The Caravan的October 2020目录

“This process will never come to an end,” Lakhyamati Daimary told me. “For as long as you make sure that the villagers keep believing in dainadaini”—the Bodo term for witches—“you don’t need any other way to fool them to get your work done.” In 2014, Lakhyamati, a cook at a primary school in Jangalgaon, a village in Assam’s Udalguri district, was accused of practising witchcraft. “My brother-in-law said that my daughter’s friend had been possessed by Aai Goxani”—a goddess associated with smallpox, also called Sheetala—“and that she had claimed I was a witch, who would wreak havoc in the entire village,” she said. “How does a 16-year-old girl claim such things and the villagers believe her? You tell me.” Lakhyamati did not take the accusation seriously at first, she added,…

LETTER FROM SRI LANKA On 30 December 2019, a young woman from Sri Lanka’s Northern Province killed herself. While her motivations are impossible to guess, many Tamil websites noted she had recently married and a few speculated that excessive pressure for dowry may have played a role. The end of an anonymous poem which circulated on social media shortly after her death translates as, “If mothers who arrange marriages for sons/ Want to keep their children under their influence/ Why do they send them to wedding halls?/ It is the ruinous dowry system/ That has ruined this beautiful face.” Women across Sri Lanka have always had strong cultural incentives to marry. In Tamil homes, it is not surprising to hear the proverb “aanillaatha pennukku vaazhvillai”—a woman without a husband has…

{ONE} TUSHAR MEHTA STOOD before a bench of S Muralidhar and Talwant Singh in the Delhi High Court. It was half past noon on 26 February, and Mehta had just rushed in. Two petitioners had approached the court the previous day, seeking orders for the Delhi Police to register first-information reports against several leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party. For the last three days, Hindu mobs had been marauding through northeastern Delhi, attacking Muslims residents and their businesses and homes. Dozens had already been killed, and attacks continued even as the court convened that day. The BJP leaders had delivered hate-filled, communally charged speeches in the run-up to the violence, which had been recorded and circulated to the point of ubiquity. But the police had refused to act on complaints…

VISHAL THAKUR’S CLOTHES hung off his gaunt body. He did not have the means to satisfy the demands of his hollow belly, and could not bring himself to ask the family he had alienated for help. Friends had dropped out of Vishal’s life when they realised that he was deaf to their pleas to get his life together. Neighbours whispered “nashedi”— junkie—when he lumbered past on the forested roads of Shimla. Thakur was in his early twenties back then, and had already been dependent on a cocktail of psychoactive substances for a decade—alcohol to begin with, at first covertly stolen from his father when he was not yet a teen, then bhang, opium, smack, assorted over-the-counter no longer able to move, a passerby handed him twenty rupees. He used the…

HELLFIRE Leesa Gazi Translated by Shabnam Hadiya Published as Rourob in 2010, Leesa Gazi’s novel follows Lovely, who loves the idea of wandering the streets of Dhaka but cannot because of her mother’s strict rules. On her fortieth birthday, she goes to a market alone, and the novel unfurls at a dizzying pace between her internal conversations and adventures. EKA, WESTLAND, R 399, 204 PAGES WE THE PEOPLE ESTABLISHING RIGHTS AND DEEPENING DEMOCRACY Edited by Nikhil Dey, Aruna Roy and Rakshita Swamy This compilation of essays by academics, lawyers and other public figures reflects on issues including decentralisation, the effectiveness of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and other public-works programmes, the rights to education and health, and strategies for reducing inequality. VINTAGE, PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, R 499,…

The village of Haripipliya is set a little apart from the highway between Neemuch and Ratlam, which traces the eastern edge of Madhya Pradesh. It is difficult to distinguish it from adjacent villages along the road. Past the colourful wall of a school lies a settlement of the Bachhada, identified as a Scheduled Caste in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The village’s other castes derogatorily call the settlement a “dera.” There, in January, I met a 26-year-old resident who made her living as a sex worker. About a year ago, after visiting a health camp at the settlement, she discovered she was HIV-positive. She has been on antiretroviral medication, distributed free of cost by the government, ever since. When we spoke, she vowed not to let her 14-year-old daughter enter the…

