Innehållsförteckning för September 2016 från The Caravan

Each week, residents of the village of Kudeng Thymmai, in Meghalaya, hike for about an hour through lush forests to get to a bazaar in a neighbouring village. On the way, they come upon a bridge that seems to have emerged from the earth itself—with moss-covered beams made not of steel or timber, but of sturdy, growing tree roots. The bridge is one of many “living-root” bridges in Meghalaya. The northeastern state receives heavy rainfall, which forms many streams and rivers that surge along its forest floors. Long ago, when Meghalaya’s indigenous people tried building bamboo bridges to cross these waters, the structures simply washed away. Then, they realised that by binding the aerial roots of local rubber trees together with bamboo or betel-nut tree trunks, they could construct better…

On the evening of 7 April, El Rincón de las Guitarras—a cozy dancehall in the Chilean city of Valparaíso—was strung with small coloured flags. These decorations, usually reserved for national holidays, had been hung in honour of the evening’s musical act. An audience of about 50 people of all ages sat around tables and chatted. Around 10.30, a singer, guitarist and pianist began to perform a bright tune to an off-kilter beat. Soon, pairs of dancers from the audience ambled to the floor, twirling handkerchiefs in the air, circling one another coquettishly and marking the rhythm with their feet. The audience was dancing the cueca, the national dance of Chile. René Alfaro, the singer performing for them that night, has frequented El Rincón for over a decade. Beginning as a…

 On 18 April, the Supreme Court heard a Public Interest Litigation seeking the restitution to India of, among other cultural artefacts, the Kohinoor diamond, which is currently part of the British crown jewels. Arguing on behalf of the Indian government against any official action, Ranjit Kumar, the solicitor general, told the court, “Kohinoor cannot be said to be forcibly taken or stolen as it was given by the successors of Maharaja Ranjit Singh to East India Company in 1849 as compensation for helping them in the Sikh wars.” This caught many by surprise. Though the government had not actively pursued the return of the diamond in recent years, it had consistently asserted India’s claim to the gem since very shortly after Independence. Kumar’s position was lambasted by the media, which…

Heart diseases, prevalent in most communities, are one of the commonest and ever-growing cause of death, disability and loss of working hours in India across genders and rural areas and cities alike. Trends indicate that these diseases have found their way into the younger populations too. SLEEP APNEA AND ITS RISKS TO INCREASED HEART DISEASE Snoring is the first indication of sleep apnea and cardiologists indicate its connection with heart diseases. Among people suffering from problems such as high blood pressure, heart failure and stroke, there is a high prevalence of sleep apnea. Whether it actually causes heart diseases is still unclear, but cardiologists do maintain that if an individual has sleep apnea today, the chances of developing hypertension in the future increases significantly. What causes blood pressure to soar…

KRISHNA SOBTI WATCHED the television screen intently, from her usual place on the worn brown sofa in her compact east Delhi apartment. As each new talking head appeared, she either bid me to listen carefully, or else gently resumed our conversation until the next section she deemed important. The scratchy DVD was something the doyenne of Hindi literature knows inside out: a Doordarshan programme about her, from the mid 1990s. We watched as the male interviewer and a series of male interviewees gave way to footage of Sobti delivering a literary speech: “Bhasha ki jo oorja hai woh maatra lekhak ke antar mein sthit nahi hai”—the energy that a language has is not located only in the interiority of the writer. “Chup reh!”—shut up!—said the old lady on the sofa…

Gandhi – The Musical 13 TO 21 AUGUST NATIONAL CENTRE FOR PERFORMING ARTS, MUMBAI Gandhi – the Musical, co-produced by Silly Point Productions and the National Centre for Performing Arts, reimagined the life of Mohandas Gandhi, from his time in South Africa until his assassination. To present its 16 original songs and 12 dance sequences, the production drew on frenetically diverse musical genres—jazz, bhajan, even dubstep. The musical’s director, Danesh Khambata, made clever casting picks, featuring the theatre actor Chirag Vohra as Gandhi, and even the Bollywood star Boman Irani as the voice of the British Raj.…

