Tabla de contenidos para July 2022 en The Caravan

On a dusty morning in Palasani, a village near Jodhpur, 46-year-old Kaburi Mirasi recounted stories her mother told her about the Chhappaniya Akal—the Famine of ’56. The famine occurred in 1899–90, or 2056 in the Bikrami calendar. Kaburi narrated how members of her community of Mirasi Muslims, a historically marginalised caste in Rajasthan, would beg their landlords for spare grain or how water from boiling green pulses was preserved as a source of nourishment. The famine spread through north-western India and, in Rajasthan, brought illness and hunger like never before. “People left their homes forever,” Kaburi told me. “Millions moved away to villages far away in the hope of some work and a meal.” In Rajasthan, famines are classified into four types: a dearth of water, a dearth of grain,…

On 7 April 2022, the union home minister, Amit Shah, while speaking at a meeting of parliament’s official-language committee, described Hindi as “the language of India.” He said that Hindi, an official language, should become an “important part of the unity of the country.” When speakers of different languages in India converse with each other, he added, “it should be in the language of India” and, in keeping with this spirit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi used Hindi for running the government. Shah suggested that Hindi, rather than indigenous languages, should take the place of English. He announced that all eight north-eastern states had agreed to make Hindi compulsory up to the tenth standard and had recruited over twenty thousand Hindi teachers. This was not the first time that the home…

DURING RAM NAVAMI processions in April this year, communal violence broke out in several states across India. In almost all cases, there was a similar pattern. Hindu mobs entered Muslim neighbourhoods, wielding swords and sticks, shouting communal slogans and playing loud music. They danced, women and children included, in front of mosques as provocative songs, replete with Islamophobic content, blared from speakers. In most instances, this invariably happened during the late afternoon, when Muslims were performing namaz or breaking their Ramzan fast. Fights broke out between the two communities, leading to arson, stone-pelting and vandalism. Many people suffered injuries, and there were even reports of some deaths. In Bihar’s Muzaffarpur and Madhya Pradesh’s Khargone, men wearing saffron scarves climbed mosques and tried to plant Hindutva flags. Houses were burnt down.…

WRITER, REBEL, SOLDIER, LOVER THE MANY LIVES OF AGYEYA Akshaya Mukul This extensive biography of the writer Sachchidanand Hirananda Vatsyayan—also known as Agyeya—unravels his “double life” and many myths surrounding impressions of him as a stoic and austere writer. It unearths personal papers, letters, archival documents and records from his time in prison, exploring his relationships, ideological beliefs and literary legacy. PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, S999, 808 PAGES HOW I BECAME A WRITER AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A DALIT Manoranjan Byapari Translated by Arunima Chanda A translation of the second volume of Manoranjan Byapari’s Itibritte Chandal Jivan, this book recounts the author’s life in Kolkata, his insights on caste, literature, identity and politics, his interest in writing, the critical acclaim of his works and more. SAGE SAMYA SELECT, S650, 376 PAGES IN…

In 2020, Lalita Boipai, a rural healthcare worker, was conducting tests with malaria kits in her village, Bera Kundrijor, as part of a government survey. She, however, was not prepared for its findings. “Surprised at the zero cases of malaria in my report, I got nervous thinking it would raise questions from the higher authorities,” she told me. “Out of panic, I reported two-three fake cases.” Bera Kundrijor is one of the 62 villages in the Noamundi block of West Singhbhum district in Jharkhand. The district is highly vulnerable to a malaria endemic. According to the National Vector Borne Disease Control Program, Jharkhand reported 37,133 malaria cases in 2019—in which West Singhbhum alone reported 9,077 cases, the highest in the state. In 2020, the cases in Jharkhand came down to…

Between April and June 2021, India experienced the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a second wave swept across the country, India recorded more than half of its total COVID-19 fatalities. The estimates vary widely, with the most conservative figure being more than a quarter million deaths. It was a period of extreme loss, angst, helplessness, mayhem and grief. Vineeta Sharma writes a personal account of that time from Delhi, one of the worst affected cities in India, where hospitals were overfull, as were crematoria and burial grounds. Sharma writes a lived account—a story behind the numbers and facts about failed institutions—as she still seeks closure a year later. In the second week of April 2021, my husband, our two children—one still a toddler—and I tested positive for COVID-19. We…

FROM THE WRITINGS of the explorer Ibn Battuta to the tales of the One Thousand and One Nights, references to the Arab fondness for oudh have persisted for centuries. Pungent yet pleasing, the complex fragrance from the agarwood tree permeates the air with a sense of opulence. Used to perfume everything from bodies and garments to houses and palaces, oudh has become undeniably synonymous with the Arabian Gulf. Interestingly, though, no agarwood-producing species is known to grow anywhere west of India. Deeply coveted within Arab commerce for over a millennium, oudh was always sourced from South and Southeast Asia, its sillage trailing long behind caravans on the Silk Route and medieval ships on the Indian Ocean. An important entrepôt of maritime trade, the Gulf historically relied on pearling, which formed…

ON 2 JULY 1964, after signing into law the Civil Rights Act, the US president Lyndon B Johnson shakes hands with the activist Martin Luther King Jr. The comprehensive legislation—the widest expansion of civil liberties in nearly a century—prohibited, among other things, unequal voting laws, racial segregation and employment discrimination. The end of the Civil War, in 1865, was followed by the passage of several anti-discrimination laws and constitutional amendments, as radical Republicans won state elections throughout the former Confederacy and took control of the US Congress. However, during the disputed presidential election of 1876, the two national parties agreed upon a compromise that included the withdrawal of all remaining federal troops in the southern states. Since these soldiers had been crucial to protecting African Americans from political violence, their…

Simranjit Singh Mann’s astounding victory over the Aam Aadmi Party candidate in the Sangrur Parliamentary bypoll, coming on the heel of the AAP’s victory in the state election months ago, is representative of the turmoil underway in Punjab. The virtual disappearance of the mainstream Akali Dal has opened up a huge space in the politics of the Sikh majority in the state and Mann, a maverick radical Sikh politician who has always been on the extreme right of the spectrum of splinter Akali groups, marks only the beginning of a period in which various new alternatives will emerge to fill this vacuum. Based in Punjab as a reporter, over twenty years ago, I found that, while reporting on elections in rural areas, it paid to take the litany of complaints…

IN HIS 1940 ESSAY “Inside the Whale,” George Orwell appeared to champion something surprisingly un-Orwellian. You would think that the future author of Animal Farm and 1984—one of the twentieth century’s most raucous moralisers, the writer who famously declared that “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude”—would dismiss a book like Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s lusty auto-fictional journal about a group of idle Americans in Paris. Instead, he was taken in by the novel’s “preoccupation with indecency and with the dirty-handkerchief side of life.” Years ago, the two writers had met in Paris, when Orwell had stopped over on his way to join the civil war in Spain. Miller presented Orwell with a corduroy jacket, but dismissed his political convictions.…