Amitabh’s Feminism

Posted on September 27, 2016 by secondsaturn

Amitabh Bachchan’s letter to his granddaughters is important in more ways than one. Firstly, it is a letter. Letter writing is an art of which the cultural elite know very well across the world; the intellectual pariahs who abound the social media and not having any kind of cultural heritage perhaps do not know of this grand art imagining that in the days of mobile messaging, why do people write letters at all? Their families may never have known letter writing and hence this unfamiliarity with this form of art. This is what one has to put up in democracies, the culturally lower classes abound in the same sphere.

Next is that he actually instructs his granddaughters. In Indian families, girls are cuddled, clothed, fed and pampered but rarely instructed specifically especially by the patriarch. Sons and grandsons are because they will have to bear the legacy of the family. But here, the patriarch takes upon himself to instruct his granddaughters on letters of life. The fact of especially instructing is already a step forward for here is the grandfather’s acknowledgment that they will bear the family legacy with them. He would not have bothered to instruct them if they were to be just individuals; because he looks upon them as legatees of the family that he sets about instructing them.

He assigns to each a lineage; the hard patriarchal lineage. Progressive families teach girls, teach them to be independent and individualistic and in many cases to even opt out of marriage. But such girls are raised as individuals and never as members of position within their families. Amitabh could have mixed the lineage; the Nanda girl could have been said to have also been a Bachchan girl. But he does not do this. He maintains the edifice of the class of heirs in the Indian law and more so in the custom. This is important because as independent women the greatest challenge comes from within the family in which when you are not married and on your own, a time comes when families marginalize you, count you out, cut you off and eventually forget you. You may have the autonomy but never a position in the family. Amitabh therefore, clearly assigns them the position of legatee of the patriarchal line of inheritance. This, I sense is remarkable.

Why not then also tell them of their mothers and grandmother? Amitabh is not socializing them or teaching them the arts. He is teaching them life and here he is assigning to them a post that women almost never have; a post within patriarchy despite not falling into one or the other of its roles. This is the great strategy of the lineage.

What are these instructions? The instructions are rather simple and in fact there is only a single instruction and which is that they should listen to only themselves and lend a deaf ear to whatever else people are asking them to do. But where is the guarantee that within the minds of these girls they will take the right decision? There are two ways in which this guarantee is achieved. One by making decisions as the legacy bearer of the patriarchal family which immediately assigns to them the position of inheritors and the other is by expanding their courage to accept the full consequence of their actions. Women suffer for want of inheritance; it is because of the essential lack of inheritance most prominent being forever remaining as outsiders and tentative members of their families of birth that women are basically rootless and anchorless. The other problem is of feminism and feminine politics itself and which is the hesitation in accepting the consequences of actions. You assert your rights within marriage and the man throws you out, you try to walk away from home and fall victim to sex trafficking; everywhere women are made weak by the consequences of their actions. Few feminists have ever recognized that the vulnerability of women to the fall out of their assertions lie in their lack of any legacy within their families. Because they have no “post” to fill in the families of their birth that women remain vulnerable, inconsequential and seemingly irrational. Amitabh’s strategies of first assigning to the independent woman a position within the patriarchal family lays the foundation for these girls to be autonomous for marry if they must, says Amitabh, marry only for reasons of marrying and not for anything else.

Why does he ask the girls to do things and not the boys? He does not curtail the girls and free the boys; he frees the girls. What would he tell the boys? and which boys? the ones on the streets, to stay off because his girls are walking it?

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Murder ? The Abesh Dasgupta Death

Posted on August 2, 2016 by secondsaturn

Of course Abesh Dasgupta has been murdered in cold blood and in a planned manner whether the police finds evidence or not. Kishore Bhimani and his gang will tend to turn the episode into one of an accidental death, an act of horse play gone horribly out of hand. Abesh fought with Rishabh over a girl called Prerana, who was not a part of the party. During the brawl, both the boys had been drinking because Rishabh punched Abesh hard with a broken booze bottle. The case has some very interesting details, of course culled out from whatever I could catch in the television fleetingly. Fleeting because I watch Mahanayak and Goyenda Ginni and then the programmes on the Epic channel. The facts of the case from whatever I catch are as follows.

The venue of the murder were the lawns of Sunny Park, an apartment house in one of who’s resided the host of the party, Aruna, the daughter of the celebrated author, Amit Chaudhuri. Aruna says that her family is a teetotaler and there is no way in which alcohol could have made its way into her house. The alcohol of course was found in the lawns and not the house. It is also clear that Aruna knew neither Rishabh nor Abesh; then how is it that these two found their way into this party? For this we must understand how such parties work.

In the common Bengali parlance there are two very distinct terms; one is called nematanna and the other is a party. A nematanna is a gathering of a closed group, of people who are especially invited for the occasion and who sit together, talk together, eat together and at the same time and constitute what one calls in sociology a group. A party is a loser idea, here there is a host but one who has an explicit intent of entertaining the guests; the guests are not especially invited but are informed of the intention of the host and a venue is often specified with a broad range of time. Some guests are closer to the host and they are informed first hand by the host and these guests then inform others and who then inform many more. The guests land up on circulated information, some kind of by word of mouth. Despite such looseness there are strong entry barriers to parties; and which is that a guest must at least know another guest very well. Every guest is a personal contact of some other guest at the party. This is why despite the utter looseness of a party, parties can very well be crashed into. Hence when Aruna says that she knows neither Rishabh nor Abesh, it makes sense. Then there must be somebody who knows Rishabh because Abesh was Rishabh’s contact.

Yet another aspect of the party is that the guests often bring their own drinks and sometimes even food; most parties have hawkeyed observers to track contributions. You can also make a money contribution and this is why Abesh took Rs 1100 from his mother to attend the party.

Why attend parties if you do not have any closeness to the host? Parties are like that; they are mostly hang out places for people to be in. Unlike the nematanna which is a private affair, a party is a public sphere though it is conducted indoors. Here people go to be in public circulation and this becomes very crucial in understanding the party’s victim, Abesh.

I went to an expensive school in Kolkata which had a significant proportion of the rich class; we were from the middle class and almost wholly removed from party scenes. We did go for nematannas though at friend’s places for birthdays and they came for ours as well. But parties were for the rich girls; many of those girls are on the face book but they refuse to recognize us. This is the quintessential class war. Alcohol and tobacco and boys were very much part of such parties but we were exiled from such worlds. We did not bother at the fact that our parents did not wish to spare the money to fund our parties for that was a world that was not for us. Ours was a world of work; futures lay clearly in pursuing professions, careers and employment. And in that we were contended and confident; because in our times, our social class, produced social leaders. The leader class, the opinion makers, the moral pursuers, the ones who made laws, who defined ethics, who laid down the rules of conduct and behavior were drawn from the middle class; this is why the upper class mores and values could were indeed not ours.

When the middle class was the leader class, middle class invested everything they could to help children maintain themselves within their social class and hence studies, accomplishments, sports and other activities like drawing and painting, sewing and knitting, swimming and cycling were pursued with ardour and compulsion. But today’s leader class is the rich class; celebrities and Page 3 persons are the opinion makers, they determine our values and mores, they chart out our ethics and rules, they set the codes of conduct and thought. This is why we need to invest in activities which will help us enter this rich class. Which are the activities of the rich class which we must cultivate? These are socializations, social contacts, networking, knowing a lot of people, the ability to drink at parties. Abesh’s family background shows that they belonged to the middle class which was on the anvil of a crossing over in terms of their contacts among the whos who of the society. It is likely that it was the family that encouraged Abesh to lead what the middle class mentality would call as the “fast life”. Abesh’s family cultivated such a lifestyle for Abesh and no wonder when Rishabh threw the lolly of attending the birthday party of a celebrity, Abesh agreed immediately for the lure of being with the high society. At this party then Rishabh bought alcohol, though they were under age with Abesh’s money and punched him with the broken rim of the bottle which he bought with Abesh’s money. Were Rishabh to buy his own bottle, going by the mindsets of such boys, he would not have jabbed Abesh with what “was” his, bought with his money.

Abesh and Rishabh fought over Prerana. In her interview, Prerana clearly said that she had no clue to what the two boys were up to. Yes, she did talk to Abesh for she liked him but nothing much. Yet, when she became friendly with Abesh, Rishabh’s father threw a fit calling Abesh names in front of Prerana, calling up her parents to say that she better be away from Abesh. He also called up Abesh’s mother to bad mouth Prerana. Prerana, on the other hand looked upon Rishabh only as a little brother, almost chaperoning and bossing him like an older sister would. Yet, Rishabh’s father was the one who behaved more like the jealous boyfriend. This is the crux of the case.

