Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2021 i The Caravan

About three years ago, as I walked past a musical instrument store in Maharashtra’s Amravati town, I was astonished to find “Signature” guitars, a brand from my hometown of Kolkata, hanging at the shop. I later learnt that these low-priced guitars—usually bought by beginners—had travelled far and had a long history. The shopkeeper told me that nearly all Indian-made guitars came from Kolkata and were distributed across the country. Back home, Gautam Das, the proprietor of a music store at Bagbazar, confirmed this and suggested that I meet “the man who started it all: Mukunda Biswas.” Crossing the Ganga, an overcrowded bus took me to Belur in the neighbouring town of Howrah. A short e-rickshaw ride and a walk down a narrow, water-logged lane later, I reached Guitar Research Enterprise,…

“Our society is based on the legacy of renaissance,” Pinarayi Vijayan said during his first term as the chief minister of Kerala. He was addressing a public meeting in October 2018, at which he spoke of the Left Democratic Front government’s commitment to progressive principles. It was a pivotal moment. The Supreme Court had just ruled that women of menstruating age could enter the Sabarimala temple, triggering widespread protests in the state. “People like Sree Narayana Guru, Chattampi Swamy, Ayyankali, Aiyya Vaikuntadar and Poykayil Kumara Guru Devan removed the evil customs in the society, bringing in the light that we have in Kerala today,” he said, referring to anti-caste intellectuals and social-reform activists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. “We should remember that all of them stood for the breaking…

ONE OF THE FREQUENT TROPES in the analysis of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral successes offered by mainstream upper-caste journalists, especially in the English-language media, is the idea of the “consolidation of OBC votes.” In this view, the Other Backward Classes, wooed by enterprising social engineering and the lure of a common spiritual identity and purpose offered by Hindutva, have been animated en masse to vote for the BJP. It centres the belief that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has successfully framed Muslims as common historical antagonists and that the OBCs are ready to align with the Sangh at any cost, even though it is a deeply Brahmanical order that has not made space for OBCs in intellectual or social leadership. This implies that the OBCs are easily manipulated to work…

The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress delivered an unexpectedly comprehensive victory in the West Bengal assembly election. In the lead up to it, almost all articles had spoken of a close contest with the Bharatiya Janata Party, which led a high-decibel campaign in the state. The TMC’s victory, in turn, led to various think pieces on the exceptionalism and pride of Bengalis that halted the Hindutva juggernaut. And yet, the electoral campaigns and a breakdown of the results show that the state is increasingly subject to the same forces that shape the politics of the Hindi belt. Rather than confining ourselves to the political history of the state, it makes sense to consider these elections results in light of what is happening in the rest of the country. The BJP’s basic…

A distant, top-angle view shows a tightly packed housing tenement and an empty plot adjacent to it. The plot is scattered with incandescent spots—the brightest of these resembles a bonfire. If you look long enough, in the darker areas you can see fires that are dying out, with the last embers glowing next to blocks of wood and circles of ash. This is a drone photograph of the cremations of COVID-19 victims at Delhi’s Old Seemapuri ground by the Reuters photographer Danish Siddiqui. As a brutal second wave of COVID-19 swept through the capital in April, this image was one of the first to visualise the massive scale of the crisis. While a still photograph typically displays a particular moment, this image evokes a period of time, a continuous cycle…

WHEN DESINGU WAS BORN, in 1967, there was a wide beach opposite his village, facing the Bay of Bengal on the outskirts of Chennai. By the time he turned ten, the beach had shrunk so much that the waves crashed near his home. So Desingu’s family and others in Nalla Thanneer Odai Kuppam—or NTO Kuppam, as the locals call it—dismantled their thatch-roofed huts, collected their belongings and moved a few more metres inland. A few years later, the sea had come even farther in. Desingu’s family and their neighbours moved again, then again and again—four times in all. Some homes were abandoned to the sea. Sitting under the roof of a roadside temple one summer morning in 2019, Desingu stared at the tiny beach where his village once stood. “As…

ALT-RIGHT MOVEMENT DISSECTING RACISM, PATRIARCHY AND ANTI-IMMIGRANT XENOPHOBIA Ipsita Chatterjee This book examines the alt-right movement and the factors that led to its growth, including the mobilisation of support on social media. It looks at the movement’s ideological foundations, its approach to gender, race and nationalism, as well as speeches, tweets and other communications by its followers and think tanks, to theorise why it has garnered popular support. SAGE, ₹1,095, 252 PAGES THE BEST SHORT STORIES EVER Edited by Terry O’ Brien This collection intends to provoke a reflection on the short-story form, bringing together 41 well-known works spanning genres, periods and countries. The featured writers include Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allen Poe, Anton Chekhov and Gabriel García Márquez. WESTLAND, ₹199, 272 PAGES THE STARTUP WIFE Tahmima Anam This fast-paced novel…

It took a week after the results of the Assam assembly election last month for the Bharatiya Janata Party to name the state’s chief minister. In a polity dominated by numerous tribal and ethnic groups, the party chose Himanta Biswa Sarma, a Brahmin, over the incumbent Sarbananda Sonowal, from a small ethnic Assamese community. Having returned to power at the head of a victorious alliance, the BJP called the result what it was: a resounding consolidation of pro-Hindutva forces in a state long known for its politics of jatiyota-bad—ethnonationalism. Assamese exceptionalism, based on a self-image of an inherently tolerant and secular people unaffected by the majoritarian impulses of the mainland, seems to have run its course. Once the BJP came to national power in 2014, it sensed an easy opportunity…

The film fraternity was blindsided by the sudden abolition of the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal in early April. The FCAT is a statutory body that came into existence in 1983 to provide an avenue for redressal for filmmakers unhappy with decisions made by the censor board. The move is part of the Modi government’s wider attempt at reforming tribunals and was brought in through an ordinance, after a bill that would have abolished the tribunal was rejected by parliament in February. Typical of this administration’s style, the measure was imposed with little consultation among those it is affects most. (Among the other tribunals that have been scrapped are those relating to copyright, patents, customs and farmers’ rights.) Several prominent figures in the film industry expressed their consternation. The director Vishal…

ON 9 JUNE 1900, the Adivasi revolutionary Birsa Munda died in Ranchi Central Jail. He had been arrested three months earlier, in the Jamkopai forest near Chakradharpur, as colonial authorities moved to crush his Ulgulan, or Great Tumult. The Ulgulan was the third major Adivasi uprising in the Chhotanagpur region during the nineteenth century, following the Kol Rebellion of 1831 and the Santal Hul of 1855. All three agitations resisted the imposition of the zamindari system, which had caused dispossession, indebtedness and bonded labour. Colonial legislation on forests further alienated Adivasis from their lands and traditional means of livelihood. Since 1858, Munda leaders had been petitioning government authorities to recognise their land rights and act against the depredations of surveyors, landlords and moneylenders. The Sardari Ladai, as this constitutional struggle…