Muddleheaded Middle Class

Posted on February 9, 2014 by secondsaturn

The Khirkee episode reminds me of a similar incident about seven years ago in Dayalbagh. In those days Dayalbagh was only a fifth as full as it is today and with new buildings coming up the neighbourhood was upbeat about us as being a new colony with promises of a prosperous consuming community. This means that in those days if you called the police they came. We had a young couple for neighbours just about two plots away and often the man would take a while to be back from work and the young bride would join us for tea in our house. Soon she was complaining of strange people coming in our out of the ground floor flat of her building. She felt uncomfortable at the sight of so many different men, always new ones she would insist. Soon others started reporting to me that girls young and bit older were often seen in and out of the flat as well. They all seemed to suggest that there was a call girl racket operating out of the seemingly unoccupied flat. I am not the one to be fazed by such fucks, let people fuck as they want to. At that point of time I was completely liberal towards such “private matters”. But one day, things changed; it seems that three men caught the sight of this young girl standing atop her terrace and decided to climb the two floors up and ring her door bell. They wanted an entry right into her flat. These men were not wholly unknown to her; one among them was our next door neighbour. In a manner of being polite to his new young neighbour he offered sex to her as a compliment! It was at this point that Madhusree decided that she would call the police in. Since it was those days, they did come. In those days the police had not found out that Dayalbagh would be the low brow colony that it presently has come to be; in those days, the game was not yet on its course and so the police could not make out that in the great game of development we were the losers.
The flat was cleared of its contents the next very night with two jeeps full of women police taking the girls away. On the next morning the flat owner, also a woman romped down from her south Delhi residence and raised hell about we being vigilantes and not respecting people’s privacy. Something rather similar to what happened to Khirkee extension actually. I am fortunate to have at least one friend who lives in Khirkee extension and so I know of this locality. It is right next to Malviya Nagar and right behind to Sarvapriya Vihar, spaces quite familiar to my friends but Khirkee extension, no one in my circle have ever seemed to have heard! Someone thought that it was a Muslim village, some thought that it was an unauthorised tenement, some thought that it was a slum and some imagined that it was close to the airport where foreign tourists lived. The society of Khirkee extension was completely unknown to my friends. The difference was that those who lived in this place earned less than what my friends do. Only this slight difference in incomes has been able to create a world so apart that Khirkee seems to be a different planet altogether with different natural laws and different rhythms to its seasons. Khirkee is home to students as well, North east and the Africans dominate the population, unfortunately both prejudiced and harassed categories in the city. In a city with an overwhelming population of vegetarians and with a significant abhorrence to meat cooking in pots, these communities of non-vegetarians are repulsive too. Prejudices are bad things; they are like the false cries of wolves often block the prospect of rescue when the real danger comes. So when the residents of Khirkee complained about the African students, people thought that they were witch hunting.
I know of this place because a friend from Assam lives here; she is also a JNUite and admittedly this makes me more favourably biased towards her to believe her story. She takes me on a tour around the place and I see these flats that are right inside apartment complexes that are built like chawls. Customers confuse doors and sometimes when they are inebriated also confuse faces taking any and everyone as their service providers. Surely this might be a welcome opportunity for someone yearning for sex and I am sure that many a bored women may find such an opportunity exhilarating but there are perhaps more of us whose tastes may be different. The embeddedness of a racket of drugs and sex right into the residential complexes might not exactly be the “commercial purpose” one could allow out of residential areas. My walk in Hell gives me a good idea of what goes on. Complaints are filed and reports are written but never an arrest. The stupidity of Delhi’s lower middle class prejudices against some kinds of people turn against them and they do not seem to be able to register a well worded complaint. In their representations, racial hate flows out making the complaints frivolous. The residents continue to be hemmed in by the growing racket around them; yet not every student from an African country is involved but there is something as being of bad company. The good and the bad stick together; in a city like Delhi they do not feel encouraged to share their woes with fellow citizens, the good among the bad lot are thus severely disadvantaged.
The racket continues; young girls returning from schools are propositioned by customers and pimps and young boys are lured with rolls of powder and who knows even sex. No one in my society knows of this world, for prosperity has shielded them into other kinds of posh localities where they also have gates with security men to shut the rest of the world. There is really no mixing of spaces, mixing up of societies across these gates. The safety of the rich is unknown to the poor, the risks of the poor are disbelieved by the rich; the rich cannot comprehend the poor’s vulnerability while the poor does not know of the rich’s security. Therefore, when the Law Minister from the incumbent AAP Party charged into these flats, the rich saw everything from the point of view of their world, shut off from and secured against the poor and the laws of their world. So when Somnath Bharti stormed into the citadel, his act was seen as being vigitantist, sexist and racist.
Everyone believed the media; not really because they were the media but because the media had people who were richer than my friends. Wealth has interesting shades; one of those interesting greys being the legitimacy of what wealth speaks. The rich man’s sayings are truer than those of the poorer and hence the media, backed by media houses, networked through family and kinship ties to politicians and the police what they said were all true. Bharti was excessively enthusiastic, he was a male chauvinist, he was a moralist and above all he needed to be hated. No one asked why did the police make FIRs against non-existent persons? No one asked why only one particular hospital was identified for the medical tests? No one ever questioned on what the interests of the police were in protecting this racket, no one ever sensed a web of interconnected interests. Instead of questioning the media everyone got busy in the media’s mind game. Is Somnath Bharti a vigilante or not? Whether he set up a kangaroo court or not? Whether Somnath Bharti can walk inside our homes and snatch away our wine glasses, beat up my boyfriends, drag me out into the streets and force me to urinate? Who asked these questions? The media did. These were media’s questions which emanated out of its own reaction to an episode.
The media is magic in many ways; it shows to us what we are supposed to believe is true. In the wired world mired with only mediations of the electronic waves, we are so much like the characters out of the films of Michaelangelo Antonioni who are unable to respond to anything which is real. Hence it occurred to none of my friends that the media was an opinion on an episode and not the episode itself. It could use evidence only selectively. Indeed, an entire discipline of media studies has emanated from such manipulations of the media in which news produced by a few is consumed by many. This already makes media possess disproportionate power and much of the media studies attempts to quell that power by repeatedly asking the question of the access to and interpretation of facts by the media in view of its interest positions. Unfortunately for us, not all are trained media studies persons and hence open to manipulation by the media.
The idea behind Bharti’s raid is atrocious, ridiculous, vigilantism, obnoxious, prejudiced and uncouth. But all this qualifies if the act is what is presented to us. But if the act is not what has been presented the description of Bharti by the media does not fit. The media cleverly manipulates us into imagining that vigilantes are walking into our homes, breaking our curios, scratching our furniture and vanadalizing our honour. The media quietly substitutes the context of quiet upper middle class respectable homes for the Khirkee chawls where random doors conceal prostitution and drugs and in this way, extracts Bharti’s raid to place him right into our drawing rooms. The media is a superior sociologist for they use sociology to manipulate us every day and no one other than the media would ever know that ideals must be located in their material context. This is why, it has cleverly made us imagine that Bharti was acting in the way he did in a world which is a continuity of ours; it concealed the fact that he was dealing with very different levels of objective conditions under which his act would indeed, contrarily have been the moral one. Amitabh Bachchan was a star of my times, and his films used to have such arguments to the core. Thankfully my doctorate is on this star and the media has not been able to fool me.
