Innehållsförteckning för January 2021 från The Caravan

At the end of an hour-long radio episode on Bengali protest songs, the singer and oral historian Moushumi Bhoumik performed a song written by Birendra Chattopadhyay, a twentieth-century socialist poet. A witness to the 1943 Bengal famine, Chattopadhyay wrote the lines “Anna bakya, Anna pran, Anna-i chetana”—Rice is language, rice is life, rice is consciousness. Like several other shows on Radio Quarantine, Bhoumik’s programme is concerned with building an archive of regional narratives of political resistance and cultural histories. She interviews folk singers and friends from as far afield as Purulia and Sylhet, and recollects her travels through the Sundarbans to document the region’s folk traditions. Radio Quarantine was started by a group of Kolkata-based filmmakers and scholars in March 2020, as West Bengal went into lockdown in response to…

When Dhruva Jaishankar was a fellow at Brookings India, in 2017, I sent him questions for a story I was reporting on the think tank for The Wire. His father, S Jaishankar, was then the foreign secretary, and I asked Dhruva what any diligent journalist would under the circumstances: Did his simultaneous position as a private foreign-policy professional and the son of the country’s top diplomat present any conflicts of interest? “Any potential conflicts of interest are easily navigated by preserving a firewall between my professional and personal lives,” he wrote back. “For example, Brookings India is the only major Indian foreign policy think tank at which the current foreign secretary has not made a speech or appearance.” Jaishankar was appointed the minister of external affairs in May 2019, and…

In the 1970s, when the bazaars first came to Uttarakhand’s Munsyari village, people began to purchase grain instead of growing it. Barley, one of the crops native to the region, slowly diminished in quantity and purpose. Rekha Rautela, who wrote about this, learnt about the rise and fall of the grain in her village through scattered accounts and personal reflections. Her memories of barley fields, however, are deeply personal and capture aspects of her identity and culture. Rautela’s story was published three months ago in Voices of Rural India, a non-profit online platform for rural storytellers founded in August 2020. VoRI carries digital snapshots of people both similar to, and different from, Rautela. The website functions as a novel way to offset the tourism industry’s crisis. Guides, homestay-owners and Sherpas—who…

In the early 1970s, a Copenhagen-based cinema operator named Søren Sögreni wanted to buy a bicycle. He could not find one that appealed to him. Despite an exponential growth in the use of bicycles in the first half of the twentieth century, the easing of fuel restrictions following the end of the Second World War had led to Danes opting to buy motor vehicles instead. As a result, cycling as a preferred mode of transport fell to an all-time low. Sögreni decided to make a bicycle himself, using tools he used at his job. So beautiful was the bicycle he designed, purely by instinct, that several young colleagues soon began requesting him to make bikes for them. Sögreni began selling handmade customised bicycles in 1981. His designs were minimalist—simple and…

THREE YEARS AGO, on 1 January 2018, an annual gathering of largely Dalit visitors to the memorial of Bhima Koregaon, near Pune, was attacked by mobs led by Hindu-nationalist organisations. For several weeks, these organisations had been trying to rouse the area’s Maratha population against the Dalit Buddhist community. A day after the violence, Anita Sawale, an anti-caste activist who was present at the gathering, filed a first-information report identifying the mobs as followers of the Hindutva leaders Manohar Bhide—who calls himself Sambhaji Bhide—and Milind Ekbote. However, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Maharashtra government ensured that little came of Sawale’s complaint. Instead, a week later, on 8 January, a counter FIR was filed by Tushar Damgude, a supporter of Bhide, alleging that incendiary speeches had been delivered at the Elgaar Parishad,…

In January 2018, we sat in a trawler on its fishing trip out of Malvan, a fishing centre and tourist town in southern Maharashtra. The boat cast a trawl net that was dragged over the seafloor, catching not only prawn, crab, and other commercially important fish, but also thousands of other animals in its path. These “accidentally” captured species, called “bycatch,” can range from tiny fish and invertebrates that have little commercial value to animals such as sea snakes, and even sea turtles and dolphins. The massive mound of catch was piled on the deck, and the fishers began sorting through it. While precious prawns and other valuable fish were quickly sorted out and safely stored, the snakes were discarded into the water and the small, often damaged fish that…

In the 1920s, as the Punjab countryside was aflame in what was till then the largest mobilisation against the British Raj, the government of India noted in its files: The Sikh peasant has been committed to a policy of “self-determination” imposed by men who are not his natural leaders, and has been induced by some mysterious process of mass psychology to enter a sphere of activity hitherto [interdicted] by all traditions of loyalty and self-interest. If we substitute the term “Khalistan” for “self-determination,” and the word “misled” for “imposed” we have precisely the same framework that the government and the mainstream media is using today regarding the ongoing farmer protests against three recently enacted farm laws: of Sikh peasants being led astray by Khalistani elements. The British, writing for their…

In 1954, while Inaugurating the Bhakra Nangal dam, one of the ambitious projects included in the First Five Year Plan, Nehru christened it as a “temple of modern India.” Laying the foundation for the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam, he would repeat the same gesture and said, “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 all over India.” Four years later, in an another speech, Nehru would repeat, “The small irrigation projects, the small industries and the small plants for electric power will change the face of the country, far more than a dozen big projects in half a dozen places.” Thus born…

JNU STORIES THE FIRST 50 YEARS Edited by Neeladri Bhattacharya, Kunal Chakrabarti, S Gunasekaran, Janaki Nair, and Joy LK Pachuau This collection is a history of Jawaharlal Nehru University, told through the eyes of several alumni, administrators and faculty members. It contains over a hundred photographs and reflects on the university’s expansion, the development of particular schools, centres and research methods, politics and myriad aspects of campus life. THE LAST LIGHT OF GLORY DAYS STORIES FROM NAGALAND Avinuo Kire In “The Disturbance,” part of this collection of short stories from Nagaland, three stories explore the everyday lives of people and their experiences with the Indo-Naga conflict through the voices of women from different generations. “New Tales from the Old World” intertwines stories about childhood, love, grief and farming life with…