Did then Rishabh’s father craft this murder by provoking Rishabh into a murderous rage against Abesh? If so, then why? Is it a case of ethnic hate? I have felt this hate of non-Bengalis against Bengalis in Kolkata many times. This is a strange hate of the colonizer of the native. Colonialism is a syndrome by which the immigrant is not a slave or a refugee as of the NRI in America, but a British or a Dutch who assumes to emerge as the ruling class. Bengalis in other provinces are culprits of a great measure of such hate. I have seen Bengalis hate native Odiyas in Odisha, detest the local Tamils in Chennai or have only contempt for the Marathis in Nagpur? Is this also part of the famous Bahari-Bihari syndrome, or the conflict between the Brexit and Bremain? Does the outsider take the insider to be a loser? Does the immigrant consider herself as the superior colonizer against the local who is the poor subject? This mentality is real though almost never documented academically. Such contempt of the colonizer may have considered Abesh’s claims to belong to the high society of the host, remember that Aruna is a Bengali too and her father Amit Chaudhuri is gunning to save Kolkata in its pristineness and which is before the non-Bengalis had run it over. It is a wealth worth robbing; murder was a mean

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India Calling China To War

Posted on July 25, 2016 by secondsaturn

Its not very serious really but one does get some ideas, stray thoughts here and there, some notions, some vague presumptions, some kind of a gut feeling that India is war mongering with China. There are movements of military tanks in Ladakh, three Chinese journalists have been asked to leave, the Parliament in the forthcoming monsoon session is full of detailed questions on China, the ministries and think tanks wants some write ups on China’s investments and a few months before now, country representatives of China’s largest state owned trading company simply upped and left India without bidding their customary adieus. In 1962, China was the aggressor; in 2016 it is India which is the aggressor. India is now under a right wing government and like all right wing regimes, it is not surprising that India too will design at least to posture for war especially at a point of time when China is really not interested in war.

China has not been too peaceful a civilization for war has been both an instrument of territorial expansion and colonization as well as a way to rev up its economy. Chinese emperors have often believed in waging wars to enlarge its economy, deepen its production base and to bloat the imperial coffers; what war has never done for China is give it a kind of nationalism or the feeling of being united under an Empire. The Chinese people are fiercely federated, proud of territorial and local ties, embedded into communities and clans, jealous of cultures and vernaculars, of beliefs and customs; it is difficult for the Chinese to let go of such ties in favour of getting universalized under a central authority. War has been a sore point in that civilization for it has put the Emperor and his people in a situation of conflict, leading sometimes to major stand-offs as peasants and armies have rebelled against kings, generals and bureaucrats. No wonder then Buddhism was such a great hit in that land for it gave an instrument for territorial expansion and colonization through peaceful means of religious teachings and it absolved the communities from having to wage wars for the Emperors.

China was keen on warfare as late as 2010, a time just before the commodity price collapsed across the world. Before 2010, China was one of the major buyers of metals and minerals, of oilseeds and grains because of the massive industrialization that was taking place within the country. But as China’s factories produced far more that what China could consume and what the world markets could absorb, the Chinese traders lost all markets into which to sell the raw materials and products. Commodity prices softened and melted leaving the Chinese traders distraught and disheveled. Then China designed the Regional Cooperation for Economic Partnership, or the RCEP in which China would emerge as the trading Godfather of an entire region spanning the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean and even the Mediterranean. With the region, the Chinese traders would trade by sourcing products from various countries and exporting these to the other countries; margins would be purely from trade.

Before 2010, the strategy of China was to buy raw materials from the countries at high prices; so high that it made more economic sense for the countries to become raw material producers rather than continue to be in the business of manufacturing. Examples from the world steel industry are cases in the point. Canada, Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Ukraine and even Russia became active exporters of iron ore and thus deprived their own steel industries of raw materials. China, on the other hand was a cheap producer of everything and its traders knew very well that with the moneys the exporters earned from raw materials they would be eager importers of cheap Chinese manufactured goods. This was how, almost through a reversal of the European colonialism, China became the largest manufacturer of goods displacing the local manufacturing bases in almost every country in the world. India, too has been a victim of Chinese manufacturing for even if it does not buy much from China, yet the natural growth of its industries are capped by the global competitiveness of Chinese factories.

When China was in the process of buying up raw materials and selling manufactured goods, war made great sense to China. War efforts were a way of absorbing minerals and steel, of coal and oil, of investing in logistics and infrastructure and keep the machine going on. But after 2010, there has been an important change within China and which is the global recession that has weakened the global demand for its goods and services reflecting in large trade surpluses held in its exchequer. While such a large trade surplus would have been a blessing to finance wars, yet wars would mean the destruction of the surplus and not its investments and circulation. China has altered its strategy; it is now looking for ways and means to invest the surplus in countries of Africa, the Middle East, in south Asia like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Afghanistan and then track, monitor and integrate returns from these investments through the trade network it proposes through the RCEP. War would mean an end to this plan. China cannot afford to go for war and neither will it indulge in any kind of battles and skirmished.

For India under the right wing, there appears much to gain from war. Firstly, war will help India cut off its ties with rest of the world and plunge into isolation. Thus isolated, its indigenous industries will grow once again and the GST Bill, if passed and made into an act will help integrate the economy at the national level. War will have the effect of isolating India, and isolation is just the thing that India is looking to given the slew of trade protection measures it is undertaking. Then war might help distract the mind of the people from the great scam of a Government actually not working at all. The food inflation, the collapse of industry, the belying of the promise of employment are emerging as major embarrassments for the Government; war may be a good idea at distraction. Besides, war may mean scope of speculation, yet another relief for the social class of speculators who have backed up the right wing government to the hilt. War is also a wonderful opportunity at the refining and activating its ultra nationalist discourses. Modi for who the greater Nemesis is neither Pakistan, nor China but Nehru, a war with China could mean an opportunity to overwrite Nehru’s defeat at the hands of China in 1962. Besides, a war with China will help India get into the same league as China, emerge in the eyes of the world as a genuine “contender” and force the world to be divided into India or China camp, thus slicing off some importance from what now is solely China’s monopoly.

But what are the odds that India will win this war? There are very few actually. China is manufacturing giant; it not only makes cheap stuff but makes very high quality stuff as well. Its designs are leading the world; technologically China can produce almost everything at a fraction of the costs of what any country can produce; it has strong communities and local bodies which makes governance both decentralized and effective unlike India where public deliveries are at best pathetic. The Chinese students have scored second in a global learning outcomes, India has ranked the second last among tests conducted across 176 countries. China has a global outlook in terms of its economic programmers, India is defensive and hides behind a pile of trade protection. Chinese investments are spread across the world, India’s investments are green horned and tentative. Besides, the Chinese are great fighters with homegrown military equipment and arsenal; Indian defense technology like its industrial production are imported and grafted externally.

India’s invitation to combat may emerge as just the opportunity that the Chinese were waiting for. For once provoked to war may help them overrun both North East, Kashmir and the Indian Ocean on the route to south east Asia. Incidentally the above are all part of the land and the sea trade routes of the Silk Road, just the routes which China wants to secure through the modern day RCEP. Pakistan will be its natural ally and so will be Russia; Pakistan because of Kashmir, and because China and Russia both have investments in Pakistan, for both are cultivating Pakistan as a destiny for their surplus funds, Russia will join the axis too. China has massive investments in Central Asia and Middle East especially in energy projects and mining and mineral beneficiation of which substantial number of Indian companies are beneficiaries. War with China will obviously see Indian companies lose their support in Central Asia and Middle East.

In Africa and Latin America Indian companies are in direct competition with the Chinese but because China has a wider and a more diverse basket of investments as compared to India, when it comes to choosing between India and China, it is possible that the African and the South American countries will choose China. Since China has purchased government debt bonds of the countries of EU and North America, it is likely that these countries will be obliged to China as well. Mr Modi is travelling across the world in a manner of Mrs Indira Gandhi did before India waged its war on East Pakistan that led to the formation of Bangladesh in 1971. His wide travels and especially repeated visits to Africa, promise of investing in agriculture and food production, plans of cultivating pulses on African soil are hints that Mr Modi is preparing for war on a large scale. Steel giants like Essar Steel is already on the job of preparing for defense equipment and supplies.

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UCLA Shooter Mainak Sarkar

Posted on June 21, 2016 by secondsaturn

I remember this incident distinctly. A nephew was once, some four decades ago, being presented with the smallest bar of Cadbury Milk Chocolate and the presenter of the gift insisted that my nephew and he alone will have the chocolate to eat it all by himself. The presenter underscored her generosity by emphasizing that my nephew should not share it with anyone and then casting a glance around the room as if waiting for aghast faces at her exclusion for the rest of us, sank down the divan with a definite smirk. This is the ideal upon which boys in Bengali middle classes are usually brought up. In my family the rules are different. Even the smallest portions must be shared for among us and I say unabashedly, the better off families who have traditionally been materially and eventually culturally more prosperous than most, social relations and family ties have been considered to be stronger than consumerist individualism. But alas for the lower middle class, consumerism has been a way of challenging the supremacy of an entrenched social intelligentsia and while our cultures are more difficult to be emulated, levels of what we consume are far easier to attain. So the underclass of the intelligentsia, or the aspiring middle class have resorted to the maximization of consumption as a means of levelling out. In India, this, I feel is the crux of the story.

Right wing or left wing politics of cadres, the Partition, ethnic or nativist politics have more or less always emanated out of the class conflict between who is the acknowledged middle class and who aspires to be one and the level of consumption has often been made to the measure. The argument I pose here is not new for Prof M.N.Srinivasan spoke of this very early in his idea of Sanskritization which meant that when lower castes claimed the higher statuses of the upper castes, they often used the outwardly and apparent symbols like dress, sacred thread, hair styles, rituals and festivals to appear as though they were at par. Consumerism is not so much of digestion or even ingestion, as much as it is to be “seen” to consume by way of possession. This is why the lady who gave the smallest possible bar of chocolate to my nephew made such a fuss about his possessing the item rather than merely getting to eat it.