The media has played on two levels; at one level it has already decided that Bharti’s is an immoral act and asked us to condemn it on moral grounds. Here it accesses our arguments of politicians being naturally corrupt and asks us to reverberate its thesis that here is a case of utter moral corruption. By placing Bharti’s as a moral issue the media has pulled from beneath the rug of arguments the claim for it being a political one. The issue could have been political were we to debate on the context; why did the police not heed to the residents on their complaints, what did the residents find objectionable, was it prejudice against the Africans and women, or were the objections for real. These questions and such questions could have helped us to travel into larger dimensions of politics. We could have asked are Delhiites witch hunters, do we like the Cold War America also suffering from Mac Carthyism? Is the police class conscious? Does it treat its citizens who do not live in the posh localities like they have done? Possible replies to these questions would have opened up the real dimensions of politics that would have made it easy for us to understand the various nexus and networks that bind politicians, media and the administrators to rot every possible institution of the society. Institutions fail not because they have lost their ideals, for everyone knows how to mouth these ideals and moralisms; institutions fail because they, through their crony connections keep off those who claim entry on purely the grounds of merit. The networks close off societies that were supposed to be redeemed as open ones. Morality is the instrument of the entrenched to ward off questioning. This has been true for almost every revolution under the sun; morals are challenged during any and every change.
The second level the media has played on is to break the confidence of the Aam Admi supporter. The plank of the party is morality because anti-corruption is its principle battle. To the corrupt, an anti-corruption drive is vigilantism, it attacks one’s wealth, it has raids, and it has people coming inside your homes to take away your possessions, your lifestyle. By projecting Bharti as one who walks into your homes objecting loudly to the freedom of lifestyle you lead the media has pushed all of you who supported the AAP’s agenda that the entrenched and the corrupt must be attacked into one of your own enemies. In a manner we are all becoming the murderer of Psycho, where he murders by donning his mother’s clothes because he was so oppressed by his mother that as soon as he felt attracted to women, he would assume his mother’s persona and kill the young woman off. Psycho went onto become Hitchcock’s greatest works and it inspired and continues to inspire film makers even today. Psycho was made at the conjunction of two eras of America, one in which its new middle class challenged the order of the corporate militaristic ruling class. Though latched upon a psychotic hero, Psycho became the metaphor of people turning against themselves by internalising the language of the oppressor. The language of the oppressor would invariably be moral and things would be taken out of context to absolutize truth statements. Psycho is being played out through the media’s moralising a political question in which we, like Norman bates assume the persona of our oppressors because our oppressors start finding fault with us whenever we try to realise our dreams.
Morality is central to the middle class, so is moralising. Anti-corruption motto of the Aam Admi can only be a middle class because of its high moral tone. Yet the middle class keeps to its morals; the khaap’s honour, the honour killings, the rise of conservatism and the recent recruitment of professionals in terrorist outfits are extensions of this middle class morality. Morality is pertinent to the middle class because morality is instrument through which it guards its own class from being predated by the wealthy or falls prey to poverty. Its morality helps in the creation of the family, in sustaining its social capital.
The function of morality of the middle class is not merely an ideal, it is an important objective affair because by transgressing the moral limits the middle class can access means that help it to break out of its ilk and stand above its milieu. This is exactly what has happened through corruption in India; people of similar means have earned disproportionate rewards through transgressing the moral limits. Then they have become a rich class that can afford cars, flats, clothes and others. Since wealth brings about certain legitimacy, this richer class too defined our goals for us. We all thought that we lived to earn for a life style and indeed life style politics by driving up consumerism cracked the very crux of middle class from one that was an intelligentsia and literati into one being a glitterati. Once we are on the path of consumerism, we oriented ourselves along planks that would help us with the money. The middle class pursued that kind of education that made it seek shelter in the wealth generating corporate houses and the industry, made them into fortune seeking NRIs and when they were more autonomous people as bureaucrats plunged them into corruption. In all such pursuit of education the middle class only plotted its way to be close to wealth. This was a complete reversal from the days when the middle class would produce ideas, intellect and knowledge. The media, owned again by the wealth class was now the producer of knowledge, and hence started to define the very ground for the middle class. The wealthy now seemed to define the middle class as a class in itself; the media defined its morality, the industry defined its profession while the advertisements defined its needs. Through such definition, the wealth class took charge of creating the middle class, where it forever moved the bar of the middle class into higher and higher income levels. The middle class depoliticization was complete in a mad rush to pursue wealth; its fall into corruption was also due to this.
The above process turned the middle class against itself; those who had more possessions guarded it from sharing with the rest. Families were the first institutions to go; better off relatives were no longer in a mood to stand beside the less successful and earning more for the household was all that one could think. At no point of time in its history was the middle class so stressed over money as it is now. Corruption is a symptom of this deeper anxiety over status that for the middle class only money can beget. Privileges were also guarded in the form of coteries and clubs; even the departments in Universities are filled with similar people those who knew one another. I attended a course in the India Habitat Centre which was strangely attended by people who I realized knew one another. The rise of ethnic politics is essentially middle class politics; communal politics is also middle class politics. Everywhere spaces are getting closed, only familiarity speaks, connections speak; gone are the days of open societies today we are looking to developing known circles of friends of mutual support so that our ideas totally disconnected from the objective reality are nonetheless legitimised on affectionate considerations. The rise of the gated colonies of high rise apartments is symbolic of the enclosures of the middle class by which this class in itself fights its own members. The middle class’s transformation from an intelligentsia to a consumer has broken its own moorings, made its existence into a zone of civil war.
The wealthy breaks the middle class through its ownership of morality. What the middle class no longer notices is what this morality consists of; does it have its own objective base or is it some manufacture from above. The media seems to be a good hand maiden to manufacture morals first by defining such morals and then by obliterating the location of such morals from their objective embeddedness. This is what has happened; we never know whether the Batla House encounter was of terrorists or of boys mess; we similarly have assumed that the drug racket was only a tourist party and that the sex den a paying guest accommodation. Keeping the veil of normalcy as it is, the act of Bharti becomes demonic; but to turn one’s attention to the facts where the harmless routine of everyday life conceals the lurid reality of customers knocking randomly at my door, Bharti is indeed a relief. Just as Bharti’s act of raiding shocks us from the perspective of our well protected lifestyles, but seen from the viewpoint of a single woman as I having to hear knocks from strange men who assume that I am on sale is abominable. In such a situation, Bharti is my messiah.
I think that my politics with the Aam Admi is all about recovering my self-respect and this I can only do when I generate the language of my reality, pursue possibilities that transform my opportunities. And this I can do by recovering my good sense to generate my language, my concepts, my theories from my perspectives rather than play only a verbal game proffered to me by the media where anchors are cued in to their onwers’ commands with that microphone fitted into their auditory meatus.

