Innehållsförteckning för March 2016 från The Caravan

It is a running joke in Odishawhere I grew up—that if the state wasn’t a part of India, the country’s plumbing system would collapse. On 11 September 2014, as the Kashmir Valley suffered floods caused by torrential rainfall, the newspaper DNA carried an article headlined “Over 100 Odisha plumbers stranded in Jammu and Kashmir.” All these plumbers belonged to Odisha’s Kendrapara district, the story said. In 2011, a “band of migrant plumbers from Kendrapara” was similarly stuck in the middle of an armed conflict in Libya, according to the news website Rediff. Another 2011 report, in The Hindu, talked about Oriya plumbers in Libya who were duped by a fake placement agency that had promised them jobs in the United Kingdom. I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that the plumbers…

The BJP, from temporarily being Modi’s party, is changing back to what it has largely been throughout its history: the political front of the RSS. On 24 January, Amit Shah began his second term as president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, following a first stint that began in July 2014, soon after Narendra Modi assumed power. The controversy over the suicide of Rohith Vemula, on 17 January, was engulfing the party. Vemula was a PhD scholar and a member of the Ambedkar Students Association at the University of Hyderabad, whose stipend had been stopped after a fracas with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. Reports that the university’s actions may have resulted from interventions by the union minister Bandaru Dattatreya, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh man, and the human resources minister, Smriti…

THE DELHI OFFICE of the controller general of patents, designs and trademarks is situated in the neighbourhood of Dwarka Sector 14, a 45-minute drive from the capital’s centres of power. There is a placid air about the place, and on winter afternoons you’re likely to spot the odd group of junior employees sunning themselves on the front lawn after lunch. Past the lawn are two wide buildings, inside which sit 30 officials who examine the patent applications submitted to the office. Most applications that pass through this office are rejected or approved without attracting much attention. Every so often, however, one will draw intense scrutiny from the media, the corporate world and the general public, usually because vast sums of money are at stake in the verdict. Some cases, though…

FOR NUMEROUS PUNDITS the advent of the Narendra Modi government after the 2014 election meant a revival of the Indian economic renaissance. The growth during the earlier boom years had petered out, according to these commentators, because of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance’s policies—the environment ministry’s “licence raj” obstructing various projects, welfare policies such as the NREGA and the Food Security Bill allegedly adding to inflation, and crony capitalism leading to scams in such things as allocating 2G spectrum and coal blocks. By contrast, it was widely held, the Modi-led National Democratic Alliance would accelerate India’s economic growth, and put the country back on the path to its much-delayed modernisation. Yet, till about five years ago, there was a consensus among the intelligentsia—both local and global—that India was already on…

The Flying Houses 5 TO 14 FEBRUARY JAWAHAR KALA KENDRA, JAIPUR The Flying Houses, an exhibition by the French photographer Laurent Chéhère, was a clear standout at Travel Photo Jaipur, an international festival. When he was in Paris, a city where most gravitate towards grandiose structures such as the Eiffel Tower and the Notre-Dame Cathedral, Chéhère instead found himself drawn to run-down street architecture—houses, tents, trailers. In the series that resulted, he superimposed photographs of these homes against photographs of swathes of Parisian sky. Each structure stands alone in its frame, often with electrical wires spilling from it into the surrounding air. By removing the buildings from their usual bustling surroundings and placing them in such austere—yet elevated—contexts, Chéhère asks the viewer to take a closer look at these quotidian…

St+art Festival 15 DECEMBER TO 16 FEBRUARY DELHI By organising this two-month-long street-art festival, the St+art India Foundation aimed to scatter Delhi with murals, installations and public presentations, bringing art to people who often lack access to museums, galleries and other cultural spaces. One of the festival’s many impressive works featured an astronaut perched atop a colourful asteroid, painted on a building façade in Delhi’s Lodhi Colony by a street-art duo from Switzerland, Never Crew. On a similar wall nearby, Borondo, a Spanish artist, painted a palatial courtyard with a series of grand columns receding into the distance. But the crown jewel of the festival was the WIP, or Work In Progress—a collection of works by 25 artists, displayed in a massive industrial venue: the Inland Container Depot, the largest…

On 15 February, three days after Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Student Union, was arrested on charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy, the Delhi police submitted a report to the ministry of home affairs. As The Hindu reported on 18 February, this report alleged that various “hidden groups” of JNU students were “indulging in anti-national activities” because they “mourned the death of Afzal Guru,” “demanded beef” and “worshipped Mahishasur in place of Goddess Durga,” among other actions. News outlets across the country puzzled over the Mahishasur line in particular. Mint cited it as proof of the police’s “moral panic”; the Bangalore Mirror called it evidence of the report’s focus on the “bizarre to innocuous.” Those bemused dismissals, however, sidestepped a large part of the story of…

