Innehållsförteckning för September 2015 från The Caravan

One morning this March, in Hyderabad, Anand Sai was preparing for his day when his phone rang. It was Kishan Rao, a retired IAS officer who is now the CEO of the Yadagirigutta Temple Development Authority, or YTDA. “Get ready,” Sai was told. “The CM wants to meet you at his office, first thing today.” “This is my day,” the art director, who has worked on over 30 Telegu films, recalled thinking. Before rushing out, he grabbed his concept sketches for a redeveloped temple complex at Yadagirigutta, a cave shrine 60 kilometres north-east of the city, in the young state of Telangana. “I couldn’t go empty-handed,” Sai told me. “My drawings do the talking for me.” He arrived at the state secretariat, and was shown into the office of the…

Bertil Lintner started writing about Myanmar in the early 1980s—when the country, ruled by a military junta since 1962 and riddled with long-standing but obscure ethnic insurgencies, was still called Burma. From Thailand, the Swedish journalist crossed into rebel-held areas in Myanmar illegally and often. Concerned for his safety, he adopted a Thai pen name. As P Vichit-thong, over the next two years he wrote articles for the Thai magazine Focus, including one on the Communist Party of Burma, or CPB. Later, under his real name, Lintner wrote a long story about the CPB for the Far Eastern Economic Review. A former CIA analyst, whose book Lintner had earlier panned, dismissed the piece in an academic journal, citing for contrast an “excellent article” in Focus by a P Vichitthong. When…

In November 2002, a civil engineer named Satyendra Dubey sent a letter to the office of the prime minister of India. At the time, Dubey was posted in Bihar, with the National Highways Authority of India, or NHAI. In the letter, he described widespread corruption in the Bihar operations of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s flagship national infrastructure project, the Golden Quadrilateral highway network. He wrote of how processes had been “manipulated and hijacked by the big contractors,” of the rampant “diversion or idling of funds,” of a “big fraud in the selection” of consultants, and of the NHAI’s complicity in such graft. A year later, Dubey was shot dead near his home, in the district of Gaya. A few days later, the Indian Express broke the story of Dubey’s letter to…

TWO YEARS AGO, on the morning of 6 September, Anita Singh, principal secretary to the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, was informed that thousands of people from the neighbouring states of Haryana and Delhi were gathering at Kawal village in Muzaffarnagar district. A “Jat Mahapanchayat,” a large-scale political meeting of the region’s Hindu Jats, was scheduled to take place the following day, curdling an atmosphere already soured by threats and suspicion. Some days earlier, two young Jat men and a Muslim youth had allegedly been murdered in an altercation; rumours had circulated of the latter harassing a young Hindu woman. A number of Jat-affiliated outfits had responded by organising the mahapanchayat, with the involvement and encouragement of the local cadre of the Bharatiya Janata Party. All this had divided local…

Memoir 1 AUGUST TO 30 SEPTEMBER THE LOFT, MUMBAI The Loft’s white walls and generous natural light accentuated the works exhibited, from acclaimed women artists such as Aisha Abid Hussain, Minal Damani, Mithu Sen, Mayura Subhedar, Prajakta Palav, Remen Chopra, Rakhi Peswani, Samanta Batra Mehta and Suruchi Choksi. Hussain’s ‘Two Not Together’ presented a series of prints inspired by love letters and old wedding photographs. Choksi’s installation of epoxy-coated steel served as a reminder of the pervasiveness and perpetuity of transformation. The eclectic mediums and techniques on display pointed to the diversity of experiences the artists have drawn on. ~ TANYA BANSAL…

Kuvempu: Man and Mission 12 AUGUST, 6.30 PM INDIA INTERNATIONAL CENTRE, DELHI This latest installment of the India International Centre’s “Celebrating Legendary Poets” series centred on the life and work of Kuvempu, considered the greatest Kannada poet of the past century. The eminent Kannada scholar Hampa Nagarajaiah, once a student of Kuvempu, opened the discussion with an affectionate meditation on the poet’s talents, personality and legacy. A short documentary, Remembering Rasarushi, was screened to introduce the audience to the dense Karnataka forests where the poet grew up. “When he entered,” Nagarajaiah noted of Kuvempu, “the desert of Kannada literature turned into a garden.” ~ BY AJAY MEHTA…

On a Wednesday night in early May, four teenage athletes were rushed to hospital from a Sports Authority of India training centre in the coastal city of Alappuzha, in Kerala. The young women had deliberatly swallowed the poisonous seeds of the othalanga tree, or Cerbera odollam. Police later reported finding a note signed by the four, explaining the act as a response to harassment by other athletes living at the centre. The next day, one of them died. In the media storm that followed, the othalanga tree was described in uniformly macabre tones—a “suicide tree,” a plant of “ill repute” bringing a “brutal harvest”—and with good reason. Kerala—where the annual suicide rate, at 24.6 deaths per 100,000 people, is more than double the national average—has a long and lethal acquaintance…