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The Life Trajectory of Krishna Dasgupta a.k.a Suchitra Sen

Posted on January 19, 2014 by secondsaturn

I did not know till I heard it on television on the reminiscences of her biographer that Roma Dasgupta was enrolled as Krishna Dasgupta in school. I also had no idea that during her wedding ceremony, Roma refused to wear the veil. I thought that she did not need to wear the veil because Brahmos are not required to do so. Roma was Hindu but her husband, Dibanath Sen could well have been a Brahmo. Dibanath was Adinath’s son and Adinath was Hemlata and Sukhalata’s brother. Hemlata Sen married Jogeendranath Dasgupta. They were my grandfather’s parents. Dibanath and my grandfather were cross cousins and Roma was therefore a pretty close relative. But that was when she was Roma; after she became Suchitra Sen, the family chose to forget her and why not, because Roma was a relative, not Suchitra Sen. A photo parched and frayed of them as a young couple made me realize that Moon Moon Sen, Suchitra’s only child looked so much like the father Dibanath. Stories in the family around Dibanath were not encouraging; he was supposed to be a sparer, a gambler, a dilettante and so on. The father Adinath was a lawyer and rich; he was a jolly fellow except that my grandfather’s older brothers had issues with him. I think a combination of Dibanath and Adinath, marinated in doses of villainy became the maleficent husband of Suchitra Sen in the film Uttar Phalguni, also remade in Hindi as Mamta. Roma was of course never happy in the marriage and she refused to acknowledge her in laws. She lived all by herself, reclused, hidden away and mysterious if not mystique. Despite the media being all ears, Suchitra’s affairs were never leaked to the press. People were far too afraid of her to step on her toes. Hers were days rather different; icons were icons because they were not seen, they had not turned into celebrities because they would be seen everywhere.

Suchitra Sen’s biographer, Phularenu Kanjilal says that Krishna was always the way she finally emerged on screen. She was haughty, snobbish, moody, peevish, absent minded, self-absorbed, self-confident, wilful, assertive and totally in command of herself. And she was beautiful. She was conscious of her great beauty, totally unapologetic about it and behaved as if she was bestowed upon with such glory because she was worth it and deserved every bit of the natural selection. Krishna may have not been very fair and there is a debate in the house whether she was indeed dark, but she may not have been the powdery white which her sisters were. Hence she was called Kirshna, the dark one, or the darker one. Krishna could walk into the class with her hair open, she always spoke with her stiff upper lip and curled up lower lip, she looked with large eyes, often obliquely. In other words, the style and the mannerisms that eventually made her into the star she is was very much a part of her while in the teens. It seems that one afternoon, Krishna sat reclined on the bench in class and staring blankly at the space before her said that she would like to be remembered long after her death. Given the fact that she was completely mediocre in her studies, music and dance and had no talent to make her stand out such an assertion seemed to her friends as absurd. She had her beauty; but that was not enough. In those days, getting a chance on the silver screen was even more difficult. Her husband’s father’s unmarried sister used to be a top model in Kolkata in those days but then the family was among the glitterati of Kolkata. Roma’s father was a dignified middle class teacher and her excessive beauty was supposed to have found a great destiny into being married into Hemlata Sen’s family. Her beauty was supposed to have played the very role that it was supposed to play and exhausted its full possibilities.

But Roma’s arrogance would have none of this; her marriage meant nothing to her and she ventured to conquer the world, a Bengali middle class, very middle class, saddled into sharing space and resources with as many as eight siblings, just about average in studies from a Bengali medium locality school and a shade darker than her sisters. She had actually nothing to her credit, nothing that could stand as a background. She had only herself, her beauty, more in her own estimation than for the rest, for she was a shade darker in her skin. But her mannerisms, her affectations ever since childhood as her biographer writes perhaps means that she was ostensibly conscious of the fact. And she believed in being entitled because of her endowment and demanded that the world should fall at her feet not because what she could deliver but just because who she was. And from this attitude arose the icon, Suchitra Sen, one that Bengal would possibly never see again. It was Suchitra Sen’s attitude that made her the great star that she was and she swayed an entire culture with her gait and her gaze, her manner of holding back the head, the way of her reserved coquetry.

The stardom of Suchitra Sen did not emanate so much from the roles which she essayed; her stardom emerged from her own off screen personality. Scripts were written to suit her and if she ever acted in Griha Daha or in Debi Choudhurani or Datta, these characters were like her own. She was born to be looked after by a caring boyfriend or a rich father and in Debi Choudhurani when she had neither, the lord of the underworld, Bhabani Pathak raises her to become Empress. But she was not a damsel in distress; she was one who commanded protection, ordered men about to do her stuff. When she lost her pet dog on a journey to a farm house she insisted that her class fellow, Uttam Kumar, the star to spend the entire night in open looking for the dog! She was the only female lead opposite Uttam Kumar who actually could make the hero or heroes of Bengali cinema go down on his knees to appease her. Sociologically this ego is rooted in the long tradition of Bengal and in its modernity; but such discussions do not constitute the scope of this obituary.
Suchitra’s arrogance made her emerge as an interesting person on screen. Though vulnerable at the core, she covered this up with a haughtiness; the same haughtiness that also made her capable of a strange loyalty and self-sacrifice to the extent of self-abnegation and annihilation. . She may want love, but she would prefer to give love rather than to ask for it; the men are supposed to guess her needs through a sincere reading of her life trajectory. She was quick to develop obsessions and eccentricities, to become prejudiced and sometimes too hasty in her judgments and actions. These flaws only added to her glamour and it needed a man like Uttam Kumar to stand as her alter ego, bear the perfection that could be achieved through the elimination of her blemishes. Uttam Kumar absorbed her shortcomings and restored her in settings in which her ego could again recover from hurt and recover the confidence to resume her high handednessIt was in her that the Bengali audience discovered her ego and it was in the comely man, Uttam Kumar that the Bengali knew softness. Together they represented the pair unmatched to this date; it was a pair of ego and arrogance and of protectiveness and nurture. It is unfortunate that Western categories so dominate our discourses but in the Indian culture, harsh haughtiness is often associated with beautiful women and comely surrender with powerful men, the quintessential Durga and Shiva or Kali and Shiva. Suchitra Sen created the Bengali femininity, the feminine force which believes that the world exists to serve them; that they would always need to be paid obeisance to and hence the need for being protected should never be made obvious or acknowledged.

