Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2022 i The Caravan

THE LEDE 8 Lajja Mistry is an education reporter at the Pittsburgh-based news website PublicSource. 10 Tanisha Saxena is a Delhi-based journalist who covers arts, queer culture, travel and lifestyle. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Hindustan Times, Outlook, Deccan Herald, The Hindu and the New Indian Express. PERSPECTIVES 12 Amarjit Chandan is a writer and activist who has lived in London since 1980. He co-edits Baramah, an annual Punjabi magazine in the Farsi script, published in Lahore. 17 Sagar is a staff writer at The Caravan. 20 Shivam Mogha is a research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for the Study of Social Systems. He is a co-editor of Trolley Times, a newspaper that emerged from and documented the movement against the Modi government’s farm laws. 25 Prabhjit Singh…

The renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote a short poem in Punjabi about the Partition of 1947: Kise beejiya ae, tusan waddhna aeKise keetiyan ne, tusan wartana aeAap wele sir puchhna gichhna siHun kise theen ki hisab manggo Someone sowed, and you shall reap.Someone did, and you deal with it.You did not probe, and questioneither when it was time. From whom will you seek explanations now? Faiz was right. What the earlier generations did, the later generations have to suffer and endure. The partition of India, and, therefore, the partition of Punjab, was carried out by outsiders, without asking the Punjabi people. But history—the public record or reality—keeps seeking answers from the dead and the living. It is a creature that never shuts up. It sees everything and rubs salt…

It has been thirty-five years since 72 Muslims were brutally killed in the small town of Maliana, in Uttar Pradesh, during communal violence in Meerut district. Their families still await even the first glimmer of justice. The Maliana case, pending in a local court, stands as a blot on our criminal-justice system. Tensions had been high in Maliana due to the riots in Meerut that followed protests against the unlocking of the Babri Masjid, in Ayodhya, for Hindu worship. However, residents of Maliana described the violence in the town as the targetted killing of Muslims by state forces. A day earlier, at least 42 Muslim men had been killed in Hashimpura, a neighbourhood in Meerut. The testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses detail the horror of what transpired in Maliana. It…

IN JUNE THIS YEAR, the Supreme Court dismissed charges of criminal conspiracy against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and others in relation to the 2002 Gujarat violence. Immediately after the judgment, the Gujarat police arrested the activist Teesta Setalvad and RB Sreekumar, a former director general of the state police. Along with the former police officer Sanjiv Bhatt, who is already in jail, Setalvad and Sreekumar were accused in a first-information report, filed by a police official, of forgery and fabricating evidence, among other things, to implicate “innocent” people. On 27 February 2002, the Sabarmati Express carrying Hindu karsevaks returning from Ayodhya, caught fire near the Godhra railway station. Gujarat witnessed intense communal violence for three days, which spilled over into the following months. Mobs killed over a thousand people, most…

How often do you sit and think about the objects that surround us in our homes? How often do you think about the memories attached to them? What role does an object’s material memory play in sparking conversations? These questions are the driving force behind the Museum of Material Memory, a digital repository that traces family history through personal antiquities and social ethnography. Founded in 2017 as a passion project by Aanchal Malhotra and Navdha Malhotra, the museum is a digital crowd-sourced platform for contributors to submit stories related to objects—from the 1970s or earlier—that they find in their homes. The stories narrate the history of the object and, with it, reveal the customs of its time. The objects seem outwardly ordinary, ranging from old photographs and jewellery to utensils…

I have a flickering memory of wading through the Phalgu River in Bihar’s Gaya district, a few hours’ journey from my home, when I was ten or twelve. The current was strong and I could barely keep my head above the water. My father, ahead of me, held me by one hand, and my cousin Gautam held me by the other. Around us were dozens of kanwariyas, including my father’s friends, each ferrying water from a tributary of the Ganga in small pots tied to a wooden pole. We were on our way to a temple on Barabar Hill, north of Gaya, to offer the water to the god Shiva. After emerging from the river, we walked on along the bank. The hill—a mountain to my young eyes—looked like a…

