Tabla de contenidos para March 2021 en The Caravan

THE LEDE  8 Camilla Caraccio is a writer and visual journalist from Italy. She has covered socio-environmental issues, culture and identity from India, Jordan, Kosovo, Poland and Lesotho. She is a media graduate from SOAS University of London. 11 Claudia Bellante is an independent Italian journalist who reports on social issues in Latin America. She collaborates with several magazines across the world, including Internazionale in Italy, Rhythms Monthly in Taiwan, and Marie Claire and El País in Spain. PERSPECTIVES  14 Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist and social activist. He is a co-editor, with Karthik Raja Karuppusamy, of the new book Shudras: Vision For a New Path (Penguin). 18 Himanshu Upadhyaya is an assistant professor at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. Abhishek Punetha is an independent researcher and former…

As Christophe Jaffrelot wrote in a recent piece in the Indian Express, after the implementation of the Mandal commission’s recommendations, in 1990, Hindutva forces worked out an agenda to stop the advancement of the Shudras. The government, then under VP Singh, extended reservations in public universities and government employment to a large section of the Shudras that was officially labelled the Other Backward Classes. Organiser, the mouthpiece of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, wrote at the time of “an urgent need to build up moral and spiritual forces to counter any fallout from an expected Shudra revolution.” In the varna-fixated ideological view of the Sangh and its electoral appendage, the Bharatiya Janata Party, Shudras are immoral and unspiritual. The “moral and spiritual” forces, in other words, meant Dwijas—the Brahmins, Kshatriyas and…

IF WE WERE TO BELIEVE the Narendra Modi government and the neoliberal commentariat, over a hundred thousand protesting farmers—most of whom have spent their lives working their farms, producing crops and selling them at local mandis—know nothing about farming, are being misled by rogue elements and do not realise what is being done for their own good. The three farm laws that were rammed through by the government in 2020, and are now on hold, are aimed at remaking India’s agricultural economy. According to the new laws, the buying and selling of farm produce can now occur in “any place of production, collection, aggregation,” apart from government-run mandis; private players can enter into negotiations with farmers on pre-arranged contracts and arrive at their own pricing; and the government can no…

AS AN OVERPROTECTED BRAHMIN boy growing up on College Road, I experienced my first culture shocks not more than fifty yards from the back wall of our house … The entire culture of Bandikeri (the area behind our house where lived a colony of Shepherds, immigrants from their village, located a few miles from Mysore) was visibly and olfactorily different from that of College Road. Bandikeri was my Trobriand Islands, my Nuerland, my Navaho country and what have you. In retrospect, it is not surprising that I became an anthropologist, all of whose fieldwork was in his own country. These lines crop up in The Legacy of MN Srinivas, a book celebrating the work of the titular sociologist and social anthropologist. Written by Srinivas’s former student and colleague AM Shah,…

In November last year, the Polish artist Przemek Branas completed his latest performance piece, “Miner’s Kiss.” The work centres on the twentieth-century writer Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz and a homosexual lover he had lost in his youth, echoing a largely forgotten queer history of communist Poland. While it is a slight departure from the religious iconography and pop elements seen in Branas’s previous works, the central theme has not changed: the homophobia modern Poland has come to reckon with, prompting many to feel disenfranchised in their own country. In early 2019, a previously unknown resolution, to declare certain areas “LGBT-free zones,” became a political agenda in Poland’s conservative heartland. Two years later, around a hundred municipalities in the southeastern part of the country have already embraced the statement. This has sparked fury…

At the time the Constitution of India was being framed, BR Ambedkar, the chairman of the drafting committee, stressed that he wanted the Comptroller and Auditor General of India to be a completely autonomous institution. “I am of the opinion that this dignitary or officer is probably the most important officer in the Constitution of India,” Ambedkar said in the Constituent Assembly in May 1949. “He is the one man who is going to see that the expenses voted by Parliament are not exceeded, or varied from what has been laid down by Parliament in the Appropriation Act. If this functionary is to carry out the duties—and his duties, I submit, are far more important than the duties even of the Judiciary—he should have been certainly as independent as the…

{ONE} ON 27 MARCH 2013 , Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Aaron Schock and Cynthia Lummis—three Republican members of the United States Congress—touched down in Ahmedabad. In the travel disclosure form that McMorris Rodgers later submitted to the US House of Representatives Committee on Ethics, she reported that the delegation came to India to discuss “trade relations with the state of Gujarat” and “mutual security concerns resulting from global terrorism.” Their sponsor’s organisational interest in the trip was for “American congressmen and business leaders to first hand experience the culture, traditions and values of India and develop a deeper understanding and friendship between the two peoples.” This sponsor was the Indian-American businessman Shalabh “Shalli” Kumar. Fifteen hours after their arrival, McMorris Rodgers, Schock and Lummis sat in Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat,…

BUDDHA IN GANDHARA Sunita Dwivedi This book draws on the writer’s research and conversations during her travels in the region of Gandhara, stretching across parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It focusses on the art and architecture of ancient Buddhist cities, revisits the history of monastic centres and antiquities, and reveals stories about ancient cities and trade routes that connected India with Central Asia and China. RUPA PUBLICATIONS, R 795, 295 PAGES BORN A MUSLIM SOME TRUTHS ABOUT ISLAM IN INDIA Ghazala Wahab The journalist Ghazala Wahab uses personal memoir, reportage and historical sources to present the history of Islam from the seventh century onwards, looking at its arrival in India and transformation over centuries. She writes about what it means to live as a Muslim in present-day India, speaking to…

One afternoon in early November 2019, Mega Trisnawatii posed for a photograph on the waterfront of Ancol, a seaside zone in the far north of Jakarta, which fills up with locals and tourists over the weekend. The photographer, her husband, Febry, had a digital camera around his neck and held a sleeping one-year-old boy in a baby carrier. After taking the shot, along with their other three-year-old son in tow, the family headed to their car. Mega is a 27-year-old Instagram celebrity with over fifty-four thousand followers. In the photos on her account, her head is covered by coloured hi-jabs and her body wrapped in floating dresses that reach her ankles. She was the brand ambassador of Amily, an Indonesian clothing brand, in 2019, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, she…

Addressing the people in Baltimore in 1864, US President Abraham Lincoln said, “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty.” On 9 March, the case California Department of Fair Employment and Housing vs Cisco Systems, Sundar Iyer & Ramana Kompella will come up for hearing before a state court in California. Last June, the DFEH filed suit before a federal court alleging that the IT giant Cisco had failed to address discrimination and harassment against one of its engineers, anonymised as…