Innehållsförteckning för July 2021 från The Caravan

THE LEDE 8 Kalpana Karunakaran teaches in the department of humanities and social sciences at IIT Madras. Her research is in the field of women’s studies. 11 Aman Gupta is a freelance journalist. 14 Tejas Harad is currently writing a book on the lives of Savitribai Phule and Jotirao Phule. PERSPECTIVES 16 Riyaz Wani is a freelance journalist based in Kashmir. Previously a journalist for the Indian Express and Tehelka, he received a Ramnath Goenka Award in 2015 and a Certificate of Honour at the 2014 Red Ink Awards. 19 Vignesh Karthik KR is a doctoral researcher at King’s College London. Pulari Meera Baskar is studying literature and political science at Ashoka University and is an intern at the Trivedi Centre for Political Data. 22 Disha Wadekar is an advocate…

On 25 April, 32-year-old Bhanuj Kappal was scheduled to get married in Goa in a Satyashodhak ceremony—a type of wedding that eschews the services of a Brahmin priest, Brahmanical rituals and unintelligible Sanskrit verses. The bride and bridegroom also write their vows—they decide what goes into those vows—which they recite on the day of the wedding in front of the guests. Kappal’s wedding, which had to be postponed due to the second wave of COVID-19, is among the growing number of Satyashodhak weddings in Maharashtra and beyond. Jotirao Phule co-founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, or Truth Seekers’ Society, on 24 September 1873. The organisation’s primary aim was to revolt against the hegemony of Brahmins and their ideology that preached the enslavement of the lower castes. It was also supposed to be…

Beginning in 2016, the Maratha community staged several agitations in Maharashtra. One of the key demands of these agitations was reservation for Marathas in government jobs and educational institutions. After sustained political pressure, the Maharashtra government passed the Socially and Educationally Backward Class Reservation Act, 2018, which provided 16-percent reservation for the community. This increased the total percentage of reservations in state-government jobs and educational institutions beyond the 50-percent limit for such quotas, as mandated by the Supreme Court, in 1992, in Indra Sawhney vs Union of India. The constitutionality of the law providing reservation to Marathas was tested by a five-judge constitution bench. On 5 May, the court struck down the Maharashtra law as unconstitutional. The court unanimously held that the Maratha community is not a socially and educationally…

{ONE} AT THE START of india’s struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Aditya Birla Group and Vedanta Limited were among the first corporate donors to the PM CARES Fund—the emergency-relief fund helmed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which his government has shielded from all public scrutiny amid questions over how it has been managed and spent. Within the first week of the fund’s creation, in March 2020, the Aditya Birla Group gave ₹400 crore and Vedanta gave ₹200 crore. Both corporations were lauded in the media for their altruism. Unbeknown to the public, JN Singh, a right-to-information activist, had tipped off multiple government agencies in December 2019 about massive concealment of aluminium production by Hindalco Industries, a part of the Aditya Birla Group, as well as the Bharat Aluminium Company,…

THE FIRST SHORT STORY that bothered me was Chekhov’s “The Bet.” Till that point, narrative resolution had meant happy endings. Rip van Winkle might find when he wakes that twenty years have passed, or shipwrecked Sinbad will see that his only hope of survival is hanging on to the giant roc, but these disruptions are just delicious means to redress. Whereas all the dark prefiguring of “The Bet” ends in nothing—the hero simply vanishes on the last page. A banker and a lawyer argue about which is the worse punishment for a crime: life imprisonment or the death penalty. The young lawyer who stakes fifteen years of his life to prove his point does not emerge triumphant from the cell where he has been living out his self-imposed solitude. He…

On 19 November 2020, the Indian embassy in Russia announced that Alexander Dubiansky, a professor of Tamil studies at Moscow State University, had died of COVID-19 at the age of 79. Dubiansky was a reputed scholar of the Tamil language and its literature, and the news of his death led to an outpouring of grief through social-media posts by writers, scholars and leaders across the political spectrum in Tamil Nadu. He was remembered as “an adopted son of Mother Tamil,” whose devotion to the language had “linked the Volga and the Vaigai rivers.” Dubiansky’s scholarship contributed to, and was in turn shaped by, a rich exchange of ideas between Tamil and Russian writers, readers and scholars. D Ravikumar, a Tamil author and member of the Lok Sabha, wrote an extended…

This February, India and Pakistan made a surprise re-affirmation of their 2003 ceasefire agreement, drawing mixed reactions across party lines. The agreement, the first formal verbal declaration by both countries to maintain peace along the Line of Control, had come four years after the Kargil War. Relations between the two countries took a nosedive in August 2019, when India revoked Article 370, which granted Jammu and Kashmir semi-autonomous status within the Indian Union. This was a body blow to the complex system of relations in the region and left the people of Kashmir seething. The Indian government enforced a communication blackout, ramped up its military presence in the valley and put Kashmir’s elected leaders under house arrest. Following this, in 2020, there were over five thousand ceasefire violations, the most…

