Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2017 i The Caravan

A few vanity vans were parked on the bank of a lake in Mumbai’s Film City studio complex, where a scene from the upcoming Marathi film Idak was about to be filmed. As the crew adjusted their cameras to accommodate the blazing November sun, the director, Deepak Gawade, sent for two of his lead actors: Sandeep Phadke and Somaih. Phadke arrived within minutes, but Somaih was nowhere to be seen. After 20 minutes of waiting, Gawade sent Shankar Narayan Iyer to hurry Somaih up. Iyer, a bearded man wearing a cap, disappeared into one of the vans, where another member of the production team was struggling to bring Somaih onto set. Within a few minutes, Iyer emerged with the actor. When I asked him how he had managed it, Iyer…

“Jo dhandhe ke liye sahi, woh sahi. Jo dhandhe ke liye galat, woh galat. Isse zyaada kabhi socha nahi” (What is right for business is right. What is wrong for business is wrong. Never thought beyond this). This one-liner from the trailer of Shah Rukh Khan’s forthcoming release Raees seemed uncomfortably apt after the actor called on Raj Thackeray, the chief of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, or MNS, at his residence, Krishnakunj, in the Mumbai neighbourhood of Dadar on the evening of 11 December. News channels showed the two hugging each other as the Bollywood star, who is also one of the film’s producers, prepared to leave Krishnakunj. Raj told the news agency ANI that Shah Rukh “had come to inform that rumours about Mahira Khan promoting Raees are false.”…

IN 2015 , ADIVAANI, an independent press dedicated to creating “a database of Adivasi writing for and by Adivasis,” published a revolutionary children’s book titled Disaibon Hul. Ruby Hembrom, its author and also Adivaani’s founder and editor, wrote in its preface, “It is our duty to keep our stories of injustice, persecution and hope alive in public spaces. ... Dear gidra, don’t let the Sido and Kanhu in all of us die.” For the first time in Indian English children’s literature, the words “our” and “us” were used by a Santhal, presupposing and centring an audience of Santhal readers who knew that “gidra” meant them—the “children” for whom references to Sido and Kanhu as freedom fighters were as familiar as references to Bhagat Singh or Mangal Pandey. Hembrom’s exhortation is…

Wood From Ships 9 DECEMBER TO 7 JANUARY CHATTERJEE AND LAL, MUMBAI The artist Nityan Unnikrishnan’s latest exhibition, his fourth solo show at the Chatterjee and Lal gallery, has been described as “replete with allusion.” With his predominant use of watercolour, and penchant for soft sepia tones, Unnikrishnan captures in his paintings some of the characteristics of memory—present, but often unclear on fine details. For more information, write to info@chatterjeeandlal.com . Of Absence and Weight 21 DECEMBER TO 11 FEBRUARY NATURE MORTE, DELHI Of Absence and Weight is Seher Shah’s second solo exhibition, and will present her work in multiple media, with ink and graphite drawings, etchings, photographs, prints and cast-iron sculptures. The pieces here explore the impermanent nature of objects and materials, and showcase Shah’s aggressive,…

 On the morning of 31 August, I sat across Salahuddin, son of the famous calligrapher Manzooruddin, inside the large living room of his Matia Mahal home in old Delhi. As we talked about his father’s work, he fetched a khaki-coloured envelope full of documents from the adjacent room. For the last 16 years, Salahuddin has been submitting documents at the office of Delhi’s lieutenant governor as part of an application for a Padma Shri award for his father. Every year, the government denies the application. “I’ve kept a record of everything,” Salahuddin said, picking out a letter from the papers. “In each and every field artists are encouraged but the calligraphic art has been neglected so far,” the letter reads. “Keeping in view his”—Manzooruddin’s—“outstanding services, it is requested that his…

 Shah Rukh Khan, perhaps India’s most well-known actor, built his career in the early 1990s playing characters ranging from misogynistic psychopaths to unhinged stalkers, in films such as Baazigar, Darr and Anjaam. There is a deliciously subtle irony about the fact that in Dear Zindagi, released in November, it is he who essays the role of Dr Jahangir “Jug” Khan—a hip psychotherapist who helps Kaira, a girl in her early twenties, played by Alia Bhatt, deal with anxiety and depression. Movies overtly featuring mental illness in men have usually either caricatured the afflicted, as the comedy Funtoosh (1956) does, or demonised them, as in Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016). Dear Zindagi’s portrayal of mental illness is as atypical for Bollywood as the role…

