Tabla de contenidos para February 2021 en The Caravan

THE LEDE  8 Tanushree Bhasin is an independent journalist based in Delhi. 12 Mahima Jain is a Bengaluru-based independent journalist and editor. She writes on the environment, gender, culture and socioeconomic issues. 14 Chanthu S is a research scholar in the department of history at University of Hyderabad. PERSPECTIVES  16 Praveen Donthi is the deputy political editor at The Caravan. 22 Parni Ray has worked as a curator for the Students’ Biennale and Kochi-Muziris Biennale, as a visual-arts programme manager at the Serendipity Arts’ Festival and as a gallery executive at Experimenter, Kolkata. She has an MA in arts and aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a masters in research from the Royal College of Art in London. 26 Nayantara Narayanan is the public-health editorial fellow with The Caravan. REPORTAGE…

The wetland region of Muhamma, located between the Vembanad Lake and the Arabian Sea in Kerala’s Alappuzha district, occupies a significant place in the history of the communist movement in what was once the princely state of Travancore. The region is also one of Kerala’s main centres of coir production. When I visited the village of Madathinkara, in November last year, 50-year-old Kummam Kode Sivadasan and his colleagues were busy in the coir-mat production unit next to his house. The son of an agricultural labourer, Sivadasan took to coir-weaving in 1985, after finishing the tenth standard. “I started as a weaver in small coir factories in our locality,” he told me. “I set up this coir-weaving unit in 2002, with a loan of ₹ 5 lakh.” Though Sivadasan and his…

The Press Trust of India ran a story on 13 March 2020, quoting unnamed officials at the health ministry saying that the spread of the coronavirus was not a health emergency. On that day, India had recorded nearly ninety confirmed cases of infection and had already reported death by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. On 30 January—the day India recorded its first case—the World Health Organisation had declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Just a day before the PTI story, the WHO declared it a pandemic. Ten days later, on 22 March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered a one-day nationwide curfew that was quickly followed by a longterm nationwide lockdown. Much of 2020 was characterised by uncertainty. Research on COVID-19 struggled to keep pace with the virus…

A FEW MONTHS AFTER HE RETIRED from the Supreme Court, in November 2019, Ranjan Gogoi, the forty-sixth Chief Justice of India, became a parliamentarian. The Narendra Modi government hustled him into the Rajya Sabha, the upper house, as a nominated member. Gogoi received a sour welcome. As he began reciting the oath of office, on 19 March 2020, an irate opposition walked out, crying “Shame! Shame!” His bureaucratic esteem also sank. As the CJI, Gogoi had ranked fifth in the national warrant of precedence, India’s ceremonial ordering of public offices. As an MP, he occupies a lowly twenty-first step. The nomination unleashed a maelstrom of criticism. Appointed for their eminence in the sciences, arts or social service, nominated MPs are often dismissed as political cronies. Madan Lokur, Gogoi’s sometime colleague…

ON 14 NOVEMBER, my sister Baran messaged me from Delhi. “Bhai not well. Panicky situation here. Fever not subsiding though it is below 100F and oxygen level slightly reduced.” My heart sank. My father was scheduled to leave for Allahabad the next day. It took a lot of persuasion from Baran to make him change his plans. Ultimately, he agreed to stay. The doctor who saw his X-ray pronounced that Father’s lungs were hazy. We reassured ourselves that this was because he had been a heavy smoker. We communicated on WhatsApp through voice notes as our hands shook and we couldn’t type. We tried to convince ourselves that it could not be COVID-19, although ugly doubts were beginning to surface. The next day, I received a stark, single-line message on…

MIDNIGHT’S BORDERS A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF MODERN INDIA Suchitra Vijayan Starting in 2013, the journalist and barrister Suchitra Vijayan spent seven years travelling along India’s borders, including visits to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and the India-China border. Drawing on her reportage as well as her experiences working at a war-crimes tribunal, her book reveals how local memory, maps and perspectives on belonging and occupation differ vastly from how these are rendered in the national imagination. CONTEXT, WESTLAND, R 699, 320 PAGES FOUR STROKES OF LUCK Perumal Murugan Translated by Nandini Krishnan Kumaresan, who gets a new job working in a shack near a bypass road, is crazy about books. Amma pines for an old buffalo her family had sold. Murugesu isn’t on talking terms with his father and doesn’t want to…

