Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2018 i The Caravan

 On a humid April evening at the Symbiosis International University’s girls’ hostel in Pune, most of the students stepped out for a stroll. Arifa Orfan, a 23-year-old computer applications student from Ghor in Afghanistan, picked up her laptop and walked to a nearby cafe. Her classmate, Habiba Hussaini, from Ghazni in Aghanistan, accompanied her. When I entered the café, the women were already seated with their laptops and books open next to them. They looked hassled. The internet at the cafe was acting up. During their time in Pune, two women from Afghanistan set up “Hour of Computer,” an online education project with modules on programming, coding and web development. We had met so that they could show me their project, “Hour of Computer,” which comprises modules on programming and…

A child born in Uttar Pradesh is ten times more likely to die in her first year than a child born in Kerala. As far as the infant mortality rate is concerned, the two states are as far apart as the United States and South Sudan. The life expectancy in Uttar Pradesh is also a good ten years lower than that in Kerala. Yet, in October last year, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Adityanath, went to Kerala and said that the state must take lessons from Uttar Pradesh on providing healthcare and running hospitals. The statement was particularly baffling considering that just a few months earlier 30 children had died in a government hospital in Gorakhpur due to the administration’s failure maintain a supply of oxygen. As absurd as…

IT WAS A BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPH of a crowded street, centred on a man glancing backwards into the camera. His face sat in the crosshairs of a computer-generated box populated with a mobile number, a date of birth, an address and other personal information. Superimposed above this was a 12-digit number, with four digits redacted: a representation of an Aadhaar number, the biometrics-backed digital identifier that the government has looked to impose on every resident of India. A few other faces in the crowd were framed by boxes crowned with Aadhaar numbers too. Above the image were a few lines of text, one of them reading, “Welcome aboard @ On_grid team.” The text and image were part of a tweet by India Stack in February 2017, announcing that OnGrid had joined…

A TIGER STARES BACK into the lens of the camera, his eyes heavy with fear and helplessness. This portrait of the caged animal, captured in Valparai, Tamil Nadu, is a departure from the standard visualisation of tigers as threatening. It evokes the battle—one that is raging in India at the moment—between people and tigers. A 39-year-old visual storyteller from south India, Senthil Kumaran began his work on tigers in 2012, visiting tiger reserves across India, including Anamalai, Sundarbans, Madhumalai, Bandipur, Tadoba, Kalakad and Periyar. In his childhood dreams, he said, he saw tigers as majestic animals. This perception was quashed when he witnessed hundreds of people viciously attacking a tiger that had entered a village. The incident compelled him to work on the hostile relationship between humans and wildlife—and its…

Arts Glimpses of India 17 TO 27 MAY BIKANER HOUSE, NEW DELHI This exhibition by the French artist Michel Testard displays paintings of forts, havelis and ruins, as well as urban India’s people, its bustling streets and crumbling buildings. To these, Testard adds travel sketches on the landscapes of rural India. The exhibition offers a unique perspective on Indian subjects and themes from the viewpoint of an outside observer, while also offering an understanding of the fascination that India exerts on the Western imagination. For more information, write to ujjala.gupta@vty.co.in Theatre Dhumrapaan 10 TO 13 MAY ODDBIRD THEATRE, DELHI Directed by Akarsh Khurana, Dhumrapaan is a comedy about coping with the proverbial rat race and the toll it takes on health, particularly the throat and lungs. It is…

It did not take long to start talking about Brexit with the Friday lunchtime crowd at Café Retro in the small town of Newry in Northern Ireland. Alongside the enduring disbelief and disappointment with the 2016 referendum’s result, in which contrary to England and Wales, Northern Ireland, along with Scotland, voted to remain in the European Union, some had worries of a more personal nature. Among those gathered was a French woman who had lived in Newry for over thirty years and had four children with her partner, who was from the town. She was unimpressed with the UK government’s handling of the Brexit negotiations so far and did not know what her status would be after Brexit, since she and her partner were not married. “The British can be…

In a scene mid-way through the movie October, the lead character, Dan, played by Varun Dhawan, is chided by his friends for wasting his time looking after a dying girl he barely knows. What’s the point, they argue. “Do you guys only do something if there’s a point?” he asks. The point, historically, of the love-story plot in Hindi cinema has been about the hero initiating romance, often in regressive ways, with a goal towards establishing a heterosexual upper-caste couple that either lives happily ever after or sometimes dies together when unable to do so. Bollywood movies abound with declarations of love, but the emotional labour and financial stresses that may burden a couple are usually invisible. In October, a film about a hotel-management student who falls in love with…

