8th anniversary issue

Founder: Vishva Nath (1917-2002) VOLUME 10 • ISSUE 1 Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Printer: Paresh Nath JANUARY 2018

36

perspectives

cover story / politics

36 Alt-Reich 28 The unholy alliance between India and the new global wave of white supremacy caste carol schaeffer 20 The “P” Word The dark history of the word “pariah” gopu mohan The “alt-right”—a new white-supremacist movement—is gathering pace across the Western world, especially after the election of US President law Donald Trump. At the centre of it is Arktos Media, a publishing house A Matter of Choice founded and fostered in India, that has organised meetings with powerful 28 What the right-to-privacy judgment means Indian politicians, and has links to radical right-wing parties across the globe. Its story is just one part of the overlooked Indian roots, both for India’s abortion law material and ideological, of the alt-right. zeba siddiqui

JANUARY 2018 3 the lede

8

business 8 Splitting Hairs 56 The booming wig trade between India and Africa amrutha manjunath

environment 10 Parched How the termination of drought relief will photo essay / communities affect communities in Lesotho 56 Years Go By camilla caraccio The past as present in modern- day Uzbekistan communities aun raza 14 On Shaky Grounds The unwarranted demolition of houses after an earthquake in Mexico devika bakshi

books 94

education 82 The Skilled and the Schooled India’s struggles over what counts as knowledge amit basole 82 the bookshelf 92 showcase 94 nOte tO reaDers: FEATURED CONTENT ON PAGES 68-81 IS PRODUCED BY LEENA GITA REGHUNATH editor’s pick 98 AS A PART OF AN EIGHTH-YEAR ANNIVERSARY FEATURE.

4 THE CARAVAN

editor Anant Nath executive editor Vinod K Jose political editor Hartosh Singh Bal senior associate editor Ajay Krishnan associate editor Roman Gautam books editor contributors Kushanava Choudhury senior assistant editors 8 Amrutha Manjunath is a student of economics and mathematics at Ashoka University. She THE LEDE Martand Kaushik and Puja Sen was an intern at The Caravan. copy editors Aria Thaker 10 Camilla Caraccio is a freelance writer and photojournalist from Italy. She has covered and Maya Palit entrepreneurship in Jordan, human-interest stories in India and environmental issues in web editor Nikita Saxena southern Africa. She is currently based in London. assistant editors (web) 14 Devika Bakshi is an independent journalist and radio producer. She has previously worked Surabhi Kanga and Arshu John with NPR, CatchNews and Open magazine, and written for the Indian Express, Mint and The contributing editors Hindu. Deborah Baker, Fatima Bhutto, Chandrahas Choudhury, PERSPECTIVES 20 Gopu Mohan is a journalist based in Chennai. Siddhartha Deb, Sadanand Dhume, 28 Zeba Siddiqui is an independent researcher based in Delhi. Siddharth Dube, Christophe Jaffrelot, Mira Kamdar, Miranda REPORTAGE 36 Carol Schaeffer is an independent writer and journalist covering the rise of the far-right Kennedy, Amitava Kumar, Basharat AND ESSAYS around the globe. She has been based in New York, Belgrade, London and Paris, and can be Peer, Samanth Subramanian and found on Twitter as @ThenCarolSaid. Salil Tripathi staff writers Praveen Donthi PHOTO ESSAY 56 Aun Raza is a documentary photographer based between Italy, Austria and Canada. Apart and Atul Dev from doing independent work, he is a contributor to Getty Images. web reporters Sagar and Kedar Nagarajan editorial manager 82 Amit Basole is an associate professor of economics and the director of the Centre for BOOKS Haripriya KM Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. He recently edited a book fact checker Nileena MS titled Lokavidya Perspectives: A Philosophy of Political Imagination for the Knowledge Age, photo editor Tanvi Mishra published by Aakar Books. photo coordinator Shahid Tantray COVER Design: Sandhya Visvanathan graphic designers Paramjeet Singh and Sandhya Visvanathan luce scholar Daniel Block editorial interns Aathira Konikkara, Abhinaya Harigovind and Gena Fazel

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Correction: Arnav Das Sharma’s “Diminishing Returns,” published last month, misspelled “Kalaari Capital” as “Kalaari Capitals.” facebook.com/TheCaravanMagazine

The Caravan regrets the error.

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6 THE CARAVAN

THE LEDE Splitting Hairs The booming wig trade between India and Africa / Business

/ amrutha manjunath

In the narrow lanes of south Delhi’s large, bustling INA market, among the shops bursting with uniforms, dupat- tas, fruits and vegetables, several sign- boards advertise human hair. On an afternoon in August, I entered a shop whose sign read “Pankaj International Human Hair,” climbed down a short flight of stairs, and found the owner, Pankaj Chitkara, in the basement. He was measuring brown hair extensions with help from his young assistant, and recording the lengths in a notebook. He showed me the six types of human hair he sold—straight, curly, natural wave, bulk hair, deep wave and wavy. They came in 11 different colours, including jet black, deep red and plati- num blonde. Chitkara, who has owned the store for 17 years, told me that many of his customers are not from India but from Africa. He said the demand for Indian hair—which is known for its strength and thickness—among Africans in Delhi has been growing since 2004. The shopkeeper of HSE Hair—a whole- sale store in Patel Nagar—also told me that her most “regular customers” are people employed by embassies of Afri- can countries, who usually buy exten- sions in bulk. The sale of hair to Africans in Delhi is part of a much larger hair trade be- tween India and Africa. According to an article on Scroll.in, India’s hair ex- port market was worth around R2,500 crore in 2015, when the piece was writ- ten, and was growing annually by 10 to 30 percent. The article also reported that the market for wigs, weaves and

extensions in Africa is worth about $6 / getty images frédéric / sygma soltan

8 THE CARAVAN the lede

billion per year. Though this trade may and its thickness—inevitably, then, opposite page: The sale of wigs and be growing, some people, including it becomes a status symbol. Fiona extensions to Africans in Delhi is part of a several African women I spoke with in Achieng from Kenya, an undergradu- growing hair trade between India and Africa. Delhi, are choosing to reject wigs and ate student at Ashoka University in Much of the supply of Indian hair is collected at temples or salons. extensions, acknowledging the political Haryana, told me in October that the implications of using imported substi- price of a wig can “go up to 100,000 tutes for natural hair. Kenyan shillings” in her country—ap- Africa, sparked after a 13-year-old Much of the massive supply of Indian proximately R63,000, and the most girl, Zulaikha Patel from Pretoria— hair comes from temples and salons. popular imports were from India, who has had to change schools three About ten million devotees get their Brazil and Puerto Rico. “It’s a class times because of her afro—was told heads shaved every year at the Tiruma- thing, so wealthier women would wear to straighten her “messy” hair by her la Venkateshwara temple in Tirupathi, straight hair, and Indian hair,” Har- school. The same year, “The Good a city in Andhra Pradesh and a famous riet Kumbani—who is from Malawi Hair” study by Perception Institute—a pilgrimage site. The hair is preserved and also enrolled at Ashoka—told me, non-profit think tank conducting sci- in godowns, cleaned and segregated adding that Indian, Peruvian and Bra- entific research on race and gender— by size and density, and then sold on- zilian hair was the most expensive in revealed that one in five black women line through e-auctions. The Tirumala markets in Malawi. in the United States feel pressured to Tirupathi Devasthanams, or TTD—an Both women went on to explain that straighten their hair in professional independent trust that oversees the straight hair has long been the stan- situations. Unsurprisingly, then, the finances of the temple—collects an dard of beauty in the countries where South African writer Danielle Bowler, average of nearly 500 kilograms of hu- they were from. Kumbani, suggest- in an article on the website Eyewit- man hair every day, and in 2015–16 it ing that this stemmed from a colonial ness News, said that black women’s generated a revenue of more than R200 hangover, said, “My mother was tell- hair is often reduced to a discussion crores through e-auctions. Generally, ing me that when they were kids, they pitting natural hair against weaves, the hair from temples that is collected didn’t have straighteners. They would which ignores the larger issue: “While and sold is of “Remy” quality, which take hot rocks and use it to straighten some women might not choose their means it is cut in a way that ensures their hair, so I guess that’s what they hairstyle based on an overt political it is intact and all the follicles are fac- thought was beautiful.” Achieng ex- decision, the choices available to us are ing in the same direction. Considered plained that since she was a child, she themselves inescapably political.” to be superior in quality, it is sold by has noticed ads depicting women with However, a movement to embrace TTD for about R25,000 per kilogram. long wavy hair, and public personali- natural hair has burgeoned in the last Regular hair, however, which is picked ties who do not wear their natural hair, five years, in—but not limited to—Af- up as waste from households or salons, perpetuating the notion that straight rica and the Americas. The Nigerian is priced lower—at around R3,000 per hair is superior. “It started around the filmmaker Zina Saro-Wawa’s 2012 kilogram. 1980s, when my mother was a teen- documentary Transition attempted When I met Purity Chinagorm, a ager, and people stopped embracing to capture this trend, and cited that Nigerian studying business admin- the Afro,” Achieng said. “That’s when health and self-discovery were among istration in Delhi, she was wearing a people started relaxing their hair”—us- the most common reasons for women curly blonde wig with greenish tints ing chemical lotions with high alkali deciding to “go natural.” Achieng told that matched her olive shirt. Hurrying levels which can cause hair thinning, me that the movement is still ongo- through INA market with groceries in scalp burns, and even increase the ing, with several media personalities both hands, she told me that her natu- risk of cystic fibroids—“and everyone in Kenya cutting off their relaxed ral hair is short and clumpy, and very started using this gel, which doesn’t hair, and accepting rather than fight- difficult to manage in warm weather. really make your hair straight, just ing their natural hair. “In the last five “You cannot do many styles with it,” more curly and long. So the gel started years, people have been cutting off she said, but added, almost warningly, the move and then there came weaves, their straight hair and going back to “It is not that our hair is not beautiful.” wigs, and so on.” their natural hair,” Kumbani said about Human hair sold in Africa becomes Like skin colour, hair has also been a hairstyles in Malawi. “And this time, it more expansive depending on the basis for discrimination against black is here to stay, because even people who country it is imported from, how long people. Last year, protests broke out at wear wigs now have their natural hair it lasts, its ability to stay untangled, schools and universities across South underneath.” s

JANUARY 2018 9 the lede Parched How the termination of drought relief will affect communities in Lesotho / Environment

/ camilla caraccio a second bout of El Niño has been pre- added, its presence had helped. “Rather dicted around the end of the year, mak- than competing, the community is It was a windy June morning in Ha ing it unclear how Lesotho will manage coming together in the spirit of coop- Lephalo, a tiny highland village over- with its scarce water resources. eration and solidarity,” one man said. looking rugged mountains and arid Masheane Nkopane, the water and “However, it’s now our responsibility wasteland. Ha Lephalo is 50 kilome- sanitation coordinator at World Vision to preserve its role and functionality so tres north of Maseru, the capital of International—an international relief that our children will be able to employ Lesotho—a small country landlocked and advocacy organisation—accompa- it fruitfully as long as possible.” by South Africa. That morning, I met nied us to Ha Lephalo. He explained As noon approached, the clouds re- the village chief, a 50-year-old woman that Lesotho is still reeling from the treated, unveiling the mountains. We named Itumeleng, who introduced her- current drought, with rural areas af- drove north to the Berea government self to me as a biting wind swept across fected the worst. “Dryness has compro- hospital, a UNICEF-supported health her wrinkled face. Lesotho’s steep, mised climate-sensitive elements such facility treating malnutrition cases mountainous landscape—the country’s as agriculture and environment, and which could be connected to drought- lowest point is at 1,400 metres above also had collateral effects on health, related crop failure. Nozizwe Chigonga, sea level—had earned it the epithet increasing level of stress and secu- a nutritionist, led us to the pediatric “Kingdom in the sky,” she said. rity concerns,” he said. The safety of ward. We saw a young mother holding This geographical position has been women, in particular, was frequently her ten-month-old baby to her breast, in both a blessing and a curse. Although compromised because of the scarcity a desperate attempt to feed him before its majestic highlands make the coun- of water. A study conducted by the he was taken away to treat a life-threat- try a popular travel destination, reach- United Nations Population Fund be- ening case of malnutrition. Shayna ing water sources is difficult because of tween October 2016 and February 2017 Rosenblum, a researcher of public health its rugged terrain. The only source of at UNICEF’s Nutrition and Emergency water for Ha Lephalo had historically Response team in Lesotho, accompa- been a spring a two-hour trek away LETTER FROM nied me to the hospital, and explained across slippery slopes. In 2015, even LESOTHO that the incidence of malnutrition had this source became tenuous because peaked during the drought’s onset in of a shortage of rainfall caused by El 2015 and again in the winter of 2016. Dry Niño—an irregular cycle of climate conditions had caused a harvest failure, changes brought on by rising tem- noted that 53.8 percent of the 1,084 leaving around 725,000 people with a peratures in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño interviewees had experienced incidents severe shortage of food. Some house- triggered the worst drought to have hit of gender-based violence during the holds, which would otherwise farm for Lesotho, and southern Africa, in the drought. According to Nkopane, women themselves, were forced to buy maize, last 35 years. and children, who usually oversee the beans, peas and other staples in the mar- In October 2016, as part of a series of food and water provisions in Basotho ket, where the shortage of food caused drought-assistance measures, the Unit- households, had to wake up around 1 prices to rise by 40 percent in the period ed Nations Children’s Fund, or UNI- am during the drought to queue at the between late 2015 and early 2016. CEF, built a large water tank with a ca- spring. These late-night visits meant Although the relief might have pacity of 20,000 litres in Ha Lephalo. It that children often missed early classes helped combat the water deficiency, Le- has since served over 1,600 people—the at school the next morning, and many sotho—particularly in its rural areas— entire population of the village—and women were regularly robbed and ha- faces another persistent issue: poverty. the water is predicted to last for about rassed by men on their way to and from According to a study released by the 30 years if the tank is maintained well. the spring. World Bank earlier this year, around According to the United Nations office “Every time my wife would leave the 58 percent of the total population of in Lesotho, half a million people in the house I couldn’t help but wonder, what Lesotho was living in extreme poverty country benefitted from $40.7 million if something happens to her?” a Ha Lep- last year. The local government imple- (about R270 crore) in international aid, halo local, one of the few passersby who mented the Child Grants Programme which ranged from agricultural assis- had joined the conversation with Itu- in 2007, one of its social protection tance and water-related interventions meleng, chipped in. Two others agreed schemes. On the basis of this, UNICEF to cash grants. But the drought-relief that it had been dangerous for women provided children from 27,000 house- was slotted to end in August 2017, and before the arrival of the tank, but, they holds with cash grants and emergency

10 THE CARAVAN parched · the lede

left: The drought in Lesotho triggered an increase in gender-based violence, crop failure and food insecurity.

The drought had hit hard and doubled their economic burden. “Land and ani- mals used to be everything to us,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do about what has happened.” Like most of their neighbours, Pesa and her family had always engaged in rain-dependent sub- sistence farming, but the scarcity of wa- ter during the drought caused livestock loss, which exacerbated the already serious food shortage. Pesa’s mother left the house in 2015, and seemed unlikely to return. Pesa conjectured that she was part of a wave of people who moved to South Africa in search of better economic opportuni- ties during the drought. Pesa’s family

john wessels / afp getty images began to fall apart after her mother’s departure: she explained that the sud- cash during the El Niño drought. The The drought compromised den absence of a female relative, with amount, an average of 500 maluti (ap- the safety of women in whom she would split daily chores, proximately R2,400) per household disrupted the household. The family’s per quarter, covered basic monthly ex- Ha Lephalo. Women, who dire financial circumstances meant that penses, including access to health and queued at the spring to Pesa’s oldest daughter, Rethabile, who primary education. collect water in the middle is almost 16 years old, was unable to Salvator Niyonzima, the resident of the night, were regularly enroll in secondary school, and instead coordinator for the United Nations in robbed and harassed by worked at a shop a few miles from her Lesotho, whom I met in Ha Lephalo, home. The family said she would re- was optimistic about Lesotho’s social- men. turn to school in a few months. “I have protection programmes. But he added w w always dreamed of being a teacher,” that the country would need to develop Rethabile said. “I would like to see my a strong coping mechanism to deal importance of speaking to communities younger brothers being offered the with weather-related disasters. “In a to understand their perception of the chance to realise their aspirations.” drought-prone country like Lesotho, drought relief. “We need to be watchful Before heading back to Maseru, we the welfare implications of climatic so that we won’t be caught off guard in pulled over to a small shop to buy re- hazards are wide-ranging,” he said. the future,” he said. freshments and chatted with two ven- “We need to understand that communi- Just after sunset, Rosenblum and I dors there. Inevitably, we spoke about ties eat what they grow and grow what drove through dying trees and aloe vera the drought. Pointing to a portion of they eat.” Besides short-term strategies, plants, and stopped at a rural small- papa—a corn-based dish popular among such as observing natural features to holding about 40 minutes from the hos- locals—one vendor said, “It used to cost detect imminent droughts and develop- pital. There was a small house adjacent ten times less.” He listed several food ing supportive social networks, Niyonz- to the smallholding. A fire was going items whose prices had shot up in late ima said different farming methods, in the tiny kitchen, and smoke seeped 2015 as a result of the drought. “Mat- including keyhole gardens—growing through a cracked door into the living satsi a loyana,” said the other vendor, vegetables with less water and recycled room. Masetormo Pesa, the head of the an older man, referring to an old Sotho material—and drought-resistant crop house, told us that she and her husband proverb. “Tomorrow might not be as seeds, would help. He also stressed the had struggled to raise three children. bad as today.” s

12 THE CARAVAN the lede On Shaky Grounds The unwarranted demolition of houses after an earthquake in Mexico / Communities

/ devika bakshi

“Look, it’s what we’re seeing in the majority of houses,” the architect Mela- nie De Gyves told Edgardo Jimenez Santiago, a 30-year-old psychologist, as they stood in his house on a hot Sunday morning in mid September, ten days after an earthquake had struck off the coast of southern Mexico. “Everything looks dramatic. The lime plaster, the finishing, everything everywhere has fissures.” The turquoise walls of Santi- ago’s house showed cracks, and chunks of finishing had fallen off, exposing the brick beneath. All the internal walls, separating three rooms, had partially collapsed. The floor was covered in debris. Santiago’s home in Ixtepec, a small city in the southern state of Oaxaca,

was one of thousands damaged by the rebecca blackwell / ap photo quake on 7 September, which measured At stake in the reconstruction of homes damaged by the quake in Mexico is something more 8.2 in magnitude, making it the stron- than roofs over heads. Some architects, engineers and residents are attempting to organise gest the country had seen in over a cen- community-driven reconstruction efforts. tury. An official census carried out by federal and state government agencies demolition. De Gyves—who is part of a ico City, while the Isthmus experienced just after the quake recorded 121,701 loose coalition of architects, engineers another cluster of quakes on 23 Septem- damaged homes in the states of Oaxaca and volunteers working to organise the ber.) “People who come from the city and Chiapas. In Oaxaca, the damage reconstruction of the community in consider these homes for poor people,” was concentrated in the Isthmus of Te- keeping with regional architectural tra- De Gyves told me. There is little un- huantepec, the thin waist of the coun- ditions—believes that in the majority of derstanding that what they are looking try, separating the Gulf of Mexico from cases, demolition would be unwarrant- at represents a built typology, which the Pacific Ocean by around 200 kilo- ed. Often, the damage to homes was evolved in the region over more than a metres. The regional hub of Juchitán de superficial or remediable. That so many century. The arquitectura vernácula, or Zaragoza was devastated, as were fish- homes had been marked uninhabit- vernacular architecture, of the Isthmus ing villages on the coast and hamlets in able was, according to her, because the incorporates a range of design features the coffee-growing hills to the north. people assigned to evaluate them for and techniques, and building materials Ixtepec was not as badly affected. Even the census were either unfamiliar with including wood, clay tiles and unbaked so, of the roughly 7,900 homes in the traditional architecture or unsuited to mud brick, commonly known as adobe. municipality, 4,130 were found by the their task. Perhaps more importantly, Often, however, the term adobe is used census to have suffered damage. they did not have a high estimation of as a stand-in for the full breadth of Noe Hernández Reyna, the municipal traditional homes. earth-based architecture, connoting secretary of Ixtepec, told me in Oc- A large part of the task facing De something basic, unsophisticated and tober that damaged homes had been Gyves and her group is to make people improvised. In the aftermath of the sorted into three categories: those that aware that their homes need not be quake, adobe became an easy scape- had suffered partial damage but were demolished wholesale, and can in fact habitable, those with partial damage be updated to be stronger and better that were uninhabitable, and those that prepared for the next quake. (Another LETTER FROM had suffered perdida total, or total loss. brutal quake hit central Mexico on 19 MEXICO About 600 homes had been marked for September and caused damage in Mex-

