The Caravan March 2023

The Caravan is India’s first narrative journalism magazine. Stories are reported in a style that uses elements usually reserved for fiction—plot, characters, scenes and setting—to bring the subject to life. Like The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Granta, the context of a Caravan story is something more substantial. In India, this niche—one for the intellectually curious, the aesthetically inclined and the upwardly mobile, has remained vacant. That is, until The Caravan.

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In This Issue

CONTRIBUTORS

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 his PhD from the Centre…

1 min

THE LEDE

Drowned Out

“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 city…

6 min

PERSPECTIVES

Chapter and Verse

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…

13 min

PERSPECTIVES

Partial Justice

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 placard…

18 min

PERSPECTIVES

Temple Tantrum

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 Modi;…

9 min