Founder: Vishva Nath (1917-2002) VOLUME 10 • ISSUE 3

Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Printer: Paresh Nath MARCH 2018

cover story / business

32

Coalgate 2.0
The Adani Group benefits as the coal scam
continues under the Modi government
nileena ms

In 2014, as the Coalgate scandal rocked the country, the

Supreme Court ordered an end to almost all existing
partnerships to exploit captive coal blocks. This included joint
ventures and mining agreements between state-owned and
private companies, which often favoured private interests.
But at Parsa East and Kanta Basan, a block reallocated in
2015 to a corporation of the Rajasthan government, pre-2014
agreements with a company of the Adani Group have continued,
promising undue gains of R6,000 crore at the very least. This is
clear in public documents, yet there has been no action by the
government of Narendra Modi, who has made no secret of his
closeness with the chairman of the Adani Group, Gautam Adani.

perspectives

32

16

politics
16 Squandered Chances
The ruling parties’ defeat in local polls
has dealt a blow to Sri Lanka’s hard-won
democratising process
tisaranee gunasekara

media
22 Cropped Out
The Indian media’s unsettling coverage
of the 2017 farmer protests
50 anushka shah and zeenab aneez

history
architecture 24 Remembrance of Things Past
50 Storeyed Past Three London exhibitions grapple with ways
The movement to rebuild an iconic monument in earthquake-hit Nepal to confront the legacy of the British Empire
atul bhattarai sidin vadukut

MARCH 2018 3
 the lede

62
10

communities
10 Boundaries of Belief
A Durga Puja celebration across the photo essay / communities
India-Bangladesh border 62 Taking the Bait
omkar khandekar Boom and bust at Lake Victoria
alec jacobson
labour
12 Re-rooting
A village in Korea attempts to keep up
with heavy migration
steven borowiec

books
94
literature
76 Globalisation’s
Fabulist
Joseph Conrad and the world
sunil khilnani

history
84 The Failed Empire
France’s troubled obsession
with India
blake smith
the bookshelf 92 76
showcase 94
editor’s pick 98 NOTE TO READERS: THE “SPONSORED FEATURE” ON PAGES 30–31 IS PAID ADVERTISING CONTENT.

4 THE CARAVAN
 editor Anant Nath
executive editor Vinod K Jose
political editor Hartosh Singh Bal
associate editor Roman Gautam
books editor
Kushanava Choudhury
contributors senior assistant editors
Martand Kaushik and Puja Sen
copy editors Aria Thaker
THE LEDE 10 Omkar Khandekar is a journalist from Mumbai and an alumnus of Cardiff University. His
and Maya Palit
reporting from India, the Maldives and the United Kingdom has appeared in numerous assistant editors (web)
publications, including The Caravan, Open and Scroll.in. Surabhi Kanga and Arshu John
12 Steven Borowiec is a journalist based in Seoul. He has written for The Guardian, Time, the contributing editors
Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera and other publications. He is the politics editor for the Korea Deborah Baker, Fatima Bhutto,
Exposé. Chandrahas Choudhury,
Siddhartha Deb, Sadanand Dhume,
PERSPECTIVES 16 Tisaranee Gunasekara is a Sri Lankan political commentator based in Colombo. Siddharth Dube, Christophe
22 Anushka Shah is a researcher at the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Jaffrelot, Mira Kamdar, Miranda
Technology. Kennedy, Amitava Kumar, Basharat
Zeenab Aneez is a freelance journalist and researcher based in the San Francisco Bay Peer, Samanth Subramanian and
Area. Her research focusses on digital publishing practices, internet audiences, new media Salil Tripathi
journalism and media ecologies, with a special interest in the Indian news industry. staff writers Praveen Donthi,
24 Sidin Vadukut is the author of Bombay Fever. He is a columnist and editor, and the UK Nikita Saxena and Atul Dev
correspondent for Mint. web reporters Sagar and
Kedar Nagarajan
REPORTAGE 32 Nileena MS is the fact checker at The Caravan. editorial manager
AND ESSAYS 50 Atul Bhattarai is a freelance journalist writing on culture and politics in South Asia. He is Haripriya KM
based in Kathmandu and tweets as @atulbhattarai. fact checker Nileena MS
photo editor Tanvi Mishra
PHOTO ESSAY 62 Alec Jacobson is a photographer and writer based in Telluride, Colorado. He has worked photo coordinator
around the world as a National Geographic Young Explorer and as the executive director of Shahid Tantray
graphic designers
the Mountain Independent.
Paramjeet Singh and
Anjali Nair
BOOKS 76 Sunil Khilnani is the author of Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives and The Idea luce scholar
of India. He is the Avantha professor and the director of the India Institute at King’s College Daniel Block
London. editorial interns
84 Blake Smith, a fellow at the European University Institute, is a historian of French exchange Abhinaya Harigovind, Gena Fazel
with India. His essays appear in such outlets as The Atlantic, Aeon and The Wire. He and Sneha
translated To Die in Benares, K Madavane’s forthcoming collection of short stories.

COVER Illustration: Pia Alize Hazarika

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6 THE CARAVAN
THE LEDE
Boundaries of Belief
A Durga Puja celebration across the India-
Bangladesh border / Communities

/ omkar khandekar

Taki in West Bengal is a town of green

paddies and greener ponds on the
banks of the Ichamati river separating
India and Bangladesh. Like the rest
of the state, it sees enthusiastic Durga
Puja celebrations every year. The
streets are lit up in canopies of fairy
lights, Bengali songs and Bollywood
hits blare from loudspeakers, and
pandals, or marquees, compete for who
carries the tallest, glossiest pratimas—
idols—of the goddess Durga.
But what distinguishes Taki from
other border towns is a particular
tradition on the final day of the Puja. As
its residents gear up for the immersion
of idols, so do its counterparts in
Satkhira, a district across the border
in Bangladesh. The inhabitants of
both towns place the pratimas in their
respective boats and sail up to border
security boats floating in middle of the
river, along the international boundary.
With a dozen metres between them, the
two groups of neighbours wave at each
shreya dutta

other, exchange greetings and—with

deafening shouts of “Aschche bochor
abar hobe!”–Until next year!–immerse
the idols together. For a day, citizens
of the two countries, divided by
geopolitics, come together to celebrate
a shared heritage.
The practice of joint celebrations
goes back several decades, Sridip Roy
Choudhary, a local Communist Party
of India (Marxist) worker, told me over
tea and rasgullas when we met in late
September 2017. Until the early 2000s,
residents of both countries would cross
the riverine boundary and dock in
the neighbouring country to shop and
socialise on the eve of visarjan—the day
of immersion. “There would be a little
mela on both sides,” Choudhary said.
“We’d buy coconuts and sugarcane
from there, they’d buy oil, soap and
Boroline (antiseptic cream) from here.”
Some people would even find a wedding
match for their sons or daughters.
His friend Subhas Pal, a 48-year-old
LIC agent, recalled it as a time of fluid
movement across the border. “I made a
lot of friends in these visits across the
border. Hindus or Muslims, they always
treated me with the best of hospitality,”
he said. “We’d fish in the ponds and
have a feast after.” While those from
Bangladesh made use of the medical
facilities available in India, Indian
visitors were keen on the cheap, “king-
size” cigarettes of Bangladesh. And Pal
added, these would not be bought, only
bartered.
At 6 pm, the border guards would
announce the end of the meeting-
time. The residents would get into
their respective boats and trawlers
and return to their countries across

10 THE CARAVAN

the river. There were no passport-checks or
entry pass for visitors. At its heart lay an implicit
trust, according to Taki residents. The practice
of an open-border tradition seems extraordinary
now, with security concerns about cross-border
terrorism, illegal immigration and cattle trade
dominating the mainstream discourse. But
academics specialising in Indo-Bangladesh
relations consider the close ties between the
border towns quite natural given their shared
ethnic identity, the mutual practice of soft
diplomacy and Durga Puja’s importance in the
Bengali community.
“The Puja festivities have always been
more social than religious affairs,” Somdatta
Chakraborty, a research associate at Calcutta
Research Group, told me over the phone. “Not only
do Muslims participate in large numbers in the
celebrations, most pandal-makers belong to the
community.” Many villages along the border lie
within shouting distance of each other, sometimes
separated by a narrow mud path or shallow
streams. Given their shared linguistic identity,
it was not easy for many residents living in the
border-towns to come to terms with the creation
of East Pakistan in 1947 and, later, Bangladesh
in 1971. Many had friends and relatives across
the border—at times, in their backyards—and
restrictions on free movement were often too
much to bear.
According to Chakraborty, the Ray Chaudharys,
an influential zamindar family, first began
communal Durga Puja celebrations in Taki in
the 1970s. As it grew in scale, visitors came
from across the border for visarjan. “After the
economic liberalisation of 1991 in India, people
started coming in from Bangladesh for work,” she
said. “Then in 1992, the Babri masjid demolition
happened. In Kolkata, it prompted communal
disturbances for the first time after 1947. This
began to dilute the homogeneous Bengali
identity.”
Beginning in 1989, the Indian side decided to
fence its 4,098-kilometre border with Bangladesh.
Thirty years later, the work remains half-finished.
A 10-foot fence with concertina wires, and two-
foot rock stumps for border-pillars, are visible
along the border. The Border Security Forces, or
above: Academics
specialising in
BSF, did not fence the perimeter of the Ichamati
Indo-Bangladesh river, since local livelihoods depended on it, but
relations consider ramped up security and surveillance. They also
the close ties erected watchtowers along the riverfront and
between the border floating outposts in the river. By the early 2000s,
towns quite natural a day-long free pass across the border on visarjan
given their shared
had all but stopped.
ethnic identity
and Durga Puja’s In May 2011, the All India Trinamool Congress,
importance in the led by the now-chief minister of West Bengal,
Bengali community. Mamata Banerjee, swept the state assembly
MARCH 2018
the lede
elections. The party, known for promoting
better relations with Bangladesh, reportedly
organised a Milan Mela—a festival to celebrate
the immersion—in Taki, and it allowed for the
relaxation of border norms on the day of visarjan.
According to eyewitnesses and media reports,
thousands allegedly trooped into India under the
garb of festivities and boarded buses and trains to
bigger cities in search of employment. There was a
near-complete shutdown of immersion festivities
for the next three years.
The BSF South Bengal Frontier, in charge
of the security at the Taki border, refused to
either confirm or deny that there had been any
security lapses in 2011. Instead, a representative
speaking for the BSF chief PSR Anjaneyulu told
me, “Such an incident hasn’t happened in the past
three to four years. Now it is very organised.”
His reluctance to speak about the incident had a
familiar ring to it: in a report published on Rediff.
com in 2014, a security personnel in Taki told
a journalist, “It’s an unpleasant memory that is
buried. Let’s talk about today and tomorrow.”
When I attended the Taki visarjan in 2017, the
diplomatic relations between the countries were
at their least combative. Over the previous four
years, India had signed the landmark Teesta
water-sharing pact, resolved the administrative
anomalies of its border enclaves and started a
public border-retreat ceremony at the Petrapole-
Benapole checkpoint, the highlight of which was
the security personnel shaking hands before
calling it a day, every day.
At Taki, the border forces of India and
Bangladesh were alert but not intrusive, as they
patrolled on steamers with guns, cameras and
life-jackets. Thousands had turned up to witness
the unique Puja celebrations along the leafy
riverfront. Nearly a hundred boats chugged along
the length of the Ichamati promenade, carrying
revellers from both countries who clicked photos,
soaked in the September drizzle and waved at
their neighbours across the border. At 6 pm, the
security forces announced that the celebrations
should wind up. Over the next hour, their
loudspeakers and flashlights led the boats back to
the coast.
Pal was also among the revellers that day. “My
only regret is that the next generation will never
know of the joy we had experienced,” he said.
“For us, visarjan was not about taking the pratima
and throwing it into river. It was about making
the journey to the other end, of interacting with
people. The charm has now diminished. It now
seems like a formality.”
I asked him what he missed the most about the
border-crossing tradition. With a laugh, he said,
“The free cigarettes, of course.” s
11
the lede
Re-rooting
A village in Korea attempts to keep up
with heavy migration / Labour
/ steven borowiec
On the main street in Mugeuk, a moun-
tainous village around 90 minutes
from Seoul, there are two markets a
few hundred metres apart. The older
of the two, which has been around for
over 100 years, is a traditional bazaar,
a high-ceilinged labyrinth of stalls and
restaurants selling Korean dishes and
produce from nearby farms. It was the
centre of village life for decades, but
nowadays it is mostly quiet, open only
one out of every five days.
Down the street is Asia Mart, a store
in operation for the last 15 years, which
caters primarily to the area’s growing
population of migrant workers. Inside,
there is a table with fruits from South-
east Asia, packets of instant Indian
curry, shelves of Chinese grain liquor
and canned fish with Russian language
labels. Next to the store’s entrance
is a table where customers can buy
SIM cards and lottery tickets. When I
visited on a crisp autumn afternoon last
year, there was a near constant flow of
migrants going in and out, buying cold
fruit juice, cigarettes and snacks.
In recent years, the road that runs
between the two markets has become
an essential point of connection for
the village economy, which relies on
cheap foreign labour. In a few con-
crete buildings, there are agencies that
work to dispatch labourers to farms,
factories and construction sites in the
surrounding countryside. On week-
day mornings, men, mostly in their
twenties and thirties, from countries
such as Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Cam-
bodia, the Philippines, Uzbekistan
and Vietnam, report at these offices
hoping to be sent out for a day’s work.
Mugeuk is one of many rural commu-
nities in South Korea that have shrunk
in recent years, as young people leave
to attend university and seek jobs in
cities. Taking their place, along with
several low-wage jobs in agriculture
and manufacturing, is a wave of young
12
men from poorer Asian countries who
come to South Korea, often on non-
renewable five-year visas. According
to data put out by the South Korean
government, the number of foreign-
ers residing in the country more than
tripled between 2006 and 2016. There
are over 250,000 migrants in the coun-
try on visas for unskilled labour. They
work low-wage jobs but enough to al-
low workers to save sums of money to
buy land or put their children through
school.
Shady Elsayed, a 31-year-old man
from Egypt who has lived in Mugeuk
for four years, volunteered to be my
guide for a day as I traversed the
village on foot. Elsayed grew up in
Alexandria and spent his early adult-
hood in Dubai, where his father owns
a printing business. He first came to
LETTER FROM
SOUTH KOREA
South Korea in 2013, after an Egyptian
friend told him it was an easy place to
find work and make money. He told
me that his first job here, welding
at a factory that makes scaffolds for
construction sites, paid only 900,000
South Korean won—a little over $800—
per month. But now, with four years’
experience and basic Korean language
skills, he earns three times that amount
doing the same work at another fac-
tory, where according to Elsayed, the
owners and managers are all South
Koreans, and the workers are all from
overseas. “They don’t hire Koreans be-
cause they ask for too much. They want
high salaries, lots of time off. Foreign
guys will work for less,” Elsayed told
me while we sat on a patio outside a
convenience store on the road between
the two markets. “Most guys come here
just to work. They might make two mil-
THE CARAVAN
lion won a month, and will send almost
all of that home, just keeping maybe a
hundred bucks to eat,” he said.
Those who live in Mugeuk spoke
about the rapid changes introduced
by the influx of migrants. Elsayed told
me that during his four years in the
village, the mentalities of the South
Korean residents altered considerably.
“When I first came here, people were
shocked to see a foreigner on the street,
but now, I don’t even think they notice,
since there are so many.” Yang Yi-soon,
a woman in her sixties, who has lived
in Mugeuk her entire life and owns
and operates Asia Mart with her son,
agreed that the changes were palpable.
“Many people have left,” she said. “In
the past, we didn’t worry about much.
Everyone had enough work, enough to
eat, even though life was slow. Now life
here moves much more quickly.”
Recent data show that not all South
Koreans are warming to the larger
numbers of outsiders. Data from a poll
conducted in 2015 by Gallup Korea,
a research company, found that 54
percent of its 1,500 respondents thought
that foreign workers were not a good
thing for the country—an increase from
49 percent in 1994. The South Korean
government last year reduced migrant
workers’ maximum stay period from
14 to 10 years, due in part to pressure
from Korean unions who contend that
migrants drive down wages for Korean
workers. Yang Kee-ho, a professor of
sociology at Sungkonghoe University
in Seoul, said that the South Korean
government would need to improve its
attempts at integrating migrants into
society and should consider grant-
ing more foreign workers permanent
residency. “Until now, the government’s
multicultural policies have been almost
like a fairy tale whereby foreigners are
expected to somehow become cultur-
ally Korean,” Kee-ho told me over email
last year. The more the policies are led
by the central government, the more
estranged the foreign populations will

become from the mainstream. It would be better to
have policies that are clearly defined and recognise
the existence of non-Koreans within South Korea.”
Mugeuk, for its part, created an Assistance Cen-
tre for Foreigners, which occupies a second-floor
space in the main road between the two markets.
Inside, there are tables set up for Korean language
classes and workshops where people learn to make
steven borowiec for the caravan
rice cakes and other Korean foods. The director
of the centre—Sophia Ko, a middle-aged South
Korean woman—explained that it was intended
to provide occasions for non-Koreans to inter-
act with the locals. In addition to cooking and
language classes, she also organises sports events,
including basketball games for workers from the
the lede
Philippines, cricket for Sri Lankans and soccer above: Mugeuk
for Indonesians. “It used to be that people around created an
here were scared when they saw foreigners,” Ko Assistance Centre
for Foreigners,
said. “We as Koreans need to change our culture
which provides
and learn to better welcome outsiders.” Korean language
While many people in Mugeuk echoed Ko’s classes and cooking
sentiments, one person seemed unperturbed by workshops.
the changing landscape of the village. Down the
road from the centre, Lee Jung-bok, an 87-year-
old widower, who retired from a construction
company over a decade ago, sat on the stairs in
front of Asia Mart. “What do you think about how
the village is changing?” I asked. “What’s there to
think about?” he responded. “It’s just the way it is.
This is still just a country village.” s
MARCH 2018 13
PERSPECTIVES
Squandered Chances
The ruling parties’ defeat in local polls has dealt a blow to
Sri Lanka’s hard-won democratising process / Politics
/ tisaranee gunasekara
On 10 February, Sri Lanka held elec-
tions for 341 local government institu-
tions. The polls were the freest and the
most peaceful in living memory. The
newly established Election Commission
managed the polling process. The po-
lice implemented the law with a level of
impartiality unfamiliar to Sri Lankans.
No one died and there were no major
outbreaks of violence, before, during or
after the voting. This, too, was unprec-
edented for the country.
In many ways, this should have been
a moment of triumph for the unity
government of President Maithripala
Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil
Wickremesinghe. The United Na-
tional Party, or UNP, and the Sri Lanka
Freedom Party, or SLFP, assumed office
with Sirisena at its helm in August
2015, after Sirisena defeated the then
president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s attempt
to win a third presidential term a few
months before. After delaying it for
over two years, the government finally
delivered on the implementation of a
new hybrid electoral system, which
combined both proportional repre-
sentation and the first-past-the-post
system. The passing of the nineteenth
amendment to the constitution—argu-
ably the most democratising piece of
legislation enacted in the country till
date—is the greatest achievement of the
current administration. Some of the
amendment’s key stipulations ensure
the creation of a new presidential term
limit and independent commissions to
oversee public service, police, human
rights, as well as to manage elections.
16
Although the Sirisena-Wick-
remesinghe government’s commit-
ment to strengthening democratic
institutions ensured for Sri Lanka its
unprecedented free and fair elections,
a plethora of unfulfilled political prom-
ises resulted in a humiliating defeat for
them in the local elections. The prices
of consumer essentials—including
rice, the staple of most Lankans—were
soaring; a promised one million jobs
had not materialised; legal action had
not been taken against those accused
of war crimes during the Rajapaksa
regime, and the government was mired
in its own corruption scandals. But
perhaps the biggest contributing factor
was that the two constituent parties
turned on each other, succumbing to an
extended fit of infantile squabbling. It
appeared as though the actual con-
test was between Sirisena’s SLFP and
Wickremesinghe’s UNP rather than
between the unity government and its
real foe—Rajapaksa and his recently
formed party, the Sri Lanka Podujana
Peramuna.
The SLPP romped to victory in a ma-
jority of councils, with the UNP a dis-
tant second. The SLFP performed even
more abysmally, ending up a poor third
in most councils. The combined vote
share of the two ruling parties, howev-
er, was higher than that of Rajapaksa’s
party: 46.01 percent of the national
electorate compared to the SLPP’s 44.65
percent. Had they contested together,
they would have beaten the SLPP by a
margin of 1.36 percent—a narrow vic-
tory, but a victory nevertheless.
By the morning of 11 February, Raj-
apaksa—who is determined to return
THE CARAVAN
to power at the earliest opportunity—
had declared himself the winner. The
same evening, he and his allies were
laying claim to the postion of opposi-
tion leader in the national legislature,
currently held by R Sampanthan, the
leader of the Tamil National Alliance,
a coalition of various Tamil political
parties. The next morning, Rajapaksa
held a media conference and demanded
the immediate dissolution of the parlia-
ment and new elections on the grounds
that the unity government had no
mandate to govern after its disastrous
performance.
Perhaps the most heartening out-
come of the election was the extremely
high voter turnout in Sri Lanka’s war-
torn northern and eastern provinces,
areas populated by a Tamil majority.
While the national turnout averaged at
65 percent, turnouts in every northern
and eastern district, apart from Jaffna,
ranged between 75 and 83 percent.
For more than a quarter of a century,
the leader and founder of the Tamil
Tigers, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was the
determinant factor in Lankan Tamil
politics. A Tamil could be a confirmed
Eelamist—a separatist—and even a
proven member of the LTTE, but if
they did not accept Prabhakaran’s
leadership, they would be automatically
excluded from the community. Prabha-
karan was more than a leader: he was a
phenomenon, the living embodiment of
extreme Tamil nationalism, whose final
goal was to carve out an independent
state.
Prabhakaran achieved this status by
mounting an existential threat to the
unity and territorial integrity of Sri

