Re-design PPT by The Caravan, Delhi Press

September 2015

Need for redesign > Realigning and adapting to evolving design preferences: a clean and distinguished appearance > Breaking the monotony of existing design > Allowing greater flexibility for incorporating photographs > Speaking through colours and improvising newer ways to brand content > To remain serious, but retaining reader attention at the same time > Increasing reader base: a more contemporary design that speaks to younger readers

The Brief To redesign The Caravan, in order to broaden its readership by engaging both the casual and the loyal reader, through a visual makeover that places The Caravan in the domain of leading international political magazines. Throughout, staying true to its fundamental purpose of long-form narrative journalism.

Our Keywords > Sophisticated > Intelligent reading experience > Robust and Eclectic > Non-sensational > Engaging > Articulate and Bold

Guiding principles of redesign The redesign exercise began with brainstorming and understanding the context and identity of the magazine as well as of its potential readers. This was followed by creating and reworking design elements where the content guided the form. The following principles became fundamental in this process: 1 People see before they read

2 Print isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t dead, it is evolving

3 Building a seamless visual narrative

Guiding principles of redesign

1P eople see before they read Most readers judge the content of a publication by accessing its design. The first challenge for a publication, therefore, lies in calling its reader from the news rack which can only be accomplished by an interesting cover. The rules for any â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;successfulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; magazine cover have to be simple; be big, be loud, be busy and call for attention.

Old Cover Page

New Cover Page Masthead

The original ‘The Caravan’ nameplate was retained for its brand-recall-value. It only needed cleaning up visually in places to make it more cohesive, compact and grounded

Tagline

The tagline moves from its ‘sidelined’ position in the older design, to a left aligned position above the masthead, establishing a better relationship between the two

Story headers

In order to ensure that on newsstands where copies are stacked one behind other, potential readers are exposed to a wider mix of stories, the story headers were pushed to the top of the page from their earlier rockbottom placement in the older design.

Profile/Portrait friendly

Retaining the essence of ‘portrait/profile’ oriented pieces as the cover-story, we tried to redefine the quality of the cover-imagery by making way for more dramatic and dynamic photographs set against contrasting, solid backgrounds

Guiding principles of redesign

2P rint isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t dead, it is evolving While readers today are used to getting their daily fix online in faster and more absorbable nuggets, a substantial reader base still prefers the tactile comfort of reading. Taking a cue from minimalist websites, which have been grabbing attention of late, graphical elements were incorporated into the print experience of The Caravan.

Contents Page

VOLUME 07 • ISSUE 09 SEPTEMBER 2015

Founder: Vishwa Nath (1917-2002) Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Printer: Paresh Nath

cover story / politics 34

Everybody’s Brother Akhilesh Yadav in the family business neha dixit

A new-age visual treatment, inspired by the ‘tiling’ trend in UI design.

When Akhilesh Yadav became the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in 2012, he was coasting on the promise of his youthful energy, an education and an interest in technology, and talk of development. Three years on, he faces a state of chaos, fierce internal competition within his Samajwadi Party, and the fraying of caste and communal ties engineered by his powerful father, Mulayam Singh Yadav.

perspectives

The modular grid allows for flexibility of scaling different stories and sections based on the intended hierarchy.

22 politics

22 In Sickness and in Health

Tamil Nadu waits on its ailing chief minister

vaasanthi

A compact design: imaginary gridlines gives the page a neat look

law

25 Unscrupulous Act

New amendments threaten to sabotage a law that protects whistle-blowers

krishn kaushik health

28 Results May Vary

Behind the snazzy marketing, there is little clarity on what AYUSH should be doing

vidya krishnan politics

31 Past Expiry

conservation

54 On The Line

An island in Lakshadweep tries to save a remarkable spawning site

The tenuous legal grounds for re-promulgating ordinances

rucha karkarey and shreya yadav

vidya krishnan SEPTEMBER 2015

THE LEDE

PERSPECTIVES

Intelligent Design

In Sickness and in Health

An acclaimed art director re-imagines a revered shrine / Architecture / swati sanyal tarafdar One morning this March, in Hyderabad, Anand Sai was preparing for his day when his phone rang. It was Kishan Rao, a retired IAS officer who is now the CEO of the Yadagirigutta Temple Development Authority, or YTDA. “Get ready,” Sai was told. “The CM wants to meet you at his office, first thing today.” “This is my day,” the art director, who has worked on over 30 Telegu films, recalled thinking. Before rushing out, he grabbed his concept sketches for a redeveloped temple complex at Yadagirigutta, a cave shrine 60 kilometres north-east of the city, in the young state of Telangana. “I couldn’t go emptyhanded,” Sai told me. “My drawings do the talking for me.” He arrived at the state secretariat, and was shown into the office of the Telangana chief minister, K Chandrashekar Rao—popularly known as KCR. The chief minister, who presides over the YTDA, was particularly taken with one of the three directions Sai presented. Over the next few weeks, Sai worked frantically to produce detailed drawings of the design, and present them to KCR again. He also helped put together a tender application, and completed the paperwork to be appointed the designer for the Yadagirigutta project. For Sai, this was the culmination of many years’ effort to transform himself into a temple designer. I visited the place, situated on a 300foot hill, in July, and headed up to the main shrine. Yadagirigutta was revered even before Telangana’s separation from Andhra Pradesh, but locals had long accused the Andhra government 8

of neglecting it. KCR, on the other hand, recently allocated R100 crore of state funds per year to realise the new design. Yadagirigutta receives between 5,000 and 8,000 visitors on a typical day, with the numbers at least doubling on holidays and skyrocketing during festivals. The temple stands over a cave, where, legend says the god Vishnu once appeared before a meditating yogi. The yogi convinced the god to remain there, in the form of a statue of Narasimha, one of his many avatars. Nobody I met could put a firm date on when worship started here, but the present shrine, Sai later told me, is around 50 years old. Around the temple was an ambulatory, and numerous puja halls, all built haphazardly over the years. The road up the hill was lined with shops and offices, housed in structures both legal and otherwise. I found the place calming, but not aweinspiring. Almost all of this was soon to be gone. “We will not touch the deity, the sanctum sanctorum,” or the main puja hall, I was told by Geeta Reddy, a temple officer. “But everything around it will be demolished and created anew.” The hilltop will hold only the temple and its primary complements—adjunct shrines, prayer halls, and ornate gopurams, or entrance towers. Here, Sai has adhered to the conventions of Vaishnavite temple style, and chosen to use black stone, common in many old south Indian temples. Beyond this core, Reddy said, “there will be two more levels created on the hillock,” for offices, guest houses, eateries and parking lots. Eventually, she added, “this and

Tamil Nadu waits on its ailing chief minister / Politics the neighboring eight hillocks will be developed to form a 2,000-acre temple city.” Those displaced by the project are being compensated, and business owners have been promised the right to return. Reddy claimed there has been no dissent. Soon after my trip, I called Sai up over the phone. “From a very young age, I was intrigued by temple architecture,” the 43-year-old told me. He earned a degree in commerce while at university, but his great talent was always drawing. So when the Telugu film star Pawan Kalyan, a personal friend, invited him to sketch set designs for one of his films, the 1998 hit Tholi Prema, Sai jumped at the chance. Sai got more such work, and became a reputed art director. Meanwhile, his fascination with temples continued. In 2003, Sai worked on a film starring the Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi, who later served as India’s minister of tourism. The actor invited Sai to design the decorations for his daughter’s wedding. Sai accepted, and as other wedding projects came his way, he said, “it was only natural that … I experimented with the various forms of temple architecture and design.” In 2005, the Vaishnavite guru Chinna Jeeyar attended a wedding at a venue Sai had decorated in temple style. Impressed, he invited Sai to rework a design for a 108-foot statue of the ancient Hindu theologian Ramanuja, currently under construction near Hyderabad. The task, Sai said, was to add a sense of spirituality to the original vision. He “felt alive and blessed” doing this work, and so dedicated himself to reli-

