Innehållsförteckning för July 2019 från The Caravan

In October last year, the All India Agarbathi Manufacturers’ Association donated a five-foot-tall incense stick to the Bengalee Association Bangalore for its Durga Puja pandal at the Manyata Tech Park. The AIAMA, a collective-bargaining and advocacy body that was established in 1949 and currently counts over seven hundred agarbatti manufacturers among its lifetime members, wanted to use the gesture to “celebrate womanhood and raise awareness about women workers in the agarbatti industry.” According to Sarath Babu, the president of the AIAMA, the agarbatti industry employs over two million workers in the country. Women constitute eighty percent of the workforce, and are mainly engaged in bamboo processing, agarbatti rolling and packaging activities. Karnataka, where the cottage industry was introduced during the 1920s by the kings of Mysore, and whose forests are…

Before campaigning for India’s general election started in April this year, I was in Delhi discussing the Bharatiya Janata Party’s candidates in the capital with party workers. As we talked about the BJP’s prospects, I asked whether they thought the Congress would make something of a revival in Delhi. One party worker dismissed my query immediately. “Of course not, this is clearly Modi’s election!” he said. On the sidelines, the Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress were facing a breakdown in talks over an alliance that did not come through. The BJP, at the time, was dealing with a public showdown of its own. Udit Raj, one of its prominent Dalit members of parliament at the time, was furious over the party’s delay in ticket distribution, specifically its reluctance to…

I was born into Hindi, and brought up in it. It was the language of my parents and siblings, my cousins and friends, all our neighbours in the Dalit ghetto in the small town in Bihar where I spent my childhood. It is still the only language I use with them. I studied for ten years in a Hindi-medium school that followed the curriculum of the Bihar state board. After a two-year intermediate course in Patna, I moved to a journalism college in coastal Karnataka. There the classes were in English, and the students spoke it on campus; the locals outside spoke Kannada or Tulu. I was not good with either. Stranded, I worked hard on my English. I was 28 when I read BR Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, in…

{ONE} FIFTEEN KILOMETRES FROM the headquarters of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, located in the posh south-Delhi neighbourhood of Vasant Vihar, lie the dusty lanes of the industrial district of Okhla. Near the banks of the Yamuna, the neighbourhood of Madan Khadar houses Muslim migrant communities that provide cheap labour for Okhla’s furniture, sugar and leather factories. Here, in a neat row of tenements that the locals call Darul Hijrat—abode of the migrant—Mohammad Salimullah’s wife, Fatima Begum, was brewing tea in a five-by-six-foot grocery store. It was December 2017. In the lane outside, the children were concluding their evening games in the mud, singing the popular Rohingya song “Arakan desher Rohingya jaati”—The Rohingya from the country of Arakan. Salimullah left Myanmar in 2002, fleeing what the United Nations…

SUPERIOR THE RETURN OF RACE SCIENCE Angela Saini In this book, the journalist Angela Saini reveals the recent upsurge of race science in political and academic discourse. She also goes back to the origins of race science, looking at the Victorian move towards categorisation as well as at how some of the now canonical figures in botany, biology and anthropology, including Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin, deployed hierarchical structures in their analysis of race. HARPER COLLINS, 340 PAGES, R 599 WALKING THE ROADLESS ROAD EXPLORING THE TRIBES OF NAGALAND Easterine Kire Beginning with the nineteenth century, the author Easterine Kire provides a comprehensive overview of the people who reside within the borders of the state of Nagaland. Relying on oral history and scholarship, she looks closely at the culture of…

On 2 October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist and columnist for the Washington Post, entered the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. He intended to marry his Turkish fiancée, and had come to collect papers confirming his divorce from his first wife. Instead, a hit team of 15 Saudis, who had arrived in the country earlier that day, were waiting for him. Khashoggi never left the consulate. Istanbul’s chief prosecutor said that the journalist had been chopped to pieces using a bone saw. An advisor to the Turkish president told the media that Khashoggi’s body had been dissolved in acid. The US Central Intelligence Agency concluded that the assassination had been ordered by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman. Later that month, I attended a hostile-environment training…

