Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2018 i The Caravan

On a windy afternoon in July, Moolchand walked into Kibber, a village in the Spiti Valley in northeastern Himachal Pradesh, following closely at the heels of a foreign tourist. “Moolchand ji,” a passerby called out. “Izzat toh deni chahiye”—you should show some respect. A group of people, waiting for the daily bus out of Kibber, laughed. Moolchand, a friendly and trusting dog, is regarded with affection by tourists and tolerated by villagers, even when he wanders near the sheep pens. But the treatment he receives is rare. In this corner of the Himalayas, dogs are entangled in a difficult conflict with locals. Spiti has long been a pastoral economy, and it depends on livestock—sheep, goats, horses, yak, donkeys and dzo—to provide resources such as meat, manure and wool. A study…

On 7 December 2017, Karnataka’s chief minister, the Congress leader Siddaramaiah, addressed an event in the Uttara Kannada district marking the inauguration of several public-works programmes by the state government. “They accuse us of being anti-Hindu. Are we not Hindus?” he asked the audience. “My name is Siddarama. My name too has bhagwan Ram’s name. We are the devotees of Lord Rama and Hanuman. … The real Hindu is one who loves all religions. You judge who the real Hindus are. Us or BJP leaders?” Then, the minister for public works in Siddaramaiah’s government, HC Mahadevappa, took the stage and also declared his allegiance to Hinduism. And soon after, the medium- and large-scale industries minister, RV Deshpande, informed the audience that he too was a devout Hindu. “By birth, I…

THERE IS A PHOTOGRAPH IN ARKO DATTO’S SERIES in which a large, almost ten-foot-tall loudspeaker dominates the frame, dwarfing a man behind it and shielding him from view. The peculiar aspect of this image is its setting, a suburban area with a river in the background: an unlikely place to stumble upon a bulky piece of equipment. Despite its incompatibility with the landscape, the loudspeaker’s wires blend in with its surroundings and other objects in the frame, including a discarded plastic bag, plate and twigs. The presence of improbable man-made objects in an unassuming, suburban landscape occurs repeatedly in Pik-Nik, Arko Datto’s series of images, which examines picnicking as a cultural practice in regions across eastern India, including Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal. Datto, a photographer based out of Kolkata,…

Mohammad Habib Mir looked pensive as he walked towards his saffron field on a cold day in November. Fifty years ago, the 67-year-old farmer was accustomed to collecting between 20 and 40 kilograms of saffron from each kanal—around 4,500 square feet—in large baskets made from willow twigs. Nowadays, he is lucky if he manages to collect around two kilograms, and he only needs a small bag. Mir, who was brought up in Pampore, a town around 13 kilometres from Srinagar, took up saffron cultivation full-time to support his family after his father’s death in 1967. “My grandfather used to tell me, the deeper you dig, the land will become more viable for sowing, and you will produce more,” he said, referring to the labour-intensive nature of saffron production. Since farmers…

The roads of the capital are shrouded in a haze. The toxicity of the air is at many times the permitted level by global standards. International flights are being cancelled. Visiting cricket teams refuse to play on our fields. Schools are often closed. Simply breathing in Delhi is now equivalent to smoking around 40 cigarettes a day. We act as if we had not expected this occurrence and cannot understand how to solve it. We purchase face masks and air purifiers and grumble about the air. We wait for it to pass. But it never passes, because the air is toxic all year round. Only for a very short period, in the rainy season, does the amount of particulate matter dip to permissible levels. As a father, I am deeply…

THE RIDES AT LAHORE’S famous Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park open for business at around 5 pm. Hundreds of people mill around the sprawling 66-acre park all day, and the most enthusiastic of them—the children—wait for ride operators to take up their positions in small cabins, from where they run a giant Ferris wheel, merry-go-rounds and fancy swirling teacups. The park is open to people from all backgrounds, but on Easter Sunday of 2016, a particularly large number of the park’s estimated 30,000 visitors were Christians. At around 6.25 pm, most of the visitors were packed into the fairground area near Gate 5, where dozens of children had queued in front of two popular rides. Just then, between the two rides and Gate 5, a suicide bomber detonated ten kilograms of explosives packed…

