Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2018 i The Caravan

Bharat Namdeo Sonawane bought a bicycle four years ago, looking to speed up his commute. Every day he travelled from his village, near Nashik, to a cement plant five kilometres away, where he worked as a wage labourer. Now, Sonawane is a semi-professional cyclist for most of the year, competing in races with the backing of two coaches. In the off-season—through the summer and monsoon—he still works as a wage labourer. I spoke with Sonawane on 25 March, right after he finished the Mumbai-Pune Cyclothon: a historic race that stretches across the old highway between the two cities. “Every time my wife asks me to get a job, I tell her that if I excel at a race like this, the job will come to me through cycling,” he said,…

On 25 April, the Allahabad High Court granted bail to Kafeel Khan—a doctor widely believed to have been framed in the case of the deaths at a Gorakhpur hospital last August. A substantial amount of reporting suggests that many patients—34 children and 18 adults—died because of a shortage of oxygen. The oxygen provider had cut the supply after the administration repeatedly delayed payments. Instead of questioning officials responsible for procuring the oxygen, the state government has accused doctors of medical negligence. “After observing the presented facts,” the judge Yashwant Verma said, “it is the opinion of this court that there is nothing in the records that can prove Dr Kafeel guilty of negligence on an individual level.” Verma added, “The court should also keep in mind that in the affidavit…

IN THE DAYS BEFORE HIS EXECUTION, a 35-year-old Filipino named José Rizal leaned over a wooden desk and wrote 14 stanzas in neat Castilian handwriting on a paper about the size of his palm. He folded the paper twice and tucked it inside a gas lamp. On his sister Trinidad’s final visit, he whispered to her, using English so that the Spanish guards would not understand, that she should look for something in the lamp after his death. Just a few miles from his prison cell, in the hills by Manila, a revolution was stirring: a movement that he had inspired and then condemned, one that would bring freedom to his country and then tear it apart. Early in the morning on 30 December 1896, Rizal dressed in a fine,…

During a late-summer road trip last September, Stanzin Saldon and Murtaza Agha unexpectedly showed up at their friend’s house, overlooking Manasbal Lake near Srinagar. They could not contact him beforehand because they had abandoned their phones to conceal their exact whereabouts. While Saldon and Agha breakfasted with his parents in the morning, the friend bolted out and ran around the neighbourhood, retrieving the daily paper from the neighbours’ doorsteps. He did not want people to see the front page, which featured his guests’ faces. That month, Saldon and Agha were breaking news. He kept the couple’s secret for a week. Only on their way out the door did they finally reveal to his family that they were not just on a summer holiday. They were on the run from the…

From the beginning, the Ramayana resisted singularity. Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana is the earliest extant version of Rama’s story, written 2,000 years ago, give or take a few centuries. Thousands of handwritten manuscripts of Valmiki’s text survive today, and no two are identical. Like the Mahabharata, its sister epic, Valmiki’s Ramayana was an “open” text, subject to alterations and additions with every new handwritten copy in premodernity. Over time, the thousands of editors substantially changed Valmiki’s epic. Valmiki, or at least some single individual, likely authored the bulk of books two through six of the seven-book text, and most of the first and seventh books were added later. Notably, for Valmiki, Rama was probably more a man than a god. His deification was grafted onto the epic—or at least seriously amplified—in…

EXCERPT / HISTORY DN JHA Over his decorated career as a historian, DN Jha has devoted himself to examining flawed views of India’s ancient and medieval past—many of them produced by colonial thinkers—that sustain the Hindu nationalist project. One of his most notable books, The Myth of the Holy Cow, documents the widespread prevalence of beef-eating in ancient India. Another, Rethinking Hindu Identity, argues that the notion of Hinduism as a religion is a colonial construct. Jha’s new book, Against the Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History, is a collection of essays that, as he writes, “are addressed to the people vulnerable to the balderdash peddled by the Hindu Right.” In this essay, excerpted from the volume, he applies his characteristic combination of polemic and rigour to a greatly…

