Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2020 i The Caravan

“We felt strange and insecure in a society where religious animosity had reached unmanageable proportions.” Sushil Srivastava, a professor of medieval and modern history at Allahabad University, wrote these words in the preface to his 1990 book, The Disputed Mosque: A Historical Inquiry, an account of the nineteenth-century origins of the communal dispute that would culminate in the destruction by a Hindu mob of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, on 6 December 1992. When I met Srivastava, shortly before his death earlier this year, he was living those words, feeling strange and insecure in a society governed by those forces of religious animosity. His professional career had been derailed in the years since he wrote the book, and he had been threatened with violence. His book itself, and the history…

Everybody knows about the writer’s block but few seem to be aware about the reader’s block. Well, it is that period when one cannot read books. You seem to lose all interest even in the most gripping novels and it has had been more than a year and a half since I had touched a single book beyond my course books. Leisure reading seemed a luxury and I did not even have the time to properly sleep. Stacks of pending assignments, tons of tests and to top it all the incomplete syllabus. My reading habit had somehow died down the lane. There was no more excitement of buying new books from the book fair. The unread books were dusting away in the bookshelf. And then one day a friend announced…

The sustained and largely leaderless resistance by citizens, mostly youth, against political compromises made by legislators in Hong Kong, has the international community transfixed. Hong Kong erupted in large-scale protests in June 2019, and there are no signs yet of them slowing down. The immediate trigger was a proposed change to extradition laws, but the demands of the protestors over the past seven months have grown wider, presenting foundational challenges to the political life of the territory. Hong Kong was a colony of the British Empire until 1997, when it was returned to China after 155 years. But the retrocession took place under special conditions. The former colony was reconstituted as a special administrative region and was granted special privileges, including a separate legal and economic system. These privileges are…

LAST YEAR, during what locals were touting as the coldest winter in 12 years, I made a visit to Srinagar. Despite it being the tail end of chillai kalan—the period from late December to the end of January, the coldest and harshest part of the season—the city received a fresh fall of snow. Winter in Kashmir has three stages. Chillai kalan gives way to chillai khurd and eventually to chillai bache—bache means “little child”—which is gentler than the previous two and gives way to spring. As a first-time visitor to Kashmir, I was told by Kashmiri friends that my trip would be incomplete without a foray, even a short one, to Gulmarg—to experience it in peak winter as much as to see the markers of militarisation along the route there…

Festival Reth Festival 29 JANUARY TO 2 FEBRUARY NARAYAN NIWAS PALACE AND NACHANA HAVELI, JAISALMER Curated by Laila Vaziralli and Dipankar Jojo Chaki, this residential festival for creators will feature workshops on sustainable printmaking, sand animation, folk instruments and Mughal miniature painting, as well as musical performances. For more information, write to ujjalab@gmail.com Theatre Locha Gotcha 1 JANUARY PRITHVI THEATRE, MUMBAI Directed by Manav Pande, Locha Gotcha is a play that follows the journey of an intelligent lower-middle-class boy. His reality gets a science-fiction twist when he takes over two aliens. For more information, write to vandana@mindworkz.in Art India Art Fair 30 JANUARY TO 2 FEBRUARY NSIC GROUNDS, DELHI The twelfth edition of the India Art Fair features work by Indian and international artists, with over seventy-five exhibitors spanning 20…

On a July night in Bengaluru, I sat down at a local microbrewery with Walter Hakala, the director of Asian studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Over beer, he told me about his latest project: a study of the Deccan region’s Urdu inscriptions. He explained his findings, observations and spoke of the different far-flung corners of the Deccan his research had taken him to. The story of one inscription in particular—in northern Karnataka—sparked off a quest of my own. Once one of the subcontinent’s most politically and culturally important cities, Bijapur is now a small town, peripheral to the centre of regional power, located over five hundred kilometres away from the state capital. It is home to a host of historically and architecturally significant mosques, palaces,…

1. Twin Beds 2. The Story of my Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi 3. Godan by Premchand 4. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas 5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte 6. Ikigai 7. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 8. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini 9. Hamlet by William Shakespeare 10. Alchemist by Paulo Coelho 11. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery 12. The Teachings of Swami Vivekananda 13. The Ivory Throne 14. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 15. Moby Dick by Herman Melville 16. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank 17. Emma by Jane Austen 18. Gulliver’s Travel by Jonathan Swift 19. Harry Potter Series by J.K.Rowling 20. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee…

