Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2017 i The Caravan

The IWA, which once had a membership of around 300 people, now has only 50. “I’m scared our passion for whistling won’t pass on to the next generation.” Tarkas said. As a child, Kartik Kullar was always drawn to whistling. “When he was young, he used to watch me whistle, and wouldn’t let me go until I taught him how to do it too,” his mother, Seema Kullar, told me. Kartik picked up the skill so well that he won a school talent competition by whistling the patriotic song “Saare jahaan se achchha.” That victory, he told me, even prompted his school to exempt him from a strict ban on whistling in its corridors. In January, I met Kartik and Seema in their flat in north Delhi. Seema told me…

“Given the political uncertainties, the tribal belt is one core area the BJP cannot afford to lose. The party has consistently won around 20 of the 27 seats here since 1995.” On 7 February 2017, the chief minister of Gujarat, Vijay Rupani, flagged off the Adivasi Vikas Gaurav Yatra—a political march promising development and promoting Adivasi pride—from the village and pilgrimage site of Unai, in the southern district of Tapi. At the function, the party’s state unit president Jitu Vaghani declared that the yatra was intended to “win hearts and not votes.” But with Gujarat assembly elections scheduled for later this year, there was little doubt that the BJP was making a concerted play for the Adivasi vote. Adivasis comprise more than 14 percent of the state’s population, and are…

A spate of explicitly Hindu television serials hit the screen in the run-up to the 2014 elections and have dominated airwaves thereafter in a period of hostility against minorities and intolerance for fair-mindedness about a shared past. On the morning of 27 January, while the filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali was shooting for his upcoming period drama Padmavati at the Jaigarh Fort in Jaipur, members of Shri Rajput Karni Sena—a caste organisation of Rajputsbarged into the fort. The horde ran amok, some smashing expensive film equipment, others breaking anything within reach and yet others forming a ruthless, agitated scrum around Bhansali. Footage shows them grabbing him by his hair and slapping him around, as the rest of the gang continued to vandalise the set. Though the entire episode was caught on…

FEW COMMODITIES in the world today reveal as much about the spread of global capitalism as cotton. It connects growers, workers, traders, factory owners, and consumers in a supply-and-distribution network that stretches across the world. A few centuries ago, cotton was barely known in Europe. When cloth from the East reached the continent in the seventeenth century, it began to gain popularity even as threatened European textile producers sought to resist the competition with the help of politicians and the church. In a Cambridge University Press blog post, Giorgio Riello, an academic and the author of Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World, wrote, “in the late seventeenth century a series of legal acts came first to limit and then to ban the trade and consumption of Indian…

LOVE IN CHAKIWARA AND OTHER MISADVENTURES Muhammad Khalid Akhtar Translated from Urdu by Bilal Tanweer This novel, first published in Urdu in 1964, describes the life of a small Karachi neighbourhood, whose daily drama is chronicled by Iqbal Hussain Changezi, a bakery owner and a collector of writers and geniuses. He has his eye on an out-of-work comedian, Chakori. Meanwhile, the town’s mostly unsuccessful healer of physical and spiritual maladies prepares to unleash his top-secret invention: the love meter. PAN MACMILLAN INDIA, 320 PAGES, R 499 FOOT SOLDIER OF THE CONSTITUTION A MEMOIR Teesta Setalvad The writer and activist Teesta Setalvad describes her early career as a journalist; her coming to political maturity during the violence in Mumbai after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in the winter of 1992;…

Jaya Ram was getting restless. For three days, his truck had been idling outside the customs office in Timure, a village in northern Nepal’s Rasuwa district. He had recently taken out a loan to purchase the vehicle, and had made only two of the 60 monthly payments, each of $600, that he owed his bank. The next instalment was due in two weeks, and to pay it, he needed the money he would make trucking his cargo to Kathmandu—almost 1 lakh Nepalese rupees, or around $930. To maximise profits, Jaya Ram had even avoided paying a transport union the 5,000-rupee fee that most drivers like him submit as a type of insurance each trip. “If you have an accident and you lose the truck, they’ll provide half of the costs…

The historian Mukul Kesavan’s column in The Telegraph on 12 February was titled “A Delicate Balance: The state of the fourth estate.” In it, Kesavan begins by saying that “Midway through Narendra Modi’s term in office … [a]s someone who writes opinion pieces, I can report that the papers I write for haven’t suddenly begun to censor me. No edit desk has returned a copy with sentences underlined in red because it has felt uneasy with the political implications of something I had written.” Then, he moves on to less rosy thoughts: “the intimidation of reporters and correspondents is more commonplace and easier to cite,” and “the NDA government and the prime minister and the BJP’s online army exert real and concerted pressure on liberal journalists.” Kesavan observes at one…

