Innehållsförteckning för October 2018 från The Caravan

For half a century, nearly a hundred watercolour paintings by an artist known only as the “Anonymous Indian” sat in the basement of a French psychiatric hospital, forgotten among old files and debris. Featuring scenes of nature and daily life as well as allusions to contemporary politics, the works were sent in 1950 to the Saint-Anne hospital in Paris by Ramanlal Patel, a psychoanalyst based in Bombay. With their gentle colours and undulating lines, the paintings hardly evoke madness, let alone a case of “paranoid psychosis.” But such was Patel’s diagnosis of their creator in the partial set of observations that accompanied them. Briefly displayed, they were then left in a dank corner until a team of psychiatrists rediscovered them at the end of the twentieth century. Founded in 1867,…

Two weeks before the Group of 20 summit was held in July last year, rail-signalling equipment was set on fire at 12 locations across Germany, including its capital, Berlin, and Hamburg, the summit’s host city. A group called Shut Down G20 claimed responsibility for the attacks, which it said were meant as an “assault on capitalism’s central nervous system.” G20 summits have a history of civil resistance. At every summit, protesters gather in large numbers outside the meeting venues to draw attention to various causes—climate change, human rights, anti-war movements—or disrupt proceedings. Protesters are known to clash with the police and vandalise public infrastructure. For the German police union, the nationwide wave of arson was not just a reaction to the summit—it represented “a new level of escalation in left-wing…

In Labour Reconciled, an installation for an exhibition that ran earlier this year at Kolkata’s Experimenter Gallery, the artist Sanchayan Ghosh brought together different elements of labour practices around the intellectual project of envisioning a possible utopia. At the centre of the room was a large mortar slab, the sort made by the roof makers of Birbhum district in West Bengal. It was surrounded by pictures of those roof makers, the first edition of a Bengali literary journal and two editions of the journal Labour Law. By putting on headphones that hung from a wall, one could hear the songs of the mostly Dalit women who used to practise this occupation—which disappeared during the 1980s—songs that have often entered poetic traditions largely curated by male poets. The mortar slab bore…

{ONE} CHILLAI KALAN, as the period from the last week of December to the end of January is known in Kashmir, is the best of the valley’s winter. Kashmir turns white and frosty, and the sun all but disappears. People sit in kitchens around kangris—earthen pots with fire embers—seeking warmth. Occasionally, one sees a few men and women walk purposefully across market places. In late December 2016, we woke up to a film of white that had settled on every visible surface. In July that year, Kashmir had lost and found its second great martyr in Burhan Wani, and his death had spurred resistance in ways similar to those seen in 1984 that followed the execution of Maqbool Bhat, the founder of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. The valley was…

THE BRITISH IN INDIA THREE CENTURIES OF AMBITION AND EXPERIENCE David Gilmour In his latest book, the historian and biographer David Gilmour constructs a social history of the British Raj, exploring the lives of the many Britons who came here over three and a half centuries: bureaucrats, soldiers, missionaries, planters, merchants, engineers, teachers and doctors. Gilmour traces their ambitions and experiences, the nature of their work, the lives of their families, their leisure activities and their relationships with the Indian people. PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, 640 PAGES, R 999 THE HIPPIE TRAIL A HISTORY Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland The legendary land route between Western Europe and South Asia was followed by thousands of young people seeking to find themselves during the 1960s and 1970s. Some were in search of cheap…

At the Barawa labour camp outside the Qatari capital of Doha, a small patch of grass has taken on an outsized significance. When I visited in late July, dozens of labourers were lying on a scrubby lawn, a novelty in Qatar’s desert landscape. The lawn was new, an attempt—ambitious or pathetic, depending on one’s viewpoint—to remind the camp’s occupants of home. “My previous camps were barren, but a year ago they shifted me here,” Mohammad Ansari, an electrician from Bihar, told me. “The greenery is good for my heart.” His colleague Ra-him Khan, who came here from Uttar Pradesh, disagreed. “This is it, then,” he said, plucking at a few blades. “This is FIFA’s gift to us.” Qatar secured the rights to host the 2022 football World Cup in 2010…

Early in September, the Madhya Pradesh chief of the Congress, Kamal Nath, announced that if the party came to power it would build a gaushala in every panchayat in the state, which amounts to a staggering 23,412 gaushalas. A fortnight later, as the party president, Rahul Gandhi, headed to Bhopal for his first speech on the campaign trail for the state’s upcoming election, billboards of him doing a Shiva abhisheka dotted the town. For a party fighting Shivraj Singh Chouhan, a three-time incumbent chief minister of middling popularity, this seemed an odd electoral strategy—defending its own religious credentials rather than attacking the government for its failings. The choice of Kamal Nath as party chief embodies all the Congress’s weaknesses in Madhya Pradesh—most notably, a lack of regional leadership and a…