My point of this long introduction is to be able to understand the case of Mainak Sarkar. An IIT Kharagpur graduate, a Stanford post graduate and a doctorate from UCLA. At UCLA he was working on a complex coding project which monitors the functioning of the human heart. He was a much regarded scientist at the UCLA, a fondly remembered student for his brilliance in his school, St Michael’s in Durgapur and his academic career is all too sweet and hunky dory, a dream run for any student who moves from a satellite industrial town to the haloed portals of an Ivy League University. Yet he plans, as the grand finale of his life, not the Nobel Prize but a killing. He purchases two licensed pistols and kills his ex-wife and then his boss, Prof Klug. He wanted to kill Prof Garfinkel as well but unfortunately the last mentioned escaped the execution. Why did Mainak sentence the three to die to his bullets?

Prof Garfinkel says that Mainak wanted the output of his research as his own property but this was not possible because the UCLA had funded the research and the research rightfully should have belonged to the UCLA and not to Mainak. While Garfinkel was talking of money, Mainak was talking of authorship. Institutions repress individuals and often subsumes the most brilliant work under its label. What is even more annoying is that a brilliant worker is loaded with seven or eight non- performers as a “team” so that they can piggyback ride into fame. This happens all the time with research institutions where brilliant performers are rendered invisible and silent and are routinely absorbed and camouflaged under a team. What can be even more annoying is that mediocre bosses claim fame by plagiarism when their incumbency in the hierarchy allows them to access intellectual property of any member of the team. Team work is often subservience to ruthless intellectual exploitation of the brilliant by the mediocre. To my mind, both Prof Klug and Prog Garfinkel were using Mainak Sarkar to do the coding while appropriating his research and sharing the credit with the team at large, the team mostly consisting of their cohorts. Would it ever have mattered to put the name of Mainak Sarkar as the lead researcher, or as the team leader or as the principle scientist? But, the idea was not to give credit, the idea was to appropriate the intellectual property, to steal by stealth of the institutional set up and organizational structure and then embalm it through the plethora of rules and conventions of the IPRA which talks only of money and not of credit. American Universities are ruthless in this business. And don’t I know?

Universities and research institutes could be elaborate set ups for the systematic exploitation of the intellect in which gender, race and even social class is systematically oppressed and misappropriated. Most Indians seem to suffer all of this in silence with old parents to send money home, with wife and children to maintain lifestyles with and to compete with dollars against successful cousins earning lakhs of rupees back in India.

But Mainak was brought up in the same way that the elderly lady imagined by nephew to be, everything was to be selfishly guarded for sole consumption of the boy. It is easy to imagine that every resource in the home must have gone to the boy to hone his brilliance and feed fodder to his ambitions. He has been lauded and praised everywhere for himself alone, for what he has done for himself and to himself. His marks, his credits, his accolades were all his, and like the bar of chocolate only for his possession and consumption and so he, with his achievements and accolades was supposed to live for himself alone rarely ever sharing anything of his with anyone else. No wonder then his marriage was such a sham because he was simply not in the habit of sharing; let alone his possessions but may be his own self as well, his joys, his sorrows, his emotions, his successes everything belonged to him and him only.

Mainak and America thus clashed over what was similar to both, common to both, the desire to appropriate everything for the self alone. Against America, Mainak had no chance whatsoever; the rules, the structure, the system, the establishment and the power elite a la C Wright Mills made it certain that a mind notwithstanding how brilliant it was had to be dispossessed from its real owner and pinned on to America. There were team mates who sponged off his mind, there were professors to appropriate his credits, and then there was the entire excuse of the funder to relegate him to anonymity. Raised a Bengali in an industrial city amidst a regime of gritty worker bargain against mill owners and capitalists demanding their pound of flesh, and as a selfish boy who believes that the world must channelize every resource towards him the American University emerged as the very anti thesis of all that Mainak Sarkar was raised upon and oriented towards.

The murder of Ms Ashley Hastis is even more so symbolic for she was his American dream, she was his stepping stone to America. I think she noticed it and may have objected to her being used for his ambitions. But for him, he was used to always having his way, he was the cynosure of every eye in his milieu and imagined that America, its girls and its teachers, the peers in there would bow down to him just as everybody in Durgapur and Kharagpur had done unto him. This was a battle of egos, between Mainak and America and as is usually always the case manifested over the body of a woman, the ex-wife Ms Ashley.

 

The shootout at UCLA is thus the tragedy of a new form of decolonization; this is about the tragedy of the immigrant, whether their babies are washed dead ashore, or their men are shot at, or as scholars and intellectuals, professionals and entrepreneurs they are subject to the worst forms of exploitations as any riff raff in their home countries would be subjected to. In the land of the masters, these immigrants pretend to live fine, gulping down in secrecy their tears and swallowing humiliations and insults and turning out the oppressions upon them as vicious oppressions on their own ilk back in their native lands. Nonresidents are the most valiant supporters of right wing politics, of hegemony, distrustful of popular movements back home and spare no effort to construe those who stay back as losers. Mainak’s story is the secret out, the faux pas of what everyone wants to conceal under the bright smiles of Face Book selfies and photos of achievements.

 

 

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Shammi Kapoor by Rauf Ahmed

Posted on May 10, 2016 by secondsaturn

I knew of Rauf Ahmed as Amitabh Bachchan’s biographer. He used to write about Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970’s when he was just rising as a star and in those days, Rauf analyzed both the persona and the phenomenon of this emergent superstar insightfully. He has been, in my opinion a raving analyzer of living stars. Now Rauf is compiling his stories on stars who are dead, and among them are Shammi Kapoor and Rajesh Khanna. I wanted to meet Rauf in connection to my work on Amitabh Bachchan but I could never connect with him. It was thus sheer serendipity when Rauf contacted me in connection with his work on Rajesh Khanna. Presently I am reading Shammi Kapoor by Rauf Ahmed. Published by Om Books earlier this year, Rauf’s exposition of Shammi Kapoor’s person and persona reveals the processes through which stars in India are made. The book becomes an insight into the entire phenomenon of stardom in Bollywood.

Shammi is divided between a life as a scientist and that of a film star; the former is his passion, the latter his family business. In the former he is not encouraged neither by his teachers nor by his family. His life in the films seem to be made out for him by his father and Shammi is supposed to play a second fiddle to Raj Kapoor, the brother who was none years older to him. Shammi is ambivalent towards Raj Kapoor, while admiring him Shammi was also eager to step out of his shadow. Utterly dominated by his sister, Urmila and thoroughly bowled over by Madhubala who seemed to have enjoyed devastating Shammi, he tried using his masculinity to gain control of his life. Shammi’s masculinity was thus a reaction to his sense of inferiority and helplessness in the face of strong women.

It appears that it was Geeta Bali who very carefully crafted the image of Shammi Kapoor. It was Geeta Bali’s genius which actually created the idea of a star, a standalone personality around who played himself in the film. Before Shammi, the idea of a man playing himself over and over again with a set of mannerisms, a specific style and attitude quite never became the meat of stories of the Hindi popular cinema. Uttam Kumar in the Bengali cinema was a star but the Hindi film world had excellent and glorified actors who played characters. Raj Kapoor stood for ideals and ideology, Dilip Kumar stood for a certain depth of emotions, Dev Anand, for elaan but Shammi stood for himself. This is where Shammi becomes the game changer.

But Shammi had a tough time establishing his image; he had the trinity, namely Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand and Dilip Kumar to deal with but on the other hand, the Hindi film industry was dominated by two formidable women, namely Nutan and Madhubala. Nargis was more or less permanently paired with Raj Kapoor but film scripts used to be written for Nutan and Madhubala and Shammi often filled in for the male supporting role. As long as Shammi would pair with Nutan or Madhubala, he had absolutely no screen space to eke out for himself. Therefore, he needed new faces inexperienced in cinema and made way for a slew of newcomers like Asha Parekh, Sharmila Tagore, Sadhna and others. In roles that were now written out for Shammi, masculinity it was and Shammi Kapoor turned the tables of Bollywood from being women centric into being a male gaze upon the world.

With the invention of Shammi Kapoor’s boisterous and brattish image, the Hindi film music got a fillip. Music director O P Nayyar, singers like Mohammad Rafi and Manna Dey emerged matching up music to Shammi’s level of energy. Nasir Hussain and Subodh Mukherji wrote mainly for Shammi; their stories were such that they put the star’s persona into a profile. It is interesting that Shammi developed an entirely new set of people who he would work with, a very different group than those who would have worked with his father and older brother, Raj Kapoor.

Shammi was not a stable person; he had anxieties of being acceptable to women and the Casanova image he developed was perhaps to cover up for his innate feeling of inadequacy as a man. Raj Kapoor had a huge weakness for women and while girls would queue up romantically for Raj Kapoor they often tied rakhis for Shammi while he was still an adolescent. The tragedy of losing Geeta Bali to small pox perhaps unsettled him further and only after his marriage to Neila Devi, did Shammi find some solace and stability.