Lanka. By defeating him and the threat he posed,
Mahinda Rajapaksa also gained a similar place in
Sinhala politics. You could love, fear or hate both
men, but neither could be ignored. Voters’ stance
on Rajapaksa was the main line of demarcation
in Lankan politics in 2010 and 2015; it remains so
today and will continue to be for the foreseeable
future.
Post January 2015, Tamils began peaceful meth-
ods of protests to make their discontent and their
s kodikara / afp / getty images
demands heard. Last year saw an increase in such
protests. Most of them focussed on two issues:
discovering the fate of the people who were disap-
peared in the 26-year civil war that ended less
than a decade ago, and freeing civilian lands from
military occupation. Until the post local elections
cabinet reshuffle, there had not been much prog-
perspectives
ress on the first issue, primarily because of the above: President
military’s success at stalling and obfuscating judi- Maithripala
cial processes and the government’s unwillingness Sirisena’s SLFP and
Prime Minister Ranil
to get involved. The second issue has seen more
Wickremesinghe’s
progress. For instance, the biggest popular protest, UNP faced a
led mostly by women, against land occupation by debilitating loss in
the armed forces, ended in success recently when the local elections
the military withdrew from the village of Kep- because they failed
papilavu, a former LTTE stronghold, allowing the to face Rajapaksa
together.
people to return.
In August 2017, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court ruled
that federalism is not separatism. The three-mem-
ber bench was responding to a 2014 petition by a
Sinhala man, which asked that the court declare
Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi—part of the Tamil
National Alliance—a separatist party. The TNA
had supported negotiations with the LTTE and
MARCH 2018 17
squandered chances · perspectives
the struggle for an independent Tamil
state before the war ended. Since then,
it has dropped the demand and now
instead advocate for regional self-rule.
The landmark decision should have
given rise to both jubilation and anger,
of which neither materialised. The mut-
ed response indicated a general lack of
mainstream interest in a political solu-
tion to the decades-long ethnic polari-
sation that has been the basis of deep
conflict in the country. A new constitu-
tion is on the cards, but it is unlikely to
contain any federalisation provisions,
or any meaningful measure to effect a
devolution of power in earnest.
This situation places the TNA in
a bind, since it seems to have placed
all its eggs in the political-solution
basket, rather than prioritising the
socio-economic needs of the people.
The economic problems common to
all Lankans are particularly acute in
the war-torn north and east, with high
levels of poverty and unemployment. Of
the five districts most severely affected
by the drought that hit the country in
2016, three are in the northern and
eastern provinces. The TNA failed to
face these challenges adequately, and
Tamil voters, like the Sinhalese, used
the local government elections as a
means of sending a warning.
In the 2015 parliamentary election,
the TNA emerged as the undisputed
leader of the Tamils, winning nearly 5
percent of the national vote. In Febru-
ary 2018, its national average fell to
just about 3 percent. The alliance led in
several districts but failed to reach the
50 percent mark in any of them. Late
last year, many Tamil political factions
banded together to contest as a united
front against the TNA, which further
fragmented the Tamil vote. The new
combine did not do well, often finish-
ing behind the SLFP and the UNP in
Tamil-majority areas.
The most surprising development of
the election is how well the SLFP and
the UNP fared in Tamil-dominated
areas. In many districts the two parties
came second and third, behind the
TNA and ahead of other Tamil parties.
The UNP won the Mannar district,
pushing the TNA into second place.
The UNP and the SLFP could have won
the Batticaloa and Vavuniya districts
18
had they contested together. Even
Mahinda Rajapaksa’s SLPP did unex-
pectedly well, winning council seats
everywhere, including in Jaffna.
Has the TNA’s dominance in
Tamil politics ended for good, or is
this merely a protest vote, a signal for
the TNA to get its act together? The
answers will depend on the provin-
cial and national elections. But the
unusually pluralist voting pattern in all
northern and eastern districts indi-
cates a decrease of racial and survival
angst on the part of Lankan Tamils,
greater confidence in their place and
an increasing willingness to engage in
political experimentation.
Freed of the LTTE and of the
Rajapaksa regime, Tamil politics is
evolving. The path it will take is hard
to predict. Regardless, for it to move
permanently beyond the racial-ghetto,
The Rajapaksa resurgence
in the south can impede
the north’s journey to
democratic normalcy. At
his post-election media
conference, Rajapaksa held
up a map of Sri Lanka and
said, “See, even Eelam has
been reduced.”
ww
democratisation must increase and
spaces for engagement and protest must
expand—this is where Tamil politics
intersects with Sinhala politics, as
always.
The Rajapaksa resurgence in the
South can impede the north’s journey
to democratic normalcy. At his post-
election media conference, Rajapaksa
held up a map of Sri Lanka with the
areas won by SLPP marked in maroon,
and said, “See, even Eelam has been re-
duced.” This remark demonstrates that
he continues to see those Tamils who
oppose him as Eelamists. Since most
Tamils do oppose him, this attitude
will create a serious bar to reconcilia-
tion. A Rajapaksa return would mean a
drastic shrinking of democratic space
in the north. If there’s no room for
protest and engagement, if the military
THE CARAVAN
is once again in command, Tamils may
have little choice but to return to the
predicament from which they have just
begun to emerge. That retrogression
would be one of the most tragic conse-
quences of a Rajapaksa comeback, one
of national and perhaps even regional
import.
So where is the south headed?
Rajapaksa and his supporters have
finally realised that their demand for
an immediate dissolution of parlia-
ment is constitutionally impossible.
According to the nineteenth amend-
ment, the president cannot dissolve the
parliament until four-and-a-half years
after a general election. The parlia-
ment can dissolve itself with a two-
thirds majority vote, but such a vote
is unlikely at this moment. The UNP
and the president seem to have come
to an agreement to continue to govern
together, with some changes, includ-
ing a cabinet reshuffle. A special panel
has finally been set up to investigate
war era disappearances. Deprived of
a governmental change, Rajapaksa
and the SLPP are likely to focus on the
upcoming provincial council election;
rendering the government unstable and
the country ungovernable.
Time is running out, both for Sri
Lanka and the government. Rajapaksa
holds the initiative and the only way it
can be regained is if the unity govern-
ment renews its political vows and
focusses its energies on fulfilling its
basic promises, starting with reducing
living costs. The outcome of the Febru-
ary election demonstrates that the new
political landscape is here to stay. The
choice is between the continuation of
Sri Lanka as a flawed democracy or its
regression into a patrimonial oligar-
chy. Lankan democracy can be saved
only if Sirisena and Wickremesinghe
and their respective parties unite
again. The UNP and the SLFP lost
to Rajapaksa because they failed to
face him together. Further disunity
will exacerbate rather than resolve
the post-poll crisis. When democracy
fails to bring about an improvement
in people’s lives, extremism—whether
ethnic or religious—wins. That was
how the Arab Spring was lost—a trag-
edy that could well be repeated in Sri
Lanka. s
perspectives
Cropped Out
The Indian media’s unsettling coverage
of the 2017 farmer protests / Media
/ anushka shah and zeenab aneez
Around mid March last year, a group of
roughly 40 farmers from Tiruchirappal-
li in Tamil Nadu began a protest at Del-
hi’s Jantar Mantar. The protest was part
of a larger agitation in the state where
farmers had been demanding a waiver
of all debts from nationalised banks, a
drought-relief package of R40,000 crore,
the inter-linking of Tamil Nadu’s rivers
and the setting up of a water-manage-
ment board for the Kaveri.
The farmers decided to come to Delhi
to attract the attention of the national
media and thus tailored their protests
for its consumption. They came up with
innovative, even provocative, ways
to protest: they held rats and snakes
between their teeth, wore a garland of
skulls which they claimed belonged to
farmers who had committed suicide,
threatened to consume their own urine
and stripped when they were denied an
audience with Prime Minister Naren-
dra Modi. In a skit they staged, a farmer
was whipped by a man wearing a Modi
mask.
The farmers found limited success
in getting responsible media coverage.
While their methods saw coverage in
mainstream media, the issues they had
been raising barely got any attention.
Given that the protest was not accom-
panied by digital outreach and social
media campaigns, the mainstream
media’s coverage formed the primary
narrative of the protests. Apart from a
few shows of solidarity, the protest in
Jantar Mantar in Delhi was largely lim-
ited to the farmers.
In September 2017, we studied the
manner in which the the English-
language Indian press presented the
causes and consequences of these and
other farmer protests between mid
March and mid July. For the study, we
used Media Cloud—an open-source
news analysis platform developed in
collaboration by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Media Lab
22
and Harvard University to examine
the content of news websites. The tool
facilitated several kinds of text analy-
ses, including finding out the most fre-
quently used words in a set of stories
and detecting the overall theme of an
article. The websites that Media Cloud
analysed included legacy newspapers
such as the Times of India and The Hin-
du, broadcast sources such as NDTV
and Times Now, websites such as The
Wire and Scroll.in, as well as small
blogs and sites that carry news about
India. The results, available in full on
www.mediacloud.org, not only rein-
forced the notion that the media has
been inept in covering rural India, but
also revealed disconcerting patterns in
the coverage, which presented a highly
distorted picture of the protests.
About two months after the Tamil
Nadu famers’ protest, in June, farmers
in Madhya Pradesh’s Mandsaur dis-
trict began a ten-day strike demanding
higher prices for their crops and milk
as well as a drought-relief package. At
the same time, farmers in Maharash-
tra began a statewide strike seeking
minimum support prices at 50 percent
over cost of production, a loan waiver,
interest-free credit, higher prices for
milk, fully subsidised micro-irrigation
equipment and a pension scheme.
The distress recorded in three differ-
ent states around the same time and the
resultant protests ensured the media
had to cover the crises. When the pro-
tests in Mandsaur turned violent and
police fired at the protestors, the media
coverage peaked in its volume. By the
end of June, the coverage had all but
petered out. The crisis elicited wide
coverage again in late November when
farmers from 25 states organised a joint
protest in Delhi. Some of their demands
remained the same: fair prices for pro-
duce and loan waivers.
Throughout the protests, the cover-
age focussed on the spectacles cre-
ated by the farmers and the violence,
instead of the core reasons behind the
THE CARAVAN
protest. Referring to the skull garlands
worn by the Tamil Nadu farmers, news
organisations branded them as “skull
protesters” and used adjectives such
as “unique,” “shocking,” “bizarre” and
“gory” to describe the protests. India
Today’s website created a category
called “skull protests” to describe re-
lated news stories.
According to Media Cloud data, near-
ly 94 percent of the 5,072 stories about
farmer protests published between
March and mid July talked about either
the unconventional methods used by
the farmers to gain attention or the
violence related to the protests. Out of
these stories, only 36.5 percent talked
about the farmers’ demands for loan
waiversƒ, 27 percent mentioned the de-
mand for minimum-support prices and
0.7 percent mentioned the rising cost of
production.
Focussing on theatrics makes it hard
to sustain consistent news reporting
about the issue, and leads to episodic
snapshots instead of comprehensive
regular reportage. The lack of discus-
sion around the economic conditions
and policies that underlie the farmers’
protests created a skewed perception of
the problem. Readers were given little
context for the farmers’ struggle and
were kept uninformed about their own
stake in the agrarian crisis.
Our study also revealed that the
media covered the protests through an
inordinately political lens. A certain de-
gree of coverage of relevant politicians’
responses to the issue is a crucial addi-
tion to the overall coverage. However,
in the media, political reactions are not
only a way to gauge the importance of a
story, they also constitute a sub-genre
of political news. The focus, once again,
moved from the causes of the protests
to the political players that stood to
gain or lose from them. Nearly 80 per-
cent of the stories made direct mention
of ministers or political parties. The
most frequently used word in these sto-
ries was “minister.”
The news stories we examined also
seemed to misunderstand symptoms
of underlying problems as the causes
of the protest. Much of the reportage
focussed on drought and farmer sui-
cides, with a third of the stories exam-
ined identifying them as the causes of

ajay verma / reuters
the protests. The actual causes of the
protests, specified by the farmers them-
selves, such as rising cost of production,
credit diversion to corporations, rural
unemployment and minimum support
prices, was replaced by the familiar
narrative of drought and farmer sui-
cides.
This distorted picture of the protests
was reflected in discussions on social
media as well. The most frequently
used words in relation to the farmers’
crisis were “skulls,” “shot” and “dead”
(referring to the Mandsaur episode).
Rural India and the agricultural
sector have long remained underrep-
resented in the media. An Al Jazeera
feature on coverage of agriculture in
Indian media quoted a study by the
Centre for Media Studies which anal-
ysed six English and Hindi newspapers
including Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jag-
ran, the Times of India and The Hindu
over the course of two months in 2015
and found that the percentage of front-
page stories focussing on rural India
was zero. The Hindu was an exception;
1.37 percent of its stories were on that
topic. Looking at six broadcast news
outlets, including DD News, Zee News
and NDTV, showed that rural news did
not receive more than seven minutes of
prime time on any of the surveyed news
channels. Most of the staff at these or-
ganisations have an urban background
and are based in the cities. News, then,
is produced by and for city folk. Farm-
ing and agriculture are covered only
during specific episodes or crises. Such
episodic reporting determines how ur-
ban India understands rural India.
The obsession with political aspects
is in fact common to most coverage of
agriculture. We used Media Cloud to
look at news reporting across English-
language publications in India in
2016. Out of all the stories that used
the words “farm,” “agri” and “agro,”
only 4.4 percent of all news was about
farming or agriculture. The rest of the
stories had politics as their main theme.
The most commonly used words within
these stories were “agriculture,” “min-
ister,” “Congress” and “crops.” The vet-
eran journalist P Sainath has pointed
out several reasons for this state of
affairs. Speaking at a media seminar in
2017, he pointed out that most Indian
newsrooms do not have an agriculture
or labour correspondent. The report-
MARCH 2018
perspectives
ers who do write stories on agriculture
“primarily work out of Delhi,” he said.
The corporatisation of media has
meant that most organisations focus on
maximising profits. Rural reporting for
many is not considered worth the in-
vestment. In the Al Jazeera feature, the
television journalist Rajdeep Sardesai
explained that media organisations are
increasingly reluctant to invest in news
reporting. As a result, news organisa-
tions are covering more stories that
take place closer to their bureaus, rath-
er than those from faraway villages.
News organisations no longer work
in isolation from each other and the
audience, but function as part of the
entire digital media ecosystem—which
includes social media websites such as
Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The
strategic use of keywords such as “skull
protests” by multiple organisations is
an indication of the formulaic repro-
duction of news content, which com-
pounds the effect of distorted coverage.
If this state of affairs continues, 70 per-
cent of India’s population, which lives
in rural areas, will not see its concerns
and aspirations portrayed appropriately
in the English-language media. s
23
perspectives
Remembrance of Things Past
Three London exhibitions grapple with ways to confront
the legacy of the British Empire / History
/ sidin vadukut
One of the most arresting objects on display at the
5000 Years of Science and Innovation exhibition,
on until the end of March at the Science Museum
in London as part of its “Illuminating India”
programme, is the index to the Great Trigono-
metrical Survey of India, published in 1860. “No
map in the world at that time,” an accompanying
signboard reads, “could rival it for scale, detail
and accuracy.” Hundreds of criss-crossing red and
blue lines form a tight network of triangles within
above: A close- the index—each, the signboard says, “the sum of
up of Folio 16v hundreds of distance and angle measurements.”
from the Bakshali Another signboard nearby displays a small litho-
manuscript, 224-383 graph of men, all Indian, lugging around survey-
CE. ing equipment. The caption reads, “Thousands
of British soldiers and Indian men lost their lives
opposite page:
A model of the polar in completing the 70-year project.” Who were
satellite launch these men? Why did they die? We are not told.
vehicle. Nor are we told how the map fits into the history
24 THE CARAVAN
of cartography in India before and during British
imperialism. Perhaps this is too much to ask of a
single show that aspires to capture 5,000 years of
Indian history. But it is not too much to ask of an
exhibition pointedly dedicated to Indian scientific
achievement that, while touting the trigonometri-
cal survey, the exhibition credits such figures
as Radhanath Sikdar, a Bengali mathematician
whose immense contributions to the project
included first calculating that what was later
copyright bodleian libraries, university of oxford
christened Mount Everest was the highest point
on earth. Yet neither Sikdar nor the many other
Indian surveyors and “calculators” who were part
of the endeavour get any mention here at all.
One of imperialism’s legacies was to write the
“native” out of her own history. This was an act of
wilful forgetting, and, from the imperial stand-
point, a crucial one—usurping all agency prepared
the ground for telling the natives that they could
not govern their land as well as the imperialists
could. Now, decades after the fall of the British

Empire, this position is unsustain-
able. “Illuminating India,” the Science
Museum’s website says, “commemo-
rates 70 years of Independence and is
part of the British Council’s UK/India
Year of Culture.” The science exhibition
is billed as part of a season of “exhibi-
tions and events that celebrates India’s
contribution to science, technology
and mathematics.” But how, today, do
you celebrate history from the imperial
period without celebrating imperialism
itself? How do you remember what you
had chosen to emphatically forget? How
do you give agency back to those who
were comprehensively stripped of it?
This is a fundamental tension in many
British museums (and increasingly, it
appears, in British society: How can we
be great again, without doing what we
did the last time?). There is no set way
to deal with the problem—but there are
better approaches, and worse ones.
The writer Ruchir Joshi, in a review
for The Hindu, called the science
exhibition “strangely bloodless.” The
project—curated by Matt Kimberley of
the Science Museum—reeks of a gen-
eral lack of effort, or ambition, or both.
Consider the first three individuals
one runs into on entering: the Buddha,
Gandhi and Nehru. Why this triumvi-
rate has been put here is left entirely to
viewers’ imaginations. And then one
turns a corner and notices how small
the exhibition is. Surely there is more
to five millennia of Indian science
than three badminton courts’ worth of
objects, with plenty of walking space in
between, especially when an autorick-
shaw—neither a uniquely Indian object,
nor an Indian invention—takes up a lot
of the space.
The problem is not that the items on
display are uninteresting. There are
various compelling objects here—in-
cluding a piece of the famous Bakhshali
Manuscript—a mathematical text dat-
ing back more than a millennium—and
a series of Mughal coins with zodiac
images on the reverse. But the exhibi-
perspectives
tion fails to see, or knows but fails to year had thinned out and only a hand-
show, that science and technology are ful of visitors were about. Almost all of
not products but processes. This is a them were concentrated in the photog-
problem with most museums—culture raphy exhibition, and with good reason.
is process but it is shown as statu- It is by far the better show.
ary, art is process but it is shown as Here the story is far more complete,
painting—and overcoming it in this and it is told with much greater con-
environment is challenging. Throw fidence. The show is framed around
imperialism into the mix, and it be- two pivots, the revolt of 1857 and the
comes doubly so. The British Empire’s establishment of Indian independence
inherent tendency to deny the native
agency has often made it impossible to
trace the processes the native was part
of. Several of the objects on display at
the science exhibition were collected
in the imperial era and memorialised
as spoils of domination, not as evidence
of Indian ability and intellect. But this
is no excuse for overlooking process
altogether, since many of the histories
of the people and methods that imperi-
alism unfairly sidelined have now been
recovered and publicised—Radhanath
Sikdar’s story is a case in point.
What is most irksome is the pervad-
ing need, all over the exhibition, to con-
nect India’s scientific and technological
heritage to a handful of contemporary
achievements, such as the country’s
space programme and information-
technology industry. The acknowledge-
ment of postcolonial achievements
helps restore a sense of agency to
Indians, but here it is lazy and simplis-
tic, as if not having a space programme
or not being a force in the global IT in-
dustry would have undermined India’s
complex, chequered history in science
and innovation. It gives a half-told story
a tacked-on happy ending, and once
copyright isro/ courtesy of science museum group
again fundamentally relegates process
to product. It puts on display not five
millennia of science, but five millennia
of scientific objects.
Right next door to 5000 Years of
Science and Innovation, on Level 2 of
the Science Museum, is Photography
1857–2017, an exhibition that is also part
of “Illuminating India.” When I visited
in January, the throngs that followed
the shows’ openings in October last
MARCH 2018 25
 remembrance of things past · perspectives
below: in 1947. It is split into roughly three phases: one
Mitch Epstein, spanning the dawn of Indian photography and
Shravanabelagala, Independence, another displaying in the photog-
Karnataka, India
raphy of the early post-independence years, and
opposite page: the last covering contemporary Indian photogra-
Rama combing his phy. As a whole, the show tells a story of Indians
hair, Ayodhya, Uttar finding a voice in the photographic form and then
Pradesh, India, 2015
speaking loudly in it—even if this is not a reading
from the series A
Myth of Two Souls that the curators explicitly propose.
(2013). The cataclysmic events of 1857 serve as crucial
markers in the first of the three phases. Prominent
here are Indian photographers, such as Ahmad
Ali Khan, and foreign practitioners, such as
the Italian-British Felice Beato. A looped video
displays a collection of Khan’s portraits from Luc-
know shortly before the rebellion broke out. This
“ghost album,” as the exhibition calls it, no doubt
features people who perished in the violence that
followed. Where Khan recorded a certain calm
before the storm, Beato captured its aftermath. A
famous shot of his, taken shortly after the rebel-
lion was quelled, shows the Sikandar Bagh palace
in Lucknow, the foreground strewn with remains
of the bodies of “rebels.” (Scholarship on the poli-
tics of Beato’s photography suggests that the photo
could well have been staged—skeletons of corpses
may have been exhumed to emphasise the extent
of the defeat.)
courtesy of galerie thomas zander, koln
26 THE CARAVAN
Khan’s portraits, many of them of Indian royal-
ty, are presented on either side of the photography
of the 1857 rebellion. The juxtaposition of “na-
tive” and imperialist photography is instructive in
highlighting the ways that both were exercises in
myth-making. The imperialists sought to mythol-
ogise rebel brutality and British valour. Postcards
featuring famous sites of the rebellion did roaring
business in Britain, a form of disaster tourism by
proxy. Early Indian photographers, meanwhile,
very often showed elite Indians in their domestic
surroundings, dressed in their ceremonial livery.
Their works are not representative of the reality of
the country at the time, but they are the first steps
in the process of Indians as photographic artists
and subjects claiming agency.
The second phase—of photography approxi-
mately between Independence and economic lib-
eralisation—is given less space than the first. We
begin to see Indian photographers capturing more
of themselves and their countrymen—for instance,
Umrao Singh Sher-Gil’s pictures of himself and his
family, most notably of his daughter, the painter
Amrita Sher-Gil—which are intimate portraits of
their inner lives. But this is still elite photography,
as many of the well-known art photographers still
hailed from a narrow, privileged class. Foreign-
ers worked in India in this phase too, such as the

copyright vasantha yogananthan
American Mitch Epstein. There are
striking photos by both Raghubir Singh
and Mitch Epstein in this exhibition,
some of them quite well-known, such
as Epstein’s Shravanabelagola, Karna-
taka, India 1981, which features a car
parked in front of a wall, containing
a man smoking a cigarette as three
children watch. It is an arresting image,
with harsh contrasts and sharp edges.
Though compositionally sound, these
images are distant from the subject,
which are often static moments lacking
the effect of a dramatic event. This
section of the exhibition suggests that
there is much to be recorded beyond
the glitz of nobility and tragedy of war.
The exhibition, curated by Kate Bush
with Shasti Lowton as assistant cura-
tor and Rahaab Allana as consultant
curator, presents a possible reading that
remembrance of things past · perspectives
photography of Indians is very differ-
ent from photography by Indians, and
that both of these types of photography
have changed over time, especially in
terms of the dynamic between elites
and non-elites. Initially, the elites
photographed each other. Then the
elites—including photographers such as
Singh and Epstein—photographed the
non-elite. And past that, the camera’s
gaze grew more democratic as the act
and subject of photography became ac-
cessible to a wider number of people on
their own terms.
This comes through in the final part
of the exhibition, which features con-
temporary works by three auteurs: the
Indian Sohrab Hura, the Briton Olivia
Arthur and the French-SriLankan
Vasantha Yogananthan. Yogananthan’s
images, part of a series titled A Myth of
MARCH 2018
Imperialists mythologised
rebel brutality and British
valour, as postcards
featuring famous sites of
the rebellion did roaring
business in Britain.
ww
Two Souls, use contemporary photog-
raphy to retell the Ramayana. The most
striking of his images is of a young boy,
dressed in white, leaning against the
parapet of an ancient building, peering
into a mirror as he combs his hair. The
photo is titled “Rama combing his hair,
Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, 2015.” Hura’s
series Sweet Life captures his responses
to his mother’s descent into schizophre-
nia in the 1990s, with unsettling black-
and-white photographs that depict his
inner strife. Arthur’s photographs, of
Mumbai’s gay and lesbian subculture,
consist of portraits of men and women—
alone and in pairs. They are harsh and
tender at the same time, juxtaposing the
public challenge of alternative sexuality
in India with the self-legitimising hu-
maneness of private love. In some sense,
India seems incidental to Arthur’s
photography; she does without the
tropes—of exotic dress, of abjectness,
of exaggerated action, colour, oriental
irony and more—that earlier marked
photography from India. The same can
be said of Hura and, less so, of Yoganan-
than’s work. India and Indians meta-
morphosise from being symbols and
caricatures of a foreign “other” to being
individuals and communities with their
own distinctive humanity.
Two short train rides from the Sci-
ence Museum is the Wellcome Collec-
tion, a museum and library complex
dedicated to the exploration of the
interface between life, medicine, the
human body, art and culture. Until
early April 2018, it is hosting Ayurvedic
Man: Encounters with Indian medicine,
which, in the words of the exhibition
catalogue, “showcases Sanskrit, Persian
and Tibetan manuscripts, vibrant
gouache paintings, erotic manuals and
animal-shaped surgical tools.”
The “Ayurvedic Man” in the title
refers to an eighteenth-century ana-
tomical painting made in Nepal based
27
 remembrance of things past · perspectives
courtesy wellcome collection
The Ayurvedic Man.
on a seventeenth-century Ayurvedic
text—the Bhavaprakasa, by Bhavamisra.
The exact purpose of the painting, and
its intended audience, is lost to time.
But research by Dominik Wujastyk, a
prolific scholar of South Asian his-
tory, suggests that it was used as a wall
hanging or a teaching aid of some kind.
Visitors are invited to view the painting
up close while Sanskrit verses from
the Bhavaprakasa are recited through
a speaker. This is perhaps the most
ambiguous of the range of objects and
multimedia installations on display. and
28
to choose it as the centrepiece of the
exhibition is to immediately ground the
work in the complexities of the history
of medicine in the Indian subcontinent.
Foregrounding this indigenous fulcrum
is one of a handful of ways in which the
curator, Bárbara Rodriguez Muñoz, has
handled the problem of agency.
Besides this, there is a mural specially
commissioned for the show, by the art-
ist Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, to tell a visual
history of the Bombay plague of 1896.
This is displayed on three large touch-
screens, on which viewers can zoom
THE CARAVAN
in on parts of the mural and summon
archival material, historical informa-
tion and period journalism. Taken
together, the installation reveals how
medicine and public health, like almost
every aspect of colonial Indian life,
were intensely political. But the broader
purpose of the mural, placed right at
the beginning of the show, is to make
clear the problematic colonial context
that many of the objects and people that
populate the show were drawn from,
forcing visitors to acknowledge that
what they are about to see is conten-
tious material. Time and again, the
display literature in Ayurvedic Man
reminds visitors that the documents,
objects and images on display are colo-
nial-era acquisitions—opening up a host
of pertinent questions, not least that of
who actually owns this heritage.
Wrenching visitors back to the pres-
ent is Quiet Flows the Stream, a diptych
of videos by the filmmaker Nilanjan
Bhattacharya that profiles the life of
two traditional healers: Kunjira Mulya
from Karnataka and Thendup Lachun-
gpa from Sikkim. If Ayurvedic Man
grounds the exhibition in the theory of
Indian medical heritage, Quiet Flows
the Stream depicts the practicalities of
this tradition, how it has been sidelined
and how traditional medical practi-
tioners cope with social and economic
marginalisation. But the videos do
something far more important too—
they reveal that there is no single tradi-
tion of medicine in India. The healers
forage in radically different environ-
ments, seeking out entirely different
medicines and drugs. The contrast with
the flat, uni-dimensional depiction of
Indian science at the Science Museum
could not be greater.
There can be no complete undoing of
the British Empire’s denigration of In-
dians and their work, but it is clear that
there are approaches to curation that
confront it. Especially when displaying
colonial-era collections and materials
in the United Kingdom, (the country’s
only museum of British rule in India,
a tiny effort in the town of Nelson,
Lancashire, has previously appeared on
a notorious list of the least-visited Brit-
ish museums), it is vital that curators
attempt to grapple with the legacy of
imperialism. s
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any sort of discomfort. but it has to be the stick would slot in the right gear. everyday jobs really well without being
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 reportage

COALGATE 2.0 The Adani Group reaps benefits worth thousands

of crores of rupees as the coal scam continues
under the Modi government

when the supreme court, in a landmark decision in

September 2014, cancelled nearly all existing permis-
sions for the captive mining of coal blocks, it was seen
as having halted the “Coalgate” scam. State-owned
enterprises and private companies across the country
were compelled to dissolve partnerships that most of-
ten favoured the corporate purse over the public good.
Those state-owned enterprises that subsequently
reapplied for permissions had to operate under a new
law that restricted private firms to the role of contrac-
tors. None were allowed to carry on with things the
way they were—with just a single exception.
The partnership between the Rajasthan Rajya
Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited, a power corporation
of the Rajasthan government, and Adani Enterprises
Limited, the flagship company of the Adani Group,
continues on the basis of agreements that pre-date the
Supreme Court ruling. In Chhattisgarh, a joint ven-
ture formed by the two entities in 2007 is exploiting a
captive coal block called Parsa East and Kanta Basan.
The terms of the joint venture give the Adani Group
effective control over it. Numerous other arrange-
ments regarding the block also violate the 2014 ruling,
as well as later laws and guidelines, and this state
of affairs is clearly laid out in company documents
and regulatory filings. Yet, despite the clear breach
of law and contempt for the Supreme Court decision,
there has been no action or complaint against these
arrangements from either the Rajasthan and Chhat-
tisgarh governments, both headed by chief ministers
from the Bharatiya Janata Party, or the central gov-
ernment, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
RRVUNL pays the joint venture for coal from
Parsa East and Kanta Basan. The pricing calcula-
tions involved in this are not normally published, but
RRVUNL has disclosed pricing breakdowns from
2016. Based on the figures in these and production
numbers reported by Adani Enterprises Limited, even
the lowest possible estimates calculated by The Cara-
van show that RRVUNL will pay the joint venture at
least R6,000 crore—approaching $1 billion at present
rates—in excess of prevailing coal prices over the 30
years that it has rights over the coal block. To add to
this, arrangements for a power plant to be run at the
block by the Adani Group promise the conglomerate
a rock-bottom benefit on fuel of R1,000 crore over the
same period. By anything but the most conservative
estimates, these sums are likely to be far higher.