Experimenter Curators’ Hub 28 TO 30 JULY EXPERIMENTER, KOLKATA The sixth edition of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub gathered premier art curators from all over the world to discuss their craft. In one evening of the conference, the veteran curators Naman Ahuja, Cosmin Costinas and Maud Page spoke about projects they had worked on that involved deep political engagement. Ahuja presented on his landmark exhibition about the body in Indian art and thought; Costinas spoke about his exhibit on the racial dynamics of Hong Kong’s SARS outbreak; and Page discussed challenges involved in curating indigenous art from Australia and New Zealand.…

Mukul showed the photograph to his father, saying “Look, there’s a picture of you apparently partitioning the National Library.” His father “just laughed and said, ‘you know that this never happened.’” On 18 August 1947, the American magazine Life carried a photograph of BS Kesavan, who would soon become the first national librarian of newly independent India. Captured by the photojournalist David Douglas Duncan, the image shows Kesavan, a young man with his hand buried in his hair, sitting at a table between two large stacks of books. The stack on the left is topped by a white placard that says “PAKISTAN,” while one atop the other says “INDIA.” The caption reads, “In the Imperial Secretariat Library, a curator tries to divide a 150,000-volume collection into equal parts for each…

On 6 August, at a town-hall-style meeting in Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke out against self-styled gau rakshaks, or cow protectors, declaring that 80 percent of them were fake. “I feel angry when people, in the name of cow protection, do business,” the Indian Express reported him as saying. It had been nearly a month since seven Dalits were flogged in the city of Una in Gujarat, for skinning a dead cow. Since then, the state had witnessed a storm of protests by Dalits, who took to the streets in rage against the assault. The agitations refused to die down in the weeks that followed, building pressure on Modi to address the issue. The prime minister’s comments on the matter, however, both in Delhi and in Telangana the next…

 KARAN VAID spent much of his boyhood, in the 1970s and 1980s, being shepherded to dog shows all around India by his dog-enthusiast parents. Decades later, Vaid, by then a photographer, found pictures from those trips while digitising old family albums. “I decided that I should revisit these shows and see what was going on,” he said. Thus was born the Indian Dog Show Project, a series that captures scenes from dog shows held across the country, from Chennai to Amritsar. Vaid has been working on it since October 2013. When shooting the series, Vaid wanted to avoid taking the “classical documentary approach.” He was struck by how many dog owners “loved the camera on them,” and how some enjoyed quasi-celebrity status…

GRASSROOTS INNOVATION MINDS ON THE MARGINS ARE NOT MARGINAL MINDS Anil K Gupta For over two decades, the scholar Anil K Gupta has travelled through India, researching innovations made by people living in rural communities. Detailed in this new book, the inventions he learnt about range from the Mitti Cool refrigerator, created after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, to the root bridges of Meghalaya, which are constructed from living tree roots. Gupta, who runs a network of innovators across India, believes that to fight the world’s largest problems, we must look towards not only the ideas born in expensive research labs, but also those of ordinary folk. PENGUIN BOOKS, 288 PAGES, R 599 RED LIPSTICK THE MEN IN MY LIFE Laxmi, Pooja Pande Growing up in a male body, Laxmi Narayan…

Rhetorical Amendments to the [REDACTED] 18 JUNE TO 30 SEPTEMBER THE GUILD ART GALLERY, MUMBAI Rhetorical Amendments to the [REDACTED] showcases work about censorship and free expression, highlighting how art can be an act of political resistance. For instance, Sreshta Rit Premnath’s ‘To Destroy is Also to Make Visible’ presents a still from a video of Hindu fundamentalists vandalising a gallery that displayed paintings by the artist MF Husain. The scene Premnath has frozen depicts a moment of destruction. But, crucially, he has cut out the images of the canvasses in the photograph, letting the bare white wall of the gallery peek through to convey utter emptiness.…

