Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2016 i The Caravan

 On 15 July 2014, during the budget session of the Rajya Sabha, the Bharatiya Janata Party government was trying to pass an ordinance to amend the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act. Mani Shankar Aiyar, a member of parliament from the Congress, got up to speak, and alleged that the amendment was being proposed in order to appoint “one single person” to the staff of the prime minister. The terms declared unparliamentary by the speaker in the parliament are expunged from the record of the day’s proceedings. They are then added to a book called Unparliamentary Expressions , and are forbidden from any use in the future. He said that the BJP had been constantly adopting the ordinance route, and was bypassing “propriety, procedure and precedent,” describing…

 The Madras High Court is currently hearing a dispute as to whether rice grown in certain areas of Madhya Pradesh qualify as genuine basmati rice under the law. The disagreement originates from a 2008 application filed by the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority, or APEDA, under the Geographical Indications of Goods Act, 1999, seeking to register the term “basmati” as a geographical indication. A geographical indication, or GI, is a form of recognition granted to a particular product grown or manufactured in a particular region, whose specific properties are considered attributable to the conditions of its place of origin, or whose reputation is associated with it. Historically, basmati rice, famed for its distinctive aroma, taste and long grains, has been marketed as a set of rice varieties…

{ONE} EARLY IN DECEMBER last year, Kadiramalai Loganathan’s father succumbed to a long illness. The funeral exacted a heavy price, and to recoup it the fisherman had little choice but to quickly return to sea. On the night of 16 December, barely a week after his loss, Loganathan set out, with one other fisherman, from Karainagar, a small island off the Jaffna peninsula in north Sri Lanka, in his small fibre-glass boat with a modest engine. Just a few kilometres out, as he waited after casting his net, Loganathan spotted a big, mechanised boat—a trawler. “Before I knew it, the boat started pulling away my net,” he told me. He chased after the trawler as fast as he could to try and save the net, his biggest investment. He had…

TWO NOVELS THAT APPEARED within two years of each other in the mid 1960s—one set in Czechoslovakia and written in Hindi, the other set in north India and written in Polish—are like literary half-siblings. It is difficult to think of two books simultaneously so alike and so dissimilar. The first, Nirmal Verma’s Ve Din (translated into English, by Krishna Baldev Vaid, as Days of Longing), was published in 1964. The setting is Communist-era Prague, the narrator an Indian student. Wojciech Zukrowski’s Kamienne tablice (Stone Tablets, in the English translation from the Polish, by Stephanie Kraft), appeared in 1966. Its protagonist, Istvan Terey, is a Hungarian consular official in Delhi in the mid 1950s. Both novels are products of an era of cultural exchange between India and the Eastern Bloc that…

Staging the Past 12 OCTOBER TO 14 NOVEMBER SHRIDHARANI GALLERY WITH ART HERITAGE GALLERY PRESENCE, NEW DELHI This exhibition, featuring the work of two young Iranian photographers, Babek Kazemi and Azadeh Akhlaghi, deals with themes of love, struggle, life and death in the country. Kazemi’s sepia, multilayered photos combine images of intimacy with maps of Iran, a comment on how the political realm can influence the personal one. Akhlaghi’s staged, sweeping panoramas depict assassinations from the history of Iran, often capturing the moment just before death. Her recreations of poignant events that have shaped Iran are marked by rigorous attention to detail.…

LETTER FROM GERMANY On an evening this June, at his three-storey house in the German city of Mainz, Hanns Dieter Lohnes showed me his personal library. On a crowded bookshelf, standing out next to dog-eared literary classics and art magazines, was the book I had come to discuss with him: a 1938 copy of Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the autobiography and manifesto of the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. The Nazi emblem—a swastika and an eagle—was embossed in gold on the midnight-blue dust jacket. Lohnes, an 82-year-old lawyer, is remarkably agile for his age. When he was only a small boy, and the Nazis had risen to power in Germany, nearly all of his male relatives were conscripted into Hitler’s army. “It was only natural that I wanted to know more…

SMRITI IRANI STEPPED IN FRONT of a swarm of cameras and microphones. It was the second week of December 2004, and the fledgling politician and television star, a lead actor in one of the most watched soap operas in Indian history, had just inaugurated a jewellery store in the city of Surat, in Gujarat. Reporters, most of them from entertainment channels, had gathered for the occasion, hoping for a sound bite or scoop about an upcoming episode of the show, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, in which, they had learnt, Irani’s character would aim a pistol at her wayward son. What she gave them was something else entirely. Irani launched a scathing attack on Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, seen as one of the most promising…

A MAN AND HIS SON were walking alongside their donkey, on the way to the market: so begins one of Aesop’s fables. “Fools,” muttered a passer-by. “What’s a donkey for if not to ride on?” Of course, thought the old man, and put his son on the donkey. “There goes a callous lad,” muttered another, “riding while his poor father walks.” The boy guiltily got off and let his father ride the donkey. “What a lazy man,” said yet another, “riding while his little son trudges along!” So the boy got on the donkey as well. “Poor, overloaded donkey,” said someone, “carrying a grown man and his hulking son.” There was nothing else for it. Man and son both got off, tied the donkey’s feet to a pole and resolved…

