Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2020 i The Caravan

Prahlad Gaikwad, a sugarcane farmer from Wathar village, in Maharashtra’s Satara district, woke up excited on the morning of 19 October 2019. He drove for about two hours to the village of Aundh, reaching just in time for the first recital of its annual festival of Hindustani classical music. Now in his eighties, Gaikwad has attended the Aundh Sangeet Mahotsav for the past 15 years, ever since he moved back to his native village from Mumbai, where he had worked in a cotton mill for several decades. Every year, he has sat through the entire 24-hour festival, which begins in the morning a week before Diwali and ends at dawn the following day. “I want to take in all the musical fragrances, particularly the tabla solo,” he told me. An…

The global coronavirus crisis has been called many things: a pandemic, an unprecedented crisis, a re-run of sorts of the Spanish flu’s decimation of the human population just over a century ago. In India, from the eyes of anyone who studies public health, it is also a catastrophe that has been in the making for decades, perhaps since as far back as Independence. In weeks of reporting since India saw its first COVID-19 cases and deaths, I am yet to speak with an epidemiologist or infectious-disease expert who is surprised that the country is utterly unprepared for what awaits us—which, they all agree, is a surge of infections and resulting deaths. One assessment published in a medical journal in January reckoned that India had 2.3 ICU beds per 100,000 people.…

IN 1918 , misfortune befell the 22-year-old poet Suryakant Tripathi, better known as Nirala, or “the strange one.” “I travelled to the riverbank in Dalmau and waited,” he wrote in his memoir, A Life Misspent. “The Ganga was swollen with dead bodies. At my in-laws’ house, I learned that my wife had passed away.” Many other members of Nirala’s family died too. There was not enough wood to cremate them. “This was the strangest time in my life,” he recalled later. “My family disappeared in the blink of an eye. All our sharecroppers and labourers died, the four who worked for my cousin, as well as the two who worked for me. My cousin’s eldest son was fifteen years old, my young daughter a year old. In whichever direction I…

SU PANIYADI’S PROTAGONIST in Sati Kamale—the first novel in the Tulu language, written in 1921 and first published in 1936—is demure, obedient, loyal and chaste. The rumour is that her husband Umesha Rao, a fierce nationalist, died while working as a revolutionary in Bengal. Kamale, though, has reason to believe that he is alive. While she behaves like a widow all day long, in the privacy of her room every night, she wears the jewellery commonly worn by married women in several parts of India—a mangalsutra and toe rings—and continues to wait for her husband. Kamale, who has about her an aggravating holier-than-thou attitude, is not easy to root for. In the novel, she resolutely abides by a mantra her husband wrote in his last letter to her: “Do not…

Shortly after noon on 14 March, in a makeshift tent next to a temple on Delhi’s Mandir Marg, a bizarre religious ritual was underway. A man in Hindu religious garb faced a flex banner that carried the image of a demon with the word “Corona” stamped across its chest, as well as photos, taken from tourism websites, of Chinese people eating bees, an octopus, a frog and a lobster, with speech bubbles saying, “Save us Corona!” As he sprinkled generous quantities of gaumutra—cow urine—on the image of the demon, the man chanted, “Corona shant ho jao, shant ho jao corona”—Calm down, corona. One of the assembled priests started distributing earthen cups of gaumutra as prasad, while another showered gulal mixed with gaumutra as “a blessing from god.” Two days before,…

“He was standing in front of the Ganesh temple in Paris. I went up to him, pulled out my katana and sliced his arm.” At a shabby café in southern Paris, last September, a former member of the Viluthus, one of the oldest gangs among the Sri Lankan Tamil community in the French capital, recalled his time with the gang. The man whose arm he had sliced off in 2006, he said, had “disrespected” the Viluthus. He could not remember how. Such acts of violence have become commonplace over the past few years in “Little Jaffna,” a neighbourhood near the Gare du Nord railway station where a large number of Tamil migrants have set up shops and restaurants. Brawls frequently break out among groups of young men from the community.…

Arun Kumar, the head of public relations for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, reportedly told a meeting in Bhopal in early February that the share of Hindus in the Indian population had shrunk from 84 percent in the 1991 census to 69 percent in 2011. This, he said, was because many Adivasis—especially from the Bhil and Koitur tribes—had identified themselves as followers of “other” religions, rather than as Hindus, in the 2011 census. Kumar’s numbers were exaggerated—in fact, the 2011 census recorded just under eighty percent of the population as Hindus—but his point was clear. Mohan Bhagwat, the organisation’s supreme leader, urged the RSS cadre at the same meeting to encourage Adivasis to declare Hinduism as their religion. India is due an updated census next year. The monumental work of gathering…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2019 , when Salman Toor ushered me into his studio in Bushwick, a neighbourhood in New York City’s borough of Brooklyn, a tiny section of his wall caught my eye. There, he had pinned a disparate collection of references for paintings he was working on for his India debut, in December, at Delhi’s Nature Morte gallery. I Know a Place, the title of the Pakistani artist’s exhibition, depicts a surreptitious utterance between a pair of queer men who desire each other’s flesh, friendship and company, away from the violence of prying eyes. For years, fans of Toor in the United States, and his global admirers on Instagram, have hailed him as a contemporary revolutionary, owing, perhaps, to the principal subjects of his paintings: queer South Asian…

