December 6th is a day of mourning. For the entire country, perhaps, but doubly so for me. It is the day my grandfather died. Not in 1992, of course. He died in his bed: practically blind, bed-ridden, in pain, and given to whispering 'ab bas' to nobody in particular, once in a while, even though he showed little sign of 'bas karo'-ing otherwise. Since he could no longer read or write, a kaatib had been hired so he could dictate and finish the last few projects he'd been working on. (One of them had been the researching of various versions of the Ramayana in Urdu.)
On the 6th of December, he slipped away. Quietly, I hear, leaving so much unfinished, unseen, unsaid.
About the other great tragedy of this date, I find I cannot find any new words. But poetry often says the unsayable, and Kaifi Azmi has said some part of it.
"Ram banvaas se laut ke jab ghar mein aaye
Yaad jungle bahut aaya jo nagar mein aaye
Raks-e-deewangi aangan mein jo dekha hoga
6 Desambar ko Shri Raam ne socha hoga..."
Read Doosra Banvaas, here.
Friday, December 07, 2007
Monday, November 26, 2007
Up,
High up, up, up winding roads, it feels so odd, making eye contact with a tribal woman, accosting her and asking whether I could speak with her for a minute.
It feels odd, irrational even, to talk politics as she gently says, yes, you may speak. In her confused, amused eyes, you can read nothing, and to most of your questions, she offers no simple answers. Then, she stares off into space and mutters, "Once, the people sniffed at the wind and followed its bent. Now, people note which way the wind is blowing, but sometimes, they bend the wind a little bit, bend it to their own will."
In Kinnaur and Spiti, where, if they don't get into government service, they get into apples or peas without much of a fuss, they have voted. I probably will get around to writing about the experience of being there, later; in the meantime, my story on the pre-election scenario.
It feels odd, irrational even, to talk politics as she gently says, yes, you may speak. In her confused, amused eyes, you can read nothing, and to most of your questions, she offers no simple answers. Then, she stares off into space and mutters, "Once, the people sniffed at the wind and followed its bent. Now, people note which way the wind is blowing, but sometimes, they bend the wind a little bit, bend it to their own will."
In Kinnaur and Spiti, where, if they don't get into government service, they get into apples or peas without much of a fuss, they have voted. I probably will get around to writing about the experience of being there, later; in the meantime, my story on the pre-election scenario.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
A brief contextual history of the blogger, in the light of Islam (ism?) and literary spats
I grew up with nursery rhymes. My mother says that I had begun to recite four-line rhymes (and was very annoying, am sure, but she doesn't say that) by the time I was two. These were politically incorrect rhymes. Like "Ten little nigger boys".
I didn't know what 'nigger boys' were. I only learnt the rough meaning when I began to read some American Literature, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Even then, while it had entered my juvenile brain that black people had been oppressed unfairly and that white people back then didn't like them, it still didn't enter my head that 'nigger' was not an acceptable word. I saw a few movies and read more books, where there were plenty of references to the word - black people calling each other 'nigger'.
It was much, much later, when I used the word once in conversation, that some NRI-type student - freshly politically sanitized in the USA - told me that it was, indeed, unacceptable. You can't say it.
But, I protested, they say it.
Yes, he said, they can. They're it. You can't say it. It's offensive.
---
I grew up thinking of myself as 'mozi'. Not Muslim. My mother hardly ever used the word 'muslim' to refer to our family. We were 'mozis'. Actually, she hardly ever referred to us as anything at all. She just made sewaiyyan twice a year, and gave me glass bangles to feel happy in. But there was no escaping it, was there? In this country, with this name, with that festival, you had to be something.
Similarly, she never called a Sikh, a Sikh. She called them 'surds'. It was apparently a Delhi thing. A college girl thing that clung to her and all her sisters over the years.
But, I digress. Where was I?
Yes, so we were 'mozi'. I didn't realize that meant anything much. Except that we also celebrated Eid. We celebrated Diwali and Holi and Christmas too. But there was one vital difference between us and the others.
They celebrated only Diwali and Holi. They did not celebrate Eid.
Over the years, it slowly, very slowly sank in: we weren't like the other kids in the colony. We dressed up in our shiniest best on Diwali, took our firecrackers to our friends', made a common pool, watched the lights, gorged on sweets. Ma put on a silk saree and went to visit other people. She also waited at home, knowing other people would come, and laid out sweets. Some namkeen too, because they would be tired of sweets by then.
But on Eid, we celebrated alone.
Almost. There was one other muslim family in the colony. Mujib bhaiyya's family. He was my brother's classmate. His sister, Nusrat, was a year younger to me. (She died one summer in a road accident, during the summer vacations) My mother had little in common with their mother, but twice a year, we'd go to their place for lunch. I still remember that their rotis were tougher than I was used to and Mujib's elder sister would tear them up into morsel sizes for me, laughing at how plump I looked but how my fingers had no strength at all.
Still, after Eid and before, I was like all other kids. And towards middle school, my friends had started asking curious questions about Eid, asking me to bring sewaiyyan the next day in my tiffin.
My mom said, just ask them to come over.
Apparently, they'd been waiting to be invited all these years. They came over.
The next Eid, they didn't show up. Apparently, because I hadn't extended a formal invitation. I remember thinking, you don't need to invite me over on Diwali; I just come to wish you, don't I? But I didn't say it. I just made it a habit, telling them to come over.
--
The first unpleasant memory associated with being 'mozi' came in.... the fourth standard?
The memory is a vivid one. I was at the 'matka' - our school didn't have fancy filters then; we just drank from an earthen pot, using our palms as a cup - with Rimjhim, a junior in school. (She was a very pretty girl and would ask her fan-friends to tie her shoe-laces, when they came undone on the playing ground.)
She said, you're Pakistani, aren't you?
I said, no. Of course not.
She said, no, I know that you people are Pakistani.
Even then, I knew that I was not Pakistani. I was such an overt patriot that I cringe to think of it now (had saare jahaan se achha by heart - the whole six verses). But in that instant, looking at her face, her smugness, the authority with which that child of eight (I think) spoke, I also knew that there was nothing I could say or do to win this particular argument.
Almost two decades later, I cannot forget. She was a child and I have forgiven. But I have not forgotten.
---
Over the years, I learnt not to speak of religion in public.
My mother never mentioned her religion when we traveled by trains - going to Lucknow to visit our grandparents twice a year. She hardly to talked to anyone, anyway.
I have vague memories of my mother silently sitting through a conversation in which other co-passengers spoke of how muslims should be killed. She wore sarees and no purdah, so they assumed her was one of them.
I was too engrossed in my Agatha Christie novels to know. Later, between adults, I heard hushed whispers recounting the conversation.
---
I still don't tell anyone my religion when I travel. Recently, in the waiting room at Gwalior, a young Punjabi girl - a schoolteacher - plonked herself down next to me, noticed my laptop and decided she wanted to get to know me.
She asked me, what are you?
I said, a writer.
She asked, no, but like, what are you?
I said, I told you... what do you mean by what?
She said, like, I am a Punjabi Hindu.
I said, like that, I am nothing.
She asked, what's your name?
I said, Annie.
She said, are you Christian?
I said, no.
She said, but how can that be? It doesn't make a difference to me, what you are, but you must be something.
I said, I am - writer, journalist... woman.
She said, but your family must be something?
I said, no.
She said, but everyone is something... born something.
I said, I don't know.
She said, what do your parents say you are? What are they?
I lied. I said, if they were, they never told me, and I never asked.
She finally shut up.
---
We never fasted during ramzan as children. My mother didn't either. We went through a brief phase when we dabbled a bit in roza-keeping. I did too. But by that time, I had outgrown the phase in which I said the namaaz.
My grandmother used to call my ramzan 'kutte ka faaqa'.
People who fast but do not pray are likened to starving dogs.
I laughed. I liked the idea of 'kutte ka faaqa'. I still do.
---
When the Babri masjid was brought down, I was still a schoolgirl, and not very interested in newspapers. Nobody even told me that it had happened. And I don't know if I would've felt particularly dismayed if I had heard: mosques didn't mean much to me. There were places where women don't enter (in most places). I had only gone to dargahs and imambaras so far. I hadn't even heard of the Babri Masjid.
Since I watched Ramayana and Mahabharata every Sunday on Doordarshan., I knew more about Ram and Krishna than I did about mosques or Babar or Mohammad. Nobody had ever told me that I should know more about one or the other.
The idea of a secular nation hadn't meant anything until then, because it had never been challenged - on a notional, national scale - until then. But that year, the riots broke out.
I wasn't affected, but my brother was a young college-going fresher. In Bombay. Panic struck as we struggled with telephone lines and reassurance.
For the first time, the word 'riot' meant something to me.
---
We still didn't fast. We still didn't pray in Arabic.
---
I went to college in Ajmer. It was a convent, and so I went to kneel in the chapel when feeling particularly devotional. Or went to beg favours from the khwaja at the dargah.
We all wore shalwar-kameez with dupatta, in college. I was the only girl in the hostel who did not wear a dupatta that first year. And was teased and ragged about it quite often. Eventually, I wore dupattas because it was the fashionable thing to do.
We were not allowed to walk about in shorts even though it was a girls college and there were no men at all except the watchman. We weren't allowed to step inside the mess if we wore shorts, pajamas or short skirts. We were discouraged from wearing sleeveless clothes.
I finally told the warden as nicely as possible that my mother herself made all these sleeveless kurtas and really, my people didn't mind.
She told me there was no point, I'd achieve nothing except getting a tan.
I laughed and told her I could afford to get a tan.
We were warned against going to the dargah. We were warned against hanging around outside in Ajmer. We were warned that if we met boys outside, the nuns would find out and we would be thrown out.
In third year, a girl went outside to meet a boy and stayed out beyond the stipulated time. The nuns found out. She was thrown out.
---
I was already a journalist when Godhra and the Gujarat riots happened.
Nothing happened to my immediate family. I was in Lucknow when the news broke and missed much of the madness on the ground. When I returned, it was just an overwhelming barrage of words that didn't seem to register.
I do not have a single coherent, logical memory of this entire time. Those two months are a blank in my head, even now.
---
After the Gujarat riots, I remember visiting a friend in Pune who was doing her MBA at Symbiosis. We were hanging out with a couple of her friends - sitting near Khadagvasla, talking, joking.
We started talking about taboos and I happened to quote Mark Twain.
'You know what they say.... Holy cows make the best hamburgers.'
My friend didn't get it and asked what that meant - 'holy cows?'
A young man in the group cut in and said, very soberly, 'It's a joke. Against us Hindus.'
My jaw fell.
---
A year after the Gujarat riots, visiting a friend, I found myself saying that for the first time, in this country, I have begun to wonder where I belonged... if I belonged. Why was I made to feel like I didn't?
She wisely pointed out that perhaps I should think, then, of where else I would belong.
There was nowhere else. You just belong where you belong.
---
When the Bombay serial blasts happened, one of our relatives was badly injured. Very badly injured. She worked in an office with lots of glass. The glass shattered. Splinters.
Shatters. Splinters.
---
When the bombs went off in the local train last year, the panic was a personal one.
I have college-going cousins who use the local trains. I have close friends who use the local trains.
---
A young writer friend wrote about her experience in Nizamuddin. She had gone there and decided to buy a burqa. She's not muslim. The article was an exploration of her own desire to buy something that is clearly an identity-marker for the 'other', something she is not and something that is not considered desirable for her.
When she read the piece out in a small gathering of aspiring writers, an older woman decided to initiate a discussion about Islam and gender, Islamism, and the conversation immediately turned to terror and 9/11.
Apropos of nothing.
---
The same older woman came back to the next gathering with a poem. About bombs and veils and the need to stand up and take a stand against this sort of thing. Terror. For the sake of our freedom.
---
You may have heard about Martin Amis. And how he's decided that he doesn't like Islamism very much. Terry Eagleton has decided that Mr Amis is a racist, an Islamophobe, and a lot of other things, besides.
Emily Hill has said some other, more mixed, things. Such as "Amis’ literary reputation, meanwhile, has gone the same way as the World Trade Center."
The spat is a very public one and perhaps, an ongoing one. It doesn't particularly perturb me. It doesn't surprise me either.
The Hindu carried an edit piece outlining Mr Amis' views: “There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? To say: ‘the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.’”
Hill's article explained further: "Islam, in Amis’ view, ‘is a religion that’s having a nervous breakdown’. And Islamism is a variation on a death cult – an ‘ideology within a religion, a turbo-charge, steroid version of murderous belief’. He made some interesting points about suicide bombing, describing it as a ‘paltry’ act, signifying nothing but a ‘besplattering’ of the self. What the Islamic world needs, he said, is dramatic progress: ‘Martin Luther, John Calvin… religious wars, then Enlightenment, then you enter the modern world 300 years after that.’ He argued that it is the Western world that is giving Islamism its power to commit atrocity, even helping to legitimise that atrocity, by trying to ‘understand it’."
---
In some ways, he is right.
We will have to pay the price. I don't think it is fair. I don't want to pay the price. But I will.
I will suffer a little bit more for being born to a Muslim mother (who never used the word muslim, and who wore silk sarees on Diwali and first taught me how to make baatis out of cotton-wool for the diyas, and how to make valentine's day cards, and how to bake a cake for Christmas) because of the idiot fatwas and the crazy bombings. I could well be strip-searched if I traveled abroad and if that happens, I will grind my teeth and bear it.
Oh, yes the larger muslim community will pay the price alright. Is there an alternative?
---
Amis says the community has to get its act together. That parents have to teach the children. Sometimes, I wonder... what sort of writer is he if he doesn't know that nobody has ever been able to teach anyone anything, especially if it's about non-violence. Gandhi tried and failed.
Each generation rebels. One generation migrates, the other becomes too liberal, the next one too conservative. One wants to slash at roots, the next one wants to find them. It has always been like that. And each generation has suffered. How can any muslim parent prevent a child from turning fanatic? Does Amis seriously imagine that muslim mothers preach bloodshed at home? Or does he seriously imagine that muslim children are any more or less obedient than kids anywhere else?
I don't blame my mother for me. And if I ever have children, I hope I won't get blamed for them. I don't blame terrorists' families for them. I don't blame the white parents of children who attack black children. I don't blame the black parents of children who attack white children. What will blame achieve?
I think that it is funny that Martin Amis should not understand. Writers know these things. But, I don't blame him either. What will blame achieve?
---
For a moment, I wondered if Amis has close muslim friends. I am convinced that he has never loved a muslim woman. He can't have. Love twists your mind around, even against yourself.
---
I'll concede that the community (but which community?) has to get its act together, for there are identities beyond religion, and sooner or later, they will assert themselves. Already, they do. Shias kill Sunnis and Sunnis kill Shias. Kurds. Various clans and tribes in many, many African nations. Genocide is not always about religion. And religion is also not always about religion.
Religious wars, did Amis say? Yes, we are having religious wars.
Breakdown, did he say? Yes, the religion is having a nervous breakdown.
-
I think muslims (and non-muslims) need to let their hair down and have fun. I think they need to stop attempts that seek to turn them into a homogeneous mess. To be many other things besides muslim; to refuse to be tacked down to that awful phrase 'muslim community'. To prove that there is no one 'muslim community'.
The community needs to stop being a community, a vote-bank, a lump or a mass. It needs to reject responsibility thrust down our throats if it is based on identity.
Sure the community that isn't a community needs to change. It needs to laugh at itself and its fracturedness, and its idiosyncrasies. It needs universities and investment in culture and art. It needs to run about in the sun and plant shady trees and fragrant flowers and respect all sexes.
---
I have never read anything Martin Amis has written. (I might now, seeing that there's so much fuss). Even if he had been one of my favourties, what difference would it make? I don't break bread with him. He does not come to my place to talk about poetry. Like we say in Delhi, saannu ki?
---
Yet, there is this business of Islamophobia.
You see, I don't like most organised, violent groups, especially if all members come from the same religion. I am afraid of fanatics. I don't like aggression or imposition.
I don't like most preachers. But I see the need for priests and preachers. I am annoyed by tradition. I follow tradition. I break rules. I know the rules. I don't like violence. I am surrounded by violence.
Am I Islamist? Am I Islamophobic?
Do I hate myself because I do not like organised religion, and yet, cannot find a way to break out of ties that depend on religious ritual?
Do I hate myself because I do not identify with organised religion?
Can I bring myself to hate those in my family who like the organised part of religion and who want to go strictly by the book?
What does faith have to do with any of this?
My faith is closer to sufi. Are sufis muslim?
Sufis did not like mullahs and mullahs did not like sufis. Are sufis Islamophobic?
My faith is selfish. My faith often does the disappearing trick. My faith is tender and fragile and unbreakable. It is plastic. It is solid. And I cannot bring myself to feel enthusiastic about ramzan. But I do not like Lord Ram or think of him as either a god or as 'purushottam'. I do not like the word 'Ram-janmabhoomi'. Does that mean I am Hindu-phobic?
I am scornful of young, Israeli tourists who flock to places like Manali or Pushkar, stoned out of their minds, rude to the locals. I pity these young Israeli tourists who have just finished serving in a compulsory army and who seem not to know what to do with themselves, or where to go, barring to the places where others have gone before them. Am I an anti-semite?
I pity Palestine too, and all the young people there. I pity those who live on the border. I pity their fear. I empathize with their fear.
