Innehållsförteckning för April 2016 från The Caravan

“Bhagwan jaane kya ashubh chhupa hua hai wahan” (God knows what evil is hiding there), Kishenlal Negi, the leader of a group of migratory herders based in the Pin valley, in the district of Lahaul and Spiti, told me with a sigh. It was early August 2014, and I was in a remote sub-division of the district in Himachal Pradesh, surveying wild goats and vegetation for my doctoral research in wildlife biology. Negi, like many other herders, took his livestock grazing to the high mountains in the region during the summer months of July and August, and brought them to lower hills in the Shimla and Solan districts during winters. Negi was telling me of a rumour: that the Shinsa, a small stream that flows through a high Himalayan pasture,…

On an early March afternoon, the economist and amateur historian Vali Jamal, a slight, soft-spoken Ugandan Indian in his late seventies, showed me a draft of his book—a coverless tome of thousands of pages on Indians living in Uganda. Nine years in the making, the manuscript is a comprehensive history of Ugandan Indians. Hundreds of pages of the draft covered a largely forgotten event: the 1972 expulsion of the country’s Indian community by the military dictator Idi Amin. Jamal and his family were among the 60,000 Indians thrown out of the country by the strongman. The draft details the chronology of the expulsion, with Ugandan newspaper clippings and many photographs of the barrel-chested Amin. Many pages were still full of corrections made with a red pen, but Jamal hoped the…

There are plenty of historical examples to illustrate the efficacy of targeted protectionism. Numerous countries have used such policies to establish strong manufacturing bases. In January 2010, the Indian government launched the National Solar Mission, or NSM, a phased plan to promote solar power aimed at achieving a generation capacity of 20 gigawatts of solar electricity by 2022. Last year, it revised that number upwards, to 100 gigawatts, while keeping the deadline the same—meaning that solar power now accounts for more than half of the 175 gigawatts of generation capacity from renewable resources that the government plans to create by that year. Even though solar power forms less than 2 percent of India’s total generation capacity at present, the revision signalled a growing confidence in the country’s solar-power sector on…

AS OUR CAR RACED ALONG a road flanked by fish farms—bheris, in Bengali—we passed gangs of young men scattered all along the way. They stepped into the middle of the road, flagging down trucks, tempos and autorickshaws to demand money—ostensibly to celebrate Saraswati Puja, which was just days away, on 8 February. “They decide the chanda”—donation—“and you simply have to pay up,” Umesh Singh, the driver ferrying me from Kolkata to the town of Basirhat, in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, told me. “There is no bargaining with them.” Our car, however, went on unimpeded, because Singh had stuck onto the windshield a sign with “Press” scrawled boldly across it. Basirhat lies about a three-hour drive east of Kolkata, near the Bangladesh border. Our journey there was taking us…

THE TINY ISLAND NATION OF NIUE, with its lush forests, turquoise swimming holes and outlying coral reefs, may seem like a paradise no one would willingly leave. But for decades now, Niue—known as the Rock of Polynesia, or just the Rock to locals—has been losing droves of its residents to New Zealand, which offers much better economic opportunities and standards of living. Around 5,000 people lived in Niue in the 1960s. Today, fewer than 1,200 remain, and approximately 24,000 people of Niuean descent live in New Zealand, 2,400 kilometres to the south-west across the Pacific Ocean. Absence is, therefore, the crux of Between a Rock and a Far Place, a documentary series shot by the photographer Vlad Sokhin in 2014, over a week’s stay on the island. The work is…

Frida Kalho’s Bathroom 9 FEBRUARY TO 8 APRIL INSTITUTO CERVANTES, DELHI When the iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo died, her husband locked her most private possessions inside her bathroom. After five decades, in 2004, the room was finally reopened. One year later, the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide visited Kahlo’s home and captured stark, black-and-white shots of scenes inside it, with a special focus on the mysterious bathroom. Iturbide has said that she aimed to document “everything related with Frida’s pain”—an approach that showcased a dramatically different side of Kahlo than the one projected in the painter’s own art, which features vivid hues and fantastical images. The theme of containment echoes ominously through many of Iturbide’s pictures, from an image of Kalho’s crutches and back brace resting against a wall, to…

