Table of contents for August 2021 in The Caravan

It has remained a long-standing puzzle whether the book We or Our Nationhood Defined was authored by MS Golwalkar, the second chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or was just his translation of a Marathi book written by Ganesh Savarkar, a founding member of the RSS. This is no ordinary authorship dispute. The book was heavily inspired by the German fascist ideology of the Nazis, and recommended that India deal with minorities the way Nazi Germany dealt with Jews. Golwalkar disowned the book after Gandhi’s assassination, at a time when the RSS and the Nazis had become increasingly reviled. However, a comparison of We to Savarkar’s work, along with a mountain of other historical evidence, proves beyond doubt that Golwalkar indeed was its author. The book’s dangerous ideas remain an…

Located next to a multiplex in the posh coastal suburb of Bandra, the 356-year-old Navpada Kokni Kabrastan in Mumbai wears a sullen look. Railway tracks run parallel to its eastern wall, just beyond the section reserved for COVID-19 burials. The cemetery used to be reserved for members of the Konkani Muslim community but, during the pandemic, it opened its doors to all Muslims. In May 2020, as the cemetery prepared to bury its first COVID-19 victim, it faced unlikely opposition. Sanjay Naik, the secretary of the Mumbai Cricket Association, and some residents of the neighbourhood put up huge locks on the cemetery gates. The cemetery workers filed a police case, and the Bombay High Court eventually ordered that the locks be removed and the cemetery be opened for COVID-19 burials.…

After many twists and turns, efforts to reignite the Naga peace process are once again underway. On 11 June, the Nagaland government issued a notification declaring the constitution of a parliamentary committee—including all 60 members of the state assembly and the state’s two MPs—tasked with playing the role of a facilitator in the thorny, decades-old negotiations. At their first meeting in Dimapur, in July, members of the core committee appealed to Naga rebel groups and the centre to “resume Peace Talks” by “setting aside pre-conditions” with the aim of finding “a political solution at earliest time possible.” One of the core contentions has been the demand for a separate Naga flag and constitution, led largely by the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah). The NSCN(I-M), one of the largest groups…

“SAABUN HAI?”— Do you have soap? Thirty-year-old Shyamkali Baiga, knew the drill. She brought out a bright-green bar of soap, held it close to her nose and confirmed that she could not smell it. Savni Baiga, a health worker, briefly took her eyes off the list of symptoms she was ticking off on a sheet and nodded in acknowledgement. As the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic swept through India, looking at the horrific visuals from Delhi and other cities, I wondered about the situation in villages. Rural India has been the focus of my reporting for the last thirteen years, and I knew its fragile healthcare systems would struggle to handle the pandemic. In early May, after fully recovering from the virus myself, I set out on a motorbike to…

THE LEDE 8 Varsha Bansal is an independent journalist based in Bengaluru. 10 Arman Khan is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers the intersection of gender, travel, sexuality, queer culture, and lifestyle. His work has appeared in publications such as Them, Vice and Femina, and the Indian editions of Vogue, GQ, Grazia, Architectural Digest and Condé Nast Traveller. 12 Shaistha Khan is a freelance culture writer who writes on Saudi Arabia, the wider Gulf region and the South Asia diaspora. Her work has appeared in publications including Shondaland, Teen Vogue, Travel + Leisure, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia and The National. 14 Fawad Hasan is a journalist based in Karachi, working on stories related to labour and human rights. PERSPECTIVES 20 Kumar Sanjay Singh is an associate professor of history at Swami Sharddhanand…

While scrolling through dance videos on Instagram and TikTok, one is likely to find some rendition of the gwara gwara—an Afrobeats dance step. Featuring a synchronous swing of the shoulder and knee, the move was first created by the South African artist DJ Bongz and popularised by Rihanna’s performance at the 2018 Grammy Awards and Childish Gambino’s music video for “This is America.” In January this year, AfroDesi, an Indian dance group, collaborated with The Rabbit Dancing Crew, from Ghana, to perform the gwara gwara to a medley of “Afghan Jalebi,” a song from the 2019 Bollywood film Phantom, and “Lifuende,” a song by the Ivorian musician Serge Beynaud. Founded by the Tanzania-born dancer Aakash Phulwani in 2018, AfroDesi combines Afrobeats with Bollywood to create a unique genre. It runs…

Last August, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences announced that it was withdrawing a plan to hold the next World Anthropology Congress, scheduled for 2023, at the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences in Bhubaneshwar. This came after many tribal and non-tribal researchers, teachers, university students and activists working on tribal rights voiced strong reservations about the IUAES’s choice of venue, and the organisation’s executive committee noted in announcing the decision that it had acted in “deference to the many anthropologists from within India and across the globe who have expressed their opinion on the matter.” The IUAES, in collaboration with the Indian Anthropological Association, has since shifted the venue to Delhi. A contingent of Indian anthropologists and anthropological associations—including the Indian Anthropological Society and others, claiming to represent…