During Durga Puja, I had gone to C.R. Park and offered 'anjali' to the Goddess. What does that make me? Secular?
If I am asked my religion when I go to temples, I lie and give them a Hindu name. What does that make me?
I don't like the idea of Pakistan. I detest the idea of religious states. Does that make me Islamophobic?
I want to visit Pakistan. I have family there. What does that make me Islamist?
Sometimes, I want to kill all the Taliban. If it were possible to kill a mindset, in one fell swoop, I suspect that I could be persuaded to kill. Am I Islamophobic?
What is Islamophobia?
What can you fear, if you don't know it? Or can you only fear what you don't know?
I know the fanatics as well as one can safely know them. I know them as they bomb the shopping complexes in my city, the trains in my brother's city, the dargah where I went, the cinema in a city I travel to for work. And knowing what they do, I know that they are ordinary young men with half an education and maybe only a little money, which is not any antidote to fear. Or hatred.
What does that make me?
I didn't know what 'nigger boys' were. I only learnt the rough meaning when I began to read some American Literature, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Even then, while it had entered my juvenile brain that black people had been oppressed unfairly and that white people back then didn't like them, it still didn't enter my head that 'nigger' was not an acceptable word. I saw a few movies and read more books, where there were plenty of references to the word - black people calling each other 'nigger'.
It was much, much later, when I used the word once in conversation, that some NRI-type student - freshly politically sanitized in the USA - told me that it was, indeed, unacceptable. You can't say it.
But, I protested, they say it.
Yes, he said, they can. They're it. You can't say it. It's offensive.
---
I grew up thinking of myself as 'mozi'. Not Muslim. My mother hardly ever used the word 'muslim' to refer to our family. We were 'mozis'. Actually, she hardly ever referred to us as anything at all. She just made sewaiyyan twice a year, and gave me glass bangles to feel happy in. But there was no escaping it, was there? In this country, with this name, with that festival, you had to be something.
Similarly, she never called a Sikh, a Sikh. She called them 'surds'. It was apparently a Delhi thing. A college girl thing that clung to her and all her sisters over the years.
But, I digress. Where was I?
Yes, so we were 'mozi'. I didn't realize that meant anything much. Except that we also celebrated Eid. We celebrated Diwali and Holi and Christmas too. But there was one vital difference between us and the others.
They celebrated only Diwali and Holi. They did not celebrate Eid.
Over the years, it slowly, very slowly sank in: we weren't like the other kids in the colony. We dressed up in our shiniest best on Diwali, took our firecrackers to our friends', made a common pool, watched the lights, gorged on sweets. Ma put on a silk saree and went to visit other people. She also waited at home, knowing other people would come, and laid out sweets. Some namkeen too, because they would be tired of sweets by then.
But on Eid, we celebrated alone.
Almost. There was one other muslim family in the colony. Mujib bhaiyya's family. He was my brother's classmate. His sister, Nusrat, was a year younger to me. (She died one summer in a road accident, during the summer vacations) My mother had little in common with their mother, but twice a year, we'd go to their place for lunch. I still remember that their rotis were tougher than I was used to and Mujib's elder sister would tear them up into morsel sizes for me, laughing at how plump I looked but how my fingers had no strength at all.
Still, after Eid and before, I was like all other kids. And towards middle school, my friends had started asking curious questions about Eid, asking me to bring sewaiyyan the next day in my tiffin.
My mom said, just ask them to come over.
Apparently, they'd been waiting to be invited all these years. They came over.
The next Eid, they didn't show up. Apparently, because I hadn't extended a formal invitation. I remember thinking, you don't need to invite me over on Diwali; I just come to wish you, don't I? But I didn't say it. I just made it a habit, telling them to come over.
--
The first unpleasant memory associated with being 'mozi' came in.... the fourth standard?
The memory is a vivid one. I was at the 'matka' - our school didn't have fancy filters then; we just drank from an earthen pot, using our palms as a cup - with Rimjhim, a junior in school. (She was a very pretty girl and would ask her fan-friends to tie her shoe-laces, when they came undone on the playing ground.)
She said, you're Pakistani, aren't you?
I said, no. Of course not.
She said, no, I know that you people are Pakistani.
Even then, I knew that I was not Pakistani. I was such an overt patriot that I cringe to think of it now (had saare jahaan se achha by heart - the whole six verses). But in that instant, looking at her face, her smugness, the authority with which that child of eight (I think) spoke, I also knew that there was nothing I could say or do to win this particular argument.
Almost two decades later, I cannot forget. She was a child and I have forgiven. But I have not forgotten.
---
Over the years, I learnt not to speak of religion in public.
My mother never mentioned her religion when we traveled by trains - going to Lucknow to visit our grandparents twice a year. She hardly to talked to anyone, anyway.
I have vague memories of my mother silently sitting through a conversation in which other co-passengers spoke of how muslims should be killed. She wore sarees and no purdah, so they assumed her was one of them.
I was too engrossed in my Agatha Christie novels to know. Later, between adults, I heard hushed whispers recounting the conversation.
---
I still don't tell anyone my religion when I travel. Recently, in the waiting room at Gwalior, a young Punjabi girl - a schoolteacher - plonked herself down next to me, noticed my laptop and decided she wanted to get to know me.
She asked me, what are you?
I said, a writer.
She asked, no, but like, what are you?
I said, I told you... what do you mean by what?
She said, like, I am a Punjabi Hindu.
I said, like that, I am nothing.
She asked, what's your name?
I said, Annie.
She said, are you Christian?
I said, no.
She said, but how can that be? It doesn't make a difference to me, what you are, but you must be something.
I said, I am - writer, journalist... woman.
She said, but your family must be something?
I said, no.
She said, but everyone is something... born something.
I said, I don't know.
She said, what do your parents say you are? What are they?
I lied. I said, if they were, they never told me, and I never asked.
She finally shut up.
---
We never fasted during ramzan as children. My mother didn't either. We went through a brief phase when we dabbled a bit in roza-keeping. I did too. But by that time, I had outgrown the phase in which I said the namaaz.
My grandmother used to call my ramzan 'kutte ka faaqa'.
People who fast but do not pray are likened to starving dogs.
I laughed. I liked the idea of 'kutte ka faaqa'. I still do.
---
When the Babri masjid was brought down, I was still a schoolgirl, and not very interested in newspapers. Nobody even told me that it had happened. And I don't know if I would've felt particularly dismayed if I had heard: mosques didn't mean much to me. There were places where women don't enter (in most places). I had only gone to dargahs and imambaras so far. I hadn't even heard of the Babri Masjid.
Since I watched Ramayana and Mahabharata every Sunday on Doordarshan., I knew more about Ram and Krishna than I did about mosques or Babar or Mohammad. Nobody had ever told me that I should know more about one or the other.
The idea of a secular nation hadn't meant anything until then, because it had never been challenged - on a notional, national scale - until then. But that year, the riots broke out.
I wasn't affected, but my brother was a young college-going fresher. In Bombay. Panic struck as we struggled with telephone lines and reassurance.
For the first time, the word 'riot' meant something to me.
---
We still didn't fast. We still didn't pray in Arabic.
---
I went to college in Ajmer. It was a convent, and so I went to kneel in the chapel when feeling particularly devotional. Or went to beg favours from the khwaja at the dargah.
We all wore shalwar-kameez with dupatta, in college. I was the only girl in the hostel who did not wear a dupatta that first year. And was teased and ragged about it quite often. Eventually, I wore dupattas because it was the fashionable thing to do.
We were not allowed to walk about in shorts even though it was a girls college and there were no men at all except the watchman. We weren't allowed to step inside the mess if we wore shorts, pajamas or short skirts. We were discouraged from wearing sleeveless clothes.
I finally told the warden as nicely as possible that my mother herself made all these sleeveless kurtas and really, my people didn't mind.
She told me there was no point, I'd achieve nothing except getting a tan.
I laughed and told her I could afford to get a tan.
We were warned against going to the dargah. We were warned against hanging around outside in Ajmer. We were warned that if we met boys outside, the nuns would find out and we would be thrown out.
In third year, a girl went outside to meet a boy and stayed out beyond the stipulated time. The nuns found out. She was thrown out.
---
I was already a journalist when Godhra and the Gujarat riots happened.
Nothing happened to my immediate family. I was in Lucknow when the news broke and missed much of the madness on the ground. When I returned, it was just an overwhelming barrage of words that didn't seem to register.
I do not have a single coherent, logical memory of this entire time. Those two months are a blank in my head, even now.
---
After the Gujarat riots, I remember visiting a friend in Pune who was doing her MBA at Symbiosis. We were hanging out with a couple of her friends - sitting near Khadagvasla, talking, joking.
We started talking about taboos and I happened to quote Mark Twain.
'You know what they say.... Holy cows make the best hamburgers.'
My friend didn't get it and asked what that meant - 'holy cows?'
A young man in the group cut in and said, very soberly, 'It's a joke. Against us Hindus.'
My jaw fell.
---
A year after the Gujarat riots, visiting a friend, I found myself saying that for the first time, in this country, I have begun to wonder where I belonged... if I belonged. Why was I made to feel like I didn't?
She wisely pointed out that perhaps I should think, then, of where else I would belong.
There was nowhere else. You just belong where you belong.
---
When the Bombay serial blasts happened, one of our relatives was badly injured. Very badly injured. She worked in an office with lots of glass. The glass shattered. Splinters.
Shatters. Splinters.
---
When the bombs went off in the local train last year, the panic was a personal one.
I have college-going cousins who use the local trains. I have close friends who use the local trains.
---
A young writer friend wrote about her experience in Nizamuddin. She had gone there and decided to buy a burqa. She's not muslim. The article was an exploration of her own desire to buy something that is clearly an identity-marker for the 'other', something she is not and something that is not considered desirable for her.
When she read the piece out in a small gathering of aspiring writers, an older woman decided to initiate a discussion about Islam and gender, Islamism, and the conversation immediately turned to terror and 9/11.
Apropos of nothing.
---
The same older woman came back to the next gathering with a poem. About bombs and veils and the need to stand up and take a stand against this sort of thing. Terror. For the sake of our freedom.
---
You may have heard about Martin Amis. And how he's decided that he doesn't like Islamism very much. Terry Eagleton has decided that Mr Amis is a racist, an Islamophobe, and a lot of other things, besides.
Emily Hill has said some other, more mixed, things. Such as "Amis’ literary reputation, meanwhile, has gone the same way as the World Trade Center."
The spat is a very public one and perhaps, an ongoing one. It doesn't particularly perturb me. It doesn't surprise me either.
The Hindu carried an edit piece outlining Mr Amis' views: “There’s a definite urge — don’t you have it? To say: ‘the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation — further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.’”
Hill's article explained further: "Islam, in Amis’ view, ‘is a religion that’s having a nervous breakdown’. And Islamism is a variation on a death cult – an ‘ideology within a religion, a turbo-charge, steroid version of murderous belief’. He made some interesting points about suicide bombing, describing it as a ‘paltry’ act, signifying nothing but a ‘besplattering’ of the self. What the Islamic world needs, he said, is dramatic progress: ‘Martin Luther, John Calvin… religious wars, then Enlightenment, then you enter the modern world 300 years after that.’ He argued that it is the Western world that is giving Islamism its power to commit atrocity, even helping to legitimise that atrocity, by trying to ‘understand it’."
---
In some ways, he is right.
We will have to pay the price. I don't think it is fair. I don't want to pay the price. But I will.
I will suffer a little bit more for being born to a Muslim mother (who never used the word muslim, and who wore silk sarees on Diwali and first taught me how to make baatis out of cotton-wool for the diyas, and how to make valentine's day cards, and how to bake a cake for Christmas) because of the idiot fatwas and the crazy bombings. I could well be strip-searched if I traveled abroad and if that happens, I will grind my teeth and bear it.
Oh, yes the larger muslim community will pay the price alright. Is there an alternative?
---
Amis says the community has to get its act together. That parents have to teach the children. Sometimes, I wonder... what sort of writer is he if he doesn't know that nobody has ever been able to teach anyone anything, especially if it's about non-violence. Gandhi tried and failed.
Each generation rebels. One generation migrates, the other becomes too liberal, the next one too conservative. One wants to slash at roots, the next one wants to find them. It has always been like that. And each generation has suffered. How can any muslim parent prevent a child from turning fanatic? Does Amis seriously imagine that muslim mothers preach bloodshed at home? Or does he seriously imagine that muslim children are any more or less obedient than kids anywhere else?
I don't blame my mother for me. And if I ever have children, I hope I won't get blamed for them. I don't blame terrorists' families for them. I don't blame the white parents of children who attack black children. I don't blame the black parents of children who attack white children. What will blame achieve?
I think that it is funny that Martin Amis should not understand. Writers know these things. But, I don't blame him either. What will blame achieve?
---
For a moment, I wondered if Amis has close muslim friends. I am convinced that he has never loved a muslim woman. He can't have. Love twists your mind around, even against yourself.
---
I'll concede that the community (but which community?) has to get its act together, for there are identities beyond religion, and sooner or later, they will assert themselves. Already, they do. Shias kill Sunnis and Sunnis kill Shias. Kurds. Various clans and tribes in many, many African nations. Genocide is not always about religion. And religion is also not always about religion.
Religious wars, did Amis say? Yes, we are having religious wars.
Breakdown, did he say? Yes, the religion is having a nervous breakdown.
-
I think muslims (and non-muslims) need to let their hair down and have fun. I think they need to stop attempts that seek to turn them into a homogeneous mess. To be many other things besides muslim; to refuse to be tacked down to that awful phrase 'muslim community'. To prove that there is no one 'muslim community'.
The community needs to stop being a community, a vote-bank, a lump or a mass. It needs to reject responsibility thrust down our throats if it is based on identity.
Sure the community that isn't a community needs to change. It needs to laugh at itself and its fracturedness, and its idiosyncrasies. It needs universities and investment in culture and art. It needs to run about in the sun and plant shady trees and fragrant flowers and respect all sexes.
---
I have never read anything Martin Amis has written. (I might now, seeing that there's so much fuss). Even if he had been one of my favourties, what difference would it make? I don't break bread with him. He does not come to my place to talk about poetry. Like we say in Delhi, saannu ki?
---
Yet, there is this business of Islamophobia.
You see, I don't like most organised, violent groups, especially if all members come from the same religion. I am afraid of fanatics. I don't like aggression or imposition.
I don't like most preachers. But I see the need for priests and preachers. I am annoyed by tradition. I follow tradition. I break rules. I know the rules. I don't like violence. I am surrounded by violence.
Am I Islamist? Am I Islamophobic?
Do I hate myself because I do not like organised religion, and yet, cannot find a way to break out of ties that depend on religious ritual?
Do I hate myself because I do not identify with organised religion?
Can I bring myself to hate those in my family who like the organised part of religion and who want to go strictly by the book?
What does faith have to do with any of this?
My faith is closer to sufi. Are sufis muslim?
Sufis did not like mullahs and mullahs did not like sufis. Are sufis Islamophobic?
My faith is selfish. My faith often does the disappearing trick. My faith is tender and fragile and unbreakable. It is plastic. It is solid. And I cannot bring myself to feel enthusiastic about ramzan. But I do not like Lord Ram or think of him as either a god or as 'purushottam'. I do not like the word 'Ram-janmabhoomi'. Does that mean I am Hindu-phobic?
I am scornful of young, Israeli tourists who flock to places like Manali or Pushkar, stoned out of their minds, rude to the locals. I pity these young Israeli tourists who have just finished serving in a compulsory army and who seem not to know what to do with themselves, or where to go, barring to the places where others have gone before them. Am I an anti-semite?
I pity Palestine too, and all the young people there. I pity those who live on the border. I pity their fear. I empathize with their fear.
During Durga Puja, I had gone to C.R. Park and offered 'anjali' to the Goddess. What does that make me? Secular?
If I am asked my religion when I go to temples, I lie and give them a Hindu name. What does that make me?
I don't like the idea of Pakistan. I detest the idea of religious states. Does that make me Islamophobic?
I want to visit Pakistan. I have family there. What does that make me Islamist?
Sometimes, I want to kill all the Taliban. If it were possible to kill a mindset, in one fell swoop, I suspect that I could be persuaded to kill. Am I Islamophobic?
What is Islamophobia?
What can you fear, if you don't know it? Or can you only fear what you don't know?
I know the fanatics as well as one can safely know them. I know them as they bomb the shopping complexes in my city, the trains in my brother's city, the dargah where I went, the cinema in a city I travel to for work. And knowing what they do, I know that they are ordinary young men with half an education and maybe only a little money, which is not any antidote to fear. Or hatred.
What does that make me?
Monday, October 22, 2007
Seen in Chandigarh
On the local cable TV channel, Bollywood songs and dances played with a running ticker offering various products and services.
One of them was from a certain 'vashikaran' specialist. He advertises himself thus: "Pyaar mein dhoka khaye ladka ladki turant milein. Khoya hua pyaar vapas mil sakta hai. Mobile number -...."
Seen in a 'tabloid' entitled Shopping & Lifestyle, distributed free in the Chandigarh-Delhi Shatabdi: An article headlined 'Pack up tips for your train trip'.
The first sentence says: "Packing for a rail trip is similar to traveling by air - you may have a little more room if booking a sleeper car but most luggage should be stored in baggage..."
