Innehållsförteckning för January 2016 från The Caravan

On 26 November, I met Tracey Curtis-Taylor, a 53-year-old aviator, in the lobby of the Taj Mahal hotel in Delhi. “You should have seen my hair when I landed yesterday,” she said in a warm English accent, describing the ravaging effects of sun and wind that come with flying an open-cockpit plane. The previous day, Curtis-Taylor had touched down in Delhi, at the controls of a dark-green vintage biplane. She was about halfway through a three-month journey from London to Sydney. Curtis-Taylor was recreating a solo flight performed almost nine decades ago by Amy Johnson, a pioneering pilot who, in 1930, became the first woman to fly a plane from England to Australia, challenging sexist prejudices in the process. Curtis-Taylor, many decades later, confronted such biases herself, when she was…

On 31 March last year, hundreds of miles southeast off the coast of Nigeria, in the Gulf of Guinea, Siddharth Chakravarty sat at the helm of the Sam Simon, a 184-foot ship under his command. Chakravarty, a youthful-faced 32-year-old from Bhopal, was looking ahead at the Thunder—a 202-foot, steel-sided vessel, wanted by Interpol for illegal and unreported fishing. To the Sam Simon’s left was its slightly smaller companion ship, the Bob Barker. The two vessels had been pursuing the Thunder for over 100 days, across three oceans and more than 10,000 nautical miles. The Sam Simon and the Bob Barker belong to Sea Shepherd, an international non-profit that works to protect marine wildlife. Sea Shepherd monitors and documents the activities of illegal fishing vessels, and reports them to authorities such…

I found the dominant share of stories to be unambiguously adversarial in nature, portraying China as a rival power that needs to be resisted. Last September, during a three-day visit to India by Xi Jinping, a newsreader at the official Indian broadcaster Doordarshan read the Chinese president’s name from a teleprompter as “Eleven” Jinping during a live telecast, mistaking “Xi” for the Roman numeral XI. It was an embarrassing gaffe—Indian officials moved with uncommon speed to fire her—and also a reminder of the unfamiliarity between the world’s two most populous states. For decades, India’s approach to China has been defined by hostility and fear—emotions stemming, among much else, from competing border claims, the memory of India’s humiliating defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian War, and the two countries’ locations in rival…

“EVERYTHING BEGAN WITH THE ALABAMA STORY FOR ME,” the photographer Regine Petersen said. In 2010, Petersen read about Ann Hodges, one of the very few humans known to have been struck by a meteorite fragment. Hodges suffered the strike in 1954, when a black rock weighing over four kilograms crashed through the roof of her house in Oak Grove, Alabama, bounced off a radio, and hit her on her side as she was napping. Petersen, who was born in Germany and was living in London at the time, was fascinated. “I gave up my home in London and travelled to make the work,” she said. That work became Stars Fell on Alabama, one part of a three-part series on meteorite strikes that she titled Find a Fallen Star. Of the…

OFFEND, SHOCK, OR DISTURB FREE SPEECH UNDER THE INDIAN CONSTITUION Gautam Bhatia Bhatia’s new book is a comprehensive examination of free speech issues in India. Taking as its point of departure the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, it discusses the development of related laws, from colonial times to present-day controversies. Issues such as sedition, hate speech, censorship, obscenity and pornography, privacy and defamation, contempt of court, and the relationship between free speech and economic structure are all thoroughly explored. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 392 PAGES, R 750 BEYOND CASTE IDENTITY AND POWER IN SOUTH ASIA PAST AND PRESENT Sumit Guha Today, caste is usually perceived as an ancient and unchanging Hindu institution preserved by deep-seated religious ideology. Yet the word itself is an importation from sixteenth-century Europe. This book, a…

Cristina Garcia Rodero: Open Mouthed 7 NOVEMBER TO 31 JANUARY INSTITUTO CERVANTES, DELHI In this photography exhibition, Cristina Garcia Rodero uncovers a range of emotions by turning her lens on the human mouth. Rodero, who is known for taking documentary photographs of rural communities in southern Europe, uses a monochrome palette to capture people’s mouths as they engage in various acts: screams, prayers, smiles, grimaces, first cries, dying expressions, and much more. The work featured here was shot over 40 years, and in locations all over the world. Despite, or perhaps because of, the vast variation within the exhibition, Open Mouthed presents a unified, relatable core of human emotion and intimacy.…