32 THE CARAVAN
 reportage

COVER STORY / BUSINESS

NILEENA MS

alok shukla / chhattisgarh bachao andolan

MARCH 2018 33
coalgate 2.0 · reportage

In its damning 2014 verdict, the court found all

the allotments of coal blocks to have been illegal,
barring just four that were being run by the cen-
tral government without any private partners. The
court noted a pattern of state-owned enterprises
granting lucrative contracts to private firms—of-
ten sister concerns of the same private firms they
had formed joint ventures with—to mine and
deliver coal from their blocks. It stated that “this
modus operandi has virtually defeated the legisla-
tive policy in the CMN Act”—the Coal Mines (Na-
tionalisation) Act, 1973—“and winning and mining
of coal mines has resultantly gone in the hands of
private companies.” One of the government’s main
justifications for the allotment system was that al-
lowing state-owned enterprises to exploit captive
blocks would allow them to reduce their costs on
coal, and so to pass the savings on to consumers—
through lower electricity fees, for instance. But
hefty payments to private contractors were often
driving up state-owned enterprises’ expenses to
the point that consumer benefits were negligible
at best.
The Supreme Court ruling came a few months
after the BJP’s ascent to power in the 2014 general
election. A major part of the party’s campaign,
with Narendra Modi at the helm, involved criticis-
ing the Congress over Coalgate and other scan-
dals, and promising action against corruption if it
came to power.
A year into office, the Modi government enacted
the Coal Mines (Special Provisions) Act, 2015,
PTI

which required auctions for all captive coal blocks

previous spread: the government allotted 218 captive coal blocks offered to private companies. The law retained the
Parsa East and to individual private and state-owned entities power for the government to allot blocks without
Kanta Basan, between 1993 and 2011. These were to funnel their
a coal block in
allotted coal to their facilities for power genera-
Chhattisgarh, is
tion or heavy industry—both official priorities. The Coal Mines (Special
alloted to Rajasthan
Rajya Vidyut Instead of auctioning the blocks, the government Provisions) Act, 2015, allows
Utpadan Nigam simply assigned each one to the interested entity
Limited. It is being that it thought would put it to best use. Many of
the government to allot blocks
managed by a joint the private companies that had received leases without auction to state-
venture between
were owned by politicians or closely linked to
RRVUNL and Adani
them, and many of the state-owned enterprises
owned enterprises, and to
Enterprises Limited,
and AEL also runs that had received them formed joint ventures with joint ventures between state-
mining operations
at the block.
politically connected private firms to exploit their owned and private firms, so
captive blocks.
In March 2012, it emerged that a draft report by long as “no company other
above: Narendra the Comptroller and Auditor General described than a Government company
Modi used Adani the allotment system as arbitrary, and estimated
Group aircraft the resulting loss of potential government rev- or corporation shall hold more
to travel during
the campaign for
enue—and effective gain to allottees entities—at than twenty-six percent of
R10.7 lakh crore, or over $200 billion. The Con-
the 2014 general
election. gress-led government of the day had presided over
the paid up share capital in
the majority of the allotments, and was the major the Government company or
target of the ensuing scandal. The matter was
taken up by the Central Bureau of Investigation,
corporation or in the joint
and then the Supreme Court. venture.”
34 THE CARAVAN

auction to state-owned enterprises, and to joint
ventures between state-owned and private firms,
so long as “no company other than a Government
company or corporation shall hold more than
twenty-six percent of the paid up share capital
in the Government company or corporation or in
the joint venture … either directly or through its
subsidiary company or associate company.” The
coal ministry also issued a Draft Model Contract
Agreement which made it clear that provisions for
state-owned enterprises to engage private mine
operators “shall not be interpreted or construed to
create an association, joint venture or partnership
between the parties.”
The original allotment of Parsa East and Kanta
Basan dates to June 2007, when it was handed
to the Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam
Limited, Rajasthan’s state power corporation.
That same year, RRVUNL agreed to form Parsa
Kanta Collieries Limited, a joint venture to exploit
the block, in partnership with Adani Mining
Private Limited. The terms of the agreement gave
Adani Mining 74-percent ownership of PKCL,
and 26-percent ownership to RRVUNL. After the
2014 Supreme Court judgment, RRVUNL ap-
plied for and was granted a reallocation of Parsa
East and Kanta Basan for 30 years. In early 2015,
Adani Mining was absorbed by Adani Enterprises
Limited. In March of that year, RRVUNL decided,
as described in AEL’s annual report for the 2016-
17 financial year, “to continue its joint venture
via the wire / vibhav.org
coalgate 2.0 · reportage
The 2007 joint-venture agreement gave
Adani Mining 74-percent ownership
of PKCL, and 26-percent ownership to
RRVUNL. In early 2015, Adani Mining was
absorbed by Adani Enterprises Limited.
In March of that year, RRVUNL decided,
as described in AEL’s annual report, “to
continue its joint venture agreement with
AEL,” with the same division of ownership
as before.
agreement with AEL,” with the same division of below: The close
ownership as before. PKCL’s annual filings to the links between Modi
registrar of companies, under the ministry of cor- and Gautam Adani
(left) stretch back
porate affairs, have consistently reflected 74-per-
to the BJP leader’s
cent ownership by AEL. days as the chief
The founder and chairman of the Adani Group, minister of Gujarat.
the parent conglomerate of AEL, is the billionaire
Gautam Adani, who rose from relative humility in
Gujarat to become one of the country’s most influ-
ential businessmen in energy, infrastructure and
more. Modi’s time as the chief minister of Gujarat,
between 2001 and 2014, coincided with massive
increases in the Adani Group’s fortune, and the
conglomerate has continued to prosper under
Modi’s prime ministership. Adani and Modi are
MARCH 2018 35
coalgate 2.0 · reportage
frequently pictured together at high-
profile events, including on the prime
minister’s foreign visits, and Modi
unabashedly used Adani Group aircraft
while travelling to campaign for the
2014 general election. Modi’s admin-
istrations, at the state and national
levels, have repeatedly been accused of
giving preferential treatment to Adani’s
businesses—through such things as
concessional land deals and advanta-
geous changes in regulation. The Adani
Group has faced multiple allegations of
tax evasion, money laundering, bribery
and environmental crimes, yet it has
largely evaded any action from regula-
tory bodies and investigative agencies.
The conglomerate is highly leveraged.
As of 2017, the combined debts of just
its listed companies totalled R1.1 lakh
crore, or over $16 billion—most of it
owed to Indian state-owned banks.
The 2007 deal to form PKCL was
agreed when the Rajasthan govern-
ment, which controls RRVUNL, was
led by the BJP, with Vasundhara Raje
as the chief minister. Raje was re-
placed in 2008 by the Congress’s Ashok
36
Gehlot, who lobbied for RRVUNL to
receive clearances from the central
government in order to begin mining
operations at Parsa East and Kanta
Basan. Raje, after regaining power in
2013, was the chief minister again at
the time of the decision to continue the
joint venture unaltered, in 2015.
RRVUNL received the necessary
clearances from the central govern-
ment over the course of 2011 and 2012,
when the Congress-led government
held national power. The Chhattisgarh
government gave the final go-ahead for
mining at Parsa East and Kanta Basan
in 2013, and production started at the
block that same year. Chhattisgarh
has been ruled by the BJP since 2003,
with Raman Singh as the chief minister
throughout.
After the block was reallotted in
2015, PKCL continued with an earlier
contract for mining services that had
been agreed with Adani Mining in
2009. The 2015 reallotment agreement,
states, “In the event the Allottee enters
into any agreement with any contrac-
tor in relation to the mining operation
SURGUJA DISTRICT
parsa east and kanta basan
coal block
THE CARAVAN
at the Coal Mine, then a duly certified
copy of such agreement shall also be
submitted to the Nominated Author-
ity within fifteen Business Days of the
execution.” The nominated authority in
this case is a joint secretary at the coal
ministry. Since 2014, the ministry has
been headed by the BJP’s Piyush Goyal.
The reallotment agreement also stip-
ulates that any contractor brought in to
run mining operations must be selected
through competitive bidding, and that
any agreement with such a contractor
must be brought to the attention of the
state government, the central govern-
ment and the nominated authority as
soon as it is finalised. There was no
bidding before PKCL’s mining-services
contract with Adani Mining in 2009,
and there has not been any since.
In response to queries from The
Caravan, the coal ministry stated that
“RRVUNL had informed the Nominat-
ed Authority that RRVUNL shall adopt
and continue” the existing mining-ser-
vices contract, and that “PKCL works
as the exclusive Mining Contractor.”
It added that coal-block “Alottees are

required to submit Pre Commencement Report
for every month to the office of the Nominated
Authority furnishing the progress made towards
development of the coal mine,” and that “this
office holds regular Review Meeting with the Al-
locatees to monitor the progress and remove any
bottlenecks being faced by them.” In reply to a
question as to whether the 74-percent ownership
of PKCL by AEL violated the Coal Mines (Special
Provisions) Act, the ministry replied that “there is
no stipulation of any investment/shareholding pat-
tern in mining contractor”—although the question
specifically pointed out that AEL is the majority
partner in the venture and not a contractor.
Besides PKCL, RRVUNL has also formed
another joint venture with AEL, called Rajasthan
Collieries Limited. This joint venture was formed
in December 2011, to exploit two coal blocks, Parsa
and Kente Extension, also allotted to RRVUNL.
These blocks are adjacent to Parsa East and Kanta
Basan. AEL owns 74 percent of Rajasthan Collier-
ies Limited, and RRVUNL owns 26 percent. The
joint venture remains active, and has a mining-
services agreement with AEL, although produc-
tion is yet to begin at either of its blocks.
Parsa was handed to RRVUNL during the real-
lotments of coal blocks in the wake of the Supreme
Court’s 2014 ruling. It had originally been allotted
to the Chhattisgarh State Power Generation Limit-
ed, a corporation of the Chhattisgarh government,
which formed a joint venture to develop the block,
and then signed a mining-services agreement,
with Adani Mining. In 2012, the Comptroller and
Auditor General reported that CSPGL had subse-
quently tweaked the mining-services agreements
to Adani Mining’s benefit, resulting in a potential
loss to itself of R1,549 crore.
parsa east and kanta basan lies in the north of
the Hasdeo Arand forest, roughly 300 kilometres
north-east by road from Raipur, Chhattisgarh’s
capital. The block forms a rough square, with sides
of approximately 5 kilometres. According to docu-
ments from the environment ministry, it contains
over 450 million tonnes of minable reserves, at a
maximum depth of 225 metres. This is too shallow
for underground mining, and calls instead for
open-cast operations—digging the coal out after
stripping away the soil and the forest above it. It is
also shallow by the standards of open-cast mining,
making Parsa East and Kanta Basan particularly
cheap and profitable to operate.
The Forest Survey of India, a body under the
environment ministry, described Hasdeo Arand
in 2011 as the largest uninterrupted tract of for-
est anywhere in central India beyond protected
areas. The forest and its surroundings are home to
numerous communities, with significant Adivasi
coalgate 2.0 · reportage
RRVUNL has also formed another joint
venture with AEL, called Rajasthan
Collieries Limited, to exploit two other coal
blocks, Parsa and Kente Extension. AEL
owns 74 percent of Rajasthan Collieries,
and RRVUNL owns 26 percent. Production
is yet to begin at either of the blocks.
populations, who depend on it for their liveli-
hoods, and who can claim rights over it under the
Forest Rights Act, 2006. Hasdeo Arand is also
highly biodiverse and ecologically sensitive. The
Chhattisgarh government had earlier proposed
setting up an elephant reserve in the area, and
received approval from the central government in
2007, but subsequently backtracked. The environ-
ment ministry declared large parts of Hasdeo
Arand “no-go” areas for mining in 2010, but the
area lost this status when the system of designat-
ing such areas was ended in 2012.
In May 2006, RRVUNL invited tenders from
firms interested in mining coal and transporting
it to the power company’s plants in Rajasthan as
part of a joint venture. The company was acting in
anticipation of being allotted a coal block; it would
be over a year before the government announced,
in June 2007, that Parsa East and Kanta Basan
had been allotted to RRVUNL. Yet in 2006 itself,
the company issued a letter of intent stating that
it had chosen to partner with AEL, based on the
“quoted price of coal for the first year of mining
operations.” AEL had submitted its tender before
factors crucial to determining the cost of min-
ing and delivery for RRVUNL—such as the grade
of the coal to be mined or the distances between
the mines and the company’s power plants, all
dependent on the location of the block allotted to
it—were known. The details of the tender process
have never been made public.
The joint-venture agreement was signed in Au-
gust 2007. According to RRVUNL’s annual report
for the 2015-16 financial year, under this agree-
ment the company “handed over its coal mines to
PKCL during 2008-09 free of cost, for prospect-
ing, exploration and coal mining … for a period of
30 years from commencement of supply of coal.”
In 2009, PKCL signed the mining-services agree-
ment with Adani Mining. According to the Adani
Group website, this entailed such work as “ob-
taining approvals (including approval of mining
plan), acquisition of land, setting up washery and
construction of railway siding at the mine.”
Plans to begin mining at Parsa East and Kanta
Basan required the assent of local communities
as well as numerous environmental permissions.
MARCH 2018 37
coalgate 2.0 · reportage
this spread: Hasdeo
Arand is highly
biodiverse, and is
home to numerous
communities
with a claim to
rights over it. The
process of securing
permissions to
mine Parsa East
and Kanta Basan
included an
unprecedented
alok shukla / chhattisgarh bachao andolan
revocation of local
land rights, and a
sudden about-turn
by the environment
ministry.
After it was allocated the coal block, Parsa Kanta
Collieries Limited faced strong resistance from
the area’s locals, and had multiple applications to
the environment ministry turned down. These
hurdles were removed by an unprecedented revo-
cation of local land rights, and a sudden about-
turn by the environment ministry against the
recommendations of its own advisers.
By law, mining in a forested area requires of-
ficial clearance. The large majority of Parsa East
and Kanta Basan was covered by forest. RRVUNL
submitted a proposal for the “diversion” of forest
land, for the consideration of the coal ministry’s
Forest Advisory Committee. On three occasions
in 2010, the committee recommended rejecting
the proposals, and Jairam Ramesh, the minister
of state for the environment, did just that. In 2011,
the committee again considered a proposal, and
in June of that year it again recommended that
the ministry turn RRVUNL down. That same
month, however, Ramesh issued an order granting
initial approval to the proposal, opening the way
for further proceedings. He attached to the order
a series of letters from Ashok Gehlot persistently
asking for permission to mine coal for Rajasthan’s
power projects.
The ministry granted environmental clearance
for work at Parsa East and Kanta Basan in Decem-
ber 2011. It followed this with forest clearance,
permitting the razing of forested areas, in March
2012. Soon afterwards, the lawyer Sudiep Shriv-
astava approached the National Green Tribunal to
challenge the forest clearance, calling into ques-
tion the validity of the ministry’s initial approval
for the “diversion” of forest land in June 2011. The
case proceeded through the following years.
38 THE CARAVAN
Even with the environmental approvals in
place, before the Chhattisgarh government could
issue RRVUNL a mining lease, finally handing
the land over for mining, it had to deal with the
people on it. Many local residents had sent in
applications to claim land rights allowed to them
under the Forest Rights Act. By law, the state
government had to ensure that all such claims
were settled before it granted a mining lease. Yet
the applications were still pending when it issued
the mining lease, in May 2012. Adani Mining
began production at Parsa East and Kanta Basan
in March 2013.
The journalist Nitin Sethi later reported that
orders from the environment ministry granting
initial approval for the diversion of the forest land
stated that the ministry’s final permission to hand
the land over for mining would depend on settling
all local claims over it—yet the ministry eventually
granted its permission without establishing that
this condition had been met. In September 2013,
residents of the village of Ghatbarra, acting under
the Forest Rights Act, won official recognition of
their community rights over forest land within
Parsa East and Kanta Basan.
In March 2014, the National Green Tribunal
ruled on the appeal against the forest clearance. It
set the clearance aside, and directed the environ-
ment ministry to reassess RRVUNL’s proposal.
It also ordered that all work at Parsa East and
Kanta Basan, “except the work of conservation of
existing flora and fauna, shall stand suspended,”
pending fresh orders from the environment minis-
try. RRVUNL appealed before the Supreme Court,
which ruled the following month that work at the
coal block could continue, but that the environ-
 coalgate 2.0 · reportage

In 2016, the administration of Surguja district, Rights Act, as well as the Provisions of
the Panchayats (Extension to Sched-
which takes in Ghatbarra, cancelled the village’s uled Areas) Act, 1996.
community forest rights. This made Chhattisgarh RRVUNL was reallotted the block
in March 2015, just as the grace period
the first state ever to revoke rights already was running out. Operations at Parsa
granted under the Forest Rights Act; there is no East and Kanta Basan never stopped
during this period, and have carried on
provision in the law for such action. ever since.
In 2016, the administration of Sur-
ment ministry should move ahead with The Supreme Court ordered a levy on guja district, which takes in Ghatbarra,
reassessing the proposal. Four years all coal mined at active blocks from the issued an order to cancel the village’s
after the order to reassess the forest moment they began production until community forest rights. This made
clearance, the ministry is yet to issue the end of the grace period, calculated Chhattisgarh the first state ever to
any new orders. at R295 per tonne. For Parsa East and revoke rights already granted under the
In early September 2014, locals Kanta Basan, the total came to R145.5 Forest Rights Act; there is no provision
displaced or otherwise affected by the crore, for almost five million tonnes of in the law for such action. The order
mining managed to temporarily halt all coal mined. The legal obligation fell on stated, “When the administration tries
work at the block as part of a campaign the allottee, RRVUNL, which paid the to get diversion of forests done for
to protest Adani Mining’s failure to full amount. the Parsa East and Kanta Basan coal
provide them with compensation and A few months after the ruling, resi- block, the villagers, using the pretext
jobs that had been promised when the dents of villages from across Hasdeo of the land rights given to them by the
company moved in. The Supreme Court Arand, including Ghatbarra, passed a [district] collector, create barriers and
verdict annulling all coal block alloca- resolution telling the government not protest to stop the work.” It argued that
tions came later the same month, but to auction mining rights for any coal since the handover of land for mining
the court allowed operations at active blocks in the region. They also demand- operations predated the recognition of
blocks to continue for a grace period of ed that the government honour their local rights over it, the recognition was
six months. rights over the land under the Forest never valid.
chitrangada choudhury

MARCH 2018 39
 coalgate 2.0 · reportage
hindustan times

above: In 2016, rrvunl was one of 77 state-owned companies to
the Rajasthan enter into joint-venture agreements with private
government, under firms upon being granted permission for captive
Vasundhara Raje,
mining. After the 2014 Supreme Court ruling, all
decided to divest
RRVUNL of its stake these agreements were to be cancelled, and state-
in the Kalisindh owned companies interested in securing captive
power plant blocks were to submit new tenders. The 2015
(pictured), as well as legislation banned state-owned companies from
in the power plant forming joint ventures with private firms to ex-
at Chhabra, in an
ploit any fresh allocations, or from bringing them
effort to cut losses.
on as partners via mining-services agreements,
opposite page: though it permitted private firms to be brought in
RRVUNL disclosed as contractors or subcontractors.
pricing breakdowns All the state-owned companies with prior al-
for PKCL coal
lotments complied with these directives—except
delivered to
Chhabra and for RRVUNL. The company applied for a realloca-
Kalisindh following tion of Parsa East and Kanta Basan, and received
the Rajasthan it in 2015. The environmental clearance for the
government’s block was reaffirmed as well. In its 2015-16 annual
decision on report, RRVUNL indicates that PKCL remains
divestment.
functional, even though this joint venture was
formed in 2007.
Adani Enterprises Limited, in its annual report
for the 2016-17 financial year, mentions both
the 2014 Supreme Court judgment and the 2015
mining law, yet also declares, “Pursuant to the
re-allotment, RRVUNL has decided to continue
existing contract with PKCL for development and
operation of the coal block.” RRVUNL’s 2015-16
annual report states, “A Coal Mining and Delivery
Agreement (CMDA) were signed with the Joint
venture (PKCL),” and makes clear that the agree-
ment was signed before the Supreme Court ruling.
The reallocation agreement makes it clear that
“the selection of contractors in relation to coal
mining operation shall be through a competitive
bidding process.” No information of bidding for
mining services at Parsa East and Kanta Basan
was ever made public, although AEL continues to
run operations at the block for PKCL.
The terms of the allocation of Parsa East and
Kanta Basan set its maximum annual production
at 10 million tonnes, all destined for RRVUNL
facilities. RRVUNL has signed fuel-supply agree-
ments with PKCL to supply three of its power
stations in Rajasthan—Kalisindh, Chhabra and
Suratgarh.
In 2016, the Rajasthan government, under
Vasundhara Raje, decided to divest RRVUNL
of its stake in Chhabra and Kalisindh, in what
it described as an effort to cut losses. (NTPC
Limited, the central government’s power com-
pany, is currently in the process of taking over the
plants.) RRVUNL has since published Preliminary

40 THE CARAVAN
 coalgate 2.0 · reportage

Information Memorandums regard- Setting aside transportation charges, (In the absence of a pricing break-
ing the divestment for both plants. In the difference between the total cost down for the Suratgarh plant, the
these documents, it has disclosed the paid to PKCL and that offered by SECL calculation assumes that the pricing
calculations behind the prices it paid for G9 coal is R274.16 per tonne. AEL’s breakdown declared for Chhabra and
PKCL to supply coal to the stations as annual report for the 2016-17 financial Kalisindh reflects that for Suratgarh
of 2016. This entails the first and only year declares that PKCL dispatched as well. The calculations here and
instance when the breakdown of the 7.33 million tonnes of beneficiated, or throughout the piece make reasonable
pricing for PKCL coal has become pub- “washed,” coal to power plants in that extrapolations based on figures from
licly available; no such disclosure has period. Applying the per-tonne cost to the 2016-17 financial year, as that is
been made since, and no details of the this amount, the total annual amount the only period for which all relevant
pricing breakdown for Suratgarh have paid to PKCL above the available SECL information has been disclosed. SECL
ever surfaced. rate comes to R200.9 crore. Project- updates its prices every six months,
The Preliminary Information Memo- ing this over the 30-year duration of and the exact sums in the calculation
randum shows that the raw coal being the mining lease for Parsa East and may vary if based on a different period;
dug up at Parsa East and Kanta Basan is Kanta Basan, the excess amount paid without timely pricing information
of G11 grade, and that RRVUNL is pay- by RRVUNL to PKCL would come to from PKCL or RRVUNL, those sums
ing PKCL for G9 coal to power Chhabra R6,029 crore—approximately $860 mil- cannot be determined. SECL prices
and Kalisindh. (The coal ministry has lion, based on 2016 exchange rates. have risen since 2016, but as the pricing
published grading guidelines for non-
coking coal—the kind used in power
generation—based on gross calorific
value. GCV is a measure of the heating
capacity of a set weight of coal, and var-
ies according to the amount of moisture
and non-coal substances present in it.
The highest grade is G1, and the lowest
G17.) Turning G11 coal into G9 coal re-
quires a process called “beneficiation,”
which reduces the amount of non-coal
substances present and removes lower-
grade coal. PKCL is charging RRVUNL
for the process. Not counting trans-
portation fees, the total cost of G9 coal
from PKCL—including beneficiation
charges, taxes, duties, royalties and
cesses—is R2,267.12 per tonne.
Chhattisgarh falls under the com-
mand area of South Eastern Coalfields
Limited, a subsidiary of Coal India
Limited, the state-owned enterprise
that dominates coal production in
India. SECL offers coal to power utili-
ties at concessionary rates. According
to SECL’s published rates for mid 2016,
it charged power utilities a rate, not in-
cluding transportation costs, of R1,100
per tonne of G9 coal—which amounts
to a total price of R1,992.96 after adding
taxes, duties, royalties and cesses.
SECL operates over 50 mines in
Chhattisgarh, and RRVUNL could
purchase G9 coal from them instead
of from PKCL. Transportation costs
from any of SECL’s mines to RRVUNL’s
plants in Rajasthan would be compa-
rable to those the company pays PKCL
for the delivery of coal from Parsa East
and Kanta Basan.

