Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2018 i The Caravan

In the narrow lanes of south Delhi’s large, bustling INA market, among the shops bursting with uniforms, dupattas, fruits and vegetables, several signboards advertise human hair. On an afternoon in August, I entered a shop whose sign read “Pankaj International Human Hair,” climbed down a short flight of stairs, and found the owner, Pankaj Chitkara, in the basement. He was measuring brown hair extensions with help from his young assistant, and recording the lengths in a notebook. He showed me the six types of human hair he sold—straight, curly, natural wave, bulk hair, deep wave and wavy. They came in 11 different colours, including jet black, deep red and platinum blonde. Chitkara, who has owned the store for 17 years, told me that many of his customers are not from…

On 20 October, D Ravikumar, the general secretary of the political party Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, sent Time magazine a strongly worded email objecting to its cover that month, which had gone viral on social media even before the magazine hit the stands. It featured the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, and the caption read, “Producer. Predator. Pariah.” More than 80 women in the media have accused Weinstein of sexual assault and misconduct, setting in motion similar allegations against high-profile men all over the world. Ravikumar’s objection concerned a very specific aspect of the cover—the usage of the word “pariah.” “There are more than 10 million people living in India who have been and continue to be called as ‘pariah’,” he wrote in his email. “Their descendants live in many countries of…

IN 1420, THE TIMURID RULER and astronomer Ulugh Beg completed construction on the first madrasa in Registan Square, Samarkand—then a bustling trade intersection on the Silk Route—and hoped that it would blossom into a centre for education. Dotted with caravanserai, or roadside inns, the square grew into a space where science was celebrated. Massive darskhonas, or lecture rooms, formed an integral part of the square’s surroundings. The square is one of the locations shown in “New Year in Uzbekistan,” a compilation of photographs by the Pakistani photographer Aun Raza, published as a book in December 2016. Between December 2013 and January 2014, he visited Uzbekistan and documented his time in the capital, Tashkent, as well as cities such as Samarkand, Khiva and Nukus. Raza had early associations with the landlocked…

JASODA Kiran Nagarkar Kiran Nagarkar’s seventh novel is about a young woman, Jasoda, who escapes a drought-stricken land with her children and travels to a city by sea. She experiences hardship and hunger, as well as a range of unexpected circumstances, which force her to commit brutal acts of violence and adopt a new morality in order to survive. FOURTH ESTATE, 272 PAGES, R 599 THE COLLECTED WORKS OF HOMEN BORGOHAIN SHORT STORIES AND NOVELLAS Translated by Pradipta Borgohain Homen Borgohain is one of Assam’s most acclaimed writers. This collection of his novellas and short stories, translated by his son Pradipta, includes Matsyagandha, a tale of inter-caste marriage and drug addiction, and numerous stories about middle-class life in contemporary Assam. Borgohain’s stories reflect upon modern forms of social hypocrisy and…

It was a windy June morning in Ha Lephalo, a tiny highland village overlooking rugged mountains and arid wasteland. Ha Lephalo is 50 kilometres north of Maseru, the capital of Lesotho—a small country landlocked by South Africa. That morning, I met the village chief, a 50-year-old woman named Itumeleng, who introduced herself to me as a biting wind swept across her wrinkled face. Lesotho’s steep, mountainous landscape—the country’s lowest point is at 1,400 metres above sea level—had earned it the epithet “Kingdom in the sky,” she said. This geographical position has been both a blessing and a curse. Although its majestic highlands make the country a popular travel destination, reaching water sources is difficult because of its rugged terrain. The only source of water for Ha Lephalo had historically been…

In mid August 2017, a ten-year-old girl gave birth by caesarean section in a Chandigarh government hospital. Her parents reportedly did not tell her she had had a baby removed from her body, saying instead that the procedure was to remove a stone from her stomach. The girl was allegedly raped by her uncle, repeatedly, over several months, and taken to the hospital after she complained of a stomach ache. There, doctors discovered that she was over 30 weeks pregnant. Her parents filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court to seek approval for an abortion (under Indian law, a woman seeking to terminate a pregnancy that is over 20 weeks old must prove that the pregnancy threatens her life). On 28 July, the petition was heard by a…