Shammi appears to have been born with a huge sense of entitlement; he had friends among the royal family of Jodhpur but his own attitude was no less worthy of a royal lineage. He felt that the world owed him a good life and insisted that he got the best of everything – a marked difference with Raj Kapoor who knew that he had to work hard for a passion. Shammi works in cinema as a star but neither as a director or producer and hence his passion for cinema remains confined to the professionalism and the involvement of a star. Even when he produced a film here or there, Shammi could not evolve the attachment to the entire medium in the manner of Raj Kapoor.

 

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Manipur – The Heart Chakra of India

Posted on April 13, 2016 by secondsaturn

This time I make an exception to my preference and which is that instead of the aisle seat I opt for the window seat on the plane. Yes I am flying from Kolkata to Imphal to attend an industrial meet and conference organized by the Manipur Government for the entire North east India. I always choose the aisle seat on the plane because of my obsessive fear of having to go to the washroom and not wanting to create a chaos by asking the passengers on the two seats in between the freeway and my seat to rise and make way for me. But this time, the flight was a short one and I was going to Imphal for the first time in my life and in order to be able to get a perspective of the city, I needed to literally have a top down view of things. I wanted to have a glimpse of the city from air so that I got a better perspective of things on the ground.

There was a thin cloud almost a mist shrouding the ground of Manipur as the plane started its descent. The green carpet of vegetation I saw on the ground below was sparser than the cover that greets me over Kolkata and even though Manipur is supposed to be home to thick jungles it is barer than Bengal. The river Imphal flowed down below like a large fat python snaking its way through the valley. The Ganga seemed now to me like a thin ribbon compared to the girth of Imphal river; the river seemed to be the true sister of the Brahmaputra. It is said that the Brahmaputra is the only male river of India, the rest are all females. Imphal was the amazon among women; powerful, corporeal, assertive and imposing.

From the clouds, Imphal seemed to me to be a strange city and unlike any other I have seen so far. The city is merely a space that hosts together many settlements, visible in the form of numerous dots from the sky. The dots seemed to be self-contained settlements and quite unconnected with one another. On the ground when I eventually drove through the city these dots were revealed to be small villages that survive around common facilities like the Kandla Fort, the Governor’s House, the City Centre and the office spaces. The cab driver who came from the hotel to pick me up was pointing in various directions at what he said was Irom Chamu Sharmila’s village, Mary Kom’s village, Jayluxmi’s village, all women, all famous in the world, placed there right at the international theatre as India’s pride by Manipur.

The cab driver was a proud Manipuri; he enumerated the various skills of Manipur, martial arts, wrestling, dance, music, poetry, cinema, sports, presence in the army, host to Subhash Chandra Bose, textile and silk weavers, Vaishnavs, brave and a society of women power. I quipped in that in the Mahabharata, Arjun came to Manipur in search of arms and eventually married the princess Chitrangada, who was raised as a boy by her father. The driver said that all Manipuri girls are raised as families would raise their boys elsewhere in India, the vast territory of mainland India being the “world outside.” No state of India, he said hosted the World War II apart from Manipur.

Getting a hang of the lay out of the city of Imphal I was slowly getting an idea that Manipur loves to host the major dramas of the world. During the turn of the millennium when the Buddhist Empire of the Mauryas was dissipated and the Hindu kings emerged under the banner of the early Guptas, Manipur kings granted asylum to the Buddhists, created libraries for their texts. When Vaishnavs were being harassed in Bengal, Manipur granted space to the Vaishnavs and the presence of the huge community called Vishnupuriyas are Bengali speaking people from Vishnupur of Bankura. Bankura is home to silk and Vaishnavism and so is Manipur and the overflow of Bankura into Manipur show that they together formed a pathway leading upto the Silk Road.

I visit the Kangla Fort; laid out in the middle of a moat of water that surrounds it, the fort is not really a concrete structure. It does have a much later addition in stone of a stupa like temple for Govinda, a name by which Krishna is usually known in the southern part of India. A brand new structure by ISCON has come up in the fort area but otherwise the fort is not a set of buildings cordoned off by high walls. The fort is an open area of grounds and groves, signifying sacred spaces of worship. The Kangla Fort is the crux of Manipur, every community, every tribe is represented here for every kind of worship is respected in this space. The Kangla Fort signifies what Manipur aspires to be; its historical aspiration is to be at the centre of the world. There is an enclosed space for the execution of enemies and of captured soldiers in war. It seems that their heads were severed off and the practice continued far into the British era, just before the Anglo Manipur war, after which the British captured and subjugated the kingdom.

Unlike the rest of India, Manipur has been ruled by a single dynasty ever since 33 AD till 1955 when the last of the kings Raja Bodhchandra died in 1955. Every Manipuri is a king at heart; a ruler unto herself and this shows in their body language, confident talk, comely manners and hospitable mood. The Meiti dynasty appears to have ruled the kingdom in an unbroken lineage. I am not too inclined to believe this; it is possible that whosoever ruled Manipur must have done so in the name of the Meitis. Meiti signifies not merely a dynasty, but the whole of Manipur for its script is called Meiti as well. Literally translated, Meiti means, Maati or the earth. Unlike the Nagas, who are inwardly nomadic, people who love to move over large territories, their mascot being the hornbill, a bird that marks a large swathe of land between Mongolia and Thailand, the Manipuri people are tied to their patches of land which they tend over generations and eras. Manipuri tribes are agrarian and settled; and because they do not fight for or fight over territory unlike the Nagas, they are calmer and confident than the Nagas. The Nagas are more aggressive and warrior like and while Manipur is also a set of martial people, such people appear to have pursued warfare as aesthetics of the spectacle rather than an exercise in subjugation and subversion. This makes the Manipuri a confident people, autonomous and self-contained and self-contended.

Being essentially Vaishnavs, the Manipuris are careless about ostentation. Tomba, my driver is slightly embarrassed at the shabbiness of the town’s buildings and he says that people choose to look poor because of the fear of the extortionists, who are also the insurgents. Think that like the Bengalis, the people of Manipur feel guilty of being rich. Culture seems to be the antonym of material prosperity and like the Bengali middle class, the people of Manipur love to live simply. We had food at a Manipuri family home, bare and minimum but the dining area accommodated people who would just drop in for lunch. The Ima, or the mother, was apologetic for she was over with fish, but we could catch some daal and a mixed vegetable, a Manipuri speciality cooked especially for festivals. Unlike their dance and martial arts, or weaving and thoughts, food in Manipur was rude and crude. The difficulty of accessing salt and oil appear to underlie the cuisine of the North east. But unlike the Nagas, who cook well and eat heartily, Manipur appeared to be rather indifferent to food and living. All their attention seemed to focus on the personhood, elevating the personality into a position of high culture with everything else as inconsequential.

Tomba, my driver repeats that Imphal is a Valley, a receiver of all that comes down the mountains, a cauldron of influences, and a unity in diversity. He is my guide and chaperone as well. He is concerned about my food, my safety, and my needs as a tourist as much as the deadlines of the conference sessions. I am in an out of the conference and into the city. Everywhere there are huge bill boards advertising classes for dance and sports; these are the two most important cultural skills one must master. Apart from this, weaving and farming appear to be excellent. In the age of the epics, Arjuna came to Manipur in search of weapons and so metallurgy seems to be of enormous importance. In the aftermath of the World War II, Manipur was left with a substantial quantity of metal scrap. During this time, import of metal scrap was banned and Manipur had a good stock of this material. In those days, small furnaces and foundries produced pig iron using this scrap. The scrap was over and so were the castings and today there are no steel facilities worth the name left in the state. The anti-insurgency drive by the Central Government has cleared Manipur of both its forests as well as of its metal industry especially the castings. Today, the state gets all its supplies through Nagaland and the latter imposes huge octroi tax on the products making things costly in Manipur. The train may make things better for the state especially the supplies of steel.

One has to be in Imphal to see the intensity of consumption of steel. Galvanized sheets have wholly replaced the straw thatch or the clay shingle. Much like in Kyrgyzstan, homes in Manipur are arranged as if in a wall. The front of the homes are covered with a raised boundary wall of thick steel sheet with an entrance door punched into it. One cannot have a glimpse of homes from the road; instead one has to enter literally through a slit in the wall into the domestic spaces.

I attend the conference session on skills and everyone is talking of teaching skills like massage, beauty industry, hotel business, drivers, security guards and electricians and plumbers to the young people of Manipur. These are the very youth who enculture themselves into one of the world’s finest forms of dance and arts, of weaving and castings, of making stuff and to imagine a future for such youth of such a high culture country as only the servants of the urban rich in the newly emerging cities of Delhi or Bangalore was a shame. I wanted to shout down every speaker on the diaz.

In the exhibition there were two classes of stalls; one set which spoke of Manipur’s self-respect in terms of developing their local crafts and local knowledge of medicinal plants and spices and condiments while the other set that only tried to capture the Manipuri youth as recruits into the menial service classes subjugated to the city. Skills must help people develop their self-respect, autonomy of the spirit and elevate their minds and souls; no wonder then the skills mission fails so badly for these create servants out of people. The upper middle class with their fancy degrees become servants of a higher order, the economically less endowed are relegated as low paid heavily worked menials. India’s education is a drive towards servitude, one wonders then why did we at all fight for our Freedom?