MARCH 2018 41
coalgate 2.0 · reportage
ESTIMATED MINIMUM GAINS To
PARSA KENTE CollIERIES lIMITED
fRoM PARSA EAST AND KANTA BASAN
CoAl BloCK, CHHATTISGARH
GrAdE of CoAL
PurChASEd
PKCL total price for G9 coal,
excluding transport and adding taxes etc.
Total cost of G9 Chhattisgarh Coal
from South Eastern Coalfields
Limited, excluding transport and adding
taxes etc.
diffErEnCE in PriCES
Excess paid per tonne to PKCL
MuLTiPLiEd for 7.33 MiLLion
TonnES diSPATChEd in 2016
Annual excess gain to PKCL
MuLTiPLiEd ovEr 30-yEAr
vALidiTy of LEASE
ToTAl EXCESS
GAIN To PKCl
Calculations reflect extrapolation based on figures for 2016-17 financial year; pricing
disclosed for Chhabra and Kalisindh power plants is applied to total declared
production from Parsa East and Kanta Basan
42
disclosed for the 2016-17 financial year
calculates the final PKCL price starting
from a SECL base price, it is reasonable
to assume that PKCL’s prices have kept
pace with the increase.)
Captive mining is meant to slash
companies’ fuel costs by giving them
raw fuel for free, and allowing them to
pay outside parties only for essential
services such as mining and delivery.
The pricing calculation disclosed by
RRVUNL completely defeats the logic
behind the practice. Industry experts
place the cost of mining coal in India—
averaging across open-cast mines and
G9 more expensive underground mines—
at a maximum of R450 per tonne. The
cost paid by the allottee of a captive
coal block to any outside party min-
K 2267.12 / tonne ing it should be in the vicinity of this
figure at most. The pricing breakdown
for PKCL begins by pricing the G11
coal mined from Parsa East and Kanta
Basan at the prevailing base rate from
J 1,992.96 / tonne SECL, of R810. This violates a condi-
tion of the reallocation agreement for
the block, which specifies that “the
allottee shall ensure that the criteria
2,267.12 - 1,992.96 = of bidding for engagement of contrac-
tors are not linked to CIL notified
price.” The pricing calculation then
J 274.16 / tonne shows an 8.5-percent discount on the
SECL base rate, but this amounts to a
discount only in theory—with all other
charges, including beneficiation costs,
274.16 x 7,330,000 = added on, the total cost of the G9 coal
produced exceeds the rate for G9 coal
offered by SECL.
J 2,00,95,92,800 In effect, RRVUNL is paying more
(J 200.9 crore) to use coal granted to it for free than it
would for coal available from another
state-owned enterprise—to the benefit
of a joint venture controlled by a private
2,00,95,92,800 x 30 =
entity, the Adani Group. The additional
cost is passed on to consumers in Raj-
asthan, in the form of higher electricity
L 60,28,77,84,000 tariffs.
While the Preliminary Information
(L 6,029 crore) Memorandum shows that RRVUNL is
purchasing G9 coal, a submission by
RRVUNL to the Rajasthan Electricity
Regulatory Commission in 2016 shows
that units at Chhabra being supplied
by PKCL are being run on G10 coal,
and that units supplied by the company
at Kalisindh and Suratgarh are being
run on G11 coal. RRVUNL has never
publicly explained the discrepancy, and
THE CARAVAN

did not respond to queries from The
Caravan.
If the submission to the regulatory
commission is accurate, it is not clear
why RRVUNL would pay PKCL for a
higher and costlier grade of coal than
required for its plants. In the case of
Kalisindh, if the plant only needs G11
coal, it is unclear why RRVUNL should
pay any of the beneficiation costs
reflected in the Preliminary Informa-
tion Memorandum when the same
document shows that the raw coal from
Parsa East and Kanta Basan is already
of G11 grade. If, in fact, it is the Pre-
liminary Information Memorandum
that is accurate, then it is surprising
that RRVUNL has chosen to pay PKCL
a higher price for the required G9 coal
than the one offered for equivalent coal
by SECL. Wherever coal from PKCL
is not sufficient to meet the needs of
the three plants, RRVUNL is already
purchasing coal from SECL to cover the
shortfall.
To add to this, RRVUNL has also
granted AEL ownership over lower-
grade coal sifted out during the benefi-
ciation process—known in the industry
as “middlings” and “rejects.” The
draft model contract issued by the coal
ministry in 2015 states that the “rejects
from the Washery shall be the prop-
erty of the Authority”—in this case,
RRVUNL. The reallotment agreement
for Parsa East and Kanta Basan states
that the “allottee”—RRVUNL—shall
“make best efforts to reduce genera-
tion of middling or washery rejects and
utilise the same in any captive power
plant of the Allottee.” It adds that any
middlings or rejects that “may be sold
by the Allottee and the Allottee shall
maintain separate records for the mid-
dling or washery rejects generated,
utilised and sold.”
The mining-services agreement
between PKCL and Adani Mining,
signed in July 2009, provided for the
establishment of a coal washery at
Parsa East and Kanta Basan, and states
that “the washery rejects are the prop-
erty of Adani Mining Pvt. Limited.”
In March 2013, the same month that
production at the block began, Surguja
Power Private Limited, a fully-owned
subsidiary of Adani Mining, applied for
environmental clearance for a power
plant at Parsa East and Kanta Basan.
The application stated that “the coal
washery rejects are proposed to be used
by Surguja Power Private Limited for
this project.”
AEL and RRVUNL’s annual reports
have continued to refer to the 2009
mining-services agreement, even
though it violates the terms of the
model contract and the reallotment.
The Surguja plant has been delayed,
but the plans to build it remain in place.
The website of Adani Power states
that “Adani Group is planning to setup
Surguja Thermal Power Project …
The Coal Washery reject will be used
as Primary Fuel.” An Environmental
Clearance Compliance Report submit-
ted to the ministry of the environment
by RRVUNL in June 2016 states that all
rejects shall be used at a power plant
that “shall be commissioned in 6-7
years.” Until then, it continues, “the
coal rejects shall be sold … to users of
coal rejects.”
RRVUNL is paying more to use coal granted to
it for free than it would for coal available from
another state-owned enterprise, SECL—to the
benefit of a joint venture controlled by a private
entity, the Adani Group.
In effect, AEL, since absorbing
Adani Mining, has been allowed to
sell rejects from Parsa East and Kanta
Basan, a captive coal block, on the open
market. According to AEL’s 2016-17
annual report, the block yielded 8.27
million tonnes of raw coal that year,
and washed coal of 7.41 million tonnes.
Calculating the difference, the quantity
of rejects generated over the period is
0.86 million tonnes. The rejects from
beneficiating G11 coal would be of a
variety of lower grades, the very lowest
and cheapest of which is G17. In 2016,
SECL’s concessionary rate on G17 coal
for power utilities was R470 per tonne.
Even assuming that all the rejects from
Parsa East and Kanta Basan were of G17
grade—and so yield the lowest possible
earnings on the market—an estimate of
the lowest possible benefit to AEL from
selling 0.86 million tonnes of the rejects
comes to R40.42 crore.
MARCH 2018
coalgate 2.0 · reportage
AEL will lose the right to sell the
rejects once the Surguja plant becomes
operational, but even so it will con-
tinue to receive them for free to fuel
the plant. Again, assuming that all the
rejects are of G17 grade, the resulting
benefit to AEL for each tonne would be
at least equal to the SECL price of G17
coal for power utilities. Put another
way, the estimate of the minimum an-
nual benefit remains the same whether
AEL sells the rejects or uses it for its
own plant.
Extrapolating from the 2016 figures
for the 30-year duration of the lease,
the total estimated gain for AEL just
from this arrangement on the rejects is
then no less than R1,212.6 crore—over
$170 million. Environmental filings on
Parsa East and Kanta Basan estimate
that the amount of rejects generated
from an annual raw yield of 10 million
tonnes could be 2.25 million tonnes per
year. If the actual yield of rejects each
year is closer to that figure than the
0.86 million tonnes reflected in AEL’s
2016-17 annual report, the benefit to the
company could be significantly greater.
In September 2016, RRVUNL applied
for approval to expand the permitted
production at Parsa East and Kanta Ba-
san to 15 million tonnes per year. It did
so despite not having raised produc-
tion to the existing limit of 10 million
tonnes per year; in May 2016, RRVUNL
forfeited a deposited guarantee of
R16.48 crore after missing a stipulated
deadline to do so. The proposed expan-
sion is still awaiting approvals. If it is
authorised and production rises, the
potential benefits to PKCL from over-
pricing coal and to AEL from receiving
washery rejects would multiply.
PKCL and RRVUNL have turned
down right-to-information requests
from activists seeking details of the
mining-services agreement for Parsa
East and Kanta Basan. The Caravan
43
coalgate 2.0 · reportage
MINIMUM ADDITIoNAl GAINS
ESTIMATED foR ADANI ENTERPRISES lIMITED
fRoM WASHERY REJECTS AloNE AT PARSA EAST
AND KANTA BASAN
declared quantity of
rejects generated
SECL price of G17 coal,
the lowest and cheapest
grade possible
quAnTiTy MuLTiPLiEd by PriCE
Annual gain for AEL
MuLTiPLiEd ovEr 30-yEAr
vALidiTy of LEASE
ToTAl GAIN
To AEl
Calculations reflect extrapolation based on figures for 2016-17 financial year
sent queries to RRVUNL and PKCL
seeking details of tenders and agree-
ments related to the mining and
purchasing of coal from the block, but
these had not been answered when this
piece went to press.
today, besides its interests in the three
coal blocks in Chhattisgarh, the Adani
Group holds the rights to the Jitpur
coal block in Jharkhand, which it
successfully bid for in 2015. It also has
active power plants in Gujarat, Ma-
harashtra, Rajasthan and Karnataka,
and owns four ports and five shipping
terminals across the country, among
other interests.
The Adani Group has a history of
highly favourable treatment by govern-
ments from across the party spectrum.
It also has a long record of partner-
ships with state-owned enterprises
that have proven detrimental to public
44
0.86 million
tonnes
J 470 per tonne
860,000 x 470 =
J 40,42,00,000
(J 40.42 crore)
40,42,00,000 x 30 =
K 12,12,60,00,000
(L 1,212.6 crore)
interests but very advantageous to the
conglomerate.
The forerunner to the Adani Group,
a trading firm, was established in 1988,
with an annual revenue of roughly R2
crore. In the early 1990s, the Gujarat
government, with the Janata Dal leader
Chimanbhai Patel as chief minister,
granted the company and a partner
firm a cheap long-term lease on roughly
a thousand hectares of land at Mundra,
on the Gujarati coast, for the declared
purpose of salt production. (Patel had
come to power at the head of a coali-
tion with the BJP, before reforming the
government with the support of the
Congress instead.) The partner firm
pulled out of the project, and the Adani
Group decided to build a port on the
land instead. After the port became
operational in 1998—the company
had also ventured into trading coal by
then—the group’s revenues hit R2,800
THE CARAVAN
crore. Within the first years of Modi’s
term as chief minister, the Gujarat gov-
ernment handed over more than 5,500
hectares of additional land at Mundra
for the Adani Group to also establish a
special economic zone.
By 2006 the company was also build-
ing a thermal power plant at the site,
and had signed a long-term deal to
supply power to the Gujarat Urja Vikas
Nigam Limited, the state’s electricity
corporation. The Adani Group ven-
tured overseas for the first time when it
acquired a coal mine in Indonesia, and
was soon the largest importer of coal
in India. By 2007, its revenues stood at
around R17,000 crore.
The group started generating
electricity in 2011, under a subsidiary
named Adani Power. The Comptroller
and Auditor General, in a report on the
performance of Gujarat’s state-owned
enterprises for the 2011-12 financial
year, revealed that Adani Power, be-
tween 2009 and 2012, had not met its
commitments to supply power to the
Gujarat Urja Vikas Nigam. The electric-
ity corporation recovered only a third
of the penalty it was due from this,
translating to a loss of R160.26 crore.
This was one of numerous deals
involving state-owned enterprises in
Gujarat that the CAG flagged as having
advantaged the Adani Group. In a re-
port published in 2011, the CAG showed
that, between 2006 and 2009, the
Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation
bought natural gas on the open market
and sold it to an Adani subsidiary at a
cheaper rate, handing the company a
benefit of around R70 crore. In 2014, the
CAG revealed that the Gujarat govern-
ment had failed to monitor the con-
struction of part of the Mundra port,
and so failed to recover R110 crore due
to it. Questions have also been raised
over how, in 2013, Mundra overtook
the nearby state-owned port of Kandla
as the country’s top port based on ton-
nage, following a series of seemingly
self-destructive decisions by the Kandla
management.
The markets read Modi’s arrival as
the prime minister as a major boost
to the Adani Group’s fortunes. The
group’s listed companies saw their
value rise by some 85 percent soon after
Modi’s inauguration, compared to a

roughly 15-percent increase for the Sensex over
the same period. Within a year of Modi’s term at
the centre, the companies’ market value had risen
by over R50,000 crore.
Numerous enterprises owned by the central
government have entered partnerships with the
Adani Group under Modi’s tenure. In 2017, Indian
Oil and Gail invested in a 49-percent stake in a
planned natural-gas terminal valued at R6,000
crore at the Adani Group-owned port of Dhamra,
in Odisha. This required both corporations to
borrow on top of their already heavy debt bur-
dens. The controlling stake in the venture is with
AEL. Indian Oil has also invested R750 crore in
a 50-percent stake in a R5,040-crore natural-gas
terminal at Mundra that is part of a joint-venture
between the AEL and the Gujarat State Petroleum
Corporation.
Such investments help shore up the finances of
the Adani Group at a time when the conglomerate
is massively indebted—as it has been for much of
its history. As of 2007, the group’s debts amounted
to a quarter of its revenues. By 2013, according
to the financial-services firm Credit Suisse, its
debt, of R81,000 crore, had outstripped its R47,000
amit dave / reuters
coalgate 2.0 · reportage
The Adani Group has a long record of
partnerships with state-owned enterprises
that have proven detrimental to public
interests but very advantageous to the
conglomerate.
revenues. Credit Suisse has named four Adani below: At Mundra,
subsidiaries—Adani Power, Adani Ports and SEZ, the Adani Group
Adani Enterprises and Adani Transmission—on received more than
5,500 hectares of
a list of 19 highly indebted Indian companies. As
additional land in
of April 2017, the total debts of the group’s listed the first years of
companies alone totalled a breathtaking R1.1 lakh Modi’s term as the
crore, or over $16 billion. The Adani Group, on its chief minister of
website, says it has revenues of over $11 billion. Gujarat, and added
The State Bank of India has stalled on approval a special economic
zone to its port
for a proposed loan of R6,200 crore, or $1 bil-
facilities at the site.
lion, to fund a controversial Adani Group project
to develop a coal mine and port terminal in the
Australian state of Queensland. The bank issued
a memorandum of understanding regarding the
loan in 2014, after Modi took national power. Four
major Australian banks refused credit for the
MARCH 2018 45
coalgate 2.0 · reportage
Such investments help shore up the finances
of the Adani Group at a time when the
conglomerate is massively indebted—as it
has been for much of its history. As of April
2017, the total debts of the group’s listed
companies alone totalled a breathtaking T1.1
lakh crore, or over $16 billion.
project, and multiple other international lenders—
including Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Citigroup, Gold-
man Sachs and more—also declined to back it. The
Queensland government recently announced that
it will veto a proposal for a massive concessional
loan under an official infrastructure scheme. The
Adani Group has twice missed deadlines to secure
funding for the project.
The Adani Group’s troubles with the law began
as early as in 1999, when the Directorate of Reve-
nue Intelligence arrested Rajesh Adani, a younger
brother of Gautam Adani and currently the
managing director of the Adani Group, for evading
customs duties. Rajesh has since been arrested
several more times on charges of customs fraud,
most recently in 2013. In 2008, Kamal Trivedi, the
advocate general of the state of Gujarat, repre-
sented Rajesh before the Gujarat High Court in
an appeal against charges of customs fraud by the
Enforcement Directorate.
The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence has,
since 2010, also been investigating over 40 compa-
nies, including five firms of the Adani Group, for
over-invoicing coal imported from Indonesia by an
estimated R29,000 crore, resulting in inflated prices
for power companies and consumers. In 2017, the
DRI moved a court in Singapore to order that an
Adani company registered in the country hand over
records of coal imports from Indonesia. The group
has appealed to a higher court to block the order.
In August 2017, three years into the Modi
government’s rule, the DRI dropped all charges
against Adani Power Maharashtra Limited and
Adani Power Rajasthan Limited in a case involv-
ing the alleged overpricing of imported power-
transmission equipment by R4,000 crore. The
customs department has challenged this deci-
sion before a tribunal, arguing that the DRI’s
order “suffers from several contradictions which
indicate either total non-application of mind or
recklessness in passing of the order.”
Besides these cases, the Karnataka Lokayukta
reported, in 2011, that AEL was involved in a scam
worth R6,000 crore involving illegal exports of
iron ore through the Belekeri port in Karnataka. A
2017 CAG report found that Adani Ports and SEZ
will reap undue gains of R29,217 crore from a deal
46 THE CARAVAN
signed with the Kerala government in 2014, when
the state was ruled by a Congress-led coalition,
to develop a port at Vizhinjam. The deal is being
probed by a commission appointed by the Kerala
High Court, and has faced fierce protests from
Vizhinjam locals who fear it will damage liveli-
hoods and the area’s ecology.
Environmental controversies have accompanied
multiple Adani Group projects beyond Vizhinjam
as well. In Goa, the group has been accused of
flouting environmental laws at its port terminal
in Mormugao, and causing alarming pollution at
the nearby town of Vasco. The group’s planned
port terminal in Australia has faced protests for
threatening sensitive ecological areas, includ-
ing the Great Barrier Reef. In 2014, the Gujarat
High Court shut down a dozen units of the group
in the Mundra special economic zone that were
operating without environmental clearance. The
Supreme Court has ordered an expert committee
under the environment ministry to probe allega-
tions that the group has flouted environmental
regulations at Mundra, resulting in the large-scale
destruction of mangrove forests and sand dunes.
the comptroller and auditor general’s draft
report on the coal scam estimated the undue
benefits to both private and state-owned allottees
when it valued the coal scam at R10.7 lakh crore.
In its final report on the allocations, submitted in
August that year, the CAG only put a figure on the
gains to private allottees—R1.86 lakh crore.
The CBI’s early investigations into the scam
looked only at blocks allotted to private compa-
nies, until, in September 2012, the Central Vigi-
lance Commission, a government body tasked with
fighting corruption, directed the agency to probe
all allocations since 1993. (Private companies were
barred from coal mining after the nationalisation
of the sector in the early 1970s, but were permitted
to operate mines with specific end-use projects af-
ter 1993. In February 2018, the government lifted
that restriction as well, to allow private companies
to mine coal commercially and sell it on the open
market.) The Supreme Court, when it cancelled all
but four prior allocations in 2014, also appointed
a public prosecutor and a judge to hear all cases
related to the allocations in a CBI special court.
The investigations surrounding the coal scam
have been ongoing for over five years now. Only
a relatively small number of the many firms and
individuals involved have been charged, and an
even smaller number have faced prosecution.
Throughout this period, questions have been
raised over procedural delays in certain cases, the
rapid dismissal of others, and the lack of action
against powerful politicians, businessmen and
corporations.
 coalgate 2.0 · reportage

SoME MAJoR vIolATIoNS BY THE ADANI GRoUP REPoRTED BY offICIAl AGENCIES

AdAni GrouP GovErnMEnT body AGEnCy LoSS To PubLiC

ChArGES of
CoMPAny or or STATE-ownEd rEPorTinG ExChEquEr
wronGdoinG
ProjECT EnTErPriSE invoLvEd vioLATionS
adani enerGy Gujarat State GSPC bought natural
Petroleum Corporation gas on the open market, Comptroller and
sold it at lower rate to Auditor General J 70 crore
Adani Energy
adani power Gujarat Urja Vikas Adani Power failed to
Nigam Limited supply electricity to
GUVNL as per terms of Comptroller and
agreement, was fined Auditor General J 80 crore
only one-third of defined
penalty amount

adani ports and Gujarat Maritime Extended limits of

Comptroller and
seZ; Mundra
port and seZ
Board port without required
agreement Auditor General J 118 crore
NA 12 units operating in Ministry of
special economic zone Environment,
without licence; Forest and
destruction of sand Climate Change nA
dunes, mangrove
forests

adani ports and Various Modification of concession

Comptroller and
seZ; ViZhinjaM
international
departments of
the government
agreement, extension of
concession period
Auditor General J 29,217 crore
seaport
of Kerala
Interest lost due to
advance payment of
equity support
Comptroller and
Auditor General
J 124 crore
adani enterprises Various Illegal mining and
liMited; belekeri departments of export of iron ore; Karnataka
port [+4 non-
adani coMpanies]
the government bribery Lokayukta J 12,228 crore
of Karnataka

adani MorMuGao Mormugao Port Violation of the Air Goa Pollution

port terMinal Trust, Goa (Prevention and Control Board
Control of Pollution) nA
Act, 1981

adani power,
Maharashtra
NA Over-invoicing of
imported power
Directorate
of Revenue
J 6,000 crore
power eastern Grid equipment Intelligence [+higher power tariffs]
power transMission
coMpany
[+essar power]

adani enterprises, NTPC, MMTC, MSTC,

adani power, adani Over-invoicing Directorate
Tamil Nadu Generation
wilMar and VyoM of imported of Revenue
and Distribution
trade link
[+40 non-adani
Corporation, Gujarat
Indonesian coal Intelligence J 29,000 crore
coMpanies] State Electricity
Corporation, and others

MARCH 2018 47
coalgate 2.0 · reportage
right: The CBI has
been investigating
the coal scam for
over five years now.
Throughout this
period, questions
have been raised
over procedural
delays in certain
cases, the rapid
dismissal of others,
and the lack of
action against
powerful politicians,
businessmen and
corporations.
The Supreme Court began monitoring investi-
gations into the scam by late 2012, long before its
final verdict. The court asked the CBI to report
directly to it, without sharing any information
about its probe with the government. In 2013,
Ranjit Sinha, the CBI director, admitted that a
draft investigation report had been vetted by the
law minister and the prime minister’s office. The
Supreme Court remarked that “the heart of the
report was changed on the suggestions of the gov-
ernment officials.” It described the CBI as “a caged
parrot speaking in its master’s voice,” and added,
“It’s a sordid saga that there are many masters and
one parrot.”
In September 2014, the judge of the CBI special
court questioned the agency’s hurried closing of a
case in which it had earlier filed a First Informa-
tion Report that named the industrialist Kumar
Mangalam Birla, the former coal secretary PC
Parakh, and Manmohan Singh, whose term as
prime minister had ended just a few months
earlier. The special court also summoned Singh,
but that order was subsequently stayed by the Su-
preme Court. In 2017, while hearing another case,
the CBI special court concluded that Singh had
been “kept in the dark by former coal secretary
HC Gupta who had prima facie violated the law
and the trust reposed in him on the issue of coal
block allocation.”
Also in September 2014, it emerged that a visi-
tors’ diary for the official residence of Ranjit Sinha
showed visits by a host of individuals accused in
the coal scam while he was still the CBI director,
48 THE CARAVAN
sonu mehta / hindustan times / getty images
including senior politicians, as well as representa-
tives of corporations involved, such as the Essar
Group and the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group.
Sinha is currently being investigated by the CBI
for abusing his authority to scuttle coal-scam
cases.
The agency’s latest status report on the coal-
scam investigations, dated January 2018, shows
that it has registered a total of 55 FIRs in connec-
tion to the allocations. (Based on the CBI’s FIRs,
the Enforcement Directorate has started looking
into economic offences by the companies involved,
and has so far issued attachment orders in 13
cases.) The CBI special court’s first convictions
were handed down in July 2016, to directors of a
private firm that had been allotted a coal block in
Jharkhand, and officials of another private firm
that been allotted a block in Chhattisgarh. In the
latest convictions, in December 2017, the court
sentenced the former Jharkhand chief minister
Madhu Koda, other former Jharkhand officials,
and the former coal secretary HC Gupta. Gupta
had earlier been sentenced in another case as well,
along with two officials of the coal ministry.
These cases, and others that have reached vari-
ous stages of prosecution, by and large involve
relatively small private companies; the major
exceptions are two cases that involve the indus-
trialist and Congress politician Naveen Jindal and
his Jindal Steel and Power Limited. No officials of
allottee companies linked to high-profile corpo-
rations such as the Tata Group, the Essar Group,
the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group and

the Adani Group have been charged so
far. The status of the CBI’s investiga-
tions into these companies has not been
made public. The agency is yet to file fi-
nal reports in the cases of 138 out of 168
private companies that were allocated
coal blocks between 2006 and 2009.
When it comes to allocations to state-
owned enterprises, the CBI’s latest
status report says that it has completed
inquiries regarding 101 coal blocks. The
agency has reported that “no case is
made out in respect of 85 coal blocks,”
and that the Central Vigilance Com-
mission has agreed to this. With regard
to the remaining 16 blocks, the agency
has registered six FIRs. Yet among
these six, the CBI has filed its final
reports, and proceeded with the cases,
in connection to only two FIRs. The
two state-owned enterprises charged in
these FIRs—and the only state-owned
companies to face prosecution so
far—are Karnataka Power Corporation
Limited and Himachal Pradesh Power
Corporation Limited.
The CBI did not respond to repeated
requests from The Caravan for informa-
tion on the status of its investigations.
Among the state-owned enterprises
against which the CBI has not filed
any FIRs so far is the Gujarat Mineral
Development Corporation, which had
been allocated two coal blocks—one
in Chhattisgarh, in the Hasdeo Arand
forest, and another in Odisha, in
partnership with a corporation of the
Pondicherry government. In January
2015, the Supreme Court issued a notice
to the chief secretary of the Gujarat
government after the state ignored re-
peated requests to provide the CBI with
documents pertinent to the matter.
The relevant coal block in Odisha,
called Naini, was allotted in 2007 to the
GMDC and the Pondicherry Industrial
Promotion Development and Invest-
ment Corporation, or PIPDIC, on the
understanding that each would set up
a power plant to run on coal from the
block. The two corporations formed a
joint venture, with 50-percent own-
ership by each, to exploit the block.
GMDC’s power plant was to be located
at either Angul, in Odisha, or Dumka,
in Jharkhand.
A 2015 CAG report revealed that the
joint venture suffered a loss of around
coalgate 2.0 · reportage
Before the Karnataka High Court, EMTA’s
lawyer brought up how RRVUNL had continued
its mining-services agreement with an Adani
company, and argued that EMTA should be allowed
to continue its prior agreement with a state-
owned allottee as well. In its ruling, the high court
reminded EMTA that the Supreme Court had “held
that the law did not permit a joint venture by a
state government with a private party, in mining.”
R55 crore after the Gujarat government, develop the blocks. After the Supreme
under Narendra Modi, insisted on Court dissolved all prior allotments,
altering the terms of these prior agree- KPCL annulled the agreement with
ments. It noted that, in 2009, the state EMTA. The private company chose to
government declared that GMDC’s challenge this. Before the Karnataka
share of coal from Naini would be sup- High Court, EMTA’s lawyer brought
plied to Adani Enterprises and another up how RRVUNL had continued its
private company, Torrent Power, and mining-services agreement with Adani
that these companies would set up the companies, and argued that EMTA
required plant. As both companies should be allowed to continue its prior
wanted to locate the plant in Gujarat in- agreement with a state-owned allottee
stead of Odisha or Jharkhand, the Gu- as well. In its ruling, in December 2015,
jarat government proposed to transport the high court reminded EMTA that
the coal there, across the breadth of the the Supreme Court had “held that the
country. (One of the factors considered law did not permit a joint venture by a
when allotting blocks was the proxim- state government with a private party,
ity of the proposed mine and power in mining,” and reaffirmed the annul-
plants, in order to avoid the expenses of ment of the contract between KPCL
transporting coal over long distances.) and EMTA.
The coal ministry consented to the pro-
posal on the condition that the ministry the supreme court’s historic 2014
of power and the government of Odisha judgment was an opportunity for India
agree. The former did, but the latter re- to end the coal scam once and for all.
fused as the proposal violated the terms The court’s message was clear—fix the
of the allotment. In December 2012, legislation and prosecute the violators.
the coal ministry cancelled the alloca- Yet the Modi government has applied
tion of the block. The GMDC and the a double standard when it comes to
PIPDIC each had to forfeit a deposited the Adani Group’s involvement with
guarantee of R16.5 crore as a result of RRVUNL, with the CBI and multiple
their failure to develop the block within other official bodies turning a blind eye
stipulated deadlines. The joint venture to clear violations of law and contempt
also lost around R23 crore that it had for the Supreme Court’s judgment.
already sunk into the project. From publicly available evidence, it is
The CBI’s FIR against the Kar- clear that the Adani Group has, at great
nataka Power Corporation Limited, cost to the public exchequer, received
which was filed in 2015, also involved massive advantages from Gautam
the EMTA Group, a private company Adani’s relationship with Modi—first
that had formed a joint venture with through Modi’s tenure as the chief
KPCL to exploit the coal blocks allot- minister of Gujarat, and now his tenure
ted to the state-owned enterprise. In as the prime minister of India. As
the FIR, the CBI had charged EMTA long as Parsa East and Kanta Basan
and KPCL with “cheating and corrup- continues to be exploited on the basis
tion.” KPCL had also signed a mining- of pre-2014 agreements, the coal scam
services agreement with EMTA to lives on. s
MARCH 2018 49
 shridhar lal manandhar collection / nepal picture library

