Innehållsförteckning för November 2018 från The Caravan

Eight years ago, a team from the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage travelled to the eastern hills of Mizoram and identified a few potential heritage sites. One of these was in the village of Vangchhia, in Champhai district, where they stumbled across around 170 menhirs—tall, upright stones from prehistoric times—of varying heights. They were embossed with scenes from what appeared to be traditional Mizo hunting practices, and images of Mizo musical instruments and heroes from the community’s legends. In May this year, following an excavation that had begun in January, the Archaeological Survey of India announced that it had found the remains of a lost civilisation. Vangchhia was not a new discovery for 82-year-old P Rohmingthanga, who has been the convenor of INTACH’s Mizoram branch since 2009.…

Kalvakuntla Chandrasekhar Rao, the first chief minister of Telangana, dissolved the state assembly in early September, eight months before the end of its term, and announced polls in December. He pitched this as a reaction to Telangana’s “political fragility”— caused, he said, by the opposition’s attacks on his government—but even with his silver tongue he could not make the excuse sound convincing. Telangana’s next state election was due to coincide with the 2019 general election. Rao—better known by his initials, KCR—acted to avoid that situation, in which his rhetoric of state pride risked being drowned out by the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party’s campaigns for national power. KCR’s Telangana Rashtra Samithi can also now focus all its resources on one battle at a time, rather than split its strength across…

“I KNEW I HAD BECOME NACCHUNEY”— too impure to touch—this is how Bunu Dhungana, a Nepal-based photographer, recalled the first time she saw bloodstains on her underwear at the age of 13. She remembered informing her mother, and that they both cried. After their conversation, Dhungana was confined to a dark room for seven days. Dhungana’s photographic work, “Confrontations,” using herself as the subject, reflects on her experiences of growing up in a traditional Nepali-Hindu community between the ages of six and 36. Using her body as the trope for discourse, her work comments on society’s role in shaping the reality of women, and the effect it has on their psyche and sense of self. “For as long as I remember, I was always reminded that I was a girl…

Exhibition Masked Dance for the Ancestors 11 OCTOBER TO 17 NOVEMBER JHAVERI CONTEMPORARY, MUMBAI The exhibition features the works of the late Indian modernist painter Mohan Samant, from the 1970s to 1990s. A member of the Progressive Artists Group, Samant often participated in the seminal international exhibitions of twentieth-century Indian modernism. “Masked Dance for the Ancestors” showcases the artist’s hybrid style through which he challenged the boundaries between painting and other disciplines of art. For further details, please contact info@jhavericontemporary.com Music/Festival Mahindra Kabira Festival 16 TO 18 NOVEMBER GULERIA GHAT AND SHIVALA GHAT, VARANASI This two-day long programme offers musical performances by the ghats at sunrise and sunset. Performers include acclaimed artists, such as Barnali Chattopadhyay, Vidya Rao, Sonam Kalra and Malini Awasthi. The festival will also include…

On 23 September, Delhi’s Constitution Club hosted two well-attended gatherings. The first was the concluding day of the National Convention against Assault on Journalists, a sombre affair with a media fraternity under fire quietly asserting its rights. The late Gauri Lankesh, whose brazen murder last year had sparked national outrage, was remembered. Prominent journalists such as Siddharth Varadarajan and Josy Joseph spoke about press freedom and its current state in India. It was all very sobering—until one discovered the other, even more sobering, event taking place at the same time. This was the first Conference on National Commission for Men, organised by Deepika Narayan Bharadwaj, an engineer-turned-documentary filmmaker, in association with the Save Indian Family Foundation. It was a full house by the time the event was to start at…

Since November 2014, the alternative treatment industry in India has been bolstered by the establishment of a dedicated ministry called the ministry of ayurveda, yoga & naturopathy, unani, siddha and homeopathy, or AYUSH. Upgraded from its status as a department, the AYUSH ministry now operates parallel to the ministry of health and family welfare, which focusses primarily on evidence-based modern medicine. In the past four years, the AYUSH ministry’s budget has more than doubled to R 1,428.7 crore in 2017-2018. With such serious money under its belt, plans for the industry’s scale and growth have been ramped up. In 2017, the union minister of state for AYUSH, Shripad Yesso Naik, a Bachelor of Arts graduate with no scientific training, announced that the centre had approved proposals to set up 100…