The next paragraph says: "Bring along some snacks, toys and activities to keep children occupied..." and "Bring comfortable shoes and a change of clothing for each member of the family".... and "Bring headphones for a tape player."
I was, and am, amazed. Really. Somebody actually writes this stuff. Somebody might even be making a living writing this stuff. Truly amazing.
One of them was from a certain 'vashikaran' specialist. He advertises himself thus: "Pyaar mein dhoka khaye ladka ladki turant milein. Khoya hua pyaar vapas mil sakta hai. Mobile number -...."
Seen in a 'tabloid' entitled Shopping & Lifestyle, distributed free in the Chandigarh-Delhi Shatabdi: An article headlined 'Pack up tips for your train trip'.
The first sentence says: "Packing for a rail trip is similar to traveling by air - you may have a little more room if booking a sleeper car but most luggage should be stored in baggage..."
The next paragraph says: "Bring along some snacks, toys and activities to keep children occupied..." and "Bring comfortable shoes and a change of clothing for each member of the family".... and "Bring headphones for a tape player."
I was, and am, amazed. Really. Somebody actually writes this stuff. Somebody might even be making a living writing this stuff. Truly amazing.
Friday, October 12, 2007
They do show up, you know
A few weeks ago, Jamia had organised an Indo-Pak mushaira.
Since I was heading towards Jamia in any case - to visit Qurratulain Hyder's grave - I decided to attend. The main draw, for me, was Nida Fazli being one of the featured poets but there was the undeniable anticipation of watching a real, live, mushaira - my first such experience - with famous contemporary poets from both sides of the border. As it turned out, many other people had been just as eagerly anticipating the event.
I knew it would be a packed audience because, despite begging and pleading with the media relations office, there were no more 'passes' to be had. The gentleman who picked up the phone very politely, very insistently let me know that the organisers were already nervous; they might have distributed more cards than there were seats. However, what I walked into that evening was too much like a poetry mob for my comfort. There was a crowd of about 300 students gathered outside the Ansari auditorium although I had arrived half an hour early. The watchmen stood in a cluster to one side, allowing you in only if you waved your invite.
I stood in queue, listening to several elderly ladies arguing about how they had definitely got an invite, they just couldn't find it at the moment, while the crowds swelled and roared to be allowed in.
Once I was seated inside, the roar filtered in every few minutes. Cries of murdabad. Cries of angry, impatient, excited youth. Frightening cries. From behind the empty stage's curtains, a firm, polite voice repeatedly requested the waiting students to go around to the back, where the open-air auditorium was and where a large screen had been set up for those who did not have an invite. I wish I could communicate here, right now, the sweetness of that firm request. How, in Urdu, you can say, "Auditorium mein gunjaish kum hai... Hum jaante hain ke aap kitne mushtaq hain, kitne betaab hain", sounding deeply civil and how you cannot match that to its translation. "There's no space here" is just not the same thing, is it?
The announcement must have been repeated at least a dozen times before some of the mushtaq-betaab crowd budged. Once a few had budged, some more budged. Eventually, enough of them budged to dispel the organisers' fears and the program could begin. Some of the promised poets did not attend (Javed Akhtar was missing, for instance). Nida Fazli was, well, Nida Fazli. His poetry was lovely in its simple themes and he was as direct and clear-throated as his verse. I'd read some of his longer poems, but this time he concentrated on 'dohas', which were a revelation. (Today, incidentally, is his birthday.)
Asgar Nadeem, a visiting Pakistani poet, presented a new one about sixty-year old travelers. Or possibly, travelers who had been on the road for sixty years and cannot find their way home.
"Musafir saath barso.n ke abhi tak ghar nahin pahunche...
kahin par raaste ki ghaans mein.... taarikh ki jadein khojte hain....
musafir saath barson ke bade pareshaan hain..."
(Travelers of sixty years have not reached home yet...
Somewhere along the way, they stop to look in the grass
for the roots of history...
these travelers of sixty years are very troubled....)
Popular Meeruthi warmed up the evening considerably with easy, jocular shers like "Raaz ab samjha jhuki nazro.n ka, jisko sharmili samjha, vo bhai.ngi nikli". The students were delighted. I was not, especially after he took pointless potshots at Mallika Sherawat's clothes. However, I do love funny poetry, and one of my favourites is Popular's take on a famous Zafar sher.
"mahabuub vaadaa kar ke bhii aayaa na dosto
kyaa kyaa kiyaa na ham ne yahaa.N us ke pyaar me.n
murGe churaa ke laaye the jo chaar "Popular"
"do aarazuu me.n kaT gaye, do intazaar me.n"
[Zafar's original was: "umr-e-daraaz maang ker laye the chaar din
do arzoo main kat gaye, do intezar main"]
The highlight of the evening, for me, was the oldest poet (Gulzar Dehlavi? I failed to catch his name when it was announced) who had turned up in a white sherwani, his skinny legs looking even skinnier and more bowed in a white churidaar, a red rose in his button-hole, a scurrying walk, a cap tilted on his bald head, and a flamboyance that quite made up for the lack of brilliant poetry (none that he chose to read at any rate).
He joked about how he's been instructed to read poetry but not something as old as himself. He read second-rate romantic shers, then paused to look at the audience and state: "Saste sher zyaada chalte hain" (the cheaper verses are more popular), before going on read some more! He scampered. He lolled against the gao-takia. He almost rolled over backwards at one point. He spoke loudly, interrupted when he chose, and gallantly insisted that the women poets also come up on stage to sit 'humare pehlu mein' (which is not the same as merely sitting next to somebody, is it?) "Meherbaani kar ke zahmat farmayein", he said and spoke of how he had not seen the white-haired Zahra since the 50s, and how very beautiful she was. Zahra, despite the coaxing, did not come to come up to sit in his pehlu, but the much younger Kishwar, did.
I hadn't read much of Kishwar Naheed and the little I found on the net might be early work that does her little justice. Hers seems to be strong, feminine voice that knows the art of gentle combat.
Half-way into the evening, I decided to leave the auditorium to sit at the back, with others who did not have passes. There awaited the real surprise of the evening. There must have been at least two thousand people watching and listening, almost all young men, almost all students of Jamia. So this had been the roar that was demanding to be let in, to hear the poets live, instead of watching them on a screen.
And of course, they made crude comments, especially when the women poets stood up to read. And of course, they were snide about the more serious shers. And of course, they treated romance with as much disdain as they could summon but reveled in it nonetheless.
My only reaction was a befuddled 'wow!'. The very idea was overwhelming. Two thousand and more! At a poetry event!
Since I was heading towards Jamia in any case - to visit Qurratulain Hyder's grave - I decided to attend. The main draw, for me, was Nida Fazli being one of the featured poets but there was the undeniable anticipation of watching a real, live, mushaira - my first such experience - with famous contemporary poets from both sides of the border. As it turned out, many other people had been just as eagerly anticipating the event.
I knew it would be a packed audience because, despite begging and pleading with the media relations office, there were no more 'passes' to be had. The gentleman who picked up the phone very politely, very insistently let me know that the organisers were already nervous; they might have distributed more cards than there were seats. However, what I walked into that evening was too much like a poetry mob for my comfort. There was a crowd of about 300 students gathered outside the Ansari auditorium although I had arrived half an hour early. The watchmen stood in a cluster to one side, allowing you in only if you waved your invite.
I stood in queue, listening to several elderly ladies arguing about how they had definitely got an invite, they just couldn't find it at the moment, while the crowds swelled and roared to be allowed in.
Once I was seated inside, the roar filtered in every few minutes. Cries of murdabad. Cries of angry, impatient, excited youth. Frightening cries. From behind the empty stage's curtains, a firm, polite voice repeatedly requested the waiting students to go around to the back, where the open-air auditorium was and where a large screen had been set up for those who did not have an invite. I wish I could communicate here, right now, the sweetness of that firm request. How, in Urdu, you can say, "Auditorium mein gunjaish kum hai... Hum jaante hain ke aap kitne mushtaq hain, kitne betaab hain", sounding deeply civil and how you cannot match that to its translation. "There's no space here" is just not the same thing, is it?
The announcement must have been repeated at least a dozen times before some of the mushtaq-betaab crowd budged. Once a few had budged, some more budged. Eventually, enough of them budged to dispel the organisers' fears and the program could begin. Some of the promised poets did not attend (Javed Akhtar was missing, for instance). Nida Fazli was, well, Nida Fazli. His poetry was lovely in its simple themes and he was as direct and clear-throated as his verse. I'd read some of his longer poems, but this time he concentrated on 'dohas', which were a revelation. (Today, incidentally, is his birthday.)
Asgar Nadeem, a visiting Pakistani poet, presented a new one about sixty-year old travelers. Or possibly, travelers who had been on the road for sixty years and cannot find their way home.
"Musafir saath barso.n ke abhi tak ghar nahin pahunche...
kahin par raaste ki ghaans mein.... taarikh ki jadein khojte hain....
musafir saath barson ke bade pareshaan hain..."
(Travelers of sixty years have not reached home yet...
Somewhere along the way, they stop to look in the grass
for the roots of history...
these travelers of sixty years are very troubled....)
Popular Meeruthi warmed up the evening considerably with easy, jocular shers like "Raaz ab samjha jhuki nazro.n ka, jisko sharmili samjha, vo bhai.ngi nikli". The students were delighted. I was not, especially after he took pointless potshots at Mallika Sherawat's clothes. However, I do love funny poetry, and one of my favourites is Popular's take on a famous Zafar sher.
"mahabuub vaadaa kar ke bhii aayaa na dosto
kyaa kyaa kiyaa na ham ne yahaa.N us ke pyaar me.n
murGe churaa ke laaye the jo chaar "Popular"
"do aarazuu me.n kaT gaye, do intazaar me.n"
[Zafar's original was: "umr-e-daraaz maang ker laye the chaar din
do arzoo main kat gaye, do intezar main"]
The highlight of the evening, for me, was the oldest poet (Gulzar Dehlavi? I failed to catch his name when it was announced) who had turned up in a white sherwani, his skinny legs looking even skinnier and more bowed in a white churidaar, a red rose in his button-hole, a scurrying walk, a cap tilted on his bald head, and a flamboyance that quite made up for the lack of brilliant poetry (none that he chose to read at any rate).
He joked about how he's been instructed to read poetry but not something as old as himself. He read second-rate romantic shers, then paused to look at the audience and state: "Saste sher zyaada chalte hain" (the cheaper verses are more popular), before going on read some more! He scampered. He lolled against the gao-takia. He almost rolled over backwards at one point. He spoke loudly, interrupted when he chose, and gallantly insisted that the women poets also come up on stage to sit 'humare pehlu mein' (which is not the same as merely sitting next to somebody, is it?) "Meherbaani kar ke zahmat farmayein", he said and spoke of how he had not seen the white-haired Zahra since the 50s, and how very beautiful she was. Zahra, despite the coaxing, did not come to come up to sit in his pehlu, but the much younger Kishwar, did.
I hadn't read much of Kishwar Naheed and the little I found on the net might be early work that does her little justice. Hers seems to be strong, feminine voice that knows the art of gentle combat.
Half-way into the evening, I decided to leave the auditorium to sit at the back, with others who did not have passes. There awaited the real surprise of the evening. There must have been at least two thousand people watching and listening, almost all young men, almost all students of Jamia. So this had been the roar that was demanding to be let in, to hear the poets live, instead of watching them on a screen.
And of course, they made crude comments, especially when the women poets stood up to read. And of course, they were snide about the more serious shers. And of course, they treated romance with as much disdain as they could summon but reveled in it nonetheless.
My only reaction was a befuddled 'wow!'. The very idea was overwhelming. Two thousand and more! At a poetry event!
Outside Hazratbal.
Inside Hazratbal, a jaali-wall, a concrete veil outside which women and children kneel. Beyond this point, I am not allowed to go.
This concrete screen - covered in tiny scrawling hopes and inky laments.
God, make me pass my matric exam. God, make my mother well. God, get me a job. God, I want to be top of the class. God, keep us together. God, let him love me. God, do not separate us lovers. God, keep our enemies from us.
And from one little girls' pencil:
God, if you help me clear my exams with good marks, I will come back to give you eleven rupees. And if you help my father with his work and clear our debts and restore my mother's health, I will come back with one hundred and one rupees. And if you help us build our house.... And if my brother does well in his exams....
In Urdu. In Hindi. In English. In mixtures. The scripts vary. But always... God, love! God, health! God, money!
This concrete screen - covered in tiny scrawling hopes and inky laments.
God, make me pass my matric exam. God, make my mother well. God, get me a job. God, I want to be top of the class. God, keep us together. God, let him love me. God, do not separate us lovers. God, keep our enemies from us.
And from one little girls' pencil:
God, if you help me clear my exams with good marks, I will come back to give you eleven rupees. And if you help my father with his work and clear our debts and restore my mother's health, I will come back with one hundred and one rupees. And if you help us build our house.... And if my brother does well in his exams....
In Urdu. In Hindi. In English. In mixtures. The scripts vary. But always... God, love! God, health! God, money!
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
that spiral of moving and losing
The other thing about this job is the hardening and having to watch out for it.
Last month, while making calls to some contacts in Madhya Pradesh, I found myself mouthing the words 'It is serious...? Did anyone die?' Even before I'd finished saying it, I was awash with shame: that I should be measuring a potential story against the number of lives lost?
But that is how we sell our stories, don't we? Not just to our editors but also to readers; in short, to ourselves - the literate, newspaper/magazine-buying middle-class. Who died? How many hurt? How many of them were children? And if nobody died, what's the noise about?
So, this is my current quandary: how does one sell starvation?
How do I sell it as an important piece of information that must be communicated to the world at large? How do I sell it before it actually kills some kids? How do I sell it if nobody certifies that hunger is, indeed, hunger? How I sell it if there are no compelling pictures of toddlers with protruding bellies and fading eyes? How does one photograph a starving adult?
How do you wear down an adult's self-esteem to the point that he admits to you - 'Yes, I am starving. I've been starving for a whole year. I have tuberculosis and I am going to back to work in the stone quarries because dying of tuberculosis or silicosis is easier than starving.'
The situation, you see, is serious. People have died. Children have died too. And if they are not dying this very instant, at the time of writing this, I am grateful, but I am not relieved.
I went back to Shivpuri this year. I've been going to Madhya Pradesh over the last two years, covering hunger in tribal villages. At first, I went after reports of kids' deaths filtered out, from Patalgarh. Then I went back, and found that things had improved marginally in Patalgarh - an anganwadi has been set up, and a school with mid-day meals. But in another village nearby, I heard of more deaths. And after that, more hunger on yet another trip.
This year, I went to visit another set of villages where there have been no deaths so far. At least, no children's deaths that are directly attributable to malnutrition. The state has been trying to introduce all sorts of schemes and programs to prevent starvation deaths. But hunger seems chronic, almost inevitable. This time, I began to understand - in part - why this was so. this time, I encountered displacement afresh.
Displacement is a funny word. A very inadequate word that conveys nothing of its meaning.
Displacement is not about moving. It is not about packing up and saying goodbye to the trees and the dust and saying hello to other people, other dust in a new place. It is not about losing touch with old friends, old customs. It is not about losing beauty and calm, mist and dew, wilderness and privacy.
Displacement is about losing a river. Losing access to clean, safe drinking water. Losing water for the fields. Losing land that is watered richly. Losing the fields that gave you grain. Losing the land that your herds grazed on. Losing your cattle. Losing the milk that came from the cattle. Losing the meat the goats ensured. Losing the sheep that gave you wool. Losing access to mud and wood that gave you shelter. Losing firewood. Losing the birds and the bees. Losing honey and herbs. Losing leaves that could be either plates or smokes. Losing hygiene. Losing legality. Losing the right to protest when somebody in a uniform and a jeep shows up to set fire to your home. Losing your walls and roofs.... what is left to lose?
No, really, what is left to lose?
With one stroke, with a single order, with a few meetings of committees formed in the state capital, all this is lost.
I had gone this time to visit displaced villages - villages that have been cleared out of forests we want to protect or 'reserve'. In this one state, there are 29 such areas that require people to move out. That require them to lose all the above-mentioned.
And they did. They lost all of that.
"Many changes over the past decade have pushed villagers who once had enough to eat into a spiral of food insecurity and the uncertain arms of the public distribution system (PDS).... Take Balharpur village. About eight years ago, its residents, most of them belonging to the Sahariya tribe, were moved out of the Madhav National Park and dumped upon a stony, non-irrigated tract of land near the highway....
While moving, the villagers set their cattle free near the Balhar Mata temple in the forest; they were certain they would not have access to grazing land in the New Balharpur village. And they were right."
Last month, while making calls to some contacts in Madhya Pradesh, I found myself mouthing the words 'It is serious...? Did anyone die?' Even before I'd finished saying it, I was awash with shame: that I should be measuring a potential story against the number of lives lost?
But that is how we sell our stories, don't we? Not just to our editors but also to readers; in short, to ourselves - the literate, newspaper/magazine-buying middle-class. Who died? How many hurt? How many of them were children? And if nobody died, what's the noise about?
So, this is my current quandary: how does one sell starvation?
How do I sell it as an important piece of information that must be communicated to the world at large? How do I sell it before it actually kills some kids? How do I sell it if nobody certifies that hunger is, indeed, hunger? How I sell it if there are no compelling pictures of toddlers with protruding bellies and fading eyes? How does one photograph a starving adult?