50
reportage

THE CARAVAN

Storeyed Past
The movement to rebuild an iconic monument
in earthquake-hit Nepal
on a sunday morning last october,
in a cramped office overlooking Kath-
mandu Durbar Square—an iconic plaza
surrounding Nepal’s old royal palace—a
small group of volunteers was frantical-
ly preparing for a public exhibition to be
held that afternoon. The subject of the
event was the reconstruction of Kast-
hamandap, a giant pagoda-like building
that gave Kathmandu its name, and
which, for more than a thousand years—
until it collapsed in an earthquake in
2015—had been a public fixture, shel-
tering ascetics, weary traders, and on
occasion, men exiled from their homes
for the night by their irate wives. The
office had the chaotic air of a crafts fair.
People rushed around wielding scissors,
stepping over paper scraps, glue-bottle
caps and chunks of styrofoam. At one
end, nine volunteers pieced together a
3D paper-model of the plaza outside.
The exhibition was organised by the
Campaign to Rebuild Kasthamandap,
or RK, a non-profit that has tried to
ensure the building is reconstructed as
closely to the original as possible and
that its associated cultural practices
remain intact. RK had held two work-
shops in the previous days. One was led
by volunteer architects, who presented
the logistics of construction to a panel
of experts. The other workshop had
guided groups of locals to document
and map out, on floor plans, the ritu-
als that had been performed inside the
building and its vicinity.
/ ARCHITECTURE
Atul BhAttArAi
As the exhibition’s opening time ap-
proached, the room swelled with volun-
teers. Several wore the Rebuild Kastha-
mandap T-shirt, with a slogan printed
on the back: “Let us rebuild our heritage
ourselves.” A short while later, the
group had shifted downstairs to an open
space at the centre of Maru, the Newari
name for the neighbourhood. (New-
ars are indigenous inhabitants of the
Kathmandu Valley.) Posters, including
proposed architectural drawings, had
been taped against the side of a building
for public scrutiny. A few steps away
was the site of Kasthamandap: about the
size of two adjacent tennis courts, now a
fenced-in mound of bricks and wooden
beams. A poster showed the building as
it had stood, “austere and ponderous,”
as described by the cultural historian
Mary Slusser, although others have
been less generous with their descrip-
tions: Alok Tuladhar, RK’s spokesper-
son, told me it was, admittedly, “a little
ugly.”
The exhibition soon caught the at-
tention of locals. A group of older men
circled RK’s paper model of the plaza
and critiqued its accuracy. Passers-by
picked up markers left on the table and
corrected spellings and names of rituals
on the posters. A crowd formed around
the architectural drawings, which RK
had ensured were faithful to the origi-
nal structure—an approach derided by
those who believe Kasthamandap col-
lapsed because of its flawed engineer-
march 2018
reportage
ing. A middle-aged man, dressed as if he
had made a sharp detour from a hike,
began lecturing the architects on the
team. “Don’t let people with limited
knowledge of structural engineering
dictate your design,” he announced. On
the margin of a drawing, he wrote: “1st
principle + responsibility as profession-
als: life safety.” Below, “2. aesthetics.”
The man, who later introduced
himself to me as Ananta Raj Baidya, a
structural engineer based in California,
summed up his position as: “Once it
goes up, it shouldn’t go down.” I asked
Badan Lal Nyachhyon, an architect
accompanying him, about his view on
RK’s work. “Our heritage comes out
of this structure,” he told me. Baidya
interjected: “They are all young, they
have energy, but if they don’t channel
the energy properly, they will destroy
everything!”
“Everything,” Nyachhyon intoned,
looking grave.
Baidya grabbed a red marker and be-
gan scrawling comments on one of the
drawings. The poster, secured to the
wall with masking tape, suddenly came
undone on one corner, folding in on
itself. Nyachhyon laughed. “It’s collaps-
ing?” he said. “Already?”
as the namesake of kathmandu, Kast-
hamandap—literally “wooden pavil-
lion”—has a special grip on the Nepali
public imagination. Every schoolchild
knows its origin story. Its likeness is on
51
storeyed past · reportage

previous page:
Kasthamandap,
a giant pagoda-
like building that
gave Kathmandu
its name, was
considered one of
the most iconic
monuments of
Nepal.

right: After it
was razed in the
2015 earthquake,
a movement
to rebuild
Kasthamandap
has engendered an
intense debate over
Nepalis’ attitudes
towards their past.
narendra shrestha / epa

the newest five-rupee note, on the National Tour-
ism Board logo, and on the logo of Kantipur, the
most widely-read Nepali-language newspaper. Its
name is used by legions of businesses in the city,
from banks and schools to an airline.
Likely conceived as a non-religious site, Kast-
hamandap became a sattal, a subtype Slusser
described as “half shelter, half temple,” after a
Gorakhnath statue was installed inside around
600 years ago. Over the centuries, it was used as a
royal council hall, a rest house and a marketplace.
Generations of visitors commented on its size—it
is the largest building in Newar architecture—its
antiquity and the austerity of its design. One
nineteenth-century Scottish visitor remarked that
it was “of so singular a form, that our terms of art
could not be applied to describe its architecture.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, it became a habitat for
doped-up hippies: the popular Bollywood song
“Dum Maro Dum” was shot there. More recently,
porters loitered in its ambulatory during the day,
awaiting work. A 1997 Let’s Go guidebook describes
it as possessing “a feeling of transience, kind of like
a train platform.”
Since it collapsed in the 2015 earthquake, there
has been a growing demand to rebuild Kastha-
mandap. The government has been criticised for
being callous toward heritage, but even its critics
are divided on how reconstruction should pro-
ceed. Some, such as RK, argue for a traditional
approach, replicating the original structure and
resuming practices such as pujas and festivals.
Others have made a case for integrating Western
engineering concepts, citing safety concerns. For
many, the debate over reconstruction is changing
their relationship with the past, and has become a

52 THE CARAVAN

way to get in touch with an attenuated
cultural identity.
when the french traveller Gustave
Le Bon visited the Kathmandu Valley in
1885, he was struck by the profusion of
temples he encountered. If the “moral
level” of a people were reflected in the
number of their religious buildings, he
wrote in his book, Voyage to Nepal, then
“one could assume that the Nepalese
are the most virtuous people of the uni-
verse.” Le Bon was evidently not a fan of
this logic—elsewhere he wrote that “it is
rare that a Hindu speaks the truth … but
a Nepalese never does”—but it is not dif-
ficult to imagine why he was impressed
with the hundreds of tiered temples
crammed into the Valley. And Kastha-
mandap, as one local elder described it
to me, is “the grandfather of them all.”
For a structure that had amassed
enough importance by the twelfth cen-
tury to have become a synecdoche for
the surrounding city, Kasthamandap
has a thin historical record. In some
ways, this is not surprising, since its
early life was a time of political tur-
bulence. When the Licchavi kingdom
dissolved in the ninth century, it was
replaced by warring fiefdoms of the
Transitional Period—something like
the European Dark Ages—during
which the historical record amounted
to little more than a sketchy timeline
of kings. In place of facts about Kast-
hamandap are creation myths, the
most popular of which is recorded in
a nineteenth-century chronicle, His-
tory of the Kings of Nepal. During the
Machhendranath festival, the legend
goes, a resident of the city trapped the
Kalpavriksha—a wish-fulfilling tree
in Sanskrit mythology—that was lurk-
ing in the crowd in the guise of a hu-
man, and freed it only after extracting
a promise that it would provide him
with a single massive tree, with enough
wood to build a sattal. The Kalpavrik-
sha agreed for its spirit to remain in the
sattal until it was consecrated. To trap
it indefinitely, the resident decided
Kasthamandap would be consecrated
only when the price of salt and oil in
the market became equal.
Kasthamandap is sometimes referred
to as a temple, a misconception regard-
ing its function more than its form.
Although twice as big as the largest
temple, Kasthamandap, with its tiers
and sloped, recessed roofs, was easy
to confuse with the religious buildings
around it. But its religious function
was incidental to its main purpose as
an “international guest house,” as the
historian Kashinath Tamot put it to me.
Soon after the 2015 earthquake, Slusser,
encouraging Kasthamandap’s recon-
If the “moral level” of a people were reflected in
the number of their religious buildings, Gustave
Le Bon wrote in his book, Voyage to Nepal, then
“one could assume that the Nepalese are the most
virtuous people of the universe.”
march 2018
storeyed past · reportage
struction, wrote that it was “Nepal’s
heritage defined, a witness to its history
and evolution as a nation.” That history
is Kathmandu’s role as an ancient lay-
over for travellers, and Kasthamandap’s
as the kind of place they would stay
in. Until the eighteenth century, when
new routes became more expedient,
the preferred path between India and
Tibet was through the Valley, through
Yangala—an ancient village that made
up the southern part of what is now
Kathmandu—and which, by the twelfth
century, was occasionally called Kast-
hamandap. From here, one would have
headed to the mountain passes to the
north, toward Lhasa, or to the flat plains
of the Terai, which connected to India
through the Uttarapatha. But seasonal
trends gave Kathmandu an outsized im-
portance: the passes into Tibet clogged
up with snow in the winter, and the jun-
gles of the Terai, called the “unhealthi-
est region in all of Asia” by one foreign
visitor, flared up with malaria in the
summer. Travellers were left stranded
in the Valley for months as they awaited
milder weather.
The first mention of traders crossing
Kathmandu on the trans-Himalayan
route appeared in the fifth century.
Inscriptions from 300 AD onwards in-
dicate that Nepal exported musk, wool,
iron and copper to India. After the Ti-
betan Empire coalesced in the seventh
century under King Songtsen Gampo,
the trade route was formalised, and a
“constant stream” of Chinese pilgrims
and diplomats, Slusser wrote, began
passing through Kathmandu. By the
fourteenth century, the Valley had been
united by King Jayasthiti Malla. A cen-
tury later it crystallised into the three
kingdoms of Bhaktapur (alternatively
Bhadgaon), Patan and Kasthamandap,
which had by now come to signify the
entire city. So many Tibetan traders
journeyed between Lhasa and the Val-
ley that they were assessed a special
visitors’ tax. Trade exploded, and for
53
storeyed past · reportage
alina tamrakar
top: Rebuild the next 300 years, Nepal accrued a wealth dispro-
Kasthamandap, portionate to its size.
a non-profit Meanwhile, the three thrones were occupied by
organisation,
a string of bickering cousin-kings, whose record
has proposed
architectural plans of rifts and alliances read like something out of an
for Kasthamandap adolescent’s diary. Between 1698 and 1699: “This
that it claims to day Patan was isolated as Kathmandu and Bhadg-
have put together aon signed an agreement of mutual friendship”;
through public “This day the three cities again became friends”;
consultation.
“This day the three cities had united, but the Rajas
opposite page: of Kathmandu and Bhadgaon were not on speak-
Rebuild ing terms.” Rivalries were expressed occasionally
Kasthamandap’s in petty raids and skit-like battles—often shouting
supporters pledged
matches between standing armies—but mostly in
in front of the
house of Kumari, each king trying to upstage the other two with the
a living goddess opulence of his palace and temples, raising what
of Kathmandu, the writer Thomas Bell called a “forest of pagoda
to rebuild roofs” in the core of his city. Once built, a temple
Kasthamandap was cared for by a dedicated guthi, a hereditary
through a
trust managed by locals. The guthi was endowed
“community-led”
process. by the patron, often a king, with land, the returns
from which were used for rituals, maintenance and
periodic renovations.
In 1744, Prithvi Narayan Shah, the king of a
northern hill territory called Gorkha, began cap-
turing kingdoms that girded the Valley, slowly
snuffing out its trade. Twenty-four years after he
launched this campaign, Shah invaded Kastha-
mandap, which the Gorkhalis had adapted into
the name “Kathmandu.” In a year’s time he had
conquered Patan and Bhaktapur. Over the rest of
his life, Shah would expand his empire and call it
Nepal, a name originally used for the Valley.
The bellicose Gorkhalis, Le Bon wrote when he
visited nearly a century and a half later, “form a
much superior race by their martial qualities, com-
54 THE CARAVAN
pared to other inhabitants,” but “certainly do not
have the artistic dispositions of the race they con-
quered.” At first, the new kings built in the Newar
style, but within a few generations temple-building
had largely ceased. Of the “remarkable” monu-
ments in the city, “almost all … have been built be-
fore the Gorkha domination,” Le Bon wrote. Since
the Gorkha conquest, he continued, “the major
parts of the country’s monuments are not main-
tained, any more, and are falling into ruin.”
on the morning of 25 april 2015, Nimbus Sav-
ings and Credit Cooperative was holding a blood
donation drive at Kasthamandap, where 54 of its
employees and shareholders had reportedly come
to volunteer. At four minutes to noon, the ground
began to shake. Loose bricks and pieces of timber
rained down on the participants. Moments later,
the sattal collapsed, killing ten people, some with
needles still in their arms.
Later that day, the army pulled out bodies
from the rubble. As aftershocks rattled weakened
homes, some locals set up camp on top of the site.
At a tourism programme three weeks later, Prime
Minister KP Oli talked of rebuilding the Dhara-
hara, a lighthouse-like tower some way south of
Maru that the earthquake had reduced to a jagged
stump. The tower, built in 1832, was quickly fash-
ioned by the media into a symbol of heritage recon-
struction. A small group of older locals in Maru,
led by Birendra Bhakta Shrestha, a former mayoral
candidate, “got pissed by the talk of Dharahara this
and Dharahara that,” Tuladhar told me, and began
speaking to the media about the historical value
of Kasthamandap. In July, the government an-
nounced that the Durbar Square restoration would
be handled by the Kathmandu Metropolitan City,
or KMC, and that of the royal palace by the Depart-
ment of Archaeology, or DoA, for a total of 7 to 10
billion Nepali rupees.
By April 2016, the KMC had decided that Kast-
hamandap would be built through the tender pro-
cess, in which construction firms place bids and
the lowest bidder is given the contract. It estimated
that construction would take three years and cost
192 million Nepali rupees. But when the DoA post-
ed its proposed design in the Durbar Square court-
yard, they were excoriated by Birendra Bhakta and
others, who argued that the plans—which included
modern materials, such as steel, structural glue and
concrete—did not meet even the DoA’s own con-
servation guidelines. In an article in the Kathman-
du Post, Baidya, the structural engineer, wrote that
the plans were “haphazardly conceived” and made
unnecessary compromises to “traditional and heri-
tage architecture and ambiance,” without adding
earthquake resistance. The work was subsequently
halted by the government.

Some months later, Birendra Bhakta
met Sumana Shrestha, a former man-
agement consultant, and Tuladhar, an
IT professional and documentarian.
They began holding public debates
on the “downfalls of the tender sys-
tem”—which is widely thought to en-
able politicians to absolve themselves
of responsibility over a structure and
extract a cut from contractors. They
decided the group should take a lead on
raising money from the public, to create
a sense of ownership over reconstruc-
tion; they would then use the money
to contract work out to architectural
firms and craftsmen. Tuladhar realised,
however, that his sense of urgency was
not shared by his older colleagues, who
“have very high attachments to our
culture, heritage, community involve-
ment,” he told me, and were also politi-
cally connected, but “were not energetic
anymore.” Earlier, Tuladhar had set up
a Facebook page—“The Campaign to
Rebuild Kasthamandap”; he soon began
receiving messages from students and
young professionals, whom he took in as
volunteers.
In December, a UNESCO-funded
archaeological team from Durham
alina tamrakar
University wrapped up a six-week ex-
cavation of the Kasthamandap site. It
announced that the foundation dated
from two periods, hundreds of years
before the earliest recorded mention of
the sattal. An inner wall was found to be
from the seventh century, and an outer
wall—indicating an expansion of the
original site—from the ninth century.
The walls formed a nine-cell matrix,
which was touted as having religious
value. To mark the end of excavations,
Tuladhar told me, RK held a Satwa puja
with 185 monks, intended as a call to the
surrounding community to “build Kast-
hamandap themselves.” Four months
later, in what the Facebook page called
a “mega event,” supporters pledged in
front of the house of the Kumari—a liv-
ing goddess of Kathmandu—to rebuild
Kasthamandap through a “community-
led” process.
The publicity this drew seemed to
make the government receptive to col-
laboration. In April 2017, the National
Reconstruction Authority, or NRA, a
government agency formed after the
earthquake, met with Birendra Bhakta
and others in what a post called a “fiery
but productive” meeting. On 12 May, RK
march 2018
storeyed past · reportage
posted to its page: “Today is a great day,
and now is a much awaited moment.”
Two days before local elections, the
NRA had coordinated a blanket four-
way agreement, designating RK respon-
sible for reconstruction and the DoA
and the KMC as supervisory bodies.
A month later, on 18 June, volunteers
erected a bamboo scaffolding to cover
Kasthamandap’s exposed foundation
before the monsoon rains began. But
eight days later, another group of locals
padlocked the site, arguing that RK
lacked legitimacy. Two days after that,
workers from the KMC dismantled the
structure. “The room, which is usually
abuzz with activity, is starkly muted
today,” wrote Sanjit Pradhananga in
the Kathmandu Post about the RK of-
fice. “A heavy cloud of frustration looms
large. Every few minutes, a volunteer
rises, peeks out the window, sighs, and
sits back down.” In a subsequent press
release, RK called it vandalism. Bidhya
Sundar Shakya, the newly elected mayor
of Kathmandu, said the four-way agree-
ment was invalid, having been signed
before the election, and announced that
the KMC would take charge of recon-
struction.
55
storeyed past · reportage
opposite page:
The architecture
few terms are heard more frequently at RK
events than “intangible heritage”: the legends and
from the time practices associated with a tangible structure,
of the Ranas
mostly comprises
upheld by the people who use it. Although Kast-
neoclassical-style hamandap was never associated with a dedicated
palaces, one of guthi, it was linked to the rites of several clan
which the French guthis. Tuladhar told me that from the outset, RK
traveller Gustave Le had interviewed dozens of locals, to uncover and
Bon called a “horrid publicise the sattal’s intangible heritage.
semi-European
building, totally
In 1905, the French traveller Sylvain Lévi wrote
in his book Le Népal that the “outstanding trait”
lacking in any
of a Newar is “his liking for society”: Newars live
interest.”
in compact, multistory houses, even if this means
their living space is cramped, “somewhat in the
manner of the Parisian,” he wrote. This attention
to society is reflected in communal gatherings. In
a 2005 lecture, the social anthropologist Gérard
Toffin said about the Newars: “There are no ethnic
groups in Nepal that devote more time and money
to rituals, festivals and offerings to the gods.” It
also comes through in the wealth of Newar archi-
tecture that falls between the privacy of a house
and the publicness of a road, such as the gazebo-
like patis, used for shelter, meetings, public events
and bhajans—which were a nightly occurrence at
Kasthamandap.
Guthis oversee both festivals and the manage-
ment of these buildings. Derived from the Sanskrit
word “gosthi,” meaning assembly, Newar guthis are
hereditary trusts. Most have members of the same
caste, but another type, which periodically shores
up public infrastructure such as roads or temples,
may span castes. Newar families tend to belong to
many guthis, all of which fund their activities with
returns from land holdings. They meet shortfalls
by collecting dues. Toffin has called guthis a form
of “social control” for levying fines on those who
shirk obligations like attending festivals, to ensure
practices persisted across generations. In the past,
to leave one’s guthi amounted to self-ostracisation.
But as families have relocated from their ancestral
homes in the past few decades, local bonds have
weakened, and many traditions have been aban-
doned.
After the Valley fell to Prithvi Narayan Shah in
1769, guthi land was sequestered first by the new
kings, and later, more gleefully, by the Ranas, who
seized control of the kingdom with a coup d’état in
1846. The Ranas used the funds to build neoclassi-
cal-style palaces, one of which Le Bon calls a “hor-
rid semi-European building, totally lacking in any
interest.” In past decades, further guthi land was
embezzled by guthiyars or lost to tenants because
of property laws, which has caused festivals to
become less frequent and opulent, and the regular
maintenance of many temples to be overlooked.
While interviewing residents about their ties
to the sattal, RK launched a series called Bakhan
56 THE CARAVAN
In 1905, the French traveller
Sylvain Lévi wrote in his book
Le Népal that the “outstanding
trait” of a Newar is “his liking
for society”: Newars live in
compact, multistory houses,
even if this means their living
space is cramped.
Nyani Wa—“come tell your story” in Newari—to
document these accounts. The two instalments
so far have featured active guthis, which have ex-
isted for centuries to carry out their yearly ritual,
although these have been pared down in recent
decades for lack of funds. The Sa guthi raises 1 lakh
rupees annually from its members to hold a two-
day feast every January, which ends with a flag
being hoisted on the roof of the sattal to mark that
it is still incomplete, and a ritual announcement
that the price of salt and oil are still not at par. This
tradition was continued after the earthquake, with
the flag being hoisted from the middle of the ruins.
During Panchadaan, the members of the Ta Chatan
guthi hold a three-day feast for the priestly caste
outside the sattal, serving food from a gigantic pot,
which is arranged in the middle of a mandala made
of four planks of wood, which guthiyars claim is
the original Kasthamandap.
As RK hunted for stories, it found six more
guthis, most of which had folded long ago. One
belonged to the Nath sect, whose members had
lived inside Kasthamandap for generations until
45 families were evicted in 1966. Members of the
sect I spoke to claimed the sattal had been built
for their use. Another was a guthi of Bajracharyas.
Drawing from traditional songs called charyas, Ya-
gyaman Pati Bajracharya, whose family was part of
the guthi, wrote a book in 2010 about Leela Bajra,
an eighth century scholar whom he billed as his
forty-third ancestor, and the one who trapped the
Kalpabriksha to build Kasthamandap. Tamot, the
historian, argued that his book is part of a wider
trend of people trying to “claim Kasthamandap for
themselves” by “weaving” emendations into popu-
lar legend.
The architect Kai Weise told me that the number
of groups with claims on Kasthamandap can make
it seem like “a little Jerusalem.” For most monu-
ments, it is not so contested which community is
responsible for rituals, nor are there so many dif-
fering opinions on reconstruction. The Sanskrit
scholar Mahesh Raj Panta, for example, told me
that before embarking on reconstruction a com-
mittee should be formed to study the formulas of

vastushastra—Hindu architecture—that
were used to plan the temples. Bajra-
charya told me the sattal should be
rebuilt only after he had performed cer-
tain pujas. When asked about his views
on using modern materials, he flared
up. “Sometimes I get so angry,” he said.
“If they want to show tourists what
Kasthamandap was like, let them build
betty woodsend collection / nepal picture library
it with their steel and concrete some-
where else. Leave this site as it is!”
for the purists among the heritage
conservationists in Nepal, Sudarshan
Raj Tiwari, a retired professor of
architecture at Tribhuvan University,
is something of a hero. At a recent
event, one booming activist announced,
without irony, that he regarded Tiwari
himself an example of “living heritage.”
For others, even some who largely agree
with his principles, Tiwari is seen as a
perpetual thorn in the side of progress,
with an endless list of grievances, and
a tiresome capacity to air them. One
engineer I spoke to said his proposal
for reinforcements to a temple in Patan,
approved by the DoA, had been put in
limbo because of the strident objections
of a certain critic. “I think you know
who,” he told me, darkly.
The debate in Nepal on heritage
restoration spans limited ground: most
architects agree that restored structures
ought to hew as closely as possible to
the original, with little deviation. But
many also argue that Newar architec-
ture is “unscientific,” and in the interest
of public safety ought to be reinforced
with stronger, modern materials. This
march 2018
storeyed past · reportage
debate took on a renewed urgency after
the 2015 earthquake brought down a
number of traditional buildings, which
many professionals took as proof of de-
fects in their engineering. Tiwari’s posi-
tion is that these buildings collapsed
because of a lack of maintenance, and
that modifications of this sort are not
only unforgivable—they are an assault
on their “values”—but unnecessary. He
thinks the properties of Newar archi-
tecture have eluded engineers, who,
steeped in the “jargon and cacophony
of alien knowledge systems,” are unable
to evaluate the traditional system on its
own merits. “A lot of engineering has
been forced into buildings saying that
you need to build them to withstand
earthquakes,” Tiwari told me. “We have
been living here for thousands of years,
57
 storeyed past · reportage
shridhar lal manandhar collection / nepal picture library
so our technology must have accommo-
dated them. Just because you don’t do
any research does not mean the build-
ings don’t withstand earthquakes.”
In the course of studying Newar ar-
chitecture, Gustave Le Bon observed
that “the temples in brick and wood ...
are very recent. The non-durable mate-
rial of which they are made prevents
them from lasting long.” For Tiwari,
the use of perishable natural materials
is what sets Newar architecture apart.
And buildings are resilient, instead of
resistant, to natural phenomena. For
58
instance, joints are not rigid—neces-
sary for seismic resistance in Western
engineering—but flexible, built to absorb
earthquake shocks. Similarly, because
wood rots or wears away, buildings were
designed as modular systems—made of
toothpicks rather than Legos, say—so
that workers could isolate and replace
damaged components without disman-
tling the structure, in a process of “cycli-
cal renewal” that was carried out every
few decades.
Tiwari feels conservationists have
snubbed these basic principles of tradi-
THE CARAVAN
tional architecture. The German-funded
Bhaktapur Development Project, one of
the first international restoration initia-
tives, used concrete and concealed steel
in its work. “It pleased the Germans very
well,” Tiwari told me, “but it destroyed
our culture totally.” Several other con-
servationists are wary of what is justi-
fied in the pursuit of safety. “If you can
use concrete, why not use styrofoam?”
Weise told me, laughing. “When you
rebuild the structure, it will look exactly
the same. It’s so light, even if it falls over
you can push it back up.”