The session on logistics was rather weak and most spoke of the railways and a few spoke of the road. It seemed to me that Manipur was divided into two segments, one happy with the road while the others looking forward to the railways. The railways is the right wing nationalist project which seeks the integration of Manipur into the Indian republic as an unpeopled territory without any regard for the high culture, the unbroken history and the uninterrupted civilization of the land. Those who seek the road know that Manipur’s survival will once more be like the centre through which goods would move freely between Bangladesh and Burma into India. The railways would make the state a receiver of goods and a taker of human beings nearly as slaves to the rest of India.

Some bureaucrats in the convention speak of Make in Manipur with hideous propositions such as juice making factories in the state. Manipur people, and for that matter across the north east of India, fruits are preferred to over juice and the crux of the industry of food processing is to be able to keep the fruit as it is, and not pound and grind to extract juice. Everyone in the city praises the purity of its air and I suspected that the government of Manipur cleverly discourages the setting up of businesses that drain its natural resources or pollute its air. Barkat, the bell captain of my hotel says to me that Imphal is the best place in the world. Why does he think so, I ask him to which he says that this is a city which has not the heat of summer nor the chill of winter, neither the ravage of the floods nor the ruin of the earthquake, no raze of the cyclone, and not the wreck of the tsunami. The sun during the day does not scorch, the rain does not hurt, no hailstone hurtles down with angry storms, Imphal is synonymous of calmness, and mildness says Barkat. This equanimity of the climate is taken as a legitimizing force as to why Manipur should be right at the centre of the Universe. Of course back in the hotel I used a shampoo and a moisturizer, both smooth and of very fine quality. Barkat told me that those were produced locally. I laughed at the naivity of the skills mission which was trying to make a plumber out of entrepreneurs who could make cosmetics finer that those of the multinational companies.

The idea that everyone must develop in the same way, irrespective of whether every community wants to develop in a singular manner or not and that development must mean some physical infrastructure, some fast cars and some cramped cities with coffee shops and shopping malls is a special gift of democracy and the idea of citizenship. Citizenship defines every human being in a homogenized relationship with the State and this reduces her to a sameness, desiring similar stuff, wanting the same things and imagining a sameness for the entire course of her life. Tomba suffers from this; though a Manipuri at heart he feels insecure if real estate does not crowd Imphal, he feels defeated if the city does not have traffic jam and these ideas of universality confuse and oppress his mind; whether to become an “Indian” or whether to continue to remain of proud Manipuri. Strangely, the two, never in confrontation earlier now appear to be a matter of choice, either this or that.

I used to think that Manipur meant the land of the gems, but now I realize that it is named after the Manipura chakra, a Buddhist term which signifies the heart or the cardiac system of the body. Just as the heart beats to keep the whole body and its individual parts alive, Manipur prides itself in balancing, harmonizing, hosting and holding together the various kinds of humanity. When it stepped in to host the Buddhists, it imagined itself as being a preserve of a threatened social order. When it hosted Vaishnavism, Manipur thought that this egalitarian system of beliefs must be protected and when Manipur hosted the Indian National Army of Subhash Chandra Bose, it acknowledged the immense role of the hero in the Indian Freedom Struggle. Manipur was an independent kingdom, it need not have risen to any of the above for none of these namely the threat to Buddhism, the persecution of the Vaishnavism and the march of the INA ever really concerned the Manipuris. Yet Manipur has risen to issues even when they have not directly concerned it. This places Manipur far ahead of any other as a civilization, it truly considers itself as having a role much beyond its everyday mundanity.

The atmosphere in the city remains, like Manipur itself obscure while hosting you with kindness. I sensed that the weather in the city almost gave me a bodilessness; there was nothing bothering the body, nothing making you aware of your existence as a human being vulnerable to the heat or the sunlight. I matched this up with the fact that I hardly see a temple or a mosque, or even a Gurudwara in the city. There are some common place buildings and invisible because they are commonplace that belong to the Presbyterian Church or to Christian libraries. Otherwise, the concrete structures are barely visible. The Manipuris are indifferent to things and stuff; there were the usual chemist shops, barbers shops, stationery goods, shops for shoes and umbrellas and motor parts and of course steel retail spaces. But the people of Imphal did not appear to be consumerists, the CCDs and the Baristas being absent in the city. The indifference to stuff also makes their living a bit careless and untidy. The population is relatively sparse, unlike in the Indian cities, people do not spill out in the streets in steady streams. This speaks volumes of the Manipuri culture, they have been able to control their population well within limits. This also speaks of the unity and integrity of the Manipuri culture, a culture that has been protected because of the strange absence of immigration into the state despite a highly cosmpoliton population.

Women are powerful in the city; they are everywhere, bold, assertive, confident and free. I wondered that despite its shabbiness and the absence of restaurants and coffee shops and the lack of “development” why Imphal looked so sophisticated to me; I realized that this was because so many women were out on the streets. Women dominate the society; there are memorials of women freedom fighters, more of girls gang who fought the British, Ima Keithel, market places run totally by women though most shops are run by women. Women cycled, women sat around, lazed on the steps of shops, cooked food, tended to children, minded the traffic as police, and were everywhere in offices. Most women and even the young girls dress in their traditional attire and this says a lot about the inner peace and confidence of the Manipuri culture.

I am in Imphal on the day of the Cheirub, the New Year. People are busy celebrating the New Year by cooking vegetables and fish and exchanging cooked meals as gifts. They have laid out a bowl of rice with the various items around it on a banana leaf and offered this to the Gods. These banana leaves are laid out on the pavement in the open air; Manipuris have thousand deities but all are invisible forces of nature, God here is everywhere immersed in the elements of Nature and does not live inside enclosed structures. Manipur is a centre, and like the centre, it is invisible and without any dimension of its own.

Tomba tells me that on the night of the Cheiraub, there is the Thabal Chungwa, where boys and girls dance as in a school prom. This is a dating festival; boys and girls get to know each other and many develop love affairs after the dance. Chungwa means dance; not just any dance but a special form of dance consisting of jumping steps. Thabal means light, of moonshine, or moonlight. Thabal Chungwa is dancing in the moonlight. I wondered whether this was the reason why the Raas of the Vaishnavs became so popular in this land. Manipur is fond of romance, Khamba Thoiti, the Romeo and Juliet for the locals epitomize unfulfilled love and it is said that their spirit moves around seeking love. The young boys and girls on the night of the Thabal Chungwa are supposed to rise to the spirit of romance and fulfill the incompleteness of the dead lovers.

I sneak out from the conference disgusted at the idea of development, the idea of progress and of course at the idea of India that all the speakers seemed to propagate for what Manipur needed was autonomy actually. Tomba drives me to Moirang to visit the museum of the Azad Hind Fauj. I don’t know but Subhas Bose makes me proud all the time; I see his journey around the world to reach Manipur, I see the notes he prints in denominations of Rs 1000 and Rs 10,000 !! I see him attending the Asia Conference, I see him with the heads of state, I see him inspecting the guards and I wonder at his sense of confidence and sense of entitlement. He, in his mind has already declared himself as the emperor of India. Manipuris love him, and I fancied that they love him for having chosen Manipur as the final destination of waging war, of having considered himself as the Lord of India, for every Manipuri at heart is Subhas precisely for these reasons.

At the Loktak Lake I see the devastation that the Indian Republic has done unto the environment of which Manipur is so proud and possessive. Indeed the Assam Rifles, against which Irom Sharmila fasts until this day, have demolished and devastated the precious flora of the land. Along with the razing down of forests, the army has endangered the famous Golden Deer of the forests. The Golden Deer lives in the island forests of the Lok Tak Lake, they do not seem to inhabit the mainland but breed in the islands surrounded by water. The species instinctively can control its population because otherwise it will not be able to accommodate the clan within the limited geography. Like the Manipuris, the Golden Deer shares its restraint on reproduction of the species.

There is something about the air in Imphal and I try to sense it; I think that it is the people in that city. They have no stranger anxiety; they seem to be genuinely concerned with your wellbeing. A young girl just learning to ride the bicycle tumbles and falls down on me in Kangla Fort, she gets up and hugs me, caresses my hurt hand. Tomba accompanies me into the war memorial saying that the place may have drug peddlers. Barkat keeps my room ready with the air conditioner and the geyser, I need neither though. When there is a goof up with my dinner order, they immediately give me a glass of Fruit Punch on the house. They appreciate care, they can care. This is Manipur.

India’s challenge is to protect this diversity of the sub-continent, to hone the inner pride of its people, to respect and regard the cultural magnificence of each society, to design a future according to each society’s historical aspirations and to provide opportunities for all to contribute rather than to consume. A nationwide culture of consumerism is antithetical to the Indian ethos; if pursued with any greater intensity, it portends to end this 4000 yearlong civilization in no time.

 

 

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The Banishment of Spring

Posted on March 25, 2016 by secondsaturn

I heard of a poem which began like Phul Phutuk Na Phutuk Aaaj Bosonto from my classmate Madhubani Ghosh of UG I in Jadavpur University. Madhubani was discussing this poem written by Subhas Mukhopadhyay with another classmate of ours, who, I forget now. Intrigued and charged up romantically with the first few lines I searched for the poem far and wide. Since ours was not the age of the Internet with no poem hunter in sight, I had to generally ask around and look for the collection of poetry by the author. I did get a chance to hear the full version when a boy, or was it Tridibda who recited the poem for our Sanskriti. The lines sounded very familiar because I used to listen to Hindi poetry in the Vividh Bharati and though I forget the poet, I remember the lines which went like .. ek ladki, kaali kuti, aankh bhi phuti who bhi mast hai holi me. Subhasbabu’s poetry went on to laud the spring which in a city like Kolkata, defeated and demoralized nevertheless has a plant shooting out through the crevices of moss ridden broken walls and looks at the dark girl who, like many in her ilk can never hope to be married off. I thought that both the poem by Subhas Mukhopadhyay and its Hindi inspiration were anti-feminist and cruel.