KS Radhakrishnan: Mapping With Figures 21 NOVEMBER TO 27 DECEMBER NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, BENGALURU The National Gallery of Modern Art in Bengaluru collaborated with the Akar Prakar gallery in Kolkata to host a solo exhibition of the work of KS Radhakrishnan, a renowned contemporary Indian sculptor. The curator, R Siva Kumar, chose to foreground the evolution of the artist’s style, instead of presenting a more standard tribute or retrospective. However, the exhibition still paid fitting respect to Radhakrishnan, who many see as the sculptor who rediscovered the human body for modern Indian art. Among other works in the gallery, one could see the famous Maiya and Musui, two bronze figures of Woman and Man that are often understood to represent Radhakrishnan’s alter-egos.…

On an afternoon in early December, as the rest of Kizhakkambalam was deep into its midday lull, there was a flurry of activity on the village’s outskirts, at a shed roughly the size of a basketball court. A massive blue-and-white sign at the entrance read “Twenty20 Kizhakkambalam.” Outside, three men unloaded a truck full of white plastic bags, each containing about six kilograms of assorted vegetables and stamped with a royal blue logo reading “Twenty20” in Malayalam. These were placed on iron shelves inside, to be sold to Kizhakkambalam’s residents at a subsidised price of R 100. At market rates, each such bag would cost R 200. Almost every family in the village I spoke to shops at the store. In the rest of India, “Twenty20” summons up images of…

In a politically hyper-sensitive society such as Kerala, it is unusual for a non-politician to occupy centre stage for long. But Natesan, a contractor and hotelier, has been grabbing headlines for past several months in the state. On 25 November last year, P Noushad, a 32-year-old autorickshaw driver in Kozhikode city, learned that two cleaners, unknown to him, had fallen into a manhole and were trapped inside. Noushad rushed to help. As he was trying to pull them out, one of the trapped men clung to his leg, and in the process, pulled Noushad into the drain. All three were asphyxiated to death. The tragedy stunned Kerala. Responding to the popular mood, the state’s government announced an ex gratia payment of R 10 lakh to Noushad’s family. Kerala’s chief minister,…

Sayeed also became the target of a popular slogan, “ Muftian kabar Kasheer-e-nebar” —Mufti’s grave outside of Kashmir, suggesting he did not deserve the dignity of being buried in his homeland. In the 1977 elections, the Congress drew a blank in the valley, won ten seats in Jammu and one seat in Ladakh. Sayeed lost from his hometown, Bijbehara. It was a humiliating defeat. {ONE} ON 3 OCTOBER 2015 , the Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly met for the first sitting of its autumn session. The day was to be spent remembering a number of prominent individuals who had died recently, most of them state politicians, such as the former ministers Mir Ghulam Mohammad Poonchi, Ghulam Rasool Kar, and Abdul Ghani Shah Veeri. Also on the list was…

Sen tells us that the traditional calendar defining the dates of Bengali Hindu religious ceremonies is attuned to commemorations of the prophet Mohammed’s journey from Mecca to Medina. IN 2002 , a year after Amartya Sen’s well-known essay on hunger, ‘Old Torments and New Blunders,’ was first published, I travelled through parts of northwest Madhya Pradesh and adjacent areas of Rajasthan, which are home to Sahariya tribals, to report on hunger-related deaths in the community. I learnt for myself the truth of Sen’s observation that a free media serves as a vital check on the government, but that it is much better at highlighting famine than undernourishment. A handful of starvation deaths were enough to ensure that the state machinery reacted speedily to prevent further casualties. But, over the years,…

Hornbill Festival 2015 1 TO 10 DECEMBER KISAMA The Hornbill Festival, held each year in Nagaland, completed its sixteenth edition this December in Kisama Heritage Village. The itinerary boasted cultural events showcasing local traditions, including a night carnival, a heritage car rally, and a peek into the cuisines of sixteen major Naga tribes. The festival’s rock competition ended with Reverse Tragedy, a progressive power-metal band from Mizoram, bagging top spot. Despite slightly lackluster attendance this year, Hornbill lived up to its claim to being the “festival of festivals,” with locals welcoming attendees with warm hospitality. As people danced around a community fire at an open amphitheatre on the last day another spectacular edition of the festival came to an end.…