In 1991, the American architect Eric Theophile
co-founded the Kathmandu Valley Preservation
Trust, which has restored more than 50 monu-
ments, especially in Patan. KVPT, funded mostly by
foreign donors, is widely feted for its work, and its
projects are among the few that have made signifi-
cant headway after the earthquake. But its inter-
ventions, though more studied than those in most
projects, are criticised by the likes of Tiwari. For
instance, KVPT uses old parts that would be dis-
carded by most architects, to keep as much of the
original building as possible; but because this intro-
duces structural weaknesses, steel pins are inserted
to tie the structure together. Tuladhar calls KVPT’s
restored monuments “a sticker of the original,”
and accuses it of turning temples into “museum
pieces.” The original architects and craftsmen
of a building “live in that building through their
materials, through their technologies, through the
carvings they have done,” Tiwari said. A conserva-
tionist’s policy towards them should be: “Look, you
have made it so well that we want to keep it. There
might be some problems, and we’ll resolve them—
but resolve them to your satisfaction.”
This criticism finds a place in a broader interna-
tional debate about what it means to safeguard the
authenticity of a restored building. Following the
1964 Venice Charter, authenticity was judged only
along physical criteria. In 1992, while inspecting
a Japanese restoration of the fourteenth century
courtesy rohit ranjitkar / kathmandu valley preservation trust
storeyed past · reportage
I Baha Bahi monastery in Patan, an official at the opposite page:
International Council on Monuments and Sites, According to
which advises UNESCO on its World Heritage many academics
who have studied
Sites, found decayed brick walls being torn down
Newar culture,
and rebuilt instead of preserved as ruins. The ar- the ethnic group
chitect responsible was fired, and in the ensuing is known to spend
kerfuffle the Japanese government invited the of- time and money
ficial to inspect its approach to heritage, in which on rituals, festivals
some monuments are regularly dismantled. For ex- and offerings to the
gods.
ample, the Shinto Ise Shrine has been rebuilt from
scratch every 20 years, for the last 1,300 years, below:
using the same blueprint and technique; others are In 1991, the
regularly repaired, as in Newar architecture. In American architect
1994, Japan hosted a conference that culminated in Eric Theophile
the Nara Document, which loosened the definition co-founded the
Kathmandu Valley
of authenticity to make room for the restoration of
Preservation Trust,
“living” structures, emphasising the continuity of which has restored
a building’s function, its associated rituals and its more than 50
craftsmanship, over conservation. monuments and is
In Nepal, this debate is undergirded by a practi- widely feted for its
cal question: Do modern materials actually make work.
traditional buildings safer? A straightforward
approach would be to assess the performance of
buildings that were strengthened with modern
materials against the 2015 earthquake. But “no one
is interested in doing that here. Everyone is inter-
ested only in hiding what went wrong,” Weise told
me. “The bad interventions—and who did those
interventions—nobody wants to talk about that.”
Several professionals I spoke to said that the DoA,
march 2018 59
storeyed past · reportage
above: After the and even KVPT, were brushing off past interven-
earthquake, some tions that had clearly backfired during the earth-
families began quake. “The greatest disservice Nepali engineers
living in tents set up
have done for our heritage is self-deprecation,”
over the rubble of
Kasthamandap. Tiwari told me. When I talked to Santosh Shres-
tha, an engineer who studied structural cracks for
his doctorate, he said there was overwhelming
evidence that steel reinforcements break through
wooden beams during an earthquake because of
the disparity in strength between the two materi-
als, much like how strong thread will cut through
threadbare fabric. In other cases, buildings seemed
to have been undermined by concrete additions.
“There is no proper study done on the impact. I
think that’s the worst part,” Weise told me. “In an
earthquake things get damaged, there’s loss, but as
long as we learn from this, then we can say at least
we got something out of it.”
If there is consensus among conservationists,
it is that heritage work and the tender system are
incompatible. Enacted to combat corruption and
reduce costs, the tender system has been lambasted
for handing out contracts indiscriminately. Legally,
a prequalification requirement should exclude
firms lacking relevant experience from consid-
60 THE CARAVAN
robic upadhayay
eration, although this is seldom enforced. Every
conservationist I talked to related cases of restora-
tion contracts going to firms that specialised in
furniture, industry or even sewage systems. Flout-
ing conservation practices, these firms skimped on
materials or inserted concrete and rebar in build-
ings out of convenience rather than necessity.
When I asked Baidya what he thought of Ti-
wari’s purism, he told me it confused aesthetics for
engineering. Life safety, he said, was paramount:
“Do they want the blood of people on their hands?”
Weise told me he thinks such an outlook would
be displaced only if the government changed its
building codes, which recognise only rigid struc-
tures, and set out to study how traditional systems
functioned. Until then, he said, the fact that tradi-
tional structures have withstood earthquakes for
hundreds of years would be dismissed, and their
technologies maligned. If the DoA’s plan had been
followed, Kasthamandap’s foundation, which has
remained intact through more than a thousand
years’ worth of earthquakes, would have been ex-
cavated and inlaid with steel and concrete. “Which
is a joke,” he said. “A concrete pile, if it’s rein-
forced, wouldn’t last for more than 50 or 60 years.

And you’re comparing that with something that’s
existed for 1300 years.”
last december, a few weeks after a third round of
legislative elections were held, controversy over
the restoration of Rani Pokhari—a seventeenth-
century pond—erupted after passers-by spotted
concrete mix on its premises. An event was hastily
planned for Christmas Eve, featuring a panel of
experts, including Tiwari. The objective was to halt
the work that had been restarted by the KMC in
the lull of election season. Several of the organisers
were part of RK. As he frequently does during such
events, Tuladhar drifted around the room with
his phone and power bank in hand, livestreaming
the proceedings. I sat next to Binita Magaiya, a
conservation architect working for RK, and asked
her which groups had planned the event. “It’s all
us. We’re fighting for so many things on differ-
ent fronts,” she told me. The experts gave their
presentations. Afterward, during the question and
answer session, a member of the Society of Nepal-
ese Architects stood up. The tussle with the KMC,
he said to laughter from the audience, had become
like “battling Ravana.” “Every time we chop one
head off, another one grows back.”
A few days earlier, a group of activists had met
with Shakya, the mayor, to discuss Rani Pokhari.
After several pleas to refrain from using concrete in
the pond, the mayor said that as a Newar, he knew
the value of heritage, but rejected the idea that
it should not be modified: “I think it’s not about
keeping it the same but making progress,” he said.
After leaving the mayor’s office, an indignant Tu-
ladhar said, “When he talked about being Newar, I
felt so much shame.”
This flurry of events had followed a long silence
from the KMC on Kasthamandap. In the months
after the site was padlocked—the “key incident,”
as some referred to it—a schism crept in between
its founding members, who clung to their original
ideas about the role RK should have in reconstruc-
tion, and some of its younger members, who fa-
voured compromise with the KMC. Negotiations
suggested the mayor’s office was amenable to RK
directing reconstruction work as long as it took mu-
nicipal money and made clear that it was working
under the KMC’s supervision. “We shouldn’t de-
monise the government,” Sumana told me. “It is an
elected body, we live in a democracy, they represent
the people. If they just gave space for us to get in-
volved, I would be okay.” Government money, she
said, was ultimately the people’s money. But Biren-
dra Bhakta was insistent that reconstruction should
be crowdfunded. The deal, which had seemed tan-
talisingly close to completion, soon fell through.
Several people I spoke to characterised the ne-
gotiations as a “battle of egos” between Shakya and
storeyed past · reportage
Birendra Bhakta, who belong to different politi-
cal parties and wanted sole credit for rebuilding
Kasthamandap. When I met Shriju Pradhan, an
official at the KMC’s Heritage Division, she made
it clear that her sympathies lay with RK. But locals
were sometimes the most exasperating, she said,
because they acted like heritage sites belonged only
to them. When I asked her if restoration should
be left to the guthis, as per tradition, she replied,
“You can’t say ‘traditional way’ and write accounts
on the back of a matchbox.” In the past, guthis had
“faith to god. Now guthis are governed by new peo-
ple. There is no trust and honesty. There should
be a mechanism that controls the guthis as well.”
“When money is involved,” she added, “you can’t
trust even Mahadev.”
When I spoke to Tuladhar recently, he told me
RK had managed to reengage the KMC in talks and
was working out a possible compromise, on terms
similar to before. In the meantime, he had been
honing RK’s media strategy, to impress the impor-
tance of heritage on a wider audience, and perhaps,
in the process, recruit more volunteers. And Tu-
ladhar felt his social media presence—he posted
at least once a day—heaped pressure on the KMC.
He reeled off statistics: “8 pm is our prime time,
Sunday to Thursday; we mostly attract Nepalis be-
As far as RK goes, he said, “the physical
building is just an excuse”—the movement is
more about “the revival of cultural values.”
tween 18 and 34; our response time for messages is
two hours.”
In an early conversation, Sumana told me that
RK was trying to spark a “spiritual awakening.”
When I first met Tuladhar this past October, he
talked about his disappointment that his parents
had not taught him about his heritage as a child.
“The last two or three generations who did not
pass it down made a mistake,” he said. After the
fall of the Ranas, in 1951, “people were in a mind-
set: discard the old, grab whatever we can from
the so-called developed Western world.” This is a
common feeling among RK volunteers—that a lack
of knowledge created a distance between them and
their heritage, bridged only after the earthquake,
when many monuments were already destroyed.
Tuladhar said he began to appreciate old knowl-
edge only recently, going out of his way to teach his
children. “I realised that it’s something I need to be
proud of, and that I need to preserve and promote.
I need to help it remain for more generations.” As
far as RK goes, he said, “the physical building is
just an excuse”—the movement is more about “the
revival of cultural values.” s
march 2018 61
Taking the Bait
Boom and bust at Lake Victoria
PHOTO ESSAY / COMMUNITIES

PHOTOGRAPHS And TexT BY Alec jAcOBSOn

 kayumba john used to sit in his office by the
shore of Lake Victoria, in Kasensero, Uganda, and
watch boats arriving at dawn. While the crews
onboard sold Nile perch—a freshwater fish found
in the Nile river and its tributaries—fishmongers
packed them into refrigerators in trucks bound
for Kampala.
“When you look in the country, there is no oth-
er profitable activity like fishing,” Kayumba, the
former chairman of the local beach management
unit, told me, with a hint of pride in his voice, as
we sat in his office in April 2015. “It is us fisher-
men who have educated our children in good
schools, alongside those politicians and well-off
people,” he added. Lake Victoria, the largest body
of freshwater in Africa, surrounds Uganda, Kenya
and Tanzania, and it affects lives and livelihoods
thousands of miles beyond the shore. The major-
ity of fish are sold in Europe, making the fishing
industry one of few—alongside coffee and tea—
with a lucrative export market.
Over the last two decades thousands of mi-
grants across the country abandoned subsistence
farming, their traditional occupation, and jumped
at the chance to make a quick fortune in the bur-
geoning fish market. The frenetic growth of the
fish market led to overfishing, causing the catch
to dwindle. Fishermen had to travel deeper into
the lake to locate fish; this intensified the haz-
ards of an already dangerous profession, as boats
64
would often capsize or break apart. Alcoholism
and gambling soared in the town, particularly
among fishermen, sex workers, truckers and
those involved in the unpredictable and risky
fishing industry. HIV rates in Kasensero—which
recorded the first case of an AIDS epidemic in
Uganda in 1982—escalated.
Kayumba supports an extended family with
over thirty children, including his own, those
of his brother, and orphans he has adopted. He
settled in Kasensero after fleeing the Rwandan
genocide in 1994. Others from his country made
the same journey, but few emerged alive. The
Kagera River just to the south of town carried a
flood of bodies to the lake that are now buried
nearby in a mass grave marked by a memorial.
When Kayumba set up his fishing business,
named Besiga Muakama—“those who believe in
god”—Kasensero was a small town with thatched
huts and little infrastructure. (The town’s name
comes from the Luganda word for “penetrate,”
a reminder of the first settlers who cut a path
through the jungle to reach the beach.) In 1994,
Kayumba told me, fishermen could capture doz-
ens of Nile perch within an afternoon, and sell
them to nearby villages. The town expanded
rapidly, acquiring roads and enough infrastruc-
ture to export the catch to supermarkets around
the world. Kayumba got over 30 boats, while the
town obtained over 400.
previous page: A man takes shelter from the rain
and waves after being out on the lake during a
stormy night

left: Fishmongers and purchasers weigh a load of

fish while the local fisheries office’s tax collector,
wearing a yellow hat, looks on.

below: A worker loads fish into a refrigerator truck

that will transport them to Kampala for processing
before they are exported.
 By 2015, the larger fish had all but run
out: less than 1 percent of the Nile perch
in the lake were larger than the 20-inch
minimum, suggesting that the fish were
too young to reproduce and too small
to sell legally. Between 2005—when the
catch on the lake peaked—and 2015, the
Nile-perch population halved as fisher-
men employed smaller nets to catch
smaller fish. Although prices remained
high and there was still money to be
made, Kayumba had to reduce his own
fleet to under ten boats.
“The lake has been very important to
us and we who have benefitted from it
have a lot of pain to see that it is being
destroyed,” Kayumba told me. “If only I
had the power, I would have restored it
because it is very important to the coun-
try.” When he tried to fight illegal fish-
ing, however, he was physically threat-
ened and taken to court. Most people
in Kasensero with whom I interacted
that year predicted that the fish supply
would run out completely within three
to five years. They explained that they
were hustling to make as much money
as possible before the end.
But this month, Kayumba told my
fixer, Kateregga Baker, about an unex-
pected turn of events in December 2016:
President Yowri Museveni had initi-
ated a drive to imprison those deploy-
ing illegal methods, including beach-
drifting—a practice where a few small
boats together haul nets onto the beach,
carrying everything in their way—and
the catching of young fish. “Many boats
were destroyed, many nets were burnt
and night and day patrols and ambushes
were put in place,” Kayumba said, add-
ing that the army’s intervention had
drastically altered the dynamic in the
town.
At the end of last year, reports from
around the lake suggested a boom in the
Nile perch population, and a national
fisheries study claimed that there had
been a 30 percent growth in their bio-
mass.
Kayumba, however, is no longer at
his desk. He was dismissed from his job
during Museveni’s drive. Nowadays, I
heard, he is scarcely seen around town.
With additional reporting by Kateregga
Baker.
opposite page: Kayumba explained that the beach management office was
established to help community leaders work alongside the district fisheries office
to keep track of the landing site and control overfishing. He complained that the
fisheries office, bribed by illegal fishermen, rendered his work ineffectual.

top: Kayumba John named his fishing company Besiga Mukama, or “those who
believe in god.”

above: Beach-drifting, locally referred to as “indiscriminate netting,” catches

everything in its path. The practice is illegal, but takes place every morning between
Kasensero and Chabasimba, a nearby village, because nets are a more affordable
option than buying multiple boats.
opposite page: Fishmongers bid on the night’s catch.

left: A labourer sorts nets on the shore. Since fishing

required minimal equipment, it rapidly became an
investment for people across the country. After the
government’s crackdown, however, they were left
with no option but to migrate elsewhere. “All these
people were stopped, houses burnt, nets burnt and
yet they did not have enough money to construct the
big boats we use,” Kayumba said.

below: A fishmonger sorts through a load of illegal

undersized fish, looking for some that he might be
able to sell locally. The smallest ones will be salted
and sent to Congo.
above: Men unload ice from a truck to fill the holds
of boats, which will be deployed by fishermen for
a considerable stretch—sometimes as long as four
consecutive nights.

left: Fishermen return in the morning after a night

of working on the lake.
left: Boys shoot pool at
a beach bar.

below: Kasensero has

a support group for
widows and orphans
of AIDS. HIV rates have
soared in the town.
top: Pub-goers dance
at the Capital pub in
Kasensero. The bars
in the town are often
frequented by a diverse
range of people,
including sex workers
and fishmongers, at
night.

right: Shops tend

to stay open late on
Kasensero’s main street.
above: A fisherman wakes after spending a night
sleeping in a boat. On my first trip, Kayumba explained
to me the dangers of fishing. “If you flip, you die,” he
said, referring to the likelihood of a boat capsizing.

right: Fishermen and fishmongers frequently blow off

steam by drinking alcohol and smoking hookah at the
Capital pub in Kasensero.
BOOKS
Globalisation’s Fabulist
Joseph Conrad and the world
/ LITERATURE
SUNIL KHILNANI
joseph conrad died in 1924, but in her bold and
winning book on the writer Maya Jasanoff sees
him as a prophetic “embodiment” of today’s glo-
balised world, whispering through his characters
“in the ears of new generations of anti-globaliza-
tion protesters and champions of free trade, liberal
interventionists and radical terrorists, social justice
activists and xenophobic nativists.” He didn’t just
see through the pieties of his own imperial age; he
espied the contours of our own. Conrad, Jasanoff
The Dawn Watch: says, “was one of us: a citizen of a global world.”
Joseph Conrad in Jasanoff is one of the smartest and coolest-
a Global World headed members of a newer generation of histori-
Maya Jasanoff
ans of empire: sensitive to complexities, sceptical
William Collins
400 pages, T799 of brute and overly ideological assessments, and
given to probing Britain’s imperial history through
new, oblique angles, so as to explore what empire
enabled as much as what it pulverised. Her previ-
ous books spanned the arc of the British Empire’s
geography. The first, centred on India, examined
collecting as a way of representing imperial posses-
sion; the second recovered the histories of Ameri-
can loyalists who fought for the king and, after the
colony became independent, fled as exiles.
The Dawn Watch is given over to one of the more
curious and profound figures of the age of empire.
How did a central European of vaguely aristo-
cratic descent named Konrad Korzeniowski, born
in 1857 in a landlocked Ukrainian town (known
proverbially as “nowhere”) grow up to sail the
76 THE CARAVAN
world, become a fabulist of empire and spend his
last decades in squire-like existence in a quiet
Kentish village, come to be revered as one of the
great writers in English—his third language?
Conrad has always been hard to place: he revelled
in slipping free of contexts, and laboured to hide his
traces. And, like the empire he wrote about, Con-
rad’s work divides opinion. To some, he is a writer
of high refinement and subtlety, modernist in his
handling of complex and loping narratives, and able
to draw from his experience a profound analysis
of the corruptions of power and wealth on human
character. For others, he is a grandiose spinner of
Edwardian adventure and romance yarns, archaic
in diction and portentous in meaning. And to some
of those whose lands he wrote about, he is simply
an imperialist—“a bloody racist,” in the Nigerian
writer Chinua Achebe’s words.
Jasanoff wants us to see him as a globalist, a
critic of empire and a subverter of stereotypes of
race and civilization—our frère semblable. Her
argument is that, in reconnoitring the edges of
empire in the last decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury, Conrad sensed the first ripples of our own
cascading conditions: terrorism, multinational
capitalism, technological disruption and immigra-
tion. And as he wrought his personal experience
into prose, Conrad “captured something about the
way power operated across continents and races,
something that seemed as important to engage
 books

with today as it had been when he first

wrote.” Those are big, startling claims.
Conrad’s life matters because it was
both the material out of which he made
his fiction and the grounds on which
(as a late interloper into the world of
English letters) he could claim the at-
tention of his readers. As the novelist
Henry James told Conrad, his author-
ity as a writer relied ultimately on “the
things you know”: on “the prodigy of
your past experience.” Yet Conrad’s
experience, his life, was anything but
transparent; nor is it clear what, or how
much, he knew. He sheds light, but he is
also himself opaque.
Jasanoff sets out to explore the
connections between the life and the
work: but where literary scholars have
mainly relied on Conrad’s words to
explain him and his life, she aims to
reconstruct the worlds in which he
lived. She interleaves her account of
Conrad’s life with readings of four of
his major works: The Secret Agent, Lord
Jim, Heart of Darkness and Nostromo.
(She has clearly learnt a narrative trick
or two from the intricacies of Conrad’s
own storytelling shufflings.) She shows
brilliantly how Conrad accumulated
and then transformed his lived experi-
ence into stories: the long days on the
still ocean; slow passage through the
dank, straggly air of Borneo’s rivers; the
meetings with broken white men who
imagined themselves grandees. Yet
Conrad’s experience was also shaped
by what he had read about the places to
which he travelled—arriving in London
as a 21-year-old, he absorbed the city
through the eyes of Dickens, whom
he had read in Polish as a boy; and his
view of Borneo was moulded by his
reading about James Brooke, the White
Rajah of Sarawak. Jasanoff attunes us
getty images

to Conrad’s habitual molestation of the

facts of his own life: he constantly and
cannily rearranged his experiences

MARCH 2018 77
 globalisation’s fabulist · books
hulton archive / getty images
into his own preferred tales. Conrad’s
uncle once complained to him that “he
lacked endurance … in the face of facts,”
a weakness that Jasanoff portrays as
feeding the writer’s capacity for insight.
konrad korzeniowski was born into
Polish Catholic gentry, their wealth
faded and their pride chafed by tsarist
rule. Jasanoff portrays that rule as
nothing less than a form of colonial
oppression, one that amputated Poles
from their history, suppressed their
language, sidelined their religion and
dismissed their way of life. Conrad’s
intuition of imperialism originated in
an internecine empire in the West.
One branch of Conrad’s family (that
of his maternal uncle) acquiesced in
Russian domination and prospered
as landlords. But Conrad’s father and
mother, who thought of themselves
as usurped aristocrats (and showed
no ability to manage an estate to any
78
profit) preferred more or less clandes-
tine opposition. Conrad’s father styled
himself a writer: his romantic nation-
alist prose and verse gained some ap-
preciation, but he had to earn his keep
through translations from French (a
language he taught his young son). His
anti-tsarist activities got him impris-
oned, then exiled, breaking both his
own and his wife’s health. He died, four
years after his wife, when Conrad was
11 years old. He had not managed to
shape his son into the nationalist that
he wished him to be, but he did imbue
in Konrad a deep disdain for money and
for bourgeois values, and also a despair
at how commerce and machinery were
corroding the habits and morals of
landed communities.
Orphaned, Conrad came under the
care of his rich and conformist uncle,
who saw the boy’s future in business
and tried to settle him in Krakow. By
his mid teens, though, Conrad had fix-
THE CARAVAN
ated on a career as far removed as pos-
sible from Poland: he would be a sailor
on the high seas. He wore down his
uncle, who finally dispatched him to
Marseilles, thinking that the French-
speaking youth might manage there.
Unable to get regular work on French
ships, adrift and leaking money, the
young Conrad botched an attempt to
shoot himself. Depression would haunt
the rest of his life; and though he never
spoke about his own attempt to end it,
in his fiction, Jasanoff tells us, there are
17 suicides.
That same year, in 1878, he moved
to London. Jasanoff evokes, in a lively
portrait, the London he would have
encountered—an open, cosmopolitan
sprawl, with unrestricted access for
visitors and immigrants. Fifty thousand
continental Europeans lived in Lon-
don—more, she nicely notes, than the
population of Krakow. (It was not until
1905 that migration into Britain was

