Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i The Caravan

In the winter of 1953, the Indian prime minister received an unusual letter, from a five-year-old boy. “Dear Mr Nehru,” it began. “Here in Gran-by, a small town in Canada, we have a lovely zoo, but we have no elephant.” Peter Marmorek had heard from his father that Jawaharlal Nehru had “lots of elephants and could probably dig up one for us.” Having understood the need to “dig up” quite literally, the child added, “I never knew that elephants lived underground, [but] I hope you can send us one.” It was an odd letter to merit the attention of a prime minister involved in the whirl of postcolonial nation-building. But it was not altogether surprising to government officials. Since Independence, the Indian government had cultivated an international reputation for generosity…

Dalli–Rajhara is a small town in the Balod district of Chhattisgarh, home to iron-ore mines that feed the Bhilai steel plant. Situated in the town is the Shaheed hospital, famous for being run for, and by, the mine workers. While it provides many services—such as internal medicine, surgery and psychiatry—the mainstay of the hospital is its department of obstetrics and gynaecology. Dr Saibal Jana, one of the founders, has been carrying out deliveries since the hospital was established in 1983. Pregnant women travel as far as a hundred kilometres in the hope of a safe delivery at the hospital. The Shaheed hospital was initially financed by mine workers. They were inspired by Shankar Guha Niyogi, who founded the Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh, a trade union for miners, in 1977. The…

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It was a week before Eid, and the streets of Mari Abad were lit up. Even though it was midnight, women and children were out shopping for clothes, haggling with shopkeepers for earrings or firmly telling the tailor to have their clothes ready two days before Eid. Standing there, it was hard to tell that the people who live there are not entirely free. Mari Abad is a small neighbourhood of Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province in Pakistan. Over the past two decades, this neighbourhood of around five thousand houses has come to be known as a Hazara area. The city’s military cantonment lies on one side of Mari Abad, with Quetta’s signature dark, barren mountains on the other. Rangers from Pakistan’s frontier corps check every car that enters…

IN AN ESSAY on Virginia Woolf’s critical writings, James Wood discusses how Woolf dealt with the competition that she faced from the subject matter at hand: other people’s books. This competition, combined with Woolf’s talent as a writer, gave the language of her criticism a metaphorical—or literary rather than explanatory—quality not different from that which imbues her own fiction. “A flurry of trapped loyalties,” as Wood calls it, drives this tone of intimacy, where the usually distant language of criticism is perforated with the linguistic finesse and play of the primary material, both competing with it and “speaking to fiction in its own accent.” Indian commentaries on the classical epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana, tend to use a comparable critical language, one that combines close assessment of the epic with a…

Art Provisions 16 JANUARY TO 9 MARCH PROJECT 88, MUMBAI In their latest exhibition, Raqs Media Collective premiers its recent video travelogue, “Provisions for Everybody,” which intends to ask pertinent questions based on George Orwell’s well-known aphorism, “The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody.” The exhibition also features a new body of work, comprising photos, texts and objects. For further information write to exhibitions@project88.in . Creative Disruptionists 11 TO 14 MARCH ITC MAURYA HOTEL, DELHI The exhibition features works by members of the celebrated Bombay Progressive Artists Group, including FN Souza, MF Husain, SH Raza, Ram Kumar and Thota Vaikuntam. The artist Krishen Khanna’s work “The Great Progression of Life” is displayed on the dome ceiling of the Maurya…

In 2002, the Israeli political scientist Sammy Smooha published an article titled “The Model of Ethnic Democracy: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State,” in the journal Nations and Nationalism. Smooha defined ethnic democracy based on a broad but precise set of criteria. It is, first, the product of ethnic nationalism, a majoritarian ideology that implies a strong sense of belonging and often one of superiority. This identity is also premised on the rejection of minorities, generally perceived as threats to the survival and integrity of the ethnic nation. According to Smooha, although many countries have gone down the road of ethnic democracy, the archetype of this political system remains Israel—a state that endeavours to combine an ethnic Jewish identity and a parliamentary system drawing its inspiration from Western Europe.…

BY THE LATE 1980 S, Dhirubhai Ambani wanted a newspaper. In 1986, the Indian Express had published a series of articles alleging that Reliance Industries had, among much else, manipulated its own share price, evaded duties and violated the limits of its licence for producing polyester feedstock—all while government officials looked the other way or made decisions that seemed customised to the corporation’s needs. The government responded with scrutiny and action that subtracted from Reliance’s bottom line, and Dhirubhai scrambled to limit his losses. A shift in the political tide and some deft manoeuvring soon brought him close to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and turned the might of the government against the Indian Express instead. But, by then, other outlets had also started publishing uncomfortable facts about Reliance’s doings. In…

MAJORITARIAN STATE HOW HINDU NATIONALISM IS CHANGING INDIA Angana P Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds) This book of essays examines the growth of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India, focussing on the tenure of the current BJP government, which came to power in 2014. The authors argue that the ruling party’s agenda of creating a majoritarian state has permeated every sphere of public life, including civil society, the media and the judiciary, and this has resulted in violence based on caste, gender and religion, and a clampdown on dissent. HURST, 472 PAGES, £45 THE PRINCE Samhita Arni The author’s most recent novel is a reinterpretation of the Silappadikaram, the first known Tamil epic poem, about a woman who has to battle against injustice, and unleashes her wrath to…