Suchitra’s total withdrawal from the public gaze was also the result of her arrogance; if she is not queen of the silver screen then she better not be seen at all, seems to be her refrain. It was a strange my way or the highway situation; she had always to be taken in her terms and not in any others. She never knew how to bend, she would better be broken than be bowed. Sometimes I thought that this was a rather lack of grace, but she was always the only one in her world and insisted that she would continue as the distant Goddess rather than to walk the earth with fellow mortals. In this cordoning off, even her own were not spared. Moon Moon had a tough time with her, despite the fact that she was the only child and while Suchitra decided that she did not want anyone, she never really stopped to wonder whether there were others who needed her.

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Politics of Sexuality – Article 377

Posted on January 9, 2014 by secondsaturn

India’s is the world’s longest written Constitution that way back in 1950 assured equality and liberty to women, poor, illiterate, homeless, orphans, oppressed and the marginalized . Yet, as is revealed, a core of repressive conservatism remained in the form of Article 377 which criminalized sex between consenting adults, which was not conceived to be in the order of nature. Hence homosexuality and transgender sex came under its attack. The history of this Act can be traced to a law in 1861, passed by the British colonialists, reminding us of Michel Foucault’s magnum opus, the three volume treatise on the History of Sexuality. It appears from Foucault that modernising Europe was keen to restrict the definition of sexual pleasure only to sex between man and woman of similar ages, a combination which produced children within matrimony. The ancient Chinese since uncertain hoary days had restrictions which regulated intercourse to days that could beget the male child. India’s own Kamasutra fine tunes recipes for maximum sexual pleasures which prescribe heterosexuality. 16th century Europe may have been keen to reproduce itself biologically to counter the damage to its population caused by the Crusades and Plague in the earlier centuries but also to consolidate the institution of the family for a steady supply of soldiers, peasants, yeomen and other workmen for its growing factories. The Kamasutra was on the other hand, an attempt at consolidating the society on the basis of uniform marriage patterns that included heterosexuality. It was also to foster a high culture and an aristocracy through prescribed standards of pleasure and enjoyment.

The VHP and the RSS’s thesis that homosexuality is an imported affair like most of its theses completely ahistorical. Ved Vyas, the composer of the Mahabharata had diverse sexual preferences which started from bestiality and became more and more varied to the scandal of the Aryan epic society. The ruling over some kinds of sex acts as being unnatural was an Aryan import, to regulate and at the same time intermingle in an indigenous Indian society.

The present sentiments against homosexuality and transgender sex however are proscriptive rather than prescriptive. These sentiments emerge within the right nationalists in response to the loss of the “centredness” of the Indian society around the family. Its invocation of parivaar in every walk of life is perhaps a desire to lionize the institution of the family so that spaces those which are outside the family are imagined to address the individual more softly and kindly. If the State is ruled as a family, the citizen becomes a member of a large family; if offices are run along principles of family, then individuals expect to feel more protected against impersonal rules and disciplines. The right nationalism in India is the politics of creating family like comfort zones all around one’s self and this can appeal to an entire range of individuals fearful of performing as free atoms in the public sphere. The right nationalist’s agenda of genocide is an extension of this fear, an attempt at elimination of the “other” whose presence requires the opening up the walls of the ensconced familiarity of the family. In the same way, the right attacks various forms of sexualities those which are neither supportive of the institution of the family nor can reproduce the family. The intolerance of diversity, whether of ethnie, or cultures, or ways of being and its upholding of a nation on the discourse of the parivaar is the bravado of a person who fears participating in the world as a wholly developed adult.

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Social Class In Delhi Elections

Posted on December 18, 2013 by secondsaturn

Facebook sites are agog with slogans, Nikalo aaj makaano se, jung ladho beimano se..exhorting citizens to vote for the candidates in the Delhi elections. The mainstay of the present elections seems to be corruption, thanks to the presence of the Aam Admi Party, the new presence that promises clean politics. This elections has no issues around it and yet voters are sharply divided into two groups and the three camps; the Congress, the BJP and the Aam Admi Party. There is a group which would vote for the Congress as a reward for what it has done for Delhi while there is another group who find the Congress government to be corrupt and callous. The latter group is divided into two further camps; the older and middle aged persons well entrenched into their life statuses while the other comprises of younger people with dreams, hopes, trepidations and anxieties as those the youth suffer anywhere in the world. These groups are so well divided that if one knew the background of the voter one could easily establish her voting preference.

In the circle that I move around everyone is a Congress voter. These are the rich who, during the regime of Congress in Delhi have become richer. Expectedly then they would be loyal to a system that has helped them grow. The BJP voters are those who have typically not done too well, struggled to improve their lot, and slipped back despite the hard work. This kind is likely to be resentful of a regime which has created opportunities which were for others. The BJP is an ideology based on the attack of the “other”; it might be the Muslims as a concrete category but in a generalized sense, its ideology is to attack the one who seemingly has beaten them to the finishing line. The voters of the Aam Admi Party are the educated middle aged and the aspiring youth, both of who desire to shape their lives up, need to take command over the future, the control the political discourse, invigilate governance and emerge as a moral force to regulate the rest of the society.  The desire to rule is the strongest in the Aam Admi Party voters.

Politics of elections are expressions of social conflicts and contestations. The entrenchment of a Party, especially like that of the Congress in Delhi was indeed a sign of satisfaction which the citizens of Delhi had with the Sheila Dixit government. She used urban development as her plank to legitimize her rule and truly then urban infrastructure was supposed to have helped everybody access superior opportunities in the city. But development has its own pitfalls; everybody wants to come into a city with facilities which lead to overcrowding, desperations and therefore in the rising crime rates. Corruption is bound to rise with speculators of food products, private electricity companies raising bills to fancy rates and the city administration descending on people with land acquisitions, clearings and demolitions. Overpopulation raises prices of goods and services making it difficult for the local population of the city access instruments needed for a decent living.  The local population who loses out to the new economy of Delhi is the largest support base of the BJP.  The local people and the new migrant who has benefitted in their various capacities and made more money through Delhi’s large scale public investments are the Congress’s bastions. But the professional, the academic, the educated who is perhaps the first generation migrant into Delhi, who has the power of thought and articulation and who has decided that a city driven only by the power of money instead of the power of culture and erudition is effete and crass is the voter for the Aam Admi Party. This is why we find in colleges and schools, in courts and bureaucracy, among the youth in the marginalized slums of Delhi, the young persons with bare graduate degrees in call centres, the ushers of cinema halls, the hands in the shops of the malls vote desperately for the Aam Admi Party. They are calling for a change in the order, an order which will be ruled more by the moral terms of this new brand of the educated and the professional and perhaps the salaried, or what we would call as the middle class intelligentsia a century ago.