Conrad had grown up hearing
his father refer to local peasants
as “monkeys.” Throughout
his life, he maintained what
Jasanoff describes as “an
enduring distaste for organized
labor and radical politics,” and
he regarded popular political
movements as nothing but
manifestations of the herd.
first regulated.) Sail ships, Conrad’s love, still glid-
ed up the Thames. But his arrival coincided with
their fast disappearance. The opening of the Suez
Canal in 1869 secured the rise of a new technology:
steamships were better able to navigate the sharp
changing wind conditions in the Red Sea. It was
a technology that Britain, with its advanced steel
production, efficient dockyards and worldwide
network of coaling stations, quickly dominated:
by the 1880s, British-owned shipping companies
“controlled around 70 per cent of world trade.”
Manning these British ships—both those powered
by steam and by wind—were crews drawn from
all over the world; Jasanoff reports that in 1891 40
percent were foreigners on the longer, more gruel-
ling routes. A sailor’s wages were poor by British
standards, and the risks were high.
Conrad joined their numbers, learnt English,
and within eight years gained his certificate as a
captain in the British merchant marine; that same
year, in 1886, he also became a naturalised British
subject. He began to use the anglicised “Conrad”
as his name. Aware perhaps that he was of the last
generation working mainly on sail ships, he culti-
vated a personal mythology about the “fellowship
of the craft” of sailing. He idealised the commu-
nity of men on-board: they formed the last redoubt
of an innately British seafarer’s morality built on
fidelity, courage, and preparedness—this while,
as Jasanoff observes, other Englishmen wrote
of the disappearing sail boats and their crews in
the “fond tones you might use to recall a beloved
grandmother.”
In actuality, Conrad seems to have shared little
fellow feeling with his shipmates, whether on sail
boats or steam boats. Ill at ease in the company of
ordinary sailors, he was no mixer, and gave off an
aloofness that others recognised as snobbishness.
He was often involved in on-board fights. At port
stops, while the crew repaired to bars and dives,
he might be seen strutting around with bowler
globalisation’s fabulist · books
hat and gold-knobbed cane. The other captains opposite page:
Conrad’s arrival in
referred to him as “the Russian count” (though he
was convinced he was being mistreated because London coincided
with the fast
he spoke poor English). When he made a brief
disappearance
trip back to Poland in 1890, “people who met him
thought he spoke Polish with a foreign accent and
of sail ships.
He cultivated
had turned into a London snob.” a personal
mythology about
Conrad had grown up hearing his father refer
to local peasants as “monkeys.” Throughout his the “fellowship of
life, he maintained what Jasanoff describes as “an the craft” of sailing,
and idealised the
enduring distaste for organized labor and radical
politics,” and he regarded popular political move-
community of men
on-board.
ments as nothing but manifestations of the herd.
Although he regarded class “a hateful thing,” he
was deeply sensitive to it. When working in the
Congo, he referred to his Belgian boss as “une es-
pece de boutiquer africaine”—an African shop boy.
He strained to be accepted as an English gentle-
man. And yet he never quite conformed to that
role. He chose to marry down—he wed his typist,
a Protestant woman from Peckham—and even
when, later, he moved his family to an estate in
Kent and mixed in literary circles (Henry James,
Ford Madox Ford and HG Wells were his friends),
he refused the trappings of British success, waving
away a knighthood and turning down honorary
degrees from Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh.
He recognised, rightly, that he could never become
his ideal. He never shook off his Polish accent
(Virginia Woolf, in her ur-snobbish way, did not
fail to note it in her obituary for “our guest”, as she
called him), and when his command of the Eng-
lish language was criticised, it tipped him over.
In his late fifties, Conrad’s agent and close friend
told him that he “did not speak English,” which
provoked a breakdown and left Conrad babbling
in Polish for days. These are fascinating cracks in
Conrad’s polished character, which I longed to see
Jasanoff probe more deeply.
conrad considered it “déclassé” to work on
the new steamships, and he would later say that
he never did. But he had little option. In the late
1880s, he worked on a steamer sailing routes in
Borneo; a ship implicated in slave trading and gun-
running (a “monotonous huckster’s round,” was
how he described the work). A few years later, he
accepted the captaincy of an inland transport boat,
journeying up the thousand-mile Congo River
along an ivory-plying route (“idiotic employment”).
From these steamer voyages, oceanic and riv-
erine, and from the social discomfort that he felt,
came his most memorable writing. The effects
produced on human character by the technol-
ogy of steam and the intensified commerce that it
created, became a theme for Conrad. In Lord Jim
(1900), we see a fine sailor, an exemplar of the fel-
MARCH 2018 79
globalisation’s fabulist · books
opposite page: lowship of the craft, take a job as chief mate on a
Conrad strained to pilgrim-laden steamship bound for Mecca. In the
be accepted as an face of what looks like looming disaster, he—with
English gentleman,
the rest of the white crew—abandons ship, fail-
yet he never quite
conformed to that ing the basic test of honour and courage. It is only
role. He recognised, when Jim removes himself to the edge of Western
rightly, that he penetration, far “from the ends of submarine ca-
could never become bles,” beyond the “haggard utilitarian lies of our
his ideal. civilization,” that he gets a second chance. He
reclaims his honour by defending a local refugee
community, who in gratitude bestow on him the
title of “Lord.” But then he—and the locals—are
betrayed by a white pirate: a second taint for
which Jim bravely accepts his own death by the
hand of the local chief.
Heart of Darkness, first published in serial form
in 1899 and as a volume in 1902, was based on Con-
rad’s months spent in the Congo almost a decade
before. The short novel transformed Conrad from
a writer of sea stories into something of a cultural
visionary. It remains the most highly charged of
all his writing, and it lurks at the centre of Jasa-
noff’s study. Of all his fiction, Jasanoff tells us,
this work was most closely tied to “contemporary
records of his experience.” In this uncanny short
masterpiece, Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, makes
a journey upriver, the jungle closing in on him, in
search of a man named Kurtz, who has set himself
up as a civilising scourge in the midst of African
savagery. Kurtz is the author of a report written
for the International Society for the Suppression
of Savage Customs—pages of closely written, flow-
ing prose, “burning noble words” that end with
a scrawled post scriptum: “Exterminate All the
Brutes!” Marlow finally discovers Kurtz installed
as a savage chief, surrounded by a stockade deco-
rated with human skulls.
Conrad, as part of his self-mythology, liked
to say that he had always intended to scour the
depths of Africa: ever since he was a young boy, he
had determined to voyage into “the blank space
then representing the unsolved mystery of the
continent.” By extension, Heart of Darkness was
the tale he was always fated to tell, and he worked
to conjure for it a primordial, timeless air, making
it a universal parable.
In fact, it was a combination of necessity (money)
and chance (social connections to Belgium) that
took him to Africa to captain a steamboat trans-
porting elephant tusks along the Congo River. He
arrived in the Congo in 1890, five years after the
Belgian king, Leopold, had established the Congo
Free State—a vast territory thrown open to West-
ern intrusion, and founded, Leopold announced,
not on imperial conquest but on principles of free
commerce and a commitment to extending eman-
cipation and civilisation to the African people.
80 THE CARAVAN
Conrad’s first African journey was a days-long
march along an unnavigable stretch of the river
to get to his boat. Unusually for him, he kept a
journal. What did he see? He noted the landscape
and the weather, birds, frogs and mosquitoes
(“beastly”). Africans? Insofar as he noticed them
at all, they were either dead (“horrid smell”), in-
jured (“gave him a little glycerine to put on the
wound”) or repellent (“three women, one of whom
albino passed our camp … Features very Negroid
and ugly”). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that
when Africans do appear in Heart of Darkness they
are described by the story’s narrator, Marlow, as
“black shadows of disease and starvation”; as “raw
matter”; as “dusty niggers with splay feet.”
To find in Conrad’s writing the racial prejudices
of his era is not shocking, and it is not a reason to
disregard his work. But it is certainly troubling,
especially given the rising racism in Western soci-
eties right now, and it asks for direct address. Jas-
anoff acknowledges its presence in Conrad’s writ-
ing, and the subject bobs awkwardly along the sur-
face of her book: addressed, it seems to me, more
through hope than analysis. Jasanoff seeks some
redemptive meaning in Conrad’s racist language—
a “potentially radical suggestion,” she calls it. In
Conrad’s story, neither civilisation nor savagery
are racially coded; they are fluid, and not the fixed
attributes of any racial group. In condemning the
European civilising mission in Africa, says Jasa-
noff, Conrad was invoking a humanity common
across races. Marlow, she suggests, is thrilled by
the thought of some remote human kinship with
the wild savages he sees around him: “The differ-
ence between savagery and civilization, Conrad
was saying, transcended skin color; it even tran-
scended place. The issue for Conrad wasn’t that
savages were inhuman. It was than any human
could be a savage.” For Conrad, “Anyone could be
savage. Everywhere could go dark.”
Jasanoff goes further. She suggests that Conrad,
in purveying such stereotypes (of women, too: they
are “savage and superb,” “wild and gorgeous”)
“subverted prejudices as much as … reinforced
them.” But there is little evidence to support such
a hopeful exoneration. In fact, whatever Jasanoff
tells us about Conrad’s contemporary readers sug-
gests the opposite. Take the case of Charles Buls,
the mayor of Brussels. Buls read Conrad before
travelling to the Congo in the 1890s, and he found
his own racist views corroborated and reinforced.
Conrad showed him how civilisation might col-
lapse when white men came in contact with “pure
savagery, primitive nature, barbarism.” Even the
critic and editor Edward Garnett, a far more so-
phisticated reader and a man whose critical intelli-
gence Conrad admired, read Heart of Darkness as a

To find in Conrad’s writing the racial prejudices of his
era is not shocking, and it is not a reason to disregard
his work. Jasanoff acknowledges its presence, and
the subject bobs awkwardly along the surface of her
book: addressed, it seems to me, more through hope
than analysis.
mansell / the life picture collection / getty images
story of what happens when a European
“goes native,” when Western values be-
come contaminated by local non-West-
ern conditions—which is to say, he read
it as Conrad wrote it. To Garnett, the
work revealed “the deterioration of the
white man’s morale, when he is let loose
from European restraint, and planted
down in the tropics.”
In her effort to compensate for Con-
rad’s blind spots, Jasanoff also claims
that he “brought to the page a more
international and multiethnic assort-
ment of voices than any other writer of
his day that I knew.” It is true that Con-
rad’s pages, when compared to those of
his English-language contemporaries,
are more open to European voices—sea-
faring and sometimes megalomaniac
Swedes, Germans and Frenchmen and
Russians and Scots and Irish. But non-
European voices? Conrad rarely con-
MARCH 2018
globalisation’s fabulist · books
ceded to Africans anything more than
inarticulate cries of rage: in Lord Jim,
he describes them making “gurgling,
choking, inhuman sounds.” Perhaps
the most striking expression that any
of his Asian characters manage is the
“philosophical shriek” uttered by a
Malay Muslim in Almayer’s Folly. When
Conrad did try to evoke the thoughts
of non-Europeans, even Jasanoff has
to accept that he did little more than
project his own moods. It is surprising,
then, that Jasanoff contrasts Conrad
favourably with Rudyard Kipling. Ki-
pling was certainly an imperialist in his
worldview, but in his fiction we hear
a range of Indian voices (his versions,
of course): Muslims, Hindus and Bud-
dhists, as well as women.
some of conrad’s contemporar-
ies—the ancestors of today’s protest-
ers and activists—did read his fiction
as a call to action. By the turn of the
century, as Conrad published Heart of
Darkness, the shocking depredations
of Leopold’s rule—the appropriation
of huge swathes of territory as private
land, the pillage of tens of thousands of
tons of ivory, the routine use of forced
labour in frenzied rubber cultivation—
were coming into European view. In
his first days in Africa, Conrad had met
Roger Casement, who would become a
leading voice in the campaign against
Belgium’s exploitation of the Congo.
After Conrad published Heart of Dark-
ness, Casement got him to read exposés
of Belgium’s administration of the
Congo by the journalist Edmund Dene
Morel, in hopes of recruiting Conrad
into the Congo Reform Association,
the campaign against Belgian misrule.
Conrad privately expressed his dismay
to Casement, but he never joined the
movement. “It is not in me … I am only
a wretched novelist inventing wretched
stories and not even up to that miser-
able game.” He claimed that what Case-
ment and Morel were telling him did
not tally with what he had seen, and
Conrad would later dismiss Casement
as emotional and unreliable.
Jasanoff ascribes Conrad’s unwill-
ingness to engage in part to the fact
that his own experience in the Congo
predated by some years the “Red
81
 globalisation’s fabulist · books
this spread: Rubber”-era brutalities of the late 1890s. As ivory
Africans in the supplies dwindled, Leopold’s men turned to the
Congo were extraction of a substance made lucrative by the
terrorised into
invention of the pneumatic tire: rubber. Africans
doing the work of
rubber extraction: were terrorised into doing this miserable work:
those who didn’t those who did not could be shot or, to save on bul-
could be shot or lets, have their hands cut off. (Whether the vio-
have their hands lence only came with the Europeans is debatable.
cut off. When he Recent historians of central Africa have argued
was confronted
that the region became increasingly violent even
with exposés of
Belgium’s misrule before European intrusions, as slave and ivory
of the territory, caravans through the nineteenth century under-
Conrad privately mined existing forms of rule and established the
expressed his warrior figure—the man who could kill, capture
dismay but did not or maim—as the source of sovereignty. Europe-
join the movement
ans were observing and in part imitating this
against it.
violence, though of course with far more lethal
equipment.)
Conrad did not see himself as a political pam-
phleteer but as a maker of complex allegorical
fictions. He built into his work warnings against
overly literal interpretations of it. The “meaning of
an episode,” Conrad’s narrator Marlow says, “was
stock montage / getty images
82 THE CARAVAN
not inside like a kernel but outside like a haze.”
“Foggishness,” as he called it, hidden and secret
meanings, were indeed integral to Conrad’s art of
storytelling. According to Jasanoff, Conrad’s re-
fusal to get involved rested also on his innate scep-
ticism. He rejected the motivating assumption of
Casement and his co-campaigners (who included
the writer Arthur Conan Doyle) that “there was
a way to clean up Congo and do civilizing right.”
Conrad, Jasanoff argues, had seen “the horror”
even earlier, during the supposedly liberal era of
the Congo Free State. For Conrad, she writes, “the
problem wasn’t a hypocritical betrayal of civiliza-
tion—it was the European notion of civilization as
a good in itself.”
That goes straight to something even deeper
that kept Conrad from being a joiner or a cam-
paigner: his unshakeable fatalism. Forms of collec-
tive protest—founded on what he regarded as mis-
placed idealism—grated against what he described
as his “deep-seated sense of fatality governing this
man-inhabited world.” The bleakness of Conrad’s
vision is arresting; among nineteenth-century
figures writing in English, it is matched perhaps
only by Carlyle. In a letter to a glamorous friend,
the leftist and progressivist swash-buckler Robert
Cunninghame Graham, Conrad wrote:
If you believe in improvement you must weep,
for the attained perfection must end in cold,
darkness, and silence. In a dispassionate view
the ardour for reform, improvement, for virtue,
for knowledge and even for beauty is only a vain
sticking up for appearances, as though one were
anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a com-
munity of blind men.
jasanoff is a tireless retracer of Conrad’s itiner-
aries. Up the Congo River she goes, using her copy
of Heart of Darkness to swat away the tsetse flies.
She makes us feel his restless movements, across
Europe, through south-east Asia, Africa and over
the oceans. But all this travel and exoticism should
not lead us to forget just how rooted Conrad was
in a certain stance of European self-doubt. He is
one of the early cracks in the imaginative edifice
of Western self-confidence. Kipling was another;
and then came a slew of writers—Forster, the
Bloomsberries, Eliot, and, beyond the anglophone
world, Valery and Spengler. Rather than a vantage
point on our own world, his work seems to me a
historical weathervane of European consciousness
and sentiment.
International politics gave Conrad much of
the subject matter for his fiction—terrorist plots
and émigré spies in European cities, revolution
in Central America and imperial rapaciousness

Conrad did not see himself as a political pamphleteer,
but as a maker of complex allegorical fictions. He
built into his work warnings against overly literal
interpretations of it.
wikimedia commons
in Africa. Yet it strikes me that he was
not really a political writer. He was,
much more, a moralist. His sense of
the world predates the age of modern
politics. He belonged to the last gen-
eration who could aspire to inhabit a
wholly European moral world: a world
accrued and made possible by the force
of European power.
As that power pressed outward, it
could for a long period sanctify the
exertion of its force by asserting moral
certitude without having to engage
in political negotiation. By the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, though,
old moral terms—embodied in such
codes as “the fellowship of the craft” or
“playing the game”—were ceasing to be
self-evident or European monopolies.
European power was embroiled in a
world where people were starting to
talk back—not in shrieks or by clamour,
but through intelligible words and ar-
guments that demanded to be heard.
Even as Conrad lamented the hol-
lowness of civilisation and doubted that
anything could be done about it, others
from outside the metropoles of Western
power were dreaming up schemes and
mobilising minds. Jasanoff knows all of
this very well—as she herself writes, Ho
Chi Minh, Sun Yat Sen, Mohandas Gan-
dhi and WEB Du Bois were all honing
their own counter-definitions of human
good, and planning how to achieve it.
Gandhi’s famous joke about Western
civilisation (“it would be a good idea”)
was far from the flippant dismissal it
is often taken to be. It stated a serious
intention to break Europe’s monopoly
MARCH 2018
globalisation’s fabulist · books
over definitions of civilisation—to plu-
ralise its meanings.
VS Naipaul, another fatalist master
of fiction, has portrayed Conrad as
the upholder of a “universal civiliza-
tion,” one able “to accommodate the
rest of the world, and all the currents
of the world’s thought.” But Conrad,
even as he traced the limits of the uni-
versal claims of his own civilisation,
stayed within its bounds. In the last
decade and a half of Conrad’s life, as
politics stirred Asians, Africans and
black Americans, setting them think-
ing about how to reclaim civilisation
for themselves and inspiring them to
embark on collective movements of
political change and revival, the ageing
writer grumbled and wagged his finger
against such hopes. Is it a coincidence
that in these final years of his life, at a
time of revolutionary ferment in both
politics and the cultural imagination,
his own work became conventional and
conservative?
Conrad believed that what threat-
ened the old moral order was the world-
wide spread of “material interests”—the
greed for money, which in his view was
the defining feature that would drive
America’s inevitable rise. But today’s
battles over globalisation are not just
struggles over who gets what in the
great shake-out of Conrad’s “material
interests.” Material interests are not the
greatest thing that divides us: by draw-
ing people into common competition for
spoils, they might even encourage some
agreement about what is prizeworthy
across geographies and cultures. The
real divides lie in the multiplicity of
beliefs, many of them increasingly
virulent, that preach exclusiveness and
intolerance. Globalisation not just elic-
its these doctrines of exclusion but also
brings them dangerously, sometimes
lethally, into adjacency. Some of these
doctrines are Eastern and Southern, but
some of them are Western and North-
ern. And some of them may fairly be
called Conradian. Conrad recognised
difference, but he turned his back on it.
We should trouble about his questions
but not about his answers. We have
advanced beyond his understandings,
which is what makes the savagery in
our own world so shattering. s
83
BOOKS
The Failed Empire
France’s troubled obsession with India
/ HISTORY
BLAKE SMITH
in the fall of 2017, the French government
launched “Bonjour India,” an ambitious programme
of cultural diplomacy in India, promising to tell
Indians “the story of how and when we met.” Over
the past winter, it brought over a hundred events
to more than thirty cities across India, including
film screenings in Kolkata, a regatta in Pondicherry
and an automotive show in Chennai. Yet one would
hardly know from the programme’s boat races and
book discussions that the story of how France and
Claiming India met is a rich and troubled tale.
India: French For many centuries, India was a French preoc-
Scholars and the cupation, a source of precious commodities, vital
Preoccupation
alliances, literary inspiration and spiritual insight.
with India in
the Nineteenth Fortunes were sought, and sometimes made, by
Century bringing the dazzling cotton cloth of early-modern
Jyoti Mohan India (known in French simply as “Indians”) to
Sage French shores. In 1788, Parisian crowds flocked to
432 pages, T995 see ambassadors from Tipu Sultan’s Mysore, and,
during the French Revolution, French mercenaries
stationed in Tipu’s capital were said to have hailed
him as a “citizen-sultan.” French literature is filled
with fantasies about India; some of its most no-
table characters have Indian connections. Captain
Nemo, the great anti-hero of Jules Verne’s science-
fiction novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea (1870), is an Indian prince whose participation
in the anti-British revolt of 1857 forced him to go
underground (or undersea). India’s spiritual heri-
tage fascinated two of the most singular French
women of the twentieth century: Mirra Alfassa,
who was later the head of Sri Aurobindo’s ashram,
and the mathematician Maximiani Portaz, who
became convinced that Adolf Hitler was an avatar
of Vishnu.
Much of France’s fixation with India formed in
the shadow of a failed empire. For a few decades
84 THE CARAVAN
in the early eighteenth century, it seemed that
France might be a major power in India. It made
and unmade rulers at its will, casting its influence
across much of modern-day Tamil Nadu, Andhra
Pradesh, Karnataka and Telangana. The memory
of this fleeting glory haunted French culture over
the next three centuries, stoking nostalgia and
regret. Today, as witnessed by “Bonjour India,”
the French government and the cultural institu-
tions it funds tend to discreetly avoid many topics
of the Franco-Indian past. But a new generation of
historians is telling a more complete story.
One of them is Jyoti Mohan, who, in her re-
cent book Claiming India, traces how France
developed a unique relationship with the Indian
subcontinent. She builds on the work of pioneers
such as Kate Marsh, who explored the French
fascination with India in the eighteenth century
and the postcolonial era, and the great French
historian Jacques Weber, whose study of Pondi-
cherry between 1816 and 1914 runs to over 5,000
pages. Mohan’s path through this challenging
field of history focusses on how French thinkers
imagined India. In Claiming India, she argues
cogently and carefully that as the French state
failed to build an empire in the subcontinent,
French intellectuals constructed a substitute: an
India of their own built through scholarship and
imagination.
france was a latecomer to the subcontinent.
While Britain and the Netherlands created com-
panies to challenge Portugal’s control of Indian
Ocean trade at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, France did not do so until 1664. It ac-
quired Pondicherry, the first and most important
of its Indian trading posts, in 1674, nearly two
 BOOKS

While the French state

failed to build an empire
in the subcontinent,
French intellectuals
constructed an India
of their own through
scholarship and
imagination.
centuries after the arrival of the Portu-
guese in 1498. Initially struggling to en-
ter markets already under the sway of
the British and the Dutch, by the 1740s
the French Company became at least
an equal to its rivals. Its headquarters,
in Pondicherry, grew into a major com-
mercial centre, and new French trading
posts appeared as far afield as Bengal
and Kerala.
Under the leadership of Joseph-Fran-
çois Dupleix, between 1742 and 1754,
the company transformed itself from a
commercial enterprise into a military
machine. Dupleix initially focussed
on crushing the British, whose trad-
ing post at Madras was uncomfortably
close to Pondicherry. The British called
on their ally Anwarrudin Khan, the
nawab of Arcot, who controlled north-
ern Tamil Nadu and whose armies
vastly outnumbered Dupleix’s small
force. At the Battle of Adyar, in 1746, a
few hundred French soldiers defeated
the nawab’s twenty-thousand-strong
army. This inspired Dupleix to pursue
a new strategy, and he used his mili-
tary superiority to drive Khan from
jacques langevin / sygma / getty images

his throne and replace him with a pup-

pet ruler. Dupleix then tried this trick
again, placing his own candidate in Hy-
derabad as the subahdar of the Deccan.
At the same time, the French reached
out to the nawab of Bengal, promising
him support against the British in Cal-
cutta. French historians such as Alfred
Martineau (who was also the governor