/ vaasanthi

Bolder and snappier slugs to give a better sense of the content spread

For some months now, supporters of Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, J Jayalalithaa, had been trying to conceal their anxiety. Something was going unimaginably wrong. Through the duration of Jayalalithaa’s long-running trial on charges of holding disproportionate assets, they had enthusiastically protested her innocence, going on fasts and circumambulating the sanctums of every Hindu god they could think of. This May, it seemed their faith had been rewarded. Jayalalithaa—Amma, to them—was absolved, and returned to head the state government. But a suspicion started growing among them. Is it true, her supporters asked each other, that Amma is ill? Jayalalithaa, the supremo of the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, spent 21 days in a Bengaluru jail last September and October after a special court found her guilty of corruption, before being released on bail. She came straight back to Chennai, and cloistered herself in her Poes Garden residence. She did not emerge for 217 days. When the Karnataka High Court acquitted her on 11 May, her supporters rushed to her gates. But Amma did not come to her balcony to wave and flash the victory symbol, as was her habit. In hushed whispers, AIADMK leaders told each other she refused to meet even the party’s top brass. Not even O Panneerselvam, her stand-in chief minister, was granted an audience. On 23 May, Jayalalithaa finally stepped out to attend her swearing-in ceremony, but that appearance only 22

THE CARAVAN

added to the gossip. The event was just 25 minutes long, and featured what was probably the first mass swearingin of ministers in any government in this country. The national anthem, whose full 52 seconds are mandated at such ceremonies, was truncated to under 20. One explanation doing the rounds was that the Tamil Nadu governor, K Rosaiah, was unwell. But Jayalalithaa herself looked pale and tired, and seemed to walk with difficulty. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Chennai in early August, Amma’s supporters must have smiled with relief to see the chief minister, resplendent in a green sari, receive him at the airport and host a lunch in his honour. These images, they would have thought, would shame those—her detractors and rivals—who had been spreading awful rumours. In many ways, the cult of the moviestar turned political leader that prevails in Tamil Nadu contradicts basic democratic values. The cult mentality is fostered within party ranks to create a cohesive political unit. In Jayalalithaa’s absence, Panneerselvam treaded softly in leading the cabinet, careful not to be seen or heard except when singing paeans to his leader. The effects of this spread beyond just the executive, as the entire state machinery paused: through Jayalalithaa’s absence, the assembly barely functioned, and important decisions went untaken. In the months after her swearing-in, Jayalalithaa visited the state secretariat only twice a week, for two hours at a time. She has inaugurated projects via video-conferencing, flagging off even

the prestigious Chennai Metro from the secretariat rather than on site. She was easily re-elected to the state assembly from Chennai’s RK Nagar, but her campaign was bafflingly brief. Her swearing-in as a member of the legislative assembly, as well as a major meeting with the Adani Group, were rescheduled at the last minute. She failed to show up to the AIADMK’s much-publicised iftar on 2 July. News reports suggest that as of mid August, the state cabinet had met only once since her return to power. There was also no indication as to when the Tamil Nadu assembly, whose budget session ended in March, would be reconvened.

Amma did not come to her balcony to wave and flash the victory symbol, as was her habit.

ww Theories abound as to what actually ails the chief minister. She is known to have chronic diabetes, and arthritis in her knees. Now, rumours in the media also speak of gangrene in her toes. Her kidneys are said to be malfunctioning, and there is talk of dialysis being carried out at her home, and house calls by specialists. Concerns over Jayalalithaa’s health began just as the AIADMK looked to be in an unassailable position going into campaigning for Tamil Nadu’s assembly elections next year. Her purported illness could revive the hopes of her opponents, and especially

THE CARAVAN

reportage BOOKS

ON THE LINE

Icons as additional visual codes to the page. Facilitates visual continuation from the print to web where the same icons could become a hyperlinked touchpoint for each story/piece

An island in Lakshadweep tries to save a remarkable spawning site / CONSERVATION RUCHA KARKAREY AND SHREYA YADAV

the island of bitra is one of the northernmost inhabited points in the Lakshadweep archipelago. Azure waters surround beaches of pale yellow sand fringed with coconut and casuarina trees. Underwater, a thriving coral metropolis houses reef fish of every imaginable shape and colour. One evening around six or seven years ago, Hamsa Koya and his brother, residents of the island, set out to sea to fish. Koya steered a kundalam, a mid-sized fishing boat with an outboard engine, carefully across the shallow waters of the island’s lagoon. He headed for a popular fishing spot that the locals called “furathabam.” Here, where a red buoy marked the lagoon channel, they often fished for chammali, or paddletail snapper, a species that lives in large shoals among nearby coral boulders. Like a few other residents of Bitra, Koya sells his catch for a living. Most others are subsistence fishermen, fishing to feed their families. That day, Koya rode out a little further, south of the channel, to the outer reef. In these deeper waters, the fishermen were more likely to find large metti, or red snapper, whose meat Bitra’s residents are particularly fond of. They stilled the boat’s engine, lowered an anchor, and fastened hooks to their fishing lines, which had been neatly rolled around flat wooden boards. Then, they spun the hooks over their heads, and hurled them as far as they could into the sea, sending the lines unfurling through the air.

Laughter in the Dark Vilas Sarang’s bilingual modernism MANTRA MUKIM

death recurs in vilas sarang’s fiction as punctually as in a flowering tree. It enters the story through everyday objects, rituals, rooms and corpses. Handcuffed to this bleak universe is Sarang’s phenomenal comic vision, that mocks what he creates and makes death a difficult joke: hard to decipher and harder to laugh at. But a writer’s death is different. It makes us turn to him or her in the way that we turn to the funnel of light coming from a projection box. For a moment the projected image, the literary text in a writer’s case, is forgotten, and the source that lights up this image becomes of greater interest. If the writer is Indian, however, and his major output has been in the genre of the short story, there’s hardly anyone facing the screen, let alone turning away from it. When Vilas Sarang passed away earlier this year in Mumbai, at the age of 73, there were stray pieces discussing his life or giving brief sketches of his work. But the kinds of literary choices he made as a bilingual writer of fiction, poetry and criticism in English and Marathi, and the precarious position he held within the Marathi cultural sphere, still need closer inspection. So does his relationship with European and Marathi modernism, genres which influenced almost all his work and whose principles he used to critique the realism of his predecessors—prolific Marathi novelists of the 1930s and 1940s such as NS Phadke—and of his contemporaries in the 1980s, such as Bhalchandra Nemade, who classified modernism as essentially a Western practice. Known by many merely as the writer whose short stories Samuel Beckett recommended to his American publishers, it’s very hard to gauge Sarang’s legacy, given his absence even from a large body of post-colonial criticism. Born in 1942