While campaigning for the 2014 general elections, Modi used the NREGA as political ammunition against Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, declaring in Karnataka, “When the pockets of Congress are full, you can call it NREGA.” At the end of December 2015, the central rural development ministry was in a state of panic. Nine of India’s largest states had declared drought in several districts. The scant kharif harvest meant many farm labourers, who might have been employed on fields, went without work. Water was so scarce that many farms weren’t sowing a winter crop, further diminishing employment prospects. In greater numbers than usual, farm workers sought support, as they have done in the past ten years, from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, or the NREGA, which guarantees at least 100 days…

TO BE MODERN, Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya thought, is to be serious, and the trouble with Indians is that they don’t know how. Engineer, scholar and statesman, Visvesvaraya was the very model of the modern Indian gentleman. “If we are to follow in the wake of other countries in the pursuit of material prosperity,” he said in a 1916 speech to the Mysore Economic Conference when he was the Diwan of Mysore, “we must give up aimless activities and bring our ideals in line with the standards of the West, namely, to spread education in all grades, multiply occupations and increase production and wealth.” Visvesvaraya would have been proud of a certain boy born in Mysore the year he gave that speech. The career of MN Srinivas—as scholar, teacher and pioneering sociologist—reeks…

Following the Box 22 JANUARY INDIRA GANDHI NATIONAL CENTRE FOR THE ARTS, DELHI Following the Box, a 30-minute film, traces the efforts of an American couple, Alan Teller and Jerri Zbiral, to make sense of a box of photographs that they found in an estate sale in Chicago 25 years ago. Neatly captioned and labelled with dates, all the photographs were taken in rural Bengal, around the Second World War. But while the images provided intimate views of villagers, rural vistas, temples and synagogues, they lacked any clear clues as to who took them. Teller and Zbiral followed the box to Bengal, where they tried to uncover the photographer’s identity. Who was this person, and what was her or his artistic intention, if any? How did the photographs get to…

Five years ago, a woman emigrated from the Indian state of Punjab to London to pursue a business degree. She had only begun adjusting to her new life when her university was abruptly shut down, and she found herself with little to do. Three months later, her family got her married to a British-born man of Indian descent. Four months after the wedding, her husband and his family began to physically, mentally and verbally abuse her. “They treated me like a prisoner,” she said. “I couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t phone my brother or my family.” After suffering about three years of this abuse, the woman visited her brother in Rotherham, a sleepy town in northern England. When the time came to return to her husband’s house, her in-laws phoned, saying…

In 1996, a reporter for the Washington Post wrote about not being able to find a single Dalit journalist in India. This prompted The Pioneer’s BN Uniyal to go on a quest to find one, only to get the same result. On the evening of 17 January, the journalist Dilip C Mandal, one of the most formidable Dalit voices on social media, wrote to his over 20,000 followers on Facebook of news from the University of Hyderabad—“perhaps the most terrible news of our times.” A few hours earlier, Rohith Vemula, a Dalit scholar suspended by the university in a manner that reeked of caste discrimination, had committed suicide. Vemula’s death immediately sparked large-scale protests on his campus, and, as the news spread,…

IN 1797 , THE FRENCH ARTIST ANNE-LOUIS GIRODET painted a portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, a statesman and former military officer of the French Republic. A native of Senegal, Belley was sold into slavery at the age of two and taken to the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. He saved enough money to purchase his freedom, fought as a commander and captain in the French Revolutionary Army, and later became a deputy representative for Saint-Domingue at France’s National Convention, in Paris. Belley became among the very few black Africans of the period to attain such an elevated status in Europe. Girodet’s painting depicts him in a nobleman’s finery—a long navy-blue coat, khaki breeches and a white cravat—but also contains a hint of protest; Belley leans on a pedestal that supports…

THE NEW XENOPHOBIA Tabish Khair In this book, the novelist, poet and cultural critic Tabish Khair studies xenophobia in several contexts: historical, philosophical and socio-economic. Khair argues that while the fear of strangers appears throughout the historical record in forms such as communal riots, racist attacks and genocide, it has acquired a unique character in recent history due to the spread of globalised capitalism. Tracing this often neglected relationship between xenophobia and economics, Khair shows how changes in market structures have altered the way societies view outsiders. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 232 PAGES, R 495 IN SEARCH OF MARY THE MOTHER OF ALL JOURNEYS Bee Rowlatt Narrating in the first person, the journalist and writer Bee Rowlatt embarks on a rollicking journey to better understand Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering eighteenth-century feminist…

Kalpana’s Warriors 30 JANUARY TO 2 MARCH ART AND AESTHETIC, DELHI Kalpana’s Warriors, created by the Bangladeshi photographer-cum-activist Shahidul Alam, is a twilit memorial to Kalpana Chakma, an indigenous-rights activist from the Pahari tribal community. Chakma has not been seen since 1996, when she was abducted by the Bangladeshi military. Twenty years after this tragedy, Alam presents a series of laser-etched photo portraits of people who have continually questioned the government’s complicity in Chakma’s disappearance. The images are printed on the straw matting that Pahari people traditionally sleep on. Alam charred these canvasses, evoking the burning of Pahari villages that has often occurred in Bangladesh. The exhibit is chilling in its serenity; the only light in the room comes from candles, each hanging alone from the ceiling to minimally illuminate…