Innehållsförteckning för January 2019 från The Caravan

“Let me introduce you to everyone before we start practising,” Hariharan K, a tall, lanky 24-year-old, said to me. It was a September night at Chennai’s Besant Nagar beach. We were next to a brightly lit Ferris wheel. A generator for an ice gola stall whirred loudly. A few steps away from it, a large group of boys and girls were huddled close together, watching YouTube videos. Hariharan, the captain of the Fly Wild Ultimate Frisbee team, gathered them in a circle. There were around twenty-five players, 12 of whom were girls. They gather thrice a week to practise under the floodlights on the beach. Each session is preceded by a warm-up, sprint and other games. While I watched a practice game, an argument broke out between one girl and…

The disconnect between the Delhi commentariat and political reality becomes most evident when the time comes to analyse a defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party. This was underlined after the latest state elections, which saw three states in the Hindi belt change hands—Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The Congress’s less-than-thumping victories, with the thinnest of margins in the two most populous states in play, were enough to get the capital talking of the end of the Narendra Modi era. In liberal drawing rooms and watering holes, many who maintained a studied silence for the last four years are rediscovering the language of dissent as they prepare themselves for what they see as an impending regime change. But political reality has no regard for such expectations. The Delhi chatter was sustained…

IN AUGUST 2017 , the Myanmar army began a new wave of targeted attacks, killing Rohingya and razing their villages. Zeid Raad Al Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, called it “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” Nearly a million Rohingya began streaming across the border to the district of Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh. In doing so, they became part of one more cycle of political persecution followed by mass migration over the past four decades, despite years of hostility from the Bangladesh government and border security forces. According to Gabriele Cecconi, an Italian photographer who has documented living conditions at the sprawling refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, this influx of migrants precipitated an environmental crisis. During his first two trips to Bangladesh, in March and…

Exhibition Rerouting Realities 10 JANUARY TO 10 FEBRUARY OJAS ART GALLERY, DELHI In his first solo exhibition, the Mithila artist Santosh Kumar Das presents a collection of 40 works spanning over two decades. Das’s work is inspired by Hindu mythology and his everyday life. Besides his renowned Gujarat and Krishna series, the exhibition includes the first ever public display of a set of two scrolls, created in 1999, that depict the mythological tale of Hans and Bachcharaj. For further information, write to ojasartgallery@gmail.com Theatre Emil and the Detectives 19 AND 20 JANUARY EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE, MUMBAI Based on Erich Kastner’s eponymous children’s novel, this is the story of Emil, a young boy travelling alone for the first time to meet his grandmother. On the way, Emil is robbed and…

Down in a basement, on a lane in south Delhi, lie manuscripts by the most renowned writers of modern Indian history: Tagore, Faiz, Manto. They are accompanied by paintings and sketches, which also come from the sort of figures known by a single name: Souza, Raza. Then there are documents autographed by political leaders, including Jinnah and Nehru. This hidden pantheon aims at comprehensiveness, but it also elicits surprise. A signature by the former prime minister VP Singh is accompanied by an abstract drawing of Ganesha. The physicist CV Raman adds to his signature a credo: “Light reveals the hidden soul of truth!” And Amartya Sen’s signature is featured alongside an unattributed caricature seemingly not available online—suggesting it might be a self-portrait. The man who collected all these singular bibelots,…

Narendra Modi rose to power on the promise of creating 20 million jobs. Contrary to expectations, the past four years have seen a record decline in employment creation. According to the latest data collected by the International Labour Organisation, the number of unemployed people is expected to rise to 18.9 million this year, from 18.6 million in 2018. In an interview to the right-wing magazine Swarajya, the prime minister said, “more than a lack of jobs, the issue is a lack of data on jobs.” As part of a larger mistrust of existing unemployment statistics, a task force instituted at Modi’s behest in 2017 scrapped the Employment–Unemployment Survey—carried out by the National Sample Survey Office every five years since Independence—and replaced it with a completely new data-gathering methodology. As a…

In 1954, the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, christened the Bhakra Nangal dam, part of India’s first ‘Five Year Plan’, as “the temple of modern India” during its inauguration. A year later, while laying the foundation for the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam as a part of the same plan, he said, “When I lay the foundation stone here of Nagarjuna Sagar, to me it is a sacred ceremony… This is the foundation of the temple of humanity in India, a symbol of new temples that we are building all over India.” Four years later, in another speech, Nehru was quoted saying, “The small irrigation projects, the small industries and the small plants for electric power will change the face of the country, far more than a dozen big projects…

“KATHERINE MANSFIELD. You will be the Katherine Mansfield of Hindi.” My father spoke slowly, placing an emphasis on each word. He seemed to be listening to a voice in his head. “Go on, write it down,” he insisted, as though afraid he would forget the ten words if they were not written immediately. His eyes were on my pen as it hesitated above the notebook. Did he really expect me to write that? It was an ordinary day and I still remember it. A crow-pheasant strutted about on the lawn, its tail feathers gleaming black. A dog barked and then there was quiet. I could hear the pressure cooker whistling, even though the kitchen was at the far back of the house. He said this in March 1994, a few…

The doorman of any five-star hotel is invariably a busy man. “It’s been a busy morning,” an apologetic Luis Nhaca told me when we met at Maputo’s Hotel Serena Polana in February 2015. “The queen of Spain was here. Can you come back at nine?” Built in 1922, the Serena Polana resembles a cross between the Grand Budapest Hotel and a European casino, plopped down in Mozambique’s capital. Its 153 rooms have housed a number of illustrious guests, including the current Aga Khan, former American presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, as well as Queen Elizabeth II. Nhaca has met most of them—or at least held open the door for them. When I returned at 10 am, Nhaca was all smiles, inviting me to stand with him at a shady…

On his way to the prime ministership in 2014, Narendra Modi promised that, if his Bharatiya Janata Party won power, the government would raise the minimum support prices paid for crops such as rice and wheat to guarantee farmers a 50-percent profit on their production costs. The benchmark was first proposed by the Swaminathan Commission, formed in 2004 to address farmers’ economic plight, and Modi castigated the incumbent Congress-led administration for not implementing the commission’s recommendations. The BJP’s campaign manifesto repeated Modi’s pledge, and promised other measures “to enhance the profitability in agriculture,” such as lowering the cost of agriculture inputs and credit. After Modi was elected, the gargantuan Food Corporation of India stopped procuring foodgrain from states that paid farmers bonuses on top of existing minimum prices. This led…

MODERN SOUTH INDIA A HISTORY FROM THE 17 TH CENTURY TO OUR TIMES Rajmohan Gandhi The historian and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi tells the story of four South Indian cultures—Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu—as well as the cultures that have influenced them. His narrative begins at the end of the sixteenth century, with the fall of the Vijayanagar empire, and brings us into the present with a look at the new generation of political leaders who have taken over the reins from dominant personalities such as M Karunanidhi, NT Rama Rao, MG Ramachandran, J Jayalalithaa and Ramakrishna Hegde. It also portrays significant cultural figures such as Narayana Guru, MS Subbulakshmi, UR Ananthamurthy and Muthulakshmi Reddy. ALEPH BOOK COMPANY, 544 PAGES, R 799 THE SIXTH STRING OF VILAYAT KHAN Namita Devidayal The…