Innehållsförteckning för June 2017 från The Caravan

“On seeing the dirt and the stinking, the official said, ‘ Kitna ganda hai yeh gaon’” —how dirty this village is. From then on, Chopra said, the name was “Ganda.” In December of 2015, about 70 students from Class 7 and Class 8 at a government middle school in Fatehabad district, Haryana, wrote letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Most of them mentioned the fact that their village’s name—“Ganda,” which means “dirty” in Hindi—made life extremely difficult for them and their neighbours. “Wherever we go, people insult us. They crack jokes on us,” read one of the letters, by a girl named Harpreet Kaur, who was 13 years old at the time. “We feel ashamed to say the name of our village.” Several months later, in May of…

Scenting blood, Eshwarappa launched an attack against Yeddyurappa, criticising him for his leadership style and his choice of appointments to various party positions. On 22 March, SM Krishna, the former Congress leader in Karnataka, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party at a ceremony held in the party’s national headquarters in Delhi. It was a typically muddled ritual. The party president, Amit Shah, gifted Krishna a shawl, various lackeys confusedly passed bouquets around, and the two leaders smiled awkwardly long for cameras. Krishna’s entry was a significant boost for the BJP. The party had just scored a massive victory in the Uttar Pradesh election, and was strategising for upcoming polls—particularly in Karnataka, which will hold an assembly election early next year, and is the only southern state in which the BJP has…

THE SUPREME COURT OF INDIA stands on a 17-acre triangular plot in central Delhi. It is built to resemble—from an aerial view—weighing scales, representing justice. The central wing, from which the scales hang, consists of 15 courtrooms. The right wing contains the offices of the attorney general for India and the solicitor generals of India, as well as the bar room for lawyers and a library. The left wing contains the administrative offices of the court. Under the central dome of the building is the court of the Chief Justice of India. As the administrative head of the Supreme Court, the chief justice wields immense power over the court’s functioning, deciding what matters will be heard by which bench. The chief justice’s courtroom has wood-panelled walls and a high ceiling,…

TUSHAR PUSHES AGAINST WEIGHT. He might be eight or nine years old, wiry, muscled. He has a large head with lashes of disproportionate length, even for his large eyes. He insists he will read “this book,” and only “this book.” On this day, “this book” is the thickest of the volumes in the Harry Potter series available in the library in Hindi translation. He is directed to volume one in the series, a book of medium thickness, but apparently not thick enough. Tushar shakes his head. He hefts the book of his choice. “This book.” On another day it is a slimmer book, but extra large. Hardcover. The title: France. Open the book and let’s see. It is about winemaking and other things French. “Yes,” he says, “this book.” When…

Art By Darkling Ground For his second solo exhibition, By Darkling Ground, the artist Adip Dutta will reimagine construction sites and labour tools. The exhibition will include ink-works, sculpture and found objects, as Dutta familiarises the viewer with “carcasses” of “built enviornment.” 17 MAY TO 8 JULY EXPERIMENTER, KOLKATA For more information, write to info@experimenter.in . Photography Views of the Spirit—Photography by Man Ray In collaboration with Madrid’s Mondo Galeria, and Mumbai’s Matthieu Foss Gallery, Tarq Gallery is hosting Views of the Spirit— an exhibition of photographs by the American artist Man Ray, who was a central figure in movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism during the early twentieth century. 25 MAY TO 1 JULY TARQ GALLERY, MUMBAI For more information, write to info@tarq.in…

In the recent debates over triple talaq , much of the community’s leadership has been forced onto the defensive, reduced to picking apart a matter of religious practice rather than speaking up for Muslims’ rights as citizens. Following the Bharatiya Janata Party’s landslide victory in the Uttar Pradesh election, at the beginning of March, Muslims across north India have been discussing what went wrong in hushed tones. What has left them feeling besieged is not just the BJP’s choice of the state’s chief minister—Adityanath, a firebrand Hindu priest who has regularly flaunted his anti-Muslim bigotry. The BJP did not field a single Muslim candidate in a state where Muslims form a fifth of the population; the party’s campaign was deeply communally divisive, making issues of such things…

