The Caravan September 2022

THE LEDE 8 Lajja Mistry is an education reporter at the Pittsburgh-based news website PublicSource. 10 Tanisha Saxena is a Delhi-based journalist who covers arts, queer culture, travel and lifestyle. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Hindustan Times, Outlook, Deccan Herald, The Hindu and the New Indian Express. PERSPECTIVES 12 Amarjit Chandan is a writer and activist who has lived in London since 1980. He co-edits Baramah, an annual Punjabi magazine in the Farsi script, published in Lahore. 17 Sagar is a staff writer at The Caravan. 20 Shivam Mogha is a research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for the Study of Social Systems. He is a co-editor of Trolley Times, a newspaper that emerged from and documented the movement against the Modi government’s farm laws. 25 Prabhjit Singh is a contributing writer…

How often do you sit and think about the objects that surround us in our homes? How often do you think about the memories attached to them? What role does an object’s material memory play in sparking conversations? These questions are the driving force behind the Museum of Material Memory, a digital repository that traces family history through personal antiquities and social ethnography. Founded in 2017 as a passion project by Aanchal Malhotra and Navdha Malhotra, the museum is a digital crowd-sourced platform for contributors to submit stories related to objects—from the 1970s or earlier—that they find in their homes. The stories narrate the history of the object and, with it, reveal the customs of its time. The objects seem outwardly ordinary, ranging from old photographs and jewellery to utensils and…

India has rich traditions of art that stretch back ten thousand years to the prehistoric cave paintings at Bhimbetka. What came as a shock to Nathaniel Gaskell, the director of the Museum of Art and Photography Academy—the research wing of the MAP, Bengaluru—was the dearth of authoritative information on Indian art. “I also realised that the information that is available has been long narrated through the Western lens, and the language is full of jargon that not everyone can understand,” Gaskell told me. On 22 April 2022, in an attempt to do something about this relative paucity of literature, Gaskell launched an encyclopaedia of Indian art, a digital platform that endeavours to transform the way South Asia’s art histories are accessed, taught and discussed—both regionally and globally. With over two thousand…

The renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote a short poem in Punjabi about the Partition of 1947: Kise beejiya ae, tusan waddhna aeKise keetiyan ne, tusan wartana aeAap wele sir puchhna gichhna siHun kise theen ki hisab manggo Someone sowed, and you shall reap.Someone did, and you deal with it.You did not probe, and questioneither when it was time. From whom will you seek explanations now? Faiz was right. What the earlier generations did, the later generations have to suffer and endure. The partition of India, and, therefore, the partition of Punjab, was carried out by outsiders, without asking the Punjabi people. But history—the public record or reality—keeps seeking answers from the dead and the living. It is a creature that never shuts up. It sees everything and rubs salt into wounds. It is as…

I have a flickering memory of wading through the Phalgu River in Bihar’s Gaya district, a few hours’ journey from my home, when I was ten or twelve. The current was strong and I could barely keep my head above the water. My father, ahead of me, held me by one hand, and my cousin Gautam held me by the other. Around us were dozens of kanwariyas, including my father’s friends, each ferrying water from a tributary of the Ganga in small pots tied to a wooden pole. We were on our way to a temple on Barabar Hill, north of Gaya, to offer the water to the god Shiva. After emerging from the river, we walked on along the bank. The hill—a mountain to my young eyes—looked like a giant…

There was an air of jubilation among the five hundred or so farmers who attended a Sankalp Sabha in Rohtak, a town in Haryana, on 27 December 2021. A month earlier, in Delhi, seventy kilometres to the south, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the withdrawal of the three farm laws that had sparked a gruelling yearlong protest movement. The rally was one of many held in solidarity to mark the movement’s victory. It had been organised by the Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh Sahyog Manch, a civil-society group from Rohtak, as well as local professors, university students and factory workers. These were all communities that had regularly joined and aided the massive sit-in at Delhi’s Tikri border. Along with the singing of Haryanvi ragnis — folk songs of protest—remembrances were held…