Innehållsförteckning för December 2021 från The Caravan

Three years ago, Tierra y Sal, a “sandschool,” was born in the pine forest near La Barrosa, one of the longest and most famous beaches in Spain. In their unique pedagogy, as the day begins, the teacher Inma Urbano accompanies boys and girls between the ages of three and six, who meet every day in what they call “the cave of the birds.” Here, they wash their hands and spend the day climbing trees, among other things. If the weather is good, they decide democratically whether or not to go down to the beach. If the majority decide yes, they apply cream, wear swimsuits, and put on booties to avoid slipping on the rocks. When the parents arrive, the little ones return home with their backpacks full of treasures: shells,…

On 9 August, commemorated as World Indigenous Day, members of the Koya community in Telangana’s Chinturu stood in areas submerged under water, shouting slogans. They were protesting against the Polavaram dam project, operations of which had submerged their village and displaced them. The irrigation project is going to affect over three hundred thousand people in 276 villages. Large numbers of affected people from the project have still not received any government compensation or rehabilitation. Yet, this protest was barely covered in the national media. It was outlets such as Koya TV, a YouTube channel covering news in Koya languages, that documented the protest. “Adivasi divas is not a day of cultural celebration but is a day to highlight human-rights issues of Adivasi communities,” Koya TV’s founder, Nehru Madavi, who was…

CASTE HAS BEEN AN OBJECT OF STUDY for around a hundred and fifty years now, but our attitude to it remains ethnographic. Bahujans are written about as objects of research through which caste might be understood, as if caste is about them and not dominant castes. This attitude extends to literature. For liberal readers, literature becomes about caste only when new—usually Dalit—voices from the margins share their worlds and experiences as ethnographic data. A review of Imayam’s novel Beasts of Burden in the Hindustan Times last year says that he “writes about the family’s life and daily activities with ethnographic details.” T Janakiraman’s novels also describe in great detail the milieu of Brahmins with roots in Thanjavur living in Madras, but they are never called “ethnographic.” In the minds of…

Narendra Modi took everyone by surprise on 19 November when he announced on national television his decision to withdraw the three farm laws. The laws had been a source of popular unrest in Punjab and Haryana since they were promulgated as ordinances in June 2020. But, in the days following Modi’s announcement, a commentariat that had had no inkling a decision like this would be made began conjuring up their own reasons for why Modi did what he did. Unsurprisingly, they tried to take credit away from the farmers for the struggle they had waged and instead sought to hand it back to Modi—for doing what, in the end, was the only politically savvy option available to him. The evident loss of face for the government needed to be disguised.…

Among the eight people who died in the Lakhimpur Kheri carnage on 3 October was the 33-year-old journalist Raman Kashyap. Anil Kumar Maurya, another journalist who was present at the scene, told The Caravan that he and Raman had been exchanging visiting cards when a black SUV drove through the crowd, hitting Raman, among others. The vehicle was part of a cavalcade associated with the union minister Ajay Kumar Mishra Teni that allegedly mowed down farmers protesting the controversial agricultural laws. After initially fleeing the scene, Maurya said, he spent the rest of the day looking for Raman, eventually returning home at 3 am. Around that time, Raman’s father, Ram Dulare, received a call from the local mortuary, asking him to come identify his son’s body. Raman was a tehsil…

ON 22 OCTOBER, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation for the tenth time since the pandemic started. He announced, to great fanfare, the achievement of a “vaccine century.” Hospitals, clinics and health centres across the country had managed to administer a billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines since the beginning of the year. “A hundred crore vaccine jabs is just not a number,” he said. “It is the reflection of the capacity of this country. This is a new chapter for the country, a country that knows how to achieve huge targets.” He went on, “Everyone questioned whether India will be able to do it. Hundred crore vaccine shots is an answer to all the questions.” The day before the announcement, television news channels such as India Today, Times Now…

AT A TIME when the signs and symbols of Hindu nationalism are ubiquitous in India, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is the hegemonic force in cultural and educational spheres, it is useful to analyse the RSS cultural output from an earlier moment when the Bharatiya Janata Party was not in power. RSS comics from the 1980s can throw light on both the continuities in Hindu-nationalist ideology over a forty-year period and the departures of the current dispensation from its traditional core of Hindutva ideology. How did the RSS view itself in 1980? How did it represent and project itself to a newly literate “imagined community” of youth that it targeted for recruitment to the Hindutva cause? Reading RSS comics from the early 1980s allows us to decode the aspirational efforts…

As the second wave of COVID-19 ripped through India, leaving the world horrified at the death toll, Divya Bhaskar, a Gujarati newspaper from the Dainik Bhaskar group, published an astounding report. “Gujarat issued 1.23 lakh death certificates between 1 March and 10 May, compared to 58,000 certificates issued in the same period last year,” the report, published on 14 May, stated. The Gujarat government had evidently issued sixty-five thousand more death certificates this year, even though its data “showed that only 4,218 patients had died of COVID-19 during that time.” The government’s mismanagement of the crisis and the ways in which it was trying to cover it up were becoming plain to see. On 17 June, the New York Times published a piece with the scathing headline, “The Ganges Is…

{ONE} “SUNDAY WAS A DARK DAY for India,” The Hindu’s editorial read on 7 December 1992. “The Hindu shares the nation’s sense of deep anguish at this painful moment.” The previous day, a mob of Hindutva activists had razed the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, convinced that the sixteenth-century mosque stood over the birthplace of the deity Ram. The editorial delivered searing judgment. It spoke of “religious fanaticism at its ugliest” and “a barbaric savagery reminiscent of the crude traditions of settling scores in medieval history.” It declared that the mosque’s destruction had “delivered a lethal blow to the image of a secular and democratic India.” As redress, it argued for the mosque to be rebuilt. The editorial was titled “Unforgivable.” In November 2019, the Supreme Court pronounced a long-awaited verdict…

SULTAN ALI JAWADI, the editor of Nasim Radio, made a phone call on the evening of 12 August to inquire about the state of fighting in Daikundi, a province in central Afghanistan. The person he called was already a former government official, who told him that the local government had abandoned the province, as had most journalists. Jawadi and his three-member team had been left behind. They remained in the office and stopped broadcasting. The following morning, a Taliban official called to ask why the private radio station was off the air. He summoned Jawadi and his team to the local administrative building. “I had reported on the Taliban for years, but I had never seen or met the Taliban before,” Jawadi told me. He changed out of his suit…

HOMEBOUND Puja Changoiwala Changoiwala’s novel is premised on the exodus of migrant workers brought on last year by the COVID-19 pandemic. It follows a family from Dharavi as it embarks on an arduous journey home to Rajasthan. harper collins, S599, 288 pages BEING ADIVASI EXISTENCE, ENTITLEMENTS, EXCLUSION Edited by Abhay Flavian Xaxa and GN Devy The essays in the seventh volume of the Rethinking India series examine Adivasi rights, politics and heritage, as well as issues of land alienation and displacement, class struggle and the legacy of the intellectual, researcher and activist Abhay Xaxa. vintage books, penguin, S599, 228 pages GODS AND ENDS Lindsay Perreira In this debut novel, the journalist and author Lindsay Perreira draws a portrait of a Roman Catholic community in the Mumbai suburb of Orlem. It…