14 THE CARAVAN on shaky grounds · the lede goat. The Mexican president, Enrique president’s statements about adobe, hers, 57-year-old Ana Maria Barenca Peña Nieto, for instance, declared that saying it was “unacceptable” to claim Rosado, though distraught, told me she the majority of collapsed homes in the that the damage suffered “was directly was grateful she could still support her city of Juchitán had been “of adobe, old linked to the construction material.” family of nine. She grows corn and sells and without the structure to withstand The letter, signed, among others, by the tortillas for a living; her mill and oven, an earthquake of such magnitude.” acclaimed painter Francisco Toledo, in the middle of the patio, were saved “It is a serious mistake to fixate on urged that reconstruction be carried from damage. Her family could cook, tierra homes as being those that col- out with respect for the architectural, and she could soon resume work, which lapsed,” the architect Marcos Sanchez, material and cultural traditions of the was even more crucial for her after the who heads a firm specialising in tierra, region. It also cautioned against a one- financial hit that followed the quake. or earth-based architecture, in Oaxaca size-fits-all approach to reconstruction, For Sanchez, the depth and speci- City, told me over the phone. He argued pointing to the relief homes built by the ficity of people’s relationships with that the term “adobe” was misleading government in the state of Guerrero af- their homes demands that any recon- in its conflation of an array of building ter devastating twin hurricanes in 2013, struction effort be participatory and techniques, and contested the idea that which turned out to be ill-suited to the community-driven. To that end, he the majority of collapsed homes were region, and soon began to fall apart. has been working to organise and fund earth-based, and therefore more vul- At stake in the reconstruction of the workshops across the region, with the nerable. The destruction had to do with Isthmus of Tehuantepec is something objective of training people in hands- a combination of factors, he said, in- more than roofs over heads. “Vernacu- on, assisted auto-construction. One cluding the intensity of the earthquake, lar architecture is our cultural heri- project will involve high-school stu- the nature of the soil—which he charac- tage,” Gerardo De Gyves—Melanie’s dents rebuilding their school in a vil- terised as “soft and fragile”—and a lack father, a civil engineer and Ixtepec na- lage near the Oaxaca-Chiapas border. of enforcement of building regulations. tive—told me in September, after a long At the heart of these efforts, Sanchez “Hundreds of buildings constructed day visiting damaged homes. “It has so explained, is the idea of tequio, a princi- with industrial materials fell,” he much to do with our way of life, with ple of mutual exchange and community pointed out—they were not necessarily the climate, with our customs. We don’t labour that was, within living memory, sturdier. want this event to become a reason a way of life in the region. It was this A walk through affected neighbour- for external institutions to erase this principle that animated another group hoods in the city of Juchitán, which has kind of cultural value on the argument in Ixtepec, who, in the weeks after the far more modern constructions than that the homes are damaged, or old, quake, organised volunteers to clear the region’s smaller towns and vil- or that they’re now no good.” For him, rubble from the homes of those who lages, seemed to prove his point. There, although heritage may seem like an had little help, including Barenca Rosa- three-storey homes had buckled under abstract matter of aesthetics, the ways do. One of the people leading the effort their own weight, flattening everything in which architecture in the Isthmus was a young civil engineer and graphic in them. The damage was less severe shapes people’s lives are in fact quite artist who did not wish to be identi- than that in traditional homes—usually concrete. fied. On an evening in October, he and single-storey structures with sloping Gerardo De Gyves and others, in- a friend walked around, tagging the wood-and-tile roofs—which had crum- cluding architects, engineers and walls of those refusing demolition with bled in chunks. Far from being more residents, pointed out to me that the a stencil that said: “This is my heritage. secure, concrete homes, if not well con- natural materials and spatial design It will not be knocked down.” They structed, could be far more lethal. The of traditional homes are perfectly greeted people as they walked around: civil engineer Andres Manzano, part of suited to the region’s muggy climate; an acquaintance sheepish about being a team of volunteer architects and en- thick mud walls are cool, ceilings are part of a government demolition crew, gineers from the University of Guada- high, and rooms open into each other someone checking on a friend’s home, lajara gathering data on the damage in and to an internal patio, encouraging a group of neighbours gathered for a Ixtepec, told me that many homes that air flow. Cooking, gardening, wash- communal dinner at a big picnic table had suffered extensive damage were ing, childrearing, meals and afternoon under a tarp in the middle of the street. those whose residents had constructed naps take place in this patio, which is Before the quake, he said, none of concrete additions on top of, or adjacent often connected to the homes of family this was happening. Everyone was shut to, existing structures of wood and ado- members on adjacent plots. When the 7 up in their own homes. After the quake, be, which completely threw the origi- September quake hit, close to midnight, he said, whether in running community nal buildings off balance. “The modern many people were able to avoid bodily kitchens, delivering supplies or shar- wants to eat the traditional, and both harm by running out into their patios. ing resources and sympathies, people end up failing,” he said. As the region continued to shake with have “retaken their right to occupy the In a letter to Peña Nieto after the tremors in the following weeks, many street.” For him, this post-quake mo- quake, a broad coalition of organisa- families, afraid to sleep under a roof, ment represented “a great opportunity” tions, architects and vernacular- yet unwilling to leave their homes un- for the community as a whole to re- construction specialists criticised the guarded, slept in their patios. Sitting in cover a lost social fabric. s

16 THE CARAVAN

PERSPECTIVES

The “P” Word The dark history of the word “pariah” / Caste

/ gopu mohan Its historical connotations, however, have been almost forgotten—except by those the term was, On 20 October, D Ravikumar, the general secre- and is, used to denigrate. The Oxford English Dic- tary of the political party Viduthalai Chiruthaigal tionary contains an anodyne description of its ori- Katchi, sent Time magazine a strongly worded gin: “Early 17th century: from Tamil paraiyar, plu- email objecting to its cover that month, which had ral of paraiyan ‘(hereditary) drummer’, from parai gone viral on social media even before the maga- ‘a drum.’” It also provides a historical definition: “A zine hit the stands. It featured the Hollywood member of an indigenous people of southern India producer Harvey Weinstein, and the caption read, originally functioning as ceremonial drummers but “Producer. Predator. Pariah.” More than 80 wom- later having a low caste.” Many Dalit scholars have en in the media have accused Weinstein of sexual contested this, arguing that the word has a more assault and misconduct, setting in motion similar complicated history, and that the definitions do not allegations against high-profile men all over the reflect the centuries of hurt and humiliation suf- world. Ravikumar’s objection concerned a very fered by the people it is meant to describe. Just as specific aspect of the cover—the usage of the word the “n” word evokes the dark history of slavery and “pariah.” “There are more than 10 million people racial prejudice, so should “pariah” be recognised living in India who have been and continue to be as carrying the brutal legacy of the caste system. called as ‘pariah’,” he wrote in his email. “Their According to the French scholar Eleni Varikas, descendants live in many countries of the world. the Portuguese military navigator Duarte Bar- The word is used by others in a derogatory and bosa, who was based in India from 1500 to 1517, insulting manner not unlike the ‘N’ word in your recorded the word for the first time in his travel country.” In an attempt to be alliterative, the mag- writing. “There is another inferior group of pa- azine had unthinkingly deployed a term loaded gans called Pareas,” he wrote. “They do not come with casteist prejudice. in contact with anyone, are considered worse than In its broadest sense, the term indicates an the devil and shunned by all; just looking at them outcast. It is often used to describe “rogue” states is enough to be contaminated and excommunicat- and their leaders. In the case of figures such ed.” About a century later, around 1613, “pariah” as Weinstein, it evokes deviance or villainy. In entered the English lexicon, and that of other Eu- mathematics, a Pariah Group is an outlier set of ropean languages. numbers that refuses to be part of the rest—inci- The earliest known inscription of the Tamil dentally also called a Monster Group. And with word “paraya” is found in a Sangam-era text, respect to animals, the word is often used to refer Purananuru, composed between the second and to a mongrel or feral dog, and a type of black kite third centuries. In his essay “Waiting to lose their found in India. patience,” Ravikumar noted that when the first modern edition of Purananuru was published in 1894, many historians claimed that the presence of Just as the “n” word evokes the dark history of the word “parayan” in Song 335 implied that a caste slavery and racial prejudice, so should “pariah” system existed 1,800 years ago. “Nondalit commen- be recognised as carrying the brutal legacy of the tators understand this to mean that the discrimina- caste system. tion and oppression of the parayars/dalits is not of recent origin,” he wrote, “and they derive solace w w in believing that untouchability is as old as the

20 THE CARAVAN the “p” word · perspectives

above: The most Sangam period.” The pioneering Dalit intellectual outcasts—the panchama, or fifth group, not even popular hypothesis Iyothee Thass questioned the very authenticity of fit to be in the four varnas of the caste system. about “paraya” the text in his 1908 article “Is there a book called They were made to perform “unhygienic” tasks states that it is Purananuru?” According to Ravikumar, there is no such as digging graves or disposing of animal derived from the way to verify whether the song exists in its original carcasses, and were treated as “untouchables” word “parai,” which denotes a drum form, or whether it was added in later centuries. for performing those very tasks. “The stigma sur- made of cowhide. The second-oldest inscription of the word is from rounding the word paraya was introduced as part the thirteenth century, during the Chola period. In of this vast and continuous process of subjuga- this case, Ravikumar writes, there are references to tion,” the Dalit academic Stalin Rajangam told me. both paraya cheri, or paraya settlement, and theen- It was here that the early colonialists—mis- da cheri, or untouchables’ settlement, indicating sionaries, traders and voyagers—played a role in that the two were not the same. The conflation of cementing the caste system. In trying to make untouchability with “paraya” had not yet occurred. sense of the new world they had just discovered Many Dalit scholars believe the prejudice as- and begun documenting, they needed guides and sociated with the word solidified soon after Vedic translators. Knowledge was by then a Brahmini- Brahminism took hold over south India. The Dra- cal preserve, and carried Brahminical bias. The vidian Buddhists and Jains, who resided in large inevitable “misunderstandings and confusions” numbers in the region and whose religions were that were part of the exchange between the Brit- dominant until the fifteenth century, were driven ish and the native elite, Varikas wrote, were away or slaughtered, excluded from social activi- “symptomatic of the processes by which Europe- ties and denied rights to property or livelihood. ans—initially the Portuguese and the Dutch and

Brahmins dubbed them lower-caste Parayas, or then the French and the English—came to know dhandapani saravanan

22 THE CARAVAN & Windows PC the “p” word · perspectives

At the same time the term was evolving to Among the people the doctor encounters on his signify the most abject caste communities in the journey across Europe and the Indian subconti- nent is an unnamed pariah, and the grand priest of subcontinent, the figure of the pariah entered Puri, supposedly the wisest of all pundits. To the European literature, distanced from its original doctor’s dismay, he finds the priest, and the sect context, and idealised in new ways. he belongs to, ignorant and vain. The priest argues that all knowledge is comprised in the “four Beths w w (vedas), written a hundred and twenty thousand the ‘discovered’ populations, their civilisations years ago in the Schanscrit language, which the and their social organization.” Bramins alone understand.” This truth should be According to the academic Rupa Vishwanath, concealed from the rest of mankind, but “it is an the first public statement of what was called the indispensible duty to disclose it to the Bramins,” “pariah problem” was published in 1891 in The says this “Oracle of India.” The pariah, on the Hindu, the Madras presidency’s leading daily at other hand, argues that the pursuit of truth, the the time. It stated, “The Hindus do not recognize very essence of Enlightenment values, is the pre- them as part of their community and nothing can rogative of all individuals. “I consider every man be more humiliating and intolerable than the treat- as laid under an obligation to search after truth, ment that the Pariahs … receive from the Hindus for the sake of his individual happiness; otherwise, of higher castes.” Vishwanath argues, “The Pariah he will be a miser, ambitious, superstitious, mis- Problem, then, marks the recognition, in public chievous, nay a cannibal, according to the preju- debate and in the halls of government, not only of dices or the interests of the persons who may have that subpopulation as particularly abject, but also brought him up,” the pariah says. of Pariahs as a group whose improvement was the The pariah’s wife is a Brahmin, who at a young responsibility of others.” By this time the name age, was almost sacrificed at the funeral pyre, af- “Paraiyar”—which denoted one caste group among ter the death of her first husband. The pariah wins many—was used to refer to all Dalits by colonial of- her over not with his valour, but with compassion. ficials. The British administration had little reason They find a natural solidarity: he, a man but a to overhaul the prevailing social organisation. The pariah, and she, a Brahmin woman but a widow— bonded labour that Dalits provided was needed both outcasts in a casteist patriarchy. “How have by both feudal landlords and their colonial over- the Bramins been able to persuade the Nations seers. By the time India became a colony, then, the of India to adopt a folly so very gross,” cries the assumed wisdom was that it was a vast land con- Englishman. “By inculcating it upon them from nected by Hinduism, which remained stable due to infancy,” replies the pariah, “and by incessantly a rigid but pragmatic caste structure. repeating it: men are taught like parrots.” The deep caste association the word had, and Saint-Pierre’s commentary about the arrogance continues to have, seems to have been lost to the of the elite and the attendant inequalities of soci- Western world. At the same time the term was ety was not lost on European readers. evolving to signify the most abject caste communi- The 1821 play Le Paria, by the French dramatist ties in the subcontinent, the figure of the pariah Casimir Delavigne, tells the story of Idamore, the entered European literature, distanced from its chief of the local military, who saves the city of original context, and idealised in new ways. As Benares but is sentenced to death after his com- Varikas argues, in adopting this figure to highlight patriots discover his caste. It has the following inequality in societies supposedly founded on description of the state of the pariah: egalitarian ideals, both great and average works gave the term pariah a “‘Western’ uniqueness, its It is the shore of a withered race own historicity and perhaps its perennial nature.” A foreign race in its homeland “Pariah” entered into the political vocabulary to Without a protective roof, without a hospitable describe the disaffected in France. temple The 1791 book The Indian Cottage by James Hen- Abominable, rebellious, horrible to the entire lot ry Bernardin de Saint-Pierre provides a significant of people example. An English doctor travels to India as The pariahs. a colonial emissary to find answers to questions prepared by the Royal Society of London, aiming Such stories of heroic but ultimately tragic out- to build “the most superb encyclopaedical struc- casts romanticised the idea of alienation. Scholars ture ever reared by any nation to the progress of have argued that this conceptualisation of the pa- human knowledge.” The questions cover wide- riah influenced the creation of the Byronic hero— ranging subjects, such as the “ancient religion of an outlier in open conflict with social norms and the Bramins” and “state of the people of India.” institutions.

24 THE CARAVAN the “p” word · perspectives

Even starker was the German-Jewish poet Mi- chael Beer’s play Der Paria, which had the perse- cution of Jews as its subtext. The hero, Gadhi, and his “upper-caste” wife, Maja, choose to commit suicide rather than be separated. Before he dies, Gadhi says, defiantly, “all, all… equal.” Staged first in 1823 in Berlin, the play won accolades, includ- ing from the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A year later, Goethe wrote the poem “The Paria’s Legend,” about a Brahmin wife beheaded by her husband for having momentarily fantasised about a handsome pariah man. After being resurrected by her son, albeit with the torso of another decapi- tated woman, the woman tells the boy that a leper, an outcast, a Brahmin and a pariah are all equal before Brahma, who, ironically, is the god who supposedly made these laws and distinctions used against them in the first place. A more recent incident instructive of the differ- ent perceptions of the word in Europe and India came when President KR Narayanan went to France in 2000. The French newspapers Le Figaro and Le Monde welcomed him as the “untouchable president,” and provoked a furious response from India. But the French feminist and philosopher found offensive are not just “paraya,” “pulaya” and Catherine Clement—Narayan’s personal friend— “chamar,” but also “harijan,” commonly trans- explained that there were few other words avail- lated as “children of god,” which Gandhi himself able to the French press to describe a person who had popularised. For Dalit intellectuals, the word had overcome insurmountable hurdles: the term “harijan” communicated not just condescension “pariah” had by then been used pejoratively to but a tacit acceptance of the caste system. refer to the presidents of Libya and North Korea; Though the Western media has come to under- “Dalit” was too foreign for the average French stand the term differently, it should refrain from reader; while “untouchable,” which to the French calling every person or state it deems a deviant a carried no stigma, made the necessary idea clear. pariah. The row in India surprised the French. To them, Time acknowledged Ravikumar’s email, but he “untouchable president” captured the man’s great has not yet received a reply from its editorial team. journey, full of hardships. The English language has a dozen other words In India, however, where terrible caste atroci- to describe the toxic masculinity of figures such ties continue till date, the term carries no such as Weinstein. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias in life-affirming meaning, nor does “pariah.” It all languages should not merely refer to the word only evokes shame and humiliation. For in- as having originated from the name of a drum stance, in 1995, Subramanian Swamy caused a in Tamil Nadu, but also explain its history and furore by calling the Tamil Tigers leader V Prab- context of its evolution. The largely powerless hakaran an “international pariah.” The then masses that suffer the tyrannies of a casteist social chief minister of Tamil Nadu, J Jayalalithaa, order could do with an act of grace from Western who considered Swamy a political rival, filed a nations founded on ideas of liberty, equality and case against him under the Protection of Civil fraternity. More importantly, perhaps if their Rights Act for using a derogatory slur. This was counterparts in the West take the lead, Indian widely understood as a political move rather writers and journalists may also shed the criminal than a genuine attempt to fight casteist bigotry, ignorance or apathy that allows them to continue but the degrading connotations the term carried using the word, as if the horrors of caste are lost were still clear. on them. (This magazine has also been guilty of In the past two decades, both the Madras High using the word uncritically.) Court and the Supreme Court have repeatedly However, renegotiating the use of the word ruled that calling a Scheduled Caste person by pariah should be undertaken carefully, so as to his caste name is an offence under the Sched- ensure a greater sensitivity in language, and not uled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of the sanitisation of history. We must preserve the Atrocities) Act. Among the words the courts have memories. We have to remember. s

26 THE CARAVAN perspectives A Matter of Choice What the right-to-privacy judgment means for India’s abortion law / Law

/ zeba siddiqui the decision was unanimous, six of the nine judges wrote separate concurring opinions). “A woman’s In mid August 2017, a ten-year-old girl gave birth freedom of choice whether to bear a child or abort by caesarean section in a Chandigarh government her pregnancy are areas which fall in the realm hospital. Her parents reportedly did not tell her of privacy,” Chelameswar continued. Justice Fali she had had a baby removed from her body, saying Nariman’s opinion included “the right to abort a instead that the procedure was to remove a stone fetus” as an item in a list of “a large number of pri- from her stomach. vacy interests.” The girl was allegedly raped by her uncle, re- To understand the potential significance of this peatedly, over several months, and taken to the judgment for abortion rights in India, it is impor- hospital after she complained of a stomach ache. tant to recognise the ways in which the current There, doctors discovered that she was over 30 legal framework often compromises the privacy of weeks pregnant. Her parents filed a public interest women seeking to terminate their pregnancies. In litigation in the Supreme Court to seek approval light of this, the right-to-privacy judgment should for an abortion (under Indian law, a woman seek- catalyse legislative reform that secures inclusive ing to terminate a pregnancy that is over 20 weeks reproductive rights for all women. old must prove that the pregnancy threatens her The Indian Penal Code, enacted by the British in life). On 28 July, the petition was heard by a bench 1860, forbade abortion in all situations except ones comprising the then Chief Justice JS Khehar and where it would save the life of the mother. This Justice DY Chandrachud, who dismissed the plea stood for over a century, until, in 1964, the Cen- because, according to reports, they took “note of a tral Family Planning Board formed a committee medical report that abortion was neither good for that suggested that the IPC’s strictures on abor- the girl nor for the foetus.” tion were too rigid, especially with thousands of women dying each year as a result of unsafe illegal abortions. In response to this, in 1971, the Medical The MTP Act provides no opportunity for a Termination of Pregnancy Act was implemented, woman to abort if she is simply unprepared to liberalising India’s abortion law. have a child—whether for career-related reasons, The MTP Act—which is still India’s overarch- financial constraints, or otherwise. ing law on abortion, though it has undergone some amendments since 1971—states that a w w woman who is up to 12 weeks pregnant may abort with the approval of one “registered medi- About a month later, Khehar and Chandrachud cal practitioner.” A woman who is between 12 were both part of a nine-judge bench that unani- and 20 weeks pregnant may abort as well, but she mously decided that Indians have a fundamental must receive the approval of two medical practi- right to privacy, under Article 21 of the constitu- tioners. Medical practitioners are only permitted tion, which deals with the right to life and liberty. to grant abortions under certain circumstances: The judgment stated that privacy “allows each in the event that “continuance of the pregnancy human being to be left alone in a core which is would involve a risk to the life of the pregnant inviolable.” woman or of grave injury to her physical or men- Most saw the court’s decision in light of what tal health”; if the child would suffer from severe it would mean for Aadhaar, the unique-identifi- “physical or mental abnormalities”; if the preg- cation system being promoted by the centre. But nancy was caused by rape; or, finally, if the preg- the verdict’s implications stretch well beyond nancy “occurs as a result of failure of any device that—including to cases such as the one of the or method used by any married woman or her ten-year-old girl. The judgment pointed out that husband for the purpose of limiting the number the recognition of the fundamental right to pri- of children.” vacy may affect issues related to bodily autonomy, While it is difficult to deny that the MTP Act including abortion. “Concerns of privacy arise improved upon the IPC’s earlier stringency, it did when the State seeks to intrude into the body of little to acknowledge a woman’s autonomy over subjects,” Justice J Chelameswar wrote (though her own body. The act expanded the set of cases

28 THE CARAVAN a matter of choice · perspectives

above: The MTP in which women could receive abortions, but still The MTP Act excludes entire swathes of wom- Act states that a rigidly dictated the situations under which they en. For example, in the event that an unmarried woman who is up to could. This position, which affirms or denies the woman becomes pregnant due to a failure in con- 12 weeks pregnant right to abort based on external circumstances, traception, the MTP Act would not permit her to may abort with the and depends upon the often subjective judgment abort, since the law refers specifically to a failure approval of one medical practitioner. of at least one medical practitioner, sometimes “of any device or method used by any married A woman who two, infringes on a woman’s privacy as well as her woman or her husband.” Similarly, an unmarried is between 12 freedom over her own body. She is forced to ac- woman who has become pregnant through un- and 20 weeks count for her reason for wanting an abortion with protected consensual sex, if she is unable to prove pregnant requires medical practitioners, and to make them the arbi- that carrying the pregnancy to term would cause the approval ters of what should be her own private decision. her undue physical or mental damage, would of two medical practitioners. “Studies from India show that medical students struggle to obtain a legal abortion. do not know much about MTP,” Sundari Ravin- The law does not make room for even married dran, a professor in the field of sexual and repro- women to seek abortion under certain circum- ductive health, told me over email. She added, stances. For example, the MTP Act provides no “Gynecologists may be averse to providing abor- opportunity for a woman to abort if she is simply tion, so making doctors the gate-keepers is like unprepared to have a child—whether for career- deliberately erecting a barrier for women’s access related reasons, financial constraints, emotional

to abortion.” reasons, or otherwise. India’s lack of recogni- quraishi / ap photo mustafa

