Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2023 i The Caravan

“After the protest, I must fill this belly, support my family and pursue my ambitions,” Tenzin, a Tibetan in exile whom I met in September 2022, told me. He did not wish to disclose his full name. He has participated in the protests outside the Chinese embassy to commemorate Tibetan Uprising Day, on 10 March, nearly every year. He works for a Chinese multinational company, as a service facilitator, and possesses a skill highly valued in India: fluency in Mandarin. Tenzin is just one among many self-contradicting Tibetans in India, who have given in to the allure of working at companies that are either Chinese-owned or do business with China. It is hard to miss the irony of Tibetans in exile earning a living from a language that forcefully replaced…

The meeting of G20 foreign ministers in Delhi, on 1 and 2 March, was deemed a success for “Brand India.” But it all depends on how we define success. The first three G20 summits, held in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, saw concrete outcomes: policy and institutional initiatives that stabilised the global banking system. This was no longer the case in 2022, with the escalation of the Russia–Ukraine war. At its Bali summit, the G20 merely issued a joint communique, stating that the participating leaders had agreed to disagree on Ukraine—this was seen as an achievement. This year, with India holding the rotating presidency, the countries could not even agree on a joint statement. Instead, India issued a “Chair’s Summary and Outcome Document,” with a footnote stating that…

AS WE TRUNDLED DOWNHILL along the treacherous dirt track, made muddy by rain, I wondered how those routinely negotiating this path did not lose their mental bearings—or a few spinal discs. Our Mizo driver was nonchalant, piloting our pickup truck with ease. Peering through the foliage running along the trail, we saw neat rows of hutments, with green asbestos roofs, sprawled over a stretch of low hills. We could also see a river snaking through the valley. The ten-kilometre trail originates in Farkawn, a village in Mizoram’s Champhai district, and snakes downhill to the Tiau River, which forms the border with Myanmar. It is frequented, among others, by Mizo sand miners and members of the Chin community—one of the eight national races recognised by the Burmese government. Under the free-movement…

“This is when it all happens. The harvest time is our playground,” Eddie Chami said, surrounded by vines, as he stood on a mountain slope in Bousit village, wearing a T-shirt and a khaki hat. It was early morning, the best time to harvest fragile grapes. Further ahead, a group of men and women were carefully cutting fruits from vines. “We won’t take these,” Chami pointed to a few low-hanging grapes. “We always leave the small ones for the birds.” Similar scenes play out across Lebanon each fall. It is a small country but has one of the longest-standing wine-making traditions in the world. The Bible describes it as a place of fragrant wines. And it was here, as is traditionally believed, that Jesus turned water into wine. But with…

“We are just waiting for the Congress,” Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, said at a rally in Purnea district, on 25 February. Kumar, who represents the Janata Dal (United), was speaking at the first formal congregation of a new grand alliance of seven political parties that have come together to fight the Bharatiya Janata Party in Bihar during the 2024 general election. He did not clarify why they were waiting for the Congress. But, while the alliance will field only one candidate in each constituency, crucial details—such as a seat-sharing agreement, a roadmap and a common minimum programme—remain undecided. Organised by the JD(U), the rally was attended by representatives of all its alliance partners: the Congress, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Hindustan Awami Morcha, the Communist Party of…

“THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE of government is a platform,” the tech billionaire Nandan Nilekani declared in the 2015 book Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations, which he co-authored with the software engineer Viral Shah. “We are talking about radically reimagining government, its purpose, its role and the way it carries out its functions, with technology at its core.” A campaign to realise this promise had been underway since 2009, in the form of the Aadhaar biometric identification system and the various digital systems that mushroomed around it. Nilekani and his coterie were now prescribing this approach to all domains of the state, from healthcare to education. The Indian state has since built countless platforms—for identification, payments, healthcare, e-commerce—for government and private companies to use. Aided by the Narendra Modi government, which…

Teresita Boljoran, now a widowed mother in her early fifties, has been cleaning houses since 2010 to support her family of six. In 2013, the super typhoon Haiyan—locally known as Yolanda—destroyed her house on the island of Malapascua, in Cebu province in the Philippines. Yolanda was one of the most powerful typhoons ever recorded in the country, affecting more than 14 million people and claiming over six thousand lives. “For a year, we lived in makeshift tents on the beach until we were able to rebuild the house thanks to several [government] aids,” Boljoran told me, in May 2022. Many such typhoons on Malapascua have forced her to rebuild her life from scratch. “Although I always live with the uncertainty of what might happen,” she said, “I don’t intend to…

{ONE} THE COUNTRY’S MOST IMPORTANT politicians and industrialists walked into a brightly lit hall in Chennai on 18 January 2015. Among them were the senior ministers Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Piyush Goyal, M Venkaiah Naidu and Ravi Shankar Prasad, and the former deputy prime minister LK Advani. Also in attendance were powerful Tamil politicians, including the heads of three regional outfits. Amit Shah, the Bharatiya Janata Party president at the time, used the opportunity to iron out their possible alliances in the state. The actor Rajnikanth ate well that day, as did the head of the national broadcaster. Also walking under the gold-painted eaves were prominent industrialists: the heads of Larsen and Toubro, India Cements, TVS and Amalgamations. They had all reached the quiet Brahmin-majority locality of Mylapore in Chennai…

UNDER THE BHASHA GAZE MODERNITY AND INDIAN LITERATURE PP Raveendran The book presents a critique of modernity within Indian literature of the last two centuries. It looks at the aftermath of colonialism, print capitalism, translation, realism and ideas surrounding the region and the nation, as well as focussing on particular authors such as Madhavikutty and MT Vasudevan Nair. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS INDIA, ₹1,795, 368 PAGES WHEN ARDH SATYA MET HIMMATWALA THE MANY LIVES OF 1980S’ BOMBAY CINEMA Avijit Ghosh This study looks at the aesthetic, social and technological shifts in Hindi cinema that occurred in the 1980s, such as piracy and video cassettes changing how cinema was viewed at home, an increasing number of film stars being elected to parliament and the popularity of disco, police dramas and action comedies.…