Innehållsförteckning för November 2019 från The Caravan

Every day at dawn, Valentina Betaba, a 16-year-old Venezuelan student, crosses the Simón Bolívar International Bridge to reach the Megacolegio La Frontera, a school in Villa del Rosario, a border town in the Colombian province of Norte de Santander. According to Gladys Myriam Carbajal Ortegon, the school’s coordinator, eighty percent of the school’s students are Venezuelans who make the crossing daily. “In Venezuela, we went to class only twice a week,” Betaba, who lives about a half hour’s walk from the Colombian border, told me when we met in June. “There were power cuts, and many professors no longer came because they did not receive their wages.” The Megacolegio, which was originally located close to the bridge and had eight hundred students, was moved in 2016 to its current location,…

In March this year, the Scheduled Tribe Demand Committee of Manipur—an organisation formed to demand Scheduled Tribe status for the state’s Meitei community—staged a 30-hour shutdown across the Imphal Valley. While Meiteis have historically been a relatively dominant community in the area, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led state government was quick to declare its support for the demand. Manipur’s chief minister, Biren Singh, gave assurance that the government was making every possible effort to include Meiteis in the list of Scheduled Tribes. A BJP man himself, Singh is in a good position to lobby with the central government, which can help fulfil the Meiteis’ demand. However, having seen no movement on the issue over the past few months, the STDCM again organised several protests in September. While the Meiteis inhabit the…

… what annoys one is the intolerance of the Brahmin scholar towards any attempt to expose the Brahmanic literature. He himself would not play the part of an iconoclast even where it is necessary. And he would not allow such non-Brahmins as have the capacity to do so to play it. If any non-Brahmin were to make such an attempt the Brahmin scholars would engage in a conspiracy of silence, take no notice of him, condemn him outright on some flimsy grounds or dub his work useless. As a writer engaged in the exposition of the Brahmanic literature I have been a victim of such mean tricks. Notwithstanding the attitude of the Brahmin scholars, I must pursue the task I have undertaken. For the origin of [the Criminal Tribes, the…

“PAAJI, YOUR KIDS go to which school?” I had been talking for about twenty minutes at the Barista in Chandigarh’s Sector 17 to a man who identified himself as Ranbir. I immediately understood the question to be a polite threat. Ranbir had earlier refused to come to my office at the Hindustan Times, where I then worked, and insisted on meeting at the café for the sake of his “anonymity as an informer.” He soon became more direct: “Our request is that you stop writing on illegal sand mining in Pathankot.” He was referring to what is broadly known as the mining mafia. He assured me that “they” would have “no objections” if I chose to continue writing about illegal sand mining in other places. After the encounter with Ranbir,…

A WINDOW LIVED IN THE WALL Vinod Kumar Shukla Translated by Satti Khanna This is a new translation of the writer and poet Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Deewar Mein Ek Khirki Rehti Thi, which won the Sahitya Akademi award for best Hindi novel in 1999. It explores the marriage of two characters, Raghuvar and Sonsi, and focusses on the humorous, the absurd and the lyrical in their everyday lives. WESTLAND, 242 PAGES, R 399 NEW KINGS OF THE WORLD THE RISE AND RISE OF EASTERN POP CULTURE Fatima Bhutto Bhutto’s new book is a deep dive into Asia’s entertainment industry, looking closely at the phenomenal popularity of K-pop, Bollywood and Turkish soap operas. It attempts to figure out how and why these cultual forms have sustained nationwide and international appeal. ALEPH,…

Every Saturday, Chander Shekhar, a professor of Persian at Delhi University, meets old friends at the Iran Culture House, opposite the Supreme Court. Over many cups of tea and gentle banter, with Abida Parveen’s ghazals playing in the background, their agenda has been the same for the last thirty years: to work on the Farhang-e-Aryan, a lexicon of the Persian language, with translations of words into Urdu, Hindi and English. Dictionaries are essential to imagining the social, cultural and material histories of a people—they are full of minute descriptions of objects, customs, ideas and beliefs, drawing on idioms, colloquialisms and poetry. “We have gathered over seven hundred and fifty dictionaries, in Persian, French, German, Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit and Arabic,” Abdur Rasheed told me. Rasheed is a professor of Urdu at…

On a warm July afternoon, in a large, airy room, three elderly actors chatted away behind a white curtain, as they waited for their audience to be seated. Next to them lay an open brown leather suitcase with metallic edges, a radio set that dated back to before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and an old songbook. The walls were splashed with photos from Italy. It took a while for the spectators to arrive from the upper levels, as the elevator could fit in only three wheelchairs at a time. Those who could walk independently settled down on neatly aligned brown, cushioned chairs. Those in wheelchairs were positioned so that they left enough space for the actors to walk through and reach every viewer. The venue of the performance…

Tu keh nawaqif-e-adab-e-shahinshahi hai abhi, Raqs zanjeer pehan kar bhi kiya jata hai. (You, who know not the ways of imperialism, You dance, even in chains.) The revolutionary poet Habib Jalib penned these stirring lines for Neelo, a Pakistani actress coerced into dancing for the Shah of Iran during a state visit in 1965. Neelo is said to have fainted from distress before the performance and been rushed to the hospital. This real-life incident lends added poignancy to the Pakistani singer Mehdi Hassan’s rendition of the lines in the film Zerqa, released on 17 October 1969, in which shahinshahi—imperialism—is replaced with ghulami—slavery. Directed by Neelo’s firebrand spouse, Riaz Shahid, Zerqa—Pakistan’s first “diamond jubilee” film, with over a hundred weeks at the box office—features her as a Palestinian militant, a peasant…