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Chhath Puja, The Trail of the Sun Salutation

Posted on November 10, 2013 by secondsaturn

Four decades ago I went into the den of a famous Bhrigu astrologer in Kolkata with my grandfather and marvelled at a wall full of calendar art images of the various Gods of the raashi chakra. I was especially intrigued at the image of the Sun God who was dark and looked rather Ashuric with a thick curled up moustache than the fair skinned and elegant featured Jupiter, Venus and Mercury. After long discussions between us, my grandfather and I decided that the Sun must have been a non-Aryan God at a time in the Indian history when Aryans and non-Aryans fought embittered battles.
Chhath puja is the worship of the Sun; the deity of Chhath Maiya seems to be more of a compulsion to place a Goddess at the centre of the worship because female deities usually adorn community gatherings in festivals among Hindus. Chhath starts on the third day of the waxing moon, in the days of misty autumn when the earth has just started to cool off and days are pulling up fast into purple red twilights. It is a time when we emerge out of the dark moon; we are just waking up to a new life after death. It is on the second day of Bhratri Dvitiya that girls pray to the Lord of Death that their brothers be spared of his sceptre, on the third day of Akshay Tritiya we pray for our long lives. On the fourth day the Chhath celebrations begin with fasting and much controlled eating, with long penance of standing in the waters and then congregating around the lit fire with simple and rude food. The Chhath, literally means the sixth day, is the day of the culmination of the community forces around peace and abstinence; the celebration is not of plenty but of constraints, the restraint on relentless consumption. It is an offering of simple savouries and fruits to the Sun God, rather than the harrowing blood sacrifices of the American Indians and the Incas and the Mayas, the other people who also worship the Sun. Non-violence and vegetarianism is a long standing ethos of the Indians especially those who occupy the land of the Sun worshippers.
It is interesting that Bihar, which is the centre of the Sun worship, is also the centre of peace; Sita was born here and throughout the Ramayana, she has stood for grace and dignity, for resilience and patience. It was here that Karna the son of Sun was born illegitimately to Kunti, and it was this land that would henceforth be his kingdom, namely Anga. Karna’s life was one of loyalty, sacrifice and forbearance. It was in this very land of Sun that the Pandavas learnt the art of beating death from Dhaumya, an important sage of the epoch. Sometime later in history, in the northern fringe of the land of the Sun people would be born two most important preachers of universal peace, namely Buddha and Mahavir. It would be here that the first sermon would be preached against animal sacrifice in rituals during Ajatashatru and it was here, with its centre in Magadha would be established the mighty Mauryan empire, the world’s first welfare state. A little towards the south, would be the Sum Temple of Konark, where Krishna’s son, Shamba would migrate to be cured of his leprosy. The Sun takes away leprosy, kills mite, decimates the various other death inflicting diseases. The Sun trail has united India as has no other festival; the Pongal of the south, the Itu of Bengal, the Magha congregation of the Kumbha and Sankranti everywhere in India. Suryanamaskar is the highpoint of yogic practice.
In the 13th century, the sun would again be invoked by dark people with snubbed features in the far away denuded mountains of antiquity, namely the Aravallis where the Mewar kingdom would be established under kings like Shiladitya and Hamir. And about four centuries before this, the persecuted Parsis would descend in India to protect their faith around the worship of Ahura Mazda, the source of the Supreme Light. The Sun was appropriated by the Vedic people and hymns were composed around Him in Sanskrit, but never has the Sun been invoked for war; surprisingly not even for prosperity, but essentially to illuminate the soul, the life force, the good sense among humans, for the civilizations to be free of darkness and death. Hence we pray to the One with rays spread out like the petals of the hibiscus, the one who is with the Ultimate brightness and the one who can end every kind of evil, literally under the sun.

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Terracotta Jewellery

Posted on November 1, 2013 by secondsaturn

Mahalakshmi Ramakrishnan, Associate Professor, Ancient History (specialities, ancient societies and art), JNU has invited the Aadhaar Mahila.. to display their wares at Aurobindo Place, Hauz Khas for Diwali. The Aadhar is an initiative by one Ms Reshma, an alumnus of Vishwabharati Kala Bhavan who lives and works in Jharkhand among the tribals. She has among her stocks, masks, lamps and jewellery. The masks are exhausted because I bought most of them off due to my fascination for them. The jewellery is there in all their resplendent terracotta. Reshma’s efforts remind me of a story I read in Amita Sen’s autobiography, Ashramkanya, the first book that I ever reviewed. For those who are interested in name dropping, Amita Sen is the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s late mother. Amita Sen writes that Tagore would often invite the glitterati of Calcutta to his Poush Mela in Shantiniketan. Tagore invented the event to promote the Adivasi way of life and showcase their arts and crafts for the fashionable world; the Poush Mela constituted his efforts at promoting the tribal way of life and tribal fashions. Poush is the month of intense winter in India and given the warm climate for most of the plains in the land, poush brings the salubrious cool and along with it the plenty of the harvested crops. Shantiniketan is at its finest in the middle of Poush, the time of the winter fair.

 However, for the girls at Tagore’s school, the fete had its problems. The girls from Calcutta were bedecked up in fine clothes and jewellery while the girls at Shantiniketan would wear coarse cloth and had no ornaments whatsoever. Amita Sen writes that they would be anxious that compared to the gold jewellery of the girls from Calcutta, they would look sallow and ugly. Tagore, sensing this rueful envy instructed Nandalal Bose’s wife to design jewellery for the Ashram girls. Mrs Bose used dried straw, wood, terracotta and flowers to create the most alluring adornments for the girls. Amita Sen writes with pride how jealous the girls from Kolkata were; they took off their enrichments and instead pined for these simple but aesthetic embellishments. Reshma’s jewellery made out of dried earth makes me recall the origin of such jewellery designing in Vishwa Bharati, her Alma Mater.