WORLD IDLI DAY, on 30 March, was instituted by Eniyavan, an idli maker in Tamil Nadu, in 2015. And every year on that date, the same nugget of information circulates on social media as if it were breaking news: The idli is not originally Indian, according to the late KT Achaya. Who better than Achaya, the widely acknowledged guru of Indian food history, to serve as a lodestar on the story behind this now incontestably Indian snack? In his Indian Food: A Historical Companion, published in 1994, Achaya explains that a food resembling the idli was first mentioned in Indian literature in the year 920, when a writer named Shivakotiacharya penned the Vaddaradhane. This is a collection of 19 tales, considered the earliest existing work of narrative prose in Kannada.…

Arts Ruminations on Labour 9 MAY TO 31 JULY BALLYGUNGE PLACE, KOLKATA “Ruminations on Labour” features work by Prabhakar Pachpute, Praneet Soi, Sanchayan Ghosh and the Raqs Media Collective. Bringing together painting, installation and sculpture, the exhibition offers an inquiry into labour in an increasingly globalised world. The artists bring together a wide range of practices that build a dialogue using folk traditions, craft practices, sociopolitical commentary and historical references. For more information, write to joshua@experimenter.in Soulmate 1 TO 4 JUNE INDIA HABITAT CENTRE, DELHI The exhibition will feature 20 contemporary artists, including Sujata Bajaj, Niladri Paul, Bratin Khan and G Subramaniam. The works touch upon various facets of Indian mythology, nature and cultural life. Renu Khera, the director of the National Institute of Fine Arts, has curated…

Altaf Masih, a sanitary worker and resident of Joseph Colony, a neighbourhood in Lahore, sat on a mattress in a single room that houses his entire family. It was an afternoon in July. The walls, painted a warm brown, displayed family portraits and paintings of Jesus. Masih moved his dog to make space for three students from the environmental-activist group Team Awaaz who had just arrived—Zoya Ali, Zameer Ahmed and Anum Qayyum. “The conditions for families living in this colony are extremely challenging,” Ali said. “I am not even sure that is a strong enough word,” she added, pointing to one of Masih’s daughters. “Look at the rashes on their legs.” A predominantly Christian area, Joseph Colony is located in Badami Bagh, an area that derives its name from a…

ON A FRIDAY EVENING in November 2016, a 20-year-old medical student sat behind a mound of papers in a crowded college library, cramming for an upcoming examination on pathology and forensic medicine. The student, in his second year at DY Patil Medical College in Pune, was panicking about the amount that he had left to study. Later that night, he complained to a friend about the formidable syllabus. The friend gave him a small, white pill, insisting that it would help with concentration. He took it on Saturday evening and revised through the night, then took another one on Sunday evening, and studied all of the following night as well. The student managed to make it to the examination hall on time on Monday morning, but blanked out when the…

“ Ek baar hori bolo mon rosona, arey manob dehai goirob koiro na, manob deha maatiro bhando, bhangile hoibe khondo re khondo. ” ONE IS NEVER FAR FROM THE BRAHMAPUTRA when in western Assam. On a subcontinent where rivers are personified as female progeny of the gods, the “son of Brahma” is an exception. The river floods seasonally, unforgiving and capricious in its course. The people closest to him live in perpetual fear of his trajectory, and he occupies a central place in the region’s songs and mythology. In one legend, a woman named Behula accompanies the corpse of her husband, Lakshmindara, on a raft down the Brahmaputra—popular belief in eastern India holds that a person killed by snakebite should be set afloat on the river. The raft…

A VERY OLD MACHINE THE MANY ORIGINS OF CINEMA IN INDIA Sudhir Mahadevan This book explores how nineteenth-century technologies and practices continue to shape Indian cinema in the twenty-first century. Deploying the methodology of media archaeology, archival research and cultural theory, the author examines the history of photography and print media, and practices of piracy and showmanship, to provide an understanding of cinema as a dominant cultural force in India. PERMANENT BLACK, 234 PAGES, R 795 TWILIGHT FALLS ON LIBERALISM Rudrangshu Mukherjee Several political regimes and political leaders across the globe, empowered by popular anti-liberal attitudes, have turned against liberalism. Mukherjee considers the origins of this philosophy and demonstrates that it flourished when Western empires dominated much of the world, although liberal freedoms were denied to colonised peoples. He argues…