Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2022 i The Caravan

On a chilly morning in December 2019, Suryakant Narayan, a farmer in Bodh Gaya, woke up at 5 am and went to his field to harvest some exotic crops: bok choy, ruby ball and napa cabbage, lemon grass, celery, strawberry, lettuce, bell peppers, baby corn, water spinach, thyme and basil. He would deliver part of his produce at the local mandi, where retailers and purchase managers of nearby hotels come to procure fresh vegetables. Due to an abundance of supply, however, he did not get the desired price for his crops. The farmers of Bodh Gaya take huge risks in planting nontraditional crops in the winter months, instead of wheat, with the hope of high demand from East Asian pilgrims. They often deliver the produce to restaurants in the area,…

In July this year, the Madras High Court issued what might be one of its most consequential judgments of the last two decades. The matter itself was minor, one that flew under the radars of a majority of the state’s loudest advocates, politicians and columnists. For over ten years, the Buddha Trust, a small Buddhist organisation in the industrial city of Salem, had pushed the courts to identify a small shrine in the nearby village of Periyeri as containing a statue of the Buddha. The statue had been a focus of prayer for Periyeri’s Hindus who had built a concrete temple around it and claimed that it represented the local deity Thalaivetti Muniappan—literally, headless Muniappan. The site, like many temples in Tamil Nadu, was owned and administered by the state…

IN THE MONTHS leading up to the 2014 general election, Ram Madhav, the national spokesperson of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, sought an appointment with the Bharatiya Janata Party leader Arun Shourie. Madhav had an intriguing request. He wanted Shourie to intervene with the BJP’s prime-ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, on behalf of Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS sarsanghchalak—supreme leader. Bhagwat is the sixth sarsanghchalak of the RSS, a Hindu-nationalist organisation that emerged from within Nagpur’s Brahmin community, in 1925. Its network of affiliated outfits—known collectively as the Sangh Parivar—has penetrated almost every aspect of Indian society. As the head of the Hindutva family, the RSS provides ideological fuel for its roughly three dozen affiliate groups, which include the ruling party, one of the largest trade unions in the country, a student union…

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY POET MIRZA Asadullah Baig Khan, better known by his nom de plume Ghalib, proclaimed in a couplet: “However intelligence casts its net of reason, the meaning of my poetic world will ever be elusive.” This declaration would turn out to be prophetic: over a hundred and fifty years since his death, debates around the evasive quality of his poetry are still raging, printing presses are churning out his Urdu deewan—collection of poetry—and contemporary scholars are grappling with certain aspects of his legacy and personality, making Ghalib a subject of exhaustive study. Ghalib had a proclivity for infusing personal elements and symbols from ancient Persian folklore into his poetry, as well as writing with his trademark frankness and humour on themes such as iconoclasm, the philosophical meanings of life…

The Congress’ organisational elections are over and, to no one’s surprise, Mallikarjun Kharge has defeated Shashi Tharoor to become the new party president. Kharge has said he will look to the Gandhis for guidance, even as Rahul Gandhi says his future in the party will be decided by Kharge. Despite such easy cues, the actual challenge before Kharge is not simply about trying to do what any one Gandhi wants but to balance the conflicting signals that the Gandhis themselves have been sending out. Kharge is their latest compromise. He was not their first choice for party president and has his task cut out. For the moment, the party is focussed on the Bharat Jodo Yatra, which has the advantage of showcasing Rahul’s attributes—such as his earnestness and willingness to…

Though the city of Leicester has had a recent history of ethnic animosity, the ferocity with which it descended into a maelstrom of communal violence in September caught the police, the press and local community leaders off guard. It started with a brief clash between cricket fans after a match on 28 August, though many could write that off as a common enough occurrence. But a sense of unease remained for the next few weeks, with The Guardian reporting seven communal disturbances in east Leicester. That was to change on 17 September, when a mob of three hundred young Hindu men in face masks and balaclavas—many of them armed—marched through the Muslim-majority Green Lane Road, chanting “Jai Shri Ram” and “Vande Mataram.” It was a sight immediately recognisable to anyone…

IN 1992, I worked as a correspondent for Eyewitness, a monthly video newsmagazine owned by Hindustan Times TV. The senior journalist Karan Thapar was the show’s executive producer. Our team had been covering Uttar Pradesh regularly, and I had visited the Babri Masjid in July. Two years earlier, the Bharatiya Janata Party president LK Advani had led a nationwide rath yatra for months to proclaim that Hindus had a right over the site, stoking communal violence along its path. In the winter of 1992, the atmosphere in Ayodhya began to heat up. Volunteers known as karsevaks associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, planned to congregate at the mosque on 6 December. Thapar decided to dispatch a group of four—three video crew members and me, the reporter—to Ayodhya. We expected the…

BORDER LESS Namrata Poddar Poddar’s novel follows Dia, who works at a Mumbai call centre, on her long journey to the United States, where she encounters other South Asians and explores notions of belonging, race, caste, class, gender and nationality. HARPER COLLINS INDIA, ₹399, 182 PAGES DIFFERENTIATION AND DISJUNCTION INTERROGATING INDIA’S EDUCATION SYSTEM AR Vasavi Vasavi, a social anthropologist, studies previous fieldwork on government schools and explores issues of marginalisation, caste discrimination, decentralisation and stratification in the education system, as well as the implications of the National Education Policy of 2020. ORIENT BLACKSWAN, ₹895, 236 PAGES DISTRESS IN THE FIELDS INDIAN AGRICULTURE AFTER ECONOMIC LIBERALIZATION Edited by R Ramakumar This volume offers an analysis of the aftermath of liberalisation, three decades on, looking in particular at agricultural policymaking in relation…

“India is celebrating 75 years of its independence, what we call ‘Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav,’” S Jaishankar, the minister of external affairs, told the United Nations General Assembly, on 25 September. “The story of that period has been one of toil, determination, innovation and enterprise of millions of ordinary Indians. They are rejuvenating a society pillaged by centuries of foreign attacks and colonialism. And they are doing so in a democratic framework, whose steady progress is reflected in more authentic voices and grounded leadership.” In keeping with his recent role as a shrill spokesperson of the government abroad, Jaishankar extolled the virtues of a “New India,” under the “visionary and dynamic leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.” He parroted the five pledges announced by Modi in his Independence Day speech:…

When everyone was celebrating India’s seventy-sixth Independence Day, there was an unbearable sense of crisis at the Chanderlok Building on Janpath, in the heart of the national capital. About forty people living with HIV were sitting in protest inside the building, which houses the National AIDS Control Organisation. They had a single demand: the government should restore the supply of HIV medicines for one month. The country was facing stockout of key HIV medicines, such as dolutegravir, lopinavir and abacavir. The protestors told me that on 13 August they were informed that the building would be closed for three days. It meant that all the bathrooms were shut, except a few on the ground floor. Lifts were not working either. To use the bathroom or bring food, the protesters had…

IN 2014, the photographer Muhammad Fadli first visited Banda, a tiny archipelago of 12 islands in Indonesia. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these islands were coveted and fought over by Western colonial powers for a rare spice that grew only on its shores: nutmeg. Once a crucial player in the world’s spice trade, the Banda islands today lie largely abandoned and erased from public memory. “Surrounded by deep and wild seas, the Banda Islands is one of those forgotten places,” Fadli and the journalist Fatris MF write in their photobook The Banda Journal. “The remote islands once exploited for centuries by European powers have now faded into obscurity, as if blotted out from the world map.” The photobook is the outcome of a three-year project, in which the duo…