I used to love spring; once. Then was a time when I was still to develop my breasts. I was a child and under pressure of my grandparents to always be well covered against any possible threat of “chill”. I was not allowed to sneeze even once for a freak sneeze could cost me my ice cream and more cardigans would be heaped upon me to the point of making my movements difficult. I would often fall down while jumping about unable to bend my knee covered with inners and clad in cotswool trousers and heavy shoes with thick socks. Windows of our home used to be shut tight and though these used to be glass panes, the fact that they shut out the air from the world outside suffocated me. Then came the spring and with “Dol” the windows would be wide open, fans would swirl again, and I would be relieved of my heavy gear. I would run free and then rush to the bathroom to relish the fact that the coconut oil in the transparent glass bottle had turned into a clear liquid again. Throughout the dusky and smoggy days of winter I would peep to see whether the white gelly of the coconut oil had melted or not and then when the oil would start to liquefy, it would be the breakout season for me.

Dol was fun for me as a child; in my infancy I played with my ten cousins at my mother’s place in New Alipore and the earliest memories of spring was about the fragrant colours, Dida’s sweet lassi, some luchi and aloor dom, or was it the plain torkaari with pnaach phoron? I forget now. But in my pre pubertal child hood, Dol shifted to Dover Lane where I had a blast with my paara friends, Chhoto Mithu and Rinkudi. We were a gang of girls and too young for boys to be interested in us, our Dol was a lot of shouting, lot of running, and lots of colours. But as I started growing up and Chhoto Mithu left Dover Lane, my Dol was over. I was afraid of my body, aware of its vulnerability, I bade good bye to spring and its colour festival.

In spring I still loved the breeze that would blow from the south, loved the way the windows were thrown open, the way the home was spring cleaned and fumigated. I loved the music played to celebrate spring over Vividh Bharati and learnt of the various ragas of the springtime. Spring was the best weather to focus on my studies, catch up with my revision and fortunately for me the half yearly examinations were just at the start of summer. I always did better in my half yearly than in my annuals because in the latter the windows would close and the smog would descend throwing a pall over the mood of the sunlight making the weather and my mind heavier. In spring I would have to give up my clothes cover and once again my body I sensed was open to be gazed at; spring would see me bend again in the chest, walk with a stoop despite admonitions to hold my posture straight. In winter I of course got back my heroic gait.

Now that I am in my middle age and live in Delhi, I hate spring. For spring is when the water crisis begins, spring is when the virulent dust storms blow covering your furniture and books with grit and soil. Spring is the prelude to long hours of power cuts, to the rush to get the chik fixed, air conditions serviced. It is the time of vicious mosquitoes leaving homes smelling of the putrid repellants. Besides I have no one to play Holi with. Holi is played not to eliminate social differences but to strengthen bonds of communities. It is not caste that Holi overcomes, it is the tribe that it bonds with. Holi is dangerous too for molesters and rioters are wholly advantaged in Holi.

Unlike in Kolkata Delhi knows no spring. In a land of evergreen flora, spring is the fall in this country. The new leaves, the green stems, the germination of new shoots is typically deciduous and hence Bengal. There is a dry season in Bengal when the fields and grounds look bare and in spring there is breakout of new life. Delhi is evergreen, it only knows of dry leaves, the burnt smell when these are burnt in the open. Spring in Delhi is the month of the income tax, of the budget which never seems to help me. Spring in Delhi is the season of despair, of gloom and pessimism of the impending scorching summer.

I still love some things of spring in Kolkata though; the sale of Chaitra for some reason excites me and the bright yellow of the costumes of the “sanyasis” who beg for alms with the sing song hoarse choroker seba laagi …mahade….b. don’t know why this festival endears me so much but for me these two are spring. When I return to Kolkata, I wont return to Dol I know but definitely to the excitement of life that late spring, or the Chaitra brings with it. After that I will wait for the kaal boishaki with its hail stones, I will wait for 25 shey Boishak, aamer tok, kolai daal, musuri daaler bora and paanta bhaath. Must get my father to make that paanta bhaath again.

Spring cannot deprive me with its efflorescence because of the state of my maidenhood; I banish spring with all its flowers and germinating greens.

 

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In Adda With A RSS Scholar

Posted on February 22, 2016 by secondsaturn

Madhusree and I are part of a Bengali adda which takes place once a month on a Sunday. Like all Bengali addas, it is the adda which is important and while pretending to be only a group for pure conversation, these addas are actually pretty seriously academic. From Tagore to Sukumar Ray, Saradindu Bandopadhyay to Rituparna, folktales to epic, from poetry to poesy all are covered in its ambit. There is a lead speaker, a second speaker and then the floor is open to discussion. The length of the adda can be as long as three hours and never less than two hours. The hosts serve tea, biscuits and some snacks but never more than that. Bottled water, paper napkins and paper cups are kept on a table and the tea is in a flask with sugar cubes and milk saches on the side. One is expected to go and help oneself to the refreshments and otherwise it is all unwavering dedication and devotion to the topic discussed. For the past two sessions, the adda is discussing Ramayana, its many readings and what those readings mean really in terms of the sensibilities of their times, the politics of their authors, the values and morals which they wished to integrate into the Indian culture. The adda is open to all; but because of the level of seriousness of engagement, the entry barrier is somewhat high for the casual dilettante.

Last Sunday, it was my turn to do a comparative study of the Aranyakand of Valmiki, Krittibas and Tulsidas Ramayan; Aranyakand because it is the simplest and after Sundarkand, the shortest of the chapters. I thought that I had read the Ramayana but I had only read the renditions of authors who rewrote the epic in prose and this was the first time that I right into my deep middle age actually lifted up what were the original texts of the epic albeit with English translations, word for word.

In this adda, this time was a youngish, bright and energetic man who refused to give his credentials and only said that he read the adda’s magazine in a Bengali library in Delhi and decided to attend the adda on the Ramayana. He was massively read in Buddhist texts and helped establish my case very well that the Ramayana is a conflict of the morals of the householder and the conqueror. He had read many parallels between Buddhist stories and those in the Ramayana and this broadened my evidence base of my prime suspicion that the idea of Ram was drawn indeed from the emperor Ashoka, known mostly as the Devanam Piya Piyadassi. For it was in Ashoka that, much like in the case of Ram, a uniform set of all-encompassing dharma guided both the king and the householder, binding the people and the king, the conqueror and the vanquished alike was established. My thesis of the Ramayana being an attempt at synthesising the Vedic Aryans, the Buddhist and Jain philosophies and the local faith of the indigenous Indians would be fulfilled by a close reading of the Buddhist and Jain sources and here the RSS scholar appeared to be rather useful for me.

The scholar was very well read in Vaishnav texts as well and he knew the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas by heart. But there was one confusion which he asked me to resolve and which was that Tulsidas, it seems had a tutor, Madhusudan Saraswati who taught him Advaitabad. Interestingly, Saraswati was initially an anti-monist person who read the Advaita doctrines only to confront the philosophy but turned into a convert. Hence the Advaita philosophy which marks Ramcharitmanas. But there were three issues which he missed out totally and these are as follows.

  1. Madhusudan Saraswati was a Bengali and hence he was familiar with Krittibas Ojha’s Bengali Ramayana. The composition of Tulsidas was different from the Bengali version but he used the stories in the Krittibas’s version for his own compositions.
  2. Madhusudan’s opposition to advaita and then his eventual acceptance of monism is interesting. The dwaita was useful in Bengali nationalism, which was interestingly the flavour of the Krittibas Ramayana while the advaita was useful in the consolidation of a spiritual empire that would, in the realm of the Hindu world correspond with the attempts at Imperial Unity by Akbar. Tulsi’s work reflected the desire for an imperial unity.
  3. Tulsi’s work is almost a verbal and a poetic rendition of the series of the Ramayana paintings commissioned by Akbar and these paintings seem to have inspired establish the iconography of Ram and the other characters of the epic.

His face lighted up in excitement at getting the broad context of Ramcharitamanas. The scholar was elated on what constituted his very first experience of Valmiki in original and here Ram’s inherent racism, Sita’s pronouncement of being one with the environment as the dharma of the land, Lakshman’s praise of Sita’s devotion for Ram are issues which enervated and energised the scholar. The scholar was excited at the similarities between some Buddhist writings and Valmiki’s Ramayana. He also was immensely elated by learning of Akbar’s keen interest in Krishna and in the Ramayana. He had little idea that Dara Shukoh was a Sanskritist and that Poland, which had one of the earliest Indology centres keenly learnt much from the Rajputs. He also had no idea that Akbar made Janmasthami the official festival for India and that he used to dance as Radha in the celebrations. In fact, legend says that he was so fascinated by Anarkali that he let her take over his performance as Krishna’s paramour; a cue which Mughal e Azam wasted no time in lapping up. The scholar had no knowledge of the epic called Manas, which is famous all across central Asia and contains the stories of Ram and also of the Pandavs. In the geography of the Ramayana, he had little idea that central Asia was the barren land from which Rishyashringa came. But these new facets thrilled him.

