Innehållsförteckning för August 2019 från The Caravan

On a Sunday morning at the usually crowded Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, the loud beating of drums began echoing through empty streets. It was a group of youths from Dharavi, the largest slum in Asia, who had gathered for their weekly practice of parai attam. The youths, part of a group called the Neelam Kalai Kuzhu—Blue Arts Collective—began by chanting a Tamil slogan: Parai ongi olikatum Idhu uzhaikum makkalin viduthalaikai Engal parai mulakam savukaga alla Uzhaikum makkalin valvukaga Onki adipathil kiliyatum Paraigal alla suya sathiya perumai pesuvor mugathiraigal Let the parai sound loudly For the freedom of the working people Our parai shouts not for death But for the life of the working people By beating loudly Let the veils of proud casteists be torn apart Parai attam refers…

Write Write down I am a Miya My serial number in NRC is 20,543 I have two children Another is coming next summer Will you hate him as you hate me? These lines by Hafiz Ahmed, a Muslim poet of Bengali heritage from Assam, could potentially land him in jail. Ahmed is part of a literary movement called “Miya poetry”—Muslims of Bengali origin are referred to as “Miyas” in Assam—that, among other things, highlights the discrimination the community faces in the state. On 11 July, first-information report was filed against Ahmed, along with nine other Miya poets, who were charged with criminal conspiracy and spreading social disharmony under various sections of the Indian Penal Code. According to the local Assamese journalist who filed the report, the poems tried to defame…

NABARD is India’s apex development bank, formed by an Act of Parliament in 1982 and wholly owned by the Government of India (GoI). Its mandate is to promote sustainable and equitable agriculture and rural development. NABARD’s activities can be broadly categorised into three heads: Financial, Developmental and Supervision. Through these initiatives, the institution touches almost every aspect of rural economy. FINANCE ROLE NABARD provides refinance to banks for financing farmers and rural entrepreneurs for their production needs as well as investments. During FY 2018-19, Rs 55,000 crore has been sanctioned for seasonal agricultural operations and Rs 35,000 crore against other short-term lending. Similarly, NABARD provides long-term refinance to financial institutions for capital formation in agriculture and rural sector. It is meant for a wide gamut of activities encompassing farm and…

On 20 March, a Bangladeshi migrant working at a small eatery in the coastal Jordanian city of Aqaba complained to me about how little the jobs there paid, leaving “hardly anything to send home,” even as he conceded that “at home, I might not even get a job.” It was a sentiment echoed by not only the majority of migrant workers I spoke to—mostly Palestinians, Syrians, South Asians, Filipinos and Egyptians—but by the Jordanians themselves. There was palpable disappointment in the air because of the lack of jobs and meagre salaries. The government holds an ongoing refugee crisis partially responsible for the domestic situation, but the residents of Jordan no longer buy this explanation. During an interview at the World Economic Forum, on 24 January, the prime minister, Omar Razzaz,…

SOMETIME AFTER THE 2005 RELEASE of his third Punjabi pop album, Smile, a young Diljit Dosanjh, only a musician then, gave an interview to Channel Punjabi, dressed in maroon from head to toe, wearing a turban, shirt and bell-bottoms. The interviewer asked him about the song “Aa Gaye Paggan Pochvian Waale”— The turban lovers are here. “In these times, most people believe that wearing a turban does not look glamorous,” he said. “But you remained confident in how you look. Tell us about how you have this confidence.” “Most people seem to believe,” Dosanjh responded in Punjabi, “that if a sardar boy ties a turban, he cannot be called good-looking or glamorous. I have nothing against those who have cut their hair. To each his own. But I have no…

FEAR OF LIONS Amita Kanekar Set in 1673, during the reign of the emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir, this novel follows two young siblings from Shahjahanabad who leave their town on secret missions. On their travels, they encounter, and are drawn into, rumours and stories about a quelled uprising, led by women and inspired by the poet Kabir, against Aurangzeb and his regime of heavy taxation. HACHETTE, 348 PAGES, R 399 MODINAMA ISSUES THAT DID NOT MATTER Subhash Gatade The writer and activist Sub-hash Gatade examines the recent victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2019 general election, the rise of Hindutva politics, cow-protection vigilantism and the spate of lynchings that have occurred over the last few years, as part of a larger exploration of growing communalisation in India. LEFTWORD, 128…

On the afternoon of 29 November, when I visited Jaykumar Shankar’s small office in Delhi’s Patel Nagar, his desk was strewn with hand-painted photographs and bottles of transparent photo colours. The photographs were for his upcoming exhibition with Vasantha Yogananthan, a photographer based in Paris who describes his work as “photographic practice that addresses the space between documentary and fiction.” The two began their collaboration in 2016, and Yogananthan’s work, A Myth of Two Souls—to which Shankar contributed—was released the following year. Shankar flipped through some of the hundreds of black-and-white photographs that he has painstakingly coloured by hand. “If someone who is not used to transparent photo colour uses it on the photograph, it will take only one dab for the photograph to be ruined,” he told me. “It…

At first light one day in July last year, Shivpal Bhagat packed his modest holdall and caught the first bus out of Kosampali—an Adivasi village in Chhattisgarh’s Raigarh district, fragmented by three coal mines and two power plants. After two hours of trailing coal trucks through patches of sal forest, Bhagat alighted at the Raigarh railway station, and boarded a cramped train to Bilaspur, another two hours away. With afternoon wearing on, he caught the Chhattisgarh Express to Bhopal. The next morning, having crossed the state border into Madhya Pradesh, the train approached Bhopal. Bhagat changed into a white shirt as the train pulled into the city, then squeezed into a shared auto for the last stretch of his journey. Finally, more than a full day after he left home,…

In the years that followed India’s independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of the nation, sought to establish a robust foundation for the development of a flourishing modern nation with a strong economy. To realize this vision, he set the ball rolling with the introduction of India’s first ‘Five Year Plan.’ Inaugurating the Bhakra Nangal dam in 1954—one of the ambitious projects included in the First Five Year Plan—Nehru christened it a “temple of modern India.” He would later repeat the gesture while laying the foundation for the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam, saying “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…

IN ONE PHOTOGRAPH in Samsul Alam Helal’s project “Disappearing Roots,” two women stand against a hilly green expanse, their faces covered by shiny aluminum foil. Helal, a Dhaka-based photographer, made this image in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in southeastern Bangladesh. When asked about his decision to hide the women’s faces, Helal said it gestured towards the “silencing and obscuring of the indigenous experience as well as the denial of normal, national protections to vulnerable communities and victims of violence … As members of minority communities in Bangladesh, they are already living behind an invisible curtain.” Helal’s photographic series focusses on the ethnic communities indigenous to the CHT—the Chakmas, the Marmas, the Tripuras and the Mrongs, among other smaller non-Bengali ethnic groups. It attempts to spark a dialogue about their disappearing…

Film National Film Festival of Kerala 10 TO 14 AUGUST ERNAKULAM, KERALA The National Film Festival of Kerala, organised by the Ker-ala State Chalachitra Academy, brings together independent and regional films. This year, the eleventh edition of the festival will feature around thirty movies, with a focus on Kashmiri films such as Hamid, Half Widow and Inshallah Football. For further information, write to deputydirector@iffk.in Theatre Old World Theatre Festival 16 TO 25 AUGUST INDIA HABITAT CENTRE, DELHI Considered one of the oldest and most distinguished theatre festivals in the country, the eighteenth edition of the Old World Theatre Festival brings a new generation of theatre practitioners to prominence. The ten-day festival will bring together significant strands of theatre forms from across the country. It will seek to reflect the contemporary…