Innehållsförteckning för May 2020 från The Caravan

On the evening of 6 January 2018, about five thousand people trickled into the grounds of the CSI Bain Matriculation Higher Secondary School, in the Chennai neighbourhood of Kilpauk. The rows of chairs in front of the stage quickly filled up, leaving the open ground for the rest of the audience to occupy. It was the Tamil month of Margazhi, which lasts from 16 December to 13 January. In Chennai, this “auspicious” month is synonymous with the Carnatic music season. Scores of music lovers from around the world, most of them from the Brahmin community, throng the concert halls of southern Chennai to listen to their favourite classical musicians, who are also mostly Brahmin. That year, however, a 19-member musical group called the Casteless Collective, composed of artists from marginalised…

The buses that pass the Piazza dei Cinquecento, in front of Rome’s Termini railway station, have been running almost empty ever since the Italian capital went under lockdown, on 11 March, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The few passengers who do alight, their faces hidden behind masks, walk quickly, as though they could flee the coronavirus as they would a predator. Those who cannot run are vagrants. There are almost a hundred of them in the piazza, nearly all of them Italian. One of the vagrants, who wished to remain anonymous, told us that he used to work at a golf resort in Tuscany, a region in central Italy. After losing his job in March, he was rendered homeless. He came to Rome hoping to earn some money panhandling. When…

In the winter of 1908, a malaria epidemic swept through Punjab, killing three hundred thousand people in around ninety days. Although malaria epidemics were common in the region, the 1908 outbreak was the most lethal in at least forty years: 18 out of every 1,000 residents of Punjab succumbed to the illness. The death toll was even higher in the mud huts of landless labourers, artisans and servants. An official inquiry led by Major SR Christophers, a Liverpool-born doctor, found that malaria infected the rich and the poor alike, but it was much more likely to kill in poor households. “If we examine in detail any town affected by the epidemic, we shall find the heaviest mortality has been in those classes, which are the poorest and living in the…

India did not stockpile COVID protective equipment for health workers despite clear WHO guidelines Vidya Krishnan Madhya Pradesh’s COVID crisis: no health minister; police and health officials test positive Vidya Krishnan India’s fourth COVID casualty attended Sikh Hola Mohalla festival in Anandpur Sahib; infected seven family members JaTindEr KaUr TUr “What will they get by killing him?”: Ram Bai, mother of Nirbhaya convict Mukesh Singh sUraBhi Kanga Hours before lockdown, Modi asked print-media owners, editors to refrain from negative COVID coverage sagar Ninety thousand NRIs entered Punjab in March; former SGPC president returned from Italy, roamed freely JaTindEr KaUr TUr High on talk, low on substance: Modi’s speech showed India is ill-prepared for COVID Vidya Krishnan After COVID-19 outbreak at Tablighi Jamaat conference, fake news targeting Muslims abounds shaWn sEBasTian…

ON 28 MAY 2019 , a video of Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared on his Twitter handle. The day marked the one-hundred-and-eighty-sixth birth anniversary of Vinayak Savarkar, the demagogue and Hindu nationalist whose portrait the video showed Modi praying to. Savarkar “epitomises courage, patriotism and unflinching commitment to a strong India,” Modi said. “He inspired many people to devote themselves towards nation-building.” Modi added that “Savarkar was both a freedom fighter and poet, who always emphasised harmony and unity.” The prime minister is not alone in this kind of hagiographic praise for Savarkar. Perhaps one of the first articulators of modern Hindutva, Savarkar has risen to the very top of the right-wing pantheon. His portrait now hangs in the Indian parliament and his image is plastered on various posters of…

At the beginning of this year, things looked good for Indian farmers. As per advance estimates of the agriculture ministry, the country was expected to produce a record 106.21 million tonnes of wheat in 2019–20, 2.61 million tonnes more than what was produced the previous year. This increase was mainly attributed to increased acreage under wheat production and optimum soil moisture on account of a good monsoon between June and September 2019. The first blow to farmers was unseasonal rains and hail storms in mid March. Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh saw severe damage to their crops. Around seven hundred thousand acres of land under wheat cultivation was affected in Punjab alone. Even as farmers were in the process of claiming insurance and compensation from the state government,…

In September 2018, the Indian government unveiled a massive three-billion-dollar project—Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States, or STARS—designed in collaboration with the World Bank to improve the country’s education system. While 85 percent of the project’s cost would be borne by the Indian government, the rest would be financed through a World Bank loan. The loan is still being negotiated, even as the Indian government prepares for the project’s implementation. But, unfortunately, the project has not seen much public discussion or scrutiny. On paper, the programme seems promising. Besides taking on some national-level initiatives, the project seeks to reform the education system in six states: Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Odisha. It promises improvement in early-childhood education, teacher and school-leadership development, and building infrastructure, among other noble…

