Innehållsförteckning för April 2018 från The Caravan

On a cold February morning in 1959, a 37-year-old American engineer fled Prague aboard an Air India flight. For the two years before that, Morton Nadler was suspected of being a spy by opposing sides in the Cold War—by the FBI in his country of birth, the United States, and by the government in his country of adopted citizenship, Czechoslovakia. Upon landing in Calcutta, he was driven to the Indian Statistical Institute, or ISI, where he would spend the next two years working with India’s first computers. Nadler had joined the Communist Party in 1936 and subsequently was on the watch list of intelligence agencies in the United States. Chafing from an incident in which he lost a job as a radio engineer in Chicago due to his political sympathies…

My colleague Pratik Purakayastha and I drove to Haokha Mamang Leikai, a village just off the Indo-Myanmar highway, on a rainy morning in September last year. Every few kilometres we would spot a poster with an image of eight boys in the national football team kit, arms crossed in front of their chests. Wherever we saw these posters, we would stop to ask directions. At one such interval, a young boy crossed us on a bicycle, promptly turned around and motioned for us to follow. Five days later, Amarjit Singh Kiyam and Jeakson Singh Thounaojam, boys the young cyclist had grown up with in Haokha, were announced as members of the Indian team in FIFA’s under-17 world championship. Eight of the 21 boys representing India were from Imphal and its…

In February 2014, months away from the Lok Sabha elections, the United Progressive Alliance government was desperate to see through the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Bill—which, if passed, would bifurcate the state of Andhra Pradesh. The bill had been the result of a fierce movement for creating Telangana that had lasted for decades. However, members of parliament from the Andhra region across parties had been protesting the bill tooth and nail—on 13 February, one Congress MP had unleashed pepper spray over the house. On 18 February, when the UPA government had made all arrangements to pass the bill, and all eyes were on Lok Sabha Television, the screen went blank about three minutes into the proceedings. Speaker Meira Kumar decided to go ahead with a “voice vote”—where the speaker asks for…

FOR MAHLUI, IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. One day, when he was in the tenth grade, Mahlui’s friend brought along a new acquaintance to visit him in his hostel room. With her pale complexion, long black hair and large eyes lined with kohl, Mahlui was instantly infatuated with this new girl. Although they became friends, he did not confess his feelings towards her. Besides, they met each other infrequently, since the girl lived far away from the city, and commuting options were limited. “She was my dream girl,” Mahlui said to me about that first, but lasting, impression. He did not want to be identified by his full name. In his adolescent years, Mahlui was at constant loggerheads with his parents, who insisted they wanted to see their daughter…

LIVING CLASS IN URBAN INDIA Sara Dickey In this book, the anthropologist Sara Dickey argues that globalisation is radically transforming Indians’ perception of class. She focusses on four individuals living in the second-tier city of Madurai: an auto-rickshaw driver, a graphic designer, a domestic worker and an English teacher. Drawing on over thirty years of fieldwork, she examines a nation in flux, bombarded with images of middle-class consumers navigating the currents of capitalism and the inequality it produces. PERMANENT BLACK, 280 PAGES, R 795 SCENE 75 Rahi Masoom Raza Translated from Urdu by Poonam Saxena The protagonist of Raza’s irreverent and surreal novel, Ali Amjad, travels from Benares to Mumbai in the 1970s in an attempt to become a scriptwriter, only to encounter the absurd and tragic reality behind the…

 Bachura, a small village in Kashmir’s Budgam district, wakes up every day to the sound of shots fired by personnel from the Indian armed forces and military groups who practise at a firing range nearby. Surrounded by the karewas—mineral-rich terraces—and dotted with almond trees, the range is six kilometres from the Srinagar airport. Many young people in Bachura, a small village in Kashmir’s Budgam district, have taken to collecting and selling used bullets for a small income. The noise from the gunfire has acquired a different meaning for the young people of the village, many of whom, in recent years, have taken to collecting and selling used bullets. The small income it generates—around R 14,000 a month—helps them with daily and family expenses. The army sometimes practises with different ammunition,…

In July last year, François Andrelie had her first ultrasound examination at Salud Digna, a clinic in downtown Tijuana, Mexico, that conducts tests at popular prices. A small-built 34-year-old Haitian woman, Andrelie was in the third month of her first pregnancy at the time. When I went to visit her the next day, at a small apartment that she shares with her boyfriend and two other Haitians, she spoke of being “happy but also a bit sad.” “I live a life that I do not like,” she said. “When I was young I thought I could give everything to my son when this time came.” She would like to become a doctor, and return to Haiti, but she knows that the chances of either happening are slim. Andrelie left her…

