Innehållsförteckning för June 2019 från The Caravan

Half a decade ago, when I was in school, I faced a penalty of five rupees every time I spoke in my mother tongue—Kashmiri. The principal reprimanded us if her ears detected a syllable of the Kashmiri language. I never paid the fine. Neither did any of my classmates. In spite of this regular admonishment, we believed that speaking our own language was neither a mistake worthy of punishment, nor a mark of humiliation. The school must still be following the same policies, but today, I see hope and resistance. Kashmiri, the only Dardic language—a branch of Indo-Aryan languages spoken across Pakistan and Afghaistanthat has a literature, is fighting its extermination. “The story of the resistance of the Kashmiri language is not a recent one,” Zareef Ahmad Zareef, a Kashmiri…

The temperature was nearly forty degrees Celsius when I left the Iraqi capital of Baghdad at dawn on 20 June 2018. I was riding in a bus with a group of local environmental activists, who pointed out the monuments of their beloved, but war-torn, city. As soon as Baghdad was left behind, large stretches of palm trees appeared over the horizon, and the landscape changed. The grey, concrete T-shaped walls, designed to protect from explosions, gradually gave way to small shrubs and high, green-leafed reeds. In the distance, small huts began to appear, made with ancient building methods, using mud, straw and reeds. We drove through the city of Nasiriyah, famous for its dates, and for being the scene of a bloody battle, in 2003, that ousted the former dictator…

Some years ago, I spent several days in Kota, Rajasthan, gathering material for an article about the coaching industry there for The Caravan. It was hardly a difficult assignment. Signs of the industry were everywhere I looked—up on hoardings, down on the street in discarded leaflets, in offices, the Mall, a temple. All I had to do was observe, then write about it. It may not always have been that easy, though. Until the 1980s, the town’s economy was largely centred around chemical factories and textiles. But then the coaching business took flight here. Students now come to Kota by the tens of thousands—usually after finishing their tenth standard, but some of them even before. They come to prepare for competitive exams for the country’s top engineering and medical colleges,…

“INDIAN DEMOCRACY IS NOT JUST IN CRISIS,” Pratap Bhanu Mehta announced from a lectern at the India Today Conclave in early March, “but there is a deep, deep diminishing of hope at this juncture compared to five years ago or perhaps ten years ago.” Mehta was impassioned, delivering his verdict on a half-decade of the rule of Narendra Modi. “The last five years have been a mutilation of the Indian soul,” he said. “They stand for everything that is un-Indian,” and “against every promise that this democracy gave to each one of its citizens.” “All the big repositories of hope we had accumulated over the last ten [or] fifteen years—India is at the cusp of structural transformation, India will, in a sense, reach a new stratosphere of growth and inclusion…

THE CAMEL MERCHANT OF PHILADELPHIA Sarbpreet Singh This book explores the rise and decline of the Sikh court of Ranjit Singh, who was declared the maharaja of Punjab in 1801 and occupied a kingdom that stretched from the borders of Afghanistan to those of the British Raj. The author examines the emperor’s relationship with figures such as his mother-in-law, Sada Kaur, and the truculent leader of his army, Akali Phoola Singh. TRANQUEBAR, 242 PAGES, R 699 CELESTIAL BODIES Jokha Alharthi Translated by Marilyn Booth A family saga set in a village named al-Awafi, in Oman, the novel revolves around the lives of three sisters and their relatives, moving from the early twentieth century to the present day. Their lives unfold against the backdrop of turbulent change in Oman. The country…

Umrao Jaan Ada—The Musical 31 MAY TO 4 JUNE JAWAHARLAL NEHRU WEIGHTLIFTING INDOOR STADIUM, NEW DELHI Featuring a live music performance by the composers Salim and Sulaiman Merchant, this musical based on Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s nineteenth-century work Umrao Jaan Ada narrates the journey of a courtesan. It is a story of love and struggle told through traditional ghazals, thumris and qawwalis. For further information write to shriya.pant@flint-culture.com Mahabharata 21 JUNE NIAS, BANGALORE Directed by Anupama Roy, Mahabharata explores the inner dilemma and stories of 15 characters in the play. Each character is an archetype, whose single-minded and unquestioning loyalty to one belief leads to inevitable conflict. The play is produced by The Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust, a Delhi-based puppet-theatre company that began in 1998. For further information write to vandana@mindworkz.in…