30 THE CARAVAN a matter of choice · perspectives

tion of marital rape compounds this for mar- cial for the detection of certain foetal abnormali- ried women, because a wife who is raped by her ties and conditions that might cause a woman husband and made pregnant without her consent to choose to terminate a pregnancy, but which, would have no legal recourse to an abortion on the within the current legal cut-off, she may not grounds of rape. If we are to take seriously a wom- know about in time. an’s fundamental right to privacy, it is crucial that Unfortunately, the bill’s progress is currently her access to a legal abortion is not granted based stalled. It was slated to be submitted for the pe- on how dire her circumstances are judged to be by rusal of the union cabinet earlier this year. But in a third party. Women must be granted the right to May, after a homeopath in Sangli, Maharashtra, make private choices about whether they want to was discovered to have been conducting sex-selec- carry a pregnancy to term. tive abortions, the file was reportedly returned to One way to expand abortion rights in India is the health ministry. through amending the MTP Act. In late 2014, the The right-to-privacy verdict may be the political health ministry floated a bill that aims to do just fillip needed to bring the amendment bill back into that. The draft bill proposes to allow women who consideration. Ravindran told me that she believes are up to 12 weeks pregnant to receive abortions the judgment “offers an opportunity for making “on request”—with no stipulations of whether it the argument to amend the MTP law and make is appropriate, and no need to defer to a medi- abortion available on request at least during the cal practitioner. The legalisation of abortion on first trimester of pregnancy.” Making the case for request would be a fundamental shift in India’s abortion on request, she said, “In societies where abortion law, recognising the autonomy of a abortion is available on request by women, the woman over her own body (even if only in the first abortion rates have not risen.” 12 weeks of pregnancy). The bill also mandates It is instructive to consider how other countries that medical practitioners maintain the anonym- have reformed their abortion laws. The right-to- privacy judgment includes lengthy discussions of If we are to take seriously a woman’s fundamental comparative legal frameworks. Among the influ- right to privacy, it is crucial that her access to a ential cases mentioned in it is the 1973 landmark decision in Roe vs Wade, in which, the right-to- legal abortion is not granted based on how dire her privacy judgment says, the United States Supreme circumstances are judged to be by a third party. Court w w dealt with the question of the right of an unmar- ity of women who receive abortions, under pain of ried pregnant woman to terminate her pregnan- prosecution. Both of these steps would help bring cy by abortion. The constitutionality of a Texas India’s abortion law in line with the recognition of Statute prohibiting abortions except with re- the fundamental right to privacy. spect to those procured or admitted by medical The amendment bill proposes other major advice for the purpose of saving the life of the changes as well, though they are more tangen- mother was challenged on the ground that the tially related to the issue of privacy. The bill law improperly invaded the right and the choice changes the terms “married women” and “hus- of a pregnant woman to terminate her pregnan- band” in the MTP Act to “any woman” and “her cy and was violative of the “liberty” guaranteed partner,” making sure that a woman’s access to under the Fourteenth Amendment and the right abortion in the event of contraceptive failure is to privacy recognized in Griswold. not contingent on her marital status. It proposes to expand the eligibility criteria for “registered The judgment also quotes a passage of the Roe medical practitioners,” allowing healthcare vs Wade majority opinion, which held that the professionals in non-allopathic fields such as ho- US Constitution “does not explicitly mention any meopathy and Ayurveda to perform medical (but right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, not surgical) abortions, increasing the number the Court has recognised that a right of personal of places where women can access legal abor- privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones tion. The bill also relaxes the restrictions on how of privacy, does exist under the Constitution.” and when women can terminate a pregnancy, India’s right-to-privacy judgment can also form stipulating that women seeking abortion beyond the bedrock for similar legal reasoning, for issues 12 weeks need the approval of only one medical such as abortion access, non-normative sexuali- practioner, not two. Perhaps most significantly, ties, data protection and more. Such reforms may the bill also raises the 20-week limit to 24 weeks, help bring about a society that would have pro- granting women an extra month during which duced a different outcome for the 10-year-old girl they may abort. This final change would be cru- in Chandigarh. s

32 THE CARAVAN

reportage

Alt-Reich The unholy alliance between India and the new global wave of white supremacy COVER STORY / POLITICS

CAROL SCHAEFFER steve helber/ ap photo

in a photograph posted to Facebook in 2011, an American man named John Morgan stands on the banks of the Ganga in Varanasi, wearing a white dhoti. He smiles, and holds a small bag in his hand. The sun is setting over the river, into which, just moments earlier, he had scattered the ashes of his beloved cat. When the photo was taken, Morgan had been living in India for two years. Several of his friends commented on the photo. “I didn’t know that you are inclined towards Sa- hajiya Vaishnavism. Traditional Gaudiya Vaish- navism sorts that path better,” one wrote. “I’m interested in everything Vedic,” Morgan

36 THE CARAVAN replied. “I’m not even certain that I’m seemed like any number of Western define a new, extreme-right politi- really a Gaudiya Vaishnava, since I find tourists, travelling in India and trying cal discourse emboldened by Donald the Sri Vaishnavas and even Advaita on different styles of spiritualism. But Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presi- Vedanta fascinating.” Morgan was not just another tourist. dential election. Obsessed with white A few comments down, he responded He is a co-founder, and until recently, identity and perceived threats to it, to a friend’s speculation that he may was the editor-in-chief, of Arktos—the the alt-right in the United States and be a Saivite, a worshipper of the Hindu world’s largest and most influential Europe generally yearns for the coming god Shiva. “Mahaprasade govinde publishing house for the “alt-right.” of a golden age—though the nature of nama brahmani vaishnava…” Morgan The alt-right—a loose affiliation of that golden age is internally disputed. wrote, invoking a prayer typically sung white nationalists, white supremacists, For some, it is a 1950s America of strict by the Hare Krishnas. “I chanted that neo-monarchists, masculinists, reac- gender roles and a racially divided soci- as I read it,” his friend replied. tionaries, conspiracists, neo-paganists ety before the expansion of civil rights At first glance, Morgan may have and social-media trolls—has come to for non-whites. For others it is a resur-

JANUARY 2018 37 alt-reich · reportage previous page: rected Roman Empire, and for others still a resur- conceives of the ideas it venerates as more “Aryan” In August 2017, rected Persian Empire. than South Asian. acolytes of the “alt- All of these longed-for ages, among various Arktos has also fostered direct connections with right” in the United others, are models for a supposed white utopia, Indian politicians, holding meetings with promi- States held a rally either with tolerated cohabitation with subor- nent members of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya in Charlottesville, chanting slogans dinate “non-Aryans,” or a territory cleansed of Janata Party and its parent organisation, the such as “Jews will those undesirables. Although such ideologies are Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, at least twice— not replace us!” and clearly fascistic and Nazi-like, most alt-righters though both meetings occurred several months carrying torches like categorically reject such taxonomy, preferring eu- before the BJP came to power under Prime Min- those used at Ku phemisms such as “identitarian,” “traditionalist” ister Narendra Modi in May 2014. On another Klux Klan rallies. and “alt-right” itself. An amorphous and factional occasion, Morgan has said, Arktos coordinated a opposite page: group prone to territorial infighting, the alt-right meeting between BJP officials and members of the Some symbols has nevertheless materialised in internet memes, far-right, anti-immigrant Hungarian party Jobbík. associated street violence and rallies designed to intimidate Friberg claims to have conducted over a hundred with Hinduism minorities. The far-right broadly has a long- meetings with influential figures in India, includ- are frequently standing history of violence and terrorism, but the ing politicians, religious leaders and publishers. referenced on alt-right websites. alt-right claims to be different, and attempts to Beyond its first-hand connections with the BJP In this image, distance itself from extremism. Yet one alt-right and Jobbík, as well as the far-right Sweden Demo- from a post on the rally, in the US city of Charlottesville in August crats, Arktos has links to the National Front of now-defunct blog 2017, resulted in the death of a 32-year-old woman, France, the National Democratic Party of Germa- Atlantic Centurion, Heather Heyer, and the injury of dozens, when an ny, Ukraine’s Svoboda, Greece’s Golden Dawn, the “Pepe the Frog,” a alt-right demonstrator plowed his car into a crowd British National Party, Italy’s Lega Nord, and oth- cartoon character that often appears of peaceful counterprotestors. White supremacists ers. Arktos has also bragged about its connections in alt-right memes, at the rally chanted “Jews will not replace us!” and to the Trump administration via Steve Bannon, is shown as Kalki, carried torches that harkened back to Ku Klux the executive chair of the alt-right media outlet the incarnation of Klan lynching rallies around the turn of the twen- Breitbart News, who served as Trump’s chief strat- Vishnu prophesied tieth century. egist until August 2017. Though it is unclear what to appear at the end Arktos was incorporated in November 2009, concrete results, if any, have come from these links of the Kali Yuga. and was among the first to translate and publish betweeen Arktos and global politicians, it seems many of the international texts that have formed obvious that the publisher is intent on forging ties the alt-right canon. The works it prints or resells with radical right-wingers across the world. have also begun to creep into the mainstream, White-supremacist interest in India is not as right-wing politicians across Europe and the unique to Arktos. Lengthy essays dedicated to United States adopt them. In January 2017, just South Asian religious texts appear on prominent days before Trump’s inauguration, the company alt-right blogs. American Vanguard, an organisa- officially partnered with the de-facto face of the tion that coordinated the deadly Charlottesville alt-right, the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, to found rally in August, sold T-shirts with a Nazi skull- the “Alt-Right Corporation”—an organisation cre- and-crossbones wearing sunglasses and the slogan ated to foment, as Spencer was quoted as saying “Surf the Kali Yuga” printed boldly below, refer- in The Atlantic magazine, “a total integration of ring to the Hindu notion that we are currently the European New Right and the US alt-right.” living in a dark epoch. According to the Southern Arktos is now based in Hungary, and represents Poverty Law Center, following the Charlottesville the European wing of the corporatised alt-right. It rally, the group Identity Evropa—which was one has published in nearly every European language, of the event’s organisers—teamed up with Arktos and has produced, according to the US-based non- to “promote identitarian literature with university profit the Southern Poverty Law Center, nearly students.” Eli Mosley Kline, Identity Evropa’s CEO 180 unique titles. at the time, had been previously photographed But before all that, Arktos’s first home was wearing Vanguard America’s “Kali Yuga” shirt. India. The publishing house’s presence in the Just before the US election, as Trump was about country was no coincidence. Although Morgan to enter a final presidential debate, Richard Spen- and his Swedish co-founder Daniel Friberg have cer tweeted—referencing the avatar of Vishnu both stated this was purely for the sake of keeping who, it is believed, will appear at the end of the operational costs down, evidence suggests other- Kali Yuga to battle evil forces—“Hopefully, Trump wise. Arktos has displayed a surprising affinity for as Kalki the destroyer will end them.” religious systems and philosophies rooted in In- dia. The publishing house seems to be inspired by i first reached out to Morgan via email in Septem- certain strains of Hindu thought, although it often ber 2016, just a day after Hillary Clinton, Trump’s refers to “Vedism” instead of “Hinduism,” and opponent in the US presidential race, brought dis-

38 THE CARAVAN alt-reich · reportage

Arktos has fostered direct connections with world. “I always had a sense very early on that there was something wrong Indian politicians, holding meetings with with society and culture in general, but prominent members of the BJP and the RSS, I could never really put my finger on it,” he said in a 2014 interview, published in including Ram Madhav and Ravi Shankar Prasad. the Journal for the Study of Radicalism. Morgan said he briefly flirted with left- ist ideas before drifting to the right. He graduated from the University of Michi- gan with a degree in literature in 1997. In 1998, Morgan came across the book Hitler’s Priestess, a biography of the esoteric Hitlerian Savitri Devi, writ- ten by the historian Nicholas Goodrick- Clarke. A European woman, born in France as Maximiani Portas, Devi spent her life blending Hindu spiritualism and nationalism with Nazism. “Savitri Devi herself was an interesting, if prob- lematic figure,” Morgan said in the 2014 interview. But what really interested him in that book, he added, were the author’s passing mentions of other writ- ers, whom Morgan called “the tradi- tionalists”—Julius Evola, René Guénon, and “all these figures who I had never heard of before that time, or maybe had just heard referenced, but didn’t know anything about them.” In 2006, bored by his job as a “low- level administrator” at his alma mater, Morgan became involved with a pub- lishing house called Integral Tradition Publishing with “some friends”—Pat- rick Boch and Jacob Christiansen Senholt—while maintaining his day job at the university. ITP was designed as a platform for “traditionalist” writ- ers such as Evola, who is now widely regarded as one of the most influential racial fascists of the twentieth century. When I interviewed Morgan, he told me that he was also drawn to ideas of the cussion of the alt-right into the public interviews that there are hate-mongers transcendent and the spiritual, and even sphere by famously calling its acolytes present within his immediate circle. “flirted with Sufism for a little while.” a “basket of deplorables.” We spoke in A nasal voice and tendency to defer to In November 2008, Barack Obama an unrecorded Skype interview, and he authors or scholarship to explain his was elected as US president, following declined to speak with me further after views seem to have made him a largely George W Bush. Morgan disliked both I questioned him on how close his be- unknown figure within the “alt-right,” of them. Fed up with politics in the liefs were to Nazism. and he prefers to avoid the intensity United States, he decided to relocate to I later interviewed Morgan in person, and visibility of activism. He told me India to work on ITP full time. He had in January 2017, in Budapest, where he that he has always been drawn to right- never left the United States except to go lives. I met him in a small Hungarian wing values through his “love of ideas” to Canada. In February 2009, he joined restaurant near the US embassy in the rather than any innate prejudice. Boch at an ashram in Mumbai that was city. Soft-faced and sometimes sporting Born in 1973 to upper-middle-class affiliated with the International Society a thin goatee, Morgan does not consider parents and raised on Long Island, near for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON: himself a hate-monger, although he has New York City, Morgan is bookish, an organisation of the devotees of AC acknowledged in public speeches and with a scepticism towards the modern Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada,

JANUARY 2018 39 alt-reich · reportage

Friberg said he considered ed pressing his forehead against my feet,” Morgan recounted. “In south India, they have these myths himself an anti-racist, listened that white Gods would come across the ocean to rap music and was “a and bring wisdom, and some people hold to these myths.” liberal” until he was 13, when Henrik Palmgren, the show’s host—and cur- he met migrant schoolmates, rently a partner in Friberg’s Alt-Right Corpora- tion—laughed, “Aryan! You have come to save me!” whom he saw as corrupting Morgan laughed along. delinquents. Morgan left India in 2013, though he continued to refer to himself as a Vaishnava Hindu in inter- views, on web forums and on internet message commonly known as “Hare Krishnas.” Morgan boards for several years afterwards. More re- began working full-time on ITP and, that year, cently, however, he has said that he has abandoned published the first English-language edition of an ISKCON. autobiography of Evola. Eventually, Morgan and his partners at ITP Boch had just graduated from the University of connected with NFSE-Media AB, a wide-ranging Buckingham’s law school in 2006 when he helped media project integral to several far-right cultural start ITP. When Arktos was registered in the Unit- websites, such as Metapedia, a far-right online ed Kingdom, Boch had provided an address in the enyclopaedia, which declares that its mission is Powai neighbourhood of Mumbai as his own. He to counter “semantic distortion worldwide.” Its was listed as a director of the company until 2010. entry on the Holocaust, for example, opens with Friberg recently said that Boch still lives in India “The Holocaust is according to politically correct and is a practising Hare Krishna. history a deliberate genocide by National Social- Eventually, Morgan made his way to a remote ist Germany in which approximately six million ashram in Salem, Tamil Nadu, run by a contro- Jews were killed.” The bulk of the entry contains versial right-wing guru called Bhakti Vikasa a rundown of revisionist and Holocaust-denialist Swami. A white man who was raised in the United perspectives. Kingdom, and joined ISKCON at the age of 18, Vi- Another initiative of NFSE-Media AB is Nord- kasa Swami is known within ISKCON as a highly isk.nu, a popular neo-Nazi forum frequented by conservative interpreter of scripture. He has been the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, banned from at least five temples in the United who was responsible for a massacre at a youth States, and has written a book that was banned by summer camp in 2011 that killed 77 people, many the ISKCON Governing Body Commission, titled of them under the age of 18. (Breivik, in a 1,500- Women: Masters or Mothers? The book proposes page manifesto, praised Hindu nationalists as his that girls should be married as children, no girl allies, urging them to fight alongside him and oth- should receive an education beyond cooking and er white nationalists. This led some Hindu leaders cleaning, women must never divorce, even if their to deny any ideological connections with Breivik; husband is abusing them, and that it is stri dhar- the RSS’s Ram Madhav called the manifesto “mo- ma—womanly duty—for women to essentially be tivated propaganda.”) slaves to their husbands. In an interview with one Through NFSE-Media, Morgan connected with devotee whose husband beat her, he advised, “Fol- Daniel Friberg, one of the co-founders of Meta- low your stri-dharma as far as possible. When he pedia. A Swedish skinhead who has grown out beats you a lot go and live with your brother and his hair, traded in his jackboots for brogues, and then return. But you should follow stri-dharma in is often seen wearing a suit, Friberg has garnered spite of all circumstances.” support within the extreme right with his well- In India, Morgan lived the ascetic life typical coiffed appearance, and attempts to cultivate a of ashram existence. He woke up at 4 am to pray, genteel persona. meditate and have breakfast, did Arktos-related But where Morgan’s demeanour is milque- work throughout the day, and in the evening did toast, Friberg relishes aggression. He has trouble work for the ashram. maintaining eye-contact and his mannerisms are In a 2016 interview with the white-nationalist stiff. He thinks hard before he tells a joke, and his radio programme Red Ice, Morgan recounted how, punchlines are nearly always insults. On 31 De- on a tour of South Asian holy sites, while chanting cember 2016, I attended a New Year’s party that mantras and waiting for a swami to speak, he saw Friberg threw in his apartment, where I met him a “short, dark homeless guy” who was muttering and many others who are a part of the alt-right. I to himself. “He walked up to me, and, without say- had declined to drink that night, which led him to ing a word, he knelt down in front of me and start- question if I was “a prude,” to which I responded

40 THE CARAVAN alt-reich · reportage with uncomfortable laughter. Friberg countered that, since I was laughing, I must be “a whore.” When I did not laugh at his other jokes, he called me “autistic.” A few days later, when I met Friberg for an in- terview, he told me to meet him in the Kempinski Hotel lobby in the city centre—a modernist con- struction of glass and steel, where he conducts all his press interviews. He told me he grew up in an upper-middle-class household with two highly educated parents, both linguists. His father had a PhD in linguistics and his mother, he said, “spent way too much time at the university, studying all sorts of useless crap,” including eight languages, among them Persian, Arabic and Greek. He described where he grew up, outside of Gothenburg, as a “nice, homogenous” town that was “tranquil.” He considered himself an anti-racist, listened to rap music and was “a liberal” until he was 13, when he met migrant ties to the Sweden Democrats, a nationalist, anti- above: John schoolmates, whom he saw as corrupting delin- immigration party. Erik Almqvist, a politician and Morgan, who used quents. He said he soon came to terms with being former Sweden Democrat, invested 600,000 kro- to be the editor- a nationalist, although he has vehemently claimed ner—nearly $75,000—in Friberg’s Wiking Mineral, in-chief of Arktos, moved to India in he never has been a “neo-Nazi,” bristling at the acquiring approximately 2.5 percent of the com- 2009. He spent term’s historical weight. pany’s shares. He, like Friberg, has relocated to some of his time In his youth, Friberg was a member of a group Budapest. Patrick Ehn, once a prominent Sweden in the country originally called Swedish Young National Social- Democrat from Gothenberg, was kicked out of the at an ashram in ists (National Socialism, or Nationalsocializumus, party for being too closely connected to neo-Nazis. Salem, Tamil Nadu, was the official ideology of the Third Reich), and This past September, Arktos hired Ehn as its “As- that was run by a police records show he was arrested for several sistant Art Director.” controversial right- wing guru. violent crimes, including throwing a rock through Friberg and Morgan formally connected soon the window of a Muslim man’s home, and having after Morgan relocated to India. Arktos absorbed a stolen gun hidden under his bed—an AK4, a type ITP in 2009, and Friberg—who was named the of automatic rifle exclusively used by the Swedish CEO of Arktos—joined Morgan in India in 2010. army. Over the next three years, Arktos became the In the early 2000s, Friberg attended Gothen- leading publisher of translated and original ma- burg University. He never graduated, although he terials of anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian and has lied about this, widely claiming that he holds anti-liberal writers. In that time, it had offices in an MBA from there. University records show that several locations in India, including Mumbai, Ben- Friberg was a mediocre student. When I asked galuru and Goa. Friberg about this via an emailed questionnaire, Arktos has sought to avoid categorisation, he responded that he “never claimed” to hold an claiming, on its website, that its project is to MBA, despite countless examples where he does, “provide the resources for individuals of many including in a blog post he wrote in response to a different inclinations to find alternatives to the report I published in The Atlantic. (After I emailed onslaught of modernity.” The publishing house has him, he changed the line where he claims to have released books on topics such as Hindu spiritual- earned an MBA to a claim that he has a “degree ism and European paganism. Morgan has insisted in economics,” but his university records indicate that Arktos is neither of the left nor the right, that although he completed some credits, he trun- but moves beyond those categories to intimate a cated his studies before completing the require- deeper truth. ments for any sort of master’s degree. I also tele- Friberg has always maintained that he is a pub- phoned the university, in June, and spoke with an lisher, not a politician, concerned with “metapoli- administrator, who confirmed that Friberg does tics” over party politics. In a book he wrote called not have a degree from Gothenburg University.) The Real Right Returns, Friberg explained, “Meta- Friberg worked until 2016 as the CEO of Wik- politics is the prerequisite of politics—the dynamic ing Mineral, a mining company founded by of power, as it is manifested on the street and Patrik Brinkmann, a Swedish businessman and computer screen and up to the government and far-right political funder. He also has significant parliament ... In short, in all the channels which