How do you wear down an adult's self-esteem to the point that he admits to you - 'Yes, I am starving. I've been starving for a whole year. I have tuberculosis and I am going to back to work in the stone quarries because dying of tuberculosis or silicosis is easier than starving.'
The situation, you see, is serious. People have died. Children have died too. And if they are not dying this very instant, at the time of writing this, I am grateful, but I am not relieved.
I went back to Shivpuri this year. I've been going to Madhya Pradesh over the last two years, covering hunger in tribal villages. At first, I went after reports of kids' deaths filtered out, from Patalgarh. Then I went back, and found that things had improved marginally in Patalgarh - an anganwadi has been set up, and a school with mid-day meals. But in another village nearby, I heard of more deaths. And after that, more hunger on yet another trip.
This year, I went to visit another set of villages where there have been no deaths so far. At least, no children's deaths that are directly attributable to malnutrition. The state has been trying to introduce all sorts of schemes and programs to prevent starvation deaths. But hunger seems chronic, almost inevitable. This time, I began to understand - in part - why this was so. this time, I encountered displacement afresh.
Displacement is a funny word. A very inadequate word that conveys nothing of its meaning.
Displacement is not about moving. It is not about packing up and saying goodbye to the trees and the dust and saying hello to other people, other dust in a new place. It is not about losing touch with old friends, old customs. It is not about losing beauty and calm, mist and dew, wilderness and privacy.
Displacement is about losing a river. Losing access to clean, safe drinking water. Losing water for the fields. Losing land that is watered richly. Losing the fields that gave you grain. Losing the land that your herds grazed on. Losing your cattle. Losing the milk that came from the cattle. Losing the meat the goats ensured. Losing the sheep that gave you wool. Losing access to mud and wood that gave you shelter. Losing firewood. Losing the birds and the bees. Losing honey and herbs. Losing leaves that could be either plates or smokes. Losing hygiene. Losing legality. Losing the right to protest when somebody in a uniform and a jeep shows up to set fire to your home. Losing your walls and roofs.... what is left to lose?
No, really, what is left to lose?
With one stroke, with a single order, with a few meetings of committees formed in the state capital, all this is lost.
I had gone this time to visit displaced villages - villages that have been cleared out of forests we want to protect or 'reserve'. In this one state, there are 29 such areas that require people to move out. That require them to lose all the above-mentioned.
And they did. They lost all of that.
"Many changes over the past decade have pushed villagers who once had enough to eat into a spiral of food insecurity and the uncertain arms of the public distribution system (PDS).... Take Balharpur village. About eight years ago, its residents, most of them belonging to the Sahariya tribe, were moved out of the Madhav National Park and dumped upon a stony, non-irrigated tract of land near the highway....
While moving, the villagers set their cattle free near the Balhar Mata temple in the forest; they were certain they would not have access to grazing land in the New Balharpur village. And they were right."
Saturday, September 22, 2007
The after-seethe
A few days ago, I was at Gwalior station, waiting for a train that just wouldn't arrive. Since I travel very light these days, I just swung my bag on my shoulders and proceeded to walk about, mostly between the enquiry counter, the platform and the tea-stall.
The man approached from a distance. I could see him but didn't notice him until he extended an arm and tried to wrap it around my waist as he walked past. For a fraction of a second, it didn't sink - what just happened? But instinctively, my hand had latched on to his arm. Even as he began to walk away, I pulled him back and with the other hand, caught his ear, and asked him (in Hindi), "Where do you think you're going?"
Young man, checked shirt. From his expression, he didn't seem to realize what was going on.
He just stared, then asked, "What do you want?"
"I want to take you to the police station."
He tried to walk off again. I hit him on the arm and twisted his ear. A few people gathered. Most paused half a second to glance at this new tamasha, and walked away.
He stepped back and struggled free. Then he got out his wallet and began to produce credentials. Some sort of identity card. "I'm not just anybody, you know..." he began.
I snatched the card out of his hands and yelled, "What do I care about this? What difference does this make? Come to the police station."
A few people asked, in passing, "What's going on? What's the matter?"
He said, "I didn't do anything."
I slapped him.
Before I could ask anyone to help me take him to the police station, he snatched his identity card out of my hand and broke away. I was about to follow him, frightened as I was, but right behind me, there stood two railway police cops. In uniform. Not saying a word. Watching.
I saw the checked shirt receding, disappearing into the crowd, and decided to forget about going to the police station. Instead, I went to the ladies-only waiting room, to seethe in silence, and to glare at every man who entered the room whoever briefly.
The man approached from a distance. I could see him but didn't notice him until he extended an arm and tried to wrap it around my waist as he walked past. For a fraction of a second, it didn't sink - what just happened? But instinctively, my hand had latched on to his arm. Even as he began to walk away, I pulled him back and with the other hand, caught his ear, and asked him (in Hindi), "Where do you think you're going?"
Young man, checked shirt. From his expression, he didn't seem to realize what was going on.
He just stared, then asked, "What do you want?"
"I want to take you to the police station."
He tried to walk off again. I hit him on the arm and twisted his ear. A few people gathered. Most paused half a second to glance at this new tamasha, and walked away.
He stepped back and struggled free. Then he got out his wallet and began to produce credentials. Some sort of identity card. "I'm not just anybody, you know..." he began.
I snatched the card out of his hands and yelled, "What do I care about this? What difference does this make? Come to the police station."
A few people asked, in passing, "What's going on? What's the matter?"
He said, "I didn't do anything."
I slapped him.
Before I could ask anyone to help me take him to the police station, he snatched his identity card out of my hand and broke away. I was about to follow him, frightened as I was, but right behind me, there stood two railway police cops. In uniform. Not saying a word. Watching.
I saw the checked shirt receding, disappearing into the crowd, and decided to forget about going to the police station. Instead, I went to the ladies-only waiting room, to seethe in silence, and to glare at every man who entered the room whoever briefly.
Friday, September 21, 2007
The flame flickereth no more?
A few weeks ago, holed up in a small-town hotel one evening, staring dully at the television, my finger stopped jabbing remote when I caught a glimpse of Mashaal.
I had seen the movie before, but yet, I hung on. Waiting for the famous death scene. The one where Waheeda Rehman, who plays Dilip Kumar’s wife with a quiet, assured dignity, dies out on the street. Her husband tries to hail passing cars and cabs, bangs on locked doors and screams ‘ae bhai!’ Nobody stops. Nobody calls a doctor. Nobody listens. She calls out to him, and dies.
I had known I would cry. And I did.
But this time, there was another scene which grabbed my attention. It was the shop-breaking/looting sequence before the death scene. Raja (Anil Kapoor playing a rough mawaali type) and his friends had just been smashing, and stealing from, a store. A very disappointed Vinod (Dilip Kumar, the upright journalist-activist), goes to his room to upbraid him. Raja, however, is not in the least bit remorseful.
He begins to talk of a memory. When he was five years old, he remembered being out with his father, walking through the market. His father had reached out to touch the fabric that was hung up there for sale. The shopkeeper had yelled. The paradox was his father was a weaver. Perhaps, the very man who had woven that bit of cloth, was now forbidden to touch it.
Raja swears that he would not live like his father did. If he was not permitted to touch something in a shop, he would break it.
For a long time, it stayed with me. That sequence. Incredibly, the movie was made by Yash Chopra.
Funny, how they just don’t say that sort of thing in the movies, any longer. No?
Saturday, September 01, 2007
The weird, the comic and the ugly
This is almost a ritual for bloggers now: to keep an eye - a widened, part-horrified, part-amused eye - out for the weird searches that direct the web-world to their blogs. I had mentioned one particular google search a couple of years back (sadly, have not kept the promise I made at the end of that bemused post).
Here's an update on some of the more interesting searches that led people to Known Turf (the comments in brackets are my reactions):
teachers in transparent saree
mallu in transparent salwar
black prostitutes on the job
quiet kind person (This googler sounds interesting)
fat woman on thin man shoulders statue
sar pe topi lal lal
ae handsome (!)
aye mere nehru (!!)
naughty tailor taking measurements of nude girls with his hands
please I saw the rashtrapati garden (why the 'please')
smriti irani cleavage pics
chennai aunty sex story
DO GUYS LIKE QUIET GIRLS? (In all capitals. And the answer to that is, I hope so)
madhuri dixit mili raste mein mili raste mein, khaye chane hamne saste mein
low waist sarees (this cannot be an Indian, surely?)
jonsar map india
Perverts "R" Us /Stories/ First Time Sex Experience
researcH WORK on rasmalai (Wow!)
dilip kumar saw sayra bano nude (One certainly hopes so)
air hostess getting raped
photos of white prostitutes
indian sexy maidservants
Empathetically meaning Dictonary English to hindi (Empathy means 'samvedna' in Hindi)
yana gupta fashion pictures
how to make an icy chai
woman from india gropped in public large breasts
xxx text stories of sex in india
paliwal farm jaipur sex drugs party
kamuk ho gayi (Kamuk means lustful?)
roti from millets
fuck renuka chowdhary
pathani suits mumbai
shia muttah marriage with hindu women
night bus girl rubbing her breast story bangalore
madhuri dixit mili raste mai (again!)
Which symbol on the 100 rupee note help blind recognize it?
sanskrit shloka on peace in hindi
land allotment policy for Biodiesel plantation in punjab, india
"hidden recording devices" journalistic ethics audio
Here's an update on some of the more interesting searches that led people to Known Turf (the comments in brackets are my reactions):
teachers in transparent saree
mallu in transparent salwar
black prostitutes on the job
quiet kind person (This googler sounds interesting)
fat woman on thin man shoulders statue
sar pe topi lal lal
ae handsome (!)
aye mere nehru (!!)
naughty tailor taking measurements of nude girls with his hands
please I saw the rashtrapati garden (why the 'please')
smriti irani cleavage pics
chennai aunty sex story
DO GUYS LIKE QUIET GIRLS? (In all capitals. And the answer to that is, I hope so)
madhuri dixit mili raste mein mili raste mein, khaye chane hamne saste mein
low waist sarees (this cannot be an Indian, surely?)
jonsar map india
Perverts "R" Us /Stories/ First Time Sex Experience
researcH WORK on rasmalai (Wow!)
dilip kumar saw sayra bano nude (One certainly hopes so)
air hostess getting raped
photos of white prostitutes
indian sexy maidservants
Empathetically meaning Dictonary English to hindi (Empathy means 'samvedna' in Hindi)
yana gupta fashion pictures
how to make an icy chai
woman from india gropped in public large breasts
xxx text stories of sex in india
paliwal farm jaipur sex drugs party
kamuk ho gayi (Kamuk means lustful?)
roti from millets
fuck renuka chowdhary
pathani suits mumbai
shia muttah marriage with hindu women
night bus girl rubbing her breast story bangalore
madhuri dixit mili raste mai (again!)
Which symbol on the 100 rupee note help blind recognize it?
disillusioned with osho (Tsk-tsk)
sanskrit shloka on peace in hindi
land allotment policy for Biodiesel plantation in punjab, india
"hidden recording devices" journalistic ethics audio
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
One more
It is the season for regrets, it seems.
Dashrath, the man who single-handedly cut a road through a hill, breathed his last recently. From Hashiya, I learnt that he was a Kabir-panthi, and that he had been happy with the way the CM had treated him, during a visit.
Glad to hear that he was cremated with full state honours.
There is no need to say, rest in peace. If peace is possible, I'm pretty sure it is his.
Dashrath, the man who single-handedly cut a road through a hill, breathed his last recently. From Hashiya, I learnt that he was a Kabir-panthi, and that he had been happy with the way the CM had treated him, during a visit.
Glad to hear that he was cremated with full state honours.
There is no need to say, rest in peace. If peace is possible, I'm pretty sure it is his.
Monday, August 27, 2007
The regrets pile up
So Qurrat-ul-Ain Haider too is gone. Slipped away, in a hospital at the edges of this city.
I've been trying to say something about her, but cannot find the words. Partly, because I am remorseful about not having met her, and partly, because I'm annoyed at not being familiar with her work. Oh, little extracts and bits. But not the seminal novel. And while I did buy some of her books in Hindi (I can't read the Urdu script), I still haven't gotten around to reading them.
Ainee Apa, they called her. My grandfather did not call her 'apa'. His children used to tease him, well into his eighties, about the secret crush he harboured. I cannot remember how, in what words, he deflected this teasing, but the photograph stayed.
My first memory of this woman was a photograph, laminated and put out in the drawing room. Stubbornly occupying pride of place amongst other photos of my grandfather's moments in the sun - a prize, a function, with heads of state. And one with Ms Haider. Both smiling, both wearing thick glasses, him seated a little behind, sort of looking over her shoulder.
The other reason she was stuck in my head was because somebody told me, I had been named after her. Ainee/Annie, they called her. And so my grandfather chose to name me. For years afterward, I wondered if this was true, but could never get up the courage to ask him outright.
And since moving to Delhi, I had often wondered if I should pay her a visit. Had never been able to decide whether it would be welcome, or not... One more regretful 'too late'.
I've been trying to say something about her, but cannot find the words. Partly, because I am remorseful about not having met her, and partly, because I'm annoyed at not being familiar with her work. Oh, little extracts and bits. But not the seminal novel. And while I did buy some of her books in Hindi (I can't read the Urdu script), I still haven't gotten around to reading them.
Ainee Apa, they called her. My grandfather did not call her 'apa'. His children used to tease him, well into his eighties, about the secret crush he harboured. I cannot remember how, in what words, he deflected this teasing, but the photograph stayed.
My first memory of this woman was a photograph, laminated and put out in the drawing room. Stubbornly occupying pride of place amongst other photos of my grandfather's moments in the sun - a prize, a function, with heads of state. And one with Ms Haider. Both smiling, both wearing thick glasses, him seated a little behind, sort of looking over her shoulder.
The other reason she was stuck in my head was because somebody told me, I had been named after her. Ainee/Annie, they called her. And so my grandfather chose to name me. For years afterward, I wondered if this was true, but could never get up the courage to ask him outright.
And since moving to Delhi, I had often wondered if I should pay her a visit. Had never been able to decide whether it would be welcome, or not... One more regretful 'too late'.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Brief items
While I was away and unconnected, several items awaited me in my work inbox. A small sample.
1.
Govt.Girls Middle School, Jaffrabad Extension, Delhi-32, has been charging girl students for using the toilet. Apparently, the toilet is kept locked and those who cannot afford to pay a rupee each time are forced to relieve themselves in the open.
This in a country where millions of girls stay away from school for the lack of toilet and water facilities.
2.
A girl was, in effect, thrown out of school for talking to a boy. According to the legal notice served on behalf of the Class-X-B student, the Govt. Sardovaya Bal Vidyalaya, Vishwas Nagar, Shahdara, "was in two shifts, morning shift for girls and afternoon shift for boys but for the last two years both the shifts were merged and the school was made co-educational. (It is submitted) That on 1st August, 2007, during the recess hours (about 11:30 a.m.), Poonam and Avdhesh (student of class-XI of the same school) were talking in the X-B class room in the presence of about thirty six students. While they were talking, Sh. Dhan Singh, Hindi subject teacher, entered into the classroom and asked Avdhesh to go out of the class. While Avdhesh was moving out, the teacher started beating him. Avdhesh pushed the teacher and run away.... Poonam was called in the principal's room where police and Avdhesh were also present. Sh. Dhan Singh, Hindi subject teacher told the principal that Avdhesh was talking with Poonam. On this, the principal told Poonam that she has been removed from the school and would not be allowed to attend classes anymore."
3.
Seven Dalits ostracized by village for refusing to beat the drums.
4.
Teenager died after spending the night at the police station.
5.
Activists affiliated with the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India celebrated World Breastfeeding Week by burning bottles meant for feeding babies.
6.
Lok Sangharsh Morcha activist Bhikhu Bhai Tadvi was ordered by the Narmada district Collector to leave Narmada, for two years. This order also applies to surrounding districts like Vadodara, Surat and Bharuchh. Bhikhu Bhai is a national secretary of the LSM, and has been charged with instigating the tribals to spread Naxalite activity in the area. According to the press note, this is not the first time the organisation's leaders have been confined. Suman Bhai Vasawa, president of the Gujarat unit of the LSM, had been arrested in 2006 under PASA, a law not unlike TADA, and released after 50 days in detention.
7.
The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) has allegedly been breaking its own rules by allowing field trials of Bt Brinjal. The press note refers to rules "...which state that large scale trials will not be allowed unless the complete biosafety data has been generated. Bt Brinjal clearly does not fall in this category... In fact, some of the prescribed tests like foliar feeding studies (which have been mandated after reports of animal mortality and morbidity after open grazing on Bt Cotton fields) have not been completed on Bt Brinjal."
8.
The practice of keeping two tumblers — one for dalits and another for others in tea shops — is persistently prevailing in 33 reserved village panchayats in Salem and Erode districts.
9.
Environmental and social activist groups in the country have expressed concerns that Japan may dump toxic wastes into India by takingadvantage of the proposed comprehensive economic partnership agreement (CEPA). The concerns are fuelled by Japan's reputation for dumping poisonous and hazardous waste in the south-east Asian countries with which it has free trade agreements .
10.
A Dalit youth who refused to work - in exchange for the Rs 20 he'd borrowed - was set ablaze.
1.
