Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2022 i The Caravan

When the queer activist Vishnu Teja was approached by Patruni Chidananda Sastry, a Hyderabad-based drag artist, for Rangula Rattnam, he realised this was the right opportunity to speak about his lived experiences of being gay. “Unfortunately, there is not much information or queer content in Telugu,” Teja, who works at the Visakhapatnam based Liberty Rebellion Organisation, which works for the rights of sexual minorities, told me. “And, being a gay man based out of Telangana, I strongly feel that there should be vocalisation about the rights of the community in the Telugu language. This podcast is something that will surely bridge the gap.” Rangula Rattnam—Colourful Carousel—is India’s first queer-centric podcast in Telugu. Each monthly episode features a queer individual and aims to explore narratives from across the queer community. In…

Notwithstanding the now infamous slap, the 2022 Academy Awards had many firsts. Among the catalogue of correctives to presumably make up for their decades of rewarding mostly cis-white male creatives—Troy Kotsur became the first deaf male actor to win an Oscar, while Ariana DeBose became the first openly queer woman of colour to win an acting award—there was also the first ever nomination for an Indian documentary: Writing with Fire, a film about Khabar Lahariya, a rural media outlet led by Dalit women. Following months of relentless buzz, a Sundance Award and multiple global accolades, the Oscar nomination came as no surprise to anyone who had been following the documentary since its global release. In an early conversation I had with the director couple Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh following…

TWO YEARS AFTER the Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kapil Mishra gave a threatening speech about protesters in northeastern Delhi, precipitating three days of communal violence, Yati Narsinghanand delivered yet another incendiary speech in the national capital. At a Hindu Mahapanchayat attended by around three hundred people, on 3 April 2022, Narsinghanand, the head of the Dasna Devi temple in Ghaziabad, claimed, “Once a Muslim becomes the prime minister of India, in twenty years, fifty percent of you will change your religion. Forty percent of Hindus will be murdered.” Three months earlier, Narsinghanand had been arrested by the Uttarakhand Police for calling for a genocide of Muslims at a similar public meeting in Haridwar. Despite international outrage, he was released on bail within a month. His arrest did not dilute his…

IN A 1921 EDITION of the now defunct journal Occult Review, a writer under the pseudonym “Badmash” proclaims, “The whole history of India teems with tragedies.” Is it any wonder, Badmash—who, judging from the tone of the piece, is possibly a British officer—asks, “that such tragedies have filled the country with ghosts, or, at any rate, a fixed belief in them? For superstition is rife everywhere.” The colonial undertones and exoticism of this phrasing notwithstanding, it is worth examining the ways writers have considered whether the country’s history has influenced its ghost stories. This is a notion often explored in relation to the genre. An earlier piece for this magazine looked at how the brutal history of the civil war permeated through contemporary Sri Lankan writing on horror. In a…

“I use music as my weapon to give voice to the Adivasi community,” Tom Murmu, a 25-year-old artist from the Santal community, told me as we sat together at the Artist Block, a Ranchi cafe built to resemble a traditional Adivasi house. “Though people don’t understand Santali, through my songs they recognise my community,” he said. An artist and YouTube star, Murmu has become an icon as a representative of Santal and Adivasi youngsters. In his performances and music videos, Murmu wears a panchi—the traditional garment worn by Santal men—and a t-shirt. His attire, like his music, is a blend of traditional and modern. Murmu—whose given name is Anuranjan Murmu, though he has become famous by his chosen artistic name—has over two hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube. He hails from…

In the motion poster for Vivek Agnihotri’s upcoming film The Delhi Files, the silhouette of a Sikh boy reaches out for help within a bloodstained national emblem, as the opening verse of the Guru Granth Sahib plays in the background, followed by the sounds of jackboots, gunshots and sobs. Tentatively scheduled for release this October, the film is ostensibly based on the anti-Sikh pogroms of November 1984, though Agnihotri has said it is more generally about “how Delhi has been destroying ‘Bharat’ for so many years.” It will be the final instalment of his trilogy of historical revisionism, following The Tashkent Files, which wildly speculated about the death of the former prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, and The Kashmir Files, which dealt with the “genocide” of Kashmiri Pandits. The 1984…

LAND, GUNS, CASTE, WOMAN THE MEMOIR OF A LAPSED REVOLUTIONARY Gita Ramaswamy Gita Ramaswamy’s memoir recalls, among many things, student life at Osmania University in the 1970s, her fight, alongside the Dalits of Ibrahimpatnam, against landlessness and bonded labour, and their struggle to reclaim fourteen thousand acres of land. NAVAYANA, S599, 432 PAGES VULTURES Dalpat Chauhan Translated by Hemang Ashwinkumar Originally published as Gidh in 1991, the novel recounts the narrator’s memories of the life of the protagonist Iso, who worked as a bonded labourer on an estate in Gujarat in the mid sixties. Hemang Ashwinkumar’s introduction explains how the book, based on the murder of a Dalit boy by Rajput landlords, explores casteist brutality, memory and social segregation in a feudal society. PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE INDIA, S599, 328 PAGEs…

In the final scene of SS Rajamouli’s period film RRR, Alluri Sitarama Raju—dressed as the Hindu deity Ram and played by the Telugu actor Ram Charan—asks what favour he may bestow on his fellow revolutionary Komaram Bheem, played by NT Rama Rao Jr. “Bheem, you fulfilled my goal, gave me ammunition for the cause,” he says. “What can I do for you?” Komaram replies, “Give me an education, brother.” Alluri pricks his finger with the tip of an arrow and writes “Jal, jangal, zameen”—water, forest and land—in the Devanagari script on a white flag. There is a lot to unpack in this scene. Although a disclaimer at the start of the film declares that RRR is a work of fiction that “doesn’t imitate or imply any person whether living or…

ON A RAINY NOVEMBER DAY in 2021 in the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s mining heartland, I sat with Helmut Kehrmann in his family home, in the village of Alt-Keyenberg. The room was empty, with the exception of a chair and a few boxes lying in a corner. Marks left by furniture and fixtures were still visible on the dusty wooden floor. This was the last time Helmut visited his house. Residents of Alt-Keyenberg are under eviction orders. The nearby Garzweiler open-pit mine, producing brown coal, or lignite, is expanding. RWE AG, the mine’s owner and Germany’s largest energy company, has purchased most of the village. Demolitions will begin once the acquisition is complete, razing the village by 2024 to make space for the lignite mine. “It is difficult to leave your…