JANUARY 2018 41 alt-reich · reportage this spread: Arktos has published many pling arctic sky against jagged black myths and elaborates on their impor- books about, or that make reference to, mountain edges, which does little to tance today and their impact on the Eastern spirituality, Hinduism and India. suggest its content. The book, first Indo-European folksoul.” Convicted of published in 1903, theorises that the burning several churches in the 1990s communicate values perceived on an North Pole was home to an original in Norway, Vikernes explained his acts individual and collective level.” Friberg Aryan race some 10,000 years ago. as paganist revenge against Christian- and others of the alt-right hope to shift Tilak, dubbed the “father of Indian what they often refer to as the “Overton unrest” for his advocacy of violent window“—a concept of what type of tactics against British colonialists discourse is socially acceptable—to the and inspiration to later Indian Hindu right. nationalists, drew from Vedic hymns The account of how Morgan and and Zoroastrian texts to support his Friberg ended up in India has changed theory. over the years. In a speech delivered in The BJP and RSS have taken many Stockholm in 2015, at the “Identitarian cues from Tilak. For example, in 1939, the RSS leader MS Gol- walkar, in his book We Or Our Nationhood Defined, posited his own theory of Aryan racial origin. His view does not challenge Tilak’s, in that it maintains that Aryans came from the North Pole. But, Golwalkar added, at the time of the Aryans’ origin, the North Pole was actually in India, located somewhere near Odisha and Bihar. The book also reads Hindu texts as transmitting historical fact, and says that India’s is the world’s most ancient civilisation. Morgan and Friberg were inspired by Tilak’s Arctic theory as well, although they interpreted it, and its im- plications, differently than Golwalkar did. They chose Arktos’s name to evoke, ac- Ideas” yearly conference funded by Fri- cording to Morgan, “European tradition berg’s think tank Motpol (which means and ‘northernness.’” The term recalls “antithesis” in Swedish), Morgan said, the myth of an Aryan arctic homeland “In the case of India, where we were now lost in snow and tundra—a genesis based for the first five years of our cor- theory of the white race as distinct from porate existence, the short answer is and superior to the rest of humanity. It simply that we needed to be in a place was briefly a popular intellectual curi- where we could afford to operate with osity in the early twentieth century, and the meagre funds we had at our dis- was later championed by Nazi esoterics posal in our early days. Although at the and mystics. same time it was good to be in a place Take, for example, Kristian “Varg” where daily life is still for the most part Vikernes, a Norwegian heavy-metal ity. He also, in 1993, fatally stabbed a ri- an expression of the traditional spirit musician whose books Arktos has sold. val musician 23 times. Arktos did men- rather than a liberal one.” Vikernes believes that a superior race tion his criminal record on its website, came from Scandinavia, which he re- but only barely, saying that Vikernes the cover of arktos’s 2011 edition of fers to as “Hyperborea.” His book, ac- was “sentenced to prison in the early The Arctic Home of the Vedas, by Bal cording to Arktos’s web page, “explains 1990s in connection with his involve- Gangadhar Tilak, shows a clear, rip- the meaning of the Norse-Germanic ment with the black metal scene”—

42 THE CARAVAN alt-reich · reportage which it defined as a subculture that, Vikernes identifies as an “Odinist,” she venerated Hitler, and considered gently put, “carried a rebellion against a worshipper of the Nordic god Odin. him an avatar of Vishnu. the mainstream.” Vikernes served 16 He rejects pan-Aryanism that includes Devi first travelled to India in 1932, in years in prison and was arrested again South Asia, but there are others who search of a living pagan, Aryan culture. in 2013 by French authorities on suspi- connect his Odinist worldview with A key figure in post-war Nazism, she cion of planning “a large terrorist act” Vedic texts, often citing archaic, widely connected with high-level Nazi lead- discredited race-science. ers in hiding, such as Otto Skorzeny At his New Year’s party, Friberg and Hans-Ulrich Rudel. Her works asked me about my heritage. enjoyed numerous revivals by neo-Nazi “European, I guess. German, French. publishers. In 1982, for a reprinted I’m not totally sure,” I responded. edition of her 1958 book The Lighting The conversation quickly moved on and the Sun, the neo-Nazi publishing to Aryan features, and suddenly Frib- house Samisdat Publishers mailed out a erg’s fingers were running against the notice, reading: “THE HITLER CULT back of my skull. He said he was con- REVEALED. Discovered alive in India: ducting a phrenological experiment, Hitler’s guru!” feeling for a ridge above my neck, just “Decipher now the encoded work- at the base of my cranium. If I have that ings of the Nazi mind,” the notice read. ridge, he said, then I must be “Indo- “Perceive how Hitler saw the work- European,” and therefore not a Jew. I ings of the universe through: Human passed the test. sacrifice. Vegetarianism. Aryanism. Arktos and Morgan are far from the The cyclic view of history. The children first to have interests in both right- of violence. The will to survive and to wing political ideology and Eastern conquer. The seat of truth. Gods on spirituality. Adolf Hitler’s appro- earth. Kalki, the avenger.” priation of the swastika as an Aryan Devi died soon after the notice was symbol is one particularly visible ex- published, living out her last days in an ample, and many members of his core apartment on the outskirts of Delhi, leadership had an affinity for Eastern surrounded by her cats. religions. Heinrich Himmler, who is Her book Impeachment of Man was generally regarded as the architect reprinted in 1991 by the far-right pub- of the Nazi party’s “final solution,” is lishing house Noontide, run by the perhaps the most frequently cited such American Holocaust-denier Willis example; he was rumoured to have al- Carto. Over two decades later, it is be- ways carried a copy of the Gita, calling ing sold again by Arktos. Four of her it a “high Aryan canto.” He also formed works were republished between 2012 the SS-Ahnenerbe, a Nazi project and 2013 by Counter-Currents, a white- tasked with finding polar evidence for nationalist outlet and publisher that is the origins of the Aryan race, echoing partially based in Hungary. Excerpts theories that Tilak proposed at the from her books also appear on the Daily turn of the century. Stormer, a neo-Nazi site whose name But as Blake Smith, a scholar of Eu- plays on that of the Nazi publication ropean orientalism, noted in the Los Der Stürmer. Devi’s ashes are interred Angeles Review of Books, the alt-right’s in Wisconsin next to the body of allusions to Hinduism are less inherited George Lincoln Rockwell, an American from the Third Reich than they are Nazi Party leader. from other esotericist thinkers sym- According to Goodrick-Clarke’s book, pathetic to twentieth-century fascism Devi’s ideas were “representative of and national socialism. These thinkers, a section of high-caste Brahmin that Smith argues, observed the Axis’s loss hated the Raj,” and hoped for an alli- and came to view it as merely a battle ance between India and Hitler in the after he was found with large weapons in a greater war—one that was being struggle against British imperial power. stockpiles, and to have penned a letter waged for the spirit of the world. However, these ideas, “so foreign to to the convicted mass-murderer Anders This idea was strongly championed the actuality of National Socialism,” Breivik, chiding him for killing ethnic by Savitri Devi and Julius Evola, both would likely fail to find support in the Norwegians instead of going after Jews of whom Arktos have prominently fea- West. Devi cited Tilak at length, and and foreigners. Arktos no longer sells tured. Devi had little personal experi- saw in India a paganism in which dark- Vikernes’s books. ence within the Third Reich, though skinned Indians subordinated them-

JANUARY 2018 43 alt-reich · reportage below: The selves to a strict caste system, and light-skinned confirmed that Arktos has published the godman’s Hitlerian writer “Aryan” Brahmins ruled. Devi’s version of Nazi- books. The Art of Living did not respond. Savitri Devi, who Aryan ideology, which attempted to transcend Arktos has also published several other books was born Maximiani the parochialism of German nationalism, gave the related to Hinduism and India, such as Hare Portas, travelled to post-war far-right a struggle of “cosmic signifi- Krishna in the Modern World: Reflections by Distin- India from Europe in 1932 in search cance,” Goodrick-Clarke wrote. guished Academics and Scholarly Devotees, edited of a living “Aryan” Devi’s periodic reintroduction to far-right lit- by Graham Dwyer and Richard J Cole, the “secre- culture. Arktos used erature points to a recruitment tactic of enticing tary of ISKCON’s communication department” at to sell her books, those whose primary concern is a disgust and Bhaktivedanta Manor, the largest ISKCON centre and other far-right disillusionment with modernity rather than an in the United Kingdom. According to its website, publishers still do. adulation of Hitler or a hatred of non-Aryans. but not any public records, Arktos also published Her invocation of Eastern religions as sources of Return of the Swastika: Hate and Hysteria versus ancient wisdom, uncorrupted by a degenerate and Hindu Sanity by Koenraad Elst, a book that, as alienating modernity, appeals to many aspects reported in a 2008 piece in Outlook magazine, was of the New Age movement. And her elevation of much appreciated by the BJP leader LK Advani for an “Indo-European” paganism that is neither its polemic against critiques of Hindu nationalism. uniquely Indian nor European, but Aryan, is an Besides these, the books Arktos at one point sold wikimedia commons

appeal to those seeking a singular, prophetic vi- include the Gita, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, sion of history. six books by ISKCON’s Prabhupada, and a book Arktos no longer sells books by Devi, although called Searching for Vedic India, which, according other publishing houses closely affiliated with to the description, “presents evidence that, con- Arktos do. trary to mainstream opinion, the Vedic civiliza- Arktos has also published five books by the tion was a highly advanced culture which encom- Hindu godman Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, whom it passed the globe.” describes as a “humanitarian spiritual leader” The publishing house has also released The whose books “provide powerful tools to eliminate Saga of the Aryan Race, written by Porus Homi stress and improve well-being.” Arktos’s website Havewala, a technology professional and “Zoro- explains that “Sri Sri has rekindled the traditions astrian Parsi native to Mumbai.” Arktos has also of yoga and meditation and has offered them in a published books by Steven J Rosen—“also known form that works in the 21st century.” as Satyaraja Dasa,” according to Arktos’s descrip- I emailed the godman’s company, the Art of Liv- tion—who wrote The Agni and the Ecstasy, a book ing, and received the response: “Wanted to share of essays about Hinduism, and Jedi In The Lotus: that we have not published anything with Arktos.” Star Wars and the Hindu Tradition, “which dis- I responded with links to Sri Sri’s books’ listings cusses the many connections between the world on Arktos’s website. A search on WorldCat—a of George Lucas’ Star Wars films and Hindu myth, comprehensive resource on published books—also history and metaphysics.”

44 THE CARAVAN alt-reich · reportage

For a reprinted edition of one of Savitri Devi’s dus “refer to our present age as the Kali Yuga; an age of spiritual and books, a neo-Nazi publisher mailed out a notice moral decline,” he said. “Northern that read: “THE HITLER CULT REVEALED. Europeans use the term Wolf Age to describe the same thing.” South Asian Discovered alive in India: Hitler’s guru!” texts or religions, to Reddall, seem to be divorced from the culture they were born from in place of a mythical, non- But Arktos most consistently fo- in which whiteness placed one within historical past: “The Vedas are helpful cusses on Julius Evola, who, like Devi, a natural, immutable hierarchy, where to us as a part of our study alongside finds the modern condition to be de- dark-skinned people constituted a natu- other texts such as the Eddas,” he generate and hails Eastern spiritualism rally servile class. “India,” as he saw wrote, referring to medieval Icelandic as an antidote. In October 2017, Arktos it, was an “Aryan India,” or the “Aryan texts and the main sources of Norse launched a campaign to raise enough East,” an entity separate from its dark- mythology. funds to translate another five books of skinned inhabitants. The interest in India for many of the his into English. European and American far-right po- readers and authors of Arktos’s books Little is known about Evola’s life, litical leaders, including Steve Bannon, seems to have little to do with South other than that he was born in 1898 in have cited Evola as well. In “An Estab- Asia and everything to do with what Rome, to an aristocratic Sicilian family, lishment Conservative’s Guide to the Evola called the “Aryan East,” framing and that he was a baron. In his writing, Alt-Right,” a piece published on Ban- South Asian culture as not anything of he argues that humanism and democ- non’s outlet Breitbart News, Evola is its own making, but rather an offshoot racy are deformations which transgress cited as one of the thinkers from whose of a vast Aryan racial civilisation. against a transcendental, perennial law. ideas the alt-right sprang. The piece The Kali Yuga, and other references His writings contain defences of both was written by the infamous conserva- from Hinduism, have also become mi- Italian fascism and German national tive commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, nor memes on the internet of the alt- socialism, although he often noted that and—as an exposé on Buzzfeed re- right. Arktos has participated in this as both were too compromising in making vealed this October—was line-edited well, including in an advertisement for populist appeals to the middle class. by some of the alt-right’s most openly the publishing house uploaded to Face- Although Evola at times dismissed extremist elements. book that used the slogan “Preparing Nazism’s obsession with genetic purity, Morgan and Arktos have borrowed you for the end of the Kali Yuga.” Some these dismissals were shallow at best. enormously from Evola. Prior to 2017, bloggers have even tried to explain the He often sidestepped biological racism when Arktos’s advertisements began hierarchy of the alt-right movement by using phrases such as “aristocracy adopting the term “alt-right,” the pub- via the caste system. In one example, of the soul,” superficially advocating lisher avoided any clear label by which the “Brahmins” of the alt-right are the a type of meritocracy, but, at the same to define itself. But, as Morgan said in “thought leaders,” a category which time, used the “caste system” as a Stockholm in 2015, if he had to pick a includes people who work for publish- means of explaining “natural law” and label for Arktos’s political designation, ers such as Arktos, the “Kshatriyas” hierarchy. In what is widely considered “I would borrow the term ‘true right,’ are the “faceless troll armies,” the his magnum opus, Revolt Against the which was first coined by the Italian “Vaishyas” are the “alt-lite” (those who Modern World, he wrote that, contrary traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola, are typically anti-immigration but do to the belief that a caste system repro- who defined it as ‘those principles not cross the line into open racism duces a hierarchy that condemns each which were accepted and seen as nor- or anti-Semitism), the “Shudras” are member of society to a predetermined mal by every well-born person every- the “listeners, readers” and finally the fate, “hierarchy was not a device of the where in the world prior to 1789’”—the “Dalits” are the dreaded “untouchable human will but a law of nature.” start of the French Revolution. normies”—people who do not identify The caste system, for Evola, was not Among Arktos’s fans, many seem with the alt-right at all. uniquely Indian, or even South Asian at to claim to have softer, more socially all. “The caste system is one of the main acceptable reasons for supporting the in a 78-page screed called “A Normie’s expressions of the traditional sociopolit- publisher. I reached out to Phil Reddall, Guide to the Alt Right,” released on the ical order,” he wrote in a chapter called who had “liked” posts about books by Daily Stormer in August 2016, Andrew “The Doctrine of the Castes” in Revolt. Tilak and Evola on Arktos’s Facebook Anglin, the site’s webmaster, wrote, Caste, he held, is a feature of all “tradi- page, with questions about what drew “The Alt-Right views the struggle for tional civilizations” of “Indo-Aryans.” him to them. “I would like you to con- the continued existence of the White In “the Hindu civilization of historical sider whether, despite great advances in race as a global battle between Whites times, we find a play of forms and mean- technology, we are happy in the west,” and the Jews. The internet has allowed ings that can be reduced respectively to he replied to me over email. for us to connect globally with as much the Aryan, boreal spirituality,” he wrote. Reddall also referred to consonances ease as we can connect to someone Evola, like Devi, envisioned an India between different philosophies. Hin- down the street or in the next room,

JANUARY 2018 45 alt-reich · reportage right: In December 2013, Friberg and Ehn travelled to Delhi and had “successful meetings” with Ram Madhav and Ravi Shankar Prasad, who have since risen to prominent leadership positions in the ruling BJP government. opposite page: Narendra Modi’s victory in India’s 2014 general election sparked concerns from human-rights organisations in light of the 2002 Gujarat riots, which occurred under Modi’s watch as chief minister, and have been recognised by many and this has fostered a sense of worldwide unity of by many analysts to take power in the coming 2014 scholars as state- cause for White people.” national elections.” sponsored pogroms Friberg and Morgan, however, have shown that In the years since they met leaders of Arktos, against Muslims. this “worldwide unity” does not merely play out both Madhav and Prasad have risen to some of online, in forums and chatrooms, but also in real the highest positions in the ruling government. political partnerships between powerful players— Madhav, now the BJP’s national general secretary, including ones in India. is one of the most powerful members of the RSS According to a post on Arktos’s Facebook page, due to his proximity to the prime minister—he has on 26 October 2013, a “delegation” from Arktos, been called Modi’s “ambassador at large,” and is comprising Friberg and the former Swedish politi- widely considered one of the most influential men cian Patrick Ehn, paid an official visit to the BJP’s in India. Prasad is a union minister who holds two Bengaluru headquarters. Ehn had been ousted prestigious portfolios: law and justice, as well as from the far-right Sweden Democrats party just electronics and information technology. five months earlier, for his neo-Nazi connections, On the same Delhi trip, the post claims, Arktos and was now Arktos’s “director of marketing.” also “met with the manager of the Voice of India, In Bengaluru, they were greeted by Aravind a Hindu nationalist publishing company, with Limbavali, the BJP’s general secretary for Kar- the purpose of negotiating new and exciting book nataka, who, according to the Karnataka BJP’s contracts.” Voice of India has frequently published website, has been an RSS worker for 35 years. The Koenraad Elst as well as other “out of India” mi- Facebook post said that Friberg and Ehn were gration theorists such as David Frawley. I called welcomed with “flowers and gifts,” and that they VOI and spoke with its editor, Aditya Goel, who discussed “possibilities for cooperation between confirmed that VOI had met with Arktos, but said traditionalist and conservative movements in that there was no follow-up or collaboration after Europe and Asia, as well as potential strategies to the meeting. counter liberal globalist hegemony, and of course, Friberg and Ehn also met with Sri Sri Ravi future book projects.” Shankar at his “Art of Living” centre in Bengaluru. Two months after meeting Limbavali, Frib- A photograph of Sri Sri welcoming them by gift- erg and Ehn travelled to Delhi and, according to ing them sashes is uploaded to a Facebook album another Facebook post, from 18 December, had on Friberg’s page called “Bangalore 2013,” which “successful meetings” with Ram Madhav, who also includes images of his room at Sri Sri’s Art was then a spokesman for the “grassroots Hindu of Living ashram, where he wrote that he stayed nationalist organization RSS,” and Ravi Shankar for a few days, and a visit that he made to an Art Prasad, who was then the deputy leader of the of Living-run school. Also included is a photo- BJP. The post discusses how the BJP is “expected graph of the interior of a colonial-style restaurant,

46 THE CARAVAN alt-reich · reportage which Friberg captioned: “Revisiting emailed him. When asked about his email, claimed that this was “not an my favorite restaurant from last year in two meetings with BJP politicians in accurate depiction of events,” but did Bangalore, a colonial style restaurant India, Friberg said that those meetings not offer further details. I emailed in the form of a train. ‘Here Sahibs “are really just the tip of the iceberg. Marton Gyöngyösi, a leading Jobbík and Memsahibs are still treated as I met with over a hundred different politician who has met with Morgan royalty’”—“Sahibs” and “Memsahibs” politicians, gurus, publishers, authors, and Friberg on multiple occasions, are colonial-era terms for white men journalists and other influencers dur- and who is known internationally for and women. Friberg’s caption contin- ing my time in India.” his comments urging the Hungarian ues: “‘At Sahib Sindh Sultan, very little By the time the BJP came to power, government to “tally up people of Jew- has changed since 1853.’ (I.e. every- Friberg and Morgan had both relocated ish ancestry” who live in the country. thing is as it should be.)” to Budapest. There, they have contin- When I asked him about the meeting Just half a year after Arktos’s two documented meetings with Hindu- nationalist politicians, the BJP, led by Narendra Modi, became India’s ruling party, winning the May 2014 general election in a landslide. Internationally, the rise of the BJP sparked concerns from human-rights organisations in view of persistent questions about Modi’s culpability in the state’s 2002 riots, classified by numerous scholars, researchers and journalists as state- sponsored pogroms against Muslims. More than 20,000 homes and business- es were damaged or destroyed in the violence, leaving some 200,000 people displaced. Official numbers put the death toll at around 1,000, while unof- ficial reports place it closer to 2,000. Modi, as Gujarat’s chief minister at the time, was widely implicated in organising attacks on Muslims. Later, a sting operation by Tehelka magazine further implicated high-level BJP and Gujarat government officials working under Modi. In 2005, the United States went so far as to impose a visa ban on Modi for his role in the riots, and high- ranking Western officials would not meet with him for nearly a decade. On the fifteenth anniversary of the Gujarat riots, this past March, an RSS leader boasted: “You killed 56, we sent