 But the sale of jewellery on the first day at Aurobindo Place was poor. It seems that women from North India did not find them inspiring; as they would be deaf to Tagorean Music, they were blind to an essentially Tagorean idea of beauty. Northern India is glitter and gloss; not for it is asceticism, not for it is the pursuit of pure beauty. North Indians pursue beauty also as ostentation; their clothes are competition, homes are displays, bodies are public. The respect for the private and personal is scant; the glory of what can be showed off is substantial. They buy fashion stuff only because it has a tag which can be converted into money and hence has value for the bystander; the idea of self as a meditative unity is as foreign to North India as aloo parathas are for the Eskimoes. North India has no ability to recognize; its cognition is only through the eyes of the other and if the other values what one has, then one values oneself. Money and not beauty, power and not peace is what North India pursues. This is why, pure beauty as terracotta jewellery has little appeal for the polyester, polythene, paraffin visitors of Hauz Khas.

 In Bengal there is an idea of “Alakshmi”, an entity which appears like Lakshmi but is essentially evil. Both signify wealth but the wealth that Lakshmi provides is rather intangible; it is a wealth of good health, good mind, pure spirit, domestic peace, goodwill among friends, kindness to all, neatness, tidiness, in other words, a typically Kantian unity of transcendental perfection. Lakshmi promises such nirvanic wealth. This is why Bengalis worship Lakshmi in the soft but bright glow of the autumn moon when the sky is the clearest and the night is the calmest. The deity is worshipped in the utter quiet of the house, no crackers, no string light, no loud laughter, no quarrel, no sharp tasting food and no display of excess wealth. The Alakshmi, on the other hand is worshipped just as she is in the North Indian Diwali with excess of everything, glitter and glow of dazzling light, gluttony of food, and ear splitting sound as she oversees the worship of wealth in gambling; her day is the darkest hour of the last leg of autumn; the wintery smog envelops her moments. The Alakshmi is wealth pursued for the sake of wealth, for power and ostentation. Lakshmi, on the other hand is the wealth of beauty, of aesthetics.

 When we worship beauty for the sake of beauty and not for the auction value of art, we truly find our centres. A well centred person seeks harmony among the wider community; appreciates and revives the core of truth in cultures and helps in a genuine communion among cultures. In this way, cultures retain their uniqueness and at the same time find a resonance in the universality of humanity. Aesthetic philosophy unites humankind, resists marginalization and makes everything worthy and valuable. Beauty for the sake of beauty is perhaps the way out for a world torn asunder not so much by great wars, or ravaged by great famines and sweeping epidemics as it is by a sense of competition and consumerism among people. In a world where each is racing against everyone else in a bid to grab the next consumer good for the sake of “one up man” ship, the pursuit of beauty, which returns the person to her inner soul, can genuinely help the human to recover her lost self.

 

 

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Secret History of Sikhism

Posted on November 1, 2013 by secondsaturn

I am travelling to Ludhiana in a car arranged for my colleague and me to attend a conference organised by Oreteam. I have started from my home in Faridabad, situated at the south east fringe of Delhi to pick up my colleague from his locality in the North West corner of the city from where we head straight for the highway which will take us to Punjab. We are in bit of a rush because both have to be seated in the dais in the opening session of the conference.  I am a bit stressed because I will be using the journey to mentally compose my speech. How I wish I could write also in a speeding car. We are shooting through the National eight lane highway at a breakneck speed of 100 kmph. We are not to stop for breaks because of the time constraints; though the road is smooth and wide, there are numerous toll plazas which are stalling an uninterrupted run every now and then. There is nothing called countryside in India anymore; everything looks like the extended city. There are gated colonies of high rise apartment homes, midpoint resting spots which are actually designed like a cocktail of a shopping mall, a restaurant complex, a party venue and an amusement park. These pieces of architecture seem to have captured the entire length of the highway; my eyes strain for the want of sights of lush green fields. I am a bit mistaken because lush green will not be there for this is a period between harvests; the kharif is cut and the ravi not sown in yet. This is the time of festivals, especially the death and dark ones of bhoot chaturdashi and karwa chauth; the deathly pall of shorter days, descending smog and the imminent winter is fought with celebration of light. Firecrackers go up to brighten up the mood here and there. The frequency will increase as the days draw nearer the dark moon of late autumn.

 We have travelled over two hours from Delhi now and we stop just short of the Punjab border. The driver grows nervous; he wants to know the exact location of the toll plaza. The Punja police is ever suspicious and the sight of a young man as our driver moving about uncertainly is likely to invite some gruelling bout of interrogation. The entry point to Punjab has none of the automated toll collections of the modern plazas; it is still guarded by a manually operated heavy iron beam tied to a palm rope. Sandbags abound the place with a trench and then a small paved road beyond which further inside the ground sit the collector. The rates are exceptionally high, one has to spend Rs 250 for a single day’s halt in Punjab. The eyes are suspicious as ever before, it seems that though the terrorism is dead in Punjab, the paranoia of the authorities still smart from its impact. I am delighted to see a truck pass me by carrying passengers instead of goods and the truck is full of Sikhs. Sikhs had become rare in Punjab cities and when I visited Amritsar in the late 1990’s I was quite surprised to see the city purged of Sikhs except inside the walls of the Golden Temple.  

 The world inside Punjab seems to be up for a battle with the encroaching and all-consuming post liberal economy. Here fields abound, they are not yet planted with the mustards that would grow into a delightful riot of the yellow but the fallows are furrowed, the stubbles of sugar cane are carefully collected and stowed away and some fields are indeed green with potato, turnips and lentils. Punjab is also India’s most industrialized state; its industrial base is not the domination of heavy industries but of the light and small scale, the precision and the specialized. Ludhiana is home to hosiery and bi cycles, agri-machinery and auto parts, of electrical goods and sports goods. Ludhiana is also home to Lala lajpat Rai and the medieval saint and composer Bulle Shah. It is the centre of Punjab that cracked the Mughal Empire and established a confederacy of clans in the same way that it has been right since the battle of the Ten Sudas in the 4 BCE. Ludhiana is the spot around which Tagore wrote his famous poem on the militarization of the Sikhs under their tenth Guru, Govind Singh.

  Ludhiana is Punjab’s largest city and has been the centre of power in the days of the British East India Company. It has been ruled by Sikh Chieftains and the Ramgharia Sikhs are especially powerful here. The last mentioned are usually the so-called “lower caste” Sikhs, a religion that does not believe in the caste system. But among the Sikhs, because of their overwhelmingly Jat background, being a land owner is of prime importance, being a carpenter is not. Jats are themselves a set of tribespeople who straddled the plains of Northern India as herdsmen. They captured lands and became rulers in small patches of land and quickly adopted the chieftain system of “self rule”. A related laity of the Gujjars remained nomadic and hence less powerful and poorer than the Jats. Sikhs are overwhelmingly drawn from the Jats. The Jats, despite their attachment to Sikhism are conscious of the Hindu varna system; they relate themselves to the Kshatriyas and consider them to be above the Brahmins, the Vaishyas and the Shudras. Thus while they would love to own farmlands, factories, shops and transport, they loathe to be workers in these; they want to be the rulers who make thers work for them. In such a scheme of things, the Ramgharias who work with their hands are looked down upon.