SHREYA YADAV

Slugs

THE CARAVAN

in Karwar, a coastal town of Karnataka, Sarang started out by producing fiction in English during his college years, and followed it with writing extensively in Marathi and in other genres, while concurrently teaching English literature in Mumbai, Kuwait and Iraq. He published three novels in English—In the Land of Enki (1993), which appeared in Marathi as Enkichya Rajyat; The Dinosaur Ship (2005); and Tandoor Cinders (2008). His collection of poetry in Marathi was simply titled Kavita (1969–1984), while two collections appeared in English—A Kind of Silence (1978) and as Another Life (2007). But it is his short stories that best exemplify his ingenious ideas and modernist craft. They often appeared internationally in journals such as Encounter and The London Magazine, and were also anthologised in the American poet and publisher James Laughlin’s famous annual anthology New Directions and Adil Jussawalla’s landmark anthology of translated literature, New Writing in India. His stories in Marathi appeared as Soledad (1975) and Atank (1999); these were translated by Sarang himself into English and collected in Fair Tree of Void (1990) and Women in Cages (2006), though he did not see them as translations but as stories that were “re-done” in and for the English language without necessarily relying on the original. Reading ‘An Evening at the Beach,’ the very first short story in Women in Cages, one knows it’s neither the familiar nor the fantastical that one has to negotiate in Sarang, but a nonchalant barter between the two. In the story, Sarang describes at length an old man trying to wash his buttocks against the incoming waves of the sea, while the story’s protagonist, Bajrang, sits looking at him with his girlfriend on the beach, an experience

Typography reportage

reportage

Thesans as the secondary typeface

ON THE LINE An island in Lakshadweep tries to save a remarkable spawning site / CONSERVATION RUCHA KARKAREY AND SHREYA YADAV

Body text set in Mercury; 9 point

SHREYA YADAV

THE CARAVAN

SEPTEMBER 2015

The Well section will use more white space

Pull quotes

Captions

Pull quotes will be made more edgy by bringing colour into typography

on the line · reportage

everybody’s brother · reportage

expressive force.” In the same essay, though, Sarang critiques and moves beyond Nemade—who exclusively adopted realism after the adventurous Kosla—to then think of bilingualism, and its practitioners, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre and himself, as the ultimate signifier of Marathi modernism. Walking the borderlands of two or more cultures, bilingualism, for Sarang, carried the project of modernism beyond the 1960s, and although he does not sufficiently explain why other writers retreat into social realism, he does make a case for bilingualism and why its followers alone continued with the modernist project. Opposed to identity politics of any kind, Sarang already felt alienated by the beginning of the 1970s, which saw the emergence of the Shiv Sena and organised Dalit politics. Even the little magazine movement of the sixties, which nurtured experimentalists and was driven by a group of motivated editors and readers, was short-lived. The writing that followed had “no trace of any desire for experimentation or innovation,” and writers of the 1970s seemed to disregard “the writing of Marathi poets and prose writers of the past two decades.” With the resurgence of the socialist Ram Manohar Lohia and the leading Dalit icon BR Ambedkar as literary influences in that decade, new thematic avenues opened up for writers who couldn’t express themselves in the Navkatha or the modernist idiom sufficiently and chose more politically stable forms of realist writing. These tendencies consolidated as grameen—rural—writing and Dalit writing, both of which consciously broke away from what they thought of as the “formalist” ethos of the previous generation. Thus it comes as no surprise that “highly innovative and original poets like Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar have had no following among the younger poets, and have been conveniently sidetracked.” Sarang, although respecting these political tendencies by imbibing some of them in his later work, could not see their literary output as anything more than throwing one’s hat into the identity politics ring. The kind of writing that dominated Marathi literature from the 1970s onwards was for him aesthetically naive and insufficiently concerned with craft, leading him to chart his own course.

sandesh bhandare / express archive photo

Sarang accepts English with unusual ease considering the kind of antagonism it was met with in regional literary circles. He wrote in an amphibian mode almost all his life.

the first full-length book that Sarang read in English, at the age of 16, was Jim Corbett’s The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag and thereafter, he confesses, “it was almost exclusively English, English, and English.” Sarang accepts English with unusual ease, considering the kind of antagonism it was met with in regional literary circles. From ‘Flies’ onwards, Sarang wrote in this amphibian mode almost all his life and in all the genres, including literary criticism. Bilingualism was, before anything else, a question of technique for him; the experiments in his stories were jointly occasioned by two literary cultures and identified with neither completely. This is why probably Sarang felt the need to burst the regional prototype by sarcastically declaring about himself and his bilingualism: “Well, there’s a ‘Marathi’ writer for you!” In an introduction to the 1990 anthology he edited, Indian English Poetry Since 1950, Sarang pointed out how pre-Independence poets failed “simply to be good poets” by not “letting the Englishness or Indianness take care of itself.” Just as he charges Marathi writers with focusing on regional and caste identities, Sarang picks issue with early Indian English writers who could not shape English into a literary language. Moreover, Sarang’s initiation into writing almost coincided with the language debates of the 1960s, SEPTEMBER 2015

In Lucknow on school vacations, Akhilesh frequently found himself in an empty house, in which the only other people he saw were the sort who were not meant to sit down with him: police constables, office staff, housekeepers and orderlies. No amount of socialist egalitarianism could bridge the gaps of an essentially oldfashioned arrangement. Singh was re-elected as the assembly representative from Jaswantnagar constituency, a seat he held seven times until 1996. (The incumbent MLA, who has held the seat for four consecutive terms, is his brother Shivpal, the second-most powerful leader in the Samajwadi Party.) The boy was brought up by his paternal grandparents, a rural farming couple with no education. They neither paid much attention to his date of birth or a formal name for him. A village elder in Saifai told me that he was known simply as “Tipu,” a nickname bestowed on him by the village pradhan. Parcelled out to relatives, Tipu’s early education was divided between a local Saifai school, and one in Etawah town. He found an older companion in Shivpal, who had just passed out of school at the time. The two spent hours in the potato fields around their home. (In August 2014, Akhilesh’s government announced that it would put some of those potatoes to use by setting up an R800-crore vodka plant in the vicinity.) When Indira Gandhi’s government declared an Emergency in 1975, Mulayam Singh was arrested and held in custody for 19 months. A friend of his sister’s family accompanied Tipu to help admit him to St Mary’s school in Etawah. The enrollment official suggested that it was not a good idea to put a nickname on the school roster, so

Dilip Chitre

the friend came up with some suggestions for an official first name, and Tipu chose “Akhilesh.” In later years, Akhilesh told journalists in Lucknow that his date of birth was registered as 1 July 1973, picked to coincide with the first day of the academic session. Until the mid-1980s, Mulayam Singh’s socialist politics did not embed itself deeply in Etawah. Here, the Congress party had long held sway among three of Uttar Pradesh’s most influential voting constituencies: Brahmins, Dalits and Muslims. Elections had long been a messy affair in the state, mired in poverty and feudal patterns of land ownership. Often, wealthy upper-caste landlords and politicians attempted to influence outcomes by using dacoits to wreak violence on the region’s lowercaste majority. But just over a decade into Mulayam Singh’s political career, two forces had upset this pattern of intimidation and control. The first was the rise of OBC assertiveness in opposition to the Congress, led by men such as Chaudhary Charan Singh, the Jat leader who briefly became prime minister in 1979, and “Netaji,” as Mulayam Singh himself came to be called. The second was the growing strength of dacoits from backward castes, fighting to assert control over land and political power. When Akhilesh was eight years old, Phoolan Devi— who was born into the Mallah sub-caste, also classified as OBC in Uttar Pradesh— SEPTEMBER 2015

achieved notoriety for the vengeance her gang of outlaws extracted for her rape, killing 22 Thakur men from Behmai village. It was 1982; the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, CP Singh of the Congress, ordered a crackdown on the region’s dacoits, and party forces and state police responded with ferocity. The following year, Mulayam Singh sent Akhilesh to Dholpur Military School in Rajasthan. In Winds of Change, her biography of Akhilesh, the journalist Sunita Aron writes that Mulayam Singh, who had been a wrestler in his early years, was convinced by a friend that the disciplined atmosphere of a military school would be good for his son. Still, it was Shivpal who went with Akhilesh to complete the admission procedures. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote his daughter enough letters from prison to fill a book. By contrast, Mulayam Singh remained a distant figure to Akhilesh; he visited him only twice in all his years at school. Aron writes that Mulayam Singh “wrote his son a letter in school which could have easily been a telegram. It said: Padhney mein mehnat karo. Kaam aayega. (Study hard. It will help you).” In Lucknow on school vacations, Akhilesh frequently found himself in an empty house, in which the only other people he saw were the sort who were not meant to sit down with him: police constables, office staff, housekeepers and orderlies. No amount of socialist egalitarianism could bridge the gaps of an essentially old-fashioned arrangement. “He was a minister’s son,” one of the orderlies who worked in this house told me. “We couldn’t call him by his name so we started to call him bhaiya”—brother. On one such vacation in 1988, according to a person close to the family, Akhilesh met Sadhana Gupta, a former civil servant who was to be acknowledged as Mulayam Singh’s wife in 2007. “It is only after Sadhana’s entry in his life, 39

above: A shoal of olive-coloured female groupers arrive at the aggregation site.

