Tabla de contenidos para August 2020 en The Caravan

It all began with a library. Intrigued when she inherited her mother’s collection of Urdu books, including the 1905 feminist novel Anwari Begum, the 76-year-old educationist Syeda Hameed began to find out more about its author, Tyeba Khedive Jung. The first Muslim woman in India to have received a university degree—in 1894—Jung was a beautiful, poised-looking woman from a nawab’s family in Hyderabad. She had also chaired the annual conference of the Hindu reformist sect, the Brahmo Samaj. “All those boundaries became irrelevant for her,” Hameed, who began to research and document the stories of other pioneers to reclaim their place in public memory, told me earlier this year. These stories—some of them forgotten, some better known—came together as a travelling exhibition, Pathbreakers: The 20th Century Muslim Women of India,…

On 24 March, the union labour ministry advised state governments and union-territory administrations to use unspent funds lying with their Building and Other Construction Workers’ Welfare Boards to provide financial assistance to construction workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a government press release, the BOCW boards cumulatively had about ₹ 52,000 crore available. The funds had been collected under the BOCW Welfare Cess Act, 1996, under which employers must pay between one to two percent of construction costs to maintain boards created to implement safety, health and welfare schemes for construction workers. A couple of days later, noting that some state governments had already earmarked a portion of their cess funds for routine welfare operations, a labour-ministry official clarified that the actual amount available with the boards for pandemic…

THE GREAT ENGINEERS OF MEDIEVAL INDIA were mainly Shudras. Members of the lowest varna in the caste hierarchy, the Shudras produced a steady supply of architects, builders, stonemasons, bronze sculptors, goldsmiths and other professionals. Sometimes called the Vishwakarma community, these artisans and craftsmen worked in hereditary guilds. They studied structural design, mathematics, material science and the artistic conventions of the day. Commissioned by kings, merchants and Brahmins—who disdained all manual labour themselves—the Shudras, aided by the labour of those considered “untouchable” and outside the varna hierarchy, built all of India’s engineering marvels, including its grand temple towns, magnificent cities such as Vijayanagar and medieval fort-palaces. Take for instance the town of Khajuraho a thousand years ago, where Shudra artisans, in large workshops, conceived and carved their artwork and taught apprentices…

The armed resistance of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ended at Mullivaikkal in 2009, when the army indiscriminately shelled a “no-fire zone” for civilians, killing over forty thousand people, according to some estimates. Eleven years on, the Sri Lankan government and military have not been held accountable for the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and disappeared during the 26-year-long military conflict. The right of Tamils to commemorate the dead and missing remains precarious, not just in Sri Lanka. The government has continued to encroach on Tamil lands and commit violence against the country’s Tamil minority with impunity. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who directed the campaign against the LTTE a decade ago as defence minister, was elected president last year. His brother Mahinda, who was president at the time, is the…

Turkey’s highest administrative court ordered on 10 July that the Hagia Sophia be reconverted from a museum to a mosque. This prompted immediate responses from many countries, but, worryingly, none came from India. The Hagia Sophia was built as a Christian church in the year 537 by the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I, in what was then Constantinople. The building stood as the largest cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years. When the city fell to the Ottomans in 1453, Mehmed II converted it into a mosque, destroyed its relics, plastered over iconography he considered idolatrous and added Islamic features such as the minarets that encircle its magnificent dome today. The Hagia Sophia remained the principal mosque of the city, renamed Istanbul, for over a century and a…

IN HIS BOOK Karaindha Nizhalgal, the Tamil author Ashokamitran writes that the film industry “works on the assumed certainty that the present is permanent.” The novel tracks people inextricably attached to Tamil cinema, even as the industry buffets them with absurdities and anguish, rewards them with success and power, and consumes their entire lives. The photographer Balaji Maheshwar’s seven-year project Dear Cinema maps this treacherous love affair through his family’s association with the industry over three generations. He knits together photographs he found of his grandfather, a successful actor and politician, with photographs he took of his father, an aspiring actor and cinema obsessive, and images of various spaces in which the industry weaves its dreams. He photographs single-screen theatres, both in their quiet moments and during the fever-pitch excitement…

THE WOMEN WHO FORGOT TO INVENT FACEBOOK AND OTHER STORIES Nisha Susan A woman gets fixated on a design blog written by someone who drowned, a writer finds herself in a Twitter firestorm, a couple’s hyper Instagram feed makes life difficult for a jealous neighbour—the characters in this collection of wry and poignant short stories explore what digital lives look like up close, and what living with the internet does to friendships and intimacy. CONTEXT, WESTLAND BOOKS, R 499, 232 PAGES BLAND FANATICS LIBERALS, RACE AND EMPIRE Pankaj Mishra In the essays contained in this book, Mishra explores topics such as The Economist and its particular form of liberalism, Brexit, forgotten aspects of the First World War, white supremacy and the policies of the US president Woodrow Wilson. JUGGERNAUT, R…

In February 2020, northeast Delhi witnessed widespread communal violence and arson. Atleast 53 people were killed and hundreds injured. On 2 May, the Indian Express reported that the Delhi Police planned to request the Delhi High Court to assign special courts to prosecute cases relating to the violence. On 15 June, the Delhi High Court designated certain courts to exclusively try cases arising out of the February violence, though it is not known whether this is in response to a police request. In the aftermath of several other pogroms, special courts have been recommended but often set up only years later. In three major instances of past communal violence—the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, the 1992-93 riots, and the 2002 Gujarat carnage—special courts were instituted to prosecute cases. Similar to those cases,…

I WAS SLIGHTLY NERVOUS before my first meeting with the author Mirza Athar Baig, in the winter of 2017, at the Big M restaurant in Lahore’s Shadman Market. I had recently signed a book deal for my translation of his 2014 Urdu novel Hassan’s State of Affairs, and I was meeting him to discuss the first round of edits. When I entered the restaurant, he was already at a table, waiting for me. I was embarrassed about being late, but this would happen every time I met him. Baig is impeccably punctual in a city that runs perpetually late. He was wearing a grey suit, slightly big for his build, and an old leather bag was on the chair next to him. The manuscript of the translation I had sent…

ON 13 AUGUST 1891 , soon after the conclusion of the Anglo-Manipur War, Tikendrajit Singh, the commander of the Manipuri army, is publicly hanged by British authorities at the polo ground in Imphal. Tikendrajit was a half-brother of Surachandra Singh, who ascended to the Manipuri throne after the death of their father, Chandrakirti Singh, in 1886. Having been named army chief after putting down an early revolt against the new king, Tikendrajit led a palace coup in 1890 that replaced Surachandra with Kulachandra Singh, their half-brother and the crown prince. Surachandra left Manipur on the pretext of heading to Vrindavan for a pilgrimage. Once he reached Calcutta, he appealed to the colonial authorities for assistance. Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, the viceroy at the time, ordered JW Quinton, the chief commissioner of Assam,…