Govt.Girls Middle School, Jaffrabad Extension, Delhi-32, has been charging girl students for using the toilet. Apparently, the toilet is kept locked and those who cannot afford to pay a rupee each time are forced to relieve themselves in the open.
This in a country where millions of girls stay away from school for the lack of toilet and water facilities.
2.
A girl was, in effect, thrown out of school for talking to a boy. According to the legal notice served on behalf of the Class-X-B student, the Govt. Sardovaya Bal Vidyalaya, Vishwas Nagar, Shahdara, "was in two shifts, morning shift for girls and afternoon shift for boys but for the last two years both the shifts were merged and the school was made co-educational. (It is submitted) That on 1st August, 2007, during the recess hours (about 11:30 a.m.), Poonam and Avdhesh (student of class-XI of the same school) were talking in the X-B class room in the presence of about thirty six students. While they were talking, Sh. Dhan Singh, Hindi subject teacher, entered into the classroom and asked Avdhesh to go out of the class. While Avdhesh was moving out, the teacher started beating him. Avdhesh pushed the teacher and run away.... Poonam was called in the principal's room where police and Avdhesh were also present. Sh. Dhan Singh, Hindi subject teacher told the principal that Avdhesh was talking with Poonam. On this, the principal told Poonam that she has been removed from the school and would not be allowed to attend classes anymore."
3.
Seven Dalits ostracized by village for refusing to beat the drums.
4.
Teenager died after spending the night at the police station.
5.
Activists affiliated with the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India celebrated World Breastfeeding Week by burning bottles meant for feeding babies.
6.
Lok Sangharsh Morcha activist Bhikhu Bhai Tadvi was ordered by the Narmada district Collector to leave Narmada, for two years. This order also applies to surrounding districts like Vadodara, Surat and Bharuchh. Bhikhu Bhai is a national secretary of the LSM, and has been charged with instigating the tribals to spread Naxalite activity in the area. According to the press note, this is not the first time the organisation's leaders have been confined. Suman Bhai Vasawa, president of the Gujarat unit of the LSM, had been arrested in 2006 under PASA, a law not unlike TADA, and released after 50 days in detention.
7.
The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) has allegedly been breaking its own rules by allowing field trials of Bt Brinjal. The press note refers to rules "...which state that large scale trials will not be allowed unless the complete biosafety data has been generated. Bt Brinjal clearly does not fall in this category... In fact, some of the prescribed tests like foliar feeding studies (which have been mandated after reports of animal mortality and morbidity after open grazing on Bt Cotton fields) have not been completed on Bt Brinjal."
8.
The practice of keeping two tumblers — one for dalits and another for others in tea shops — is persistently prevailing in 33 reserved village panchayats in Salem and Erode districts.
9.
Environmental and social activist groups in the country have expressed concerns that Japan may dump toxic wastes into India by takingadvantage of the proposed comprehensive economic partnership agreement (CEPA). The concerns are fuelled by Japan's reputation for dumping poisonous and hazardous waste in the south-east Asian countries with which it has free trade agreements .
10.
A Dalit youth who refused to work - in exchange for the Rs 20 he'd borrowed - was set ablaze.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
The heart that beats no more
I met Lal Singh 'Dil' about two years ago. Interviewed him for this story, mentioned him in passing, in that blog post.
And I did not say anything else about him. How he lived, in what sort of ramshackle barsaati, how he attempted to make some terrible tea for me, how he seemed ill and shriveled and how sunken his cheeks were and how he did not know how to honour me, as a guest, and how he would not let me leave without tea, and maybe a drink? How he held on to my hand when I got up to leave, and how he kissed it. And how he had begun to scrawl poetry in coal-black, all over his walls. And how he asked a visiting friend, Kali, to paint the lines higher up, all around.
There had been some beautiful black-n-white portrait photos Kali had taken, of Dil, but he canceled his own exhibition, when people began to protest against one particular photo - Dil lighting a bidi, and the flame of the matchstick reflected in his eye. (People had problems with the photo because it showed a famous figure smoking.)
And how often I had thought that one of these days, I would go back and see how Dil was doing. And whether he remembered me, and whether he tried kissing the hands of all young women who visited.
And now, it is too late.
For more on Dil:
http://www.theotherindia.org/caste/lal-singh-dil.html
http://www.littlemag.com/vox/dil.html
http://www.littlemag.com/vox/dil2.html
http://bhupindersingh.blogspot.com/2006/07/lal-singh-dil.html
Update:
Sourabh has a tribute to Dil in the Hindustan Times. I cannot find a link, but have his permission to reproduce it here:
Where is the heart?
Lal Singh Dil is dead. Long live the revolution
Sourabh Gupta
You love me, do you?
Even though you belong
to another caste.
But do you know,
Our elders do not
even cremate their dead
at the same place.
Lal Singh Dil died two days before my 29th birthday.
But why measure a death as tragic and big as the poet's against an impending birthday as happy and petty as mine? The next day was August 15. The irony of his passing away could have been juxtaposed to that date. But I couldn't do that. I shall remember only this: that Dil died two days before my birthday, a day you celebrate what you have become after you were brought into the world. But Dil was dead. The heart would seize up into a gnawing void.
I have read very few of his poems and do not know much about his long harsh life and I never met him more than twice within a gap of two months and there too he didn't talk much. But Dil was mine because I was not his reader, not his fan. I could not measure his worth with the lines he wrote as I still do with other poets. Neither could I praise his poems nor could I criticise them. Like a lover does to his lover, like a boy does to his grandfather, I had just surrendered to Dil. He might have had remembered me if he saw me again. But that will never happen.
The poet had been killed by gangrene in his intestines, my friend had told me over the mobile. That night, I gulped down some of my grandmother's Correx cough syrup and went to sleep.
"Log Dil, Dil kehende rehdey ne. Par dil hai kithe? (People keep asking for Dil. But where is the heart?)." The thin old man smoking a bidi in a Panjab University lawn some months back had mocked in his softly shrill and suppressed voice to the scholar friends surrounding him. This line was an afterthought, to a debate on whether Marxism was science or Marxism was religion. Dil was arguing for the second line, without any rhetoric, almost talking to himself, as if he didn't want to argue. (This was where I first met him.)
'Words have been
uttered
long before us
and for long after us
chop off every tongue
If you can
But the words
had been uttered.'
The poet could never become the assertive bourgeois; but he was not from the subjugated proletariat either.
Dil's lineage went far below: he was from the stooping figures of social injustice; he was a chamar whose soul itself is considered filthy. No amount of education or money or power could wipe out this slur of destiny. To wipe out this slur of destiny, the destiny would simply have to change; the poet would have had to take rebirth.
On the evening of August 15, Dil close friend Dr Satyapal Sehgal, a Hindi teacher at PU, told me he had been to his friend's funeral at Samrala and with extraordinary sadness recited to me on the phone Dil's poem that I have written above. Dil had really been cremated in a Dalits' cremation ground, he told me.
To turn around this fate, the young Dalit poet had attacked with a group of other Naxalites a police chowki in Chamkaur Sahib in 1969, and after nine months of intense police torture, had fled to UP and become a Mussalman. On his funeral, everything that Dil had done to cleanse himself of his destiny was burnt to ashes. He had changed a lot in 64 years; the world around him had not.
My friend had cursed that it was the state that actually killed Dil, however self-destructive the poet might have been, while Sehgal bitterly said that the Punjabi writers' fraternity was responsible for Dil's death. They knew his critical condition but never took heed and got him any medical help till the last moment.
'News of Naxalbari spread like wildfire. I was working as a daily wage labourer then. Carrying loads up and down the stairs, I felt strangely energised. It was like a great opportunity. What I had not been able to go and do in Vietnam, I would achieve here…,' Dil had written in his autobiography Dastaan.
Dil had recalled to us his lock-up days with grimace. If an animal had been tortured that much day and night, it would have died, he had smirked. He was still being watched, he had said. Two Punjab Police constables often came to visit him, peering through the door to check if he had fled again. But in them too-- the policemen keeping an eye on the former Naxalite-- Dil only saw love. They would come and ask, how's your health, baba? Thy too were enamoured by the gigantic poet. Spying was only an excuse to be close to him, the poet had told us.
After an hour or so, the discussion in the lawn broke up. It was never meant to take the turns it had taken. It was getting bitter with friends and fans.
Dil, the diminutive figure with a rexin bag under his arm, began walking away, following the scholar friend who had brought him to the university. Hungrily, I followed the poet, walking with him, making small talk as if I had known him since my childhood, just to be near him and see him with all the love I could muster up from my welling heart. I had a vision of a saint. But the saint just nodded his head-- it didn't matter if he knew me or not; if I liked him or not. It was beautiful—this inability to connect with words.
As he began to light another bidi, walking on the loose red gravel below the trees, I turned my head back, to see the students walking behind us. I then sped up and went ahead of Dil and turned back completely on the gravel and saw what I wanted to see fully—with two other girls, the tall voluptuous girl student, very fair and well-fed-- the extra flesh oozing out of her very tight jeans and t-shirt—inching towards Dil from behind and dwarfing, by several feet, the dark and oily and wasted-looking revolutionary poet as he kept looking down still lost in himself, and the girls walking past the poet, nearly brushing his rickety blackish body of a labourer and walking past me eventually, lost continuously in their own banter. I felt the rapture I had anticipated. I had seen two opposite worlds coming together. Like a wave had come and crashed onto my heart; it felt all salty and sweet, maybe the heart had burst at its seams.
In hindsight, I had seen the master and the slave and I had seen the revolution. My going ahead and looking back was the revolution Dil had fought for—the rich and the poor or the upper caste and the lower caste, with all their little cultures and dogmas and suppressions and superstitions, feeding on each other, coming so close, so tantalisingly, so obscenely close, that one annihilates the other.
'The long caravan is moving on
Carrying the burden of rebukes
Along the long shadows
Children are riding donkeys
Their fathers have dogs in their arms
Pans hang on the backs of their mothers
Babies are sleeping in these pans.'
From Dil's Evening Tide
Parnab came for Dil later. From Delhi, Manipur, London, East Timor, Kolkata, I don't know. But he came. He was possessed. He was as short as Dil and as fair and plump as that girl in the university. He was from both the worlds simultaneously; he was a two-world.
Parnab started from Chandigarh in a Ford Ikon in the evening with a woman friend of his and a friend of mine who knew Dil by heart and reached the delirious old poet's one-room dwelling Samrala in the dark of the night finding the poet expectedly drunk.
That night, that lonely night, my friend saw the poet weep.
Inebriated Dil was telling them how his publishers were threatening him since he had gone to another publisher, how the old publishers were threatening to stop whatever meagre royalties they gave him. The helpless old man cried and cried.
Parnab Mukherjee is a very sharp theatre actor and theatre director and journalist and activist and in Dil he had found his new play—a solo performance on the poet's struggles with identity and the state, with the poet himself as the audience.
As such, I met my muse again at the Government Museum and Art Gallery, looking tired and more lovable after a rattling, lonely two-hour bus journey from Samarla to Chandigarh amid the morning heat of May, to be, for a day at least, the crown prince of a play on his own life.
Even in the well-lit white gallery, Dil was invisible, like so many others we see, pulling loads or human beings on thin wheels. He had to be pointed out to the journalists and the photographers. He did not carry on his face the inner glow of a belly well-fed and a body less exhausted. Dil had to be pointed out. Then Nirupama Dutt came, the journalist who had written this in a magazine seven years back: "One day soon, I think we shall learn that the slightly crazed man who sold tea and wrote poetry to be painted on trucks, said his namaaz in the mosque and heretically drank country brew, is no more. What will happen then? My hunch is that the people of Samrala will build a little mazar to him and anoint him a Pir." Dil is dead but nothing holy or supreme has happened to him. But the two had a bond. She would sweetly incite him to relive the old times and Dil would melt and slowly expand the story from there. Using the moment then, Parnab would recite a long prose-like English poem on Dil (which I do not know if Dil fully understood but the journalists did, quoting parts of it in the next day's papers) and using the moment again, Dil would read an even longer poem from Naglok. The loop, the circular snake-rhythm of the recurring word 'Naglok' from his fragile throat reverberates in my mind as I write it down.
"No other play had depicted the life of the sweepers so well. Watching it, I felt the saga was set in the present. Harish Chandar was shown tending the pigs, working with a basket and a broom, cremating corpses for a fee and finally breaking down when his wife would not let him touch him for fear of being defiled," Dil had written in Dastaan.
In the evening, Parnab turned and twisted his round plump body on the gallery's floor enacting the agony of Dil and the people of Nandigram—both fighting the state-- and the stick-like Dil somberly watched, sitting crossed legged in the first circle, staring, through Parnab's loud dialogues and restless body, into an eternal, stony void.
And I did not say anything else about him. How he lived, in what sort of ramshackle barsaati, how he attempted to make some terrible tea for me, how he seemed ill and shriveled and how sunken his cheeks were and how he did not know how to honour me, as a guest, and how he would not let me leave without tea, and maybe a drink? How he held on to my hand when I got up to leave, and how he kissed it. And how he had begun to scrawl poetry in coal-black, all over his walls. And how he asked a visiting friend, Kali, to paint the lines higher up, all around.
There had been some beautiful black-n-white portrait photos Kali had taken, of Dil, but he canceled his own exhibition, when people began to protest against one particular photo - Dil lighting a bidi, and the flame of the matchstick reflected in his eye. (People had problems with the photo because it showed a famous figure smoking.)
And how often I had thought that one of these days, I would go back and see how Dil was doing. And whether he remembered me, and whether he tried kissing the hands of all young women who visited.
And now, it is too late.
For more on Dil:
http://www.theotherindia.org
http://www.littlemag.com/vox
http://www.littlemag.com/vox
http://bhupindersingh.blogspot
Update:
Sourabh has a tribute to Dil in the Hindustan Times. I cannot find a link, but have his permission to reproduce it here:
Where is the heart?
Lal Singh Dil is dead. Long live the revolution
Sourabh Gupta
You love me, do you?
Even though you belong
to another caste.
But do you know,
Our elders do not
even cremate their dead
at the same place.
Lal Singh Dil died two days before my 29th birthday.
But why measure a death as tragic and big as the poet's against an impending birthday as happy and petty as mine? The next day was August 15. The irony of his passing away could have been juxtaposed to that date. But I couldn't do that. I shall remember only this: that Dil died two days before my birthday, a day you celebrate what you have become after you were brought into the world. But Dil was dead. The heart would seize up into a gnawing void.
I have read very few of his poems and do not know much about his long harsh life and I never met him more than twice within a gap of two months and there too he didn't talk much. But Dil was mine because I was not his reader, not his fan. I could not measure his worth with the lines he wrote as I still do with other poets. Neither could I praise his poems nor could I criticise them. Like a lover does to his lover, like a boy does to his grandfather, I had just surrendered to Dil. He might have had remembered me if he saw me again. But that will never happen.
The poet had been killed by gangrene in his intestines, my friend had told me over the mobile. That night, I gulped down some of my grandmother's Correx cough syrup and went to sleep.
"Log Dil, Dil kehende rehdey ne. Par dil hai kithe? (People keep asking for Dil. But where is the heart?)." The thin old man smoking a bidi in a Panjab University lawn some months back had mocked in his softly shrill and suppressed voice to the scholar friends surrounding him. This line was an afterthought, to a debate on whether Marxism was science or Marxism was religion. Dil was arguing for the second line, without any rhetoric, almost talking to himself, as if he didn't want to argue. (This was where I first met him.)
'Words have been
uttered
long before us
and for long after us
chop off every tongue
If you can
But the words
had been uttered.'
The poet could never become the assertive bourgeois; but he was not from the subjugated proletariat either.
Dil's lineage went far below: he was from the stooping figures of social injustice; he was a chamar whose soul itself is considered filthy. No amount of education or money or power could wipe out this slur of destiny. To wipe out this slur of destiny, the destiny would simply have to change; the poet would have had to take rebirth.
On the evening of August 15, Dil close friend Dr Satyapal Sehgal, a Hindi teacher at PU, told me he had been to his friend's funeral at Samrala and with extraordinary sadness recited to me on the phone Dil's poem that I have written above. Dil had really been cremated in a Dalits' cremation ground, he told me.
To turn around this fate, the young Dalit poet had attacked with a group of other Naxalites a police chowki in Chamkaur Sahib in 1969, and after nine months of intense police torture, had fled to UP and become a Mussalman. On his funeral, everything that Dil had done to cleanse himself of his destiny was burnt to ashes. He had changed a lot in 64 years; the world around him had not.
My friend had cursed that it was the state that actually killed Dil, however self-destructive the poet might have been, while Sehgal bitterly said that the Punjabi writers' fraternity was responsible for Dil's death. They knew his critical condition but never took heed and got him any medical help till the last moment.
'News of Naxalbari spread like wildfire. I was working as a daily wage labourer then. Carrying loads up and down the stairs, I felt strangely energised. It was like a great opportunity. What I had not been able to go and do in Vietnam, I would achieve here…,' Dil had written in his autobiography Dastaan.
Dil had recalled to us his lock-up days with grimace. If an animal had been tortured that much day and night, it would have died, he had smirked. He was still being watched, he had said. Two Punjab Police constables often came to visit him, peering through the door to check if he had fled again. But in them too-- the policemen keeping an eye on the former Naxalite-- Dil only saw love. They would come and ask, how's your health, baba? Thy too were enamoured by the gigantic poet. Spying was only an excuse to be close to him, the poet had told us.