rucha karkarey

laughter in the dark · books

shadweep’s ancient traditions. It is not a popular food, nor does it have any religious significance. But in Bitra, in just a year, the grouper had emerged as a totem, a symbol that the locals had accepted as their own. But this alone is not enough. While local fishermen complied fully with the temporary restrictions this year, fishermen from other islands did not. As Haider pointed out, “How can we prevent the outsiders from doing so when there is no official government ban?” Even Bitra’s resolve, though, will increasingly be challenged by financial temptations. The tentacles of an emerging reef fish trade are rapidly spreading across Lakshadweep. By our count, at least five commercial boats were operating in the waters around Bitra this year, up from two last year. Rising demand in foreign markets means the prices of reef fish have increased, and groupers fetch some of the highest rates. In 2013, fishermen sold their catch to bigger traders for about R55 per kilogram; today, a kilogram fetches R80. “The profits from the aggregation are going to other islands,” Pu Koya, a professional tuna fisher-

man, complained. “If we are being restricted from gaining the same profits, the government will have to give us incentives.” On our visit to the aggregation site this year, we found startling damage. Fish numbers had dropped to almost half of the 3,600 we were used to seeing, and the place wasn’t bustling with the usual activity. There were no elegant female shoals swarming above the reef. There were no distinctive mating behaviours. The site looked like a warzone: broken anchor lines littered the reef, and injured fish swam around with hooks dangling from their mouths. A thriving spawning aggregation was in decline after just one year’s exposure to fishing. A week later, as we loaded up our boat to leave, a ten-tonne commercial fishing vessel sailed into the lagoon. Seven fishing boats, all from other islands, trailed in its wake, seeking a place to anchor for the next two weeks or so. As we pulled away, and Bitra shrank to a speck, our usual chatter was replaced by long silences. No one wanted to state the obvious—that we might not see the grouper aggregation when we came back next year. s

SEPTEMBER 2015

New space will be added for more dynamic captions

Guiding principles of redesign

3B uilding a seamless visual narrative Keeping in mind long-form reading requires spending a long time with the publication, visual modulation was introduced to guide the reading experienceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;easing eye movement and reading comfort, complementing the change in tone of writing from one section to another.

Design Flow > The Caravan is strategically divided into three distinct sections, namely- Front of Book (FoB), The Well, and Back of the Book (BoB). > The pieces are sequenced by format and nature • FoB: shorter, quirkier stories in The Lede and commentaries in Perspectives • The Well: long reportage pieces followed by the photo essays • BoB: Book reviews, followed by lighter content at the back

Design Flow A classic ‘Warm-to-Cold’ colour scheme used to complement this transition, moving between yellow, orange, red, blue and green from the front of the magazine to the back The Lede FoB

Perspectives FoB

the lede

perspectives

Past Expiry

Getting to know Kerala’s “suicide tree” / Nature

The tenuous legal grounds for re-promulgating ordinances / Politics

THE CARAVAN

The seeds of the othalanga tree, loaded with a highly poisonous toxin, come shielded by a hard fruit.

by the seeds is extremely rare, which is why Keralites tend not to see the othalanga tree as a source of peril. After my excursion with Dileep, I drove deeper into the backwaters as the afternoon wore on. Sobha Maniradhan was sweeping her yard when I showed up at her gate, and her two-year-old grandson was frolicking in her garden. Maniradhan had two othalanga trees in her backyard. “A child can’t bite into the seed because the fruit is very hard,” she reassured me. Rather than being an immediate threat, the species is threatened itself. In places, the trees are being crowded out by pollution and urban encroachment. Local botanists are concerned about the species’ future. “It is one of the important backwater trees we have here,” Dileep said. “Not only does it prevent soil erosion, its fruits are also part of the diet of local birds.” Thankfully, there have been no calls for its eradication. Suicide is a problem that requires a “social response,” Gaillard told me. “It is not for humanity to try and control biodiversity.” s

On the last day of 2014, the Narendra Modi-led government promulgated the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Ordinance, 2014. The ordinance, a law put into effect by the cabinet without the approval of the legislature, undid key features of the original land acquisition law, enacted in 2013. The revised rules benefited both government departments and private entities by increasing the categories of acquisition for which consent would not have to be obtained, and social impact assessments carried out. These were controversial changes. The Congress party and its allies immediately objected; so did some constituents of the ruling National Democratic Alliance. In March, the government tried to make the ordinance permanent by presenting it for consideration before the parliament, but an unlikely coalition stared it down. The proposed bill passed in the Lok Sabha, where Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has a comfortable majority. In the Rajya Sabha, however, where the BJP is in the minority, it was blocked by other parties. The Modi government dug its heels in, and insisted on keeping the ordinance alive. It was re-promulgated twice in the next three months. As of mid August, more than seven months after it was initially enforced, the land ordinance remained in effect, though its parliamentary fate was still uncertain. The Indian constitution authorises the president to promulgate ordinances at the behest of the cabinet, provided at least one house of parliament isn’t in session and a law is urgently needed. But such promulgations are meant to be temporary measures. An ordinance lapses if it isn’t ratified by both houses within six weeks of them reconvening. The Modi government sidestepped this important limitation in March, by cutting short the Rajya Sabha session so it

buddhika weerasinghe / reuters

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On a Wednesday night in early May, four teenage athletes were rushed to hospital from a Sports Authority of India training centre in the coastal city of Alappuzha, in Kerala. The young women had deliberatly swallowed the poisonous seeds of the othalanga tree, or Cerbera odollam. Police later reported finding a note signed by the four, explaining the act as a response to harassment by other athletes living at the centre. The next day, one of them died. In the media storm that followed, the othalanga tree was described in uniformly macabre tones—a “suicide tree,” a plant of “ill repute” bringing a “brutal harvest”—and with good reason. Kerala—where the annual suicide rate, at 24.6 deaths per 100,000 people, is more than double the national average—has a long and lethal acquaintance with the species. Yet, as I discovered on a visit to Alappuzha in June, the Othalanga tree is far from ostracised here. It grows freely in nearby salt marshes, and in similar locations elsewhere in south Kerala, and has rooted itself deeply in the local psyche. Many Keralites have a surprisingly easy relationship with the potentially mortal plant. C Dileep, an assistant professor of botany at the Sanatana Dharma College in Alappuzha, agreed to show me the tree in its natural habitat. From a new fast-food restaurant opposite the college campus, we drove along roads under gathering monsoon clouds, lined with fisherman waving their catch at us in hopes of a sale. We stopped just outside town, at a stretch of road cutting through a backwater. Othalanga trees shot up sporadically along its flank, displaying succulent leaves and dainty white flowers reminiscent of crape jasmine blooms. Mango-like fruits hung low and heavy, bobbing in the wind like yo-yos; I was told they are also called “sea mangoes,” and have inspired a

