Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2017 i The Caravan

Isis Singh, a 28-year-old woman born to a Punjabi Hindu family in Delhi, has a first name that is about as rare as her surname is common. Her family named her “Isis” after the Egyptian goddess of fertility and womanhood. So, in October 2015, when Singh saw her first name splashed across television news shows in upper-case letters, she was confused. She soon learnt that the channels were using “ISIS” to refer to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria: a violent extremist organisation that had beheaded a group of Christians in Syria who refused to convert to Islam. Things soon started changing for Singh. Friends joked about how she was wreaking havoc around the world. Some of her colleagues teased her about her name, once even pasting a cutout…

One evening in March, 15-year-old Ayat Hariri—a Syrian refugee in Lebanon—emerged in front of a packed house at a popular bistro in Beirut. She began narrating the story of how when she first came to Lebanon five years earlier, she had thought she was a tourist. “I was wondering, why is it taking so long at the military check points?” she said, recalling the 80-kilometre drive from Deraa, a city in Syria. Just ten years old at the time, Hariri had not understood the chaos descending on her country. Her parents had told her that the family was on a holiday to meet her father, who lived and earned handsomely in Beirut. After having lived a year in Lebanon, Hariri’s family finally enrolled her in a school. This is when…

Halfway through Jab Harry Met Sejal, which released in August this year, the lead pair bumps into the male protagonist’s white ex-girlfriend, Clara. While Harry (Shah Rukh Khan) cowers, unable to handle Clara’s anger at having been spurned, Sejal (Anushka Sharma) rises to the occasion. With the confidence of a Bollywood hero, Sejal sits her down and explains to her that since she consented to a relationship with Harry, of her free will, his emotional mistreatment of her is really her fault. A lawyer by training, Sejal then goes on to accuse Clara of harassment for having the temerity to demand an answer for Harry’s disrespectful and deeply distressing behavior, which involved disappearing on her without a word. The film is about a lonely Indian tour guide called Harry, and…

THE JAIL IN THE TOWN of Baliguda, in Odisha’s Kandhamal district, houses around 85 prisoners, both convicts and undertrials. To meet any of these inmates, visitors have to fill in a form and hand it to a jail official through a window in the prison’s imposing brownish-red iron door. In July, I visited the jail to meet Duryodhan Sunamajhi, one of its most high-profile inmates. Entering the prison’s main gate, I walked past a few goats grazing near the entrance of a small Hindu shrine, whose walls were newly painted a bright brick red. I was accompanying Jirimiya, Duryodhan’s nephew, who filled the form with his, his father’s and his uncle’s names, and the name of his village. He handed the form to a jail official, who disappeared inside with…

LOOKING BACK THE 1947 PARTITION OF INDIA 70 YEARS ON Edited by Rakshanda Jalil, Tarun K Saint and Debjani Sengupta This newly edited volume of writings on Partition includes poetry, fiction, reportage, film criticism and essays on music, providing a rich and varied account of a traumatic past. It addresses the experiences of Dalits and Adivasis and explores the ways in which third- and fourth-generation descendants of Partition refugees are developing new ways to tell stories that have been repressed. ORIENT BLACKSWAN, 396 PAGES, R 1,095 REMNANTS OF A SEPARATION A HISTORY OF THE PARTITION THROUGH MATERIAL MEMORY Anchal Malhotra The artist and oral historian Aanchal Malhotra’s first book paints a portrait of Partition through stories about material objects—a pocketknife, a bracelet, utensils—that refugees in both India and Pakistan took…

Fourteen-year-old Manideep Reddy stood at the centre of a well-lit hall in a building in Secunderabad, surrounded by a crowd of children. It was a morning in mid August, and Reddy, wearing a black suit and red bow tie, was the oldest child present. The other children and I watched as he took out a piece of rope from his pocket, held it up at both ends and showed it around. Reddy then turned to me—the unsuspecting adult he had chosen to help him—and asked me to examine the rope closely. “Let’s cut it into two equal halves,” he said, folding it at the centre and passing me a pair of scissors. I cut the rope at the folded end. When Reddy unfolded it, however, he showed us that one…

In December 2012, the Communist Party of China’s political bureau, or politburo, the highest political body in the country, adopted a document that spelt out eight regulations for the functioning of its own members. Among these were that members should reject extravagance, reduce inefficient meetings, avoid unnecessary travel abroad and remain in close contact with the grassroots. Xi Jinping had taken over the previous month as the party’s general secretary, and the eight regulations were seen as his way of initiating a campaign against corruption in the party. Beginning this 18 October, when the party, also called the CPC, meets at the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing, for the party congress meeting—which convenes every five years and will be held for the nineteenth time—much of the party’s leadership…

