Innehållsförteckning för September 2018 från The Caravan

In a bright, spacious and strikingly empty building around four years old, Indian art and artefacts stood observed by a few bored guards. The museum’s only guide insisted that that morning in early June was exceptional and that the halls were usually crammed with tourists from around the world. Recently incorporated into a new cultural centre known as Square 500, behind the city’s iconic Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, the museum has an ideal location for luring Sofia’s growing numbers of tourists. But despite our guide’s assurances, Square 500’s unique collection of Indian art, the largest in the Balkans, has been neglected for many years by the public, scholars and the state. The Indian collection was once a priority of the Bulgarian government and a showcase of its aspirations to cosmopolitan modernity.…

In the second week of August, addressing a campaign rally in Kolkata, the BJP national president Amit Shah yelled into a mic: “Are the Bangladeshi infiltrators a security threat to this country or not?” A crowd of BJP supporters roared that they were. “The bomb explosions that occur in Bengal are carried out by the Bangladeshi infiltrators or not? Should they be thrown out or not?” he went on with his noxious rhetoric. Shah’s comments echo those made by several BJP leaders on the immigration issue in Assam. Using the terms “infiltrators” for Muslim Bangladeshis and “refugees” for Hindu ones, the BJP is appropriating a long-standing anti-foreigner sentiment in Assam to demand curbs on immigration into the state from Bangladesh. With the promise of acche din seeming like a crude…

The Company’s social responsibility extends beyond its employees and customers to the communities neighbouring the manufacturing facilities and the society at large. The Company’s social initiatives focus on Community Development, Skill Development and Road Safety, and are aimed at creating opportunities for people to live a dignified, healthy, safe and productive life. The Company strives to achieve high standards of quality, productivity and customer care in the automobile industry and the manufacturing sector at large. The Company uses the same rigour and discipline in undertaking social projects, which includes needs assessment during project design, efficient and timely execution and impact assessment during project life-cycle. In 2017-18, the Company spent INR 1250.8 million in social projects, over 2% of its average net profit for the previous three years. The automobile industry…

BORN WITHIN A FEW YEARS OF EACH OTHER, Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004), Srinivas Rayaprol (1925–1998), AK Ramanujan (1929–1993), and Arun Kolatkar (1931–2004) were the first generation of Indian poets in English to recognise that the times had been a-changin’ and the trade winds blowing over a newly independent India now brought with them clouds from the United States. As late as 1947, the year India became independent, those clouds were not even a speck on the horizon. One perspective on the poetry scene as it then existed comes from This Strange Adventure: An Anthology of Poems in English by Indians, 1828–1946. The title is revealing. Though Indians had by then been writing poetry in English for more than a hundred years, it was still considered a slightly out of the way…

Madhosh Balhami was sitting in his courtyard feeding his two cows grass one afternoon in March 2018, when he heard the sound of gunshots at a distance. A short time later, three men came running past him, towards a leafy, tree-lined path descending on his left. As soon as they took a few steps down the stairs, they abruptly turned and came running back, straight into Balhami’s brick-and-stone house in Balhama, a saffron-growing village on the outskirts of Srinagar. He knew at that moment that his house was marked. Balhami is the pen name of Ghullam Mohammad, a 52-year-old saffron farmer and poet. The three men who had run in were members of Ghazwat-ul-Hind, a new militant group led by Zakir Musa that claims links to Al Qaeda and supports…

“Under our constitutional system, no single entity can claim superiority,” Muthuvel Karunanidhi, then the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, wrote in The Hindu on 15 August 2007. “Sovereignty does not lie in any one institution or in any one wing of the government. The power of governance is distributed in several organs and institutions … Even if we assume that the Centre has been given a certain dominance over the States, that dominance should be used strictly for the purpose intended, not for oblique purposes.” At the time Karunanidhi wrote the article, his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government was in its second year of office and enjoyed cordial relations with the Congress and the left parties at the local and national levels. Even so, it opposed a move by the central…

3 DAYS LATER A new business opportunity opens up in the naval sector when the Defence Acquisition Council approves a proposal to build six conventional submarines to the tune of I 80,000 crore. MARCH 2015 RDSPL acquires 18% stake for I 819 crore in Pipavav, one of India’s largest private shipbuilders. Pipavav was then on the verge of bankruptcy and its total debt stood at I 6,893.07 crore. Among others, Pipvav had tie ups with a Russian group JSC Zvyozdochka. JULY 2015 Modi attends BRICS summit in Ufa, in Russia. Russian government reportedly chose Pipavav to partner with Zvyozdochka to build frigates for Indian navy. JULY 2015 National Stock Exchange asks Pipavav if it got selected for frigate contract. Pipavav’s response to NSE: The company is in negotiation with organisations…

HINDU GODS ARE IN A LITIGIOUS MOOD these days. Following the struggle by Ram Lalla—the Hindu deity’s infant form—to lay claim to the 2.77 acres of land where the Babri Masjid once stood, even minor gods are flexing their muscles. The temple idol in Sri Govind Dev Ji Mandir, a garden-variety temple in Eastern Rajasthan, has recently been deemed to be the sole owner of about 400 bighas of land. The yoga guru Ramdev, incidentally, was eyeing the same plot of land for his Patanjali empire. The Indian state, which routinely dispossesses its citizens in the name of large infrastructure projects, is quite helpless when it comes to the land rights of temple deities. Idols have long enjoyed state patronage. In 1988, the Indian government represented the god Shiva in…