Malayalam phrase with their tendency to wobble before coming to rest: Othalanga pole mariyum, or “Fickle like an othalanga.” Dileep picked a fruit, and, after several blows with a rock, prised it open to reveal an ovoid seed in a fibrous white shell. This is the seat of a toxin, cerberin, that causes uncoordinated spasms of the heart and eventual cardiac arrest. The seeds are a favoured means of suicide, Dileep said, because they purportedly bring on a painless death. There is also a cultish fascination with them, including in online forums about mystery writing, as perfect murder weapons, since cerberin goes undetected in standard autopsies. No antidote has been found yet. If anyone swallows a seed, doctors can only induce vomiting to try and flush the toxin out. The othalanga seed’s poisonous traits were documented at least as early as 1914, when Rao Sahib M Rama Rao noted them in his Flowering Plants of Travancore. Rao, then the conservator of forests in the erstwhile kingdom, wrote of the othalanga fruit’s use to kill dogs, and even, curiously, to “deprive them of their teeth.” A rare paper on the seeds’ use for suicide, published in 2004, attributed 537 deaths in Kerala to them between 1989 and 1999. “To the best of our knowledge,” it stated, “no plant in the world is responsible for as many deaths by suicide as the odollam tree.” The French toxicologist Yvan Gaillard, the paper’s lead author, told me over email that othalanga seeds may well have caused “as many homicides as suicides” over the period studied. He based this view on suggestions from a coroner in Kerala, whose suspicions could never be confirmed because no lab in the state could then detect cerberin. For all the plant’s notoriety, othalanga poisoning is hardly the leading means of suicide in Kerala, and is eclipsed by hanging and ingesting pesticides. Unintentional poisoning

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Forbidden Fruit

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Reportage Well

Justice PN Bhagwati held that ordinances were a “fraud against the constitutional provision.”

could re-promulgate the land acquisition ordinance. Though this action had constitutional basis, a look at legal history shows that the validity of repromulgation rests on a subtle detail of law, which dates back to a 1986 case in the state of Bihar. In 1979, Diwan Chand Wadhwa, a Pune-based agrarian economist, stumbled upon a peculiar legal trail while researching land reforms in eastern India. He noticed that an amendment to the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act, 1908, was being repeatedly promulgated in Bihar. (By law, governors can promulgate ordinances for their state on the advice of the chief minister and cabinets.) The text of the amendment never changed; essentially, the same ordinance was being reinstated repeatedly. This, Wadhwa discovered, was part of an epidemic. Between 1967 and 1983, as many as 265 ordinances had been re-promulgated in Bihar. Of these, 60 remained in effect for a year or less; about 50 were promulgated over and over again for between five and ten years; and, astonishingly, 13 had been kept active for between ten and 15 years without ever being subjected to a vote in the state legislature. SEPTEMBER 2015

This was a scam of monstrous proportions, and public departments in Bihar had perfected a method for making it possible. After every session of the state assembly, the legislative affairs department, which manages the legislative agenda, dutifully circulated a note to officials, noting dates on which ordinances were to expire and reminding them to flag any ones they wanted extended. Immediately, wish lists would pour in. Officials of the law department, which drafts bills and ordinances, forwarded these to the governor for assent. The reasons for re-promulgating the ordinances were never mentioned, and the governor did not bother to insist on any. There was an eerie efficiency to the arrangement. But for Wadhwa’s accidental discovery, India may not have learnt of it at all. Wadhwa described all of this in a book, Re-promulgation of Ordinances: A Fraud on the Constitution of India, published in 1983. Newspapers wrote glowingly about the monograph, and more than 200 popular and specialised outlets reviewed it. Parliament, too, debated Wadhwa’s findings. Rarely has a piece of academic work commanded such public attention in India. 31

the south. You have travelled so much. You know that discrimination is everywhere,” he said. “But socialists function without discrimination.” When Akhilesh was first elected to parliament, his Samajwadi colleague in the lower house was his distant neighbour from Chambal, Phoolan Devi. He said he had no personal memory of Chambal’s caste wars. “I studied in a Christian school, and then a military school, where there were no such divisions,” he said. Outsiders were always more scared by the thought of dacoitry than those who lived with it, he said. “Those rivalries were because of land issues. You must have seen the movie, Paan Singh Tomar?”—the hit 2012 biopic of a National Games-winning runner compelled to turn dacoit when he returned home to the Chambal valley. He paused for a moment. “But now I have made a lion safari there,” he said with a smile, referring to the project he inaugurated in 2012 in a forest close to the National Chambal Sanctuary. “Instead of dacoits, lions will roam around there. It is a big project, in 3,000 acres. Times have changed.” I approached the question of the Muzaffarnagar violence from a different tack. Was it now true, I asked, that the party practised strategic, opportunistic secularism, evident even in its approach to rival parties? The Samajwadis had made no major objections to thinly-veiled electoral speeches about “honour” and “defence” that the BJP leader Amit Shah had made during the 2014 campaign. Yet it blocked Asaduddin Owaisi, leader of the fast-growing All India Majlis-e-Ittihadul Muslimeen, from visiting violence-affected areas in western Uttar Pradesh. Perhaps the party feared that its Muslim supporters would shift allegiance to the MIM, I suggested. “The local administration took a call on the issues of law and order regarding his visit,” Akhilesh said. “We don’t play any role in it.” 52

A person who left the Samajwadi Party shortly after the Muzaffarnagar violence told me that the Yadav-Muslim alliance had begun to witness fissures. “Mulayam was known as Mullah Mulayam,” he said. “Akhilesh will be known as Yadav bhaiya.” According to him, the state’s mixed population posed a problem to the BJP, which had played a deeply divisive political game to make inroads here. “That is why BJP makes all incidents of disagreements into a communal issue,” he said. This answer did not take into account the fact that riots and communal violence almost always occur because of failures or abdications of responsibility from state machinery. “The Muzaffarnagar conversation is over,” he said. “The state has helped in whatever way it could.” “it is not that the cm office did not know that large-scale violence was brewing in West UP,” one of the chief minister’s aides told me when we met in April this year. “It was the indecision.” One reason for this may have been the dissatisfaction the government had incurred for a law and order decision it had taken just weeks prior to the mahapanchayat. In late August, 1,698 activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad were arrested from across the state for flouting a state government ban on their activities. Those arrested included high-level VHP leaders, such as Ashok Singhal, Mahant Nritya Gopal Das and Praveen Togadia, who had managed to reach Ayodhya in spite of the ban. The incident had been messy for the government. “The CM office did not want a similar situation by banning the mahapanchayat,” said a bureaucrat attached to the office. Figures of the toll of the Muzaffarnagar violence vary widely. Official THE CARAVAN

documents state that the outcome was 60 deaths, seven alleged rapes and 40,000 displaced people. In a public interest litigation filed by a victim of the violence, Mohammed Haroon and others in the Supreme Court, the number of deaths is pegged at over 200. The figures may well vary; bodies of those killed in the violence were being found months after it was all over. According to a union home ministry report released at the end of September 2013, 247 communal riots had taken place in Uttar Pradesh already that year, compared to 118 in all of 2012. The BJP’s election plank consisted, in part, of sympathy for the Jat community, whose members stood accused of rioting and were up for legal action. It was a strategy that brought the party unprecedented success; it won 71 of the state’s 80 seats, a huge leap over its previous tally of 10. The Samajwadi Party won only five seats, and the BSP none at all. For the first time in the history of independent India, Uttar Pradesh did not send a single Muslim MP to the lower house. A person who left the Samajwadi Party shortly after the Muzaffarnagar violence told me that the Yadav-Muslim alliance had begun to witness fissures. “Mulayam was known as Mullah Mulayam,” he said. “Akhilesh will be known as Yadav bhaiya.” But in spite of widespread discontent over the increasing religious violence, Uttar Pradesh’s influential Muslim leaders may still see the party of Mulayam Singh as their best bet.