{ONE} SUR SADAN IS THE CULTURAL EPICENTRE OF AGRA. The auditorium hosts many of the city’s most significant cultural events, and stands in a compound along one of the main roads through the city centre. Potted plants, arrayed a few paces from each other, form a ring around the auditorium building, and manicured shrubs and small trees line the roads and walkways. On the morning of 10 July, every pot had a saffron flag planted in its soil, and every shrub and tree within easy reach had one dangling from its branches. The flags bore a circular logo of a flaming torch held aloft against a silhouette of the Indian subcontinent. Four bold letters above it announced “ABVP.” Every year, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, a student group affiliated with…

 IN AN IMAGE CAPTURED by the documentary photographer Showkat Nanda, a faded Khan dress—a type of salwar kameez commonly worn by Kashmiri men—is shown tied to a tree trunk next to a mass grave in the desolate village of Kitchama, northern Kashmir. The garment is weather-beaten and covered with moss. According to Nanda, locals in the area said that it belonged to a very young boy, whose dead body the police had handed over to them in 2004. They buried the body and left the clothes outside, hoping that someone would eventually recognise them and identify the boy. When Nanda took the photograph, 12 years after the boy’s death, no one had yet come forward to do so. The photo appears in…

Theatre Old World Theatre Festival The sixteenth edition of the Old World Theatre Festival, hosted by the Old World Culture Trust, will include 15 plays, directed and performed by artists of prominence in the Indian theatre scene. Among the range of productions is Shikhandi—The Story of the In-Betweens, which narrates with humour the story of Hindu mythology’s renowned transgender character. 6 TO 15 OCTOBER INDIA HABITAT CENTRE, DELHI For more information, write to events@oldworldculture.com Dance Nakshatra Dance Festival The National Centre for the Performing Arts will host its annual edition of the Nakshatra Dance Festival, featuring depictions of the ancient and the contemporary through dance forms such as Bharatanatyam, Kathak and Odissi. The itinerary, spread over three days, includes performances by dance exponents and their troupes from different…

“Onkalo,” which means cavity, or cavern, in Finnish, is an apt name for Finland’s repository for radioactive waste. Touted as a “100,000-year tomb,” the Onkalo facility on Olkiluoto—a small island in western Finland—is currently being built at a depth of 450 metres, inside bedrock. It will be the world’s first permanent disposal site for spent nuclear fuel. Other countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Germany, Canada and Japan have attempted, for years, to set up nuclear-waste disposal sites, but their plans have stalled because of political, environmental and social roadblocks. Finnish leaders, on the other hand, have managed to drum up popular support for the repository by convincing locals that it will be a financial asset to their community. The Finnish government granted Posiva—a nuclear-waste management…

The initial hostile stance of the BJP government, evident in the advisory, spoke to its Hindu-nationalist followers, who are largely unsympathetic to the predominantly Muslim Rohingya, with some even spreading lies about the community on social media. On 14 September, an Indian Air Force aircraft landed in Chittagong with 53 tonnes of relief materials, including food, salt, cooking oil and mosquito nets. The delivery was meant to help Bangladesh cope with the vast influx of Rohingyas—a minority community in Myanmar that is facing large-scale violence there. This was the first tranche of assistance India said it would provide, as the refugees continued to arrive, crossing the Naf—the river that marks the border of south-eastern Bangladesh and western Myanmar—and swelling overcrowded, makeshift camps that have emerged on a narrow strip of…

ON A SEPTEMBER NIGHT IN 1907 , an angry mob of about six hundred white people attacked and destroyed an Asian Indian settlement in Bellingham, in the north-western US state of Washington. Many of the traumatised residents fled to Canada. A San Francisco-based organisation called the Asiatic Exclusion League, dedicated to “the preservation of the Caucasian race upon American soil,” blamed the victims for the riot, adding that the “filthy and immodest habits” of Indians invited such attacks. Despite the small number of Indians in the United States—there were fewer than 4,000 at the time—the Asiatic Exclusion League had been warning of a “Hindu invasion” of the country’s west coast. Two months later, another angry white mob struck a settlement of Indian workers in Everett, Washington, forcibly driving them out…