IT HAS REMAINED a long-standing puzzle whether the controversial book We or Our Nationhood Defined was authored by MS Golwalkar or was just his translation of a Marathi book written by Ganesh Damodar Savarkar, the elder brother of the famous Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. This is no ordinary authorship dispute. Golwalkar, the second sarsanghchalak—chief—of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, who held the post between 1940 and 1973, remains one of the most influential figures in the Sangh’s history. We, published in 1939 under his name, played a key part in making him a prominent figure within the RSS and was considered the first systematic explication of the Sangh’s ideology. Taking inspiration from Adolf Hitler, it asserted that India belongs to Hindus and that the country’s minorities should be treated along…

{ONE} FEW POPULAR WRITERS can have received quite as much critical praise in their own lifetimes as PG Wodehouse. Yet not long ago, the critic Philip Hensher could remark that “apart from England … the only country in the world which truly loves and understands Wodehouse is India.” This affinity is supposedly embodied in Indian English, said to be based (rather like Wodehouse’s prose) on “English grammar at its most formal” and “the vivid and racy idiom in un-English contexts.” This might be persuasive if it weren’t for the difficulty of proving that Indian English actually exists. English takes different forms in different parts of the country, but none ever possessed sufficient consistency and verve to develop into a recognised dialect. There was a time when fluent speakers favoured the Received…

One morning in April, an anxious 15-year-old girl boarded a bus by herself, near her parents’ home in Fatehnagar, a town in Rajasthan. After being beaten and forced to get married by her parents—both daily-wage workers—she realised the only way to slip out of this situation and continue with her education was to make a run for it. Soon after boarding the local bus, she called a local anti-child-marriage activist and told her she would reach their office in roughly two hours. “I was scared and didn’t know what to do,” the young adolescent, who dreams of becoming a police officer someday, told me. “This was the only thing I could think of.” Her brother’s wedding had been fixed, and her parents, who have not been able to earn much…

It was the first working day of the week, and Abid Asghar woke up early to head to his small office in Karachi’s central district. This was no ordinary Monday, however. Asghar and his comrades had taken time off from their jobs for a far more important task: preventing thousands of houses from being demolished in Karachi. “Around 9 am on 21 June, we were making placards for our protest, which was supposed to take place in front of Bilawal House” —the headquarters of the Pakistan Peoples Party, which heads the provincial government in Sindh— “to demand our just rights and fair compensation for the broken houses,” Asghar told me. “However, I received a call from someone and got to know that they are going to arrest me soon.” Soon…

India’s sacred literature points to the impermanence of all things, and to renewal and change as part of the natural order, but the very same texts reinforce the idea that renewal and renovation should be attempted before discarding or rebuilding. The Agni Purāṇa clearly states that old and broken idols should be repaired rather than discarded, and only replaced when repair is no longer possible. When studying India’s ancient texts, scholars have focussed on ma-hakumbhabhishekham, or consecration ceremonies, including prāṇa-pratiṣṭhā and cakṣu-dāna—that is, instilling life, and opening the eyes of newly made idols. But both these ceremonies are described in the very same texts alongside jīrṇoddhāra—an irrefutably Indian approach to conservation and re-use. “Jīrṇoddhāra literally means digesting the past, an act of sacralised renovation,” writes the art historian Annapurna Garimella,…

ON 14 SEPTEMBER 2020, a 19-year-old Dalit woman was sexually assaulted in the millet fields of Bul Garhi, a village in the Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh. Relatives towed her paralysed body to the nearby Chand Pa police station. Speaking with a gnashed tongue, the victim narrated her ordeal and named the alleged perpetrators, but the policemen on duty disputed her account and rebuffed her plea for assistance. The family admitted her to the local medical college in nearby Aligarh. With public rage soaring, the authorities registered a case and recorded the victim’s statement. A delayed forensic examination—conducted some eight days after the alleged crime—did not reveal evidence of rape, the police claimed. With her vitals wavering, the family removed the victim to Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital. A day later, on 29…

OUTCASTE BOMBAY CITY MAKING AND THE POLITICS OF THE POOR Juned Shaikh This text examines the workings of caste and capitalism in Mumbai. Using English and Marathi sources, it looks at literature and political theory, as well as the history of urban planning, labour, housing, social welfare and land tenures, to study the relations between communities in the sprawling city. ORIENT BLACKSWAN, S995, 240 PAGES WINGED STALLIONS AND WICKED MARES HORSES IN INDIAN MYTH AND HISTORY Wendy Doniger In this book, Doniger traces the place of the horse in Indian history and culture, from the arrival of the Indo-Europeans to the Mughals and the British. The book examines how the horse—which was not indigenous to India—was imported, how it became entrenched in mythology and how European standards were imposed on…