 When I was in my master’s programme I wrote a term paper on the Punjab terrorism for Prof Nirmal Singh, himself a Sikh. I read almost every material on Punjab and collated a wonderfully fat booklet which I insisted was almost a dissertation. In it I wrote how the Central Government and the entire institution of the State was against the poor Sikhs. Prof Nirmal Singh was very angry, he stammered with rage at what I thought would mightily flatter him. He gave me the grades but said that never before he was so unhappy to be generous towards such a poor understanding of the Punjab affair. The Sikhs, he told me loathe to work with their hands and as long as they belie this essential ingredient of modern capitalism, they are bound to be left behind by history. A Sikh never steps on his field to pull out weeds, he never sows, and if he ever does plough he is atop a tractor which he drives more like a vehicle. When he has a washing machine, he is too proud to hand over this articulation of a new technology to his wife to wash clothes and he is too conscious of his status to do to the same; hence he makes lassi, Nirmal Singh was now barking at me. He was an insider of his community and sometimes, insiders are more intolerant of their ilk, so I deduced. I have known anti-Islamic fundamentalism among many a Muslim friend, I am myself insanely angry with Hindutva. Indian secular liberals more often than not turn against their own societies and societies turn against the liberals through assertions of ethnicity and religious fundamentalism. Sikh militancy, much like the later day Islamic terrorism and Hindu nationalism, was a reaction of a society against the forces of newness of which they had little cultural cognition and far less capabilities of social adaptation.

 Today as I drive through Punjab, the words of this ageing professor ring in my ears. I do not see Sikh prosperity any more as I would in my younger days, which is about four decades ago. I see cities dirty, unplanned, gawky, dusty, as if some force has abandoned it leaving its spaces to be occupied by vagabonds. Ludhiana looks every inch a vagabond city, vandalized by high rise hotels, hospitals and shopping malls. Hindu assertion is everywhere; hospitals are crowned by temple like spires and large images of demon like Goddesses pressed into the concrete. Hindus did not worship idols till as late as the 12th and 13th century. Idol worship was a near monopoly of Buddhism. I cross the Buddha nala, the stream which runs parallel to the Sutlej, which was once wide enough for the barges to reach the hinterland. The land of five rivers had an active riverine trade and the name of Buddha means that this area must have been tied to the Silk Road which went through the Buddhist Ladakh and present day Afghanistan. Sikh fortunes swelled by controlling the prime mode of production, which by the time Sikhs rose as a political force had become agrarian land. Recall that Nanak was a salt trader and not a landowner. It was on the might of food production that the Sikhs actually asserted their political freedom as well. On the foundation of food production, Sikh power rose to build fantastic real estates like the gurudwaras. Sikhs transferred profits from land into retail businesses, repair shops and the retail. Think of a factory, a shop or a transport; these were the ‘new lands” of which Sikhs became owners. Besides driving, Sikhs did not wish to involve their “bodies”. Hence they were not among the engineers or doctors, or scientists or craftsmen.

 If the Sikhs at all did involve their bodies, they did so in fighting. In their mind, they were the Kshatriyas and according to them that was the highest rank of the four varnas. So they loved the army and they also loved martyrdom. Bhagat Singh is everywhere etched along the concrete bases of traffic circles. Together with Sukhdev and Rajguru, these etched figures are of men hung to death. Before the Punjab crisis broke out, the Sikhs demanded better representation in the army. In a free competitive recruitment system, this could only mean that there is a Sikh reservation in the Indian army! Nothing could be more preposterous.

 Sikhs were always a minority of Punjab. Being only a quarter of its population, Sikhs ruled over the Hindus and the Muslims. They were an open religion, so open that Sikhism began to be identified with Punjabiyat. Despite strong Muslim and Hindu presence, Punjab culture came to be associated with Sikhism. I can sense the growing cosmopolitanism of Ludhiana; Biharis speak Punjabi with their accent, Marwaris never speak in any language other than Punjabi and this Punjabi written in Gurmukhi script is essential to Sikhism. No wonder the Sikhs were hopping mad when Hindi and the Hindus raised their heads in assertion. The division between Haryana and Punjab is less of a division between the Sikhs and the Hindus; it is more of a division between the Vedically rooted Sikh who are the people of the book and the people of informal religion, the Gujjar vagabonds of the Harappa civilization. Gujjars used to adapt to Sikhism through the cult of Gurudom which defines the Nirankari sect today.

 Ludhiana looks like a false city; giving an impression of a city which has been orphaned, abandoned and now taken over by the attackers. It is a Sikhless city, it is thus a rulerless city.  It is a cultureless city, colourless in that culturelessness. Punjab separatism cost Punjab dearly; how I wish they had not assassinated the Prime Minister, a sin which they will have to pay for by a complete decimation of their culture and community. Sikhs are nowhere in Ludhiana today; there is an odd guard here, a hotel steward there, but no more are industry conferences attended by the turbaned handsome self-assured six footers. I see the list of participants, Garg, Jain, Agarwal, Singhania, Taluya, Modi, but where are the Barnalas, Singhs, Dhillons and the Sidhus? Punjab without the Sikhs is Punjab without its owners, deserted and discarded.

 The conference has begun and I am pretending to take notes of the proceedings. I am sharing the dais with the leader of the chamber of commerce. He has begun his speech. Nothing is right in Punjab for industries to grow he says; it is located so deep in the interior, so far away from the ports, electricity is expensive for industry because it is so cheap for the farmers. This man who calls himself as the general secretary of his association is angry why farmers must get all the subsidized electricity while the industry suffers. Oreteam’s data clearly shows that the industry is in fact growing in Punjab, with surplus electricity left over from the declining activity in the farm sector. Punjab is prosperous because of its farming; were it not had been for its farming, Punjab would not have been the oasis of high consumption and high development. The industrial base of Punjab emanates out of the profits from farming. I mentioned these in my expert comments at the end of the presentations. Strange are the ways of the Marwaris; they want to destroy the prosperity of their clients! It never really occurred to me that the Marwaris almost invisibly manages to take control of the intermediates of economic production; in Punjab they started controlling steel, which is the major input material for castings and forgings. This community played around with steel, made things very difficult for the Punjabis to run their businesses and soon industry stopped growing in the state. Slowly, these industries were taken over by the Marwaris and soon after profits sucked out and units became lifeless corpses. The entire synergy between agriculture and industry snapped and no one had any clue. Sikhs incompletely identified the problem and turned against all Hindus.

