Innehållsförteckning för February 2023 från The Caravan

“I literally left everything,” a journalist, who did not wish to be named, told me. Entering an intercaste relationship, she said, was “really hard—to leave your family, to deal with the police.” But the couple stood their ground and married. Soon, however, a pattern of verbal and physical abuse crept into their relationship. Their marriage, once an act of love and rebellion, had now become a site of regular violence. “I used to wake up at night and start crying,” the journalist said. “I kept thinking there’s no one who’s my friend or my community.” They eventually separated. Abuse within marriages in India is severely underreported. This abuse only intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic—a 2021 survey report by United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women stated…

The much-hyped claim that India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, invited the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to take part in the Republic Day parade of 1963 is nothing but an outright attempt to insert a lie in Indian history. Archival records refute this assertion. Instead, they suggest a completely different scenario: some members of the RSS, in their full uniform, entered that year’s Republic Day event, which was more of a citizens’ march than a military parade due to the national emergency caused by the Sino-Indian War of 1962. This claim has routinely cropped up in the last few years and generated intense speculation. “Recognising the role that the RSS played in national emergencies, Pandit Nehru invited them for Republic Day parade in 1963,” Ratan Sharda, a member of the RSS…

The Caravan has obtained a copy of an inquiry conducted by the government of the United Kingdom into the 2002 Gujarat violence, which was cited in a recent BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, titled India: The Modi Question. The report states that the violence was “pre-planned, possibly months ago” by Vishva Hindu Parishad, a Hindu nationalist organisation. The report notes: “The attack on the train at Godhra on 27 February provided the pretext. If it had not occurred, another one would have been found.” The report cites evidence for stating the violence was pre-planned: “Police contacts confirmed that rioters used computerised lists to target Muslim homes and businesses. The accuracy and detail of the lists, including businesses with minority Muslim share-holding, suggest that they were prepared in advance.”…

On a cold autumn day in 1902, Parisians flocked to the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation—Garden of Acclimatisation—in large numbers to witness a spectacular installation of a gopuram, an entrance gateway to a Hindu temple typical of south Indian temple architecture. The installation was part of an ethnographic exhibition by the Hagenbeck brothers, titled Les Malabares—The Malabaris. It was one among various colonial exhibitions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that displayed non-European people and cultures from different parts of the world to entertain their European audience at home. Established by a fishmonger, who bought and sold exotic fish in Hamburg in the mid-nineteenth century, the Hagenbeck company had, by the 1870s, grown to become the largest trader in exotic animals. Carl Hagenbeck inherited the company from his father and expanded the…

In December 2015, Oommen Chandy, then chief minister of Kerala and a member of the Congress party, laid the foundation stone for the R7,525 crore Vizhinjam International Port project, a deepwater multipurpose seaport in Thiruvananthapuram district. It is being built under a public-private partnership model with Adani Ports. The agreement allows the Adani Group to operate the port for 40 years, with a provision to extend it for another 20 years, after which it is to be handed over to the Kerala government. Construction of the port began in 2015. The main argument of the proponents of the project is that by making Vizhinjam a hub for cargo operations in the Indian subcontinent, a major part of transhipment traffic can be attracted there, allowing it to compete with ports in…

{ONE} ALTAF AHMAD WAS AT HOME in Gurugram on 17 September 2021. It was his forty-fifth birthday. Throughout the morning, he had been fielding congratulatory calls and texts from his relatives and friends. Some of his callers joked about a coincidence: Ahmad shared his birthday with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Ahmad’s birthday fell on a Friday that year. As he prepared to head out for namaz, he received a call from Abdul Haseeb, a local imam who had been teaching his daughters Arabic. They knew each other well. Haseeb told him that things were getting tense at the namaz site in Gurugram’s Sector 47. Dinesh Bharti, the founder of the far-right outfit Bharat Mata Vahini, had arrived at the site with a large number of supporters. The Sector 47 prayer…

IN FEAR AND TREMBLING, Søren Kierkegaard sets out a philosophical category that he calls “the interesting”: “a category that especially today (just because we live … at a turning point in human affairs) has acquired great importance, for really it is the category of crisis.” In this lies its paradox. An interesting life—like that of Socrates—is a life of inward pain and trouble. The crisis is psychological, for it impels the sufferer to reevaluate ideas other people take for granted. Its origins, however, lie in the world around us—if it did not change, there would be no need to change our ideas at all. There’s little doubt that climate change denotes a turning point in human affairs, albeit one that Kierkegaard could scarcely have envisaged. Generally speaking, our first reaction…

Slightly taller than Mount Olympus, the mythical home of the Greek pantheon, the 3,002-metre Sapitwa Peak, Malawi’s highest point, is regarded by locals as a sacred place where the spirits of their ancestors reside. For centuries, it was believed to be unreachable—its name translates to “a place where people do not go.” Although it was first climbed in 1894, many tourists attempting to scale the peak have died over the years, leading to the dominant narrative among locals that the spirits of the ancestors claim some lives when they are angry. Nevertheless, the peak remains a popular destination for mountaineers, while the Mulanje Massif, an inselberg of which Sapitwa is part, attracts thousands of tourists every year. “I hear a lot about Mulanje mountain,” a German tourist I met while…

THE VAZIRABAD CHAURASTA in Nanded, a town in central Maharashtra, echoed with the sounds of trumpets, drums, cymbals and patriotic songs in the afternoon of 10 November. Around a hundred local workers of the Indian National Congress had gathered to welcome their former party president Rahul Gandhi, who was expected to arrive before sunset and address a rally. Dozens of youngsters carrying national flags stood in one corner, while Brahmin priests chanted shlokas in unison at the centre of the crossroads. It was the sixty-fourth day of Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra—which translates to “the journey to unite India”—a march of nearly thirty-five hundred kilometres from Kanyakumari to Srinagar. “All of you would have seen that the people of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party are spreading hatred…

ON 6 SEPTEMBER 1915, 22-year-old Kala Bagai arrived at Angel Island aboard the SS Korea with her husband and three sons. Kala carried a material archive of her life in her luggage: gold ornaments, a portrait of herself, a sky-blue silk sari reserved for special occasions. Kala had carefully chosen the valuables, knowing her husband, Vaishno Das Bagai, intended to establish a home in the United States. After being questioned and examined at Angel Island, the Bagai family made their way to San Francisco. Sixteen days later, Vaishno submitted his declaration of intention for naturalisation. Given that a married woman’s nationality was considered a corollary of her husband’s, and a child’s nationality derived from the father’s, Vaishno’s application was important for the whole family. Vaishno prepared his naturalisation case hoping…

IMPRINTS OF THE POPULIST TIME Ranabir Samaddar This book examines the rise of populism as a historical phenomenon, looking at elections, populist language and governments’ attempts to gain legitimacy, while focussing in particular on West Bengal’s recent political trajectory since the end of the Left Front government in 2011. ORIENT BLACKSWAN, ₹1,105, 352 PAGES PRIVATE AND CONTROVERSIAL WHEN PUBLIC HEALTH AND PRIVACY MEET IN INDIA Smriti Parsheera An anthology of essays that explores how health data is collected, analysed and preserved, including aspects such as confidentiality, contact tracing, increased digitalisation and the deployment of artificial intelligence. HARPER COLLINS INDIA, ₹559, 572 PAGES UN/COMMON SCHOOLING EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA Edited by Janaki Nair Examining alternative schooling across India from the 1970s to the present day and drawing on interviews with…