Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2018 i The Caravan

Osteoarthritis, which results when the cartilage and bone in the body’s joints wears down from stress, often causes swelling, stiffness, chronic pain and difficulty in walking. The condition is widespread in India; a scientific paper from 2016 estimated that between 22 and 39 percent of the country’s population suffers from it. There is no cure for osteoarthritis, though doctors recommend various treatment regimens, from lifestyle changes to joint-replacement surgeries. A lab in Assam is currently researching what may become a sophisticated new treatment for the condition—a silk-based tissue implant. Biman B Mandal, an associate professor in biosciences and bioengineering at IIT Guwahati, along with Jonathan Knowles, a professor at University College London, have developed a technology to synthesise mats made of silk proteins and bioactive glass fibres, creating a tissue…

The Karnataka assembly election that took place this May was replete with high drama and plot twists. Following a hung assembly in which the Bharatiya Janata Party was the single largest party, but the Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) made it past the halfway mark in a post-election alliance, Karnataka governor Vajubhai Vala was faced with a tough choice regarding whom to invite to form a government. Although the BJP leader BS Yeddyurappa was first sworn in as chief minister, the Supreme Court mandated a floor test for the party to prove its majority in the house through a vote of confidence within 48 hours. With one day left to go for the test, Vala stoked controversy by appointing a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh member and former BJP minister KG Bopaiah…

AS AFTERNOON TURNED to evening on 16 December 1971—shortly after Pakistani forces surrendered to the Indian Army in East Pakistan—Prime Minister Indira Gandhi called a large meeting in the Cabinet Room, in the South Block of the Secretariat Building that housed her offices. Those present included the defence, foreign, finance and home ministers—all the senior members of the cabinet committee on security—as well as their secretaries, the chiefs of all three armed services, the head of the Research and Analysis Wing, and the cabinet secretary. Also in attendance were four of the prime minister’s closest advisers—PN Haksar, her principal secretary, PN Dhar, her secretary, G Parthasarathi, my father, then formally serving as the vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, and myself, her science and technology adviser. Opening the meeting, Gandhi…

ONE DAY ABOUT SEVEN YEARS AGO, I visited one of the infamous photocopy shops near Delhi University’s south campus. I had just enrolled in a master’s course in literature at the university and needed to buy textbooks. The shop sold pirated photocopies of DU’s prescribed readings at about one-tenth the price of the original books, which were out of reach for most students. I remember standing at the shop, flipping through the syllabus. It was clear why the course was called “English literature” and not “literature in English.” There was “Poetry from Chaucer to Milton,” “Eighteenth-century English literature,” “Seventeenth-century English drama” and an entire paper on Shakespeare. By contrast, there was just one compulsory paper on Indian literature, summing up thousands of years of literary output in four short texts.…

On 1 December 2017, the day Nuriye Gulmen was released from prison, she filmed a video from her bed. Amid pillows nearly swallowing her emaciated frame, she thanked her supporters for rallying against her incarceration. Gulmen, a 35-year-old academic, had been on hunger strike for nine months, and had lost half of her body weight. Gulmen was one of around 100,000 public-sector workers—including 5,000 academics—whom the Turkish government had dismissed from their jobs after a military coup was attempted in July 2016. Many of the purged individuals had called for an end to state violence in Turkey’s Kurdish province. Others were critics of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erodgan, and some were followers of Fethullah Gulen, the Muslim cleric whom the government blames for orchestrating the attempted coup. In November 2016,…

Last summer, on a visit to my home city of Bengaluru, I stood waiting for a train at the newly renamed Dr BR Ambedkar Vidhana Soudha metro station. In the background, I could hear gentle twangs of a veena in the style of Carnatic classical music. The contrast between the name of the station and the style of music, which has been the reserve of upper castes for centuries, was quite amusing to me. However, the music is so ubiquitous in the city that I doubt most long-term residents even notice it. To many outsiders, it is a defining marker of Bengaluru’s culture. You could be a Pardhi tribal living in and around the same street corner in Mumbai for the last three generations, but your story would always be…

FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD SAVITRI was unusually quiet on her first visit home after her gauna—a traditional ceremony, common in Uttar Pradesh, marking a bride’s arrival at her in-laws’ house. “Everything is fine, didi,” she insisted when photojournalist Saumya Khandelwal asked about her withdrawn demeanour. “I was seeing this girl, who I had become fond of, change over time. Some part of her had died. And I was never able to see that part again,” Khandelwal, who knew Savitri well by this point, recounted. For young girls in Shravasti, a district in Uttar Pradesh near the Nepal border, childhood is fleeting. They are married off early, shifting homes and families at ages as young as eight years old. Families plan in advance for the girls’ move to their husbands’ homes, but the shift…

13 YEARS A NAXALITE’S PRISON DIARY Ramachandra Singh Translated from Hindi by Madhu Singh In September 1970, 20-year-old Ramchandra Singh, who later joined the Communist Party of India, entered the Hardoi District Jail in Uttar Pradesh as a Naxalite undertrial. He later received a life sentence.. Despite the odds being stacked against him, Singh used his sense of humour, empathy and gift for writing to survive. Singh’s diary, which was smuggled out by friends, offers an intimate account of his life in the prison. NAVAYANA, 207 PAGES, R 395 BEYOND DHARMA DISSENT IN THE ANCIENT INDIAN SCIENCES OF SEX AND POLITICS Wendy Doniger Dharma, artha and kama, that is, religion, politics and pleasure, are each held to be an essential requirement of a fulfilling life according to ancient Hindu philosophy,…

The battle for the 2019 elections today seems more open than expected. Three distinct and possible outcomes include the return of Narendra Modi as the prime minister of a Bharatiya Janata Party-led government that commands a majority; a National Democratic Alliance not led by Modi that manages to secure a majority; or a government comprising parties currently in opposition where the Congress plays a significant role. Key to any of these scenarios is how the BJP fares in Uttar Pradesh, where it won 71 of the 80 seats in 2014. With the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party and the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party bringing together their respective Dalit and Yadav-Muslim support bases, this number is set to decline. The questions that remain are by how much, and what the BJP can…

{ONE} IT WAS COMMON for Jayanta Kumar Das to find bundles of documents on the doorstep of his house in Puri, Odisha. Having spent two decades in the Indian Air Force, Das retired as a sergeant, in 2001, aged 39. He started brokering land deals, which exposed him to a lot of corruption. When the Right to Information Act was passed, in 2005, Das felt enabled. At the turn of the decade, he was scratching away at what came to be called the Odisha chit-fund scam. His name began appearing in the press as the scandal surfaced. “So people know me,” Das told me recently. “And because they know that I work honestly, they send me information.” Sometimes his dog chewed documents up before he could open the door to…

MAXIM GORKY, one of Soviet Russia’s most influential writers, and a champion of the “socialist realist” school of art, delivered a rousing speech from the stage of the Soviet Writers’ Congress in Moscow in August 1934, a couple of years before his death. His subject was the future of Russian literature and Europe’s degenerate past. European writers—from Shakespeare to Fielding, Molière to Maupassant—had a history, Gorky said, of pandering to the bourgeoisie. They made loving portraits of feudal lords, knights and monarchs, and glamourised “rogues, thieves, assassins and agents of the criminal police” in their books. Rather than grappling with real problems of the real world, these writers preferred shutting themselves “in the solitude of their soul” to pursue a kind of anarchic individualism. In Gorky’s analysis, Russian bourgeois literature…

Theatre Nona 28 JULY TATA THEATRE, MUMBAI Nona, directed by the prominent Malayalam playwright Jino Joseph, is set in rural India. The play is a social and political satire dealing with the themes of caste and nationalism. The protagonist Govindan’s son creates a map of India with redrawn boundaries that causes chaos in his peaceful village. For further details, contact dpant@ncpamumbai.com Arts New Configurations  27 APRIL TO 31 JULY KIRAN NADAR MUSEUM OF ART, NEW DELHI This exhibition will present select works from the museum’s permanent collection. It will highlight artists such as A Ramachandran, Aisha Khalid, Jamini Roy and FN Souza, among others. The exhibition is in memorial of the eminent artist Ram Kumar, who passed away recently. For further details, contact annu.dey@flint-culture.com Theatre Detective…