THE WORD “CARTOON” got its modern sense, denoting a comic drawing, in 1843. It appeared in the still-new British weekly Punch to describe the magazine’s popular caricatures of London political life. When the news reached London a couple of decades later that someone had launched a magazine called Indian Punch, Charles Dickens was incredulous. “Punch in India,” he mused. “The idea seems unpromising. … The Asiatic temperament is solemn, and finds no enjoyment in fun for its own sake.” Within a few short decades, as the anthropologist Ritu Khanduri describes in Caricaturing Culture in India, the satirical ideals of Punch were appropriated, indigenised, and, with an irony worthy of one of its cartoons, transformed into a vehicle for anti-British commentary in the colony. The empire’s humourless Asiatic subjects were laughing…

“The first casualty when war comes, is truth.” – US Senator Hiram Johnson War is not just about suffering and death, but also about the complex workings of bureaucracies, militaries, political groups and societies that form its scaffolding. IN EVERY WAR WE LEARN ABOUT—from the Greco-Persian wars that featured Leonidas and his Spartans to the Mahabharata, from the First World War to modern India’s continuing border clashes with China and Pakistan—ordinary citizens have had to grapple with what’s offered to us as truth. Just a few months ago, for example, the Associated Press summed up the fallout of India’s “surgical strike,” the operation the army launched across the Line of Control, with this headline: “Dueling truths follow Indian raid in Pakistani Kashmir.” The anthropologist Nandini Sundar’s new book, The Burning…

12 Angry Jurors 22 JANUARY SUSIE SORABJI AUDITORIUM, PUNE This play, adapted from a teleplay by the American writer Reginald Rose, begins with an 18-year-old boy from a slum on trial for the murder of his abusive father. A 12-member jury is locked in a room to unanimously decide the boy’s fate. Every vote of “not guilty” sparks deliberation on the preconceptions held by the jurors, as well as on the impact their respective pasts have had on them. For more information, write to varun@oranjuice.net .…

The tomb of the Muslim saint Imam Asim lies in China’s Taklamakan Desert, at the end of a long walkway lined with poplar trees. An elevated mud structure, the shrine would easily be camouflaged by the sand if not for the flags, rams’ skulls and strips of cloth decorating it. It is located near the town of Hotan, in the autonomous region of Xinjiang, in the country’s north-west—the homeland of the Turkic-speaking Uyghur Muslim community. For centuries, Uyghur Sufis would journey through the desert between shrines such as this one, stopping at each to recite poems celebrating religious heroes. “Chinese people don’t come here,” said Tudi Mohammad, a 50-year-old sheikh who is the shrine’s guardian. “It’s not a tourist site.” Mohammad has lived near the shrine for most of his…

IN EARLY NOVEMBER, the Punjab government issued double-spread advertisements in a number of major newspapers, announcing that the city of Amritsar had been made over “as part of Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal’s dream project.” The advertisement claimed that the “Rs 210 crore endeavour has stunningly transformed the area around the iconic spots: the Town Hall, Jallianwala Bagh and Sri Harmandir Sahib”—referring, respectively, to a colonial-era administrative building, the walled public garden that was the site of a horrific massacre in 1919, and the central shrine of Sikhism, which includes the Golden Temple. “The once crowded corridor,” the advertisement continued, “is now a grandiosely designed ‘Heritage Walkway’ dotted with surreal aura statues of historical figures, architecturally refurbished buildings and giant LEDs live streaming kirtans from Sri Darbar Sahib”—the name…

 THE IXIL MAYA HAVE RESIDED FOR MILLENNIA in Guatemala’s forest-covered Cuchumatanes mountains. One of more than twenty ethnic groups from the Maya indigenous community, they have resisted many forms of violence since the dawn of colonialism in the Americas. Guatemala’s civil war, which raged from 1960 through 1996, saw a systematic campaign of genocide against them; 7,000 Ixil were killed, and 29,000 displaced. Soldiers in the national army were given a simple command: Indio visto, Indio muerte (Indian seen, Indian dead). Daniele Volpe, an Italian photographer, had been living in Guatemala for over a decade when, in 2011, he began to travel to different Mayan communities across the country, documenting their experiences of state violence. The following year, he decided to narrow…

WHO REALLY FEEDS THE WORLD? THE FAILURES OF AGRIBUSINESS AND THE PROMISE OF AGROECOLOGY Vandana Shiva In this book, the author and activist Vandana Shiva examines the adverse effects on the planet of monocultures, soil depletion, cash crops and more. Assessing the world’s food crisis, she contends that caught in the crossfire between small producers and corporate giants are the nearly one billion people in the world who suffer from hunger and malnutrition, and the thousands afflicted with diseases caused by toxins in food. Shiva advocates reclaiming the right to food security through sustainable practices that value biodiversity. WOMEN UNLIMITED, 132 PAGES, R 300 UNCONDITIONAL EQUALITY ’ GANDHI S RELIGION OF RESISTANCE Ajay Skaria Ajay Skaria, a historian, examines Mohandas Gandhi’s approach to the issues of freedom and equality. Sometimes…