8 WRITERS 1. What is the best book you read in the last year? 2. What do think India’s priorities should be in 2018? PANKAJ MISHRA WRITER 1. Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla: A memoir that not only describes the brave struggles of a Dalit family but also radically revises our view of some of the most famous events and personalities of Indian history. 2. After three and half years of Narendra Modi’s rule, Indians have no more important task than to stem the moral and spiritual degradation of their public sphere and to restore to it some civility and sanity. KR MEERA WRITER 1. The best book I read was The Vegetarian by Han Kang. It is a book which would offer a reader many layers of…

Photography Stuart Freedman: The Palaces of Memory–Tales from the Indian Coffee House 17 TO 23 JANUARY AMETHYST, CHENNAI This is an exhibition of 40 photographs by the British photographer Stuart Freedman, taken between 2010 and 2013, of the iconic Indian Coffee Houses across the country. Besides documenting the faded grandeur of these establishments that echo India’s colonial past, the series also encapsulates their unique atmosphere as “palaces of memory,” seemingly frozen in time with their largely unchanged decor. The exhibition is part of Tasveer Gallery’s twelfth season of travelling exhibitions. For more information, write to anishaa@tasveerarts.com Theatre International Theatre Festival of Kerala 20 TO 29 JANUARY KERALA SANGEETHA NATAKA AKADEMI, KERALA The theme for the festival’s tenth edition is “Theatre of the Marginalised—Reclaiming the Margins.” The festival focusses…

“Look, it’s what we’re seeing in the majority of houses,” the architect Melanie De Gyves told Edgardo Jimenez Santiago, a 30-year-old psychologist, as they stood in his house on a hot Sunday morning in mid September, ten days after an earthquake had struck off the coast of southern Mexico. “Everything looks dramatic. The lime plaster, the finishing, everything everywhere has fissures.” The turquoise walls of Santiago’s house showed cracks, and chunks of finishing had fallen off, exposing the brick beneath. All the internal walls, separating three rooms, had partially collapsed. The floor was covered in debris. Santiago’s home in Ixtepec, a small city in the southern state of Oaxaca, was one of thousands damaged by the quake on 7 September, which measured 8.2 in magnitude, making it the strongest the…

IN A PHOTOGRAPH POSTED to Facebook in 2011, an American man named John Morgan stands on the banks of the Ganga in Varanasi, wearing a white dhoti. He smiles, and holds a small bag in his hand. The sun is setting over the river, into which, just moments earlier, he had scattered the ashes of his beloved cat. When the photo was taken, Morgan had been living in India for two years. Several of his friends commented on the photo. “I didn’t know that you are inclined towards Sahajiya Vaishnavism. Traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism sorts that path better,” one wrote. “I’m interested in everything Vedic,” Morgan replied. “I’m not even certain that I’m really a Gaudiya Vaishnava, since I find the Sri Vaishnavas and even Advaita Vedanta fascinating.” A few comments…

IN EARLY 2017 , the West Bengal government held an examination for 6,000 jobs in the Class IV category. This is the lowest category of permanent employment in government service, and reportedly pays R 16,200 a month, by no means a princely sum. Roughly 2.5 million men and women appeared for the exam, many of them holders of graduate and postgraduate degrees. This is not an unusual occurrence. In 2015, 2.3 million people applied for around 400 Class IV jobs in Uttar Pradesh. Of these, 150,000 were university graduates. Across the country, young people in the thousands, desperate for stable employment as well as a life of respect and dignity, have taken to the streets to demand reservations in government jobs for their communities—Marathas in Maharashtra, Kapus in Andhra Pradesh,…