After an hour or so, the discussion in the lawn broke up. It was never meant to take the turns it had taken. It was getting bitter with friends and fans.
Dil, the diminutive figure with a rexin bag under his arm, began walking away, following the scholar friend who had brought him to the university. Hungrily, I followed the poet, walking with him, making small talk as if I had known him since my childhood, just to be near him and see him with all the love I could muster up from my welling heart. I had a vision of a saint. But the saint just nodded his head-- it didn't matter if he knew me or not; if I liked him or not. It was beautiful—this inability to connect with words.
As he began to light another bidi, walking on the loose red gravel below the trees, I turned my head back, to see the students walking behind us. I then sped up and went ahead of Dil and turned back completely on the gravel and saw what I wanted to see fully—with two other girls, the tall voluptuous girl student, very fair and well-fed-- the extra flesh oozing out of her very tight jeans and t-shirt—inching towards Dil from behind and dwarfing, by several feet, the dark and oily and wasted-looking revolutionary poet as he kept looking down still lost in himself, and the girls walking past the poet, nearly brushing his rickety blackish body of a labourer and walking past me eventually, lost continuously in their own banter. I felt the rapture I had anticipated. I had seen two opposite worlds coming together. Like a wave had come and crashed onto my heart; it felt all salty and sweet, maybe the heart had burst at its seams.
In hindsight, I had seen the master and the slave and I had seen the revolution. My going ahead and looking back was the revolution Dil had fought for—the rich and the poor or the upper caste and the lower caste, with all their little cultures and dogmas and suppressions and superstitions, feeding on each other, coming so close, so tantalisingly, so obscenely close, that one annihilates the other.
'The long caravan is moving on
Carrying the burden of rebukes
Along the long shadows
Children are riding donkeys
Their fathers have dogs in their arms
Pans hang on the backs of their mothers
Babies are sleeping in these pans.'
From Dil's Evening Tide
Parnab came for Dil later. From Delhi, Manipur, London, East Timor, Kolkata, I don't know. But he came. He was possessed. He was as short as Dil and as fair and plump as that girl in the university. He was from both the worlds simultaneously; he was a two-world.
Parnab started from Chandigarh in a Ford Ikon in the evening with a woman friend of his and a friend of mine who knew Dil by heart and reached the delirious old poet's one-room dwelling Samrala in the dark of the night finding the poet expectedly drunk.
That night, that lonely night, my friend saw the poet weep.
Inebriated Dil was telling them how his publishers were threatening him since he had gone to another publisher, how the old publishers were threatening to stop whatever meagre royalties they gave him. The helpless old man cried and cried.
Parnab Mukherjee is a very sharp theatre actor and theatre director and journalist and activist and in Dil he had found his new play—a solo performance on the poet's struggles with identity and the state, with the poet himself as the audience.
As such, I met my muse again at the Government Museum and Art Gallery, looking tired and more lovable after a rattling, lonely two-hour bus journey from Samarla to Chandigarh amid the morning heat of May, to be, for a day at least, the crown prince of a play on his own life.
Even in the well-lit white gallery, Dil was invisible, like so many others we see, pulling loads or human beings on thin wheels. He had to be pointed out to the journalists and the photographers. He did not carry on his face the inner glow of a belly well-fed and a body less exhausted. Dil had to be pointed out. Then Nirupama Dutt came, the journalist who had written this in a magazine seven years back: "One day soon, I think we shall learn that the slightly crazed man who sold tea and wrote poetry to be painted on trucks, said his namaaz in the mosque and heretically drank country brew, is no more. What will happen then? My hunch is that the people of Samrala will build a little mazar to him and anoint him a Pir." Dil is dead but nothing holy or supreme has happened to him. But the two had a bond. She would sweetly incite him to relive the old times and Dil would melt and slowly expand the story from there. Using the moment then, Parnab would recite a long prose-like English poem on Dil (which I do not know if Dil fully understood but the journalists did, quoting parts of it in the next day's papers) and using the moment again, Dil would read an even longer poem from Naglok. The loop, the circular snake-rhythm of the recurring word 'Naglok' from his fragile throat reverberates in my mind as I write it down.
"No other play had depicted the life of the sweepers so well. Watching it, I felt the saga was set in the present. Harish Chandar was shown tending the pigs, working with a basket and a broom, cremating corpses for a fee and finally breaking down when his wife would not let him touch him for fear of being defiled," Dil had written in Dastaan.
In the evening, Parnab turned and twisted his round plump body on the gallery's floor enacting the agony of Dil and the people of Nandigram—both fighting the state-- and the stick-like Dil somberly watched, sitting crossed legged in the first circle, staring, through Parnab's loud dialogues and restless body, into an eternal, stony void.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Seen and heard in Kashmir
Seen at Srinagar airport, on my way back from covering this story:
Large groups of tourists, possibly religious tourists, working themselves up into an aggressive mood.
They were waiting for a Spice Jet flight. Since it had been raining, many of the flights were delayed, including mine.
These tourists decided that they would not wait any longer and starting queueing up (though theirs wasn't a queue, you understand; it was three or four thick and a random zigzag long) at the departure gate. The harried airline officials tried to reason with them, but to no avail.
Across the glass doors, your could see a Spice Jet plane arrive. This group decided that they were going to board the plane, and were unwilling to accept the fact that this was not 'their' flight and that people cannot just up and board any plane, not unless a departure announcement has been made.
This restive little group had been shouting 'Har Har Mahadev' for a while now. The Kashmiri policemen had not said one word, so far; had been unfailingly polite, smiling while explaining that they would have to wait until the airline officials gave them the signal to board.
Some of the men began to press against and bang on the glass doors of the departure gate. Some began to hunt down airline staff and in aggressive overtones, demanded to be put on a flight - now! The staff quickly escaped to the other side of the glass doors and made themselves as inconspicuous as possible.
More shouting of 'Har Har Mahadev'.
An old, old woman, with thick glasses and a rather marvellous, old black burqa with satin trimming, pulled at my hand and asked me to sit beside her.
"Don't stand there. It's not safe."
And then she told me all about how she had a wedding in the family and how her daughter was dangerously sick, and how she was waiting to go to Delhi. And looking at the voluble bunch of tourists, she said:
"Junglees!... Are they not?"
I said, "Er... hmm.... er, I should go and find out about my flight."
I saw her catch at the passing hand of another young woman, bidding her take the empty seat. The wedding, the sick daughter, the flight that had to be boarded.
And then, another woman.
And over strange shoulders, the resounding cries of 'har har mahadev' and harassed police officers, trying to be polite while pushing back something not unlike a mob.
Large groups of tourists, possibly religious tourists, working themselves up into an aggressive mood.
They were waiting for a Spice Jet flight. Since it had been raining, many of the flights were delayed, including mine.
These tourists decided that they would not wait any longer and starting queueing up (though theirs wasn't a queue, you understand; it was three or four thick and a random zigzag long) at the departure gate. The harried airline officials tried to reason with them, but to no avail.
Across the glass doors, your could see a Spice Jet plane arrive. This group decided that they were going to board the plane, and were unwilling to accept the fact that this was not 'their' flight and that people cannot just up and board any plane, not unless a departure announcement has been made.
This restive little group had been shouting 'Har Har Mahadev' for a while now. The Kashmiri policemen had not said one word, so far; had been unfailingly polite, smiling while explaining that they would have to wait until the airline officials gave them the signal to board.
Some of the men began to press against and bang on the glass doors of the departure gate. Some began to hunt down airline staff and in aggressive overtones, demanded to be put on a flight - now! The staff quickly escaped to the other side of the glass doors and made themselves as inconspicuous as possible.
More shouting of 'Har Har Mahadev'.
An old, old woman, with thick glasses and a rather marvellous, old black burqa with satin trimming, pulled at my hand and asked me to sit beside her.
"Don't stand there. It's not safe."
And then she told me all about how she had a wedding in the family and how her daughter was dangerously sick, and how she was waiting to go to Delhi. And looking at the voluble bunch of tourists, she said:
"Junglees!... Are they not?"
I said, "Er... hmm.... er, I should go and find out about my flight."
I saw her catch at the passing hand of another young woman, bidding her take the empty seat. The wedding, the sick daughter, the flight that had to be boarded.
And then, another woman.
And over strange shoulders, the resounding cries of 'har har mahadev' and harassed police officers, trying to be polite while pushing back something not unlike a mob.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Language, language!
"Chairing the meeting, the PCCF-cum-Secretary, Environment & Forests, Shri S S Choudhury urged upon the PRI members to decimate the information divulged in this meeting to the people of their respective constituencies to get their support and cooperation for sustainable development along with conservation of forest resources of the islands for future generations."
(emphasis mine)
Yes, of course.
This is from an article in 'THE DAILY TELEGRAMS, July 30, 2007', headlined "Greater involvement of PRIs in conservation of isles natural resources stressed".
Now, I have no idea whether the reporter was only truthfully reporting what he heard, or whether, his fingers slipped a bit on the keyboard. But, in either case, the slip appears Freudian. When it comes to information, this country does seem to do a good job of decimation.
But, sub-editor, where wert thou?
(emphasis mine)
Yes, of course.
This is from an article in 'THE DAILY TELEGRAMS, July 30, 2007', headlined "Greater involvement of PRIs in conservation of isles natural resources stressed".
Now, I have no idea whether the reporter was only truthfully reporting what he heard, or whether, his fingers slipped a bit on the keyboard. But, in either case, the slip appears Freudian. When it comes to information, this country does seem to do a good job of decimation.
But, sub-editor, where wert thou?
Friday, July 27, 2007
Things one should know about deras in Punjab
To get a feel of just how influential the Dera is, around Sirsa, just drive through it. You will see Sachi Daadhi, Sach Nursery, Sach Petrol Pump, Sach engineering repair works, Sach Beauty Parlour... the truth, perhaps, is out there.
Security was very tight. At the entrance to the Dera Sacha Sauda in Sirsa, I was subjected to a security check more stringent than I've seen anywhere else, including at airports or the Secretariat or ministers' offices. Three times, groups of women stopped me, ran their hands over me, including my ankles, the small of my back, and my neck, lifting my hair to look under it. Each object in my purse was taken out, opened, pressed, snapped shut, put back. My mobile phone was switched off, and on.
At most of the other deras I visited, there were similar security measures but none as diligent as this. And nowhere else were the women so firmly, politely, unyielding while conducting the security checks. Even long-term followers were subjected to security checks.
Outside the building, there are rows of frightening photographs and posters of oral and throat cancer. Not delicate, no.
And inside, one of the followers tells me, "We go everywhere. To Gujarat, during the earthquake. To Tamil Nadu, after the Tsunami. Floods in Bihar. Our guruji even went to Kotra, to meet the tribals. You should have seen them. They were violent people. Mahua drinkers. Unclean, Naked. They threw stones at us, but we kept talking to them. We gave them food.... and love, of course. Such violent people, they even shot arrows at birds! We taught them to give up bad habits, take to farming and weaving."
I took notes to avoid having to look at him while he talked. Tribals... who could aim at a bird in flight... given food. Later, I attended the satsang. There must have been ten thousand people there. A woman sevak told me that this guru performs miracles. He can cure cancer with kharboozaa (melons). "If you write all his miracles down, you could make a granth of it".
I shuddered a little. The last time somebody wrote his own miracles down and made a granth of it, he went to jail, survived a stabbing and a bombing, and continues to ride in a jeep with a machine gun mounted on top.
The satsang is also called a 'majlis'. And at this majlis, thousands press into each other on one side, a high chair awaits, on the other. Sevaks fan the rest with large, hand-held pankhaas. A hush, the security men arrive, a green screen with tinsels rolls down, behind the high chair, and Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh occupies it. A clutch of musicians break into song.
A qawwali by Baal Mukesh Insaan.
The announcer insists that the qawwali is a bhajan.
The waiting crowds erupt into 'balle balle'.
The singer sings - "Tera andaaz zamaane se judaa dikhtaa hai... Dekhne walo.n ne yahaan dekha hai... sir farishto.n ka yahaan jhukaa miltaa hai... dhoondne walo.n ko is dar pe khudaa miltaa hai."
The living Guru.
The women do not get up to dance. Their men do. Their children do. The women say they are longing to dance, oh, they can barely restrain themselves... but they will not. They have their 'maryaada'.
Another bhajan.
'Satguru ke darshan paao ji, dil ki pyaas bujhaao ji'.... sung to the tune of the popular song 'ye desh hai veer jawano.n ka'
And right through his sermon, Baba Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh refers to intoxication and 'nashaa' and how terrible it is, and isn't that why you're here? To quit? Every fifth sentence is about addiction and 'nashaa'.
Little roars of approval and acquiescence from the crowd.
Just before the jaam-e-insaan program, an announcement - the media must leave. All journalists, all cameras. Please leave.
I left.
And then I went on to visit other deras.
Overheard, on the road. Anonymous comments about the Dera Sacha Sauda:
- This man is only capitalizing on the Dalit need for dignity
- 'Jaam', talk and de-addiction.... I can bet that on the inside, he's offering all the nashaa himself. These people need to be raided. Chhape padne chahiye.
- Ye Sikhi ko tod raha hai.
- Premi... why not? Still a Sikh. Still Akali.
- This man has no social relevance. Just a self-serving quest for power and money.
- Don't we know we are all human? Why this need for 'insaan'?
- What's in Sirsa? Why do you want to go there? It is not worth your time.
- Abstinence. That's what they call 'good moral support'.
- Did you see all the high-tech? Live recordings were happening and on the internet, these sevaks will show it to people online, through yahoo messenger. I saw it myself.
Basic things one should know about Dera Sacha Sauda (since it looks like the controversy won't die an easy death) and deras in general (though I must warn you that most of this is based on hearsay, i.e., what various people have told me. Some are academics, some journalists, some followers, some policemen.)
- Deras were different, fifty years ago. They were small mazaars or ashrams or huts or any place where a holy man or preacher has decided to live, and where his followers sought him out. It literally meant 'a place to stay/halt'.
- A 'dera' can be headed by a 'baba' or 'sadhu' or 'fakir' of any religion denomination, though there are very few Muslim peers left in Punjab. Some Sufi deras remain, and remain fairly popular. There are many sects in Sikhism, and almost all have some form of representative dera. In fact, gurudwaras are a fairly recent phenomenon in Punjab, and especially in the Doaba belt of Punjab. For instance, many villages have a dera called 'Lakha.n da daata'. This may have a statue of 'Bhairav' (or 'Pairao.n', as they say, in Punjab) outside it. The Lakh Data was supposed to be Sheikh Makhdoom Ali Hazbiri, or so I am told, and there is a significant mazaar to him in Lahore, Daataganj Baksh.
- According to a Punjabi newspaper, Desh Sewak, there are 9000 Deras, spread across 12000 villages. At least.
- Originally, few deras had 'branches'. When a follower was ready to become a guru himself, he usually wandered off, and set up his own thing. This has changed. According to official sources, Sacha Sauda has 25 branches in Punjab, Divya Jyti Jagran (headed by Baba Ashutosh) has 13, Radhasoami Satsang has 23, Namdharis have 13. They may call themselves 'ashram' or 'satsang ghar' or 'gurdwara' or whatever, but the common man refers to them all as 'deras'.
- Sacha Sauda is headquartered in Sirsa district, Haryana. Sirsa is also where the other major dera, the Radhasoami satsang, is headquartered.
- There are two buildings for Sacha Sauda dera. The newer one is where the current chief, Baba Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh lives and usually preaches, twice a day.
- It was set up (around 1948) by Mastana Baba Baloochistani who was a disciple of Beparwah Shah. According to legend, Shah sent Mastana to take care of the spiritual health of the 'bangdi' people, who lived along the Haryana-Punjab-Rajasthan borders.
- Mastana Baba lived in a cave and refused to take money or donations. It is said that he (and some of his supporters) used to dig for a living - I assume, at construction sites - and he would actually give money to the desperately poor. The current guru's residence is still called a 'gufa', or cave, though it can't be anything like one, by the looks of it. (Wasn't allowed to see it up close).
- The role of chief/head of a dera is referred to as a 'gaddi'. Chair or throne. The head is called the 'gaddi-nasheen'.
- The passing on of spiritual power was traditionally called 'ilaahi baksheesh'.
- Dera Sacha Sauda claims that there are no fixed rules or rituals. No covering of head - though most women I saw did cover their heads. No taking off of slippers or taking of ritual baths.
- The bulk of the income of the dera, so the spokesperson says, comes from land. Initially, a small plot was created as a kitchen garden. The followers would colect dung from the roadside and sell it, or use it. Over the years, about 700 acres or more have been acquired. The spokesperson says that it was uneven, barren land. Some of it was dug up and the soil used for brick-making. Later, the land was evened out, and the soil tested by local agricultural scientists. By switching to organic farming, input cost was brought down to the minimum. Returns went up three times. Orchards were inter-cropped with aloe vera. Etc etc.
Since agriculture is not taxed.... they've got plenty of money.
The Dera spokesperson said (I'm only quoting) "We have stopped asking for money in the name of God. That is the highest form of corruption. This hypothetical entity does not depend on us for monetary support."
- The jaam-e-insaan ceremony comprises of large vats of rooh-afza mixed with milk. Followers drink that, swear to follow the 47 rules set down by the guru, drop their surnames and add 'Insaan' as a suffix.
