Innehållsförteckning för May 2019 från The Caravan

Erwin Karl Tiegel was born in the German port city of Hamburg. He died at the age of 83, on 11 June 1994, at the VM Salgaocar hospital at Chicalim, in Goa. He had spent the last 55 years of his life in the coastal state, nearly seven thousand kilometres from home, as a consequence of participating in a forgotten, but no less extraordinary, episode in one of the more obscure theatres of the Second World War. When the war broke out, on 1 September 1939, Tiegel was employed by the German shipping line DDG Hansa. He was serving on the MV Braunfels, which was then travelling from Djibouti to Calcutta. Its cargo included “all kinds of things, from cars to cement,” his son, Edward, who lived in Goa until…

In the afternoon of 25 October 2018, 14-year-old Nidal and 15-year-old Haseeb walked through the narrow streets of Camini, a small town in the region of Calabria, in southern Italy. Nidal’s family had come from the village of Kafaroumah, at the gates of Idlib, a town in northwestern Syria where forces opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad still resist. Haseeb was from Lahore, in Pakistan, and had been in Italy for the past four years, with his 13-year-old sister Muskan. The two boys chatted and laughed as they headed for the multimedia classroom run by the local cooperative Jungi Mundu—which, in the Calabrian dialect, means “unite the world.” Their class that afternoon dealt with the age of European colonialism and the rise of nationalism. Jungi Mundu was founded, in…

IN AN IMAGE CAPTURED BY the documentary photographer Chinky Shukla, a nine-year-old girl stands in front of a fence and gazes into the camera. Her head looks slightly enlarged and disproportionate to her body. The photograph is from “A Curse in Disguise,” Shukla’s series on people who experienced adverse health conditions following a nuclear test, codenamed Operation Shakti, that was held at Pokhran, Rajasthan, in 1998. The test involved five nuclear-bomb detonations, and was the second of the two nuclear tests India has conducted at the Indian army’s test range in Pokhran. The first, codenamed Smiling Buddha, was held in 1974. At the time, people from villages surrounding the range were largely unaware of the explosion until it was announced on the radio. But the 1998 test was carried out…

HEAT Poomani Translated by N Kalyan Raman Poomani’s critically acclaimed novel Vekkai, which is being adapted into a film, is out in a new English translation. It follows a young boy from a town in Tamil Nadu, whose life turns upside down after he murders an affluent landowner as revenge for having killed his brother. The boy then goes on the run with his father, hiding out in forests, caves and mountains near their town, where they forage for meals and reflect on their broken family. JUGGERNAUT, 264 PAGES, R 499 THE RSS A MENACE TO INDIA AG Noorani The author and lawyer AG Noorani writes an extensive chronicle of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s history. He traces the motives behind its formation and the setting up of a political front,…

After a hard day’s work, 15-year-old Bhurilal Gayeri was ready to call it a night. Over the course of that day in March 2011, Bhurilal and his co-worker, who was 16 years old, had fried 500 kilograms of farsan—a Gujarati catchall term for salty snacks—at the Sheetal Farsan Mart in the Vapi industrial estate in Gujarat. The owner had locked the doors from outside, to ensure that the underage workers he employed could not escape. In order to make room to sleep, the two teenagers struggled to move their large kadhai—wok—out of the way. Suddenly, Bhurilal slipped and fell, into 35 litres of hot cooking oil. “I have no memory of what happened after,” he told me when we met in October 2018 at his house in Nandeshma village in…

On 27 and 28 April last year, a rare “informal summit” took place between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and China’s president, Xi Jinping, at Wuhan in China. The meeting was described by the Indian and foreign media as a chance for the two countries to “reset” their fraught relationship. According to the Indian government, several outstanding issues were discussed—the dispute over the 4,056-kilometre Line of Actual Control; the trade deficit India has with China, a statistical figure going up every year; and ways to develop cultural exchange. Whether China’s occupation of Tibet—a longstanding bone of contention between the two nations—figured in their discussions is not known. Both countries’ governments and sections of the mainstream media hailed the visit as a milestone in bilateral relations. India’s ministry of external affairs released…