{ONE} SOHAIL MERCHANT’S phone kept him awake through the night of 8 November. That evening, at 8 pm, Prime Minister Narendra Modi shocked the country by declaring that, from midnight, all R 500 and R 1,000 notes would no longer be legal tender. Modi presented this as a way to flush out “black money”—untaxed wealth, part of which is held as unaccounted-for cash. Demonetised notes could either be deposited in bank accounts, exposing their owners to official scrutiny, or left, Modi said, to become “worthless pieces of paper.” Some with stockpiled cash rushed to purchase goods with it, or convert it into other stores of value, while they still could. Jewellers and retailers of luxury goods reported a spike in business that night, and many stayed open late. The first…

I REMEMBER MEETING my Gujarati-American spouse’s siblings for the first time, a few years ago, at a restaurant called Surati Farsan in the “Little India” neighbourhood of Cerritos, a city in greater Los Angeles. I was then teaching literature from the Indian Ocean region at the University of California, in Los Angeles, and as soon as I read Surati’s hybrid desi menu, which was peppered with Gujarati-inflected English, I was at home. Over African chevdo, chocolate dosa, bhaji quesadilla, ragda petish, bataka vada, mango lassi and masala chaash, my spouse, his siblings and I swapped stories about India. They had been brought up by parents who migrated from rural Gujarat in the 1970s to work in California’s motel industry, and had extended family in different parts of the world, including…

Visual Art Studio Photography for the 22nd Century 9 MARCH TO 8 APRIL SAKSHI GALLERY, MUMBAI In his exhibition, the artist Nandan Ghiya uses acrylic paint on found photographs to show the transition “from the vintage to new age, from the physical to digital.” The pieces explore both positive and negative sides of technological modernity. For more information, write to office@sakshigallery.com . Music Ganapati 18, 19 AND 22 MARCH MULTIPLE VENUES, DELHI AND JAIPUR Ganapati is a theatrical performance conducted by Adishkati Arts—a performing-arts company based on the outskirts of Auroville, in Tamil Nadu. The programme interprets the mythical stories around the birth of the elephant-god Ganapati. For more information, write to adishaktiprogram@gmail.com . Art Kathmandu Triennale 2017 24 MARCH TO 9 APRIL MULTIPLE…

As a 22-year-old university student in her fourth year of a nutrition course, Kim Sung-eun had never been much interested in politics. But recently, with a political crisis convulsing her country, she was compelled to take to the streets. “Of course I read the news, and I see that our country has issues with corruption,” she said. “But this time, I saw someone in my own age group benefitting, just because she is from a rich family.” From October through December last year, Kim was among the hundreds of thousands of South Koreans who participated in a protest movement that culminated in the achievement of its primary goal: the ousting of the country’s president, Park Geun-hye.    Park faces allegations that she conspired with her confidante Choi Soon-sil to pressure…

On 29 December 2007, Sunil Joshi, a one-time member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was shot and killed near his home in the district of Dewas, in Madhya Pradesh. Nearly a decade later, in February 2017, eight people who were charged with his killing were acquitted of the crime. Joshi’s murder, it appeared, was destined to remain unsolved. The significance of the acquittals extended far beyond the case of Joshi’s killing. One of the theories that investigating agencies proposed for the murder was that it was linked to Joshi’s involvement in some of the most heinous acts of mass murder in India’s history: the Malegaon blasts of 2006, and the Samjhauta Express blast, the Ajmer Sharif blast and the Mecca Masjid blast of 2007, which, in all, killed 111 people.…

ON A CRISP MORNING sometime in late February, 1978, an elephant waited patiently outside Mysore’s Hotel Metro-pole to meet with a foreign visitor. Alejandro Jodorowsky, a Chilean-French filmmaker with a cult international following, had requested the meeting. Earlier that decade, Jodorowsky had shot to fame with the off-kilter hit El Topo (1970), which had caught the attention of many in the alternative arts fraternity, including John Lennon. Lennon even helped fund Jodorowsky’s next film, The Holy Mountain, which released in 1973 to widespread acclaim. Five years later, Jodorowsky arrived in Mysore to start work on his next film, Tusk, which was to be based in India. But Jodorowsky had no idea where exactly he would shoot the film. He only knew he needed a landscape teeming with elephants, for, according…

HOW DOES POETRY ENGAGE WITH THE WORLD without referring overtly to something larger than the poem itself, such as an allegory of the nation or the hope of a coming insurrection? The work of three contemporary Hindi poets—Kedarnath Singh, Vinod Kumar Shukla and Mangalesh Dabral—offers a possible answer to that question. The concerns of their poetry might seem limited, yet these poets have, through their intense engagement with language, shown how poetry’s formal and stylistic concerns can renew one’s connection with the world. The microscopic focus of their poems does not sunder the ties between the poem and the world but forges it in rather new and original ways. Singh, Shukla and Dabral all started writing around the 1960s, when the Pragativaad, or progressive movement, which emphasised the social content…