- The spokespeople insist that no conversion takes place. However, the ceremony seems to be shaped along the lines of a conversion ritual. Nobody is asked to renounce their own religion. But people are asked to swear by a new code of living, adopt a new name, and drink a sip of the 'jaam', which is similar to rituals involving holy water, amrit, etcetera.
- There are 47 rules (including one forbidding abortion) but three main rules: an oath to give up all intoxicants, including alcohol; turning turn vegetarian and (I quote) 'good character'.
- Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh belongs to Pilibanga, district Sriganganagar. He was originally Gurmeet Singh. It is said that he started visiting this dera since he was about five years old. He was given the gaddi on 23 September, 1990. His followers call him guru-ji, maharaj, or 'pita-ji'.
- There are 40-45 ashrams, spread across several states, that are affiliated to this dera. The chief baba alone can hold a 'satsang' but there are bhajan-kirtans at all and the 'sevaadars' or 'sevaks' can read out his sermons.
- To be part of the jaam-e-insaan ceremony, you have to fill a form in advance, with a biodata and a photo. So, I was told. But there were masses of people waiting in long queues, to receive the jaam, when I'd visited; most were uneducated, and had probably never heard of 'bio-data'.
- In Jagmalwali village, tehsil Dabwali, also in Sirsa, there is another branch of the Dera Sacha Sauda. It was set up by Gurbakht Singh, now dead, when he was not chosen to take over the gaddi.
- There are people who allege that they have been loved from their lands by force. There was a small protest between 1993 and 1995, old-timers recall.
- The Dera chief has also been accused of having a hand in the murder of journalist Ram Chandra Chatrapati, who headed a paper called, believe it or not, Poora Sach.
Security was very tight. At the entrance to the Dera Sacha Sauda in Sirsa, I was subjected to a security check more stringent than I've seen anywhere else, including at airports or the Secretariat or ministers' offices. Three times, groups of women stopped me, ran their hands over me, including my ankles, the small of my back, and my neck, lifting my hair to look under it. Each object in my purse was taken out, opened, pressed, snapped shut, put back. My mobile phone was switched off, and on.
At most of the other deras I visited, there were similar security measures but none as diligent as this. And nowhere else were the women so firmly, politely, unyielding while conducting the security checks. Even long-term followers were subjected to security checks.
Outside the building, there are rows of frightening photographs and posters of oral and throat cancer. Not delicate, no.
And inside, one of the followers tells me, "We go everywhere. To Gujarat, during the earthquake. To Tamil Nadu, after the Tsunami. Floods in Bihar. Our guruji even went to Kotra, to meet the tribals. You should have seen them. They were violent people. Mahua drinkers. Unclean, Naked. They threw stones at us, but we kept talking to them. We gave them food.... and love, of course. Such violent people, they even shot arrows at birds! We taught them to give up bad habits, take to farming and weaving."
I took notes to avoid having to look at him while he talked. Tribals... who could aim at a bird in flight... given food. Later, I attended the satsang. There must have been ten thousand people there. A woman sevak told me that this guru performs miracles. He can cure cancer with kharboozaa (melons). "If you write all his miracles down, you could make a granth of it".
I shuddered a little. The last time somebody wrote his own miracles down and made a granth of it, he went to jail, survived a stabbing and a bombing, and continues to ride in a jeep with a machine gun mounted on top.
The satsang is also called a 'majlis'. And at this majlis, thousands press into each other on one side, a high chair awaits, on the other. Sevaks fan the rest with large, hand-held pankhaas. A hush, the security men arrive, a green screen with tinsels rolls down, behind the high chair, and Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh occupies it. A clutch of musicians break into song.
A qawwali by Baal Mukesh Insaan.
The announcer insists that the qawwali is a bhajan.
The waiting crowds erupt into 'balle balle'.
The singer sings - "Tera andaaz zamaane se judaa dikhtaa hai... Dekhne walo.n ne yahaan dekha hai... sir farishto.n ka yahaan jhukaa miltaa hai... dhoondne walo.n ko is dar pe khudaa miltaa hai."
The living Guru.
The women do not get up to dance. Their men do. Their children do. The women say they are longing to dance, oh, they can barely restrain themselves... but they will not. They have their 'maryaada'.
Another bhajan.
'Satguru ke darshan paao ji, dil ki pyaas bujhaao ji'.... sung to the tune of the popular song 'ye desh hai veer jawano.n ka'
And right through his sermon, Baba Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh refers to intoxication and 'nashaa' and how terrible it is, and isn't that why you're here? To quit? Every fifth sentence is about addiction and 'nashaa'.
Little roars of approval and acquiescence from the crowd.
Just before the jaam-e-insaan program, an announcement - the media must leave. All journalists, all cameras. Please leave.
I left.
And then I went on to visit other deras.
Overheard, on the road. Anonymous comments about the Dera Sacha Sauda:
- This man is only capitalizing on the Dalit need for dignity
- 'Jaam', talk and de-addiction.... I can bet that on the inside, he's offering all the nashaa himself. These people need to be raided. Chhape padne chahiye.
- Ye Sikhi ko tod raha hai.
- Premi... why not? Still a Sikh. Still Akali.
- This man has no social relevance. Just a self-serving quest for power and money.
- Don't we know we are all human? Why this need for 'insaan'?
- What's in Sirsa? Why do you want to go there? It is not worth your time.
- Abstinence. That's what they call 'good moral support'.
- Did you see all the high-tech? Live recordings were happening and on the internet, these sevaks will show it to people online, through yahoo messenger. I saw it myself.
Basic things one should know about Dera Sacha Sauda (since it looks like the controversy won't die an easy death) and deras in general (though I must warn you that most of this is based on hearsay, i.e., what various people have told me. Some are academics, some journalists, some followers, some policemen.)
- Deras were different, fifty years ago. They were small mazaars or ashrams or huts or any place where a holy man or preacher has decided to live, and where his followers sought him out. It literally meant 'a place to stay/halt'.
- A 'dera' can be headed by a 'baba' or 'sadhu' or 'fakir' of any religion denomination, though there are very few Muslim peers left in Punjab. Some Sufi deras remain, and remain fairly popular. There are many sects in Sikhism, and almost all have some form of representative dera. In fact, gurudwaras are a fairly recent phenomenon in Punjab, and especially in the Doaba belt of Punjab. For instance, many villages have a dera called 'Lakha.n da daata'. This may have a statue of 'Bhairav' (or 'Pairao.n', as they say, in Punjab) outside it. The Lakh Data was supposed to be Sheikh Makhdoom Ali Hazbiri, or so I am told, and there is a significant mazaar to him in Lahore, Daataganj Baksh.
- According to a Punjabi newspaper, Desh Sewak, there are 9000 Deras, spread across 12000 villages. At least.
- Originally, few deras had 'branches'. When a follower was ready to become a guru himself, he usually wandered off, and set up his own thing. This has changed. According to official sources, Sacha Sauda has 25 branches in Punjab, Divya Jyti Jagran (headed by Baba Ashutosh) has 13, Radhasoami Satsang has 23, Namdharis have 13. They may call themselves 'ashram' or 'satsang ghar' or 'gurdwara' or whatever, but the common man refers to them all as 'deras'.
- Sacha Sauda is headquartered in Sirsa district, Haryana. Sirsa is also where the other major dera, the Radhasoami satsang, is headquartered.
- There are two buildings for Sacha Sauda dera. The newer one is where the current chief, Baba Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh lives and usually preaches, twice a day.
- It was set up (around 1948) by Mastana Baba Baloochistani who was a disciple of Beparwah Shah. According to legend, Shah sent Mastana to take care of the spiritual health of the 'bangdi' people, who lived along the Haryana-Punjab-Rajasthan borders.
- Mastana Baba lived in a cave and refused to take money or donations. It is said that he (and some of his supporters) used to dig for a living - I assume, at construction sites - and he would actually give money to the desperately poor. The current guru's residence is still called a 'gufa', or cave, though it can't be anything like one, by the looks of it. (Wasn't allowed to see it up close).
- The role of chief/head of a dera is referred to as a 'gaddi'. Chair or throne. The head is called the 'gaddi-nasheen'.
- The passing on of spiritual power was traditionally called 'ilaahi baksheesh'.
- Dera Sacha Sauda claims that there are no fixed rules or rituals. No covering of head - though most women I saw did cover their heads. No taking off of slippers or taking of ritual baths.
- The bulk of the income of the dera, so the spokesperson says, comes from land. Initially, a small plot was created as a kitchen garden. The followers would colect dung from the roadside and sell it, or use it. Over the years, about 700 acres or more have been acquired. The spokesperson says that it was uneven, barren land. Some of it was dug up and the soil used for brick-making. Later, the land was evened out, and the soil tested by local agricultural scientists. By switching to organic farming, input cost was brought down to the minimum. Returns went up three times. Orchards were inter-cropped with aloe vera. Etc etc.
Since agriculture is not taxed.... they've got plenty of money.
The Dera spokesperson said (I'm only quoting) "We have stopped asking for money in the name of God. That is the highest form of corruption. This hypothetical entity does not depend on us for monetary support."
- The jaam-e-insaan ceremony comprises of large vats of rooh-afza mixed with milk. Followers drink that, swear to follow the 47 rules set down by the guru, drop their surnames and add 'Insaan' as a suffix.
- The spokespeople insist that no conversion takes place. However, the ceremony seems to be shaped along the lines of a conversion ritual. Nobody is asked to renounce their own religion. But people are asked to swear by a new code of living, adopt a new name, and drink a sip of the 'jaam', which is similar to rituals involving holy water, amrit, etcetera.
- There are 47 rules (including one forbidding abortion) but three main rules: an oath to give up all intoxicants, including alcohol; turning turn vegetarian and (I quote) 'good character'.
- Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh belongs to Pilibanga, district Sriganganagar. He was originally Gurmeet Singh. It is said that he started visiting this dera since he was about five years old. He was given the gaddi on 23 September, 1990. His followers call him guru-ji, maharaj, or 'pita-ji'.
- There are 40-45 ashrams, spread across several states, that are affiliated to this dera. The chief baba alone can hold a 'satsang' but there are bhajan-kirtans at all and the 'sevaadars' or 'sevaks' can read out his sermons.
- To be part of the jaam-e-insaan ceremony, you have to fill a form in advance, with a biodata and a photo. So, I was told. But there were masses of people waiting in long queues, to receive the jaam, when I'd visited; most were uneducated, and had probably never heard of 'bio-data'.
- In Jagmalwali village, tehsil Dabwali, also in Sirsa, there is another branch of the Dera Sacha Sauda. It was set up by Gurbakht Singh, now dead, when he was not chosen to take over the gaddi.
- There are people who allege that they have been loved from their lands by force. There was a small protest between 1993 and 1995, old-timers recall.
- The Dera chief has also been accused of having a hand in the murder of journalist Ram Chandra Chatrapati, who headed a paper called, believe it or not, Poora Sach.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
chulha te manji
In Punjab, there is a village called Ajitwal.
In Ajitwal, there is a family of farmers. They probably have roots in UP, but have been here for three or four generations and can only speak Punjabi, cook Punjabi, worry and laugh Punjabi.
One son-husband-father-farmer. He is bathing when I enter the house. The door is wide open, and he squats, in his underclothes, in a small bathroom. The door is shut after my arrival.
One old woman. The mother-grandmother-greatgrandmother who cannot hear, cannot speak even a little Hindi, speaks incessantly and makes dahi-lassi for breakfast.
One middle-aged woman. Fine wrinkles, a slow smile and incessantly busy hands that move, nevertheless, with a steady, noiseless rhythm. She works all the time and when you look at her, and she turns to look back at you and smiles a quiet smile, the work seems to fall away... somewhere. Where? Just off the edge of the your eye; just off the sides of her fingertips; just along the curved lines of her rubber slippers. She calls me Guddi. When I leave the house, she is the one who reaches out to embrace me. A tight, close embrace. Only my own mother has ever held me this close, this hard. It is the embrace of bone and blood and it is not afraid of civilization.
One young woman. Thin. Oh, so thin! A mother of two young children who race about, nervous at my newness. The 'noo' of the household. She too is incessantly busy. But harried-busy. So visibly busy with work that she herself seems invisible. When she pumps at the hand-pump, the cranking seems louder than the clink of her glass bangles. When she scrubs the dirty dishes, the very streaks of crusting daal seem to be letting out a slow moan. While she is utterly, utterly silent. Meeting my eyes with a quick smile, a too-wide smile behind which presses the urgency to get something else done. Quickly, once, she whispers, she never could go to college. They got her married after high school. I had not asked her.
Another young woman. Pleasantly plump. A full body. Fair. A loose, fat braid of pale-brown. The unmarried daughter of the house. It is she towards whom I am gently pushed. As if we belong together. It is she who leads me to the manji, sits cautiously at the other end and whispers - 'are you married?'
It is she who draws me into an inner room, to sit on a softer, modern bed, to whisper more questions - where? how? until when? how much? alone? mummy? daddy? why not?
And to whisper about her fiance - a student still, who lives with an aunt, who belongs to a village in Haryana. She too lived with an aunt in a slightly larger village, almost a town, until the year before. She went to college there. Here, in the village, she does nothing. She's done some crafts and embroidery courses, but she is not encouraged to practice any of it here. She says, her daddy says - 'do what you want, when you go to your own home'.
Her own home. I ask her - 'what's the village called? where your own home will be?'
She doesn't know. And suddenly, she clams up, and doesn't speak to me again, until after dinner.
Her mother, the tall one, the older 'noo' who is now the quietly confident mistress of the house, beckons me. Asks me what I will eat. I shrug - anything, whatever you're eating.
But they have already eaten. They eat before sundown. The chulha is lit for me again. An open-air chulha fed with dry twigs. The smoke rises. The children gain courage. They dance around me. The little girl is dressed almost exactly like her older brother. She tugs at the hem of my kurta and runs away. Returns. Tugs at my dupatta. Runs away. Her brother follows suit.
Their greatgrandmother calls them. Takes the little one into her lap - 'Tell her a poem. Sing her a song.' They coax. The little one is suddenly shy, near tears. She looks victimized. I look away.
Their young mother is invisibly there, somewhere. Her shadow lurks near the kitchen.
The mother of the house is rolling out roti again, the daughter is taking them out of a warm tandoor. They feed me. They do not let me wash my own plate.
Later, a row of manjis are laid out under the open sky. A whirring stand-up fan is placed near my bed.
And just when I am about to lie down, the mother and daughter beckon. I follow them out. Their brother-son is at the gate, carrying one of his children. We walk a few houses away, in complete starlit silence. A large metal gate. A few knocks and calls. A smaller door opens within the large gates. We stoop to enter.
A cousin. Full-ish. Smiling. Another mother, tall-ish, rushing about to get milk. Four times, I have turned down offers of warm milk this night. But here, it is handed to me. Protests fall on smiling, deaf ears. Milk.
This young girl sews. Fabric is strewn all around a machine. Her mother feels my kurta - 'Cotton... is it?', and she sounds disappointed. They all wear soft , printed cottons. I wear the loose kurti of an old woman. The young ones all wear them tight.
The younger girls pull me away, take me to a small barsati at the top of the house, onto a balcony. The cool night air. Again, the whispered questions - where? alone? why? why not? man? can't you find?
I smile a lot. Shake my head a lot. They giggle a little. We descend when the questions are done.
The engaged girl has brought along a letter. It is from her fiance. Addressed to the whole family, not to her. She is a passing reference, respectfully regarded in the last paragraph. Her cousin reads it. Her cousin's mother reads it. Her own mother glances at it. She's already read it.
I finish the milk. We step out into the silence. Back on the eerie dirt road. Only a few houses, but such utter loneliness. Back into a small door cut into large metal gates.
The man of the house is half-asleep. He sits up. We all gather round to talk of water, of fields, and deep, deepening dryness. Of salinity and pumps. The baggy bleakness of his eyes. The shifting silence on the wrists of the women. Greatgrandmother, grandmother-wife, wife-mother, daughter. Printed cotton, so still in the soft folds of patiala shalwars.
The fan whirrs. I lie down next to the engaged girl, unfold a rough sheet.
The stars are such medicine.
Dreams are as cold, village wells.
Dawn breaks to the chink of glass bangles.
In Ajitwal, there is a family of farmers. They probably have roots in UP, but have been here for three or four generations and can only speak Punjabi, cook Punjabi, worry and laugh Punjabi.
One son-husband-father-farmer. He is bathing when I enter the house. The door is wide open, and he squats, in his underclothes, in a small bathroom. The door is shut after my arrival.
One old woman. The mother-grandmother-greatgrandmo
One middle-aged woman. Fine wrinkles, a slow smile and incessantly busy hands that move, nevertheless, with a steady, noiseless rhythm. She works all the time and when you look at her, and she turns to look back at you and smiles a quiet smile, the work seems to fall away... somewhere. Where? Just off the edge of the your eye; just off the sides of her fingertips; just along the curved lines of her rubber slippers. She calls me Guddi. When I leave the house, she is the one who reaches out to embrace me. A tight, close embrace. Only my own mother has ever held me this close, this hard. It is the embrace of bone and blood and it is not afraid of civilization.