IT IS OFTEN ASSUMED THAT to write in or be translated into English makes one “global,” and that to write in a “regional” language is to be more finely attuned to rural, small-town, or at least non-metropolitan India. The regional has two great signposts: language and space. But what if these signposts do not coincide? What of the writer in English who addresses the interior, or the writer in Malayalam who speaks from the metropole? And this doesn’t even begin to exhaust the possible permutations of a writer’s idiom, location and audience. How should we approach the matter of a writer’s relationship with geographical belonging and estrangement, and the literary consequences of it? Two recent poetry collections—Jayanta Mahapatra’s The Lie of Dawns, and K Satchidanandan’s The Missing Rib—offer an occasion…

Jodhpur Riff Festival 13 TO 17 OCTOBER MEHRANGARH FORT, JODHPUR Coinciding with Sharad Purnima, the brightest full moon of the year, the ninth annual Jodhpur Riff Festival featured musicians from both India and around the globe. Days began with performances of devotional music outside the walls of the Mehrangarh Fort at sunrise, from 5.30 am to 7.30 am, and concluded with improvised jam sessions, featuring the likes of Ross Daly, a world-renowned lyra player, in collaboration with the prominent Rajasthani vocalist Anwar Khan Manganiyar. The Sufi singer Smita Bellur’s renderings of Kabir’s poetry were particularly remarkable.…

On 5 September, a petition filed by the Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai, questioning India’s criminal defamation law, came up for hearing in the Supreme Court. A bench presided by Justice JS Khehar agreed to hear her case, but limited the frame of the inquiry to one critical question: should corporations be allowed—as they currently are—to invoke the criminal defamation provision under the Indian Penal Code? In her petition, Pillai argued that they should not. Pillai’s petition was originally part of a batch of cases, now known by its lead petition, Subramanian Swamy v Union of India. In these cases, a broader challenge was made to those provisions of the Indian Penal Code that collectively criminalise defamation. In May, the Supreme Court ruled against the petitioners, who included activists and politicians.…

 The Bridge Talks, held on October 8, 2016, was an inaugural initiative by The Caravan magazine aimed at challenging conventional thinking around gender empowerment. Bringing together leading politicians, academicians, artists and personalities from Bollywood and business, the initiative was an attempt to bring the discussion about gender outside the narrow confines of academia and into a more sustained dialogue with society at large. Inaugurated by Maneka Gandhi, the Union Minister for Women and Child Development, the discussions at The Bridge Talks centered around issues of women’s access to technology, public space, work, safety, pleasure and politics, to name a few. Sapna Chadha, the marketing head of Google India, in her address, mentioned the gender gap in women’s access to the digital world in rural India and how it could be…

THE TOWN OF EAST LIVERPOOL, in the state of Ohio, is a ragged notch on the United States’s Rust Belt—a line of former industrial hubs that stretches across the country’s northern mid-west. Many of those cities and towns, including East Liverpool, are still suffering from the mid-twentieth century collapse of American manufacturing. Today, the town’s population sits at around 11,000, less than half of what it was in the 1950s. Scott Houston, a New York City-based photographer, is married to a woman who grew up in East Liverpool. On his first visit to her hometown, he recalled, “I just wanted to get back to New York.” But after returning a few times, he “started to like the colours there,” and “the way that some people looked.” Houston’s growing fascination with…

SWAMI IN A STRANGE LAND HOW KRISHNA CAME TO THE WEST Joshua M Greene In 1965, a 70-year-old man set sail from India to the United States. He arrived in New York at the peak of the hippie counterculture movement and went on to create the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, becoming known as Swami Prabhupada. This biography shows how and why millions around the globe, including cultural icons such as the musician George Harrison and the poet Allen Ginsberg, incorporated Prabhupada’s teachings into their lives. SIMON AND SCHUSTER, 340 PAGES, R 999 DEMOCRATS AND DISSENTERS Ramchandra Guha This collection of essays is a work of scholarship on topics of contemporary interest. Its subjects range from the national projects of India’s neighbours to the complex relationship between democracy and violence.…

Long Night of Literatures 23 SEPTEMBER INSTITUTO CERVANTES OF NEW DELHI “Long Night of Literatures,” an initiative supported by the European Union, as well as a motley crew of cultural institutes, ranging from the Swiss Arts Council to the Polish Institute, featured ten writers from ten countries, presenting in seven different languages. Advertised as an exercise in “literary speed dating,” the event consisted of 20-minute sessions, in which authors gave readings in their native languages as well as English, followed by short question-and-answer rounds. Highlights included the Spanish author Gabriela Ybarra’s exploration of the curative powers of storytelling amid familial trauma, as well as Vea Kaiser’s humorous yet affectionate portrayal of Austrian village life.…