BAO NINH SETTLED INTO HIS CHAIR and ordered for tea. He put a pack of Camel cigarettes on the table and looked out of the window. “It’s not a good time to come to Hanoi,” he said. May in the city is hot and stifling, and marks the beginning of a sweltering summer. As the temperatures soar, the crowds fizzle out. Later, the monsoon rains wash the city, igniting the “spirit of Hanoi,” which, according to Kien—the protagonist of The Sorrow of War, Ninh’s daring and wildly popular 1990 novel based on his experiences in the Vietnam war—is “strongest by night, even stronger in the rain. Like now, when the whole town seems deserted, wet, lonely, cold, and deeply sad.” We met at a cafe in downtown Hanoi, favoured by…

Exhibition Indian Ceramics Triennale: Breaking Ground 31 AUGUST TO 18 NOVEMBER JAWAHAR LAL KENDRA, JAIPUR Celebrating the vast possibilities of the medium of clay, the first edition of the Indian Ceramics Triennale features projects by 35 Indian and 12 international artists, as well as ten collaborative works. Apart from the exhibition, the festival includes talks by 12 speakers, a symposium, film screenings and workshops for adults and children. For further information, write to shriya.pant@flint-culture.com Theatre The Father 1 TO 30 SEPTEMBER EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE, MUMBAI Written by Florian Zeller, who called it a “tragic farce,” The Father attempts to portray a picture of mental dysfunction and the toll it takes on the sufferers and their caregivers. This story of a man suffering from dementia being visited by a procession…

Even more than in previous instances, the July elections in Pakistan were swayed by the army, a veritable state within the state. The country has experienced three military coups since its independence, which allowed the army to govern the country for some thirty years altogether. Ten years ago, the military vacated centre stage, allowing the formation of civilian governments after elections often tainted by irregularities. The vote in 2008 brought about a two-stage democratic transition. The first phase was when the Pakistan People’s Party won the general elections owing to the wave of sympathy caused by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. The second phase was in August 2008 when General Musharraf yielded the presidency to Benazir’s widower, Asif Zardari. Five years later, for the first time in its history, Pakistan saw not…

{ONE} NARENDRA MODI’S first prime ministerial visit to France, in April 2015, came amid long-drawn negotiations over India’s purchase of Rafale warplanes, manufactured by the French company Dassault Aviation. In 2012, a Congress-led government had declared Dassault the lowest bidder in a contest to supply 126 fighter jets for the Indian Air Force. After nearly ten years of cautious planning, field trials and rigorous evaluations, the country was, by most accounts, on the brink of finally acquiring its long-awaited seven squadrons, when Modi’s government took over. Modi now had a chance to make his mark on the negotiations. The Indian prime minister’s schedule for the first full day of his visit included, among much else, round-table discussions with French CEOs from the infrastructure and defence industries, as well as talks…

When India achieved independence in 1947, it was primarily an agricultural country with a weak industrial base. The national consensus was in favour of rapid industrialisation of the economy which was seen as the key to economic development, improving living standards and economic sovereignty.Building upon the Bombay Plan, which noted the requirement of government intervention and regulation, the first Industrial Policy Resolution announced in 1948 laid down broad contours of the strategy of industrial development. Subsequently, the Planning Commission was constituted in March 1950 and the Industrial (Development and Regulation) Act was enacted in 1951 with the objective of empowering the government to take necessary steps to regulate industrial development. The Public Sector Units were initiated by the Indian government during the Nehruvian Era to play a significant role in…

ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS the Russian photographer Ksenia Kuleshova heard about Abkhazia when she visited the country was a legend. When god assigned nations their place on earth, the Abkhaz representative was entertaining guests and arrived too late. Recalling that Abkhazians are renowned for their hospitality, god gifted him a place where he had intended to live himself—a small, beautiful region overlooking the Black Sea. An image of Kuleshova’s, which shows a child playing next to frothy waves on a snow-covered beach in Sukhum—the country’s capital—matches the image conjured up by this myth. With its extensive coastline and the Caucasus Mountains in the north of the country, Abkhazia, a breakaway republic of Georgia, was an idyllic holiday destination frequented largely by Soviet tourists. But the country was ravaged by…

THE RSS A VIEW TO THE INSIDE Walter K Andersen and Shridhar D Damle More than thirty years ago, the American academic Walter Andersen and the Indian scholar Shridhar Damle came together to write The Brotherhood in Saffron, their first book on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. In this, their new work, they address fundamental questions about the RSS, including its rapid growth over the past 25 years, its response to India’s new socioeconomic milieu and the impact of its growth on the country’s politics and policy. PENGUIN VIKING, 400 PAGES, R 699 IMAGINING LAHORE THE CITY THAT IS, THE CITY THAT WAS Haroon Khalid This account of Lahore begins in the present—describing its people, communities, monuments, parks and institutions—and travels backwards to the mythological origins of the city. During the…