In a sparsely decorated mud hut in Matungu, a small town in Kakamega county in western Kenya, 26-year-old Esther Echesa was preparing to feed her family ugali. Clothes for her toddlers, Sheila and Bravine, were strung up on a wire stretched from wall to wall. It was a pleasant March morning, and her husband, Hamisi, dressed in a Manchester United jersey, had just returned from market with a small bagful of sardines, to be sprinkled over the thick maize porridge for flavour. The ugali, a Kenyan staple, was to be the family’s only meal of the day. The Echesas cultivate maize, cassava and sweet potatoes on a small patch of land. In a good month, they make as much as 600 Kenyan shillings—about $6—selling some of their crop. Echesa delivered…

On 27 September 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the United Nations General Assembly, he launched into an unexpected digression about yoga. Yoga, he said, “is not about exercise but to discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and the nature.” He went on: “By changing our lifestyle and creating consciousness, it can help us deal with climate change.” The statement made its way to the front pages of most national dailies, with some commentators mocking Modi’s attempt to link yoga and climate change. Nevertheless, in December last year, the UN General Assembly accepted Modi’s call for the adoption of 21 June as International Yoga Day. The event in Delhi to celebrate the occasion, which Modi himself led, set a Guinness World Record for the yoga class…

THE ISLAND OF BITRA IS ONE OF THE NORTHERNMOST inhabited points in the Lakshadweep archipelago. Azure waters surround beaches of pale yellow sand fringed with coconut and casuarina trees. Underwater, a thriving coral metropolis houses reef fish of every imaginable shape and colour. One evening around six or seven years ago, Hamsa Koya and his brother, residents of the island, set out to sea to fish. Koya steered a kundalam, a mid-sized fishing boat with an outboard engine, carefully across the shallow waters of the island’s lagoon. He headed for a popular fishing spot that the locals called “furathabam.” Here, where a red buoy marked the lagoon channel, they often fished for chammali, or paddletail snapper, a species that lives in large shoals among nearby coral boulders. Like a few…

DEATH RECURS IN VILAS SARANG'S FICTION as punctually as in a flowering tree. It enters the story through everyday objects, rituals, rooms and corpses. Handcuffed to this bleak universe is Sarang’s phenomenal comic vision, that mocks what he creates and makes death a difficult joke: hard to decipher and harder to laugh at. But a writer’s death is different. It makes us turn to him or her in the way that we turn to the funnel of light coming from a projection box. For a moment the projected image, the literary text in a writer’s case, is forgotten, and the source that lights up this image becomes of greater interest. If the writer is Indian, however, and his major output has been in the genre of the short story, there’s…

Suman Sridhar and the Oracle 14 AUGUST, 9.00 PM BLUE FROG, BENGALURU Suman Sridhar and the Oracle kicked off their Black Mamba Tour, presenting music from Sridhar’s forthcoming solo album, in Mumbai. A good crowd turned up in Bengaluru to hear Sridhar open the set with a distinctive reworking of ‘Ave Maria,’ influenced by African styles. She continued to exhibit her versatility on everything from slow ballads to energetic Bollywood covers. After a score of original numbers, the band closed the night with a rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s classic ‘All Along the Watchtower.’ ~ PRIYANJALI SIMON…

Marx My Word 6 AUGUST, 7.30 PM SHRI RAM CENTRE, DELHI In the play, a curious, hoary Oxford don returns to India in search of answers to old questions. In Delhi, he meets two former students: a one-time centrist turned capitalist, and a wispy feminist turned social activist. Together, the three revisit a midsummer evening several decades ago in Oxford, “where questions were answered and answers were questioned,” and where a discussion of Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy meandered into the politics of his grandson, Rajiv Gandhi. As the students debate whether Gandhi will become a symbol of hope or of dynastic elitism, they run up against the limits of their own selves, their personal politics and ideologies. Marx My Word marked the actor Tom Alter’s return to direction after a four-year…

IN THE YEARS LEADING UP TO PARTITION, Osman Ali Khan, the hereditary nizam of Hyderabad, was reputed to be the richest man in the world. Hyderabad was the largest and most affluent of the over 500 princely states scattered across the subcontinent towards the end of British rule, and had a population of over 16 million people. From 1798 onwards, the Hyderabadi monarchy had enjoyed relative autonomy in return for partnering with the British. In 1947, upon the departure of the British, the princely states faced a choice: join one of the new nations of India and Pakistan, or try to effect their own independence. The nizam decided on the latter option, and appealed to the British government and the United Nations to help maintain his rule. But the rulers…