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, I became captivated with Hymn 130 from the Atharva Veda: Let him be consumed with love of meThat he may think of me, and that Imay never think of himSend forth the spell, Gods! Let himbe consumed with love of me.Madden him, Maruts, madden him,madden him, madden him.Madden him, Agni, madden him. The reason for my absorption: it was clearly written in the voice of an infatuated young woman in the throes of a lovers’ quarrel—a voice that seemed unusual to me, rare even. Much of my engagement with ancient Indian literature has been coloured by cultural attitudes I assimilated towards such literature, which were based on a myopic understanding of a past often misconstrued as predominantly Hindu. I was fed on stories, images and…

A Photogenetic Line 13 APRIL TO 15 JULY EXPERIMENTER, KOLKATA Pieced together from the photo archives of The Hindu, the exhibition features a 100-foot sequence of cutouts. Reframing existing photographs as new entities, these cutouts—made up of images of significant historical moments—frequently transcend temporal and political boundaries. For further information write to joshua@experimenter.in Drishyakala 1 FEBRUARY 2019 TO 31 JANUARY 2020 RED FORT, NEW DELHI Seafaring Europeans commissioned artists as early as the eighteenth century to come to India, so that they might carry back artistic renditions of the land and its people to the countries from which they had sailed. This resulted in the creation of some of the first paintings ever to realistically depict people and places in India. This exhibition features Oriental Scenery: Aquatints of India, a…

On 29 October 1842, The Nation, an Irish weekly newspaper, published the lyrics of a new version of “Sean Bhean Bhocht,” a folk ballad that had been passed down orally over generations. It was originally a scurrilous love song, about a young man who marries a sean-bhean bhocht—a poor old woman—and submits to her every demand, most of them sexual in nature. The version published in The Nation, however, recast the previously apolitical ballad to decidedly political ends. It had been composed almost fifty years before, and heralded the success of a French maritime expedition that planned to land nearly fifteen thousand troops at Bantry Bay in 1796 to aid the Society of United Irishmen in their planned rebellion against British colonial rule. Their landing was imminent, the sean-bhean bhocht…

Documentaries usually tend to leave mainstream Indian audiences indifferent. Except, when it wins an Oscar and has something to do with India. In February, Period. End of Sentence., directed by the Iranian-American filmmaker Rayka Zahtabchi, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject). The 26-minute film is set in Kathikera, a village in Uttar Pradesh, and depicts rural women overcoming their shame about menstruation by learning to manufacture and sell indigenous sanitary pads. The film in many ways resembles the kind of documentaries commissioned by non-profits. It is neat, tells an inspirational story, and follows the introduce-a-problem-suggest-a-solution model. The documentary is devoid of complexity and nuance, and aims to balance activism and storytelling. Such a style, by itself, is fine, but raises two vital questions: Why did this mediocre…

ON THE BRIGHT, SUNNY EVENING OF 24 OCTOBER 2018 , in downtown Kochi, close to two hundred men and women, most of them employed in the banking and insurance sectors, gathered after office hours to listen to a speech. They huddled inside a Victorian-era auditorium, owned by the Young Men’s Christian Association, on the busy Chittoor road. On the two-foot stage at one end of the hall stood a slender, bespectacled man, dressed modestly in a white mundu and a faded green handloom kurta. Leaning against a wooden podium, he spoke firmly for the next hour, his teeth flashing, as he smiled with every pause. Behind him, an ivory-coloured curtain bore the name of the organisers, and the title of his public lecture—“Sabarimala: The Court Verdict and Kerala Renaissance.” The…

IN 1860 , CHARLES TREVELYAN, the governor of the Madras Presidency at the time, orchestrated what came to be known as the Madras rebellion. He claimed that the budget of the colonial administration leaned too far towards financial centralisation, and was therefore unfair to the provinces in general, and the Madras Presidency in particular. He questioned the legitimacy of British control of finances, given that there was no representation of tax-paying Indians in the decision-making process. Two recent books attempt to grapple with the issue of how India manages the fiscal aspects of its federalism project. They conclude that the centre is both unfair and incompetent in its management of public funds. The colonial administration had centralised power structures for the ease of its own bureaucracy. Trevelyan thought the Madras…

20 Years of Bhavishyavani Future Soundz 11 MAY FAMOUS STUDIOS, MUMBAI Formed in the late 1990s, the Mumbai-based collective Bhavishyavani Future Soundz, which has been influential in the Indian electronic-music scene, completes 20 years in 2019. As part of its anniversary celebration, the group will conduct a series of music events across the country. The first in the series will be a daylong show, in collaboration with Red Bull Music. For further information write to ruhi@thecitypress.in…