Laughter in the Dark Vilas Sarang’s bilingual modernism MANTRA MUKIM

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Intelligent Design

/ swati sanyal tarafdar One morning this March, in Hyderabad, Anand Sai was preparing for his day when his phone rang. It was Kishan Rao, a retired IAS officer who is now the CEO of the Yadagirigutta Temple Development Authority, or YTDA. “Get ready,” Sai was told. “The CM wants to meet you at his office, first thing today.” “This is my day,” the art director, who has worked on over 30 Telegu films, recalled thinking. Before rushing out, he grabbed his concept sketches for a redeveloped temple complex at Yadagirigutta, a cave shrine 60 kilometres north-east of the city, in the young state of Telangana. “I couldn’t go emptyhanded,” Sai told me. “My drawings do the talking for me.” He arrived at the state secretariat, and was shown into the office of the Telangana chief minister, K Chandrashekar Rao—popularly known as KCR. The chief minister, who presides over the YTDA, was particularly taken with one of the three directions Sai presented. Over the next few weeks, Sai worked frantically to produce detailed drawings of the design, and present them to KCR again. He also helped put together a tender application, and completed the paperwork to be appointed the designer for the Yadagirigutta project. For Sai, this was the culmination of many years’ effort to transform himself into a temple designer. I visited the place, situated on a 300foot hill, in July, and headed up to the main shrine. Yadagirigutta was revered even before Telangana’s separation from Andhra Pradesh, but locals had long accused the Andhra government 8

the neighboring eight hillocks will be developed to form a 2,000-acre temple city.” Those displaced by the project are being compensated, and business owners have been promised the right to return. Reddy claimed there has been no dissent. Soon after my trip, I called Sai up over the phone. “From a very young age, I was intrigued by temple architecture,” the 43-year-old told me. He earned a degree in commerce while at university, but his great talent was always drawing. So when the Telugu film star Pawan Kalyan, a personal friend, invited him to sketch set designs for one of his films, the 1998 hit Tholi Prema, Sai jumped at the chance. Sai got more such work, and became a reputed art director. Meanwhile, his fascination with temples continued. In 2003, Sai worked on a film starring the Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi, who later served as India’s minister of tourism. The actor invited Sai to design the decorations for his daughter’s wedding. Sai accepted, and as other wedding projects came his way, he said, “it was only natural that … I experimented with the various forms of temple architecture and design.” In 2005, the Vaishnavite guru Chinna Jeeyar attended a wedding at a venue Sai had decorated in temple style. Impressed, he invited Sai to rework a design for a 108-foot statue of the ancient Hindu theologian Ramanuja, currently under construction near Hyderabad. The task, Sai said, was to add a sense of spirituality to the original vision. He “felt alive and blessed” doing this work, and so dedicated himself to reli-

B ANAND SAI

An acclaimed art director re-imagines a revered shrine / Architecture

above: Anand Sai’s design for the core of the Yadagirigutta complex adheres to the conventions of Vaishnavite temple style.

gious and temple design entirely. For two years, he studied temple architecture at a government arts college in Mahabalipuram, in Tamil Nadu. “People criticised me because I had stopped working for films at this juncture, my earnings had stopped,” he said. “My family was worried, but firmly beside me.” From there, Sai travelled across the country to visit and study about 50 temples of the Vaishnava sect. At a function in December 2014, Sai ran into Kishan Rao, recently appointed the top executive of the Telangana State Tourism Development Corporation. The two knew each other from Rao’s previous post as the tourism director for Andhra Pradesh, and got talking. Rao told Sai about the planned overhaul at Yadagirigutta. “I had never been to Yadagirigutta before,” Sai said, but “Mr SEPTEMBER 2015

Rao had explained to me what was needed and the idea behind the project,” and ideas started flowing. Though there was no official approach for his services, he found himself drawn to the site. “During those days, I would either be at home or at the temple. I made over 150 sketches.” Sai started speaking to priests and visitors, and looking closely not just at the shrine, but also at “the surroundings, the associated facilities, the comfort of the staff who work there and also of the pilgrims.” When the call came in March, he was ready. Now, he seems poised to repeat with temples his success in cinema. “At the core of temple designing is the establishment of the connect—the connect between a devotee and the god,” he said. He sees his role as nurturing that link. Almost shyly, he added, “it takes time, and feel.” s 9

PERSPECTIVES

perspectives

In Sickness and in Health

/ vaasanthi For some months now, supporters of Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, J Jayalalithaa, had been trying to conceal their anxiety. Something was going unimaginably wrong. Through the duration of Jayalalithaa’s long-running trial on charges of holding disproportionate assets, they had enthusiastically protested her innocence, going on fasts and circumambulating the sanctums of every Hindu god they could think of. This May, it seemed their faith had been rewarded. Jayalalithaa—Amma, to them—was absolved, and returned to head the state government. But a suspicion started growing among them. Is it true, her supporters asked each other, that Amma is ill? Jayalalithaa, the supremo of the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, spent 21 days in a Bengaluru jail last September and October after a special court found her guilty of corruption, before being released on bail. She came straight back to Chennai, and cloistered herself in her Poes Garden residence. She did not emerge for 217 days. When the Karnataka High Court acquitted her on 11 May, her supporters rushed to her gates. But Amma did not come to her balcony to wave and flash the victory symbol, as was her habit. In hushed whispers, AIADMK leaders told each other she refused to meet even the party’s top brass. Not even O Panneerselvam, her stand-in chief minister, was granted an audience. On 23 May, Jayalalithaa finally stepped out to attend her swearing-in ceremony, but that appearance only 22

Amma did not come to her balcony to wave and flash the victory symbol, as was her habit.

vipin kumar / hindustan times / getty images

Tamil Nadu waits on its ailing chief minister / Politics

of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, which has been laid low by massive electoral defeats at the state and national levels, reduced to third position in the assembly, and coming a distant second in Tamil Nadu in the Lok Sabha elections. But the opposition parties’ hopes of painting Jayalalithaa as bedridden and collapsing were dented by her appearances with Modi, and later at Independence Day celebrations. Earlier, her arch-rival, Muthuvel Karunanidhi of the DMK, had claimed she was unfit to lead, and publicly advised her to leave office. “The chief minister is not discharging her duties because she is not in good health,” he said at a public meeting in July. “That is why the state is being run like one without a CM.” He asked the “ailing” Jayalalithaa to divulge her medical condition, and to “take rest.” These were provocations rather than expressions

of concern, and also attempts to cast a shadow over the future of the AIADMK as a whole. Karunanidhi’s barbs seem to suggest history repeating itself. Over 30 years ago, the AIADMK founder and former chief minister MG Ramachandran, or MGR, Karunanidhi’s bitter rival, suffered kidney failure and a stroke, and had to be taken to the United States for medical treatment. Karunanidhi used the same rhetorical weapons against him then. But so popular was MGR that he won the 1984 assembly elections from his hospital bed in Brooklyn. If an election were held today, Jayalalithaa and her party— which captured 44 percent of the vote in the state in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections—may yet win hands down. She may not be able to campaign like she did in 2011, but that in itself may garner sympathy votes. SEPTEMBER 2015

above: The speculation about Jayalalithaa’s health came as her party looked to be in an unassailable position going into assembly elections next year.