Sarin & Sonam: Burning Against the Dying of the Light 10 TO 31 DECEMBER KHOJ INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS’ ASSOCIATION, DELHI Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam are an Indian-Tibetan filmmaking duo, and their new multimedia exhibit explores political protest and conflict in Tibet. Usually they only present work they have personally filmed, but they have departed from that precedent for this exhibit, which also features footage shot by others—including amateurs with mobile cameras. The most striking videos in the show are, undoubtedly, those of Tibetans committing suicide by burning themselves alive in political protest. To date, 149 Tibetans are known to have self-immolated, with most committing this act after 2008, when the region erupted in protest against the Chinese government. Watching living human bodies being consumed by fire is terribly mesmerising, and…

I reported from a protest at Tahrir Square, in the historic centre of Cairo, on 29 January 2011, just days into a mass movement that ended the rule of Hosni Mubarak, a strongman president who had ruled Egypt for 30 years. The army was called in to stem the uprising after the swelling number of protestors had made the police withdraw from the streets on the previous day. Over the next few days, with Tahrir becoming the symbolic heart of the uprising, a sea of demonstrators occupied the square, and the area filled up with tents and banners. The mood was excited and confused. Many of those I spoke to were unsure what to make of the army, which had been sympathetic to the protestors. In the years of political…

The timing and strategy behind some of India’s diplomacy has been unfortunate, stoking anti-India sentiment in Nepal and undermining hopes of a fresh dawn in India’s regional policy. On 18 September last year, India’s foreign secretary, S Jaishankar, landed in Kathmandu with an impossible mission. Less than 48 hours earlier, a constituent assembly had approved a new Nepali constitution that had been seven years in the making. India had played a crucial role in bringing that moment to pass, acting as an intermediary and a broker in numerous agreements as Nepal resolved a Maoist insurgency. Since 2006, Nepal had removed a centuries-old Hindu monarchy and declared itself a republic, and elected first one and then a second constituent assembly tasked with creating a new body of laws. Now, Jaishankar, as…

AT THE START OF APRIL 2009 , I couldn’t have been better positioned. My book of short stories, Breathless in Bombay, published the previous year, had been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. I was working on a novel about the eunuchs of Mumbai. I had two years of research behind me, and a character and a story I believed in. On the afternoon of 8 April, I got a text message from a journalist at the daily Mid Day, asking if she could call me. She said it was important. I asked her to call in 20 minutes, which she did. She got straight to the point, and asked for my response to the criminal complaint against my work. Criminal complaint? I had no clue, honestly! She proceeded to…

THE POLITICAL JOURNALIST ROHINI MOHAN begins The Seasons of Trouble, her 2014 book on the Sri Lankan Civil War, with Sarva, as we’ll come to know him, arrested for being a member of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Someone must have talked plenty, because on an afternoon in June 2008, Sarvanantha Pereira was detained by men who didn’t say who they were. They would call it an arrest. It felt more like an abduction. Sri Lankan law allows for a person to be held for three months without charge even in the absence of any incriminating evidence, after which the police are allowed extensions to gather said evidence—a potentially endless process. Hence the allusion in the quote above to the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which…

Anoushka Shankar Live in Concert: Home 13 DECEMBER SIRI FORT AUDITORIUM, DELHI Performing in Delhi as part of a four-city tour, sitarist and composer Anoushka Shankar played songs from her latest album, Home, which is dedicated to her late father, the legendary Ravi Shankar. She opened with his raga Jogeshwari, a combination of the ragas Jog and Rageshri. Next came an ensemble performance of Sandhya raga, another of Ravi’s compositions. Anoushka closed with a performance of her own composition, ‘Pancham se Gara.’ The concert had an undercurrent of nostalgia, especially during the Sandhya raga, but it was still unequivocally Anoushka’s—especially given the triumph of Home, which has been nominated for a Grammy award in the World Music category, making her a five-time Grammy nominee.…

Ek Punjab Ye Bhi 2 TO 6 DECEMBER PRITHVI THEATRE, MUMBAI Ek Punjab Ye Bhi was a stage production based on four short stories written by the Urdu writer Ali Akbar Natiq. Danish Husain, who directed the play, also adapted the short stories into a deft script, where characters speak in a mixture of Urdu and Punjabi, at some times playing narrators and at others, renditions of Natiq’s characters. Husain also incorporated Punjabi folk music into the production, which, combined with strong acting and astute dialogue, helped vividly depict the play’s setting, western Punjab. The play did not attempt to bind Natiq’s four stories to a common theme or narrative. The slightly scattered effect of this, however, worked in the production’s favour, and the audience was left wrestling with morally…