Innehållsförteckning för March 2020 från The Caravan

The Bektashi, a Sufi order in the Balkans, have a joke. A Bektashi man is praying at a mosque. While others pray for grace and faith, he prays for plenty of wine. The imam hears him and rebukes him for asking god for something sinful. The Bektashi replies, “Well, everyone asks for what they don’t have.” Atop Albania’s Mount Tomorr last summer, I contemplated buying a bottle of wine labelled with the face of the early Muslim martyr Abbas ibn Ali. The bottle, which cost 700 lek—around four hundred and fifty rupees—seemed, to me, an incredible provocation, collapsing the sacred and the profane. It was late August, around 1 am on the second night of the annual Bektashi pilgrimage up the mountain. Almost two thousand metres above sea level, in…

“I am issuing this warning because we should all be concerned about the country,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi told both houses of parliament a week into the budget session. “If the Rajasthan assembly passes a law but no one in Rajasthan is ready to obey it,” he asked, where would it lead? “Can the country run like this? Should we go on the path to anarchy?” Only what had irked Modi was not the residents of a state defying local legislation, but entire states lining up to resist a central law—the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. To date, a dozen states and the union territories of Delhi and Puducherry have rebelled against the CAA. Six of them have also adopted resolutions denouncing it. Modi’s reproach was aimed at this reality. India’s federal…

Some of the most seminal works in photography have used the idea of the road trip to define who Americans are. Walker Evans spent a decade during the Great Depression compiling his masterpiece American Photographs. Robert Frank’s The Americans portrayed the angst-ridden post-war United States of the 1950s. In the 1970s, Stephen Shore captured the textures of American life in American Surfaces, while in the early 2000s, Alec Soth’s poetic series, Sleeping by the Mississippi, portrayed life along the country’s second-longest river. These photographers journeyed through the “open road,” capturing the essence of their nation, standing witness to the world they chronicled. The Levee, the Magnum associate Sohrab Hura’s photographic journey along the Mississippi River, follows this road map, with full recognition of his position as an outsider. Unlike his…

The building on the outskirts of Kampala that houses Icebreakers Uganda, a non-profit working for sexual minorities, was bustling with activity when I visited in July last year. Programme managers sat hunched over their laptops writing grant applications. A group meeting was in progress in the living-room-turned-meeting-room. Other activists slouched on the red couch at the entrance, waiting for the next meeting. For an uninformed local seeing it from the outside, the building would seem as unremarkable as any other. But behind the jet-black, unmarked iron gates were the offices of at least four queer-rights organisations. They included Kampala’s first LGBTQ+ clinic, where a doctor visited thrice a week for consultation, as well as a safe house for at-risk queer Ugandans. Other groups in the compound were Rainbow Mirrors, the…

The annual budget, presented by the finance minister, is one of the most awaited government documents every year. Seen as a statement of account of the nation—it spells out how the government intends to mobilise resources and spend public money—these documents show the economic priorities and the agenda of the government. Unlike many other government documents, budgets are presented to the parliament, debated and voted upon, and thus, the commitments made in a budget document assume a certain sanctity. However, since the National Democratic Alliance government came to power in 2014, this sanctity has been fast eroding and is virtually extinct at this point. The government has repeatedly taken decisions that contradict commitments made in the budget, making the mandatory parliamentary approval of the budget a farce. The numbers presented…

ON 12 JANUARY 2017 , three days before Army Day, Lance Naik Yagya Pratap Singh, then posted with the Forty-Second Infantry Brigade of the Indian Army, in Dehradun, uploaded a video on Facebook. It soon went viral, and was picked up by news channels. The mobile-phone footage showed the soldier in camouflage fatigues, facing the camera with squared shoulders, his image blurry but his voice sharp and clear. In June the previous year, Singh said in the video, he had addressed a letter to the prime minister, the president, the defence minister, the home minister and the Supreme Court. The letter called for an end to the practice of assigning soldiers to officers as sahayaks—attendants. He described the practice as exploitative. Soldiers trained to fight the enemy, he said, should…