Raja Ravi Varma: Royal Lithography and Legacy 8 JULY TO 31 AUGUST NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, BENGALURU The Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation, in its first endeavour, displayed 131 of Varma’s lithographs—the largest exhibition of the painter’s work ever organised. It began with Varma’s depictions of the avatars of Vishnu, and moved on to works of other deities and characters from Hindu epics. While most of Varma’s paintings depict subjects sitting in isolation or in conversation with each other, some capture dynamic moments, such as ‘Jatayu Vadha’—in which Ravana kills the deity Jatayu before abducting Sita. The final section of the exhibit displays Varma’s portraits of celebrated personalities, from the Nizam of Hyderabad to the theologian Adi Shankaracharya.…

 About two years ago, Rajesh Kumar, a 43-year-old artist who earns a living by making drawings on commission, received a phone call from a Delhi police station. “The police were investigating the rape case of a minor girl and they wanted my help,” he told me last month, when I met him in his tiny studio in Sarojini Nagar. Rajesh sketched as he spoke, putting the finishing touches on a charcoal drawing of Barack Obama. The officer on the phone, he remembered, had “kept on asking me about my experience in the field of sketching, and also said that I will get a prize if they catch the man.” “Prejudice, it creeps in, no matter who you are,” said Rakesh Shukla, a lawyer and psychotherapist who works at the Delhi…

ON A SATURDAY NIGHT IN APRIL, at around 9 pm, I rode a motorcycle to the outskirts of Haryana’s Jhajjar town, 20 kilometres west of Delhi, accompanied by a photographer. “Bhrata shree,” an enthusiastic Gau Raksha Dal, or GRD, activist had addressed me over the phone earlier that evening, using the Sanskrit word for brother. “Come whenever you want. We’ll start the gasht”—patrol—“once you’re here,” he said. The location he had called us to was an unlit and isolated stretch of road, right before National Highway 334B, about a kilometre from Jhajjar bypass. I stopped the motorcycle after spotting a group of 20 men, all gau rakshaks, or cow-protection vigilantes, milling about near two parked SU-Vs—a Tata Scorpio and a Mahindra Bolero. Close by, there was a police control room…

SOMETIME IN 2000 , I watched the actor Sabitri Heisnam play the eponymous protagonist in a stage adaptation of Mahasweta Devi’s 1976 story ‘Draupadi.’ Set against the backdrop of the Naxalite movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, ‘Draupadi’ tells of a woman Adivasi insurgent in the fictitious but recognisable forested belt of “Jharkhani” on the Bengal-Bihar border, working in tandem with a group of communist guerrillas from the city. Draupadi gets caught by the military, and is serially raped as part of a ritual chastisement session. Then, in a throwback to the public shaming of Draupadi from the Mahabharata, to which Mahasweta adds a defiant twist, the woman casts off her sari, refusing to cover up the wounds inflicted on her by the state. The audience gasped in…

Mapping Stillness 23 JULY TO 31 AUGUST NINE FISH ART GALLERY, MUMBAI In a gallery located in the recesses of an abandoned mill, this exhibit explored various interpretations of stillness, through the work of the artists Madhu Das, Prathap Modi and Sujith SN. All three are known for depicting fictional landscapes, but their styles differ widely—particularly in their choices of media, which range from watercolour to woodblock to woodcut print. In a particularly affecting series of paintings by Das, a man lies curled up in the foetal position. A large, siren-hued woodcut print by Modi shows a man sitting in a meditative pose atop a red lotus. And a melancholy watercolour painting by SN shows a line of people waiting in a queue, the dark sea roiling in the background.…

It is likely the house will be dismantled piece by piece with a large crane and a scaffold to support the remaining structure 29 JULY KHOJ STUDIOS, DELHI Much like its title, this dance performance was abstract, long and perplexing. The three performers were artists from drastically different backgrounds: the Goa-based painter Nikhil Chopra, the French cinema and theatre artist Romain Loustau and the Japanese butoh dancer Yuko Kaseki. Wearing loose clothing smeared with red-brick paste, the trio led the audience out of the studio and into the narrow gully outside. People and objects on the street were quickly absorbed into their act. Kaseki climbed on to the first floor ledge of a vacant, decrepit building, her body moulding itself into its jagged edges. At the end of the performance…