The Caravan

Karam Sain led the way through the narrow paths of the temperate forest near the tribal village of Lippa, located in the Kinnaur district of Himachal Pradesh. The cool May air was filled with the scent of dried chilgoza pine cones, which crackled und

Earlier this year, Muhammad Raees, a 57-year-old resident of Jamia Nagar, began looking for a new house for his family. In his years of living in Delhi, he had never found a house that suited his requirements, a secure locality being top of his list.

Under the dilapidated ceiling of the Taji Khan Hazara Sports Complex—its white paint now grey and peeling—72-year-old Habibullah Jaferi practised punches with a young student. A spot of sunlight lit the cold, concrete ground. The two danced around it

As I walked past the barbershops and dimly lit bars on the right bank of the Seine, young men, mostly Malian and Ivorian, called out, offering manicures and haircuts. The east-central boroughs of the tenth and eighteenth arrondissements of Paris are

I think that there will come a time when people will ask of the Indian media: What were you doing in those five years when a government came to power that spread hate and poison, that controlled the media, what were you doing then? And very few in th

“While we should not be worried, there is some anxiety after reading news reports,” AK Abdul Momen, the foreign minister of Bangladesh, told a television channel in July. He was speaking of the National Register of Citizens, the Indian government’s p

Docked in the choppy waters of a Venetian canal, along the warehouse architecture of the Arsenale—one of two venues of the 2019 Venice Biennale—is the ruin of a 90-foot fishing boat. Titled “Barca Nostra”—Italian for “our boat”—it forms part of a pro

THE SENSE OF SIEGE HIT EARLY, in the air, long before seeing the barbed-wire barricades and security forces armed to the teeth blocking the way. Fifteen minutes before the plane touched down at Srinagar, an announcement was made asking the passengers

AS INDIA CELEBRATES her seventy-third year of independence from British rule, ragged children thread their way through traffic in Delhi, selling outsized national flags and souvenirs that say, “Mera Bharat Mahan”—My India is Great. Quite honestly, it

ON 31 JULY, I spoke at an event titled, “An Enigma called Nation & the Question of Identity,” organised in Delhi by the Hindi literary publication Hans to mark the birth anniversary of the writer Premchand. Among my fellow speakers was Makarand Paran

IN THE OPENING sequence to his photo book 1528, Rohit Saha is quick to set the tone for the narrative that follows. It opens with a grainy black-and-white image of a man’s face, framed such that it cuts right under his eyes, his unflinching gaze dire

IN SHIROMI PINTO’S new novel Plastic Emotions, released this July, there is a moment where the protagonist, the Sri Lankan architect Minnette De Silva, reads an article about herself. The headline trumpets that it is about “Ceylon’s first woman archi

ONE DAY IN EARLY APRIL, after contemplating a shelf of local literature for an essay reflecting on the tenth anniversary of the official end of the Sri Lankan civil war, I walked through a Colombo neighbourhood, in defiance of the exceptional heat, g

WEEKENDS IN SEPTEMBER SHOONYA CENTRE FOR ART AND SOMATIC PRACTICES, BENGALURU This event features the works of 12 young dancers from across the country, spanning a variety of dance forms: contemporary, folk and classical. Scheduled on Saturdays and

AN ITALIAN SOLDIER CARRIES a captured Ottoman flag during the Italo-Turkish war, which began on 29 September 1911. In the early years of the twentieth century, Italy wanted to assert its place among the great powers of Europe. It had long harboured d