ON 2 SEPTEMBER 2017 , Çağdaş Erdoğan, a Turkish photojournalist of Kurdish descent, was detained while walking through Istanbul’s Yoğurtçu Park. He was initially accused of photographing the headquarters of the Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı, Turkey’s intelligence agency. “But it is entirely fictitious,” he said in an interview with the British Journal of Photography, “because the place where I photographed is just a park, and there isn’t any building, or even signs that show the presence of a restricted area where you cannot take pictures.” On 13 September, he was officially charged with being a member of a terrorist organisation, based on his previous work photographing members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party—known by its Turkish acronym, PKK. After spending six months in pre-trial detention, he was released on bail at the…

INDIA’S REVOLUTIONARY INHERITANCE POLITICS AND THE PROMISE OF BHAGAT SINGH Chris Moffat Moffat’s account of revolutionary thought in South Asia explores the legacies of militant violence and their implications for contemporary Indian politics. His book focusses on the afterlives of anti-colonial figures such as Bhagat Singh, featuring them as active interlocutors in the present. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, R 724, 296 PAGES PARESH MAITY A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN THE WORLD Paresh Maity, Nemai Ghosh and Ina Puri The photographer Nemai Ghosh created a body of work on prolific figures in Indian cinema and art. In this book, Ghosh and the biographer Ina Puri document the work and life of the acclaimed watercolourist Paresh Maity, who Ghosh accompanied on his travels, including in Kerala, Shantiniketan and London. WESTLAND, R 4,999,…

Theatre Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards Festival 13 TO 18 MARCH KAMANI AUDITORIUM AND SHRI RAM CENTRE, DELHI The Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards Festival features ten plays from across the country, in languages including English, Bengali, Assamese, Malayalam and Marathi. META’s selection committee, composed of established theatre critics and practitioners, chose the plays from a pool of over three hundred and fifty submissions. For more information, write to santosh@zimisha.com Exhibition The Fifties Show 1 FEBRUARY TO 26 MARCH DAG, THE CLARIDGES, DELHI In its most recent exhibition, The Fifties Show, the Delhi Art Gallery explores the wave of modernist art that defined the decade following India’s independence. It features the works of artists such as KK Hebbar, MF Husain and Nandalal Bose, who often embraced modernism as a means…

ON 30 MARCH 1834 , having previously exchanged rings and vows, Anne Lister—seen here in a portrait by a painter known only as Mrs Taylor—and Ann Walker took sacrament together at the Holy Trinity Church in York, England. It was the first ever recorded lesbian wedding. Lister, who was 42 years old at the time, and Walker, aged 30, were both heiresses to neighbouring estates in the Yorkshire town of Halifax. They moved in together at Shibden Hall, Lister’s ancestral home. Lister maintained meticulous diaries since the age of 15. In her diaries—which ran into 26 volumes, spanning five million words—she recorded her torrid love affairs with several women, beginning when she was in boarding school. An avid mountaineer, she travelled extensively through Europe before returning to Shibden, where she…

In the aftermath of the sweeping electoral triumph of Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi, liberals throughout the country hailed the result. Prominent commentators across the board, whether journalists or celebrities from other spheres such as Bollywood, interpreted it as a rejection of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s hate-filled campaign in the capital. Reacting to exit polls on 8 February, all of which showed a decisive victory for the AAP, Shekhar Gupta, the former editor of the Indian Express, tweeted that the verdict “will be a stunning repudiation of the politics of polarization in Delhi.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The liberal reaction is part of a familiar pattern. Ever since the AAP appeared on the Indian political landscape, liberals have not just misunderstood the nature…

Sometime in the third week of February, social-media networks lit up with the revelation that a little known 1981 book, The Eyes of Darkness, by the American author Dean Koontz, had predicted the outbreak of COVID-19—a new coronavirus discovered in central China’s Hubei province in December last year. Koontz’s book referred to a lethal man-made virus, created as a biological weapon, called “Wuhan-400.” Wuhan is the capital city of Hubei and ground zero for the ongoing epidemic of the pneumonia-like disease that was declared a global public-health emergency by the World Health Organisation on 30 January. As the relevant passages of the book spread online, it did not take long before it was revealed that the original edition of the book named the virus as “Gorki-400,” a reference to several…