It was early morning in Tikri, but the bustling roads were full of life. The aroma of brewing tea rose up in makeshift kitchens. Farmers from Punjab and Haryana, who were braving the January cold to protest the government’s neoliberal agricultural reforms at Delhi’s borders, slowly made their way out of their trolleys. Like most of us, they began their day reading the newspaper over a cup of tea, but their publication of choice was Trolley Times, available at the Shaheed Bhagat Singh Library. Located on the pavement, between two trolleys parked at Pillar Number 783, the makeshift library houses hundreds of books in Hindi, Punjabi and English, donated by the movement’s allies. “Every morning, a few farmers come asking for the day’s Trolley Times, and we have to remind…

The month of January is marked by the birth and death anniversaries of Rohith Vemula. Five years ago, after he was pushed to take his own life at the University of Hyderabad—in what Dalits aptly described as an institutional murder—I reported on the defiant politics of Vemula and the Ambedkar Students’ Association that he was part of, and how they were trying to create a “universal language of discrimination” for the country’s marginalised. Early this January, the Bollywood actor Richa Chadha shared on Twitter a poster of her upcoming film, Madam Chief Minister. The film’s title character, played by Chadha, is based on Mayawati, the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and the first leader from a Dalit party to hold such a post in the country’s history. The poster…

AKSHAY KUMAR LOVES INDIA. He really does. He has said so in his movies, in his advertisements and in his tweets. In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the country to its knees, and the actor was grounded. The final round of promotions for his film Sooryavanshi had to be cancelled since the Maharashtra government started telling people not to leave their homes. The release of the cop drama, the latest in the filmmaker Rohit Shetty’s oeuvre, was postponed indefinitely. But still, Kumar was as busy as he could be, for his work as a performer in recent times has hardly been limited to films. During the COVID-19 crisis, he came to play the role of the responsible superstar and the morale-booster-in-chief on social media. His Twitter posts were a…

The concrete jungle in the shadow of the Srirangam Temple in Tiruchirappalli hides a nascent forest of over ten thousand trees, planted a year ago on 1.25 acres of barren land. Last October, encouraged by the luxuriant outcome, around two hundred people gathered to plant fifteen thousand more saplings on 1.65 acres of railway land in the neighbouring town of Lalgudi. Tiruchirappalli and Lalgudi are among the latest adopters of an afforestation method that is gaining attention across Indian cities. The method, propounded by the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki in the 1980s, compresses layers of a forest—shrubs, trees, canopies—on small plots of land, turning them into tiny forests. “I wanted to improve the green cover and found this method to be more useful than parks and gardens,” S Vaidyanathan, the…

The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library put out a call for applications for the position of curator early last year. Founded in 1964, the NMML is set in the midst of the lush-green 25 acres of the Teen Murti Bhavan complex in Delhi. Teen Murti was the official residence of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first and longest-serving prime minister, from 1947 to 1964. Apart from the library, the building currently houses the Nehru Museum, the Center for Contemporary Studies and a planetarium. In the five decades since its inception, NMML has been the country’s premier research library for modern history and the social sciences. When I was a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, from 2007 to 2009, visits to the NMML were a rite of passage. Assuming that the position advertised…

ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, the wind on the Ghazipur flyover, on National Highway 24, was cold and harsh, and the temperature was creeping towards zero. A quiet stage stood on one side of the flyover. Three historical figures kept watch from larger-than-life posters next to the stage: the farmer leaders Chowdhary Charan Singh and Mahender Singh Tikait, and the socialist freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. Surrounding them lay their followers: thousands of farmers from western Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, blocking a major road into Delhi to protest farm laws recently enacted by the Narendra Modi government. The layout of their camps—a patchwork of plastic, polyester and tarpaulin tents—mirrored the geography of the places they called home. Farmers from the flat-lands of western Uttar Pradesh spread out on the level ground below…

{ONE} REFLECTING ON THE PRESENT ASCENDANCE of Hindu nationalism in Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point, the historian Gyan Prakash wrote: There is nothing in India like the organic resistance in the United States to Trump’s racist agenda. The reasons are not far to seek. No history of civil rights battles stands behind the granting of equal rights to minorities in postcolonial India. Instead, it was the nationalist struggle against British rule that produced a secular and democratic constitution. But with nationalism now hijacked by Hindu majoritarianism, the defense of minority rights can summon no history of popular struggle on its behalf. One evening in December 2019, roughly a year after the publication of Prakash’s book, I accompanied a friend to Shaheen Bagh, a Delhi neighbourhood neither of…