The Caravan February 2023

“I literally left everything,” a journalist, who did not wish to be named, told me. Entering an intercaste relationship, she said, was “really hard—to leave your family, to deal with the police.” But the couple stood their ground and married. Soon, however, a pattern of verbal and physical abuse crept into their relationship. Their marriage, once an act of love and rebellion, had now become a site of regular violence. “I used to wake up at night and start crying,” the journalist said. “I kept thinking there’s no one who’s my friend or my community.” They eventually separated. Abuse within marriages in India is severely underreported. This abuse only intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic—a 2021 survey report by United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women stated that…

On a cold autumn day in 1902, Parisians flocked to the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation—Garden of Acclimatisation—in large numbers to witness a spectacular installation of a gopuram, an entrance gateway to a Hindu temple typical of south Indian temple architecture. The installation was part of an ethnographic exhibition by the Hagenbeck brothers, titled Les Malabares—The Malabaris. It was one among various colonial exhibitions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that displayed non-European people and cultures from different parts of the world to entertain their European audience at home. Established by a fishmonger, who bought and sold exotic fish in Hamburg in the mid-nineteenth century, the Hagenbeck company had, by the 1870s, grown to become the largest trader in exotic animals. Carl Hagenbeck inherited the company from his father and expanded the business,…

Slightly taller than Mount Olympus, the mythical home of the Greek pantheon, the 3,002-metre Sapitwa Peak, Malawi’s highest point, is regarded by locals as a sacred place where the spirits of their ancestors reside. For centuries, it was believed to be unreachable—its name translates to “a place where people do not go.” Although it was first climbed in 1894, many tourists attempting to scale the peak have died over the years, leading to the dominant narrative among locals that the spirits of the ancestors claim some lives when they are angry. Nevertheless, the peak remains a popular destination for mountaineers, while the Mulanje Massif, an inselberg of which Sapitwa is part, attracts thousands of tourists every year. “I hear a lot about Mulanje mountain,” a German tourist I met while visiting…

The much-hyped claim that India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, invited the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to take part in the Republic Day parade of 1963 is nothing but an outright attempt to insert a lie in Indian history. Archival records refute this assertion. Instead, they suggest a completely different scenario: some members of the RSS, in their full uniform, entered that year’s Republic Day event, which was more of a citizens’ march than a military parade due to the national emergency caused by the Sino-Indian War of 1962. This claim has routinely cropped up in the last few years and generated intense speculation. “Recognising the role that the RSS played in national emergencies, Pandit Nehru invited them for Republic Day parade in 1963,” Ratan Sharda, a member of the RSS media…

In December 2015, Oommen Chandy, then chief minister of Kerala and a member of the Congress party, laid the foundation stone for the R7,525 crore Vizhinjam International Port project, a deepwater multipurpose seaport in Thiruvananthapuram district. It is being built under a public-private partnership model with Adani Ports. The agreement allows the Adani Group to operate the port for 40 years, with a provision to extend it for another 20 years, after which it is to be handed over to the Kerala government. Construction of the port began in 2015. The main argument of the proponents of the project is that by making Vizhinjam a hub for cargo operations in the Indian subcontinent, a major part of transhipment traffic can be attracted there, allowing it to compete with ports in Colombo,…

THE VAZIRABAD CHAURASTA in Nanded, a town in central Maharashtra, echoed with the sounds of trumpets, drums, cymbals and patriotic songs in the afternoon of 10 November. Around a hundred local workers of the Indian National Congress had gathered to welcome their former party president Rahul Gandhi, who was expected to arrive before sunset and address a rally. Dozens of youngsters carrying national flags stood in one corner, while Brahmin priests chanted shlokas in unison at the centre of the crossroads. It was the sixty-fourth day of Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra—which translates to “the journey to unite India”—a march of nearly thirty-five hundred kilometres from Kanyakumari to Srinagar. “All of you would have seen that the people of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party are spreading hatred and…