One young woman. Thin. Oh, so thin! A mother of two young children who race about, nervous at my newness. The 'noo' of the household. She too is incessantly busy. But harried-busy. So visibly busy with work that she herself seems invisible. When she pumps at the hand-pump, the cranking seems louder than the clink of her glass bangles. When she scrubs the dirty dishes, the very streaks of crusting daal seem to be letting out a slow moan. While she is utterly, utterly silent. Meeting my eyes with a quick smile, a too-wide smile behind which presses the urgency to get something else done. Quickly, once, she whispers, she never could go to college. They got her married after high school. I had not asked her.
Another young woman. Pleasantly plump. A full body. Fair. A loose, fat braid of pale-brown. The unmarried daughter of the house. It is she towards whom I am gently pushed. As if we belong together. It is she who leads me to the manji, sits cautiously at the other end and whispers - 'are you married?'
It is she who draws me into an inner room, to sit on a softer, modern bed, to whisper more questions - where? how? until when? how much? alone? mummy? daddy? why not?
And to whisper about her fiance - a student still, who lives with an aunt, who belongs to a village in Haryana. She too lived with an aunt in a slightly larger village, almost a town, until the year before. She went to college there. Here, in the village, she does nothing. She's done some crafts and embroidery courses, but she is not encouraged to practice any of it here. She says, her daddy says - 'do what you want, when you go to your own home'.
Her own home. I ask her - 'what's the village called? where your own home will be?'
She doesn't know. And suddenly, she clams up, and doesn't speak to me again, until after dinner.
Her mother, the tall one, the older 'noo' who is now the quietly confident mistress of the house, beckons me. Asks me what I will eat. I shrug - anything, whatever you're eating.
But they have already eaten. They eat before sundown. The chulha is lit for me again. An open-air chulha fed with dry twigs. The smoke rises. The children gain courage. They dance around me. The little girl is dressed almost exactly like her older brother. She tugs at the hem of my kurta and runs away. Returns. Tugs at my dupatta. Runs away. Her brother follows suit.
Their greatgrandmother calls them. Takes the little one into her lap - 'Tell her a poem. Sing her a song.' They coax. The little one is suddenly shy, near tears. She looks victimized. I look away.
Their young mother is invisibly there, somewhere. Her shadow lurks near the kitchen.
The mother of the house is rolling out roti again, the daughter is taking them out of a warm tandoor. They feed me. They do not let me wash my own plate.
Later, a row of manjis are laid out under the open sky. A whirring stand-up fan is placed near my bed.
And just when I am about to lie down, the mother and daughter beckon. I follow them out. Their brother-son is at the gate, carrying one of his children. We walk a few houses away, in complete starlit silence. A large metal gate. A few knocks and calls. A smaller door opens within the large gates. We stoop to enter.
A cousin. Full-ish. Smiling. Another mother, tall-ish, rushing about to get milk. Four times, I have turned down offers of warm milk this night. But here, it is handed to me. Protests fall on smiling, deaf ears. Milk.
This young girl sews. Fabric is strewn all around a machine. Her mother feels my kurta - 'Cotton... is it?', and she sounds disappointed. They all wear soft , printed cottons. I wear the loose kurti of an old woman. The young ones all wear them tight.
The younger girls pull me away, take me to a small barsati at the top of the house, onto a balcony. The cool night air. Again, the whispered questions - where? alone? why? why not? man? can't you find?
I smile a lot. Shake my head a lot. They giggle a little. We descend when the questions are done.
The engaged girl has brought along a letter. It is from her fiance. Addressed to the whole family, not to her. She is a passing reference, respectfully regarded in the last paragraph. Her cousin reads it. Her cousin's mother reads it. Her own mother glances at it. She's already read it.
I finish the milk. We step out into the silence. Back on the eerie dirt road. Only a few houses, but such utter loneliness. Back into a small door cut into large metal gates.
The man of the house is half-asleep. He sits up. We all gather round to talk of water, of fields, and deep, deepening dryness. Of salinity and pumps. The baggy bleakness of his eyes. The shifting silence on the wrists of the women. Greatgrandmother, grandmother-wife, wife-mother, daughter. Printed cotton, so still in the soft folds of patiala shalwars.
The fan whirrs. I lie down next to the engaged girl, unfold a rough sheet.
The stars are such medicine.
Dreams are as cold, village wells.
Dawn breaks to the chink of glass bangles.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Peace Talk
Came across this poem by Kunwar Narayan. Am not going to attempt a translation because this poem works primarily (for me) phonetically. It has to be read in Hindi, preferably read aloud. Please note that 'gun' in the first verse is the English word 'gun'.
Shanti Varta (Peace Talks)
- Kunwar Narayan
Allaho Akbar
Vintee hai bhagwan
Agar do to anu-bam
Na ye gun, na vo gun
Brahmastra daanam
Rocket mahaanam
Mahashoonya khaddam
Samajh gadd maddham
Ladaaku vimaanam
Na annam na vastram
Karein shaastra charcha
Magar hod shastram
Halaahal pachaye
Magar munh pe kheesam
Karein shanti vaarta
Magar daant peesam
Puraanam quraanam
Sabhi ko pranamam
Na saakhi na sabdam
Mahayudh tthaanam
Isa na islam
Marxam na buddham
Na mazhab na dhammam
Param satya yuddham
Parmanu bam bam
Tum tum na hum hum
Mitaane au mitna mein
Hum kum na tum kum
Na paschim na poorvam
Nakaaram bhavishyam
Visphot safalam
Niraakar vishwam!
Those who are more familiar with both languages, and better equipped than I am, are welcome to translate it.
Shanti Varta (Peace Talks)
- Kunwar Narayan
Allaho Akbar
Vintee hai bhagwan
Agar do to anu-bam
Na ye gun, na vo gun
Brahmastra daanam
Rocket mahaanam
Mahashoonya khaddam
Samajh gadd maddham
Ladaaku vimaanam
Na annam na vastram
Karein shaastra charcha
Magar hod shastram
Halaahal pachaye
Magar munh pe kheesam
Karein shanti vaarta
Magar daant peesam
Puraanam quraanam
Sabhi ko pranamam
Na saakhi na sabdam
Mahayudh tthaanam
Isa na islam
Marxam na buddham
Na mazhab na dhammam
Param satya yuddham
Parmanu bam bam
Tum tum na hum hum
Mitaane au mitna mein
Hum kum na tum kum
Na paschim na poorvam
Nakaaram bhavishyam
Visphot safalam
Niraakar vishwam!
Those who are more familiar with both languages, and better equipped than I am, are welcome to translate it.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
The spin and reel of it
I sometimes wonder whether some of us (film reviewers especially) are losing the ability to be entertained. Or whether we like to set ourselves up as tough customers, who put up intellectual barriers between our minds and a movie, where having fun is not a virtue unto itself. What else could explain the negative/wishy-washy/pursed-lip reviews that Jhoom Barabar Jhoom has been getting?
Is it because we no longer enter a theatre with a little skip in our pulse, and when the lights go dim, our hearts do not thud with the anticipation of being whisked off into a different world? Is it because 'real' can only be equated with dark, gritty, gory, violent, depressing? Is it because we ourselves have lost faith in the power of fantasy, and we no longer believe in simple premises like girl-meets-boy-at-a-railway-station?
Or was it because some of us are so alienated from our own cultural contexts, that we just do not get the 'reality' of this fantasy? A fantasy in which ordinary people tell lies, not necessarily to get out of trouble, but also because those lies are their dreams. Dreams in which your lover is rich, foreign, exotic. And willing to marry you. Dreams in which you acknowledge your hard-headedness, your greed, your crookedness, even your self-defeating racism.
Is it that a whole generation has grown up without those classic, allovertheplace, Bollywood films that this film is contantly referencing? Do they not understand the slightly accented Punjabi peppering most of the dilogue? Do they not hear their mothers talking, when the mothers in the film talk? Do they not hear their own happy, romantic subconciouses tumbling towards the inevitable happy, romantic climax?
I, of course, loved Jhoom Barabar Jhoom. Saw it last night and could see it again tonight, if only movie-watching was not so expensive. If only I had the option of a third-rate theatre where tickets cost Rs 12, or even Rs 25, and the cold-drink man comes 'cold-ddrrrrink' clinking glass bottles with the metal opener during the intermission... If only, I could go see it again and again, every weekend for the next month.
Lest it appear as if I'm saying that 'it's a Hindi movie, so why not leave your brains outside the theatre', I'm not! This is actually a fairly intelligent movie. Not only does it experiment with the story within a story mould (which many people have done before in different ways, and of which Roshomon is the most obvious, most famous example), it also seeks to tweak the mould. I don't think we have seen this particular format of storytelling in mainstream Bollywood, so far. Nor have we seen a single theme song being used so cleverly, so successfully, so constantly in any other film. It is terribly hard to listen to the same song - high on beat and lyrics, low on quiet melodiousness - for half an hour or more. But here, the audience is begging for more of the same, because it never is quite exactly the same.
What's more, the filmmaker Shaad Ali has his finger on the pulse of the people. Not the whole nation; I don't mean that he's familiar with, or bringing to life, each class and caste in each corner of our very diverse counry, but he's very definitely got a grip on one vein - that of the aspiring, small-town Indian, who may not be hungry for food but is hungry for love and adventure and exotica and money and bigger, wider canvases. This was very evident in Bunty Aur Bubli (beautifully summed up in the song - chote chote shehro.n se, khaali bhor-dupahro.n se, hum to jhola uthaa ke chale), and to a smaller degree, in Saathiya (two subtly poignant scenes are stamped upon my memory - one is when Rani Mukherjee's family is sitting down in the evening, playing cards; her father is drinking alcohol, the mother and sisters are drinking tea. The other is the scene in which Rani wants to hug her husband in the film, after a hard day at work, and he is embarassed because she's doing so in the balcony, with other peole looking on; her resentment and frustration is a remarkably fine mix of just about everything in that frame, that moment, that life.) In Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, Shaad Ali has taken one step further, and opened the door between the audience's fantasy and that of his characters. For instance, there is an obvious reference to Punjabi illegals (immigrants) in the UK, and this was all the more delicious for me, because I have covered that story, and know just how big that aspiration - and that racket - is, and what a huge deal it is, to have made it from Punjabi Indian or Pakistani, to British Citizen.
Speaking of characters, all are well-sketched, well-cast. All four of the major roles are meaty in their own right. Of course, they're stereotypical too. But the beauty of it is that, because they're a fantasy, because they are and are not themselves, they have the scope for stereotypical, overthetop representation.
For those who like to read stuff in lists and boxes, for the following reasons, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom is immensely enjoyable:
1] The title came to the screen studded, as if with little fake diamonds.
2] Abhishek Bacchan's mobile phone's ring tone. It goes 'Ae Handsome! Ae Handsome!'
3] Hearing Lara Dutta abuse - like a good, authentic desi. The scene where Preity Zinta attempts an impromptu slanging contest with Dutta is particularly, er, endearing.
4] The guy playing Abhishek's friend-mentor, Hafiz Bhai. His tone, his diction, his dialogues, his expressions are priceless. (what's his name?)
5] Amitabh Bacchan is NOT playing sutradhaar, again.
6] It's funny. I was laughing out loud every five minutes.
7] The boys' costumes are to die for. The women's clothes are nice too, but to see silk and colour and glitter on men, for a change, is such joy.
8] The theme song (and dance) grows on you, and it assumes a special growth curve when you 'see' it. Listening to it is just not the same thing. Once you've seen it on the big screen, the song somehow slips into your blood and throbs there, willing you to get up and jhoom-o-fy.
9] Bobby Deol as he is in the second half.
10] The sizeable flirty young desi girl, with the spectacles stuck in her cleavage, and her Punjabi invocation of mum's advice.
11] The Mr and Ms Southall contest.
If anybody hasn't yet, go watch it. And if you've been to see it, and didn't like it... oh, forget it. Go see Roshomon.
Footnote: I hadn't been keen on film initially. The half-wit print interviews with the stars of the film had a lot to do with that, I suspect. None of the fun, none of the spirit, none of the cheek with which the film was made shines through.
UPDATE: Saw it once again! Yay!
UPDATE 2: Saw it once yet again!
Is it because we no longer enter a theatre with a little skip in our pulse, and when the lights go dim, our hearts do not thud with the anticipation of being whisked off into a different world? Is it because 'real' can only be equated with dark, gritty, gory, violent, depressing? Is it because we ourselves have lost faith in the power of fantasy, and we no longer believe in simple premises like girl-meets-boy-at-a-railway-station?
Or was it because some of us are so alienated from our own cultural contexts, that we just do not get the 'reality' of this fantasy? A fantasy in which ordinary people tell lies, not necessarily to get out of trouble, but also because those lies are their dreams. Dreams in which your lover is rich, foreign, exotic. And willing to marry you. Dreams in which you acknowledge your hard-headedness, your greed, your crookedness, even your self-defeating racism.
Is it that a whole generation has grown up without those classic, allovertheplace, Bollywood films that this film is contantly referencing? Do they not understand the slightly accented Punjabi peppering most of the dilogue? Do they not hear their mothers talking, when the mothers in the film talk? Do they not hear their own happy, romantic subconciouses tumbling towards the inevitable happy, romantic climax?
I, of course, loved Jhoom Barabar Jhoom. Saw it last night and could see it again tonight, if only movie-watching was not so expensive. If only I had the option of a third-rate theatre where tickets cost Rs 12, or even Rs 25, and the cold-drink man comes 'cold-ddrrrrink' clinking glass bottles with the metal opener during the intermission... If only, I could go see it again and again, every weekend for the next month.
Lest it appear as if I'm saying that 'it's a Hindi movie, so why not leave your brains outside the theatre', I'm not! This is actually a fairly intelligent movie. Not only does it experiment with the story within a story mould (which many people have done before in different ways, and of which Roshomon is the most obvious, most famous example), it also seeks to tweak the mould. I don't think we have seen this particular format of storytelling in mainstream Bollywood, so far. Nor have we seen a single theme song being used so cleverly, so successfully, so constantly in any other film. It is terribly hard to listen to the same song - high on beat and lyrics, low on quiet melodiousness - for half an hour or more. But here, the audience is begging for more of the same, because it never is quite exactly the same.
What's more, the filmmaker Shaad Ali has his finger on the pulse of the people. Not the whole nation; I don't mean that he's familiar with, or bringing to life, each class and caste in each corner of our very diverse counry, but he's very definitely got a grip on one vein - that of the aspiring, small-town Indian, who may not be hungry for food but is hungry for love and adventure and exotica and money and bigger, wider canvases. This was very evident in Bunty Aur Bubli (beautifully summed up in the song - chote chote shehro.n se, khaali bhor-dupahro.n se, hum to jhola uthaa ke chale), and to a smaller degree, in Saathiya (two subtly poignant scenes are stamped upon my memory - one is when Rani Mukherjee's family is sitting down in the evening, playing cards; her father is drinking alcohol, the mother and sisters are drinking tea. The other is the scene in which Rani wants to hug her husband in the film, after a hard day at work, and he is embarassed because she's doing so in the balcony, with other peole looking on; her resentment and frustration is a remarkably fine mix of just about everything in that frame, that moment, that life.) In Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, Shaad Ali has taken one step further, and opened the door between the audience's fantasy and that of his characters. For instance, there is an obvious reference to Punjabi illegals (immigrants) in the UK, and this was all the more delicious for me, because I have covered that story, and know just how big that aspiration - and that racket - is, and what a huge deal it is, to have made it from Punjabi Indian or Pakistani, to British Citizen.
Speaking of characters, all are well-sketched, well-cast. All four of the major roles are meaty in their own right. Of course, they're stereotypical too. But the beauty of it is that, because they're a fantasy, because they are and are not themselves, they have the scope for stereotypical, overthetop representation.
For those who like to read stuff in lists and boxes, for the following reasons, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom is immensely enjoyable:
1] The title came to the screen studded, as if with little fake diamonds.
2] Abhishek Bacchan's mobile phone's ring tone. It goes 'Ae Handsome! Ae Handsome!'
3] Hearing Lara Dutta abuse - like a good, authentic desi. The scene where Preity Zinta attempts an impromptu slanging contest with Dutta is particularly, er, endearing.
4] The guy playing Abhishek's friend-mentor, Hafiz Bhai. His tone, his diction, his dialogues, his expressions are priceless. (what's his name?)
5] Amitabh Bacchan is NOT playing sutradhaar, again.
6] It's funny. I was laughing out loud every five minutes.
7] The boys' costumes are to die for. The women's clothes are nice too, but to see silk and colour and glitter on men, for a change, is such joy.
8] The theme song (and dance) grows on you, and it assumes a special growth curve when you 'see' it. Listening to it is just not the same thing. Once you've seen it on the big screen, the song somehow slips into your blood and throbs there, willing you to get up and jhoom-o-fy.
9] Bobby Deol as he is in the second half.
10] The sizeable flirty young desi girl, with the spectacles stuck in her cleavage, and her Punjabi invocation of mum's advice.
11] The Mr and Ms Southall contest.
If anybody hasn't yet, go watch it. And if you've been to see it, and didn't like it... oh, forget it. Go see Roshomon.
Footnote: I hadn't been keen on film initially. The half-wit print interviews with the stars of the film had a lot to do with that, I suspect. None of the fun, none of the spirit, none of the cheek with which the film was made shines through.
UPDATE: Saw it once again! Yay!
UPDATE 2: Saw it once yet again!
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