Bangalore Queer Film Festival 25 TO 28 FEBRUARY ALLIANCE FRANCAISE AND MAX MUELLER BHAVAN, BENGALURU The eighth edition of the annual Bangalore Queer Film Festival featured an array of movies from Indian and international directors alike. One audience favourite was Naanu Avanalla Avalu, a Kannada film based on the life of a transgender woman activist from Karnataka. Tangerine, an experimental feature shot entirely on an iPhone, told the stories of two transgender sex workers living in Hollywood, California. Memories of a Machine, a 10-minute Malayali film about a woman recollecting her first sexual encounter, premiered at the festival to a positive response. Also popular was a presentation by the film scholar Thomas Waugh, who screened a fascinating triad of short films that touched on themes such as the decriminalisation of…

The artist Jeram Patel died, at the age of 86, on 18 January. Many newspapers paid homage to him. He was remembered as a pioneer of abstract art in India, and for his contributions to the modern art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Almost every article mentioned the technique he made famous—blowtorch on woodwork—in which artists burn patterns onto wood with a flame. But another aspect of his life was never brought up: that Patel might have partly caused the disbandment of a high-profile art movement that challenged the dominant trends in Indian art. The movement was called Group 1890. It arrived with much fanfare in the 1960s, and disappeared within a few years almost unnoticed. A brainchild of the famous painter Jagdish Swaminathan, it boasted a line-up of…

On 27 January, Kerala’s chief minister, Oommen Chandy, was grilled for 14 continuous hours about the “solar scam” that has rocked the state for the past three years. None of Kerala’s 13 former chief ministers had ever endured such a public ordeal. It was a low point for Chandy, who heads the state’s Congress-led United Democratic Front government, and who has had a nearly spotless five-decade-long political career. These interrogations—conducted by G Sivarajan, a retired high court judge who heads the judicial commission probing the scam—pertained to the close contact between Chandy’s office and the businesswoman Saritha Nair. Three years earlier, Nair had been accused of cheating hundreds of people of crores through a fraudulent company dealing in solar panels. Two of Chandy’s aides had already been arrested before he…

THE SCHOLAR BENEDICT ANDERSON died on 13 December 2015, in the Indonesian city of Malang, in eastern Java. Anderson lived a peripatetic existence. Born in 1936 in China, of Anglo-Irish parentage, he studied in the United Kingdom and the United States, and taught for much of his life at Cornell University, in the state of New York. But he was always drawn, by inclination, back to Asia—particularly to South East Asia. Over decades of studying the region, Anderson learnt Indonesian, Javanese, Tagalog and Thai, and authored numerous works of history, political science, and social and cultural analysis. Indonesia exerted the greatest pull on his interest and affection: Anderson devoted more scholarship to it than to any other country, and adopted two Indonesian sons. It was the closest thing he had…

AT INTERNATIONAL BOOK FAIRS, which I have attended for the last seven years, experts show off their national book markets in elaborate presentations with colourful graphs and pie charts. I stare in wonderment. Not because the numbers are exceptional, but because they exist in the first place. By contrast, any presentation on the Indian book market is a collection of qualitative descriptions, anecdotal observations, experts’ views, information from newspapers, and whispered rumours. Indian publishers don’t rely on hard market data to make business decisions, because almost none exists. Instead, they fall back on an elaborate network of informers, which primarily consists of retailers and distributors, and in-house marketing and sales teams. New entrants to the publishing scene in India are often baffled by the complicated industry. But even as publishers…

Tea Garden Journal and Other Drawings 16 FEBRUARY TO 20 MARCH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, BENGALURU In the 1940s, the Communist Party of India tasked the artist Somnath Hore with documenting the lives of people working in the tea gardens of Bengal. Nearly seven decades later, this exhibition—organised by Kolkata’s Seagull Foundation for the Arts and Bengaluru’s National Gallery of Modern Art—presented many of the pieces that resulted from this assignment, displaying over 150 drawings from the artist’s journal and sketchbooks. Mostly completed in pen and ink, Hore’s pieces use broken lines and uneven strokes to document the unease and agitation that pervaded the workers’ lives. Some of the drawings seem almost mundane, depicting basic scenes from labourers’ everyday routines. Others are more dramatic, focussing closely on individual subjects’…

On 17 February, in an airy, white lecture theatre in Dublin City University, eight politicians—six men and two women—debated issues ranging from abortion rights to student loans. Each was vying for a seat in Ireland’s parliament, the Dáil Éireann, to represent Dublin’s North-West constituency. One of the two women candidates was Cathleen Carney Boud, the 37-year-old councillor of the city’s North-West ward—a working-class residential area. Boud, a first-time general election contender, took questions confidently and spoke in a measured tone. I met her after the debate to ask about her experience standing in this election. “Once you are in politics,” she said, “you forget about the gender thing.” But that can only happen, she added, “with the support of your party.” Boud was one of 163 women running to be…

