Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2018 i The Caravan

Taki in West Bengal is a town of green paddies and greener ponds on the banks of the Ichamati river separating India and Bangladesh. Like the rest of the state, it sees enthusiastic Durga Puja celebrations every year. The streets are lit up in canopies of fairy lights, Bengali songs and Bollywood hits blare from loudspeakers, and pandals, or marquees, compete for who carries the tallest, glossiest pratimas— idols—of the goddess Durga. But what distinguishes Taki from other border towns is a particular tradition on the final day of the Puja. As its residents gear up for the immersion of idols, so do its counterparts in Satkhira, a district across the border in Bangladesh. The inhabitants of both towns place the pratimas in their respective boats and sail up to…

Around mid March last year, a group of roughly 40 farmers from Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu began a protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. The protest was part of a larger agitation in the state where farmers had been demanding a waiver of all debts from nationalised banks, a drought-relief package of R 40,000 crore, the inter-linking of Tamil Nadu’s rivers and the setting up of a water-management board for the Kaveri. The farmers decided to come to Delhi to attract the attention of the national media and thus tailored their protests for its consumption. They came up with innovative, even provocative, ways to protest: they held rats and snakes between their teeth, wore a garland of skulls which they claimed belonged to farmers who had committed suicide, threatened to consume…

JOSEPH CONRAD DIED IN 1924 , but in her bold and winning book on the writer Maya Jasanoff sees him as a prophetic “embodiment” of today’s globalised world, whispering through his characters “in the ears of new generations of anti-globalization protesters and champions of free trade, liberal interventionists and radical terrorists, social justice activists and xenophobic nativists.” He didn’t just see through the pieties of his own imperial age; he espied the contours of our own. Conrad, Jasanoff says, “was one of us: a citizen of a global world.” Jasanoff is one of the smartest and coolest-headed members of a newer generation of historians of empire: sensitive to complexities, sceptical of brute and overly ideological assessments, and given to probing Britain’s imperial history through new, oblique angles, so as to…

Arts Julus and Other Stories 13 MARCH TO 7 APRIL CHEMOULD PRESCOTT ROAD, MUMBAI Julus and Other Stories is a multimedia project by Shakuntala Kulkarni consisting of synchronised videos, chalk drawings on board, prints of wiped-off chalk drawings and cane objects. The film Julus is a declaration of the vision that anyone can have equal rights and freedom as individuals, and as part of a community as a whole. The artist also addresses her concern about the violation of the female body in public and private spaces. For more information, write to janhavishirwadkar@gallerychemould.com Theatre Playback Theatre 31 MARCH LAHE-LAHE, INDIRANAGAR, BENGALURU Playback Theatre is an exercise in breaking the third wall. A space is constructed to permit interaction between the audience and the actors. The story of the…

On the main street in Mugeuk, a mountainous village around 90 minutes from Seoul, there are two markets a few hundred metres apart. The older of the two, which has been around for over 100 years, is a traditional bazaar, a high-ceilinged labyrinth of stalls and restaurants selling Korean dishes and produce from nearby farms. It was the centre of village life for decades, but nowadays it is mostly quiet, open only one out of every five days. Down the street is Asia Mart, a store in operation for the last 15 years, which caters primarily to the area’s growing population of migrant workers. Inside, there is a table with fruits from Southeast Asia, packets of instant Indian curry, shelves of Chinese grain liquor and canned fish with Russian language…

One of the most arresting objects on display at the 5000 Years of Science and Innovation exhibition, on until the end of March at the Science Museum in London as part of its “Illuminating India” programme, is the index to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, published in 1860. “No map in the world at that time,” an accompanying signboard reads, “could rival it for scale, detail and accuracy.” Hundreds of criss-crossing red and blue lines form a tight network of triangles within the index—each, the signboard says, “the sum of hundreds of distance and angle measurements.” Another signboard nearby displays a small lithograph of men, all Indian, lugging around surveying equipment. The caption reads, “Thousands of British soldiers and Indian men lost their lives in completing the 70-year project.”…

ON A SUNDAY MORNING LAST OCTOBER, in a cramped office overlooking Kathmandu Durbar Square—an iconic plaza surrounding Nepal’s old royal palace—a small group of volunteers was frantically preparing for a public exhibition to be held that afternoon. The subject of the event was the reconstruction of Kasthamandap, a giant pagoda-like building that gave Kathmandu its name, and which, for more than a thousand years—until it collapsed in an earthquake in 2015—had been a public fixture, sheltering ascetics, weary traders, and on occasion, men exiled from their homes for the night by their irate wives. The office had the chaotic air of a crafts fair. People rushed around wielding scissors, stepping over paper scraps, glue-bottle caps and chunks of styrofoam. At one end, nine volunteers pieced together a 3D paper-model of…

IN THE FALL OF 2017 , the French government launched “Bonjour India,” an ambitious programme of cultural diplomacy in India, promising to tell Indians “the story of how and when we met.” Over the past winter, it brought over a hundred events to more than thirty cities across India, including film screenings in Kolkata, a regatta in Pondicherry and an automotive show in Chennai. Yet one would hardly know from the programme’s boat races and book discussions that the story of how France and India met is a rich and troubled tale. For many centuries, India was a French preoccupation, a source of precious commodities, vital alliances, literary inspiration and spiritual insight. Fortunes were sought, and sometimes made, by bringing the dazzling cotton cloth of early-modern India (known in French…

On 10 February, Sri Lanka held elections for 341 local government institutions. The polls were the freest and the most peaceful in living memory. The newly established Election Commission managed the polling process. The police implemented the law with a level of impartiality unfamiliar to Sri Lankans. No one died and there were no major outbreaks of violence, before, during or after the voting. This, too, was unprecedented for the country. In many ways, this should have been a moment of triumph for the unity government of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. The United National Party, or UNP, and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, or SLFP, assumed office with Sirisena at its helm in August 2015, after Sirisena defeated the then president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s attempt to win…

KAYUMBA JOHN USED TO SIT IN HIS OFFICE by the shore of Lake Victoria, in Kasensero, Uganda, and watch boats arriving at dawn. While the crews onboard sold Nile perch—a freshwater fish found in the Nile river and its tributaries—fishmongers packed them into refrigerators in trucks bound for Kampala. “When you look in the country, there is no other profitable activity like fishing,” Kayumba, the former chairman of the local beach management unit, told me, with a hint of pride in his voice, as we sat in his office in April 2015. “It is us fishermen who have educated our children in good schools, alongside those politicians and well-off people,” he added. Lake Victoria, the largest body of freshwater in Africa, surrounds Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, and it affects lives…

DREAMERS HOW YOUNG INDIANS ARE CHANGING THEIR WORLD Snigdha Poonam Half of India’s population is below the age of 25. In this book of profiles, mainly of young men from small towns, the journalist Snigdha Poonam notes that the majority of India’s youth are uneducated, unemployed or unemployable. Their stories are a combination of big dreams and dim horizons, with only a few succeeding in India’s competitive labour market. Many are pushed to seeking redressal though a politics of anger and vengeance. PENGUIN VIKING, 256 PAGES, R 599 MOTHER EARTH, SISTER SEED TRAVELS THROUGH INDIA’S FARMLANDS Lathika George Lathika George, an organic gardener and author of cookbooks, travelled across rural India—including Goa, Kerala, Karnataka and Maharashtra—to collect stories about how food is produced. She writes about seasonal fruits, sustainable fishing,…