Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2022 i The Caravan

THE LEDE 8 Kinshuk Gupta is an award-winning writer, poet and freelance journalist who writes on culture, gender and books. 10 Joseph Palmer is a former diplomat and bartender. His non-fiction work covers wildlife, travel, sport, politics, music and art PERSPECTIVES 12 Seema Chishti is a Delhi based journalist and writer. 14 Viruben Nandakumar is an editor at the Tamil Guardian, focussing on Sri Lanka and human rights. 18 Bindu Doddahatti is associated with the School of Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru as well as Prisons Forum, Karnataka. Ameya Bokil is associated with the School of Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru as well as Prisons Forum, Karnataka. REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS 22 Shiv Inder Singh is a freelance journalist and the editor-in-chief of…

In the month of July, 75 years ago, a soon to be independent India chose the tricolour as its national flag. A spirited debate followed in the Constituent Assembly before it was adopted. However, the national emblem, inspired by the Sarnath lions, was adopted on 26 January 1950 without debate. According to the historian Madhavan Palat, the four lions found in the excavations at the Buddhist site of Sarnath, in Uttar Pradesh, “standing together, facing the world in all four directions, represented a spirit of courage, calm and control.” Palat, the editor of Jawaharlal Nehru’s multi-volume Selected Works, understood Nehru and the imagery he wanted to invoke. Nehru, he said, believed firmly in projecting a view of India that was suitable to the deep turmoil and violence the region was…

LIKE HIS IDOL, the pioneering gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur, the Punjabi rapper and politician Shubhdeep Singh Sidhu—better known as Sidhu Moose Wala—was shot dead in the front seat of his car. On 29 May, Sidhu left his home in the village of Moosa, in Punjab’s Mansa district, driving a Mahindra Thar SUV. A day earlier, the Punjab government had reduced the number of security personnel assigned to the 28-year-old from four to two, though none of them were with him when he was killed. When he arrived at Jawaharke, a village on the outskirts of Mansa, unknown assailants surrounded the car and opened fire with automatic weapons. According to two others in the car, Sidhu fired back with a pistol but could not fend off the assassins. Around two dozen…

ON 16 AUGUST 1975, the Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam, gives a handful of soil to the Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari as a symbol of his government’s decision to return Gurindji land to its traditional owners. The transfer was the result of a prolonged strike, led by Lingiari, at the Wave Hill cattle station. Wave Hill was established, in 1884, on land in the Northern Territory leased from the colonial authorities. Thirty years later, it was purchased by the Vestey Group, a British meatpacking company that would grow into the world’s largest private conglomerate. Much of that growth was achieved through its holdings in Australia, where it benefited from paltry rents, no taxes and the exploitation of Aboriginal labour. Gurindji workers at Wave Hill were initially paid in rations. Even…

When I was in my second year at Delhi’s Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital, a lanky boy in a red shirt and fraying jeans came to the dermatology OPD for a consultation. He spoke openly about the globular swellings on his penis that had ruptured, leaving shallow craters. A busy resident asked him to strip and lie down on the examination table. She enquired about his history of contact: “Have you had sexual relations with a girl?” “Are you married?” “Have you visited any sex workers?” “No,” he responded to each question, quickly and confidently. Running out of time and patience, the resident referred him to me. It was only when I changed “girl” to “partner” that I understood the reason for his denial. He was in a sexual…

When Gotabaya Rajapaksa had nowhere else to go—protestors raging against him on the streets of Colombo, his opulent presidential residence overrun, blocked by airport immigration staff from boarding civil flights out of the country—he found sanctuary at a military base for his last night in Sri Lanka. The next day, 13 July, he and his wife finally escaped aboard a special air-force flight to the Maldives, leaving behind the country he and his brothers had led to complete economic ruin. In his darkest hour, Gotabaya knew that the military was the last institution still with the power to stand up to the people who had sent him running. Gotabaya gave up the presidency, and the immunity from arrest that came with it, only after he had made his way to…

ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER 2018, I found myself driving through a stretch of the Thar Desert. The landscape was all sand, broken by patches of shrubs, as far as the eye could see, and I felt a surreal and slightly alarming absence of greenery and human presence. I was on my first visit to Sudasari Desert National Park, about sixty kilometres away from Jaisalmer, in Rajasthan. The national park is home to the great Indian bustard, a critically endangered bird species, and my travel companions and I cut trails through the desert in open jeeps in search of them. We spotted a few birds hiding in bushes. It was a brief encounter that would lead me to a much longer association with the custodians of the endangered birds. Soon after…

In the wake of a global health crisis, it is worth taking a moment to appreciate the humble horseshoe crab. According to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, “if you have ever needed a vaccine … you most likely benefited from the use of horseshoe crab blood.” The SCDNR would know—it is facing a lawsuit on the subject. Horseshoe crabs are a common sight in South Carolina, a rural state on the south-eastern coast of the United States covering roughly the same area as Jharkhand but with a population smaller than Himachal Pradesh. The state’s coastline is a picturesque labyrinth of interweaving barrier islands, saltwater marshes and sandy beaches. Every spring, Atlantic horseshoe crabs converge here by the tens of thousands to spawn, just as they have since time…

By March 2021, the National Crime Records Bureau—the apex body maintaining crime- and criminal-related databases—had a record of eight million fingerprints in its National Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Much of it was collected, it is assumed, under the purview of either the Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920, or various state regulations. A lot of what has been collected, though, goes beyond the sanction of the law. For instance, there are the recent reports of police in Telangana and Madhya Pradesh collecting fingerprints and photographs during stop-and-search operations. It would seem that, so far, state desire for greater surveillance and the eagerness to adopt new technologies for this purpose has been checked only by the absence of physical infrastructure to store the quantities of data and not by any legal framework…

Appointments such as that of Danish Ansari can at best be considered a reflection of the BJP’s carrot-and-stick approach for oppressed Muslims, who are “victims of bulldozers, pogroms and lynchings,” Mohammad Reyaz said. “YOU ARE A MUSLIM, what are you doing in a saffron brigade?” Danish Azad Ansari recalled being asked when he was a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Ansari would reply that he had joined because the ABVP was a nationalist organisation. The 34-year-old gave me a similar response in April this year, when I asked him about becoming the only Muslim minister in the Uttar Pradesh government, run by the RSS-affiliated Bharatiya Janata Party. “What I had learnt in the Vidyarthi Parishad,” he said, “the BJP taught…

WHEN SI NEWHOUSE JR—the former chairperson of Advance Publications, which owns titles such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker—sold the Random House group, in 1998, to the German media giant Bertelsmann AG, several editorials expressed shock and dismay at the seemingly abrupt decision. The handover had been code-named “Project Black” in emails and company memos, so that the deal remained under wraps. The questions abounded. Why would you sell Random House and not, for instance, the fledgling Vogue, which was consistently second to Elle in the number of copies sold? Surely the behemoth that had published renowned authors such as James Joyce and William Faulkner could not be written off? Were the profits not reasonable? “I would hope that at this late stage in my career I won’t…

LIES OUR MOTHERS TOLD US THE INDIAN WOMAN’S BURDEN Nilanjana Bhowmick This book focusses on middle class Indian women, the institution of marriage, notions of tradition and modernity, women’s role in the workforce and how the society they are part of renders invisible women’s contributions. ALEPH BOOK COMPANY, ₹699, 272 PAGES BIBI’S ROOM HYDERABADI WOMEN AND TWENTIETHCENTURY URDU PROSE Nazia Akhtar This book argues that there has been a lack of scholarship on Hyderabadi women writers in Urdu because of the predominant focus on north India and Pakistan, and explores the lives and writing of Zeenath Sajida, Najma Nikhat and Jeelani Bano through critical readings of their work against the political and social context of the time. ORIENT BLACKSWAN, ₹995, 432 PAGES FIRST STEPS CITIZEN SCIENCE IN ECOLOGY IN INDIA…