WHEN THE GOVERNMENT IMPLEMENTED the Mandal Commission recommendations, in the early 1990s, it was meant to be a watershed moment for the Shudras. The measure reserved positions in government employment and public higher education for the Other Backward Classes—a category made up overwhelmingly of disadvantaged Shudra castes, traditionally labourers and craftspeople. The commission had identified these castes, part of the fourth and lowest varna of the Brahminical order, as holding a wretched place in Indian society. They lagged far behind the better-off castes on multiple social, economic and educational measures, yet were excluded from the system of positive discrimination created at Independence for the Dalits and Adivasis—officially, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The commission rightly created a separate category of reservations for the OBCs based on their historical backwardness.…

THE WRITER ALICE GREGORY once called anorexia “the impossible subject.” Writing about the disease was difficult, she suggested, because “unlike other kinds of addictions, anorexia disguises itself as virtue.” Accounts of eating disorders tend to use language associated with self-improvement and discipline, and risk romanticising the illness. While shooting “The Girls of Malawa”—a photo project that documents young women with eating disorders—the Danish photographer Marie Hald realised that illnesses involving aspirations for the body are inextricable from notions of the self. “With my camera as my tool I discovered that anorexia and bulimia has little to do with the actual body but much more to do with control and perfection,” she said. Her project documents girls with anorexia and bulimia during their time at Drzewo Zycia—Tree of Life—a facility in…

Exhibition Art Now ART ALIVE GALLERY, DELHI 8 TO 31 OCTOBER The exhibition will bring together the works of 35 artists. These will include amateur artists, and prominent ones such as Sakti Burman, Anjolie Ela Menon and Manu Parekh. The show will showcase the current cultural and global influences on Indian art. For further information, please contact ujjala.gupta@longform.in Theatre One Night Only ODDBIRD THEATRE, DELHI 26 TO 28 OCTOBER “One Night Only” is a musical comedy, a tongue-in-cheek retelling of the story of Aravan from the epic Mahabharata. Set against the backdrop of trans folk journeying to Koovagam for a grand celebration, the plot follows the young Aravan, who is in search of his father, Arjun. The performance draws on forms such as Odissi, Karagattam and Kalaripayattu, and…

In Thailand’s deep south, a region on the Malaysian border that is infamous for harbouring a decades-long violent separatist insurgency, a Chinese Muslim called Hu Ya Feng was reading Immanuel Kant. It was not for leisure. The German philosopher is required reading in the mandatory Peace Studies programme assigned to all students at Fatoni University. “This is a very unique programme,” the tall, smiling student from Shandong told me. “I wanted to study in Thailand because it’s a beautiful country, and it’s much closer to my family than a university in the Middle East.” He was in his fourth year, studying Islamic law and Arabic at the university in Pattani province, which attracts students from places such as Cambodia, France and Papua New Guinea. Founded in 2004, Fatoni University has…

In late August, while investigating the violence at the Bhima Koregaon memorial in Pune earlier this year, the Pune police raided the homes of several well-known human-rights activists, scholars and lawyers, and arrested five among them. The arrests were made under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act—a law that has been widely criticised for its draconian nature. Amid public outcry over the arrests, the Congress too panned the government. “There is only place for one NGO in India and it’s called the RSS,” the Congress’s president, Rahul Gandhi, tweeted. “Shut down all other NGOs. Jail all activists and shoot those that complain. Welcome to the new India. #BhimaKoregaon.” The Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi stepped up to argue in favour of the accused in the Supreme Court. Regardless of such gestures…

THE FALL OF THE INDUS CIVILISATION In the oldest text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, the warrior god Indra rides against his “impure enemies,” or dasa, in a horse-drawn chariot, destroys their fortresses, or pur, and secures land and water for his people, the arya, or Aryans. Composed between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago in Old Sanskrit, the Rig Veda was passed down orally for some two thousand years before being written down, much like the Iliad and Odyssey in Greece, which were composed several hundred years later in another early Indo-European language. The Rig Veda is an extraordinary window into the past, as it provides a glimpse of what Indo-European culture might have been like in a period far closer in time to when these languages radiated from a…

SOME WRITERS TURN ORDINARY READERS into critics looking for hidden meanings in books and asking how they work. Other writers do the opposite, turning even the wariest of critics into ordinary readers, causing them to forget that it takes art to look artless and that easy reading need not come of easy writing. RK Narayan was the second kind of writer. He has inspired love, of the sort one feels for a grandfather full of stories, but less often respect. His literary achievements have been assumed to stem from a reliable and unchanging storytelling instinct rather than a constantly evolving writerly intelligence. His readers, and the more numerous viewers of the television adaptations of his stories, feel nostalgia for the simple world they take his fictional town of Malgudi to…

ON 16 OCTOBER 1968 , Tommie Smith and John Carlos create one of the most iconic images of the civil-rights movement by raising their fists on the medal podium at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Smith and Carlos finished first and third respectively in the 200-metre sprint, and made the gesture to support the struggle raging in the United States against racial discrimination. As they made their way to the medal ceremony with the silver medallist, Peter Norman of Australia, the two athletes wore black socks to symbolise the poverty that plagued so many African Americans. Carlos wore a necklace of black beads to honour those who had been lynched or thrown off slave ships. Smith wore a black scarf. All three, including Norman, wore badges issued by the…