On the morning of 3 July, in courtroom 46 of the Bombay High Court, all eyes were on a female Parsi plaintiff in her early forties, seated in the witness box. The defendant, her Parsi husband, contesting a petition for divorce, was slumped on the back benches. “Would you be willing to go back to the marriage?” the defendant’s lawyer asked the aggrieved wife. “You have a choice of saying yes, no, or that you can’t answer at the moment. No reasons need to be given for this,” the judge instructed her. She leaned into a microphone: “No.” Directly across from the witness, an all-Parsi jury of two men and three women looked on from behind two tables serving as a temporary jury box. The forewoman smiled, and shared her…

For some months now, supporters of Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, J Jayalalithaa, had been trying to conceal their anxiety. Something was going unimaginably wrong. Through the duration of Jayalalithaa’s long-running trial on charges of holding disproportionate assets, they had enthusiastically protested her innocence, going on fasts and circumambulating the sanctums of every Hindu god they could think of. This May, it seemed their faith had been rewarded. Jayalalithaa—Amma, to them—was absolved, and returned to head the state government. But a suspicion started growing among them. Is it true, her supporters asked each other, that Amma is ill? Jayalalithaa, the supremo of the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, spent 21 days in a Bengaluru jail last September and October after a special court found her guilty of corruption, before being released…

On the last day of 2014, the Narendra Modi-led government promulgated the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Ordinance, 2014. The ordinance, a law put into effect by the cabinet without the approval of the legislature, undid key features of the original land acquisition law, enacted in 2013. The revised rules benefited both government departments and private entities by increasing the categories of acquisition for which consent would not have to be obtained, and social impact assessments carried out. These were controversial changes. The Congress party and its allies immediately objected; so did some constituents of the ruling National Democratic Alliance. In March, the government tried to make the ordinance permanent by presenting it for consideration before the parliament, but an unlikely coalition stared…

ALBERTO MASERIN GREW UP in the town of Maniago, in north-east Italy, 15 kilometres from the Aviano Air Base. As a teenager, in the early 1990s, he heard stories about the place. It had magnificent air shows, and stores that stocked American goods such as peanut butter. Some of the American servicemen stationed there lived with their families just around the block, and when reassigned elsewhere they would sell off clothes and trinkets on their front lawns. The locals clamoured for this American paraphernalia. But, Maserin said, things have changed. “Nowadays … there are no more air shows, yard sales are forbidden and people who work inside the base are restricted on what they can buy” from outsiders. The Aviano Air Base was established by the Italian military in 1911.…

IN MANCHURIA A VILLAGE CALLED WASTELAND AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF RURAL CHINA Michael Meyer Combining memoir, reporting and research, Meyer presents a unique profile of China’s north-east. For three years, Meyer lived in the rice-farming community of Wasteland, his wife’s hometown. His personal saga mirrors some of the tremendous changes underway in much of rural China. In Wasteland, a private rice company has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed high-rise apartments—which farmers can move into in exchange for their land rights. BLOOMSBURY, 384 PAGES, R 499 REST IN PEACE RAVAN AND EDDIE Kiran Nagarkar Ravan and Eddie first appeared, as children, in Nagarkar’s landmark, eponymous 1995 novel. The author then chronicled their adventures as adults in The Extras, published in 2012. Now, in the third and final novel…

Hashback Hashish 24 JULY, 9.00 PM DEF COL SOCIAL, DELHI The Delhi-based electronic musician Ashish Sachan, who goes by “Hash-back Hashish” when playing solo, has had a busy year so far. In March, he performed at the South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, before stopping by New York City for a few gigs. Just afterwards, he released his new record, Brevity. In Delhi, he started a new record label, called Circuit, to foster Indian techno. I attended his free set at the Delhi club Def Col Social, where he combined sophisticated, minimal beats with brooding ambient sounds. Hashback Hashish’s tunes present textured layers of sound drawn from various genres and styles, and are as enjoyable on headphones as when dancing to them at a club. Well, maybe dancing…

Ways of Seeing 24 JULY TO 11 AUGUST INDIAN INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN SETTLEMENTS, BENGALURU The photographs in “Ways of Seeing” drew attention to factors that affect how we look at, judge and ascribe meaning to cities. Highlights included Zohrab Reys Gamat’s images of Bengaluru taken between 5 and 8 pm, hours associated with the heavy road traffic that is a distinguishing feature of the city; Kunal Despande’s collection “Reality Exists Only in the Human Mind, Nowhere Else,” focused on buildings and public spaces in numerous municipalities; Vikram M S’s collection “Solitude,” of images of spaces and people composed to evoke loneliness; and Yashodara Udupa’s collection “Juxtaposing the Innocence of Childhood and Old Age,” with photographs that associate urban spaces with children and the elderly.…