2,000 to the graveyard.” Meanwhile, / afp getty images d’souza sebastian Madhav has praised Modi for making a “riot-free India,” despite ongoing reli- ued to meet with far-right politicians, with BJP politicians, he responded, “As gious tensions and violence throughout making connections with Hungary’s the meeting was informal, I do not wish the nation. Jobbík, which is widely recognised as a to comment.” But, he added, “as an op- Despite multiple phone calls and neo-Nazi party. position MP of a small country I would emails to the offices of Limbavali, Mad- In fact, Arktos has orchestrated a any time gladly fly around the world to hav and Prasad, none responded to my meeting between far-right players meet informally some influential MPs request for comment on Arktos. in India and Hungary. In Morgan’s of one of the largest countries of the I emailed Morgan, Ehn and Friberg 2015 speech in Stockholm, he stated, worlds—especially if they are bound to for comment as well. Morgan never “In 2013, while we were still in In- win the next elections.” responded; Ehn said he would get back dia, we facilitated a meeting between Jobbík, like the BJP, has its own his- to me, though he never did; but Frib- representatives from Jobbík and the tory of complicity in violence against erg answered the specific questions I BJP.” Friberg, in his response to my minorities—in their case, often Jews

JANUARY 2018 47 alt-reich · reportage janek skarzynski / afp getty images skarzynski janek above: Arktos, and Roma. Although Hungary’s prime minister, national European Court of Human Rights found Morgan said, Viktor Orbán, is not from Jobbík, he is also from a the Gárda to be illegal in 2009, but that did not has organised a right-wing party, and the country has proclaimed stop copycat groups from forming. meeting between itself an “illiberal state” under his rule, routinely The question of violence is one that often elicits politicians from engaging in a campaign of xenophobia against ref- from Jobbík leaders a stern look and disavowal, Jobbík, a Hungarian neo-Nazi party, and ugees in the country, most of whom are Muslim. followed by an eliding grin and reiterations of who the BJP. Arktos was welcomed to Hungary with a tour the “true violent criminals” are, namely “gypsies” of the country’s parliament by the Jobbík leader (a racial slur for Roma) or “Jewish globalists.” Gabor Vona, and Vona also wrote the introduc- In an official statement after the evacuation of tion to Arktos’s edition of Evola’s A Handbook for Gyöngyöspata, when neo-Nazi groups widely Right-Wing Youth. Friberg has also been photo- thought to be connected to Jobbík held several graphed having a candlelit dinner with Gyöngyösi. Roma settlements essentially under siege for three In interviews with me, both Arktos leaders and months, Jobbík said that the portrayal of Roma the politicians mentioned have either dismissed “living in fear due to the aggressive attitude of or downplayed their relationships to each other as the majority population” was “misleading,” and unremarkable and unworthy of scrutiny, despite continued on to say that “members of the Gipsy numerous examples of collaboration and contact. minority are becoming more and more frequently In August 2007, the Magyar Gárda, a para- responsible for killing innocent, lonely elderly military wing of Jobbík, was founded. In the 18 people in the countryside.” months after that, over a dozen Roma homes Islamophobia, like racism, is also at the heart were burned with Molotov cocktails. In February of the alt-right’s ideology. This is most visible in 2009, a Roma man and his four-year-old son were its opportunistic treatment of the recent “refugee gunned down as they fled their firebombed home. crisis”—the influx of refugees, many of them Mus- Two months later, a 54-year-old grandfather was lim, into Europe from west Asia and Africa. Riding shot on his doorstep as he was on his way to his this wave of xenophobia, many once-fringe groups, nearby factory job. Jobbík and the Gárda denied including Jobbík, have slithered out of relative ob- involvement in the violence and deaths. The inter- scurity and into mainstream debates about immi-

48 THE CARAVAN alt-reich · reportage

Friberg told me that the two In a New Year’s Facebook post to their follow- ers, rounding out 2013 and rolling into 2014, Ark- meetings with BJP politicians tos wrote that it “intends to become the Indian that Arktos posted about on Right’s gateway to the Western world.” This would be, they hoped, “fruitful for our friends in India” Facebook are “just the tip of and their friends worldwide. the iceberg.” He claimed to i arrived at Friberg’s apartment for his birthday have met with over a hundred party in January 2017, several days after his New other politicians, religious Year’s party. He snickered when he opened the door. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “I almost forgot about leaders and other influential you. Well, I’m glad the entertainment for the eve- Indian figures. ning has arrived.” The party guests came from all over: France, Sweden, the United States. Morgan was there, and gration. “From my point of view we’ve had a mi- next to him was Matt Forney, a notorious misogy- grant crisis for 30 years,” Friberg said to me when nist and white-nationalist who had built a modest I interviewed him in January 2017. He went on to following online by writing articles with headlines explain how it was anti-immigrant prejudice that such as “How to Beat Your Girlfriend or Wife and drew him into the alt-right in the first place. “Being Get Away With It,” or “The Case Against Female against immigration got me interested,” he said. Self-Esteem.” Under a pseudonym, in an essay The BJP and RSS also often peddle anti-Islam titled “The Necessity of Domestic Violence,” he ideology, portraying Muslims as invaders and wrote that women “should be terrorized by their colonisers, and therefore illegitimate Indian citi- men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave zens. In RSS-supported historical revisionism, better than chimps.” the Mughal dynasty, which ruled India from 1526 That night, Forney recounted a story about until the arrival of the British colonialists, is in- taunting a homeless black man in Chicago, pulling creasingly omitted from school textbooks, with out a five-dollar bill and throwing it on the sub- the justification that its leaders were tyrants or way train tracks, only to laugh at the expression “invaders.” of humiliation and desperation on the man’s face. “History is critical to the creation of an ideol- Morgan laughed along at this anecdote. ogy,” Aditya Mukherjee, a professor of history and At this point, recently relocated from Chicago, social sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Forney had only been in Hungary for three days, said when I interviewed him in December. The but had long-term plans to stay. RSS and other Hindu-nationalist players, he said, “What do you think of Hungary so far?” I asked, “want to project distorted history in order to vali- changing the subject. date their current politics.” “Oh I love it. No kikes, spics or dindus,” Forney Mukherjee also spoke about the connections be- responded, using slurs to refer to Jews and Lati- tween Hindu nationalism and the types of West- nos. I did not recognise the last word. ern ideologies being celebrated by the alt-right. “What’s a dindu?” “The link between the BJP-RSS thought and the Forney and Morgan exchanged a glance and fascist thought that arose in Europe is very simi- laughed. “It’s another word for ‘nigger,’” Morgan lar,” he said. “It is an aggressive nationalism, it is a explained. homogenising nationalism, it is an identity-based “Yeah, like ‘didn’t do nuffin,’” Forney clarified. nationalism.” “Why not just say ‘nigger,’ then?” In his 2015 Stockholm speech, Morgan said, Forney seemed to fumble and he and Morgan “If we are to defeat our liberal globalist enemy, exchanged glances. “More polite in mixed com- we ourselves must adopt an alternative form of pany, I guess.” globalism, seeking alliances and common ground Throughout the evening, Friberg kept pull- with individuals and groups who share our desires ing me aside or interrupting my conversations to everywhere, even outside of Europe. … The nar- relay commands to me. When his friend spilled a row, ethnocentric viewpoint is a relic of the past. drink on my hand, Friberg told his friend to pat Only together, by working with nationalists and my breasts as the drink must have spilled there as traditionalists everywhere, can we succeed. To- well. The hors d’oeuvres for the evening were slic- ward this end, Arktos seeks to represent as many es of brie wrapped in prosciutto. “Eat ten of those! of these facets of the struggle as possible, which is Prove you’re not a Jew,” he told me. one reason why we have published several books Tor Westman, Arktos’s marketing director, pertaining to the traditions of India, for example.” reassured me, “Don’t worry, we already all think

JANUARY 2018 49 alt-reich · reportage right: Though he was a skinhead as a young man, Friberg has since grown out his hair and begun to dress formally, garnering support within the extreme right for his well-coiffed, “respectable” appearance. hampus andersson

you’re a Jew,” citing my German last name and excused myself to the restroom, and soon attempt- saying that “real Germans all changed their names ed to make a polite exit. when they went to America.” Markus, a red-haired Swede, eyed me as I was At one point, Friberg pulled me down by my trying to leave. “Are you triggered?” he asked. shoulder to sit next to him on the couch. A music My blood finally boiled. Fuck“ you,” I snarled. video by Emily Youcis, a young woman who was He stared back at me with simmering hatred. a well-known food vendor at a baseball stadium “What are you going to do, are you going to cry?” in Philadelphia, but who was fired for her white- Enraged, I lifted the corners of the coffee table nationalist politics, was playing. It was a cover of he was sitting at, but held back enough to not flip the classic song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” it over. Some long-stemmed candles fell on the with a far-right twist. carpet. Somewhere, over the rainbow, way up high Friberg came over to me to tell me that I was There’s a Reich that I’ve heard of overreacting. I asked him why he hurt me. “Will Once in a lullaby… you cry rape?” he asked. “It was only a joke, I only “This is a real independent woman for you to did it lightly.” admire,” Friberg said to me. He grasped the back “Oh!” I laughed. “Then I should play along?” I of my neck to turn my head towards the television. reached up to his gelled hair and yanked hard. “Pay attention.” He called me a “deranged liberal bitch” and or- Somewhere, over the rainbow dered me out of his apartment. There’s no Jews… Friberg followed up with articles and podcast As I squirmed under his grip, his fingers commentary about the events of that evening, touched the back of my skull, this time not looking with the help of Matt Forney, who said that I for a ridge to confirm my race. “nearly start[ed] a fire and [left] burn marks on an Someday I’ll wish upon the sun $800 rug.” In the blog post Friberg wrote follow- And wake up when the race war’s done ing the report I published in The Atlantic, he re- Sieg Heil-ing… peated those claims, saying that I “almost set fire” “Stop,” I said, pulling away. His grip tightened. to his apartment. But in a response to a commenter I repeated the word louder, and then yelled it. In who asked Friberg why he did not choose to press response, Friberg tugged my hair so hard that I charges, he stated that the damage was little more screamed in pain. than “a few burn marks on the carpet.” Hitler flew over the rainbow, Several comments on Friberg’s blog post about Why, oh, why can’t I? me, however, criticised him for being too “de- The room looked over, and Friberg laughed. I fensive” on the question of his extremism. “The

50 THE CARAVAN alt-reich · reportage

Atlantic is obsessed with the alt right and they’ve But there is one sentiment that remains consis- below: A screed given us a lot of coverage,” one commenter wrote. tent throughout the text—despair at the supposed published on the “In addition so far every article they’ve written on decay of American culture. In a chapter titled alt-right website the movement seemed quite favorable to anyone “The Crisis of Modernity,” for example, he writes: the Daily Stormer claims, “The Alt- who isn’t weighed down by words like ‘racist’ and Right views the ‘bigot.’” Another person wrote, “The Alt Right is Despite [America] being the wealthiest and ar- struggle for the most certainly extremist. Who tf is Daniel Frie- guably most powerful nation the world has ever continued existence berg and why does he sound like a scared rabbit known ... it is now an undebatable fact that our of the White race when he gets called a Nazi?” culture has been purposefully and systemati- as a global battle cally infested with degeneracy, moral ugliness between Whites the dharma manifesto, a 2013 publication, is one and a trash-laden culture by a secretive cabal and the Jews.” potent example of a book that Arktos has pub- of powerful elites who control our nation (and lished that uses Hindu ideas and symbols to riff much of the world) from behind the scenes. We on themes popular among the alt-right. Written are in a crisis. by a white American man named Frank Morales, who goes by the Sanskrit name “Sri Dharma Pra- “Dharma nationalism” is not a widely refer- vartaka Acharya,” and sometimes refers to himself enced concept in the alt-right. It does not appear as “Acharya-ji,” the book proposes a nationalism in memes or blog posts beyond the author’s. There built on the concept of dharma, which Morales are no copies of the book available in any uni- calls “dharma nationalism.” versity or public library, according to WorldCat’s The book is legion in inconsistency and contra- records. Morales has appeared in interviews with diction. Morales praises the values of the American white nationalists, including with Robert Stark Revolution, but rejects the European Enlighten- of Counter-Currents, but beyond that, he and his ment that bore it. He wants limited government, work remain obscure. Still, his view of the world but draconian punishment for “crime,” especially in a crisis of rot, marionetted by a cabalistic elite (a “treason against the nation.” He yearns for meritoc- thinly veiled anti-Jewish jibe), and the promise of racy and the valuation of women, yet disdains “neo- an imminent rectifying cataclysm is engraved into Hindu obsessions with eliminating ‘caste’” and the alt-right. “eliminating sati,” the custom of widows immolat- In a YouTube interview on 19 March 2017, the ing themselves on their husband’s funeral pyres. He author claims that he is “close to people who are argues for distinct nations’ right to self-governance, close” to Donald Trump, and that several of the yet envisions a global dictatorial suprastructure president’s advisors own a copy of The Dharma based on a singular and immutable “dharma.” Manifesto. “If you look at the policy section of my scott olson / getty images

JANUARY 2018 51 alt-reich · reportage right: The writings of Frank Morales (left), who goes by the Sanskrit name “Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya,” have attracted the attention, he claims, of a number of high-profile Hindu leaders. opposite page: The Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin (far right) is one of Arktos’s most popular writers, as well as an influential political figure who boasts of connections with book, and precisely what it is that Trump is doing, ing the ancient Vedic religious tradition in its fully many right-wing they are practically synonymous. … That is not 100 authentic and unaltered form.” players across the percent by accident,” he said. “That was done by Morales declares that his “dharma nationalism” globe. design.” is not a reiteration of the “Hindu nationalism” of Amid lengthy quotes from Morales’s book and the BJP and the RSS. But his only apparent gripe other promotional material, the Facebook page with Hindutva is reminiscent of Evola’s disparag- for The Dharma Manifesto is essentially a fan ing critiques of German Nazism and Italian fas- site to various European and American far-right cism—Morales argues in his book that Hindutva leaders. It includes posts about the leader of is too compromising in its appeals to “Muslims, France’s National Front, Marine Le Pen; Frauke Christians, pseudo-secularists, and other non- Petry of Germany’s Alternative für Deutsch- Hindu Indians by merely presenting themselves land; Nigel Farage of the UK Independence as patriotic Indians.” This is why, he theorises, the Party; and, of course, Donald Trump. Morales BJP lost the general election in 2004. The Dharma endorsed the accused paedophile Roy Moore in Manifesto was, however, published before the BJP a recent contentious battle for an Alabama Sen- won in 2014, so his views on the party may have ate seat. In a Facebook album titled “Leaders of since changed. I reached out to Morales to request the Resistance,” he praised Modi as well as Yogi an interview several times, via Facebook, his web- Adityanath, the BJP chief minister of Uttar site, and even through some of his devotees, but he Pradesh and leader of the far-right Hindu Yuva never responded. Vahini. Often, Morales’s writings and speeches drift Born in New York City to Catholic parents and into strange territory. In one of his more popular raised in Brooklyn, Morales has said in multiple YouTube videos, with over 85,000 views, called interviews that he began reading the Gita when “Ancient Vedic Aliens,” Morales explains that he was ten years old. He was ordained in India as UFOs are literal manifestations of beings from an orthodox Vedic brahmana in 1986, and earned “hellish” and “heavenly” realms. Nordics, he says, a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison are examples of “heavenly” aliens. “You’ve heard in 2002. He had a brief and unremarkable stint as of Nordic aliens,” he casually says. “The Nordics an adjunct academic, and eventually left to teach are human beings but they are definitely more Hinduism, or, as he prefers to refer to it, Sanatana advanced than us, both spiritually but also tech- Dharma. nologically in the good sense. They’re almost be- He was the leading scholar of a Hindu temple in tween us and the devas.” Omaha, Nebraska, from 2007 through 2009. His His writings have, according to his website, at- departure from the temple is shrouded in mystery. tracted the attention of a number of high-profile I called both priests of the temple, as well as the Hindu leaders. He posed for pictures with the temple leader, and each declined to comment on outspoken BJP politician Subramanian Swamy at why and how he left. Morales now runs the In- a “Hindu Unity Day” celebration in New York City. ternational Sanatana Dharma Society in Omaha, According to Morales’s website, the prominent which, on its website, claims to be a “global spiri- alternative-medicine advocate Deepak Chopra tual movement dedicated to practicing and teach- has said his work is “phenomenal,” and that it

52 THE CARAVAN alt-reich · reportage

teaches “the pure essence of Yoga.” religious ideology,” Morales writes. for those on the alt-right who do not The website also cites accolades from “The amount of destruction wrought identify as closely with Hinduism as the writer Rajiv Malhotra, who appar- upon so many hundreds of Dharmic Morales does, the Kali Yuga and its end ently praised Morales as a “great public cultures that was experienced at the function as ancient signifiers of what champion of Hinduism.” Both Morales hands of Islam, ranging from the the alt-right sees as a society in which and Malhotra have been cited together Middle East and Persia to India and white power, in a shifting and increas- as critics of “radical universalism”—an Indonesia, boggles human comprehen- ingly global world, is threatened. As idea, which they describe as a Hindu sion.” He is equally critical of Judaism Morgan said in the 2014 interview for one, that all religions are similar paths and Marxism—which he includes as an the Journal for the Study of Radicalism, to the ultimate goal of realising divine Abrahamic religion, as it is “the antith- “there’s a lot of talk in our circles about potential. Malhotra has built his career esis of Dharmic law.” (This is, again, what is usually termed ‘the collapse.’ A around attacking Hindu progressives another instance of anti-Jewish preju- lot of people are talking about this on as colonial imposters. Modi himself has dice, as he closely associates Marxism the Left as well. It’s the idea that this reportedly praised Malhotra as “glori- with Jews.) civilization we have now, and especial- fying our priceless heritage.” A piece Morales rejects the term “Hinduism” ly American society, is unsustainable in on Scroll refers to him as “the philoso- in favor of “Vedism,” which he argues the long term, and that sometime in the pher-in-chief of Internet Hindutva”—a more accurately reflects his interpreta- not-too-distant future, it’s all going to leader to “swarms of angry right-wing tion of Hinduism as being a branch of come to a head and fall apart.” bloggers, chat-room lurkers and Twit- European paganism. “Vedic culture Blake Smith, in the Los Angeles Re- ter trolls.” and the pre-Christian European reli- view of Books, argues that the idea of I reached out to Swamy, Chopra and gions are not merely spiritual cousins; the Kali Yuga anchors “the alt-right Malhotra to ask them about their sup- they are one and the same worldview,” in a historical movement that extends posed interactions with Morales, but he said in an interview with Counter- beyond the Third Reich, whose col- none of them responded to my requests Currents. This European paganism, ac- lapse remains a troubling explanandum for comment. cording to Morales, includes Odinism— for neo-Nazi movements … Citing the The Dharma Manifesto also includes like that of Varg Vikernes—as well as Manusmriti or the Puranas suggests critiques of Christianity in a larger Celtic and Slavic pantheisms. that by attacking ‘degeneracy,’ the alt- polemic against “Abrahamic religions,” Morales’s view that modern, Western right speaks for a millennia-old moral but is far less critical of Christianity life is degenerate gives way, as much of consensus shared by many societies than Islam. “Islam is an alien, inher- Arktos’s literature does, to expectations and only recently perverted in our ently oppressive, violent and hateful for an end of days. In this way, even own.” mikhail metzel / ap photo