The scholar was very well read in the Greek epics and while my position of India being the forerunner of the concept of the State and the King assured him, he was a tad bit disappointed when someone said that Valmiki was influenced by Homer. He quickly calculated the dates of Alexander’s invasion of India but I stopped him to say that India has absorbed far less from the conquerors and kings and much more from scholars and saints. As Tagore says in his four essay long volume on nationalism that India has little interest in kings and emperors, we are more interested in social matters; our gods and heroes, our men and women, characters of stories. This is why our Ram is sometimes a man, sometimes a hero and at other times God but never really in any seriousness a King. Tagore says that neither commerce nor polity has endeared the idea of nation in India; rather it is a set of comprehensive values and morals that has had the purpose of mitigating the differences among races in India. Aryans, Scythians, Huns, Mongols and the Turks had stormed down India or Arabs, Semitic races, Assyrians, Romans, Persians, Poles and Finns, Dutch and the Portuguese have traded with India making India’s cultural goal one of assimilation of beliefs, social structures, kinship rules, inheritance patterns, marriage rules and incest across the multiple races. I tend to view Valmiki’s Ramayana as a great invention of the idea of the family, of the public space, of dealing with issues of making friends and overcoming enemies. Ram is a social role, who extols the society’s construction of him which often stands in antagonism to his individual will. The conflict between the persona and the personality in which the former always win, is the pattern which the Ramayana invents as a unifier and homogeniser of a society across races.

The scholar’s mind opened up for I acknowledged the conflict among races, spoke in terms of races and the irreconcilable differences among them and spoke of how the Ramayana is an invention of the highest order, unparalleled in any civilization of the world in its imagination of the family as an institution and making that institution the very centre of our culture and social cohesion. If we are one civilization, then it is the way India imagines its family and its values; the values of India are the values of the family. The values of the individual are created in a way which upholds the social structure of this society born through a mingling of the races. The scholar had never looked at the Ramayana as a vehicle of social invention; the story of Ram as the hero seemed to recede back in importance compared to the sociology of Valmiki.

The development of the idea of individuals as social roles brought many scholars and adventurers to India and one among them was none other than Babur. Divested of his kingdom by a wicked step mother, Babur wanders in the wilderness; who does he imagine he is? Ofcourse, the exiled hero, Ram. Both Ramayana and the Mahabharata are contained in the epic of central asia, the Manas. No wonder then Babur descends to India, to Ayodhya and after conquering parts of the land, builds his mosque, the Babri Masjid at Ramjanmabhumi. I know that it is the Ramjanmabhumi, because Babur led me to it by building the mosque there for he is Ram himself. This is the power of the Ramayana, the social invention of a sane society, for it appeals to all. Babur had come in as Ram.

I know that the scholar will rethink his ideas and rework his notes which he sends to the BJP headquarters. I did not contest his knowledge; I only widened it by placing it in a context.

 

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Nehru’s Legacy Public vs Private Sector

Posted on January 20, 2016 by secondsaturn

http://www.tehelka.com/2015/12/the-great-invisible-hand/#.Vn6Y7mdrA50.facebook

 

 

 

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Nirmohi Akhra

Posted on December 17, 2015 by secondsaturn

Nirmohi Akhara and Ram Lalla Virajaman: Susmita Dasgupta

October 5, 2010

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[In this guest post, Susmita Dasgupta throws light on some important aspects of the Ayodhya issue that have been misunderstood. First, she argues that there is an anomaly in treating the Nirmohi Akhara as a “Hindu” group, when in fact historically, akharas (aakhra in Bengali) were gymnasiums associated with sects that were usually opposed to organized and/or textual religions like Hinduism and Islam and claimed themselves to be non-Hindus. More importantly, she points out that the worship of the child-God – Ram Lalla, or Balkishan – was an important ingredient of defiance against organized religion. The Hindu appropriation of Ram Lalla, she argues, is therefore the greatest anomaly in the case, and this is the anomaly, she suggests, that historians should have focused on.]

Archaeologists are divided over the issue of whether a Ram Temple at all existed under the dome of the Babri Masjid and the Muslim theologicians are divided over whether the Babri is a legitimate mosque at all because in Islam if a mosque is built over a heathen’s structure of worship then it is not fit for prayers. Historians from JNU are almost universally concerned that whatever the archaeology is, the mosque should remain intact as a historical monument. The secularists are upset that the fictitious Ram Lalla be accepted as a party to a dispute and every structure of the Muslims could be pulled down on the flimsiest belief that the land archaeologically belonged to the Hindus. Such a judgment would then be a precedent in pulling down every mosque in the land and may even cast aspersions on the continued existence of the Taj Mahal and Red Fort !! I, too share similar concerns.

But historians of such caliber have failed to note the greatest anomaly of the case and which is the confounding of the Nirmohi Akhara as Hindu. The akhara is a gymnasium, a place where people are supposed to do their exercises, train in weights and various kinds of martial arts and athletics. Akharas were somewhat like the youth clubs and became as central to various mystic cults like Sufis, Bauls, Vaishnavs and Rampanthis and even certain sects of the Sikhs. The akhara was the same to these cults as the temple was to the Hindus and the mosque for the Muslims. Important saints like Ramdas, Namdeo, Eknath, Tukaram and others had veritable akharas. These sects were usually opposed to organized and/or textual religions like Hinduism and Islam and claimed themselves to be non-Hindus. They were influenced by Vaishnavism, the Bhakti and even some surviving remnants of Buddhism and Jainism.

These sects also had influences of the yogis, a cult based around the yoga method of exercises, which developed around the 12th century AD. The confounding of physical exercises with spiritual achievements is not new to India because such have been the ways of the Ninja in Japan. In fact, martial arts have invariably been tied to monasteries that were outside the fold of ecclesiastical religions. Nirmohi Akhara as the name suggests was one of the numerous instances of a “non-Hindu” sect.

An important ingredient of defiance against the organized religion was the worship of balkishan and ramlalla, infants or child gods. This is because the child has no sense of social discrimination, and because of its defecation and urination breaks the purity barriers constantly, the image of the God as a child is therefore a profane one. In due course of time, the Krishna worshippers could climb into the Hindu fold because Krishna has a Puranic backing. Unfortunately Ram who was only a fiction hero without a Puranic text to validate him, remained a God worshipped by these marginal sects, eventually the untouchables. Nirmohi Akhara is one such sect of marginals who exist autonomously and with equal mixing of Hinduism and Islam.

The Ramlalla Virajaman as God literally means a star, a fictitious character that evolves, grows, matures, ages and even dies rather than the absolute and fixed God like a Hindu deity or a Semitic God.

Therefore, the Hindu appropriation of Ram Lalla is the greatest anomaly in the case and the cause for the dispute.

The historians should have ideally argued over the Hindu claim over Ram rather than proceed to sieve archaeological evidence of whether there was or not a temple beneath the mosque. One has no idea of how the Hindus could suddenly lay a claim on Ram worship, which typically has never been a God in the Hindu pantheon. There are numerous deities across the country, tasla devi, bhadu, phullara, ashaan bibi and many others who are worshipped by the local persons irrespective of their religion. These deities pertain to sects that do not belong to the mainstream religions. The worship of Ram Lalla at the premises of the Babri Masjid, where the Muslims also prayed together with the Rambhakts have been a vindication of practices in India that are neither wholly Hindu nor fully Islamic.

The anomaly in this case was that a local worship became appropriated and hijacked by interests of the metropolis and this the historians of eminence should have noticed and investigated rather than fall into the trap of having to categorize something in terms of mainstream religions

T T Sreekumar on the 6th of December 2015

നിര്‍മോഹികളുടെ ഡിസംബര്‍ ആറുകള്‍

ബാബറി പള്ളി പ്രശ്നത്തില്‍ ഏറ്റവും കൂടുതല്‍ നേട്ടം കൊയ്തത് നിര്‍മോഹി അഖാരകള്‍ ആണ്. 1853-ൽ നവാബ് വാജിദ് അലി ഷായുടെ കയ്യില്‍ നിന്ന് എങ്ങനെ അവുധിന്റെ ഭരണം തട്ടി എടുക്കാം എന്ന് തക്കം പാര്ത്തിരുന്ന ബ്രിട്ടീഷ് ഈസ്റ്റ് ഇന്ത്യാ കമ്പനി ഷിയാ നവാബ് മാര്ക്കെതിരെ സുന്നി-ഷിയാ തര്ക്കങ്ങള്‍ കുത്തിപ്പൊക്കി അവിടെ കാലുറപ്പിക്കാന്‍ ശ്രമിച്ചിരുന്നു. സുന്നികളെയും ഹിന്ദുക്കളെയും നവാബ് മാര്ക്കെ തിരെ തിരിക്കുക ബുദ്ധിമുട്ടായിരുന്നു.