To the question whether the Hindus ever ate beef, every Touchable Hindu, whether he is a Brahmin or a non-Brahmin, will say “no, never”. In a certain sense, he is right. From times [sic], no Hindu has eaten beef. If this is all that the Touchable Hindu wants to convey by his answer there need be no quarrel over it. But when the learned Brahmins argue that the Hindus not only never ate beef but they always held the cow to be sacred and were always opposed to the killing of the cow, it is impossible to accept their view. What is the evidence in support of the construction that the Hindus never ate beef and were opposed to the killing of the cow? There are two series of references…

A MYTH IN LISU FOLKLORE figures two orphan siblings, Lecha and Secha, who live in a forest with other members of their community. In the face of an imminent flood, a bird perched on a tree tells the two to take shelter in a cave and seal its opening until the flood recedes. They do this, but when, eventually, they emerge, they realise that the flood has swept away their village and they are the only survivors. Deciding to search for other survivors, they go separate ways, but are left alone until they cross paths again, when they are much older, and eventually marry to continue their race. As the photographer Sharbendu De recounted this myth, he added that it “bears all the archetypal imprints that resonate with the Lisus…

Exhibition Can You Hear Me? 19 OCTOBER TO 2 JANUARY MAX MUELLER BHAWAN, MUMBAI Featuring more than fifty animations by the artist Nalini Malani, the exhibition focusses on the voices of the dispossessed. The exhibition opens on the fiftieth anniversary of the Max Mueller Bhavan in Mumbai. For more information, write to phalguni.desai@goethe.de Theatre Constellations 22 TO 25 NOVEMBER EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE, NCPA, MUMBAI Written by Nick Payne, this acclaimed Broadway musical is the heart-wrenching tale of the relationship between Roland, a beekeeper, and Marianne, a cosmologist. It goes beyond this particular dynamic and explores a multiverse between string theory, free will and honey. For more information, write to vandana@mindworkz.in Exhibition So Far So Good 12 OCTOBER TO 30 NOVEMBER GALLERY SUMUKHA, BENGALURU This solo exhibition by the artist George Martin…

In 1969, in the small village of Umbraj, in the Junnar taluka of Pune district, an eight-year-old boy, who could not yet comprehend the idea of death, stood dumbstruck at the sight of people wailing over a woman who had just died of a snakebite. It was his first brush with snakebites, a menace that kills thousands of people in India every year. This early encounter would foreshadow the course of his life. The boy, Sadanand Raut, grew up to become a doctor. In 1992, he established a small dispensary and clinic in Junnar. One day in 1994, Raut was informed that the eight-year-old daughter of a farm labourer had been bitten by a viper in the nearby town of Narayangaon. She was rushed to his clinic, but it was…

On 4 October, the Reserve Bank of India announced that India’s projected growth rate for 2019-20 was 6.1 percent, and admitted that the economy has considerably slowed down. The latest government data for the April-to-June quarter showed the growth rate declining to five percent—falling from 5.8 percent in the last quarter of the previous year. This was an unexpectedly sharp decline from the eight-percent growth rate five quarters ago. Since the indications for the current quarter are that the economy has further slowed down, the likely growth rate may turn out to be 4.5 percent, or even less. Four days after the announcement, the new chief of International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, said that the effects of slowdown in the world economy would be “more pronounced” in India this year.…

“WE WOULD HAVE FELT PROUD if the Vice Chancellor has told that we were suspended because we organized Ambedkar Vardhanthi, Babri Masjid demolition day and Beef festival in the last week,” Rohith Vemula wrote in a Facebook post on 18 December 2015. A day earlier, the administration of the University of Hyderabad, where Rohith was a PhD scholar, upheld an earlier decision to suspend him and four other students for allegedly assaulting a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the students’ organisation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. All five suspended students were Dalits and members of the Ambedkar Students’ Association. On 6 December, the anniversary of BR Ambedkar’s death and the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the ASA had held an event to mark both occasions, and to publicly…

FIFTY YEARS AGO, Syeda Bibi did not own a shop. But she was happy. She was 31 years old, stayed at home and looked after her three children, while her husband made a modest income repairing cycles. They lived in a small house a few metres away from the Malek Saban Dargah, in Ahmedabad’s Bapunagar. “I lived here when Bapunagar was wilderness,” Syeda said, as we sat on a cot in her current home, inside the dargah compound. “There were no buses, no proper road, and when we wanted to go to the bathroom, we had to go behind some bush.” Syeda lived with her extended family in a settlement of mostly Muslims that had a small number of Hindu homes scattered in between. The family knew their Hindu neighbours,…

MALKA PUKHRAJ’S MEMOIRS, Song Sung True, begin with the story of her birth, in 1912, in a small village called Hamirpur Sidhar, along the banks of the Chen-ab, at a time when Jammu and Kashmir was still a princely state and British colonisation of the subcontinent was on its last legs. A celebrated ghazal and folk singer, Malka was employed at the court of Hari Singh, the king of Jammu and Kashmir, when she was only nine years old. After she left his court, she moved to Pakistan, prior to Partition, and settled in Lahore, gave private concerts and began singing for the radio. Like her contemporary Begum Akhtar, Malka made a name for herself as a singer of ghazal, thumri and dadra, as well as folk songs in her…