JANUARY 2018 53 alt-reich · reportage

In a short video released on his Some people believe Arktos is part of a larger, Facebook page the day after Trump’s inauguration, Morales preaches that covert geopolitical strategy, in which Russia is 2017 will be “the beginning of the using the Cold-War tactic of “active measures.” golden age.” But, he adds, “there are two distinct routes that the world can now take. One, in which the forces of the Beast, the anti-Christ or, in other sassination as an inside government job evil simply relinquish and surrender. Or terms, Kali Yuga.” to AIDS as a CIA invention, were plant- one, in which they make the very stupid Credited as a central figure in the rise ed by Soviets in accordance with this mistake of trying to retain power. If of several European far-right groups, tactic. (Dezsö did not cite any specific they do the latter, 2017 has the poten- Dugin influences political parties such evidence of the Kremlin’s involvement tial to be one of, if not the most, violent as Germany’s National Democratic Par- in Arktos, however. And, even if the years in history, going back to the Ma- ty, the British National Party, Greece’s publisher is an instance of Russian ac- habharata war.” Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbík and tive measures, its fan base, along with He pauses, then continues. “It’s still France’s National Front. His reach has the rest of the alt-right, seems to largely the beginning of the golden age. Be- arguably been perceptible in the White be comprised of genuine supporters.) cause the forces of good will win.” House as well, through Bannon, who The term “active measures” has been was widely perceived to be Trump’s resurrected from Cold War vocabu- the russian philosopher Alexander very own Dugin. Bannon has portrayed lary in the wake of Trump’s victory, Dugin is one of Arktos’s most popular Putin as championing both national- to describe cultural subversion in the writers. Arktos’s 2012 publication of a ism and conservative cultural values. form of fake news and disinformation translation of Dugin was the first of his Reciprocally, Dugin has said that he is campaigns amid allegations of collusion full texts to be translated into English. Bannon’s “ideological ally.” between the Trump election team and Dugin is also an influential political In Dugin’s geopolitical vision, West- Russia. It has made its way into several figure, although the extent of his power ern liberalism has attempted to colo- government public hearings, including is widely debated among Russianists. nise and subordinate the globe, bend- the fallen FBI director James Comey’s Nevertheless, his connections with ing white nations to its will through a testimony, in which he described Rus- nearly every European far-right politi- campaign of sabotage against ethnic sia’s influence in the 2016 US election as cal party and extremist group seem tradition via “multiculturalism.” This a part of “active measures.” to have opened up strategic corridors liberalism, to Dugin, is a destructive Dezsö said that Arktos’s prior loca- for Arktos. Variously cited as “Putin’s force that will render the white race tion in India only provided more proof Brain” and “Putin’s Rasputin,” Dugin obsolete. This is a key tenet of white- that Russia is executing active mea- has been credited with being a leading nationalism—that whites must prevent sures through it. Third countries are ideological force in the Kremlin as Pu- their own racial dissolution wrought by often used, he said, as a diversionary tin’s former “geopolitical advisor.” Du- interracial societies, for fear of genetic tactic and a means of weakening any gin, too, is an intellectual heir of Evola “pollution,” or “white genocide.” claims of covert Russian operations. (whom he has translated into Russian) Some believe Arktos is part of a He pointed out that India was a centre and the French New Right, also widely larger covert geopolitical strategy by for Russian intelligence services in the published by Arktos. He has reportedly Russia. In January 2017, I met Andras 1970s and 1980s. called for a “genuine, true, radically Dezsö, a national-security and organ- Now, Dezsö said, Eastern European revolutionary, and consistently fascist ised-crime reporter for the Hungarian countries such as Hungary are becom- fascism,” and seeks to “hasten the ‘end digital-news site Index.hu, at his of- ing these third countries of covert of times’ with all out war.” As the first fice on the outskirts of Budapest. He activity. “Friberg can do freely what he provider of Dugin texts in English, is a specialist on Russian connections wants to do here, and active measures Arktos is patient zero for the spread of to far-right organisations. Dezsö de- get a green light,” he said. Arktos and these ideas across Europe and beyond. scribed Arktos and its “metapolitical” its friends, he continued, “are danger- Dugin regularly interacts with Fri- project as an example of “active mea- ous, because it’s a cultural war, also.” berg and Morgan on social media, and sures,” or aktivniye meropriyatiye. A Dezsö continued, “I think the super- visited them several times in India. On KGB tactic of disinformation and Cold powers and the powers that think about one of these trips, in Delhi in February War psychological warfare, “active war, they think about arms and bombs, 2012, Dugin gave an interview to Mor- measures” were designed to subvert but it’s a very, very important field, the gan and Friberg, now hosted on Coun- “Western community alliances of all cultural field.” He added: “There is al- ter-Currents. In it, he said, “we must sorts … and thus to prepare ground in ready a war, and the soldiers are guys create strategic alliances to overthrow case the war really occurs,” according like Friberg.” the present order of things, of which to the retired KGB General Oleg Kalu- the core could be described as human gin. Researchers have argued that some friberg and morgan are both still in rights, anti-hierarchy, and political cor- of the most famous Cold War conspir- Hungary. But Morgan left Arktos in rectness—everything that is the face of acy theories, from John F Kennedy’s as- March 2017, due to a personal split with

54 THE CARAVAN alt-reich · reportage

Friberg. In retaliatory blog posts in June 2017, Nevertheless, Trump has made overtures to below: In mid Friberg accused Morgan of attempting a coup in the Hindu American community. At a Bolly- 2016, the Trump the company, and Morgan accused Friberg of em- wood-themed benefit concert for “victims of campaign held bezzlement. Friberg’s post called ISKCON a cult, terror” a few months before the election, he an event called “Hindus for Trump,” “famous around the world for its panhandling and spoke to a crowd of “Hindus for Trump” in Edi- in which the hokey moralizing,” and mocked Morgan’s involve- son, New Jersey. Posters for the event showed candidate declared ment with it, along with that of Patrick Boch—the Trump sitting in a red-white-and-blue lotus, “I am a big fan of former employee of Arktos who is still a Hare holding a yoga pose, and flyers showed a demon- Hindu,” and that Krishna devotee. Friberg also added that Boch is ic Hillary Clinton and Sonia Gandhi rallying the United States married “to a woman of dark complexion” in India. to “Get Modi!” and frame him for the Gujarat and India would be Morgan is now an editor for Counter-Currents. riots. The highlight of the evening was a perfor- “best friends” were he elected. Friberg remains the CEO of Arktos and a part- mance in which Indian dancers were attacked ner in the Alt-Right Corporation, alongside Rich- by terrorists on stage. They were saved by the evan vucci / ap photo evan ard Spencer. Friberg flew from Europe specifically US Army, after which they held their hands to attend the Charlottesville rally this past August. over their hearts during the American national Recently, Arktos has claimed that it is expand- anthem, followed by Bruce Springsteen’s song ing. In September, its website announced several “Born in the USA.” Trump later came on stage to new hires to account for a growing influx of manu- proclaim “I am a big fan of Hindu,” and that the scripts. United States and India would be “best friends” Arktos has also bragged about its connections if he were elected. to the White House. Jason Jorjani, a co-founder of Yet, just weeks after Trump’s inauguration, in the Alt-Right Corporation, along with Friberg and early February, an Indian man in Colorado awoke Spencer, was caught on video claiming that Steve to find his house defaced with faeces and racist slo- Bannon was to be the interface between the Alt- gans. Two weeks later, in Kansas, a white man shot Right Corporation and Donald Trump. (Jorjani has two Indian men, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok since left Arktos and the Alt-Right Corporation.) Madasani, killing Kuchibhotla. The shooter report- Of course, none of the fascination with the im- edly yelled “Get out of my country!” before firing. plications of Hindu spirituality has stopped far- Trump only addressed the death a week later to right violence against Indians in the United States. comment on “the divisiveness in our country.” Indeed, the contempt Friberg expressed for Hare All the while, the alt-right, on its message Krishnas and Boch’s wife is much more represen- boards and its blogs, has continued to eagerly tative of the sentiments of most racist Americans. await the end of the Kali Yuga. s

JANUARY 2018 55 Years Go By

in 1420, the timurid ruler and astronomer Ulugh Beg completed construction on the first madrasa in Registan Square, Samarkand—then a bustling trade intersection on the Silk Route—and hoped that it would blossom into a centre for education. Dotted with caravanserai, or roadside inns, the square grew into a space where science was cel- ebrated. Massive darskhonas, or lecture rooms, formed an integral part of the square’s surround- ings. The square is one of the locations shown in “New Year in Uzbekistan,” a compilation of photo- graphs by the Pakistani photographer Aun Raza, published as a book in December 2016. Between December 2013 and January 2014, he visited Uz- bekistan and documented his time in the capital, Tashkent, as well as cities such as Samarkand, Kh- iva and Nukus. Raza had early associations with the landlocked former Soviet colony: he recalled reading about djinns, magicians and fortresses in the One Thousand and One Nights, and also the Hamzanama, an epic about the exploits of Amir Hamza, a relative of Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Having seen the array of cultures that have influenced the country, he likened it to a painting where “the base coat seems to be of the Silk Road and one of the heaviest washes is that of the Soviet times.” The Russian Empire advanced into Central Asia in the 1800s, and Russian power held sway in the region for over a century. The Uzbek Soviet Social- ist Republic was a constituent republic of the So- viet Union from 1924 to 1991, when it declared in- dependence. Raza’s images of Christmas and New Year’s in Samarkand bring out part of the legacy of the Soviet period. Despite the Gregorian calendar not having particular significance in some Islamic countries, the Soviet tradition of celebrating New The past as present in modern-day Uzbekistan PHOTO ESSAY / COMMUNITIES

PHOTOGRAPHS BY AUN RAZA

Year’s is entrenched in Uzbek culture. Christmas is also marked, but with faint, if any, religious overtones, as in the Soviet habit. Beyond the festivites, Raza also records disqui- eting images of dilapidated buildings and relics from the Soviet era, such as abandoned gunboats beside the dried-up Aral Sea. These suggest that the country has, in some ways, been suspended in time. A photograph of young men peering anxiously at their seasonal lottery tickets ap- pears alongside a close-up of an advertisement for gas voda—gas water—in Nukus, a city that, Raza explained, has a severe shortage of water, compelling locals to drink boiled tap water despite the knowledge that it is contaminated. “It is not a happy or flourishing country,” Raza said. “It is a place where ordinary people are still used as forced labour each year to work in cotton fields. Their currency is extremely devalued. They have had one of the biggest man-made disasters of hu- man history, the drying of the Aral Sea.” Raza’s images capture what he referred to as a “silent, global homogenisation” in Uzbeki- stan, where Soviet influence overlaps with the American and Chinese ones that have followed it, often to surreal effect. In one image, policemen keep watch outside the Samarkand Vokzal—a train station—anticipating unruly crowds around street entertainers dressed as Mickey Mouse and Santa Claus. In others, a group of young men as- semble plastic Christmas trees, newly imported from China, at Chorsu Bazaar in Tashkent; a butcher, dressed in a Santa Claus costume, prepares meat for a customer; and children play under towering water pipes from the Soviet era. Raza’s framing of his subjects sets up a constant interaction between history and the contempo- rary moment.

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A N N IV ER SA RY FE AT U R E

eight opinion leaders in the worlds of WRITING, CULTURE AND BUSINESS ON 8THE8 YEAR PAST AND THE NEW YEAR

WRITERS

1. What is the best book you read in the last year?

2. What do think India’s priorities should be in 2018?

PANKAJ MISHRA WRITER

1. Ants Among Elephants by Sujatha Gidla: A memoir that not only describes the brave struggles of a Dalit family but also radically revises our view of some of the most famous events and personalities of

Courtesy Pankaj Mishra Pankaj Courtesy Indian history.

2. After three KR MEERA and half years WRITER of Narendra Modi’s rule, 1. The best book I read was The Indians have no Vegetarian by Han Kang. It is a book more important which would offer a reader many task than to layers of interpretation. You can stem the moral read it as the story of one particular and spiritual woman or as the story of a whole degradation generation. I consider a book of their public important when it helps any reader sphere and to to interpret it to her satisfaction, no restore to it matter what her age or experience or some civility understanding is. and sanity.

2. In 2018, India should concentrate on creating more employment opportunities for the underprivileged. I would like to see the women’s

reservation bill passed too. KR Meera Courtesy 8th ANNIVERSARY FEATURE

PERUMAL MURUGAN WRITER

1. AR Venkatachalapathy’s Ezhuga, Nee Pulavan is a collection of research articles on Subramania Bharati. The book adopts a historical approach to some of the least known aspects of the Tamil poet and demonstrates that research works too can make for a riveting read.

2. Voices of ethnic nationalities are growing stronger everywhere against the unitary principle of jingoism that India currently seems to be heading towards. In 2018, the demands of ethnic nationalities will be an issue that can no longer be

ignored. G Nathan

SHOBHAA DE WRITER

1. The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Deceptive title. Macabre. Exquisitely constructed. Haunting. Acutely disturbing. I force-fed it to several victims, who thanked me later!

2. Preparing wisely for the next general election. Courtesy Shobhaa De Courtesy 8th ANNIVERSARY FEATURE

VASANT ABAJI DAHAKE WRITER

1. Ujvya Sondecha Bahulya is a Marathi novel by Pravin Dasharath Bandekar. The writer has narrated a story through the traditional puppet game of the Thakar community from the Konkan region. The puppets, or the dolls, are typical, a doll within a doll within a doll—like Russian matryoshka nesting dolls. Parsha

Thakar is the narrator Abaji Dahake Vasant Courtesy in this novel and he uses his puppets to tell the about right-wing politics. There responsibility. The form of the story. His identity is not are intellectuals, writers, artists novel is unique. It mixes reality fixed, he is the narrator who have forgotten their identity, into fantasy. Jose Saramago and as well as one of the they have also forgotten their Haruki Murakami are characters characters, and takes the tasks. On the other side there are in the novel. The novelist tries shape of other characters traditionists, fundamentalists, to understand the relationship too, like the dolls. The revivalists, who are trying to move between the fictionalised world and narration moves from the society towards the imaginary the real world. time present to the past past. Our society is divided by to the future. The novel caste-religion-culture politics 2. Peace. Stability. Security. is definitely about our and the so-called intellectuals Freedom. I do not think there is a times, and obviously are indifferent and not taking need to elaborate these words.

SHASHI DESHPANDE WRITER

1. James Joyce’s Dubliners. Early stories, but the work of a master. “The Dead” is one of the finest stories ever written. Beautiful and poignant.

2. For the government: health, education and equal opportunities for all. Regardless of religion, caste. For the people: inculcate honesty and discipline in ourselves. Without these, no government can help us. Courtesy Shashi Deshpande Courtesy 8th ANNIVERSARY FEATURE

SHASHI THAROOR WRITER AND POLITICIAN

1. Rethinking Public Institutions in India, edited by Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav, is a magisterial account of how the public institutions required to manage our responses to India’s major challenges have failed to keep pace with our needs.

2. Fixing the damage to our economy done by demonetisation and the shambolic implementation of the much-needed GST; urgently investing in job-creating industries like tourism and the related infrastructure; and promoting skill-development on a war footing. None of these is currently being done by the BJP government. Also, ending the culture of intolerance and bigotry spread by the cow vigilantes and their ilk. Courtesy Shashi Tharoor Courtesy

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE WRITER

1. Maya Jasanoff’sDawn Watch, a profound mediation on globalisation and colonialism, takes us from Russian-occupied Poland, around South East Asia and up the Congo in Joseph Conrad’s footsteps. Jasanoff writes beautifully, and the book is well worth reading even just for her evocative and beautifully crafted descriptions of nineteenth century Singapore, Marseilles and London, as well as her mastery of nineteenth century seadog slang: where else can you enter a world of dogwatches, pollywogs and shellbacks? But it is far more than that, as she shows how Conrad was the first writer to grapple with the great issues of our time: terrorism, immigration, the ramifications of rapid technological change and globalisation, and “the way power operates across continents and races.” “Conrad’s world,” she writes, “shimmers beneath the surface of our own.”

2. Obviously, to stop industry and agriculture from poisoning us all—2018 must be the year when India gets its environmental act together, in the whole

Bikramjit Bose / Platform Magazine Bose / Platform Bikramjit country but most pressingly in Delhi. CULTURATI

1. What for you was the best creative surprise of 2017?

2. Culturally, what do you think India should attempt in 2018?

KALKI KOECHLIN MEGHNA GULZAR ACTOR DIRECTOR

1. Anything and everything that Elon 1. Creative expression— Musk has been up to. the narrative style has taken a huge turn for 2. More inclusion and tolerance and the better, across all less censorship of opinions outside the mediums. And audiences ruling establishment. are wholeheartedly accepting unusual but strong content.

2. Culturally, I look forward to us as a people being more inclusive and less prudish. Yet remembering that creativity and responsibility are forever entwined. Courtesy Kalki Koechlin / Rema Chaudhary / Rema Koechlin Kalki Courtesy / Getty Images Times / Hindustan Gashroo Waseem 8th ANNIVERSARY FEATURE Courtesy Irrfan Khan Irrfan Courtesy

IRRFAN KHAN ACTOR

1. It was not so much of a surprise, And the other creative but audiences supporting good surprise was how comics content, and content taking the in the United States, forefront in cinema, was the most such as John Oliver, satisfying creative experience Stephen Colbert, Trevor for me in 2017. It has been a good Noah, Samantha Bee change for all those creatively etcetera, used comedy to involved in Hindi cinema. But fight for the democratic moving ahead, I think films, and institutions and entertainment formats need to be constitutional values of more inclusive and have stories their country, and hold which are more relatable, and accountable a seemingly reflections of society. insane and destructive president. 2. I think overall, culturally, we need to be more open and 2. I think we should accepting. A more logical way of attempt to give some policing and censorship needs to more value and in

come our way. We need to globalise Vishwa Tarun Courtesy material terms try to ourselves. I think it would be great uphold and protect our to see, culturally, more countries SWARA BHASKAR constitutional right to around the world looking forward ACTOR freedom of expression, to Indian content as something which currently is which can be viewed and enjoyed 1. The most pleasant creative the most undermined by a larger spectrum of audiences. surprise for 2017 for me was and attacked of our In short, our way of storytelling, reading comedian Trevor Noah’s constitutional provisions, drawing on the rich heritage and book Born A Crime, his memoir of and yet is essential for culture we come from, needs to growing up in apartheid South any culture of worth to have a global appeal. Africa. thrive. 8th ANNIVERSARY FEATURE

TM KRISHNA 2. Culture is a celebration of land, MUSICIAN people and all that surrounds us. But today culture has been reduced 1. The way “Chennai Porombokku Padal” went viral was to just being a religious signifier. stunningly beautiful . When we created the song we had no idea The people of India need to stop the of what impact it might have. It has become an example of how BJP, RSS and their affiliates from classical music can be used in environmental, social and political turning this country into a lifeless, activism. This is just the beginning! homogeneous, monolithic fiefdom. Courtesy TM Krishna Courtesy

PV SINDHU SPORTSPERSON

1. Following the silver from the 2016 Olympics, my best creative surprise for 2017 has been converting the bronze to silver at the BWF World Championships, as well as winning the Indian Open and the Korean Open Super Series. I hope this year ends on a high note with me playing the Dubai Super Series final, and I hope I do well in that.

2. If I talk about India’s sport culture, I believe India is doing really well, and I hope it continues doing really well. Especially with badminton, we have all the facilities here and government support too has been really good. Men and women are doing really well and we will get more medals and

more laurels for the country. Caravan The For Harsha Vadlamani 8th ANNIVERSARY FEATURE

RESUL POOKUTTY SOUND DESIGNER

1. One is Loving Vincent, an unusual film based on Vincent van Gogh and his paintings. Paintings were done with his strokes, and they animated it; nobody has done anything like this before. That it is not just a study of Van Gogh’s entire career but is also a live-action animation for me was very creatively surprising. The film War for the Planet of the Apes, that came out in Dolby Vision, where each frame is thousands of pixels in terms of digital quality, which is

Courtesy Resul Pookutty Resul Courtesy going to change the entertainment industry in the biggest way. That’s only been experimented with right TWINKLE KHANNA now in the United States of America. ACTOR The quality of the pictures, the quality of texture, the colour, the 1. The best creative surprise for me hue is like a window to reality. I personally was the fact that my story, Salaam was very surprised and taken aback Noni Appa, was adapted into a play. by the outstanding quality of the work. What they have achieved is 2. We are a nation steeped in mythology. Our to make an ape feel more human childhood is spent hearing stories about the than a human being. That kind of Ramayana and the golden period of the great animation, that can make an ape act sages, and we haven’t really been schooled to better than a human being, that was look towards the future. I think our writers an outstanding work. and creators should attempt dreaming up paradigms, universes and odysseys of the And in India, Amish Tripathi’s future in 2018. Immortal India, a collection of his talks. I found it to be quite an endearing and eye-opening work.

2. India, at the moment, needs three things— fact, logic and humaneness. Things that we say politically, culturally, as a community, we have to be factual. For the things that we say and propagate, we have to be logical. We must show more humaneness to our own brothers and sisters. Children are getting raped, women are getting killed, people are being killed on the road for various things, frivolous things, that makes me feel that there is no humanness left in our social sphere now. I think—culturally, politically—there are these three things that we need to hold dear, the core of our Indianness. That was one of our strongest elements

STR / AFP Getty Images STR in front of the world. BUSINESS LEADERS

1. What is the best corporate social responsibility practice your company has undertaken in 2017?

2. What do you think should be India’s economic priorities in 2018?

SUNDAR MAHALINGAM date the project has benefited 720 CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER, HCL villages with over 90,000 households, AND SHIV NADAR FOUNDATION impacting around 600,000 people. HCL has already invested around R100 1. HCL has launched several landmark crore in Samuday, and earmarked a CSR initiatives over the last few budget of R130 crore for the current years with the vision of helping financial year. in the process of nation-building. In 2017, HCL officially unveiled its 2. The Indian economy is growing most ambitious integrated rural at a fair pace but the two areas that I development project: Samuday. believe should be prioritised in 2018 HCL Samuday has created a unique are agriculture and employment. model of development that can India’s agrarian economy has been simultaneously address the challenges under stress for a long time and the in the fields of education, livelihood, sector needs both fiscal impetus agriculture, health, sanitation, and structural reforms from the

infrastructure and community government to make it flourish Chatterjee Rudra Courtesy engagement, and finally develop again. Also, the rate of job growth “model villages” in partnership in India continues to trail the GDP RUDRA with state governments, village growth rate, hence a more concerted CHATTERJEE communities, NGOs, knowledge effort towards aligning the multiple DIRECTOR, LUXMI institutions and allied partners. The policies and schemes towards GROUP AND OBEETEE program aims to be sustainable, creation of more employment seems scalable and replicable, and till to be the need of the hour. 1. Supplementary education for children in 40 villages around Mirzapur along with Pratham.

2. 30 percent of Indian youth are neither in employment or education. Labour and entrepreneurship policies to bring them into training and workforce. Courtesy Sundar Mahalingam Courtesy 8th ANNIVERSARY FEATURE

ANAND MAHINDRA CHAIRMAN, MAHINDRA GROUP

1. Our best initiative in 2017 has been the promotion of the social enterprise Araku, which is building a global brand for coffee grown by the Adivasi community of Araku Valley in Andhra Pradesh. Sustainable Corporate Social Responsibility will, in the future, come less from simply writing out cheques, and more from

the establishment of / Getty Images / Bloomberg Simon Dawson viable social enterprises that create shared value.

2. In my opinion, there is one overarching economic priority for India in 2018. Since the private sector seems to be unable to build momentum in the investment cycle, AMIT AGARWAL 1. We have worked across 12 the government must SVP AND COUNTRY community centres, established relentlessly push HEAD, AMAZON INDIA in the neighbourhoods of our ahead with its plan fulfilment centres across India, to pump-prime the impacting more than 25,000 economy through major women and youth through infrastructure spending. livelihood training and health and hygiene initiatives as well as 25,000+ children through education initiatives like setting up digital libraries. At the same time, we collaborated with the Akshaya Patra Foundation for the Ksheera Bhagya Scheme, to distribute milk to 170,000 children across 1,300 schools in Bengaluru, five days a week.