SHORTLY BEFORE HIS EXECUTION, in the early hours of 15 November 1949, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, the Hindu-nationalist fanatic who killed Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on 30 January 1948, recited a prayer: Namaste Sada Vatsale MatrubhumeTwaya Hindubhume Sukham VardhitohamMahanmangale Punyabhume TwadarthePatatvesh Kayo Namaste, Namaste! O affectionate motherland, I eternally bow to youO land of Hindus, you have reared me in comfortO sacred and holy land,May this body of mine be dedicated to you and I bow before you again and again! These four Sanskrit sentences constitute the first of the three stanzas of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s official prayer, which continues to be sung to this day at its shakhas—regular assemblies meant for physical and ideological training. Godse’s choice of prayer is puzzling. He is believed to have left the RSS sometime…

IN THE LATE 1940 S, the 18-year-old American poet WS Merwin made a pilgrimage to Saint Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, DC to meet another poet—Ezra Pound. Though Pound was under indictment for treason against the United States, following radio broadcasts during the Second World War in which he declared his support for Benito Mussolini, Merwin admired the poet and had wandered into the hospital looking for advice from a revered figure. Pound argued that if Merwin was serious about being a poet, he should write 75 lines every day. “But at your age you don’t have anything to write about,” he continued. “You may think you do, but you don’t. So get to translating.” In a career that spanned almost seven decades, Merwin followed Pound’s advice to learn the art…

At the dive bar in front of the screening centre for migrants in Marsa, a town in southeastern Malta, time passes by slowly. To kill time, one plays dominoes or billiards, or tries to catch a glimpse of the open sea beyond the rusty ships docked at the harbour. Everything here, whether the languages people speak or the spicy scent of the meat on the grill or the warm and dry wind, is reminiscent of Africa. Yet, Malta plays its role as a southern portal to Fortress Europe. Thousands of refugees have made their way to this island nation over the years and found themselves confined here, awaiting a tenuous future. Their exact number is unknown even to humanitarian organisations that support asylum-seekers. Among these organisations, one of the most…

The decades-old Babri Masjid–Ram Janmabhoomi case has come to be the most intractable property dispute of our times. Most reports locate the starting point of the conflict at 1949, when Hindu idols were surreptitiously placed under the central dome of the Babri Masjid in the dead of the night. Years later, in 1984, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad started the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, mobilising Hindus across the country to build a temple on the disputed site. It ultimately led to the destruction of the mosque by mobs of kar sevaks—religious volunteers—in 1992, and communal bloodletting that left at least two thousand dead. On 9 November 2019, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court pronounced the eagerly anticipated final verdict on the resulting legal dispute. In a unanimous judgment, the court maintained…

WHILE PROTEST REVERBERATES on the streets of Chile, Catalonia, Britain, France, Iraq, Lebanon and Hong Kong, and a new generation rages against what has been done to their planet, I hope you will forgive me for speaking about a place where the street has been taken over by something quite different. There was a time when dissent was India’s best export. But now, even as protest swells in the West, our great anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements for social and environmental justice—the marches against big dams, against the privatisation and plunder of our rivers and forests, against mass displacement and the alienation of indigenous peoples’ homelands—have largely fallen silent. On 17 September this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gifted himself the filled-to-the-brim reservoir of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada…

ONE DROP OF BLOOD THE STORY OF KARBALA Ismat Chughtai Translated by Tahira Naqvi This is a new translation of the renowned Urdu author Is-mat Chugtai’s final novel Ek Qatra-e-Khoon. A reimagining of the bloody battle of Karbala in 680 CE, it chronicles the life of Imam Hussain, Muhammad’s grandson, and his family and friends, as their small army clashed with the forces of the second Ummayad caliph, Yazid I. WOMEN UNLIMITED, R 575, 440 PAGES SEBASTIAN & SONS A BRIEF HISTORY OF MRIDANGAM MAKERS TM Krishna A new work of nonfiction by the musician and activist TM Krishna, this book explores the history of makers of the mridangam—a musical instrument used in Carnatic music—in Thanjavur, Chennai and elsewhere. It draws upon Krishna’s extensive fieldwork and interviews to investigate the…