THE SCENE TAKES PLACE IN RAJASTHAN, sometime in the 1970s. A photographer passing through the desert comes upon a well. From a distance it appears romantic, the centre of rural life. But up close he finds the well nearly dry, which is a problem for the local peasants, who have no other source of water. They have other problems too, such as finding food. A drought seems to have ruined their annual crop. And their livestock, too expensive to feed, has been sent away. “I have eaten only a bit of gruel today,” a peasant tells the photographer. Raghubir Singh recalls this episode in the introduction to his fourth photo-book Rajasthan, India’s Enchanted Land (1981). He offers the following by way of conclusion: Peasants, Singh argues, “stand out” because of…

Arts Turn of the Tide 12 TO 24 FEBRUARY KHOJ INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS’ ASSOCIATION, DELHI Turn of the Tide is an exploration of the various temperaments of our times, with a new generation of artists making sense of what constitutes the “now.” In conversation with each other, they continue to expand the boundaries of contemporary art. Featuring 20 artists across mediums and ideas, the exhibition includes works by Abir Karmakar, Prabhakar Pachpute, Pallavi Paul and Sahil Naik. For more information, write to mario@khojworkshop.org Festival Urur Olcott Kuppam Vizha 10 TO 11 FEBRUARY URUR OLCOTT KUPPAM, CHENNAI The Urur Olcott Kuppam Vizha is a joint initiative of the fisherfolk of Urur Olcott Kuppam and Chennai residents. It attempts to liberate the arts from their respective ghettoes, and unify them by…

Miroslav Brož, holding a can of Krušovice beer, greeted me and Eli Naegele, a Czech reporter, one April afternoon last year. We had just arrived at Předlice, a neighbourhood 15 minutes by bus from the desolate centre of Ústí nad Labem, a visibly poor industrial town near the Czech-German border. Gesturing at the graffiti, grime and abandoned buildings that bordered the open field in front of us, Brož, the 38-year-old president of Konexe, a Prague-based Roma-rights NGO, described Předlice and its dilapidated housing as “the worst Roma ghetto in the country.” The conditions under which the Roma or Romani—a traditionally itinerant group, comprising between 10 and 12 million people in Europe—live in the Czech Republic are particularly dire. According to a survey conducted in 2015 by the European Commission, respondents…

“MY NAME IS JAGMEET SINGH, a member of provincial parliament for Bramalea-Gore-Malton. I want to thank all the organisers and all the volunteers who made this event possible.” It was December 2013, and Jagmeet Singh was addressing an award ceremony taking place in Punjab, hosted by the Social Educational Welfare Association, in association with International Fateh Academy. A legislator in Ontario—Canada’s largest province—Jagmeet was receiving SEWA’s “Sikh of the Year” award, given to a Sikh who has “overcome challenges to restore the honour and pride of Sikhism and to spread its fragrance in the entire world.” He made it clear why he was, quite literally, an attractive choice. “The largest daily newspaper in Canada, the Toronto Star, recognised me as one of 2012’s top 12 people or 12 personalities for…

FIRE AND FURY INSIDE THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE Michael Wolff The journalist Michael Wolff had unprecedented access to the White House after Donald Trump became the president of the United States of America, and was witness to many private conversations and meetings between White House staff as well as members of Trump’s family. In this book, Wolff reveals shocking stories about chaos and mismanagement in the Oval Office, particularly the conflict between Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon and senior advisor Jared Kushner, and tensions among other members of Trump’s family. HACHETTE, 336 PAGES, R 699 THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM WOMEN DRAW THEIR WORLD Spring Collective This book brings together the work of 16 feminist comic artists from India and Germany and their views on identity, power, family, sex, their…

ON 11 FEBRUARY 1916 , while on her way to deliver a lecture on atheism in New York City, a 46-year-old woman named Emma Goldman was arrested on charges of obscenity for lecturing on and dispensing information related to birth control. She was accused of violating the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it a federal offence for anyone, including doctors, to distribute information about contraception. Born to a Jewish family in Russia in 1869, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885 and worked in New York as a nurse and midwife for 25 years. She soon realised that birth control would be crucial in the struggle for women to achieve economic and social equality, and she became an advocate for women’s reproductive rights. Goldman—who was also known as…