Table of contents for May 2021 in The Caravan

One of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s most prominent ideological planks has been the issue of cow protection. Its leaders have used the issue to pit Hindus against Muslims, who dominate the meat and allied trades in many parts of the country. But this aggressive rhetoric conceals a different truth: cattle smuggling continues unabated across northern India into Bangladesh, and crackdowns against Muslims have actually led to Hindus gaining an upper hand in smuggling networks. Higher up in the business, investigators have arrested an alleged cattle-smuggling kingpin, who is Muslim, but little information has emerged about the many Hindu-run companies that were closely involved with him. Meanwhile, though the BJP’s love for cattle is in line with an upper-caste religious vegetarianism long promoted by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the business of…

The Lyab-i Hauz—Tajik for “by the pool”—complex is the tourist hub of the storied city of Bukhara in Uzbekistan, surrounded by the ubiquitous accoutrements of such centres: bed-and-breakfasts, money-changers, souvenir shops and bistros. The rectangular Hauz was created in the seventeenth century—next to the decades-older Kukeldash Madrasa, at the time the biggest Islamic school in Central Asia—by Nadir, vizier to Imam Quli, the khan of Bukhara. A khanqah, or Sufi hermitage, and a caravanserai, both named after Nadir, flank the pool. However, while inaugurating the complex, Imam Quli called the caravanserai a madrasa. As the khan could not be wrong, Nadir added to the structure, commissioning a magnificent portal and adjoining loggia, as well as an additional floor with cells for students. When I entered the Madrasa of Nadir Divan-Beghi,…

In the 1972 movie Koshish, written and directed by Gulzar, a mimed conversation takes place between the deaf and mute protagonist and the mother of the deaf and mute heroine. This is when the two characters meet for the second time. The former communicates his name, Hari Charan, to the latter by placing a green chilli on her left foot. Thus, the viewer is shown how the hero, who cannot speak, communicates his name with ingenuity to a person who does not understand sign language—a language as developed as any spoken language. It is worthwhile to note that both sighted and blind viewers of the film need the mother to vocalise the name “Hari Charan” to comprehend the significance of the protagonist’s action. Now consider the sentimental—and frankly, pretty irritating—song…

“OI DEKH, TAKA PORCHHE, TAKA PORCHHE!”—See, money is falling! Money is falling! It was 6 November 2019, and a stunned crowd gathered under the MK Point building on Kolkata’s Bentinck Street as a shower of ₹ 500 and ₹ 2,000 notes rained down on them from the windows of an office high up in the building. Some people watched in shock, some took videos and some scrabbled, trying to grab some of the cash for themselves. As the crowd grew, the shower continued. Through the slats of a window, an arm wielding a floor wiper emerged and prodded bundles of cash off the ledge, where they had gotten stuck. The building housed a number of offices. Among them, on the sixth and seventh floors, were those of the Hoque group…

ON 27 FEBRUARY 2002 , as 59 karsevaks burnt to death in the Sabarmati Express’s S6 coach in the central Gujarat town of Godhra, Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of the state, rushed to the spot. Later that day, the Gujarat government released a press note in which Modi termed the horrendous incident a “pre-planned inhuman collective violent act of terrorism.” The Vishwa Hindu Parishad—a militant Hindu-nationalist group—called for a statewide bandh the next day, while the Gujarat government allowed the VHP to carry out a public procession with the dead bodies of the karsevaks. One of the worst massacres of Muslims in post-independent India followed this bandh, centred in and around Ahmedabad and Vadodara districts, and killing at least a thousand people. Following the train-burning incident, mobs, often…

TRANSLATION, SCRIPT AND ORALITY BECOMING A LANGUAGE OF STATE Rochelle Pinto This book examines debates around Konkani and its development, looking at translations, popular literature, newspaper articles and scholarly essays on the language. It also traces how Konkani acquired cultural dominance and the ways in which it strayed from nationalist literary norms. ORIENT BLACKSWAN, R 1,145, 408 PAGES NAMES OF THE WOMEN Jeet Thayil Jeet Thayil’s novel explores the stories of 15 women mentioned in the gospels of the New Testament, whose lives overlapped with that of Jesus Christ but have been misremembered or relegated to relative obscurity—including Christ’s companion Mary Magdalene, and his sisters Assia and Lydia. JONATHAN CAPE, PENGUIN, R 699, 192 PAGES RUMOURS OF SPRING A GIRLHOOD IN KASHMIR Farah Bashir This memoir begins in 1994, with…

“And what colour bra were you wearing?” her friend asks. That’s not relevant, she argues, and besides, she doesn’t remember. When she finally answers, if only to dispel the mounting tension, the atmosphere shifts. The motley chorus that was, until a few moments ago, dancing to the Bollywood classic “Choli ke Peechhe kya hai?”— What’s Behind the Blouse?—is now passing judgement. Does it matter that her bra was red? Is it wrong for her to want to look sexy for herself? For someone else? Does she make for a “good” rape victim? Is a feeling the same as a fact? These are some of the questions the chorus poses, first to each other and then to you. You get 15 seconds to answer yes or no, and find out the…