MARCH 2018 85
 the failed empire · books
of French India during the 1910s) have
insisted that Dupleix was the pioneer
of European imperialism in India, and
that he invented the strategies of indi-
rect rule that the British officer Robert
Clive would later deploy in Bengal. But
these inventive techniques of political
manipulation only gave the French a
taste of Indian empire.
The conflicts between Pondicherry
and Madras, as well as between Britain
and France’s respective Indian allies,
were part of a much larger struggle.
Over the eighteenth century, the two
European rivals clashed all over the
world, drawing many local powers into
culture club / getty images
86
conflict. Diplomacy among Indian and
European leaders alike turned on the
question of whether they would join the
French or the British. While France was
often militarily successful in Europe, it
lacked Britain’s ability to project force
overseas, often leaving its allies unpro-
tected. In the globe-spanning Seven
Years War, fought from 1756 to 1763, the
French were soundly defeated by the
British everywhere from North America
to South Asia, including in south India
and Bengal. France’s Indian clients
abandoned it, leaving it only five scat-
tered trading posts: Pondicherry, Chan-
dernagore, Mahé, Yanaon and Karaikal.
THE CARAVAN
With the victory in 1763, Britain
became the world’s foremost imperial
power, and seemingly unbeatable in
India. But the French government and
French soldiers employed by Indian
rulers continued to resist Britain’s
growing might. France supported
Indian rulers such as Tipu Sultan in
fighting the British, just as it supported
rebels in Britain’s North American
colonies. After Tipu’s death in 1799 and
Napoleon’s fall in 1815 France aban-
doned any military ambitions in India,
restricting itself to the management of
its five small and isolated colonies. It
was not for another generation that the
French government dreamt of empire
again, and then it focussed on North
Africa (where the French seized Alge-
ria in 1830) rather than South Asia. But
French mercenaries fought on against
Britain in the service of Indian rulers
such as Ranjit Singh until the 1830s.
the collapse of dupleix’s empire in
1763 might have inspired French intel-
lectuals to forget about India. In the
same year, Britain also seized France’s
far larger possessions in North Amer-
ica. Voltaire, the pre-eminent French
writer of his day, spoke for many when
he dismissed the vast arc of lost ter-
ritory stretching from New Orleans
to Quebec as a “few acres of snow.”
India, however, was a different mat-
ter. Voltaire, like many of his peers, felt
France’s defeat there was a real trauma,
and he participated in debates about
how India had been “lost” and who
should be held responsible. In his 1773
book Fragments about India, he exoner-
ated his favoured generals while ex-
coriating others. More importantly, in
this and in other writings, he outlined a
vision of India that became widespread
in French culture, presenting the sub-
continent as the source of civilisation.
Jyoti Mohan presents a sophisticated
analysis of what made Voltaire’s ideas
on India so influential in France, and
so different from those prevalent in
Britain. Like many thinkers on both
sides of the English Channel, Voltaire
was fascinated by Brahminical reli-
gions. Europeans at the time knew
little about the content of Indian re-
ligious traditions, but Brahmins had
been a byword for wisdom and spiritual

power ever since the days of ancient Greece and
Rome. Early-modern European travellers to India
sent back reports of what seemed to be outra-
geous and horrifying superstitions: the worship
of animals, fearsome idols, self-mutilation and,
most famously, widow-burning. Practically every
European travel-writer reported having seen, or
at least hearing about, a widow being burned. The
Widow of Malabar, first presented for the Paris
stage in 1770, won international success with its
depiction (and denunciation) of widow-burning.
It even inspired a “Malabar” hairstyle, in which
women piled brightly coloured feathers on their
heads. While theatre-goers and fashionable ladies
were frightened and thrilled, intellectuals asked
themselves how India, known since antiquity as a
source of wisdom, could also be home to such dis-
turbing practices.
Mohan shows that British and French thinkers
developed different responses to this question.
Scholars and officials of the British East India
Company argued that India must have degener-
ated from an original purity. They blamed Islamic
getty images
the failed empire · books
invasions for this supposed decline—as much this spread: In
right-wing historiography continues to do. This the 1740s and
theory allowed the British to argue that their role 1750s, the French
conquered lands
in India was to restore it to its former glory. It also
in North America
allowed them to disparage many aspects of con- (below) as well as
temporary Indian culture while affirming a pious on the subcontinent
respect for ancient Indian traditions. (opposite page).
Voltaire, as Mohan shows, punctured this self- That spree came to
congratulatory nonsense with his typical wit. He an end when the
British defeated the
wrote in Fragments about India that “it would be
French in the Seven
very difficult to reconcile the sublime ideas which Years War (1756-
the Brahmins preserve of the Supreme Being with 1763),
their superstition and fabulous mythology, if his-
tory did not present the same sort of contradic-
tions among the Greeks and Romans.” If Europe-
ans could wink at the ridiculous aspects of their
own spiritual traditions, they should extend the
same courtesy to India. The great writer deflated
other stereotypes about India as well. Many trav-
ellers and scholars insisted that India was popu-
lated by lazy natives who were unfit for industry
or trade. Such views again provided a justification
for the British conquest of India, particularly the
MARCH 2018 87
the failed empire · books
Voltaire wrote passionately about Indian
philosophy, though much of his knowledge
was based on the “Ezour-Vedam,” a so-called
“lost Veda,” which later turned out to be a
forgery.
imposition of colonial commerce, but as Voltaire
observed, they had little truth. History shows, he
noted, that Indians have been “of all times a trad-
ing and industrious people.”
His enthusiasm for India led Voltaire into
trouble as well. Equipped only with vague ideas
about Indian knowledge—it was only in the fol-
lowing decades that Sanskrit texts began to be
seriously translated for Western readers—he and
many other French intellectuals of his day were
hoodwinked by “the Ezour-Vedam,” purportedly
a “lost Veda.” Voltaire was given a manuscript of
it in 1760, and for many years passed it around
among his friends before securing its publication
in 1778. The book showed Voltaire exactly what
he wanted to see; it presented Indian religion as
an enlightened monotheism. Only after Voltaire’s
death was the Ezour-Vedam revealed to be a forg-
ery, concocted by a Jesuit priest.
until voltaire’s time, the only Europeans who
knew much about Indian languages, history and
religion were missionaries, who aimed at under-
standing the faiths they sought to displace. Since
the seventeenth century, they had filled European
libraries in Paris, Oxford and elsewhere with
Indian manuscripts. For decades these precious
documents in Sanskrit, Pali and other classical
languages gathered dust, since no one in Europe
could read them. Gradually, French officials and
scholars concluded that if their nation could no
longer rival Britain for control of India’s present,
they would become the masters of its past. As Mo-
han shows, such was the impulse behind a vogue
for Indological scholarship in France, beginning
in the second half of the eighteenth century, with
Indian manuscripts at the centre of it.
The most well-known French Indologist was
Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron, who
pioneered European study of the Upanishads in
the last decades of the eighteenth century. An-
quetil began his scholarly career as an agent of
the French Royal Library, when he came to India
at the age of 24 to gather manuscripts and learn
the languages necessary to read them. His dream
was to travel to Varanasi and study Sanskrit with
the greatest pandits of the subcontinent: a feat
no European scholar had accomplished. Anquetil
had the misfortune, however, of arriving in India
on the eve of the Seven Years War. After an initial
88 THE CARAVAN
stay in Pondicherry, he travelled to the French
trading post of Chandernagore in Bengal, from
where he meant to begin a journey up the Ganga
to Varanasi. Instead, he had to flee a British army
under Robert Clive, which was marching upcoun-
try for the decisive Battle of Plassey, which in 1757
crushed the nawab of Bengal—Siraj ud-Daulah—
and his French allies. After a torturous overland
escape to Pondicherry, Anquetil decided to try a
different approach. He headed to Surat, in Gujarat,
to learn ancient Iranian languages from the Parsi
community there. But war followed him again; a
British fleet captured Surat in 1761. When a dis-
traught Anquetil finally left the subcontinent the
following year, he negotiated passage on a British
ship, only to be thrown in prison when it docked
in England. It was enough to make anyone a critic
of British imperialism, and Anquetil bore a grudge
for the remainder of his career.
One of his books, Oriental Legislation (1778),
attacked the British theory of “‘Oriental despo-
tism,’” which claimed that Asian states such as the
Mughal Empire lacked any form of law. Leaders of
the British East India Company—such as the noto-
rious Warren Hastings, who was the governor of
Bengal between 1772 and 1785—used this theory to
justify their arbitrary and rapacious rule, arguing
that Indians did not understand any other form
of government aside from despotism. Drawing on
sources such as the Akbarnama, the vizier Abu
al-Fazl’s chronicle of the reign of the Mughal em-
peror Akbar, Anquetil showed that the Mughals
did employ the rule of law. The British, he argued,
brought despotism to India. Even the index was
a weapon in Anquetil’s hands. It directs readers
searching for “The English,” to search under “bar-
barous behavior towards the Marathas ... injustice
to the French ... conquer Hindustan to pay off their
national debt.”
The masterstroke of Anquetil’s revenge on the
British was his publication of a translation of the
Upanishads, which until then had been unavail-
able, and unknown, in Europe. While he had been
unable to study in Varanasi because of the British
invasion of Bengal, Anquetil kept up a correspon-
dence with a French agent behind enemy lines.
Jean-Baptiste Gentil fought the British in Bengal
alongside Siraj ud-Daulah before fleeing to Awadh
in 1763. Once there, Gentil found a new ally, the
nawab Shuja ud-Daulah, and organised a contin-
gent of French mercenaries for his army. A copy of
the Upanishads was among the many manuscripts
he supplied to Anquetil from there. The scholar
worked painstakingly in Paris from 1775 to 1802 to
craft a translation.
Anquetil insisted that the Upanishads were
the equal—and the source—of the philosophies of
Plato and Immanuel Kant, then the most revered

leemage / corbis / getty images
getty images
figures in European thought. As Mohan observes,
Anquetil “was convinced that the key to all Eu-
ropean culture” lay in ancient Indian texts. He
noticed many parallels between the philosophy of
the Upanishads and the teachings of the ancient
Greeks as well as modern European thought. He
developed an elaborate theory that Brahmins trav-
elled to the Mediterranean in the sixth and fifth
centuries BCE, and inspired the Greeks. Their
teachings had disappeared in the Christian era,
he argued, but surfaced again as thinkers such as
Kant unconsciously rediscovered the Indian wis-
dom in European traditions.
Anquetil’s ideas were not always correct or
original. His claims that the Upanishads were the
the failed empire · books
basis of Greek philosophy were false, although left: Joseph-
India did influence Greek philosophy to a degree. François Dupleix
Having mastered only the basics of Sanskrit, he was a pioneer
of European
worked via the Persian translations of Mughal-
imperialism in India
era scholars supported by the prince Dara Shi- and transformed
koh. Dara and his circle had also systematically a commercial
compared the Upanishads to Islam, and Anquetil enterprise into a
drew from this template for his comparison of the military machine.
Upanishads and Western traditions. This, in turn,
shaped later European Orientalism. left bottom:
This work opened a new chapter in intellectual During the French
Revolution, Tipu
history. Henceforth, European intellectuals would
Sultan of Mysore
have to confront India’s philosophical traditions. was hailed by the
Anquetil, who styled himself as a humble sage French as a “citizen-
filled with Brahminical wisdom, could not resist sultan.”
bragging. A Frenchman, harassed at every turn in
his travels through India by British armies, had
triumphed over British scholars. He scornfully ob-
served that the British “are the masters of every-
thing in all of India, from the Ganges to the Indus,
with Brahmins, pandits, authority and wealth at
their disposal,” yet “they have not a single San-
skrit grammar, nor even a dictionary.” This was
somewhat unfair to British Orientalists such as
William Jones and Nathaniel Halhed (who wrote
his own incomplete and unpublished translation
of the Upanishads in 1787). These scholars, who
were part of the administrative system of the Brit-
ish East India Company, had to divide their time
between translating ancient texts and compiling
legal codes—and they did publish dictionaries and
grammars. But Anquetil, giddy with vengeance,
was perhaps entitled to his scorn.
anquetil hoped that Indological expertise could
help the French re-establish themselves in India.
After being routed in the Seven Years War, France
partnered with Mysore, which then seemed Brit-
ain’s most formidable Indian enemy, hoping to
create a rebel alliance that would bring together
Mysore, the Marathas and the Nizam of Hyder-
abad. But expeditions in support of Mysore during
the American Revolutionary War, between 1777
and 1783, did little to thwart the growth of British
power, and efforts to help during the Third and
Fourth Anglo-Mysore Wars, in the last decade of
the eighteenth century, came to nothing. Mysore
was crushed. Throughout this period, Anquetil
sent countless letters to French officials warning
them that Mysore’s rulers, Haidar Ali and Tipu
Sultan, were seen by many Indians as untrust-
worthy usurpers, and that there was no hope that
the Marathas and the Nizam would join them.
Even as France’s most knowledgeable expert on
India, he was ignored.
Anquetil died in 1805, after several years of em-
bittered isolation. While finishing his translation
of the Upanishads he had become something of
MARCH 2018 89
the failed empire · books
a hermit, withdrawing himself from a
rising generation of scholars whom he
had inspired. Due in part to his efforts,
at the dawn of the nineteenth century
Paris was the place in Europe to study
Sanskrit. Anquetil’s successors were
left to decipher Sanskrit on their own,
using the manuscripts that he and oth-
ers had gathered in the national library.
Mohan describes the difficulties of
their endeavour, demonstrating the
perseverance of Antoine de Chézy, the
“self-taught Sanskritist” who would
train the next generations of scholars,
and of Louis Langlès, who laid the basis
for modern Indology in the first de-
cades of the nineteenth century.
The Indological knowledge of Pari-
sian scholars did little for French impe-
rialism, but it would add fuel to Germa-
ny’s quest for national greatness. Many
nineteenth-century German scholars,
such as the orientalist Max Müller,
studied Sanskrit in Paris in the first de-
cades of the century, while others, such
as the philosopher Arthur Schopenhau-
er, were inspired by Anquetil’s transla-
tions. It was such Germans who gave a
sinister twist to Anquetil’s hypothesis
that the term “Aryan” as it appears in
ancient Persian sources might be con-
nected to the Sanskrit “arya.” Anquetil
had suggested that there must be—as
indeed there is—a linguistic and cul-
tural connection between the ancient
peoples of South Asia and the Iranian
plateau; his German successors, on the
other hand, imagined that this connec-
tion implied the existence of a distinct
(and superior) Aryan race. By the mid-
dle of the nineteenth century, inspired
by vague notions of “Indo-European”
heritage, Germany was creating a net-
work of modern research universities
that would transform Indology into
one of the most prestigious—and politi-
cised—fields of scholarship. France
became at best a second-rate centre of
Indology, lagging far behind.
Beaten in both imperial and aca-
demic competition, France now nur-
tured no ambitions regarding India,
only nostalgia. In novels, plays, songs
and postcards, French culture con-
tinued to play out fantasies about the
distant land. Kate Marsh, among other
scholars, has shown how the prevail-
ing images of a “lost India,” where the
90
By the mid nineteenth century, inspired by vague
notions of a shared “Indo-European” heritage,
German researchers would transform Indology into
one of the most prestigious fields of scholarship.
French once could have ruled, became
detached from any substantive refer-
ences to India’s present or future. The
realities of Indian history and France’s
role in it disappeared behind a fog of
comfortable memories about the “good
old days” of Dupleix (a similar process
now seems to be underway in Britain
regarding the Raj).
claiming india cannot cover the
whole story of France’s relationship
with India, nor does Mohan pretend
that it does. She recognises that her
book has a narrow scope, covering a
significant period of the Franco-Indian
encounter. With skill and sophistica-
tion, she analyses missionary reports,
Indological treatises, museums and
exhibitions, and much else besides, to
present an excellent overview.
Much of the early, pioneering work
on Western views of India—by scholars
such as Ronald Inden, Berhard Cohn
and Robert Travers—focussed, natu-
rally enough, on the views of British
colonialists. But the history of India’s
entanglement with the West is far more
complicated and interesting than just
that involving British rule. Scholars
such as Ines Županov and Sanjay Sub-
rahmanyam have revealed the fascinat-
ing negotiations by which Portuguese
traders, missionaries and soldiers be-
came participants in the political and
cultural life of early-modern southern
India. There is still much to learn about
the Dutch, Danish and other European
empires in the subcontinent. By show-
ing that France developed its own
unique view of India, Mohan contrib-
utes to a growing body of scholarship
that de-centres the British Raj.
Readers may be unconvinced by
certain elements of Claiming India’s
conceptual framework. For instance,
Mohan borrows from Kate Marsh the
idea that France’s position in India
must be seen as that of a “subaltern col-
onizer.” This term seems at best a puz-
zling oxymoron and at worst a wrong-
THE CARAVAN
headed appropriation of the idea of the
“subaltern.” Mohan’s work, like that
of Marsh, often elides the realities of
France’s presence in India. The French
ideas about India that Mohan traces
were connected to colonial realities,
both shaping them and being shaped by
them. Scholars such as Julie Marquet
and Gauri Parasher have shown that
French officers in Pondicherry, like
their British counterparts elsewhere,
were guided by Indological and Orien-
talist stereotypes as they tried to make
sense of Indian society. Searching for
supposedly timeless customs, they
imagined that the caste system was a
permanent, immovable hierarchy—and
tried to remake Pondicherrian society
in the image of their fantasy. Enriched
by Mohan’s study, scholars must now
take the further step of seeing what
French visions of India meant for colo-
nial rulers and colonial subjects.
The rich and complex history be-
tween the two countries makes Bonjour
India’s “story of how we met” seem
rather tame. But while Paris and Delhi
seem to ignore that history in their dip-
lomatic efforts, the legacy of Franco-
Indian contact continues to bear fruit.
In India, writers such as the Malayalam
novelist M Mukundan from Mahé
and the playwright K Madavane from
Pondicherry (who writes in French),
continue to explore the colonial and
postcolonial worlds of French India.
In France, the public is beginning to
rediscover this legacy through the
newly refurbished French East India
Company museum. A modest facility
on France’s western coast, near the
port of Lorient that was once the Com-
pany’s headquarters, the museum has
received increasing support from the
central government and boasts of over
a million and a half visitors in the last
decade. India and France remain en-
tangled in a challenging and stimulat-
ing history, one that they could benefit
from embracing rather than trying to
avoid. s
THE BOOKSHELF

dreaMerS Mother earth,

how young indianS SiSter Seed
are Changing their travelS through
world india’S FarMlandS
Snigdha Poonam Lathika George

Half of India’s population Lathika George, an organic gardener and author of cookbooks,
is below the age of 25. travelled across rural India—including Goa, Kerala, Karna-
In this book of profiles, taka and Maharashtra—to collect stories about how food is
mainly of young men from produced. She writes about seasonal fruits, sustainable fish-
small towns, the journalist ing, foraging for wild food and organic farming, and records
Snigdha Poonam notes that the majority of India’s youth are various longstanding agricultural practices that are currently
uneducated, unemployed or unemployable. Their stories are under threat across India.
a combination of big dreams and dim horizons, with only a
few succeeding in India’s competitive labour market. Many
are pushed to seeking redressal though a politics of anger and
vengeance.

penguin viking, 256 pages, S599 penguin random house india, 256 pages, S699

gleaningS idolatry and

oF the road the Colonial
Rabindranath Tagore,
idea oF india
translated by Somdatta viSionS oF horror,
Mandal allegorieS oF
enlightenMent
Swagato Ganguly

Rabindranath Tagore, who Swagato Ganguly reveals

once wrote that the soul dies the extent to which British
if it does not travel, travelled colonial antipathy towards
extensively all his life, criss- idolatry—in their eyes, a su-
crossing Europe, North and perstitious and inferior form
South America, the Middle of worship—constructed Eu-
East and East Asia. In this ropean conceptions of India
book of essays, most of which were published in Bengali and legitimised colonial rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth
magazines in the 1910s and 1920s, Tagore chronicles his centuries. According to Ganguly, depictions of idol worship-
travels and impressions of, among other things, Egypt, Arabia, pers as irrational people given to social disorder began to
William Butler Yeats, Modernist poetry, the bustle of London converge into a set of stereotypes about India in the works of
and Port Said, English drawing-room manners and the quality European writers such as William Jones and Max Müller.
of the light on a Sunday morning in America.

thornbird, 220 pages, S295 routledge india, 208 pages, S795

92 THE CARAVAN

the Skull oF
aluM Bheg
the liFe and death
oF a reBel oF 1857
Kim A Wagner
The historian Kim A Wagner
traces a skull found in a bar
in England to Alum Bheg,
a rebel soldier in the 1857
revolt. According to Wagner,
Bheg was captured by the British East India Company and
shot out of a cannon. This book offers a grisly and macabre
account of the 1857 revolt, including the public executions of
thousands of men.
penguin random house, 256 pages, S599
Mothering
a MuSliM
Nazia Erum
The author Nazia Erum ex-
poses how Muslim children
in Delhi’s private schools are
taunted, insulted and sometimes violently attacked by their
classmates because of their religion, while teachers and prin-
cipals look the other way. Erum interviews several children,
parents and teachers to reveal patterns of prejudice.
juggernaut, 248 pages, S399
march 2018
THE BOOKSHELF
Five PlayS
Ritwik Ghatak,
translated by
Amrita Nilanjana
The Bengali filmmaker
Ritwik Ghatak is one of the
most acclaimed figures in
independent Indian cin-
ema. In the late 1940s and 1950s, as a member of the Indian
People’s Theatre Association, he wrote five plays focussing on
the Bengal Famine and the aftermath of the Partition. These
works have been translated into English and made available
in a single volume.
thornbird, 312 pages, S495
My enCounter
with the Big Cat
and other
adventureS in
ranthaMBore
Daulat Singh Shaktawat
A few years ago, locals in a Rajasthan village summoned
Daulat Singh Shaktawat, a forest-department officer, to a
farm where they had spotted a tiger. While Shaktawat was
tracking the animal on foot, it pounced on him, biting his
arm and gouging out an eye. Shaktawat, who survived and
eventually returned to duty, narrates this incident in vivid
detail in his book.
niyogi books, 184 pages, S695
93
SHOWCASE

Arts

Julus and
Other Stories
13 MARCH TO 7 APRIL
CHEMOULD PRESCOTT ROAD, MUMBAI

Julus and Other Stories is a multimedia project

by Shakuntala Kulkarni consisting of synchro-
nised videos, chalk drawings on board, prints of
wiped-off chalk drawings and cane objects. The
courtesy anil rane and ajay narhona

film Julus is a declaration of the vision that anyone

can have equal rights and freedom as individuals,
and as part of a community as a whole. The artist
also addresses her concern about the violation of
the female body in public and private spaces.

For more information, write to

janhavishirwadkar@gallerychemould.com

94 THE CARAVAN
 SHOWCASE

Theatre
Playback Theatre
31 MARCH
LAHE-LAHE, INDIRANAGAR, BENGALURU

Playback Theatre is an exercise in breaking the

third wall. A space is constructed to permit inter-
action between the audience and the actors. The
story of the individual in the audience is brought
to life by actors, to the tunes of talented musicians
in the background. The re-enactment, ritualistic
in nature, offers the possibility of viewing per-
sonal experience through a theatrical form.

For more information, write to

mansee.st@gmail.com

Film
Habitat Indian
Film Festival
23 MARCH TO 1 APRIL
INDIA HABITAT CENTRE,
NEW DELHI

In its second edition, the

festival brings together
critically acclaimed
films, features and
documentaries from
across the globe. This
year, the focus is on
the Swedish director
Ingmar Bergman and
the German filmmaker
Christian Schwochow,
along with a collection of
children’s movies. Carry-
ing the momentum forward from the previous year, this year
boasts an impressive line-up such as Swedish director Ruben
all images courtesy ihc

Östlund’s The Square, Iranian director Mohammad Rasou-

lof’s A Man of Integrity and Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri’s
The Insult.

For more information, write to ujjala.gupta@vty.co.in

MARCH 2018 95
showcase

Theatre

Aasakta
On its fifteenth anniversary, Aasakta Kalamanch is bringing four plays to Prithvi Theatre.
Mukaam Dehru Jila Nagaur is a farce, originally penned in Marathi by Paresh Mokashi. Math-

Plays emagician is a solo performance based on a Hindi-Urdu translation of Gowri Ramnarayan’s

original work with the same title. The highly acclaimed Mein Huun Yusuf Aur Ye Hai Mera
Bhai is based on a play by the Palestinian playwright Amir Nisar Zuabi. Gajab Kahani is an
adaptation of Nobel laureate Jose Saramago’s novel The Elephant’s Journey.
15 TO 18 MARCH
PRITHVI THEATRE, MUMBAI For more information, write to aasakta.pune@gmail.com

96 THE CARAVAN
 showcase

Theatre
Living Traditions
17 TO 18 MARCH
NCPA, MUMBAI

Living Traditions is an ongoing series showcas-

ing folk traditions from different regions of India.
Yakshagana, a vibrant form of traditional theatre
from coastal Karnataka, is in the spotlight this
year. The origin of this ritual theatre, patronised
by temples, can be traced to the period between
the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Tradition-
ally performed in open air through the night by
all-male troupes, Yakshagana performers wear
elaborate headgear, facial make-up and colourful
costumes. The themes of the plays are drawn from
the epics. Over two days, two well-known troupes
all images courtesy ncpa

from Udupi will present the two main variants of

Yakshagana.

For more information, write to

Hina.Thadani@pointninelintas.com

Music
Aayo Phagun
The Hindustani classical singer Kalapini Komkali channels the
spirit of phagun—the last month of the Hindu solar calendar.
Phagun sets in a month after basant, or spring, and brings with it
the hope of a fresh start. Inspired by the maestro Kumar Gand-
harva, Komkali’s compositions attempt to capture the burst of
colour and new energy with rich, descriptive melodies that bring
to life the coming together of man and nature.
courtesy ncpa

9 MARCH For more information, write to

NCPA, MUMBAI Hina.Thadani@pointninelintas.in

MARCH 2018 97
 Editor’s Pick
ap photo
on 3 march 1913, over 5,000 people
gathered in Washington D.C. for
a march to win public support for
women’s right to vote. The National
American Woman Suffrage Association
spearheaded the movement, demanding
constitutional amendments.
The procession, which included
trumpeters, began near the Capitol—
the meeting chamber of the United
States Congress—and carried on to the
Treasury Building along roads strewn
with rose petals. The lawyer Inez
Milholland led the march on a white
horse. Around a hundred women and
children displayed a tableau with alle-
98
gorical figures such as Charity, Liberty
and Justice, hoping to draw attention
to “those ideals toward which both
men and women have been struggling
through the ages and toward which,
in co-operation and equality, they will
continue to strive.” The New York Times
declared the march “one of the most
impressively beautiful spectacles ever
staged in this country.”
Though successful, the event was
not uncontroversial. When African
American suffragists announced their
intention to join the march, several
white Southern suffragists threatened
to boycott it. Ultimately, the march
THE CARAVAN
was segregated. In 1974, the feminist
and activist Alice Paul, who organised
the parade, claimed that it had been
largely peaceful. But other contempo-
rary accounts claim that male onlook-
ers tripped and shoved women, and
shouted out insults. Over 100 injured
marchers were reportedly rushed to the
hospital. The author Helen Keller, who
had intended to speak, declined. She
explained later that the crude remarks
and jeers of male onlookers had left her
“exhausted and unnerved.”
Seven years later, the United States
passed a constitutional amendment
granting women the right to vote.