2. Infrastructure for inclusive growth including digital enablement that can facilitate inclusiveness, aid job creation and drive entrepreneurship by encouraging industries such as e-commerce. E-commerce can help direct and indirect employment with allied industries like logistics, warehousing, IT/ITeS and other

Courtesy Amit Agarwal Courtesy support industries. 8th ANNIVERSARY FEATURE

RAKESH BHARTI MITTAL VICE CHAIRMAN, BHARTI ENTERPRISES AND CO- CHAIRMAN, BHARTI FOUNDATION

1. We have pledged 10 percent of our family wealth towards philanthropy. This pledge will significantly step up the scope and reach of Bharti Foundation’s initiatives and also set up a world-class institution—the Satya Bharti University for Science and Technology—to offer free education to deserving youth from economically weaker sections of society.

2. Stay true to the path of economic reforms, with a clear focus on the ease of doing business, to prop up investment in the economy. Quick resolution of outstanding GST issues to revive investment by the

Courtesy Rakesh Bharti Mittal Rakesh Courtesy private sector.

KIRAN MAZUMDAR SHAW CHAIRMAN OF BIOCON LIMITED

1. Biocon Foundation scaled up its unique technology led eLAJ Smart Clinics model to strengthen primary healthcare delivery in India by converting PHCs into comprehensive single-point treatment centres to benefit marginalised communities with limited access to treatment.

2. India’s number-one economic priority in 2018 should be to create real jobs by enabling policies for manufacturing, agriculture and the services sector through new-age business models. Focus on universal health, education, financial services and start- ups could unlock many

opportunities. / Mint Getty Images Hemant Mishra 8th ANNIVERSARY FEATURE

SAIREE CHAHAL FOUNDER, CEO, SHEROES

1. Our SEW (Support Every Woman) initiative reaches out to thousands of young girls at ITIs and women in tier 2 and 3 cities to engage with and understand aspirations through open-forum sessions with SHEROES counsellors.

2. We need apolitical, single- minded focus on three pillars for progress—women’s safety (bring perpetrators of crimes against women to book); investing significantly in healthcare; creating equal access to education

Courtesy Sairee Chahal Sairee Courtesy and opportunities at various levels.

SAURABH MUKHERJEA CEO, AMBIT CAPITAL

1. Ambit and its employees have set up a not- for-profit called the Oditi Foundation. This is funded by contributions from Ambit’s employees, matching contributions from Ambit itself and the revenues generated by sales of my book The Unusual Billionaires. The Oditi Foundation’s monies are spent on various initiatives, but the ones which are closest to my heart are: we invest in the education of the children of Ambit’s support staff and provide medical aid for this segment of our team; and on behalf of a specific school in the Palghar district of Maharashtra we have invested in water filters, sports equipment and stationery.

2. We are fortunate to be part of a continent which has at least half a dozen economies— China, Taiwan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Vietnam—whose progress has been underpinned by educating the populace, by providing them affordable healthcare and a secure environment in which to conduct business. We need to take a leaf out of this Asian playbook and invest in our people—their health, their skills and their safety. If we can combine such investments with liberalisation of our labour market, our agricultural-produce market and our land market, we could, for the first time, create a genuinely competitive economy where skilled workers are available at competitive wage rates—as opposed

to the status quo, where minimum wages in / Mint Getty Images Aniruddha Chowdhury Maharashtra are three times that of Bangladesh. A competitive economy will then give us the basis put off these policy changes, the greater will be to provide livelihoods to the ten million Indians the groundswell of crime and discontent that we who join the labour force each year. The longer we will have to reckon with. BOOKS mahesh kumar a / ap photo kumar mahesh

82 THE CARAVAN books THE SKILLED AND THE SCHOOLED India’s struggles over what counts as knowledge / EDUCATION

AMIT BASOLE

in early 2017, the West Bengal government held an examination for 6,000 jobs in the Class IV category. This is the lowest category of permanent employment in government service, and reportedly pays R16,200 a month, by no means a princely sum. Roughly 2.5 million men and women appeared for the exam, many of them holders of graduate and postgraduate degrees. This is not an unusual occurrence. In 2015, 2.3 million people applied for around 400 Class IV jobs in Uttar Pradesh. Of these, 150,000 were university graduates. Across the country, young people in the thousands, desperate for stable employment as well as a life of respect and dignity, have taken to the streets to demand reservations in government jobs for their communities—Marathas in Maharash- tra, Kapus in Andhra Pradesh, Jats across north India, all tradition- ally powerful and well-to-do groups. Reservations for Patidars were a central issue in the recent electoral battle in Gujarat. India’s GDP has grown at a rough average of 7 percent per year over the past two decades, social aspirations have risen with it. There have been significant improvements in education in many states. Not long ago, most adult workers had no formal schooling, and hence no hope of formal employment, whether in the public or the private sector. Now, their children increasingly have high school certificates and often also college degrees, and with these the expectation of per- manent jobs. But the number of decent, stable and well-paying jobs, whether private or public, have not increased in keeping with the numbers of new entrants to the labour-force, let alone to accommo- date those leaving agriculture and other traditional occupations in search of better employment. This phenomenon has popularly been termed “jobless growth.” Surveys by the ministry of labour show that only 15 percent of Indian workers have regular, salaried jobs. The same surveys also show that 67 percent of Indian households report a monthly income of R10,000 or less, and only 2 to 3 percent of house- holds earn more than R50,000 a month. These trends have given us a generation that feels cheated by the system. But the problem is two-fold. While educated young Indians can- not find good jobs, employers cannot find good, educated workers. A recent “employability study” of 150,000 engineering graduates by a Delhi-based employment-solutions company, found that barely 7

JANUARY 2018 83 the skilled and the schooled · books percent were suitable for engineering weave our cloth and stitch our clothes, skilled and unskilled work—rooted in jobs. Another, by the Associated Cham- make our furniture, construct our the accepted notions of who is valued as bers of Commerce of India, also found houses, and perform most services—are a worker with specialised knowledge, that around 7 percent of the thousands denied the better wages and legal pro- and what counts as knowledge in the of graduates emerging from the coun- tections considered worthy of formal, first place. India’s social divisions are try’s 5,500 business schools each year salaried work. In the twenty-first cen- at the heart of these issues, based on were “employable.” Young people are tury, our skilled, uneducated workforce caste, class and colonial values. realising the futility of attending many is being replaced by unskilled, educated India is triply disadvantaged. As in of the country’s institutes of higher workers. This is an unsustainable many other societies, we suffer from learning. There are now no takers for model. the “head versus hand” hierarchy, nearly half of all available seats at engi- We may lament the state of our edu- which ascribes higher status to purely neering colleges nationwide. cation system, the incompetence of our mental work over work that requires Yet the Indian economy still func- policymakers, the insincerity of our physical labour. In India, that hierarchy tions and provides livelihoods for mil- politicians, and even blame globalisa- is also encoded in caste, with mental lions of people. Jobless growth is in tion for failing to create equal oppor- labour assigned to dominant castes and some ways a misnomer. It is not that tunities for all Indian citizens. There physical labour assigned to oppressed Indian growth has not created jobs at is plenty of blame to go around, but the ones. Finally, there is the colonial pre- all, it is that that the jobs created have question is, what is to be done? sumption, still largely in place, that flu- mostly been in what economists call Fixing the current model is not a ency in English is a sign of intellectual the “informal economy,” which takes in matter of just opening more vocational superiority. hundreds of millions of farmers, arti- training programmes or designing the These divisions enforce social and sans and workers of all kinds—workers right foreign-direct-investment policy. knowledge hierarchies. Simply put, who have no job security, and often no It needs us to question what values gov- most elites do not consider the knowl- regular income. Millions of skilled and ern our society, and what futures we edge that most people possess in productive, but formally uneducated, imagine for India. The main problem contemporary India to be legitimate workers—who grow and cook our food, is the popular discrimination between or deserving of equal standing with

84 THE CARAVAN the skilled and the schooled · books

support of village industries and a local economy. The rapidly growing Indian He argued that these were crucial to restoring em- economy has not generated ployment, autonomy and dignity to ordinary citi- enough secure and steady zens. According to Govindu and Malghan, “while Gandhi laid out the broad contours of an argu- employment to keep up with ment for swadeshi, it was Kumarappa who out of the rising number of young prolonged engagement shaped it into a theory of decentralization.” graduates. After Independence, the prime minister Jawa- harlal Nehru, advocated large-scale production formal knowledge. Social justice, and a way out of and the centralisation of resources wherever pos- The Web of the current crisis, requires a roadmap for cogni- sible, to be coordinated through the National Plan- Freedom: JC tive justice. ning Commission. Kumarappa took the opposite Kumarappa and Gandhi’s Struggle stance. He advocated small-scale and decentral- for Economic the web of freedom, a recent intellectual biog- ised production, and large-scale production only Justice raphy of the economist JC Kumarappa by the when these were not feasible. The Web of Freedom Venu Madhav academics Venu Madhav Govindu and Deepak outlines his debates on the merits and demerits Govindu and Malghan, is an account of one man’s lifelong battle of large-scale and small-scale industry with Jay- Deepak Malghan to restore legitimacy and dignity to the knowledge aprakash Narayan, who was at the time an ardent Oxford University systems of common people. Kumarappa played Marxist. The questions they raised—such as ones Press 388 pages, T895 a key role in developing the “village movement,” of appropriate scale of production, whether effi- part of the Gandhian project of the 1930s, and ciency is the same as productivity, and the nature was a key figure in debates surrounding economic of progress—are still relevant. Perhaps most sig- policy in colonial and post-colonial India. The me- nificantly, they force us to ask why certain tech- ticulously researched book offers an in-depth ac- niques and forms of knowledge are seen as “pro- count of Kumarappa’s evolution from a successful gressive,” and what would happen if we accorded Bombay-based accountant to one of the foremost importance to equity over productivity. proponents of an economy organised around the Kumarappa’s philosophical vision incorporated skills of ordinary Indians. a range of influences—Christian theology, the Kumarappa was born in 1892, into an elite Tamil nineteenth-century American economist Thor- Christian family. He studied at Columbia Univer- stein Veblen, and, of course, Gandhi. For Kuma- sity, where he was taught by the economist EA rappa, a “web of rights and obligations” constitut- Seligman—who also taught BR Ambedkar—and ed a “natural order,” and Ahimsa is the process of later settled in Bombay as an accountant. Meeting recognising these rights and obligations—as well Gandhi and encountering his theories of village as the fundamental interconnectedness of being— economics transformed him. Kumarappa threw and conforming to them. The task of the policy- previous spread: Each night, himself wholeheartedly into the Gandhian move- maker, in his view, is to create institutions that hundreds of ment, and spent 20 years living in a small hut in enable humans to act in accordance with these aspirants sit Maganvadi, near Wardha, in what is now Maha- ethical and moral principles. The Web of Freedom outside the City rashtra, from where he coordinated the activities points out that neither Kumarappa nor Gandhi Central Library of the All India Village Industries Association. believed naively in human goodness. Instead, they in Hyderabad, Reviving the rural economy was his life’s work. He thought that one could create institutions that studying for was the only Gandhian on the pre-Independence bring out cooperative non-violent tendencies over competitive exams to secure one of the National Planning Committee, the forerunner of competitive violent ones. limited number of the National Planning Commission. After Inde- The championing of small-scale industry, a hall- government jobs. pendence, he served as the chair of the govern- mark of Kumarappa’s career, has to be understood ment’s Agrarian Reform Committee. in this larger ideological context. One illustrative opposite page: Among Kumarappa’s better-known works case in the book involves a struggle against of- Thousands of are Economy of Permanence and Why the Village ficial strictures by sugarcane farmers in Madurai youths from traditionally Movement? Between the 1930s and the 1950s, district in 1949 and 1950. In order to ensure that powerful groups, he also wrote several articles on experiments a regional sugar mill had an adequate supply of such as the Patidars in village industries, khadi production and the sugarcane, and to get farmers to sell sugarcane to in Gujarat and swadeshi economy. For him, as for Gandhi, mills at subsidised rates, the central government the Marathas swadeshi ideals did not mean replacing English prevailed upon the Madras government to pass in Maharashtra factories with Indian ones, but rather, creating a an order that required farmers within a 20-mile have taken to the streets to demand distributed or decentralised system of production radius of the mill to get licences for jaggery pro- reservations in based in villages. Being a trained economist, Ku- duction. This move jeopardised the incomes that government jobs for shailesh andrade / reuters marappa also produced theoretical arguments in farmers derived from small-scale jaggery pro- their communities.

JANUARY 2018 85 the skilled and the schooled · books opposite page: duction. Kumarappa joined forces with a young The economist JC Gandhian named Jagannathan, who, in the spirit Epistemicide is the killing of Kumarappa (second of satyagraha, protested by laying down in front of a society’s way of thinking, from right), played a van carrying gur-making equipment confiscated a key part in the seeing and doing. Sousa Santos from nearby villages. “village movement” initiated by Gandhi. The book’s detailed accounts of Kumarappa’s argues that “the Global North” practices counter a frequently cited criticism has committed epistemicide of the Gandhian programme—that it advocated primitive methods of production and wanted to around the world. turn the clock back to a pre-modern past. In fact, both Kumarappa and Gandhi were committed to lated it even in dissent. This elite class controlled making improvements in existing techniques of key economic institutions, such as the National production and methods of organisation, as long Planning Commission, which determined how as these stayed consistent with core Gandhian resources were to be allocated to shape India’s principles. For them, khadi production, spinning economic future. During the colonial period, on the charkha and decentralised small-scale in- Kumarappa had disagreed with fellow members dustries were not to be championed because they of the National Planning Council on almost all were “traditional,” nor for the sake of preserv- counts, and eventually resigned from the body. ing “Indian culture.” Rather, these were ways to After Independence, he was not given a place on generate creative, meaningful work for the vast the National Planning Commission. The Web of majority of people, not just for the fortunate few Freedom ends with Kumarappa’s disillusionment with access to formal education. The strength of towards the end of his life—he died in 1960—with Kumarappa’s approach lies in the fact that it starts both the official inheritors of Gandhi’s legacy and from the majority’s position in terms of existing the Nehru-led Congress government. Neverthe- skills and knowledge. It does not ask them to wait less, he continued to work towards what is con- decades, or generations, to become formally edu- sidered the first “knowledge movement” of post- cated and then get in line for jobs that may never colonial India. materialise. Kumarappa’s economic theory was based on the gandhian movement posed a challenge to what ecological economists today call “sustain- the hegemony of book-learning as well as colonial ability,” though he used the term “permanence.” hierarchies of knowledge, but that challenge was Sustainable approaches in the field of economics ultimately defeated by the ruling elite. Opposition do not focus on endless growth in material living to the Gandhian programme also came from “un- standards, but see the human economy as part touchable” jatis, who were exploited and oppressed of nature. They place ordinary farmers, workers on the basis of their occupations, which Brahmini- and artisans at the centre of economic thought, cal thought deemed impure and polluting. and favour low-cost, labour-intensive technology In his debates with Gandhi, BR Ambedkar ar- with low negative environmental impact, as well gued for forsaking the knowledge embedded in as decentralised production. Moreover, they insist undesirable work, and embracing modern educa- that exchange must primarily be local, not only tion. Ambedkar’s leadership and vision trans- because distance deprives consumers of knowl- formed Indian society, not least in contributing to edge about the conditions under which goods the emergence of Dalits as an organised political are produced, and so aids unethical practices, force. But at the same time, seven decades after but also because long-distance transport of daily Independence, most Indians, including Dalits and necessities is ecologically expensive. These same others from oppressed castes, have not been able principles can be found in Kumarappa’s economic to advance through modern education.The hierar- writings and practice. chies of knowledge in contemporary India are still Kumarappa was aiding a social movement that structured by hierarchies of caste. directly challenged the hegemony of text-based Post-Hindu India: A Discourse on the Dalit- knowledge over other, practical forms of knowl- Bahujan Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Revolu- edge. In so doing, he, like Gandhi, attempted to tion, by the political theorist and activist Kancha produce a more inclusive alternative to the cen- Ilaiah, launches a fresh attack on caste-based trally-organised industrial production system that knowledge hierarchies. The book, first published the country’s post-colonial elite rushed towards. in English in 2010, was published in 2017 in Hindi Seventy years ago, only a small minority of as Hindutva-Mukt Bharat. Ilaiah takes readers Indians had graduate or post-graduate degrees. on a tour through a prototypical Telugu village, These were Macaulay’s children—they were edu- visiting communities that specialise in different

cated in the colonial way of thought, and emu- occupations traditionally reserved for oppressed vithalbhai jhaveri / dinodia photo

86 THE CARAVAN the skilled and the schooled · books castes. Through various chapters, such and economic mobility for oppressed implies that Indian society would ben- as “Unpaid Teachers,” “Subaltern Sci- castes. But in Post-Hindu India, Ilaiah efit greatly from a dialogue between entists,” “Social Doctors,” “Meat and chooses to focus on non-formal sys- these knowledge systems. Milk Economists” and “Unknown En- tems of knowledge. He argues that Ilaiah argues that Dalit-Bahujan gineers,” Ilaiah reveals the complexi- the classification of those doing pro- jatis have been the custodians of sci- ties of Dalit-Bahujan jati society and ductive work into ostensibly “lower” entific thinking in India, a thesis that knowledge. The village’s inhabitants castes has done much damage to a resonates with our contemporary are highly able specialists who, because potentially fruitful relationship be- understanding of the development they lack formal degrees, are never rec- tween epistemologies rooted in such of technical knowledge in Europe. It ognised as such by the rest of society. work and formal knowledge systems. is now well-established that in early Unlike in dominant-caste society, here Ilaiah envisions welding together ex- modern Europe science and mathemat- men and women work alongside each isting and new forms of knowledge, ics were the domain of artisans and other, and women are knowledge-cre- even if he does not offer clear ways manual workers, and that these fields ators and teachers in their own right. for integrating these into university grew in connection with the solving of Ilaiah exposes the divide between ex- curricula. Noting that the engineering practical problems. As the biochemist isting forms of Brahminical knowledge, skills of Dalit-Bahujan communities LJ Henderson proclaimed, “Science which are written down and therefore have never been recorded by Brahmin owes more to the steam engine than the legitimised, and the knowledge of the scholars or allowed into textbooks, steam engine owes to Science.” The key Dalit-Bahujan majority, which is largely he observes that “all these knowledge inventors of the Industrial Revolution transmitted through apprenticeship systems and engineering skills are in England, such as James Watt and and not recorded in text. still out there in our villages … to be George Stephenson, were also crafts- From his other writings and public seen and improved upon and when men. Craft apprenticeships included statements, it is clear that Ilaiah is a the children from these castes get into training in mathematics, material strong proponent of modern educa- modern IITs and other engineering science and physics. The economist tion, and particularly English-lan- institutions, they definitely advance David Landes, in his book The Unbound guage education, as a means of social our knowledge of engineering.” Ilaiah Prometheus, argues that craftsmen were not “unlettered tinkerers,” but possessed sophisticated theoretical knowledge. The historian Pamela Long, in Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600, states that in early modern Europe, those with university backgrounds engaged in re- ciprocally beneficial conversations with artisans. In Europe’s courts, workshops and coffee houses, “the learned taught the skilled, and the skilled taught the learned.” This happened because learned individuals valued practical knowledge “not only for what it could achieve in the material world, but also as a form of knowledge.” Ilaiah’s book demonstrates that technical knowledge does not exist in a social vacuum, and that mundane occupational practices embody philoso- phies and worldviews. He describes the activities of farmers, milk producers, weavers, barbers, leather-workers and washerfolk, and then examines the val- ues embedded in these. “In fact for the civilization-makers like the barbers, pot makers, leather tanners, shoemak- ers, producers of meat and milk, and so on, these texts did not exist,” he writes. “What existed for them as symbols of the civilized world were their own tools and instruments and the methods

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above: Weaving of using these tools and instruments for the ad- their close friends a karigar, a mistry, a farmer, or Banarasi saris vancement of Indian society.” someone who has not completed high school. Until requires specialised Instead of a text-based perspective of Indian I started my research into the epistemologies of knowledge, which is civilisation, then, Ilaiah offers a tool-based view, such marginalised specialists, I had none. taught in an ustad- which overturns both the dominance of the head This is perhaps one reason why economists and shagird system of apprenticeship, over the hand, and of text-based, Brahminical policy-makers routinely classify the Indian labour rather than in knowledge systems over the epistemologies of the force—90 percent of which works in the informal formal schools. Dalit-Bahujan jatis. At times his conclusions can sector—as overwhelmingly unskilled. As a career appear tenuous—as, for instance, when he valo- economist, I have had to suffer through many rises male dhobis as proto-feminists for working studies that use years of formal schooling, or lack alongside women—and he does not always provide thereof, as a proxy measurement of skill. While ample evidence to back his claims. But to focus this approach may be useful in the United States on these aspects of the book would be to miss the or Europe, where most workers acquire skills wood for the trees. Post-Hindu India is a powerful through formal education, it makes no sense at all challenge to the Brahminical knowledge structure in India. that denigrates skilled, productive work because I began to realise the shortcomings of this ap- it has a manual component or is performed by op- proach, and its insidious implications, when I be- pressed castes, and makes the case for a new social gan conducting field research among weavers and imagination based on the knowledge of Dalit- other informal workers in Varanasi in 2009. The Bahujan jatis. city has a government institution called the Weav- ers Service Centre, whose stated aim is to provide it is difficult to find conditions under which the technical support to weavers. Once, while wait- kind of dialogue between scholars and artisans ing to meet its director, I introduced myself to his that Europe saw in past centuries could take place secretary, and told him I was interested in karigar in contemporary India. The social spheres of the vidya—artisanal knowledge. He asked, “What is two groups are largely distinct, and there are few that?” The director, on hearing the same term, public spaces where they can interact as equals. asked, “You mean ‘education’?” He assumed I was The same dichotomy is present in our private lives. interested in the state of formal education among