Caste Thread, an exhibit by the artist Kalidas Mhamal, currently on display at the Museum of Goa, makes heavy use of symbolism. It consists of a series of five mannequin torsos, hung on five separate wooden blocks. Each of the torsos has a janave, with a key hung on it. The janave, known in Hindi as janeu, is the caste thread that Brahmin and savarna men wear as a sign of their privelege and high birth. The torsos also have a rosary around their necks, and a painted symbol or motif: from left to right, Goan pork sausages, a lit matchstick, a pão, a Band-Aid and a glass of red wine. The wooden blocks from which the torsos are hung display a set of names, Hindu and Christian, suggesting a…

IN AN IMAGE from Soumya Sankar Bose’s photographic series, two bodies are locked in an embrace, with only their silhouettes visible. Despite being in the shadows, their intimacy is palpable—in the tilt of their heads, the tenderness of the embrace and the intensity of their gaze. In Bose’s composition, light entering through the window falls on a crown of flowers worn by one of the individuals, perhaps to suggest to the viewer the nature of their hidden identities in real life. This play of light hides as much as it reveals. Immersing the viewer in a surreal universe is crucial to Bose’s project “Full moon on a Dark Night.” By way of these portraits, Bose conducts a psychological exploration of a community of individuals who have been relentlessly persecuted by…

Arts Step Inside and You Are No Longer a Stranger: Over 50 years 8 FEBRUARY TO 10 JUNE KIRAN NADAR MUSEUM OF ART, DELHI This exhibition by Vivan Sundaram, one of India’s most prolific artists, features almost 200 of his works. His most recent piece, “Meanings of Failed Action,” is an experiential, collaborative work. It sits somewhere between theatre, performance and installation (featuring sound art by the notable British artist David Chapman) and re-tells a mostly forgotten event in India’s pre-Independence movement. This is displayed alongside rare works from the mid sixties. The show is curated by Roobina Karode and Vivan Sundaram. For more information, write to knma@shivnadarfoundation.org Arts Lapses 12 APRIL TO 12 MAY SAKSHI GALLERY, MUMBAI The exhibition is centred on the idea that memory is…

In 2001, a large collection of artefacts from the trans-Himalayan caravan trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were discovered in a dilapidated serai in Kargil’s Old Bazaar. It did not immediately occur to the owners—the Bhats, a prominent family in Kargil—to build a museum to house them. The Bhats had lived in the city for four generations, working in the fields of politics, commerce and welfare. But it took three years, some debate and a few coincidences for the Munshi Aziz Bhat Museum of Central Asian and Kargil Trade Artefacts to open to the public. The curator, Aijaz Hussain Munshi, told me when we met in June 2017 in Kargil that the family had nearly forgotten its role in the caravan trade until his older brother, Munshi Abdur Rehman,…

On 22 March, the Karnataka state government issued a notice granting minority status to the Lingayat community. Over the last few years, the issue of separate religion status for the Lingayats has seen intense debate, invoking issues related to history and religious doctrine, as well as politics. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has adopted a position consistent with its ideology, seeing it as a move that threatens Hinduism by fragmenting it. The RSS is duplicating arguments and rhetoric it has used to suggest that Sikhism is not a separate religion, a stance that has caused much acrimony and some violence in Punjab. In the long term, the RSS viewpoint holds the potential to stir similar trouble in Karnataka. Last year on 20 August, the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat held a meeting…

ON 26 JULY 2014, two months after Narendra Modi became the prime minister, the Sunday Guardian broke a story that sophisticated listening devices had been found in the official residence of Nitin Gadkari, a minister in Modi’s cabinet. The newspaper, closely aligned with the Bharatiya Janata Party, cited an anonymous source saying that the devices had been planted by US intelligence, and Subramanian Swamy, a member of parliament with the newly ruling BJP, alleged that the bugging had been done under the previous, Congress-led government. Gadkari himself, in a tweet the next morning, called the story “highly speculative,” but stopped short of dismissing it outright. In parliament, opposition parties called for a probe and a statement from the prime minister, disrupting proceedings for two days. The home minister, Rajnath Singh,…

DURING A TYPICALLY SURREAL PASSAGE of arms in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty remarks loftily to Alice: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” This accidental observation on the mutability of categories could be applied to almost any literary genre, including nature writing. In each case the critic is forced to set a boundary depending upon the problem under discussion. The difficulty of defining nature writing becomes especially acute in the Indian context, where examples of it are few and far between. The most serviceable analogy might be with literary fiction, for, like it, nature writing is marked by inherent complexity of language, thought and structure. It’s this that sets it apart from the much broader…