GRAVEPYRES SCHOOL FOR THE RECENTLY DECEASED Anita Roy Anita’s Roy book of fantasy fiction for young adults follows the adventures of Joseph Srinivas, newly admitted to the Gravepyres School for the Recently Deceased, who is surrounded by vulture friends and mad hermits as he grapples with being dead and the tests that come along with it. WESTLAND, R 499, 232 PAGES CHORASHASTHRA THE SUBTLE SCIENCE OF THIEVERY VJ James This book by the popular Malayalam author VJ James, who also works at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, is a dark comedy about a burglar who breaks into the home of an eccentric professor, from whom he learns how to open a lock by looking at it. EKA, WESTLAND, R 299, 176 PAGES GAINING GROUND THE CHANGING CONTOURS OF…

ON 9 APRIL 1939 , the African-American singer Marian Anderson performs an Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. One of the finest contraltos of her time, Anderson had been performing gospel songs and opera arias throughout the country for over a decade. She had also toured South America and made several trips to Europe during the 1930s. Despite the international acclaim she received, Anderson faced racial discrimination in the United States. For the most part, she was forced to perform for segregated audiences. She eventually refused to hold concerts at venues that had “an invisible line marking the Negro section from the white.” In 1938, Anderson’s manager, Sol Hurok, decided to organise her first major concert in the nation’s capital. He wrote to…

In April 2019, as part of its preparations for the Asian under-16 championship this year, the Indian under-15 football team visited Italy for an “exposure tour.” In a press release, the All India Football Federation stated that its squad for matches against the United States, Mexico and Slovenia included players “born on or after January, 1 2004”—the cut-off date for the Asian championship. The team against Slovenia was captained by Eric Lalsangzuala, whose date of birth, according to the AIFF’s central registration system, is 15 June 2002, making him almost eighteen months too old. Lalsangzuala’s CRS entry had been approved by the AIFF on 20 November 2018, and could be readily accessed by AIFF officials, clubs, agents and scouts. His birth certificate was registered on 16 June 2002, confirming his…

On the evening of 12 March, 46-year-old Wilma Sangalang Naguit was returning home from work. She was waiting for the subway not far from Milan Central Station, wearing a mask to protect herself from a possible COVID-19 infection, when a man approached her to ask for alms. Wilma asked him to keep his distance, but the man spat on her. “He didn’t catch me, but I was very scared,” Wilma told me. “There was nobody else around, I felt like crying. When I got home I took off my clothes and took a shower.” Wilma works as a domestic employee, but after this experience she took a week off from work and decided not to leave the house anymore. So did her husband Benedict, who works in a pastry laboratory.…

DAVID C MULFORD, then the US ambassador to India, sent a confidential cable to Washington, DC in 2005, titled, “Socioeconomic Future of Indian Dalits Remains Bleak.” This was a status note on the condition of Dalits in the country. Ram Nath Kovind, the current president of India but then a Bharatiya Janata Party MP from Uttar Pradesh, was interviewed by American diplomats, and told them that open discrimination against Dalits had reduced dramatically in the preceding decade. However, he also predicted that caste-based discrimination would exist for at least the next fifty to one hundred years in India. Kovind suggested that since the Hindu religion condones caste, it would take longer for the Indian government to end caste discrimination than for the US administration to eradicate racial discrimination in its…

IN FEBRUARY, swathes of northeastern Delhi witnessed largescale and targeted violence, looting and arson that lasted around four days. According to the last official death toll—53 dead, many more injured, and scores of people fleeing their homes. It is still unclear precisely what sparked the violence. On 23 February, the Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kapil Mishra, had visited Babarpur, accompanied by people whom he claimed were Citizenship (Amendment) Act supporters, and gave an incendiary speech. In it, he gave an ultimatum to the police to clear out an anti-CAA protest at Jaffrabad within three days: he would wait till after the departure of the US president Donald Trump, he said, and after that, would take matters into his own hands. Soon after, on that day, armed Hindu mobs targeted Muslim…

Art Night Forest 16 March to 15 april art alive Gallery, Delhi Night Forest presents recent paintings by the artist Chandra Bhattacharjee on the current ecological crisis. The artist uses a spectrum of greys, ranging from pearl white to charcoal black, with traces of lignite, sepia and indigo. For more information, write to rhythm.arora@longform.in Theatre A Small Family Business 9 to 12 april experiMental theatre, ncpa, MuMbai The director Adhaar Khurana presents an Indian adaptation of the family comedy by Alan Ayckbourn. The play revolves around the protagonist Samson Sequeira’s marriage into a Punjabi business family in Delhi and the complications that unfold. For more information, write to vandana@mindworkz.in Exhibition A Body Without Organs 12 March to 9 May project 88, MuMbai The artist Prajakta Potnis’s second solo exhibition at…