ഷിയാ നവാബുമാര്‍ ധാരാളം ഹിന്ദു ക്ഷേത്രങ്ങള്‍ നിര്മ്മിക്കുകയും ഭരണത്തിലും പട്ടാളത്തിലും കായസ്ഥ ഹിന്ദുക്കള്ക്കും ശൈവനാഗന്മാര്ക്കും വിപുലമായ പങ്കാളിത്തം നല്കുലകയും ചെയ്തിരുന്നു. അയോധ്യക്ക് ഇന്ന് കാണുന്ന ഹൈന്ദവ തീര്ത്ഥാടന കേന്ദ്രം എന്ന പദവി തന്നെ നവബുമാരുടെ കാലത്ത് ലഭിക്കുന്നതാണ്. അയോധ്യയില്‍ ആരും നോക്കാനില്ലാതെ പൊളിഞ്ഞു കിടന്നിരുന്ന പല അമ്പലങ്ങളും അറ്റകുറ്റ പണികള്‍ തീര്ത്തു ആരാധനാ യോഗ്യമാക്കി തുറന്നു കൊടുത്തത് നവബുമാരുടെ ശ്രമഫലമായാണ്.

ഹനുമാന്ഗാര്‍ഹി ക്ഷേത്രം പണിയാന്‍ അവിടെ പുതുതായി ഉടര്ന്നു് വന്ന ഒരു വൈഷ്ണവ കള്‍ട്ടായ നിര്‍മോഹി അഖാരകള്‍ക്ക് സ്ഥലം സൌജന്യമായി നല്കിയതു നവാബ് സഫ്ദര്‍ ജങ്ങ് ആയിരുന്നു. ഈ നിര്‍മോഹികള്‍ പേര് സൂചിപ്പിക്കുന്നത് പോലെ നിര്‍മോഹികള്‍ അല്ല. യഥാര്ത്ഥ ത്തില്‍ ഇവര്‍ ഹിന്ദുക്കള്‍ പോലുമല്ലെന്നു സുസ്മിത ദാസ്ഗുപ്ത എഴുതിയിട്ടുണ്ട്. യോഗയും മറ്റും പരിശീലിക്കുന്ന, നമ്മുടെ കളരികള്‍ പോലുള്ള, ജിംഖാനകള്‍ ആയിരുന്നു നിര്‍മോഹികള്‍ നടത്തിയിരുന്നത്. ഹിന്ദു മതം അടക്കം ഒരു മതത്തെയും ഇവര്‍ പിന്‍പറ്റിയിരുന്നില്ല. എന്നാല്‍ പതിനെട്ടാം നൂറ്റാണ്ടിന്റെ തുടക്കത്തില്‍ ഇത് ഒരു വൈഷ്ണവ സംഘമായി പുനവതരിക്കുകയും ഹൈന്ദവ സങ്കല്പ്പങ്ങള്‍ സ്വീകരിച്ചു പ്രവര്ത്തിനക്കാന്‍ തുടങ്ങുകയും ചെയ്തു. 1853 -ല്‍ വാജിദ് അലി ഷാ യുടെ കാലത്ത് ബാബറി മസ്ജിദ് നെ മേല്‍ അവകാശം ഉണയിക്കുകയും ചെയ്യുക ആയിരുന്നു. ഇത് മുന്പ് ക്ഷേത്രമായിരുന്നു എന്ന് അവകാശപ്പെട്ടു അക്രമങ്ങള്‍ ആരംഭിക്കുകയും അങ്ങനെ ഹിന്ദു-മുസ്ലീം കലാപങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് അവിടെ തുടക്കം ഇടുകയും ചെയ്തത് ഈ നിര്‍മോഹികള്‍ ആയിരുന്നു.

ബ്രിട്ടീഷ് പ്രേരണകള്‍ അന്ന് പ്രധാനമായും ഹിന്ദു മുസ്ലീം വൈരം കുത്തിപ്പൊക്കുന്നതിനായിരുന്നു. എന്നാല്‍ നവാബ് ഈ കെണിയില്‍ വീഴാന്‍ കൂട്ടാക്കിയില്ല. അവുധ് ഏറ്റെടുക്കാന്‍ കാരണം നോക്കി ഇരിക്കുന്ന ഈസ്റ്റ് ഇന്ത്യാ കമ്പനി പ്രശ്നം വഷളാക്കാന്‍ മാത്രമാണ് തുനിഞ്ഞത്. അവുധ് പിടിച്ചെടുത്തു പള്ളിക്ക് ചുറ്റും കമ്പി വേലി കെട്ടി ഹിന്ദു മുസ്ലീം വൈരം എന്ന സ്വന്തം ചരിത്ര നിര്മിതിക്ക് ഈസ്റ്റ് ഇന്ത്യാ കമ്പനി പ്രതീകാത്മകമായ ചൂണ്ടുപലകയും തീര്ത്തു . നിര്‍മോഹികള്‍ ആണ് കോടതി വ്യവഹാരത്തിലേക്കും ഈ നിയമ സമാധനപ്രശ്നത്തെ വലിച്ചിഴച്ചത്. ഹിന്ദുക്കള്‍ പോലുമല്ലാത്ത നിര്‍മോഹി അഖാരകള്‍, 1720 ല്‍ മാത്രം ഒരു വൈഷ്ണവ സംഘമായി രംഗ പ്രവേശം ചെയ്ത നിര്‍മോഹികള്‍, തങ്ങള്‍ കാലാതീത കാലം മുതല്‍ ആരാധിക്കുന്ന ക്ഷേത്രമാണ് അത് എന്നാണ് കോടതിയില്‍ അവകാശപ്പെട്ടത്!

അലഹബാദ് കോടതി വിധിയിലെ എല്ലാ പോരായ്മകള്‍ക്കും മുകളില്‍ മുഴച്ചു നില്ക്കു ന്നത് വഖഫ് ബോര്ഡിനോപ്പം നിര്‍മോഹികള്ക്കും അവകാശമുണ്ട്‌ എന്ന കോടതിയുടെ തീര്‍പ്പാണ് ! “Whether Nirmohi Akhara, Plaintiff, is Panchayati Math of Rama Nandi sect of Bairagies and as such is a religious denomination following its religious faith and per suit according to its own custom.” എന്നത് കോടതി അംഗീകരിക്കുക ആയിരുന്നു. ബാബറി മസ്ജിദ് വിധിയിലെ ഏറ്റവും നീചമായ വശം ഈ പ്രശ്നത്തെ ബ്രിട്ടീഷ് കൊളോനിയലിസത്തിന്റെ ചട്ടുകമായി, ഹിന്ദു മുസ്ലീം വൈരം കുത്തി പൊക്കി, ആദ്യത്തെ സാമുദായിക കലാപങ്ങള്ക്ക് തുടക്കമിട്ടു, വിശ്വാസികളെ തന്നെ വഞ്ചിച്ചു ഉയര്ന്നു വന്ന ഹിംസാത്മകമായ ഒരു കള്‍ട്ടിനു ഈ വിധിയിലൂടെ സാധൂകരണം കിട്ടുന്നു എന്നുള്ളതാണ്. ഈ നിര്‍മോഹികളുടെ രക്തദാഹമാണ്, കുല്‍സി്തരാഷ്ട്രീയമാണ്, രണ്ട് നൂറ്റാണ്ടുകളിലൂടെ നിരന്തരമായ സാമുദായിക സ്പര്ദ്ധയുടെ കൊലവാള്‍ ഉയര്ത്തി ഇന്ത്യയെ ചോരക്കളം ആക്കിയത് എന്നത് എളുപ്പത്തില്‍ വിസ്മരിക്കാന്‍ കഴിയുന്ന കാര്യമല്ല.

1992 ഡിസംബര്‍ 6-നു കര്‍സേവ നടത്തിയത് ബി ജെ പി യും ആര്‍ എസ് എസ്സും ഹിന്ദു മഹാ സഭയും ഒക്കെ ആയിരുന്നു. പക്ഷേ യഥാര്ത്ഥ വേട്ട നിര്‍മോഹികളുടെതായിരുന്നു. രണ്ട് നൂറ്റാണ്ട് കാലത്തെ ചരിത്ര വിരുദ്ധ രാഷ്ട്രീയത്തിലൂടെ അവര്‍ തകര്‍ത്തത് ഒരു സമൂഹത്തിന്റെ ഏറ്റവും പ്രിയപ്പെട്ട നൈതികസങ്കല്പ്പങ്ങളെ ആയിരുന്നു എന്നത് ഓരോ ഡിസംബര്‍ ആറുകളും അവരുടെതാക്കുന്നു. ചരിത്രത്തില്‍ എങ്ങനയാണ്‌ ഇത്തരം ഭീകരസംഘങ്ങള്‍ ജന്മമെടുക്കുക, എങ്ങനെയൊക്കെ ആണ് അവ വള്ര്‍ന്നു വരിക എന്നത് പ്രവചിക്കാന്‍ ആവില്ല. ഒരു സമൂഹത്തെ ഒന്നാകെ ഒരു ചെറിയ ഭീകരസംഘം എങ്ങനെയാണ് വാള്മുുനയില്‍ നിര്ത്തി ശിഥിലീകരിക്കുന്നത് എന്നത് പഠിക്കാന്‍ ഏറ്റവും നല്ല ഉദാഹരണം ഇന്ന് ഈ നിര്‍മോഹികളുടെ ചരിത്രം തന്നെയാണ്

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