The most famous line from the 1992 film A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth,” is aimed at the average American who wants their country to be both secure and free but does not ever wonder about the inherent contradiction. In the climax, Colonel Nathan Jessup, played by a snarling Jack Nicholson, has been cornered in court over a cruel hazing practice that led to the death of a young marine. Defending this method of instilling discipline in marines, Jessup claims that the lawyer questioning him, played by Tom Cruise, cannot handle the reality that the young man’s death, “while tragic, probably saved lives.” Jessup alleges that, deep down, the average American knows that the price of their freedom is a functional military, whose undemocratic character become necessary…

KARAN KALUCHA WOKE UP early on the morning of 9 February and did something he rarely does: he prayed. His son’s future was at stake. The drawing of lots for admission to Kalucha’s “target school,” Sardar Patel Vidyalaya in Lodhi Estate, was scheduled for 9 am. Kalucha was seated in the school auditorium an hour in advance. Before long, the room was humming with anxious chatter from the parents of around three hundred prospective students, all waiting for their children’s fates to be decided. Some faces exhibited anticipation; others, resignation. There was justifiable cause for the latter. Of the 1,844 children who had applied to SPV, 63 had been admitted while 310 others had been shortlisted for the lottery. Of these, 34 would be selected in the drawing of lots,…

THE EDUCATION OF YURI Jerry Pinto Jerry Pinto’s newest novel, set in Bombay in the 1980s, revolves around the character Yuri Fonseca from Mahim. It explores themes including friendship, adolescence, love, politics and loss. speaking tiger, S599, 408 pages BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH WRITINGS ON THE INDIAN HILLS Edited by Ruskin Bond and Bulbul Sharma An anthology that brings together forty-one pieces of writing about hill stations and towns in India, including by the authors Jim Corbett and Keki Daruwalla, which provide insights into the regions’ complex histories, communities, flora and fauna. speaking tiger, S699, 432 pages NIGHTS OF PLAGUE Orhan Pamuk Pamuk’s newest novel is set in the 1900s against the backdrop of a deadly plague on an imaginary island named Mingheria. As many refuse to quarantine, and tensions…

India has rich traditions of art that stretch back ten thousand years to the prehistoric cave paintings at Bhimbetka. What came as a shock to Nathaniel Gaskell, the director of the Museum of Art and Photography Academy—the research wing of the MAP, Bengaluru—was the dearth of authoritative information on Indian art. “I also realised that the information that is available has been long narrated through the Western lens, and the language is full of jargon that not everyone can understand,” Gaskell told me. On 22 April 2022, in an attempt to do something about this relative paucity of literature, Gaskell launched an encyclopaedia of Indian art, a digital platform that endeavours to transform the way South Asia’s art histories are accessed, taught and discussed—both regionally and globally. With over two…

There was an air of jubilation among the five hundred or so farmers who attended a Sankalp Sabha in Rohtak, a town in Haryana, on 27 December 2021. A month earlier, in Delhi, seventy kilometres to the south, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the withdrawal of the three farm laws that had sparked a gruelling yearlong protest movement. The rally was one of many held in solidarity to mark the movement’s victory. It had been organised by the Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh Sahyog Manch, a civil-society group from Rohtak, as well as local professors, university students and factory workers. These were all communities that had regularly joined and aided the massive sit-in at Delhi’s Tikri border. Along with the singing of Haryanvi ragnis — folk songs of protest—remembrances were held…

I think what we need a lot more of is free, thinking press. Press which is unafraid, press which actually explores and gets into the nitty-gritties, which isn’t just there as one of news but continues to explore and dig deep, and is unafraid to do so. And it is that to my mind that Caravan represents, and which we need more of—good, well-reasoned journalism, which is unafraid and which has a voice. So keep it up! NAINA LAL KIDWAI, Chairperson, Max Financial Services I read Caravan because I find it to be a journal that tells, investigates, and delves into important stories, on what’s going on in the country today. Caravan is not influenced by corporate interest or political alignments, and investigates in a genuine sense the real stories…