On 15 August 2014, in his first Independence Day speech as prime minister, Narendra Modi said: “whether it is the poison of casteism, communal-ism, regionalism, discrimination on social and economic basis, all these are obstacles in our way forward. Let’s resolve for once in our hearts; let’s put a moratorium on all such activities for ten years. We shall march ahead to a society free from all such tensions … My dear countrymen, believe in my words.” Lots of red flags should go up when a prime minister puts an expiry date on social harmony, but most mainstream media quoted it either uncritically or approvingly, including a national daily describing it as “non-partisan.” By 2014, the media should have been alert to the doublespeak of, and the division of labour…

SIX YEARS AGO, when Sutirtha Chatterjee began working on portraits of children at a blind school in Kolkata, he had intended to report on their daily lives and the importance of education for visually impaired Indians. As he grew close with them and gained an insight into their lives, the work started to evolve into a personal exploration of the stories of five students from the school. Chatterjee’s developing friendships with them led him to contemplate questions about the way the visually impaired make sense of the world. “I learnt how things that I as a sighted person hardly notice, have such a profound impact on their lives—the sound of rain, the sun on your face and the wind in your hair,” Chatterjee remembered. “How was I as a sighted…

Theatre AHA! International Theatre Festival for Children 14 TO 21 JULY RANGASHANKARA, BANGALORE AHA! International Theatre Festival for Children, hosted by Rangashankara, will bring together national and international theatre productions to audiences in Bengaluru. The festival, which has attracted large audiences since its inception, in 2009, will cater to various age groups, ranging from toddlers to adolescents. Productions from Germany, South Korea, Australia, Italy and Sri Lanka, among others, will feature alongside local and Indian performances at the festival. For further information, write to programming@rangashankara.in Exhibition Astitva 13 JUNE TO 28 JULY NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, DELHI This exhibition presents the work of Prabhakar Barwe, one of the pioneers of modern Indian painting. The work is chronologically presented, with different sections representing phases of Barwe’s practice, which was influenced…

On a Sunday morning in March 2015, José Mujica, the president of Uruguay, left his farm in Rincón del Cerro, on the outskirts of Montevideo, for his office in the capital. That day, he was scheduled to hand over power to his successor, Tabaré Vázquez, a leader of the leftist Frente Amplio coalition. Vázquez had also been Mujica’s predecessor in government. As Mujica travelled the nineteen kilometres in his old Volkswagen Beetle, many Uruguayans saluted his passage. After five years in the presidency, the former guerrilla was leaving office with an approval rating of 65 percent. His administration would be remembered for its social reforms—decriminalising abortion, authorising same-sex marriage and making Uruguay the first country in the world to legalise the cultivation and sale of cannabis, a peaceful initiative in…

On 8 January this year, the Lok Sabha passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, which declared that a specified category of undocumented immigrants residing in India—Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who hail from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan—would not be treated as illegal immigrants. This implied that only Muslims, atheists and practitioners of indigenous faiths from these countries would be treated as undocumented, making them fit for detention and deportation. In the month that followed, there were widespread protests in India’s northeastern states, where people felt the legitimisation of foreigners would threaten the culture and demography of the indigenous people of the region. On 13 February, the protestors were momentarily victorious, as the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government had to abort the plan to table the bill in Rajya Sabha…

{ONE} NARENDRA MODI’S ARRIVAL in the prime minister’s office in 2014 heralded tense days for the Indian judiciary. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto had pledged to “set up a National Judicial Commission for the appointment of judges in higher judiciary.” Within months of the party taking power, both houses of parliament passed the ninety-ninth amendment to the Constitution, to create the National Judicial Appointments Commission. By the end of the year, it was ratified by 16 state legislatures, signed by the president and enshrined in law. The NJAC, as envisioned, was to have six members, entrusted with control over appointments to the Supreme Court as well as appointments and transfers in all high courts. Led by the Chief Justice of India, it was to include the second and third most…

SOMETIME IN THE 1980 S, at a party in Bombay, VS Naipaul was seated next to a drunk man. The man introduced himself—Behram Contractor, better known as Busybee to the readers of his daily newspaper column on the city, “Round and About”— and asked Naipaul who he was. “My name is Vidia Naipaul,” came the reply. Busybee was amazed. “You are not the VS Naipaul, the famous writer?” Naipaul nodded. “You are a very good writer,” Busybee said. “But Dom Moraes is a better writer than you are.” This was not the first time Naipaul found himself paired with Moraes. As a younger writer in London, while writing A House For Mr Biswas, a common friend had insisted he should meet the poet. Moraes tells the story of being persuaded…