Welcome to City of Dis! This page is a snippet view about the Author.
I, Rashmi Munikempanna, am the author of this website. The sole legal responsibility for writing, designing and publishing lies in my legal personhood.
This website is as an archive of sorts – an archive of complaint, of frustration, of exhaustion. An archive of labour. It draws inspiration from the The Divine Comedy [Inferno] by Dante Alighieri wherein Dante, led by Virgil, journeys through the circles of Hell. City of Dis encloses the 6th to the 9th Circle of Hell – Heresy, Violence, Fraud and Treachery.
I am a cis-gendered non-heteronormative/queer disabled woman living in Bengaluru. Before this journey I was an artist and a visiting lecturer working with photography, visual communication and self representative practices.
I now live with an autoimmune inflammatory illness called Spondyloarthritis wherein some of the vertebrae in my spine are in the process of fusion. This is further complicated with Enthesitis – basically most of the joints in my body are inflamed and compromised. As a result I live with a painful dynamic disability that waxes and wanes in response to stress. I use mobility aids when walking becomes painful. Which is now pretty much most of the time!
This website is a document of my journey as a litigant-in-person in the courts – District, High Court of Karnataka and the Supreme Court of India. I went party-in-person in 2017. In 2020 I started to appear in person as a power of attorney holder for a family member, my mother, and then for myself. This journey started in the District and Sessions Court Bengaluru and the Court of the Senior Civil Judge Bengaluru Rural District. It moved on to the High Court of Karnataka and then the Supreme Court of India.
My partner in this journey has been my sister without whom I believe I could not have survived this.
Why Author this Website?
It’s hard this journey. It’s befuddling, demeaning, frustrating, exhausting, killing. Authoring this website also heralds in my mind what I see as a dead end – a death of faith in due process or as they say in Indian law – the death of faith in procedure established by law. I no longer believe that the justice dispensing system can work or I believe that I no longer have the capacity, resources, energy or the body to sustain the belief that the justice dispensing system works.
I believe my life and the lives of my family matters. This fight cannot just disappear into dusty shelves. Just like others before us who pointed us the way I too believe it is time to leave a record. A record of a fight that has been designed to be lost.
I believe that the public – the larger public have a right to know. Whether anyone cares – that I leave up to time.
Being the author of this journey is in some ways also making sense of something that is meaning-less. Owning it. Speaking Up. Speaking truth to power.
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