BIGUL KISAN 1987 I used to grow crops in the fields of Ishwar Tirkey. I had gone to take control of that land in accordance with the decision by the Krishak Sabha. But the goons of the landlord attacked me in the fields of Lahari Bura. They nearly crushed my head. They also took away my plough and oxen. In protest, peasants under the leadership of Prahlad Singh and Muzibur Rahman attacked the house of the landlord. The police came and arrested many on charges of rioting. PANCHANAN SARKAR 1987 Tempers frayed, and when the police resorted to firing the peasants replied by shooting their arrows. A police officer named Sonam Wangdi was hit by two arrows and died later in the day. The following day, on 25 May, the…

ON 28 MAY 1989 , Lijia Zhang, a twenty-something factory worker, addressed a political rally in the Chinese city of Nanjing. This was unusual for her. A high-school dropout, Lijia had up until then been largely apolitical. But the pro-democracy student demonstrations at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square—going five weeks strong, and days away from massacre—had captured the public imagination. Like many workers, she had followed the events on the radio for weeks. Learning of a nearby demonstration that day, she impulsively decided to attend. At the rally, Lijia somehow found herself on the podium. Speaking without preparation, through tears, she began modestly enough, expressing solidarity with the students at Tiananmen. The crowd egged her on. Emboldened, she went on to denounce the People’s Republic of China as a “dictatorship,” and even…

“The American strike is nothing more than a message that they have the final word,” Bayush told me. “I do not think there will be another strike in the near future.” On 7 April, the United States launched 59 cruise missiles from the Mediterranean Sea into Syria, taking aim at an airfield of the Syrian government. Reports cited damage to airplane hangars, and between nine and 13 casualties. The strikes were a response to an alleged use of chemical weapons three days earlier by the forces of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, that killed 87 people. According to Feras al-Bayush, the airstrikes were far too mild a response. Bayush formerly served as a lieutenant colonel with the Syrian air force, but defected in 2013 and joined the Free Syrian Army—a…

In the realm of mental healthcare, realities on the ground bear little relation to legal frameworks—a rupture that has been central to understanding and evaluating India’s mental-healthcare policy. In December 2014, the international advocacy group Human Rights Watch released a report documenting wide-ranging and intense human-rights abuses involving women in 24 institutions across India that house those perceived to be mentally ill. Most striking amid the blocks of text describing the abuse were the stark images of women and girls forcibly deposited in these institutions. Deepali, a 46-year-old with a perceived mental illness, was pictured on the first page of the document, alongside a quote: “I woke up one night and I couldn’t move; my body was in intense physical pain. A nurse came and jabbed an injection into my…

GLENNA GORDON is drawn to “alternative narratives, surprising subcultures,” and themes “outside of the realm of mainstream photojournalism.” So in 2012, when, in the conservative region of northern Nigeria, the documentary photographer encountered littattafan soyayya—a genre of romance literature penned by women—she knew she had stumbled upon her next project. Littattafan soyayya consists of many types of works, including “morality tales and pulp fiction,” Gordon said, though most of the stories are about love and marriage. Composed in Hausa, the most dominant of the Chadic languages, these stories are usually handwritten in small composition notebooks by women in and around the northern Nigerian city of Kano. The stories are then typed up, mimeographed, assembled by hand, published and sold in markets across the Sahel region, just below the Sahara…

THE OTHER MAN Shashank Kela Shashank Kela’s stylish debut novel introduces Daya, a police inspector who is drawn with shades of the famous fictional characters Inspector Maigret and Agastya Sen. Sent from Delhi to an unnamed tribal area to investigate the police killing of two suspected Maoists, Daya uncovers inconvenient truths about corruption and complicity that are hidden behind the media rhetoric of a war between Naxalites and the Indian state. JUGGERNAUT BOOKS, 208 PAGES, R 80 VAMPIRE IN LOVE STORIES Enrique Vila-Matas Translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa This is the first short-story collection by the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas to be translated into and published in English. In these surreal and comic stories, which feature hunchback romantic heroes and unreal cameos by real writers such as Marguerite…