Tabla de contenidos para March 2023 en The Caravan

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While speaking on the birth anniversary of the medieval anti-caste reformer Ravidas, on 5 February, Mohan Bhagwat, the sarsanghchalak—supreme leader—of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and a Chitpavan Brahmin, claimed that a few pandits had been misinterpreting Hindu scripture to propagate caste supremacy. Everyone was equal before god, he said. It led to a backlash on social media. Demanding that Bhagwat apologise, many Brahmin users posted a verse from the Gita in which the Hindu deity Krishna says that he created the four varnas. The ecclesiastical leader Nishchalananda Saraswati accused Bhagwat of not studying scripture, arguing that the caste system was fundamental to Hinduism. He was right. Brahminical literature, including the Gita, the Manusmriti and the Rigveda, provides scriptural support for caste. Bhagwat could not defend the indefensible, so attempted obfuscation…

A tiny turtle moves through garbage, as the camera languidly pans to follow its slow crawl. In the background, the city’s traffic hurtles across relentlessly, a blur of noise and unrestrained movement. It is a comparative snapshot of pace, the chaos of a city pitted against a dawdling animal invisibilised by it. In another scene, a vertical pan of a busy neighbourhood, its somewhat disorganised life is contrasted by the leisurely stroll of a pig across a dimly lit ravine. Shaunak Sen’s Oscar-nominated documentary All That Breathes expands the geography of everyday existence by candidly dragging into view the understated, yet fragile, presence of our other neighbours—animals. Kartiki Gonsalves’s The Elephant Whisperers ditches this dystopic texture for a more alluring juxtaposition. In a scene from the film, Bellie, the middle-aged…

WHO CARES? CARE EXTRACTION AND THE STRUGGLES OF INDIAN HEALTH WORKERS Edited by Maya John and Christa Wichterich This volume analyses the history of healthcare work in India in light of the coronavirus pandemic, examining issues that care workers have to face, such as underpayment, long hours and social prejudice, as well as how liberalisation impacted contract labour and hierarchies in private and public hospitals. ZUBAAN ACADEMIC, S895, 342 PAGES CONVERSATIONS REGARDING THE FATALISTIC OUTLOOK OF THE COMMON MAN Kuzhali Manickavel The author presents a compilation of over thirty dialogues that invoke chatroom conversations, about an array of themes and things—ghosts, the Bhopal gas tragedy, Hindi, Facebook groups and charity, hipsters, cinema tropes, pronouns and more. BLAFT PUBLICATIONS, S795, 161 PAGES THE INHERITORS Nadeem Zaman This novel explores themes including…

THE LEDE 10 Sunil Kashyap is a staff writer at The Caravan. PERSPECTIVES 12 Sagar is a staff writer at The Caravan. 16 Surabhi Kanga is the web editor at The Caravan. 21 Aathira Konikkara is a staff writer at The Caravan. 24 Manik Sharma writes on arts, culture, books and films. REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS 28 Eram Agha is a reporting fellow at The Caravan. 50 Jatinder Kaur Tur is a senior journalist with two decades of experience with various national English-language dailies, including the Indian Express, the Times of India, the Hindustan Times and Deccan Chronicle. PHOTO ESSAY 64 Amina Kadous is a visual artist based in Cairo, Egypt. Her work tackles concepts of memory and identity. Sukruti Anah Staneley is the creative director at The Caravan. BOOKS 82 Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi received…

There was unusual activity outside Delhi’s Tihar Jail in the pre-dawn hours of 20 March 2020. The jail’s security had been fortified with additional battalions of the central reserved police force, and a crowd of spectators and media persons were gathered outside. As morning drew closer, the crowd began to get more and more energised. The moment that they had been waiting for was almost here—at 5.30 am, four convicts accused of gangraping a woman in Delhi in 2012, were due to be hanged. Anchors on mainstream news channels, who had been delivering high-octane coverage through the night, began a jubilant countdown a few minutes before the execution. When the clock struck five-thirty, cheers went up in the studios and the crowd. One protestor distributed sweets, another held up a…

LIKE A DETECTIVE STORY, Jalalul Haq’s philosophical work The Shudra: A Philosophical Narrative of Indian Superhumanism begins with a death. Purusha, the creator-god in the “Purusha Sukta” of the Rigveda, is sacrificed in order to create the world. This death is also the myth that legitimises the birth of the caste system, since, according to the hymn, the caste order emerges after this sacrifice. The mouth of Purusha becomes the Brahmin, the arms become the Kshatriya, the thighs become the Vaishya and the feet become the Shudra. “When God was thus killed, and man along with him, caste was born,” Haq writes. “With the death of man, the ‘casteman’ is born, who is not man at all. The caste-man is either higher, superior, or lower, inferior.” A version of this…

“It’s been seven years since my husband died,” Poonam Sahni, a garland seller and mother of two, told me. “Whenever he used to go, we used to be scared and would argue bitterly. But he did not listen to us.” Her husband, Gubbar, a coin diver, died at the age of forty while removing a dead body from the Ganges, at Shastri Ghat. Sahni now receives a monthly widow pension of R500 every three months. She worries about her children’s education. “We have a boat but it is now completely ruined. The house is falling apart. I do not know what to do, how to feed them, teach them or get a house built.” Over the Ganges, near Raj Ghat in Varanasi, is a double-decker bridge which connects the holy…

In the climactic scene of Vishnu Sasi Shankar’s film Malikappuram, its female protagonist, Kalyani, climbs the 18 stairs leading to the sanctum sanctorum of the Sabarimala temple, finally fulfilling her long-held desire to meet Ayyappan, the deity to which the pilgrimage site is dedicated. However, this is not a pathbreaking story about a woman making the trek to visit the deity in defiance of the social mores that prohibit women of menstruating age from entering the temple’s premises. Kalyani—known to all as Kallu and played by the child actor Deva Nandha—is eight years old, and her stubborn insistence on meeting Ayyappan is indulged by everyone she meets. The film’s worldview becomes clear even before it starts. Among the many people thanked in the opening credits are the prime minister, Narendra…

IT WAS AROUND 2 PM on the afternoon of 23 February. A contingent of the Punjab Police, almost eight hundred strong and armed with lathis, stood behind barricades placed outside the Ajnala Police Station, near Amritsar. On the other side, a crowd of equal size was gathering. Scores among them were armed with kirpans, flanking a converted bus that held a palki sahib—a consecrated seat for the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. Walking alongside the vehicle, surrounded by men armed with rifles, was Amritpal Singh, a 30-year-old self-styled preacher. He had been travelling up and down the state for the past six months, calling for the establishment of Khalistan, an independent state for Sikhs, and urging a return to Sikh orthodoxy, which he often redefined on his own…

HOWEVER WE JUDGE the Aragalaya that ended in Sri Lanka last year—not with a bang but with a whimper—it offered an occasion to watch and think about the possibilities and the limits of a politics reliant on historical consciousness. Whether the more liberal part of the majority demanding the island’s true diversity be recognised or Tamil critics reminding us that the Rajapaksas had been criminals of the worst sort for decades before the Sinhala public took notice, the movement fomented a political discourse that called for a truer recognition of history, truth or record, blaming the denial (or ignorance) of history for the country’s, and the movement’s, ills. Since the birth of the modern nation state in Western Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, history has been made to assume the…