from one of Mumbai’s satellite towns, said he was proud to see India’s ancient empires on the same map as the great Greek and Roman ones. He and his wife, Geetha, were also impressed by the gallery that explains humankind’s African origins.

“We all come from the same place,” said Geetha, “so what are we fighting for?”

AP Photo

Evan Mawarire, a pastor, poses last year with a Zimbabwean flag, a symbol he used to rally many in Zimbabwe to work and pray for honest and open government.

In Africa, a popular Twitter hashtag in recent days has been #Zimbabwe. And for good reason. It is rare for Africans to witness a dictator like Robert Mugabe being sidelined so easily by close associates, especially after 37 years in power. He was a fixture for a generation, a symbol of how rulers can cling to power. Yet it is not only the political transition in Harare that is the focus of interest. Just as compelling for Africans is the sudden lifting of mental chains among millions of Zimbabweans.

Many in the Southern African nation have taken to cyberspace to express a liberation of thought and a shedding of fear. They are scratching their heads over why they once believed what had seemed so real – that a corrupt ruling elite must be Zimbabwe’s future. The phenomenon is similar to the 2011 Arab Spring, or the surprise awakening to a new narrative and a rejection of servitude as the norm.

Typical of the new introspection is this internet posting by branding consultant Thembe Khumalo on the media site NewsDay:

“We saw the end of an error, or rather a collection of errors; errors we had been making and failing to correct for decades, and we also saw the end of an era. We saw the beginning of another.... We should have required more of ourselves and one another.”

Or this by writer Learnmore Zuze in Zimbabwe Daily: “The system was so impermeable that everyone felt powerless over the possibility of untangling it. But fast forward to November 2017, could this be the beginning of a rebirth of Zimbabwe arising from the current chaos?”

The ground for a national introspection was laid last year by a Baptist pastor, Evan Mawarire. He released a homemade video asking Zimbabweans to refuse to participate in a corrupt regime and stay at home for a day. The mass “soft insurgency” caught on, as did his calls for daily prayers and for peaceful, grass-roots action.

“Let not fear grip your hearts,” he said in a posting this week as the military and top politicians decide the next steps for Mr. Mugabe and the nation.

A nation’s liberation is often portrayed as a matter of raw power over others, of guns and intimidation. But as Morgan Tsvangirai, a major opposition figure in Zimbabwe said in a speech last April: “None but ourselves can free ourselves.”