AT THE OUTSET OF Why I Am a Hindu, the politician and writer Shashi Tharoor—a member of the Nair castes, and so a Shudra—writes that the book is in large part a response to the “intolerant and often violent forms of Hindutva that began to impose themselves on the public consciousness of Indians in the 1980s.” I am also a Shudra, part of what are now officially called the Other Backward Classes, and I wrote my book Why I Am Not a Hindu in response to the rise of Hindutva as well. My book was published in 1996, in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the struggle over the Mandal reservations. It was widely opposed by Brahminical forces, including Hindutva groups, and earned me many threats.…

On 2 April, thousands of Dalits across the country took to the streets to protest the dilution of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act by a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court, and declared a nationwide bandh. Through the day protestors faced aggression from the police and Hindutva goons, resulting in the deaths of ten Dalits. The next morning’s headlines, however, seemed to suggest that it was Dal-its who had done the killing. “Nine killed as angry Dalits take to the streets, Madhya Pradesh most affected” declared the Indian Express. The Pioneer titled a story, “Dalit rage singes India; 8 killed.” Many were more concerned with the inconvenience caused by the bandh than the factors that led to it. By and large, the protest saw no support…

This year, The Caravan hosted the second annual edition of The Bridge: Conversations on Gender Empowerment, at the Shangri La hotel in Delhi. The event featured prominent figures from a variety of professional fields. The topic ranged from women’s rights, everyday assumptions about gender and how to best promote equality. Speakers, including Swara Bhaskar, Gurmehar Kaur, Shehla Rashid, Naina Lal Kidwai, Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, Brinda Karat, Mantasha Binti Rashid, Sumukhi Suresh, Ananya Birla and Shailaja Chandra, talked about a variety of topics, such as Bollywood’s representation problem, the dearth of women in politics and how to make it easier to combat sexual harassment and report assault. Invariably, the conversations were political. Swara Bhaskar criticised the ruling party for making it difficult for activists to engage in dissent, while Renuka Chowdhury…

On 15 July 2016, Fouzia Azeem, better known as Qandeel Baloch, was found murdered in her parents’ home in Multan, in the Punjab province of Pakistan. Her brother, Waseem, confessed to drugging and then strangling her, and said that she had sullied the family’s honour. Such “honour killings” are prevalent in Pakistan, where they are a brutal method to punish behaviour that is deemed socially unacceptable. Born to an underprivileged family, Qandeel shot to fame on social media after her audition for Pakistan Idol went viral on the internet. Her posts and appearances on television celebrated a playful, risqué sexuality. This brought her love and admiration as well as intense vitriol. Over time, she became a frequent commentator on the position of women in Pakistani society. A few weeks before…

THE FREE VOICE ON DEMOCRACY, CULTURE AND THE NATION Ravish Kumar Translated from the Hindi by Chitra Padmanabhan, Anurag Basnet and Ravi Singh The journalist Ravish Kumar’s new book is an examination of the shrinking spaces—in mainstream and social media—for people to speak out. He investigates threats to free expression, including censorship and the fear of institutional, physical and psychological violence. The book contemplates how these threats are deployed to replace debate, dialogue and social harmony with an atmosphere of intolerance and hatred. SPEAKING TIGER, 176 PAGES, R 499 A LIFE MISSPENT Suryakant Tripathi Nirala Translated from the Hindi by Satti Khanna In this memoir originally published in 1939, Nirala, India’s first modern Hindi poet, recounts the story of being married off at 16 years and sent to his in-laws’…

ON 28 MAY 1981 , Peter Benenson, the British founder of the human-rights organisation Amnesty International, celebrated the group’s twentieth anniversary by lighting a candle. It was the same candle he first lit at the birth of the organisation two decades earlier on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields, in London. In Portugal in 1961, under the authoritarian regime of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, two students were arrested and imprisoned for seven years for making a toast to liberty in a public restaurant. Benenson was so angered by the arrests he decided to do something about it. His solution was to urge people to inundate the Portuguese government with letters of protest. Rather than limit this action to just one particular case, Benenson wanted to draw attention to political prisoners the…