EVERYBODY’S BROTHER reportage

reportage

Akhilesh Yadav in the family business COVER STORY / POLITICS

two years ago, on the morning of 6 September, Anita Singh, principal secretary to the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, was informed that thousands of people from the neighbouring states of Haryana and Delhi were gathering at Kawal village in Muzaffarnagar district. A “Jat Mahapanchayat,” a large-scale political meeting of the region’s Hindu Jats, was scheduled to take place the following day, curdling an atmosphere already soured by threats and suspicion. Some days earlier, two young Jat men and a Muslim youth had allegedly been murdered in an altercation; rumours had circulated of the latter harassing a young Hindu woman. A number of Jat-affiliated outfits had responded by organising the mahapanchayat, with the involvement and encouragement of the local cadre of the Bharatiya Janata Party. All this had divided local Hindus and Muslims, and the regional authorities were on edge, anticipating violence. Orders prohibiting assembly under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code were in force. The men occupying the posts of senior superintendent of police, and district magistrate, had been transferred out twice in the last fortnight. Thousands of police and paramilitary personnel were mobilised in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts to maintain the state’s control over a potentially inflammatory situation. An additional director-general of police, Arun Kumar, had come west from Lucknow to keep an eye on the proceedings. Yet instructions to actually stop the mahapanchayat never arrived from the secretariat. On this day, Uttar Pradesh’s youngest-ever chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, was in Delhi to inaugurate the new headquarters of the information technology body NASSCOM. The offices had been set up in Noida, the part of the National Capital Region that falls under his governance, but he was presiding over the ceremony from the Taj Mansingh hotel in central Delhi. Since assuming office in 2012, Yadav had inaugurated several major Noida projects remotely, usually from Lucknow. Many speculated that this was because of persistent stories about the “Noida jinx”—a political superstition that no chief minister of Uttar Pradesh 34

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courtesy samajwadi party

NEHA DIXIT

above: Akhilesh Yadav, a twoterm member of parliament, became one of the faces of the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh in 2008, when he led a student campaign against the Mayawati government.

who visited Noida got to keep his or her seat in the following election. It had created some bad press for Yadav. Journalists covering the inauguration wanted to know whether Yadav, a tech-savvy environment engineer who went about distributing laptops to his state’s students, was falling prey to baseless belief. A reporter asked him why a young and modern chief minister was scared of Noida. Yadav, smiling, delivered a riposte in Hindi: “Because you guys live there.” The Noida jinx preoccupies the “pancham tal,” or fifth floor, of the Uttar Pradesh secretariat in Lucknow, where the chief minister’s offices are located. For at least 20 years now, every man in the post has considered a visit to Noida as a bad omen for their career: anyone who visited, it was said, would not get another term in office. This had happened to Narayan

Dutt Tiwari, Veer Bahadur Singh, and Rajnath Singh. Mulayam Singh Yadav, Akhilesh’s father, went to Noida during one of his terms, failed to be re-elected, and did not repeat the trip when he regained power. Akhilesh’s predecessor, Mayawati, tried to break the jinx in the last few months of her tenure, but was taken to have failed when she lost the assembly elections in 2012. In his keynote address at the NASSCOM inauguration, Yadav talked of Uttar Pradesh’s progress in the information technology sector, and his Samajwadi Party government’s scheme for distributing laptops to citizens. They were now planning to set up a cyber-security lab at the NASSCOM headquarters. “We have spruced up the police control rooms to check the law and order situation in the state,” Yadav said.

SEPTEMBER 2015

FLIGHT OF FANCY The footprint of an American air base in Italy PHOTO ESSAY / MILITARY AFFAIRS PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALBERTO MASERIN

alberto maserin grew up in the town of Maniago, in north-east Italy, 15 kilometres from the Aviano Air Base. As a teenager, in the early 1990s, he heard stories about the place. It had magnificent air shows, and stores that stocked American goods such as peanut butter. Some of the American servicemen stationed there lived with their families just around the block, and when reassigned elsewhere they would sell off clothes and trinkets on their front lawns. The locals clamoured for this American paraphernalia. But, Maserin said, things have changed. “Nowadays … there are no more air shows, yard sales are forbidden and people who work inside the base are restricted on what they can buy” from outsiders. The Aviano Air Base was established by the Italian military in 1911. In 1955, it became home to an American squadron, and a key Western outpost in the Cold War. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, it played a role as a NATO base in conflicts in the Balkans, in Iraq, and, most recently, in Libya. Today, Aviano hosts two combat-ready fighter-jet squadrons of the United States Air Force, and also, it is thought, a sizeable number of nuclear bombs. With security tightened in recent times, the base has become increasingly isolated from its surrounding community. American personnel are stationed here for shorter periods of time,

and more on-base housing has all but ended the practice of renting local homes. Now, instead of recounting air shows— the last public one was in 1996—the base’s neighbours wonder how many secret bunkers the facility hides. An air of myth and mystery prevails. In 2013, Maserin, back home from studying photography in Dublin, rekindled his interest in the area, and set about researching and documenting the intersecting history of the base and its environs. He dug up files listing the old addresses of American military staff and families, and visited the villages where they lived, recording locals’ stories and photographing whatever caught his attention. One person led to the next, one home to another. Sometimes the work took him to nearby hills and back roads, where he found artefacts from the base and got glimpses of its periphery. Maserin, working with a medium-format camera, made many of his photographs in cloudy weather, to achieve “a sense of flatness, mystery, secrecy,” he said, in keeping with his task of exploring “the unknown of the area.” He shied away from capturing military symbols, since the work was not about the “physicality of a specific military structure but … the experience of a place, hidden from your understanding and sight. Where people are just left with small truths and try to put the whole picture together with a glue of maybes.”

BOOKS

Laughter in the Dark

Bajrang thinks fit for Reader’s Digest—the scene soon shifts to the funeral of Bajrang’s friend’s mother, which is taking place metres away from where he sits. The story moves seamlessly from the banal, but scrupulously recorded, events on the beach to the solemn funeral rituals of Hindus. Bajrang, amusingly enough, does not register this shift; standing in front of the pyre he thinks how “the warmth of the fire made him feel better,” and speculates that the mourners around him “might have killed this woman so that they could warm

themselves on a cold day.” The story does not leave us with new ways to think about funerals or social behavior, but just a twitchy feeling of not being able to mourn as readers a death that the protagonist himself leaves unattended. If to mourn is to let someone pass, to begin to forget, Sarang’s story through its comic discomfort does not let the event elapse easily but makes it linger like an unfinished sentence. Figures in Sarang’s stories often mishear even while being fully immersed in the event. The reader, on the other hand, is allowed to discern both the oddity and the actual music. The characters start by misinterpreting conventional codes of conduct and regular emotions, and then lapse into a private language. Stories such as ‘On the Stone Steps’ stop here, without reconciling the protagonist, and his sense of himself, with the world outside. But some stories do bridge the gap, such as ‘Om Phallus,’ in which Om wakes up to find himself turned into a giant phallus. He immediately shuns society, retreating into his own thoughts, until he finds a way to translate his own condition into a religious language. Taking the place of a shiva linga in a temple, Om’s metamorphosis forecloses all human encounters for him but also makes him an object of worship in a hierarchical world of idolatry. Sarang’s story uses this duality to pull off a private joke, one between him and the readers, at the expense of a belief system that accepts and cherishes Om’s condition in temples but one that the believers themselves would otherwise see as a public joke. This duality is reiterated in other stories from the same volume, such as ‘A Revolt of the Gods,’ where Ganesha idols come to life in order to escape immersion in water. Sarang’s narrative strength lies in how he turns the everyday on its head by introducing figures who can look at it from a moral and emotional distance. This does not make such a figure a critical insider who can evaluate his or her own surroundings—because Sarang is equally suspicious of endowing the individual with such a rational power—but someone who constantly plays out the tensions between private and public languages. This kind of tension is central to Sarang’s modernist practice, and something that distinguishes him from those

SEPTEMBER 2015

Vilas Sarang’s bilingual modernism

THE CARAVAN

express archive photo

MANTRA MUKIM

Vilas Sarang

Bookshelf The bookshelf will be made more engaging through larger book covers and titles THE BOOKSHELF

THE BOOKSHELF

IN MANCHURIA A VILLAGE CALLED WASTELAND AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF RURAL CHINA

INDIAN FOREIGN POLICY Sumit Ganguly

THE HISTORY OF MODERN FRANCE FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE PRESENT DAY

UNBOUND 2,000 YEARS OF INDIAN WOMEN’S WRITING Edited by Annie Zaidi

Jonathan Fenby

Michael Meyer

Combining memoir, reporting and research, Meyer presents a unique profile of China’s north-east. For three years, Meyer lived in the rice-farming community of Wasteland, his wife’s hometown. His personal saga mirrors some of the tremendous changes underway in much of rural China. In Wasteland, a private rice company has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed high-rise apartments—which farmers can move into in exchange for their land rights.