I wonder how many readers can count among weavers, and complained that their lack of educa- dhiraj singh / bloomberg getty images

88 THE CARAVAN the skilled and the schooled · books tion made them resistant to change and improvement. Ilaiah argues that the Dalit-Bahujan jatis have been Weaving Banarasi saris requires the custodians of scientific thinking in India. This highly skilled work, which is taught—as thesis resonates with the ways in which technical is almost universally the case in the informal sector—in an ustad-shagird knowledge developed in early modern Europe, system of apprenticeship. The weav- where science and mathematics were the domains of ers I interviewed consider themselves engineers and masters of their craft, artisans and manual workers. and resent the way they are treated by officials. As a result, in contrast to the backgrounds. But overcoming the epis- nant castes and emphasise text-based hustle and bustle of the weavers’ work- temic schism amid all the complexities instead of experiential knowledge. shops, neighbourhoods and markets, of Indian society is not easy. In the heyday of the anti-colonial the Weaver Service Center stands quiet Last semester, while teaching a movements worldwide, leaders fighting and aloof, of little use to those it is sup- course on alternative visions of India’s European political domination echoed posed to serve. future, I had extensive discussions the need for intellectual decolonisation. What began as a study of Banarasi- with two Dalit students in my class. In During the mid-twentieth century, sari weavers expanded over the past many ways, our debates seemed to lead thinkers such as Gandhi, Kumarappa, decade to a study of artisans and in- to the same impasse as the exchanges Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon ar- formal workers across India, and the between Gandhi and Ambedkar. Both gued that freedom from colonial rule methods they use to learn skills and of them, echoing Ambedkar, saw in the required the dismantling of colonial share their knowledge. The term that lokavidya position an attempt by the forms of education, and a decoloni- I, and other academics and activists dominant castes—in my case, a third- sation of the colonised intellect and interested in this area, have been using generation educated Brahmin—to deny imagination. Yet in recent decades, to describe the knowledge such people them their rightful place in the modern this cognitive project has largely been possess is “knowledge-in-society,” or economy. I tried to suggest that we abandoned, and even post-colonial lokavidya. move beyond a zero-sum game involv- nations have accepted the hegemony Several points emerge from this ing Gandhi or Ambedkar, because both of Western economic and knowledge work. First, lokavidya is not “traditional head-versus-hand and caste-based paradigms. knowledge.” It is always contemporary, hierarchies need to be challenged. I In the twenty-first century, new or nit-naveen. It is modified, improved do not think I convinced either of my movements in Latin America have upon and reconstructed constantly ac- students. In this regard, Ilaiah’s work is brought intellectual decolonisation to cording to the experiences, needs and most useful, because, while champion- the forefront of their political agenda. aptitude of those who possess it. Sec- ing modern education and learning in The Portuguese scholar Boaventura de ond, it is everywhere, and yet invisible. English, along Ambedkarite lines, he Sousa Santos, in his new book Episte- Our statistical methods cannot see it, demonstrates the depth of knowledge mologies of the South: Justice Against yet it is there, working silently, serving that exists in any village. Epistemicide, analyses how these move- people’s needs. Every time a karigar Our universities should be spaces ments are trying to bring another world community adapts to a new type of raw where cultures and knowledge systems into being. “Epistemicide,” as the writer material, a new market or a new source can interact as equals, and to mutual uses it, is the killing of ways of thinking, of power, lokavidya is at work. Inno- benefit. But that ideal is stymied by seeing and doing. According to Sousa vation, adaptation and change occur the colonial history of our institutions Santos, knowledge paradigms of the constantly in the world of lokavidya, of knowledge-production. Most of the West—or to use the more recent termi- often under duress and with very few oldest of these were created by the Brit- nology, “the Global North”—have com- resources. ish to bring into existence a new native mitted epistemicide across the world. Kumarappa and Ilaiah ask us to elite that would help them rule. They The book begins with the assertion imagine ways in which the world of produced scientists, engineers and oth- that the sum of all human understand- lokavidya can enter into a dialogue on er specialists who were initially, and for ing of the world far exceeds that of the equal terms with the world of formal many decades, almost exclusively Brah- Western understanding of the world. knowledge. I teach at a new private uni- mins or members of other dominant For Sousa Santos, the intellectual he- versity that attempts to remedy the di- castes. It was also this colonial system gemony of the Global North needs to vide between college curricula and the that enshrined English education, be challenged by the “epistemologies of world outside. Time in the field is built and created a model of transmitting the South,” which implies that people into the undergraduate programme, knowledge that has remained largely across the world should use “gram- and teachers are encouraged to make unchanged, even in the post-colonial mars and scripts other than those pedagogical use of students’ experi- era. University courses are overwhelm- developed by Western-centric critical ences, particularly when those students ingly taught in English, by teachers theory.” Those in the Global South, he come from rural or oppressed-caste who are disproportionately from domi- observes, have suffered for generations

JANUARY 2018 89 the skilled and the schooled · books from a “loss of critical nouns.” We can only qualify what is given to us. If the As an economist, I have read many studies that North’s episteme promotes “develop- use years of formal schooling, or lack thereof, as a ment,” then the South can only qualify proxy measurement of skill. Such studies feed the it to create “alternative development,” “inclusive development” or “sustainable common misconception that the Indian labour force development.” If the North promotes is overwhelmingly unskilled. “democracy,” then the South can only complain that the democracy it has is One of these was held at the Indian versities especially—are today more not “decentralised,” “radical” or “true” Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and democratised than they were even a democracy. members of the iron-smelting Agaria few decades ago, thanks in part to the Sousa Santos collects and transmits tribe of Chhattisgarh attended, giving Green Revolution delivering prosperity new “critical nouns.” If the Gandhian professors a chance to interact with ar- to new quarters, and in part to a gen- movement spoke of satyagraha, sarvo- tisans adept at producing high-quality eration’s worth of reservation policies daya, swadeshi and swaraj, indigenous iron using small clay furnaces. In the for disadvantaged groups. Yet, thus far, peoples’ movements in Mexico, Bolivia, areas of ecology and environmental sci- instead of leveraging student diversity Ecuador, Peru and elsewhere have ence, collaborations across knowledge to help in an epistemic overhaul, uni- brought forward ideas such as Rights of systems between scientists and experts versities have by and large seen it as a Nature, pachamama, or Mother Earth, from forest-dwelling and other commu- threat to the legitimacy of the histori- and sumak kawsay, a Quechua word for nities are relatively common. cal elites that continue to control them. a life lived in balance with the non-hu- The Lokavidya Jan Andolan, a Rather than a broadening of minds, man environment. In a few cases, these people’s movement for lokavidya, has there has been a backlash, manifested concepts, sometimes as old as the com- held gyan panchayats—public forums in the failure of administrators in al- munities they spring from, have been that assume epistemic equality, where most all public universities to fill fac- formally acknowledged in constitutions all the participants are considered to ulty posts in reserved categories, and and legal systems. The 2008 constitu- be knowledgeable and have something in universities both public and private tion of Ecuador and the 2009 constitu- worth contributing to the discussion. to check institutional discrimination tion of Bolivia both recognise the prin- In one such panchayat I attended in Va- against Dalit and Adivasi students. And ciple of sumak kawsay, for instance, as a ranasi, farmers and weavers were of the so our colleges and universities remain goal of society. In real-world terms, this opinion that the large-scale tendency to substandard imitations of Western means that their modern legal systems call common people ignorant will not universities, where teaching, learning have to recognise the rights of trees and break until the walls of the university and examinations have become perfor- rivers in court rulings. There are other fall. They elaborated that these “walls” mances to be acted out in order to draw symbolic victories as well, such as the were not just the literal structures, salaries and receive often worthless granting of official-language status to but also the geographical distance degrees. Quechua in Ecuador, and the election of between their homes and places of Still, “traditional” and “indigenous” Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous higher learning, the economic barri- knowledge now enjoy almost main- president in 2006. ers between ordinary students and our stream status in discourses on eco- In this way, the new Latin American universities, and the distance between nomic development, at least in some movements have brought epistemic people’s knowledge and science. Many quarters, even if in highly restricted decolonisation back into politics. They participants complained that universi- ways that leave the basic notions of have successfully shown how our deep ties have created modes of discourse “development” unquestioned. It is not ecological crises and unprecedented within which lokavidya-holders are not unimaginable that soon a new “open economic inequality are also a failure of able to fully express themselves. Break- university” can be founded, where ev- the imagination. In seeking solutions, ing the walls of the university would ery department, be it engineering, soci- they have taken up the task of setting mean creating modes of expression that ology or music, has holders of lokavidya aside borrowed categories and begun allow everyone to participate. A televi- as equal members. thinking for themselves. sion programme on the agrarian crisis, In this effort, we have rich intellec- for instance, would host academics and tual traditions, modern and historical, over the years, India has witnessed policy experts alongside farmers, with to draw upon. The Bhakti movement, several experiments that have at- the latter fully empowered to provide for instance, was a religious and social tempted to bridge the country’s epis- analyses and not merely share experi- movement, but it was also a knowledge temic divides. In the 1990s, scientists, ences. Some participants pointed to movement, which we still remember for philosophers and activists associated systems of training and learning in the proliferation of literature, poetry with the Chennai-based Patriotic and their own communities as models for and music it produced. In verse, the Peoples’ Oriented Science and Technol- low-cost, useful education. question of justice was always posed ogy group organised three congresses One favourable development is that as one about who possesses legitimate on traditional science and technologies. Indian universities—and public uni- knowledge.

90 THE CARAVAN the skilled and the schooled · books

Kabir, who was a weaver, poet and philosopher In popular iconography, still visible in work- above: Recent from Varanasi, once famously said, pothi padh shops across India, these visionaries are often mass movements padh jag muaa pandit bhayaa na koye—many have depicted working or surrounded by their tools: by Ambedkarite died reciting the scriptures, but no one became a Ravidas with his anvil, Kabir at his loom and Gora activists have demanded pandit. He also wrote: kneading the mud while chanting the Lord’s name. recognition and Ironically, Hindutva thought today tries to respect for the Jaat na poochho saadhu ki, pooch lijiye gyaan embrace the bhakti tradition as a symbol of an work of the hands Mol karo talwaar kaa, padi rahene do myaan ostensible Hindu meritocracy, where knowledge that is still done is respected above caste, in an attempt to garner by members of Don’t ask the seeker’s caste, ask about knowl- support from the Dalit-Bahujan castes. This is a oppressed castes across India. edge instead cynical attempt to neutralise the potent anti-Brah- Learn to value the sword, leave aside the sheath. minical thrust of the movement. For the bhakti saints, as for the rest of us, challenging Brahmini- Like Kabir, many Bhakti poets were artisans, cal knowledge hierarchies remains crucial for and their poetry and philosophy derived from a achieving social and economic justice. tool-based way of knowing, thinking and imagin- ing another world. Their poetry is suffused with the looming crisis of mass unemployment threat- metaphors from their crafts. In one of his ab- ens large-scale social unrest and further polari- hangs—devotional poems—Tukaram, the beloved sation in India, but historical and contemporary bhakti poet of Maharashtra, enumerates these movements and traditions offer a solution. For artisan-saints and questions the Vedas. He says those of us who are products of the modern educa- that the potmaker Gora, the leatherworker Ravi- tion system, being allies of these movements means das, the momin Kabir, the barber Sena, the danc- adopting an attitude of humility, and acknowledg- ing girl Kanhopatra, the cotton-carder Dadu and ing that there is much we do not know, that our the Mahar saint Chokhamela are all Vishnu’s ser- ways of seeing and doing are not the only ways, and vants, who have no caste. Delivering a final blow, that the “educated” and “uneducated” are epistemic he asks the Brahmins, “Which of your books have equals. To draw on Sousa-Santos’s words, there can

sam panthaky / afp getty images panthaky sam saved the fallen? I know of none.” be no social justice without cognitive justice. s

JANUARY 2018 91 THE BOOKSHELF

JASODA THE COLLECTED Kiran Nagarkar WORKS OF HOMEN BORGOHAIN SHORT STORIES AND NOVELLAS Translated by Pradipta Borgohain

Kiran Nagarkar’s seventh Homen Borgohain is one novel is about a young of Assam’s most acclaimed woman, Jasoda, who escapes writers. This collection a drought-stricken land of his novellas and short with her children and travels to a city by sea. She experi- stories, translated by his son Pradipta, includes Matsyagan- ences hardship and hunger, as well as a range of unexpected dha, a tale of inter-caste marriage and drug addiction, and circumstances, which force her to commit brutal acts of numerous stories about middle-class life in contemporary As- violence and adopt a new morality in order to survive. sam. Borgohain’s stories reflect upon modern forms of social hypocrisy and moral corruption, while retaining irony and humour.

fourth estate, 272 pages, S599 amaryllis, 395 pages, S599

A WORLD OF ALTERNATIVE THREE ZEROS FUTURES THE NEW ECONOMICS INDIA UNSHACKLED OF ZERO POVERTY Edited by Ashish Muhammad Yunus Kothari and KJ Joy

In this book, the Grameen Bank founder and No- bel Peace Prize recipient Mohammad Yunus argues that capitalism is an un- sustainable system which has increased inequality, unemployment and environ- This book of 35 essays compiles the writing of scholars and mental degradation. The adverse effects of relentless global activists, including Anand Teltumbde, Shiv Visvanathan, growth are disproportionately felt in poor countries such as Gladson Dungdung and Aruna Roy. Its premise is that the Bangladesh. He offers a blueprint for a sustainable economy, current ecological, economic and political situation in India which aims at zero carbon emissions, zero poverty and zero is both unequal and unsustainable, and that an alternative unemployment, built by thousands of small firms—such as future may be forged if it can first be imagined. ones supplying solar power—driven by both social concern and profit motives. hachette, 288 pages, S599 authors upfront, 708 pages, S995

92 THE CARAVAN THE BOOKSHELF

HOW MAY I DEMONETIZATION HELP YOU? AND THE BLACK AN IMMIGRANT’S ECONOMY JOURNEY FROM MBA Arun Kumar TO MINIMUM WAGE Deepak Singh

The journalist Deepak In November 2016, the Singh’s parents convinced central government an- him to get an MBA so that nounced the demonetisation he would always be employ- of all R500 and R1,000 notes, able. But when he followed which made up 86 percent of the circulated currency in his spouse to the United States, he found it difficult to get a India, with the expressed intent of curbing the flow of black job. How May I Help You? chronicles his experiences working money. A year later, economist Arun Kumar, an expert on in an electronics store, among the legions of Americans of all India’s black economy, assesses the effects of this move. His races stuck in service-sector jobs that offer low wages and new book argues that demonetisation has had little effect on no career prospects. Singh’s down-and-out depiction reveals the overall scale of the black economy, and that it has slowed how immigration, race and class intersect in the lowest tiers growth and created more inequality. of the American wage economy. penguin, 282 pages, S399 penguin, 240 pages, S499

COROMANDEL DANCING WITH A PERSONAL HISTORY THE NATION OF SOUTH INDIA COURTESANS IN Charles Allen BOMBAY CINEMA Ruth Vanita

As is the case with danc- ers in item numbers today, courtesans in Hindi cinema have often been dismissed This book, by the historian Charles Allen, traces a literal and as overly sexualised, marginal figures. Yet, from the 1930s intellectual journey across south India. Travelling along the onwards, courtesan characters were depicted as single, inde- Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu, Allen uncovers fascinating pendent working women at a time when the main characters facts about archaeology, linguistics and the region’s Jain and in most Hindi films were far more conservative and tethered Buddhist traditions. to religious and social norms. In this book, the scholar Ruth Vanita analyses over 200 films featuring courtesans, and un- covers an alternative feminist history of cinema in Mumbai. little, brown, 412 pages, S699 speaking tiger, 272 pages, S450

JANUARY 2018 93 SHOWCASE Photography

Stuart Freedman: The Palaces of Memory–Tales from the Indian Coffee House

17 TO 23 JANUARY AMETHYST, CHENNAI

This is an exhibition of 40 photographs by the British photographer Stuart Freedman, taken between 2010 and 2013, of the iconic Indian Coffee Houses across the country. Besides documenting the faded grandeur of these estab- lishments that echo India’s colonial past, the series also encapsulates their unique atmosphere as “palaces of memory,” seemingly frozen in time with their largely unchanged decor. The exhibition is part of Tasveer Gallery’s twelfth season of travelling exhibitions.

all images courtesy tasveer all images For more information, write to [email protected]

94 THE CARAVAN SHOWCASE Theatre International Theatre Festival of Kerala

20 TO 29 JANUARY KERALA SANGEETHA NATAKA AKADEMI, KERALA

The theme for the festival’s tenth edition is “Theatre of the Margin- alised—Reclaiming the Margins.” The festival focusses on the lives of those who are otherwise excluded from

courtesy rene fernandez creative spaces. Through 16 Indian and 16 international plays, the festival will present theatrical interpretations of issues related to caste, ethnicity, gender and class. Besides staged performances, the programme also features seminars on “Gendering Theatre” and “Theatres of Resistance.”

For more information, write to

courtesy tobiasz papuczys courtesy savanan [email protected] Music Swami Haridas Tansen Sangeet Nritya Mahotsav

11 TO 14 JANUARY SHANKAR LAL HALL, MODERN SCHOOL, DELHI

The Bharatiya Sangeet Sadan in collaboration with the Sri Ram Centre for Performing Arts is organising a four-day music and dance festival for classical art enthusiasts. The festival honours the legacy of Swami Haridas and his disciple Mian Tansen. The line-up for the 2018 edition includes the Hindustani classical vocalist Kaushiki Chakraborty, the sitar maestro Shujaat Khan, the renowned flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia and the kathak dancer Uma Sharma.

courtesy bharatiya sangeet sadan sangeet courtesy bharatiya For more information, write to [email protected]

JANUARY 2018 95 showcase Photography

Derry Moore: In the Shadow of the Raj

19 JANUARY TO 17 FEBRUARY TASVEER, BANGALORE

In the Shadow of the Raj features a selection of 28 photographs by the English photographer Derry Moore. The exhibition highlights enduring colonial legacies in the visual and social life of India through Moore’s architectural studies, images of interiors, and also landscapes and portraits. Taken in the mid 1970s and early 1980s, many of these photographs capture a young nation caught in the throes of a political, social and technological transformation. A sense of arrested time is created through the black, white and grey tones in his photographs.

For more information, write to

all images courtesy tasveer all images [email protected]

96 THE CARAVAN showcase Exhibition This is Rithika Merchant’s Merchant creates elabo- Where the first solo exhibition at rate and poetic mosaics of Tarq. It explores issues of myths that seek to thread Water Takes Us migration, displacement together myriad stories and belonging, through across time and space. epics and mythologies. The exhibition draws its 1 DECEMBER TO 13 JANUARY For more information, Working primarily with inspiration from Mer- TARQ, MUMBAI write to [email protected] gouache and ink on paper, chant’s close encounter with the plight of refugees who have been streaming into European cities from conflict-ridden parts of the world. all images courtesy tarq all images Music A year after its debut, the Rantham- Rajasthani traditions. The festival has The bore Festival is back with a series of scheduled workshops where partici- concerts featuring folk and interna- pants will be taught to play folk music Ranthambore tional musicians as well as interac- instruments such as the bhapang and tive workshops for music and nature khartaal. There will also be screen- Festival enthusiasts. This season will see per- ings and talks focussed on wildlife formances by bands such as the Faran and conservation. Ensemble, Trio Benares and Labik 19 TO 21 JANUARY Kamal. Listeners will also be treated For more information, write to NAHARGARH PALACE, RANTHAMBORE to folk music rooted in Gujarati and [email protected] courtesy trio benares singh courtesy bhanu pratap

JANUARY 2018 97 Editor’s Pick wikimedia commons

people pray beside the Wailing Wall, or the West- of one such battle, as Arabs allegedly attacked ern Wall, in the Old City of Jerusalem, in 1948. In Jewish quarters in the vicinity in retaliation after Jewish tradition, it is believed to hold the remains Jews threw grenades at their riflemen. The same of the Second Holy Temple. Muslims, who refer to day, an explosion at the Arab National Commit- it as the al-Buraq wall, believe that it was where tee headquarters in Jaffa killed at least 15 people. Muhammad tied al-Buraq, the steed on which he There has been intermittent violence in the area rode into heaven. The Western Wall is part of a for decades since. large compound that houses the Al-Aqsa Mosque In December this year, the US President Donald and the Temple Mount—sacred sites for Muslims Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital and Jews—and is a point of immense territorial of Israel sparked international controversy for its conflict between the communities. blatant disregard of the Arab community’s claim In November 1947, the United Nations General to the city as a capital. The Organisation of Islamic Assembly adopted a resolution that proposed Cooperation dismissed the decision as “null and the partition of Palestine. The Arab community void,” and declared East Jerusalem the capital of rejected the plan on the grounds that it denied Palestine. Weeks after Trump’s announcement, them self-determination, and, in the weeks a majority vote in the United Nations General that followed, this disagreement caused several Assembly backed the international consensus clashes between Jewish and Muslim groups. On that Jerusalem’s status could only be determined 4 January 1948, the Wailing Wall was the site through a peace deal between Israel and Palestine.

98 THE CARAVAN