The second season of The Family Man begins with Srikanth Tiwari, a former intelligence officer of TASC—a fictitious intelligence agency akin to the Research & Analysis Wing—working at an IT company. He writes “TPS reports” for an overbearing boss who calls him the “minimum guy.” He has replaced eating vada pav at ungodly hours on the streets with overpriced salads. He drops and picks up his kids from school, pines for his old job and is concerned about the newly-formed government in Pakistan—all the while trying to salvage his crumbling marriage. The Family Man has found tremendous success as a slick and funny espionage drama, particularly for its treatment of the protagonist, and even for “humanising” terrorists. As a spy working for TASC, Tiwari has to juggle being an underpaid…

ON 19 FEBRUARY 2019, Eidgah ke Jinnat, a Hindustani translation of Abhishek Majumdar’s play Djinns of Eidgah, was scheduled to be performed at Jaipur’s Jawahar Kala Kendra. But, before the play could begin, a group of protesters stormed the venue. The mob did not stop at protesting and seemed determined to assault the artists, forcing Majumdar and others in the troupe to flee. The show was cancelled. On the previous night, the play had opened to a full house. The next morning, the local Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar reported that the Indian army was referred in the play to as “vahshi,” or barbaric, and that there were objectionable references to the Hindu deity Hanuman. With the 2019 Lok Sabha elections approaching, Hindu-nationalist organisations had created a charged atmosphere following the…

THE KHAN Saima Mir At the beginning of this thrilling debut novel, the protagonist, a London-based lawyer named Jia Khan, is on her way to see her parents after fifteen years. But when her father, who heads a big organised-crime ring, is murdered, she realises she has to take his place. WESTLAND, S499, 318 PAGES CURING MADNESS? A SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF INSANITY IN COLONIAL NORTH INDIA, 1800–1950S Shilpi Rajpal This book explores the history of “insanity” and how it was managed in colonial north India. It draws on archival material and examines government policy, legal processes and instances of diagnosis and treatment via the history of asylums in Agra, Benaras, Bareilly, Lucknow, Delhi and Lahore. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, S1,359, 316 PAGES KEEPING IN TOUCH Anjali Joseph This novel…

In the early hours of 3 July 2020, a team of the Uttar Pradesh police went to the village of Bikru, in Kanpur Dehat district, to arrest the gangster Vikas Dubey on charges of attempted murder. Eight policemen, including a deputy superintendent, were killed in an ambush. A few hours later, the police killed two of Dubey’s relatives. Dubey was declared a fugitive and, six days later, was arrested in the town of Ujjain, in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh. On 10 July, as he was being transported back to Kanpur, the police shot him dead—they claimed he had been trying to escape. Six months later, the terror of Vikas Dubey could still be felt in Bikru. Most villagers would ignore me, or abruptly end our conversation, whenever I brought his name…

As the results of the Tamil Nadu election were announced in early May, the strides achieved by the Dravidian politics of representation became apparent. The new state assembly, headed by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, is perhaps the most representative in terms of caste and religion in all of India, and stands in stark contrast to legislative assemblies in many other parts of the country. However, akin to other progressive states such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu’s diverse and otherwise representative legislature is yet to encompass a representative share of women. The rival alliances led by the DMK and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam both fielded considerably fewer female candidates compared to the last state elections. The AIADMK went from 30 to 17 female candidates (nine of whom contested seats…

Modi’s liberalised vaccination policy is a mistake that other countries avoided NAYANTARA NARAYANAN AND CHAHAT RANA “Love and Rage”: Natasha and Devangana’s letters of hope and resistance from Tihar Jail 6 DEVANGANA KALITA AND NATASHA NARWAL 10 questions on COVID-19 management that the Narendra Modi government must answer THE CARAVAN To honour our dead, we must remember the horror of the COVID-19 second wave ARKESH AJAY AND AAHANA DHAR Poverty, panic and panchayat polls led to mass burial of bodies along UP riverbanks SUNIL KASHYAP Mosque in UP demolished in violation of HC order; locals maintain construction was legal MAYA PALIT We cannot survive here: Lakshadweep locals on administrator Praful Patel’s executive siege AATHIRA KONIKKARA The truth is on our side: Raihana Kappan’s struggle to free her journalist husband, Siddique…

IN MAY THIS YEAR, images of a weeping woman and the words “We are Palestine,” painted by the artist Mudasir Gul on the gates of a spillover channel of the Jhelum River in Srinagar’s Padshahi Bagh, began circulating beyond Kashmir. The police detained 21 people, including Gul, who had protested against the Israeli government’s recent bombing campaign in Gaza. “Every child in Kashmir knows about Palestine,” Gul, who spent three days in police custody, said in an interview. “Like the children of Gaza, we too have grown up in a conflict zone. Our lives are shaped by violence over which we have no control.” This solidarity, visible in protest and in prayer, is decades old. In the Australia-based artist and writer Alana Hunt’s book Cups of nun chai, conversations around…