Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2020 i The Caravan

“I have never worn a mask,” Jagdish Chandra told me, in November. The 51-year-old businessman from Kolkata said that he had taken six flights since September and that he carries documents that supported his right to not wear a mask while travelling. “The security person may try to say, ‘I won’t scan you,’” he added. “But, more than following the rules, I need to protect myself.” Chandra, who claimed to have filed around twenty right-to-information requests regarding the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has taken part in several recent anti-mask protests in India, which he described as part of an awareness initiative. “There is nothing like virus,” Ashok Patel told me, a month earlier. “How can something so small harm us?” The 65-year-old former sweet-monger from Rajkot said that…

ON THE NIGHT OF 23 FEBRUARY THIS YEAR, Delhi was on the brink of large-scale communal violence. For several months, peaceful protests had been taking place against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens. The protestors had been demanding rollback of these government initiatives, which many fear will strip a lot of Indian Muslims of their citizenship. Earlier that afternoon, the Bharatiya Janata Party politician Kapil Mishra gave an incendiary speech in northeastern Delhi, warning that if the protests in the area did not stop, he would clear them out by force. The speech set in motion a cycle of violence targeted at Muslims. Vehicles, blazed and still burning, were strewn across the streets of localities such as Jafrabad, Maujpur and Chand Bagh. Reports through the…

In the December 2014 issue of The Caravan, we took a deep dive into two repositories of data that capture different dimensions of the media landscape. The first was the Department of Advertising and Visual Publicity, which oversees the central government’s advertising spend—and has since been renamed the Bureau of Outreach and Communication. The second data repository was the ministry of corporate affairs, which stores information filed by companies for compliance purposes. Six years later, we revisited both to see how the needle has moved on some of the media practices outlined last time. In this time period, the country has faced severe economic challenges, which has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and a considerable shift in the ideological moorings of the media ecosystem. The rise of the…

In 2013, the autumn edition of Chowkidar, a journal published by the British Association of Cemeteries in South Asia, featured the story of one of its readers, Edward Mitchell. Mitchell knew his grandparents were buried in Poona’s St Sepulchre Cemetery and Bombay’s Sewree Cemetery but was unable to find out whether the graves still existed. “I have very little information on these grandparents, and I wondered if the graves themselves could throw light on them through their inscriptions,” Mitchell asked in the journal’s column “Can You Help?” The column, a fixture in every issue, addresses readers’ queries about family histories or the condition of a relative’s grave. The BACSA—which has been described as “the liveliest Society for the dead”—was founded in October 1976, by Theon Wilkinson, a captain in the…

When I spoke to a senior staffer of News18 Tamil Nadu in October, I was told the entire organisation was crumbling. Numerous staff members had been forced to leave, the tone of the channel’s coverage had changed sharply over the last two months and all editorial decisions were now being made by a distant Delhi leadership. From being one of the state’s most successful and fastest growing channels a few months ago, News18 had gone to seeing its ratings and viewership nosedive. Worst of all, the staffer told me, was the air of fear floating around the channel’s Chennai office. “All it’ll take is one social-media post saying I’m an anti-national and I’ll be fired,” the staffer said. “None of us can know for certain, but we could be just…

ON 5 AUGUST, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for a Ram temple in Ayodhya, Imran Khan—not to be confused with Pakistan’s prime minister—was most elated. For Khan, an anchor for the Urdu news and devotional-content channel Zee Salaam, the Ram-temple ceremony inaugurated “a new chapter of rejuvenation in the history of sanatana culture”—another word for the “eternal” Hindu culture. The inauguration ceremony met a fundamental ideological commitment of the Hindu-nationalist movement, which is why it was held on the first anniversary of another monumental feat for the Hindu Right—the abrogation of the special status granted under Article 370 to the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir. Khan demonstrated his commitment to Hindu nationalism through song. On his Facebook page, he posted a recording of a song…

IN EARLY 1984 , the actress Parveen Babi announced her retirement from Bollywood in blazingly public fashion: she wrote about it in a cover story for the Illustrated Weekly of India. Titled “The Confessions of Parveen Babi,” the essay was diaristic and occasionally disturbing in its honesty. “Have you ever wondered what it is like to function in life, distrusting everything and everybody?” the actress, then 34 years old, wrote. “Slowly, one by one, I lost trust in everybody and everything around me. We trust most of the things and people around us without questioning. We trust the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe.” Diagnosed with schizophrenia in the late 1970s, Babi had experienced her latest breakdown just months before the article’s publication. She was…

On 2 October, images of a war memorial in eastern Ladakh started appearing on the social-media accounts of some journalists. The memorial, “Gallants of Galwan,” was built for the 20 Indian soldiers who died in a violent physical clash with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army on 15 June. The unacknowledged source of those images, which made it to all newspapers the next day, was the army headquarters, and the pictures contained more details about the incident than had been made public till date. The inscription on the memorial stated that Colonel Santosh Babu, the commanding officer of 16 Bihar Regiment, and his team had been “tasked to evict the PLA OP (observation post) from Gen A (General Area) Y-Nala and move further to Patrolling Point 14.” It further clarified that…

PRINCIPLES OF PREDICTION Anushka Jasraj A weather forecaster tries to stay sane in the face of an impending storm, a group of friends is arrested for their covert radio operations around India’s independence, a woman leaves her husband and joins a circus—these are some of the characters in Jasraj’s witty, and sometimes surreal, short-story collection. PORTAL THE CURIOUS ACCOUNT OF ACHINTYA BOSE Compiled by Shantanu Bhattacharya This book presents a fictional archive in the form of a diary, kept between 1994 and 1996, by a one-time owner of a small photography studio in Kolkata before his unexplained disappearance. It introduces fictional text based on real visual material, via photographic prints, letters, newspaper cuttings, ads and polaroids. THE WATER PHOENIX A MEMOIR OF CHILDHOOD ABUSE, HEALING AND FORGIVENESS Rituparna Chatterjee The…