In April last year, as India was in the midst of parliamentary elections that saw Narendra Modi return to power with a bigger majority, the former vice-chief of the army staff Lieutenant General Sarath Chand formally joined the Bharatiya Janata Party. Since many top military officers have joined the ruling party immediately after retirement, another one joining it within a year of hanging up his uniform should not have come as a surprise. But Chand had made news in February 2018, a few months prior to his retirement, when he told the parliamentary standing committee on defence that most of the equipment with the Indian Army was in the vintage category. “Typically, any modern Armed Forces should have ... one-third of its equipment in the vintage category, one-third in the…

NIRAD CHAUDHURI ENJOYED COMPLAINING about his struggles despite a long, outwardly happy and very productive life. He became a full-time writer during the 1950s, when very few Indians wrote “literature” in English. Like their successors, they lacked a significant domestic audience—to be published meant being published abroad. Even in Britain, until the breakthrough success of Midnight’s Children in 1981, books about India usually sold in modest quantities. The best-known “Indian” novels were written by English (or Anglo-Irish) writers like Paul Scott and JG Farrell (who won the Booker Prize in 1973 for the superb The Siege of Krishnapur). Yet Chaudhuri managed to earn his living as a writer—if his books did not make much money, he always found publishers willing to take them. In 1970, he moved with his wife…

LETTER FROM THE UNITED STATES At about 1 am on 20 July—the fifty-fourth consecutive day of protests against police brutality in Portland, Oregon—a flash grenade exploded about four feet to my left, shooting out blinding light and a burst of sparks, illuminating the vast cloud of tear gas near the Mark O Hatfield Federal Courthouse. A journalist in front of me stood behind a large plexiglass shield with a camera affixed to it. I hid behind him, peaking out in an attempt to film the federal agents unleashing this barrage on the few dozen protesters and press. As the onslaught appeared to slow down, another tear-gas canister came in our direction. I stepped too far away from the shield in front of me, and an expletive passed my lips as…

As India has climbed to the second spot in overall numbers of persons infected by COVID-19 across the world, the healthcare situation is deteriorating rapidly, especially in prisons. On 23 March, the Supreme Court ordered that state governments constitute “high-powered committees” to devise a criteria for granting interim bail or parole to undertrials and convicted inmates, respectively, to decongest prisons. Despite these measures, the governments and courts appear to be unable to control the crisis. Prisons across India have shown high rates of infection, with those in Maharashtra being worst hit—with 2,061 inmates and 421 jail staff infected as of 23 September, and an increase of about thirty positive cases daily. In Andhra Pradesh, 928 prison inmates and 167 staff have tested positive across jails. Most states have not made…

Recently, in partnership with Bridgestone, we kicked off a series of online chats with the movers and shakers of the Indian automotive industry. Never, in its history, has the industry faced a situation as devastating and perplexing as COVID, and we were keen to find out how those who are part of it are facing up to the challenges, individually and collectively. In the first episode of The Motoring Conversations, we were joined by Tarun Garg, Director, Sales, Marketing and Service, Hyundai Motor India Ltd., Shashank Srivastava, Executive Director, Marketing and Sales, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd., Naveen Soni, Senior Vice President, Sales and Service, Toyota Kirloskar Motor Pvt. Ltd., and Parag Satpute, Managing Director, Bridgestone India. Here are some highlights. Motoring World: COVID came out of the blue in a…

Excerpted from Romila Thapar’s Voices of Dissent: An Essay, published by Seagull Books, 2020. I WOULD LIKE TO ARGUE that it is because of the absence of emphasising the monolithic and the uniform in religion that dissent took the form that it did and, to some extent, continues to do. Confrontations did occur and some were violent, as they still are. This is not surprising given the sharpness of social distinctions in Indian society. Nevertheless, it is because there is the possibility of juxtaposing the undercurrents of dissent and allowing them space that there is also flexibility in contention. This would require us to view Hinduism—the religion of the largest number—not as a single, continuous, unchanging institution but, rather, as a series of reformulated institutions, of which some get amalgamated…