कोरोना िॉकडाउन : रर्स माइग्›न क बाि मबहारी काम›ारों क भम्षय का स्ाि उमेश कमार राय िॉकडाउन म मानसर : महनत करन ्ाि मजदूर मा› कर ›ान को मजबर, राहत ल›्र म फस िो›ों म बढ रही कनरा›ा अमन गुप्ा कोरोना क साथ उत्तर प्रि› म जारी ह अधम्श्ास का प्रकोप, िो› किय जिाकर और कए म पानी डािकर महामारी का कर रह “इिाज” सुनील कश्यप आइसोि›न कद्र म रुक िलित य्क न पलिस की कपटाई स आहत होकर की ›ुिकु ›ी सुनील कश्यप झार›ड पलिस न तबिी›ी जमात म ›ाममि बताकर 37 को ककया क्ारटीन, 27 न कहा नहीं ›ए किलिी मो. असग़र खान…

ON A DELHI PLAYGROUND in the late 2000s, five-year-old Azania was about to kick a football with her white canvas shoes, when a boy from the rival team screamed, “Get away from the ball, you Paki.” When the author Nazia Erum heard about this—one of several instances of Islamophobia in elite schools in the National Capital Region, she writes—she wondered whether she should give her own daughter a Muslim name. When did schools become like this? She remembered that her elder brother was called “Hamas” in the 1990s, but that had felt somewhat lighthearted by comparison. A few years before the playground incident, another child in a different part of the city found that there was an unexpected problem with her new home. After moving near her workplace in a…

Whether or not you have been to Rajasthan, you have probably seen the famous Kalbeliya dance of the desert state. Visuals of Rajasthani women twirling at a dizzying pace, their carefully crafted black skirts a circular blur, are etched into our collective memory. At festivals, in folk-dance competitions, on television, the dance can be seen everywhere. You probably believe that this is the “traditional” dance form of the nomadic tribes of the Thar. Well, not quite. According to Ayla Joncheere, a Belgian anthropologist who has spent the past decade researching the Kalbeliya community, this hugely popular dance form is an “invented tradition.” The term was first popularised by the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger in their 1983 book, The Invention of Tradition. They noted that many traditions are recent…

Indian prisons are highly overcrowded. As per the last count, put out by the National Crimes Record Bureau in 2018, the country has about four hundred and fifty thousand prisoners, a number that exceeds the official capacity by about seventeen percent. Prisons in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh have among the highest occupancy rates, over fifty percent above capacity. The COVID-19 pandemic has made Indian prisons and prisoners highly vulnerable, creating an urgent need to decongest them. Therefore, on 16 March this year, a Supreme Court bench led by the chief justice, Sharad A Bobde, took suo motu cognisance of the situation. A week later, it ordered states and union territories to form high-powered committees for determining which class of prisoners could be released on parole or interim bail. Although the…

{ONE} IN THE AUTUMN OF 2018 , on a trip to Kolkata, I walked into a bookstore in the neighbourhood of College Street, out of habit, to see what interesting gem I could find. Among the books I picked up was the July 2018 quarterly issue of the Bengali little magazine Gangchil Patrika. The magazine had earlier published issues on a wide range of topics, including refugees, pornography and the Naxal movement. This issue was devoted to the topic of famines. Among the articles was a collection of 16 oral histories with full-page photographs of “Monnontorer Shakkhi,” or “Famine Witnesses,” compiled by Sailen Sarkar, the editor of the magazine. These were testimonies of ordinary people in the Bengal countryside who had witnessed, and survived, the Bengal famine of 1943, in…

ON THE MORNING OF 9 AUGUST 2019 , a group of police constables sat on plastic chairs outside the Mahakavi Kalidas auditorium in Mulund, a suburb in northern Mumbai. The rainless morning had given a sudden reprieve to the flood-hit city. With their guns, lathis and lunch bags next to their chairs, the policemen kept a close watch on every person entering and exiting the venue. The security seemed tight for an event that had been billed as a “birthday celebration.” Metal detectors were installed at the entrance. Men, women, children and bags, were all scanned for weapons. At a desk set up opposite the auditorium, a few men and women carefully took down the contact details of every visitor, checked their identification cards and assigned each of them a…