There was the usual slur to his speech. But a massive crowd of his followers, assembled in Kanchipuram on 20 February, clearly understood what the actor turned politician Vijayakanth, popularly known as Captain, said. “Do you want me to be the king or the king-maker?” he thundered. “The king!” the crowd roared back. He commanded them to repeat the words, and they did, again and again. “So be it,” Vijayakanth said, before thanking them and leaving the podium. That was all the indication he gave of his course of action in the upcoming assembly election—which had been a matter of frenzied speculation in political circles and the media. For nearly five decades, political control of Tamil Nadu has oscillated between two major outfits—the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, or DMK, now led…

ON THE AFTERNOON of 22 February 2014, Gujarat’s then chief minister, Narendra Modi, strode up to a lectern at a political rally in Silchar, in southern Assam, around 40 kilometres east of the Bangladesh border. Dressed in a peach kurta, a patterned beige stole and a white, gold-bordered turban, Modi resembled an elderly groom more than a prime-ministerial candidate. As he spoke, the crowd of tens of thousands regularly erupted in chants of his name. “Brothers-sisters,” Modi said, in Hindi. “The kind of governments elected here, all of Assam is troubled because of Bangladeshis.” He continued: “And because of me, all of Pakistan is troubled”—referring to speculation that the neighbouring country was wary of him. “Now you have to make the choice whether you want to tolerate the problems of…

With the advent of spring and summer, as trees and flowers are starting to bloom, a heavy concentration of pollens is continuously released into the atmosphere, which can travel over miles in the air. In the summer months, increased ozone from smog, exhaust fumes, and pollutants tend to be higher and can trigger asthma symptoms. There is a heavy concentration of moulds and pollens in the atmosphere in the months of February, March and April, especially after rainfall. This can cause misery to people in the form of recurrent bouts of coughing, breathing difficulties, sneezing, runny nose, red itchy eyes, feeling feverish and headaches. There is increased possibility of worsening the symptoms of asthma, leading to severe acute attacks. Both children and adults can get affected alike, but children and…

UNDERSTANDING THE FOUNDING FATHERS AN ENQUIRY INTO THE INDIAN REPUBLIC’S BEGINNINGS Rajmohan Gandhi Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, BR Ambedkar, Subhas Chandra Bose and Vallabhbhai Patel shaped the Indian republic in its early stages, often attempting to shield it from sectarianism and authoritarianism. In recent times, the legacies of these men have been questioned. Here, the historian Rajmohan Gandhi weighs in on their contributions, addressing questions such as: Did Gandhi weaken India’s Hindus? Would Bose and Patel have led better than Gandhi and Nehru? Could the Kashmir issue have been handled differently? ALEPH BOOK COMPANY, 160 PAGES, R 299 CURFEW IN THE CITY Vibhuti Narain Rai Translated from Hindi by CM Naim Originally published in Hindi as Shahar Mein Curfew, this novella by the police officer and writer Vibhuti Narain Rai…

Step Into My Parlour 6 MARCH THE PIANO MAN JAZZ CLUB, DELHI The venue of “Step Into My Parlour” was decorated with objects one would find in a traditional Irish sitting room. Before she began performing, the Irish singer Michelle Burke encouraged audience members to interact with these props—helping themselves to sherry from a glass bottle, or completing a few stitches on a half-knitted scarf. Then, Burke performed an eclectic recital that interwove traditional Irish songs with spoken fables and family stories. The combined effect of the setting, music and recitations was unusual, and the singer seemed to revel in the audience’s surprise. But the power of her soulful voice, accompanied by piano and guitar, was enough to captivate the room. The core of her set comprised traditional Irish songs,…

A MILITARY TRUCK parks at the foot of a colossal statue of the Buddha in Bamiyan Valley, in Afghanistan’s central highlands, sometime around the turn of the twenty-first century. Carved into a sandstone cliff and standing 53 metres tall, this was the world’s largest standing Buddha statue. A similar, but slightly smaller Buddha figure stood to its left. The Buddhas were built around 500 AD, at a time when the Bamiyan Valley was the world’s westernmost centre of Buddhist culture and learning. In the ninth century, the statues came under threat when the valley was invaded by the Muslim Saffarid dynasty, which suppressed Buddhism. But the Buddhas survived, and continued to for over a millennium, through attacks such as a Mongol conquest in the twelfth century and a Soviet invasion…