ON 6 APRIL 1994, Hutu extremists in Rwanda began a genocidal campaign that killed more than eight hundred thousand people, most of whom belonged to the minority Tutsi community. Around 2 million Rwandans fled the country, and over three hundred thous

“We are just waiting for the Congress,” Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, said at a rally in Purnea district, on 25 February. Kumar, who represents the Janata Dal (United), was speaking at the first formal congregation of a new grand allianc

“After the protest, I must fill this belly, support my family and pursue my ambitions,” Tenzin, a Tibetan in exile whom I met in September 2022, told me. He did not wish to disclose his full name. He has participated in the protests outside the Chine

THE COUNTRY’S MOST IMPORTANT politicians and industrialists walked into a brightly lit hall in Chennai on 18 January 2015. Among them were the senior ministers Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Piyush Goyal, M Venkaiah Naidu and Ravi Shankar Prasad, and t

“This is when it all happens. The harvest time is our playground,” Eddie Chami said, surrounded by vines, as he stood on a mountain slope in Bousit village, wearing a T-shirt and a khaki hat. It was early morning, the best time to harvest fragile gra

Teresita Boljoran, now a widowed mother in her early fifties, has been cleaning houses since 2010 to support her family of six. In 2013, the super typhoon Haiyan—locally known as Yolanda—destroyed her house on the island of Malapascua, in Cebu provin

“THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE of government is a platform,” the tech billionaire Nandan Nilekani declared in the 2015 book Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations, which he co-authored with the software engineer Viral Shah. “We are talking about r

AS WE TRUNDLED DOWNHILL along the treacherous dirt track, made muddy by rain, I wondered how those routinely negotiating this path did not lose their mental bearings—or a few spinal discs. Our Mizo driver was nonchalant, piloting our pickup truck wit

The meeting of G20 foreign ministers in Delhi, on 1 and 2 March, was deemed a success for “Brand India.” But it all depends on how we define success. The first three G20 summits, held in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, saw concrete outcomes: p

A GROUP OF AROUND TEN PEOPLE arrived outside the Hyatt Regency in Ahmedabad early in the morning of 14 February 2016. Chanting “Jai Shri Ram” and “Shah Rukh Khan hai hai,” they threw stones into the hotel’s parking lot, shattering the windshield of a

Daril Atkins sculpts parts of the human body. The life of this 77-year-old sculptor-turned-anaplastologist is marked by giving helping hands to people, literally. “I am a trained sculptor,” he told me at his lab, DA Anaplastology India LLP, in Bengal

ON 13 JANUARY 1898, the newspaper L’Aurore published an open letter by the novelist Émile Zola to the French president, Félix Faure. Titled “J’accuse…!”—I accuse—the article deplored the antisemitism that had led to the artillery officer Alfred Dreyf

ARPUTHAM HAD WAITED for this moment for 11,299 days. A large crowd had gathered at her house—lawyers, journalists, local political activists and friends. Throughout the morning, more reporters came flooding into the small railway town of Jolarpettai,

The questions are about China. The answers are about Pakistan. That seems to be the case when it comes to the Narendra Modi government’s designs for India’s security challenges. Even as the Chinese army clashed with Indian soldiers at Tawang’s Yangts

“I was just a child when I left Mali,” Mamadou said. “I travelled a long way arriving in Libya, but after the fall of Gaddafi, the socio-political situation in the country…” His voice trailed off, as he stirred the remaining sugar at the bottom of hi

“DON’T YOU LIVE IN GHATSILA? You were born here, weren’t you?” Sushanto Seet asked me, visibly exasperated. Seet is the organising secretary of the Bibhuti Smriti Sansad—a cultural organisation based in Ghatsila, in the Purbi Singhbhum district of Jh

The Bharatiya Janata Party foregrounded the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the recent Gujarat assembly election and swept aside the opposition. It fought the Delhi municipal election in his name and came close to winning. The oversized imag

The Caravan brings you regular opinions and analysis from authoritative journalists covering politics, global affairs, healthcare, religion, culture, technology and more. caravanmagazine.in/caravan-columns ■

A recent groundswell of protests to demand the Sarna code, a separate religious classification in the census for Adivasis, has the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates in a fix. In a special session held in November 2020, the Jharkhand Asse

IN SEPTEMBER 2018, a member of the skateboarding community in Gangtok invited me to photograph an event. That was my first glimpse into this small fraternity and the skateboarding subculture in the city. In the following months, I started getting mor

SOON AFTER the Indian men’s cricket team beat Pakistan in the Asia Cup, on 28 August, hundreds of people gathered to celebrate on the Golden Mile, a street in the Leicester suburb of Belgrave that is known for its Indian restaurants and shops, as wel

Andrew Otis’ Hicky’s Bengal Gazette: The Untold Story of India’s First Newspaper depicts the trajectory of the eighteenth-century journalist James Augustus Hicky, who, while based in Calcutta, used a press to start the first printed newspaper in Asia