THE NATIONALISM OF THE CONGRESS and the vision of Indian civilisation that sustained it—the fantasy of a Sanskritic, Aryan heritage that united the subcontinent’s countless peoples—have long been supplanted in Tamil Nadu by a politics of Tamil difference and autonomy. Similarly, the imagined institution of Indian literature has long ceased to animate Tamil writing. The first Tamil modernists of the twentieth century, though, drew heavily on the imaginary of Indian nationalism and its associated reform movements—the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj. Foremost among these writers was the poet Subramanya Bharathiyar. He wrote both Tamil and Indian nationalist songs, was deeply read in Sanskrit, and believed the Tamils were Aryan. Bharathiyar wrote the earliest poems in Tamil without metre. His poems demonstrate how, for him, the human, the divine and…

ON 5 FEBRUARY 1913 the Mexican president Francisco I Madero and the vice president José María Pino Suárez attended a ceremony at the Benito Juárez Hemicycle—a monument in Mexico City. It was the last official event presided by the two before they were assassinated just over two weeks later. Before they came to power in 1911, both politicians had led a political revolution for the establishment of democracy in the regime. During the 35-yearlong dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, the president who preceded Madero, large-scale modernisation, economic growth and urbanisation had benefitted only the elite, and had further marginalised the peasant community. Demonstrations that opposed the Diaz regime were quelled, including in 1903, when police fired on protestors at a massive public rally. In 1908, Diaz declared that he would retire…

On 30 August 1887, in the town of Brunswick, Tennessee, a black mill worker named James Eastman came out victorious in a fight his white employer had started. On 1 April 1892, an unidentified black man—reported to be the only black man in the county—was “standing around” in a white neighbourhood in Millersburg, Ohio. According to the Aurora Daily Express, it was “alleged that he ‘sneaked around town,’ that he ‘stared at people,’ and committed several grave misdemeanors against the people and dignity of the state. But it [did] not appear that he perpetrated any crime.” On 23 July 1926, a farmer’s daughter in Wythe County, Virginia, gave birth to a child whose father was Raymond Bird, a black farmhand. All three men were lynched. Hazel Turner was lynched in…

On 1 June, HD Kumaraswamy, newly sworn in as the chief minister of Karnataka, met the former Infosys chief Narayana Murthy at the latter’s residence in Jayanagar, a plush neighbourhood in southern Bengaluru. Before Kumaraswamy even had a cabinet in place, he was at Murthy’s door, seeking guidance on constituting an expert committee to solve Bengaluru’s civic problems, particularly those related to infrastructure and waste management. Kumaraswamy was aping the many similar state initiatives that have sought to address problems of Bengaluru’s governance by creating “expert bodies” headed by information-technology czars. This trend started in 1999 when the then chief minister SM Krishna constituted the Bangalore Agenda Task Force, headed by the Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and continued with BS Yeddyurappa constituting another expert body—the Agenda for Bengaluru’s Infrastructural Development.…

THE ECONOMICS OF RELIGION IN INDIA Sriya Iyer Based on a decade of research and a survey of almost six hundred religious organisations, the economist Sriya Iyer explores how growth, inequality, education, technology and social trends affect, and are affected, by religious groups. Iyer demonstrates how religious organisations substantially increased their provision of services after economic liberalisation in India and suggests that this compensated for the retreat of the state. Her data also indicates that religious violence is more common where economic growth is higher, because growth increases inequality, which sectarian politicians might exploit to encourage hostility toward other religions. HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 304 PAGES, R 799 HALF GODS Akil Kumarasamy In this debut collection of ten interlinked stories, the writer Akil Kumarasamy follows the fractured origins and destinies of…