Ganguly provides a clear and succinct introduction to the evolution of Indian foreign policy over the six decades since 1947. The book covers the ideational period, starting immediately after Independence and ending with the Sino-Indian border war of 1962; the period between 1962 and the end of the Cold War, and India’s adjustments following the triumph of the US-led bloc; as well as current trends and debates, unresolved tensions and possible future directions.

France lived through two tumultuous centuries following the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo, in June 1815. Fenby conducts an expert and riveting journey through this period, covering the end of the First Revolution and then two others, the return of Empire, three catastrophic wars with Germany and, more recently, France’s struggle to become the leader of the European Union. Along the way, he reflects on social changes and cultural landmarks, and on fundamental questions of what this nation, which considers itself exceptional, really stood—and stands—for.

bloomsbury, 384 pages, S499

oxford india short introductions, 220 pages, S295

simon and schuster, 544 pages, S899

REST IN PEACE RAVAN AND EDDIE

THE DEVIL TAKE LOVE

Kiran Nagarkar

Sudhir Kakar

Unbound brings together some of the most significant writing by women in various Indian languages over the past two millennia. Divided into 11 sections, it encompasses writing on spirituality, love, marriage, children, food, work, social and individual identity, battles, myths, fables, travel and death. Many of the pieces comment on women’s struggles to overcome obstacles both social and political, and all of them showcase their authors’ remarkable creative abilities.

aleph book company, 372 pages, 499

THE TEA-GARDEN JOURNAL

JUNGLE FOLK INDIAN NATURAL HISTORY SKETCHES

Somnath Hore

Douglas Dewar

Ravan and Eddie first appeared, as children, in Nagarkar’s landmark, eponymous 1995 novel. The author then chronicled their adventures as adults in The Extras, published in 2012. Now, in the third and final novel in the series, the duo make it to the top as music directors in Bollywood, but without ever losing sight of their big dream. Ravan and Eddie are determined to become superstars, even if they have to produce a film themselves. harpercollins india, 376 pages, S450 92

In this fictionalised account of the life of the seventhcentury Sanskrit poet Bhartrihari, the protagonist, as a young man, travels from the provincial town of Jalandhar to the magnificent city of Ujjayini. His brilliance is recognised, and the young king of Avanti becomes his chief patron. Bhartrihari’s fame grows at fabulous speed, but his own journey is not as smooth: he fluctuates between sexual passion and erotic disenchantment, as the appeal of the senses wars with the call of the spirit.

In this book of sketches, first published in 1912, the legendary naturalist Douglas Dewar pays homage to India’s “jungle folk,” especially birds, whom he calls the “lesser fry.” Dewar explores their anatomy, physiology, behaviour, lifestyles and habitats. Intended for amateur naturalists as well as serious ornithologists, this is an eye-opening, intriguing and original account of avian life in India.

penguin books india, 256 pages, S499

aleph book company, 224 pages, S295

THE CARAVAN

In the 1930s, the Communist Party of India organised a union movement in the tea gardens of Bengal. Despite powerful opposing forces, the workers successfully wrenched concessions from the tea companies. The Communist Party sent a young artist and activist named Somnath Hore—later one of India’s foremost painters and sculptors—to document this struggle. This book presents his observations, recorded in text and illustrated with more than a hundred pen drawings. seagull books, 108 pages, S1,125

SEPTEMBER 2015

Showcase The showcase will focus on more in-depth event descriptions, using slugs for a more visual and engaging experience showcase

showcase

Music

Theatre

Photography

Hashback Hashish

Marx My Word

24 JULY, 9.00 PM DEF COL SOCIAL, DELHI

6 AUGUST, 7.30 PM SHRI RAM CENTRE, DELHI

The Delhi-based electronic musician Ashish Sachan, who goes by “Hashback Hashish” when playing solo, has had a busy year so far. In March, he performed at the South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, before stopping by New York City for a few gigs. Just afterwards, he released his new record, Brevity. In Delhi, he started a new record label, called Circuit, to foster Indian techno. I attended his free set at the Delhi club Def Col Social, where he combined sophisticated, minimal beats with brooding ambient sounds. Hashback Hashish’s tunes present textured layers of sound drawn from various genres and styles, and are as enjoyable on headphones as when dancing to them at a club. Well, maybe dancing to them is a little more fun.

In the play, a curious, hoary Oxford don returns to India in search of answers to old questions. In Delhi, he meets two former students: a one-time centrist turned capitalist, and a wispy feminist turned social activist. Together, the three revisit a midsummer evening several decades ago in Oxford, “where questions were answered and answers were questioned,” and where a discussion of Jawaharlal Nehru’s legacy meandered into the politics of his grandson, Rajiv Gandhi. As the students debate whether Gandhi will become a symbol of hope or of dynastic elitism, they run up against the limits of their own selves, their personal politics and ideologies. Marx My Word marked the actor Tom Alter’s return to direction after a four-year break, with an elegant if somewhat predictably satirical production.

Ways of Seeing 24 JULY TO 11 AUGUST INDIAN INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN SETTLEMENTS, BENGALURU

~ by nikhil pandhi

~ by ajay mehta

Literature

Kuvempu: Man and Mission

The photographs in “Ways of Seeing” drew attention to factors that affect how we look at, judge and ascribe meaning to cities. Highlights included Zohrab Reys Gamat’s images of Bengaluru taken between 5 and 8 pm, hours associated with the heavy road traffic that is a distinguishing feature of the city; Kunal Despande’s collection “Reality Exists Only in the Human Mind, Nowhere Else,” focused on buildings and public spaces in numerous municipalities; Vikram M S’s collection “Solitude,” of images of spaces and people composed to evoke loneliness; and Yashodara Udupa’s collection “Juxtaposing the Innocence of Childhood and Old Age,” with photographs that associate urban spaces with children and the elderly. ~ by manisha ar

12 AUGUST, 6.30 PM INDIA INTERNATIONAL CENTRE, DELHI

This latest installment of the India International Centre’s “Celebrating Legendary Poets” series centred on the life and work of Kuvempu, considered the greatest Kannada poet of the past century. The eminent Kannada scholar Hampa Nagarajaiah, once a student of Kuvempu, opened the discussion with an affectionate meditation on the poet’s talents, personality and legacy. A short documentary, Remembering Rasarushi, was screened to introduce the audience to the dense Karnataka forests where the poet grew up. “When he entered,” Nagarajaiah noted of Kuvempu, “the desert of Kannada literature turned into a garden.” ~ by ajay mehta

THE CARAVAN

SEPTEMBER 2015

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