The Hyundai Santro that picked me up last December at a bus stop at Oon, a small town in the Khargone district of Madhya Pradesh, had a bumper sticker that read, “musli ki kripa”—musli’s benevolence. Unlike the usual references on bumper stickers, musli was not some local deity. It was, in fact, an herb, a cash crop cultivated by farmers of the region, which is widely used for Ayurvedic medicines and sold at a price as high as ₹ 1,500 per kilogram. As we drove to the village of Raibidpura, Deepak Verma, who owned the car—he was the sole car owner among the farmers in his village—proudly claimed to have brought this unconventional crop to the village. It was not musli, however, that had brought me to Raibidpura. I first…

In March 2018, the Nepal Picture Library—a digital photo-archive based out of Kathmandu that focusses on Nepali social and cultural history—put out a public call. They were looking for researchers to help build a visual archive examining women’s histories in the country. The research work first became open to the public at an exhibition titled “The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project,” which was part of a photography festival held in Kathmandu later that year. The archive, which continues to evolve, includes photographs, letters, diary entries, pamphlets and other formal and informal records documenting women and the role women have played in Nepal’s contemporary history, starting from the mid 1930s. The intention of the research project, which officially began in April 2018, was to assemble a feminist history…

Osmosis 6 TO 10 JUNE TARQ, MUMBAI This group exhibition features the works of three artists—Rithika Merchant, Samanta Batra Mehta and Savia Mahajan. Curated by Shaleen Wadhwana, it shows the responses of the artists to the processes of life, death, distance and belonging, and their interactions with nature, politics, culture, society and religion. For further information write to ananyaa@tarq.in Four Abstractionists 6 MAY TO 8 JUNE AAKRITI ART GALLERY, KOLKATA Four Abstractionists showcases the works of Akhilesh, Amitava Dhar, Samindranath Majumdar and Sunil De. While the works of Dhar and Majumdar are closely attached, and critical, to life, the forms of De and Akhilesh have a trend towards classical and tranquil beauty. These art works do not follow the pure geometrical mode, and are detached from the warmth of life…

“We’ve worked here so fucking long, they should give us an award, send us off with flowers and five or seven lakhs,” Gyan Bahadur Acharya told me one morning last January. We were inside the premises of the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu, and Acharya, a slight, scowling man, was sitting cross-legged near the steps of the Bhasmeshwor ghat. On a row of raised stone platforms in front of us, bodies burned on wooden funeral pyres. Tending to them were cremators in white dhotis, many of them Acharya’s protégés. One lobbed packets of vegetable oil into a fire, followed by bundles of straw; another, using a long bamboo pole, gently reversed the course of a blackened foot that had drifted from the rest of the body. Acharya, who is 68 years…

About a hundred years ago, over the month of April 1919, the city of Amritsar was a site of massive unrest. During the First World War, Punjab was a hub of anti-colonial activity. The passage of the Rowlatt Act—a colonial law meant to curb sedition—was seen as an attack on Indian civil liberties and Mohandas Gandhi’s call to protest the law led to a vigorous response in Amritsar. On 10 April, there were violent clashes between the British Indian military and protestors. On the evening of 12 April, Hans Raj, a 23-year-old aide of the freedom-movement leader Saifuddin Kitchlew, attended a meeting of nationalists at the Hindu College in Amritsar. Hans Raj informed the attendees about another meeting that had been planned for the next day at the Jallianwala Bagh,…

IN 2012 , the English-speaking science-fiction world was taken by storm with the publication of AfroSF. A black-jacketed book, its cover featured a ball of rimmed fire, and explicitly proclaimed: “Science fiction by African writers.” In the introduction, the Zimbabwean writer and editor Ivor W Hartmann wrote: “if you can’t see and relay an understandable vision of the future, your future will be co-opted by someone else’s vision.” Six years later, in the introduction to AfroSFv3, the third volume in what had become a series, Hartmann continued the thought: “a thirst for homegrown African SFF, for works that address our unique problems and envision our futures.” Hartmann’s impulse for creating the AfroSF series has been echoed by other writers from African countries. In a 2017 interview, Ntone Edjabe, the editor…

International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala 21 TO 26 JUNE THIRUVANANTHAPURAM The twelfth edition of the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala, organised by the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy, will be held in Thiruvananthapuram. The festival showcases long and short documentaries, short fiction, campus films, animation and music videos. It invites only Indian films for the main competition, while the non-competition sections—including the international non-competition section—present some of the best documentaries and short films from across the world. For further information write to deputydirector@iffk.in…