These are tough times for the Indian Air Force. Over the past year, the IAF has been stretched thin due to a border crisis in Ladakh. In order “to conserve flying hours and equipment,” it recently cancelled its showpiece training exercise Iron Fist, which is supposed to be held every three years. The need to conserve came because its fleet only has around thirty squadrons of fighter jets against the 42 authorised by the government. More importantly, it is in desperate need of a qualitative upgrade. After the embarrassing outcome of the limited aerial skirmish over Jammu and Kashmir skies during the 2019 Balakot crisis, an upgrade would at least restore the IAF’s technological superiority over its Pakistani counterpart. The IAF seems to consider the induction of 36 French Rafale…

POLICE OFFICERS are usually happy to be interviewed about successful operations. They might narrate the details with great flair, while juniors who are around may chip in now and then with additional bits of information. But Bhanu Pratap Singh, the station house officer at the Nawabganj police station, in Uttar Pradesh’s Gonda district, was far from enthusiastic when I asked him about a successful raid he had led on 4 January 2019. In that operation, a joint team of the Nawabganj police and the Uttar Pradesh police’s Special Weapons and Tactics unit rescued nearly a hundred cows and bulls from smugglers. The arrested smugglers told the police that they had planned to transport the animals to the city of Faizabad, twenty kilometres away. From there, they intended to make their…

ON 16 MAY 1951 , Jawaharlal Nehru stood in parliament and moved for a bill to be referred to a select committee. The Constitution (First Amendment) Bill sought to change the new Constitution that had come into effect less than sixteen months before. The bill would pass sixteen days later and change the Constitution even before the first elections of independent India. The key part of the amendment consisted in changes to three constitutional rights: the rights to freedom of speech, non-discrimination and private property. The amendment added new grounds for restricting the freedom of speech into Article 19(2). Speech could now be restricted in the interests of “public order” and “friendly relations with foreign states,” but all restrictions would now have to be “reasonable” as well. The right to…

In March 2020, as COVID-19 lock-downs started to engulf the world, Sunila Galappatti—a dramaturg, editor, and writer—mulled over an experiment in Colombo. The news of the lockdown made her wonder if people were at risk of shrinking into enclosed realities, shunted away in isolation. Could airing people’s experience of the pandemic amount to something? With this thought, she set up lockdownjournal.com. Galappatti told me she had a desire to build a quiet place, where one could think “not about moments and quick-fire exchanges, but about whole days at a time.” The journal houses a collection of first-person accounts of the pandemic—musings, reflections, families reuniting or being forced to live apart, young worrying about the old, journalists working in empty newsrooms, people venturing on walks, tackling tall grocery lists, coping with…

On 20 March, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh appointed Dattatreya Hosabale as its new sarkaryavah—the executive head of the organisation. Though RSS leaders argue in public that his elevation is nothing but a generational change, many of them admit in private that it has to do greatly with the support he enjoys from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Hosabale has helped Modi use the RSS machinery in managing several elections. His willingness to allow the RSS machinery to be used for electoral campaigns makes him exactly the kind of leader Modi needs. He owes a great deal to the prime minister—his status within the organisation has been rising since Modi became prime minister. The BJP leadership, according to sources in the RSS, has long been trying to appoint Hosabale in the position…

ON 2 APRIL 2014 , Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat at the time and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime-ministerial candidate, addressed an election rally in Bihar’s Newada district. “The same Yaduvanshi which worships Krishna, which rears and serves cows, who are they with?” Modi asked. “With whom is their leader practising politics? With those who feel proud of slaughtering animals in India.” Yaduvanshi is a reference to the Yadav community, who rear cattle by caste vocation and are a crucial vote base for the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar and the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh. Modi seemed to be taking a dig at the Samajwadi party for courting Muslim voters. Pitching animal protection as an electoral issue, Modi added, “Brothers and sisters, the government in Delhi neither…

ON 26 MARCH THIS YEAR, at a feminist webinar to mark fifty years since Bangladesh gained independence, the Pakistani author and oral historian Anam Zakaria spoke about the “political and cultural silencing around the birth of Bangladesh” that she witnessed around her while growing up. She clarified that this was not a “complete erasure” of 1971, which “remains one of the most defining years in Pakistan’s history and the national imagination,” with a lasting effect on education, policy-making, perceptions of neighbouring countries and so on. “But what is remembered about ’71 also in many ways determines what must not be remembered,” she continued. In her research, where she draws on textbooks, museum exhibits and military memoirs, she analyses techniques of official history-making and the dissemination of “fabricated narratives” regarding the…