 Farmers suicides are rising in the state; especially those of the Sikhs. Drug addiction has now invaded Sikhs as an epidemic taking up the space left vacant by terrorism. Once they wanted to kill us and now they wish to kill themselves. Drugs and suicides. No more the Takht to die for, no more the Indian Army to be monopolised as the Sikh’s innate right to martyrdom. The Sikh civilization seems to have ended; in a bid to save face due to the loss of factories and farms, Sikhs would migrate frantically to “Umrika” or “Kanaada” but now they reproduce there and become citizens in the West. The West demands uniformity and thus the Sikh is at the verge of losing the beard and the turban especially if France passes its law. Teg Bahadur is a joke, the guru who had told Aurangzeb, why do you want only by braid of hair? Why not also take my head which bears it? Ask one, get one free !! What an end to this stout pride, this self-confidence of a race!

 To my mind, the secret problem of Punjab lies in its industrialization; in agro processing and in its engineering goods. In either case the Marwaris have played havoc with Punjab. In agro produce, they managed to monopolise the wholesale buying and in agro produce they managed to monopolize the supply of steel. This was exactly the way the Marwaris destroyed Bengal just before the Partition. In undivided Punjab, it was the Sindhis and then the Gujaratis. I am intrigued at this strange behaviour of the bania community. Why do they destroy on those who they feed? perplexing attitude, curious ideology. I remember that in a class III primer I read that once Emperor Ashoka was furious with the Jains. I used to imagine that this was a typical Buddhism versus Jainism thing but now I think that Ashoka’s sensibilities revolted at this strange habit of the Jains. With Independence, both Islam and Sikhism felt threatened as civilizations; Muslims wanted their “vilayat”, or the seat of moral power, or literally place of moral authority. Sikhs initially were not separatists for they believe in making home out of any place they inhabit. No wonder then we have gurudwaras wherever the Sikh goes, a gurudwara is much more than a place of worship, it is literally the gate of the guru, where you come never to be sent back empty handed. Jahan par savera basera wahin hai is a verse from the Granth Sahib. Jains are interesting; jahan par basera ho, lootera wahin par. The business of the Jain is to cut the branch in which he sits; no wonder then the ballad of Kalidasa was written in the Gupta age, an era when the bania would be emperor to India.

 The Sikhs felt their problem but could really never articulate the same. A race of chieftains, Sikhs loathe to accept any other as emperor; Independent India was the strongest Empire they faced and it was also the one that decimated them the most. Sikh pride was hurt and in that sense of hurt they really never tried to excavate the material bases of their power. Interestingly, Bhagat Singh’s bravado at the gallows far outshone his real worth for the future of India; namely his writings on socialism or the material bases of power. For most Indians, Marxism meant a downgrading of one’s status to the next rung of poverty, Indians have never realized that a far greater truth of Marxism lies in its thesis of the material context of things and the invariability of dialectics as a law of nature. Had Punjab taken Bhagat Singh more seriously they would have looked towards the material reasons for the undermining of their civilization and the role of the unscrupulous Jain in the entire scheme of things. The Hindutva assertion in Punjab is going on everywhere and I observe amusedly that this is now the turn of the Punjabi Hindus to protect Punjabiyat from being smothered by the destructive influence of the Marwaris. Monica is receiving SMSs on her mobile taunting the secretary of the association’s efforts at delivering his speech in Punjabi. The crowd has very few Sikhs and they are sitting close to me and they are not the ones fiddling with their mobiles.

 Sikh separatism has been a failure of Sikh intellectualism; a group which relies so much upon the bodily force, deriving masochistic pleasure out of martyrdom loses its mind. Whoever said that the mind and body were inseparable is wrong. Sikhs thought very little, reacted too fast. They lost the sense of their doom; assigning their civilizational problems upon the Indian democracy, the Indian nation-state. Khalistan is a strange demand; for the Sikhs think that the world is their home, they must live like family amongst the local people. Sorry, not merely family but like the head of the household. Elders would say to us that if you are to take a taxi, go for a Sardarji driver, we were sure to be fine in their care. Sikhs loathed the Muslims for their demand for Pakistan, seeking a separate and a fixed homeland was completely anomalous to the Sikh ethos. Yet they did suddenly seek their own territory, a sign that they were already being pushed to a cubby hole by the march of times to which they could never adapt. Then they attacked the Empire by pressing bullets into the Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy. And then they were just over; the Sikh riots in the language of Malcolm Gladwell were the tipping point. Sikhs were destroyed, looted, burnt in the fiercest genocides of recent times. The Partition was repeated. Sikhs silently suffered an epidemic of mental distress. They lost in body and in mind. Most were unable to put their worlds together again; Sikhs never admit this but they were literally disbanded. They were no longer capable of any kind of intellectual thought. A small brand of youngsters tried to restore hurt souls through pop music; some film makers like Yash Chopra and Karan Johar tried to project the Punjabi in her never say die spirit. But these are lies; I now know in Punjab that cinema is a damned lie.

 No one speaks this out in public that Punjab leads the country in drug addiction and in farmer suicides and also in migration out of the country. It is a spent force and along with it we are losing its poetry, its wisdom, its courage, its myths and its history. Punjab is a challenge for the Indian intellectual.

 We are driving away from Punjab. My heart is heavy. I pass Sirhind, Khanna, places of Sikh victory, over the Mughals, over the Afghans. I pass shops decorated with Chinese lights and Korean LEDs, all decked up for the Karwa Chauth, yet another festival which is so quintessentially Punjabi Hindu. The car stops again at the state border, many cars stand in queues, some are playing cheap Punjabi pop in their music systems, and some are sitting inside their airconditioned cases. The dignified Sikh officer in a white turban and the equally self-respectful Sikh driver in his livery drive in beside my window. I glance surreptitiously, the last of the Mohicans I feel, a race of the chieftains may end soon.  

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Meera

Posted on October 16, 2013 by secondsaturn

I am somewhat intrigued by Meera, I mean the one and only Meera, the queen who left home to become a sage. I knew of a grand sage called Meera who wrote songs which the kirtanayas had sung when they came to our house on the evenings during the mourning period after my grandmother’s death but I was really introduced to her through Amar Chitra Katha which I read during my stay in Nirole. Nirole is an obscure village in which my mother’s ancestral home is located and as children we we had to be there during the Durga Puja. On one of the Puja days, after having stuffed myself with Prasad, in a super elated mood I opened my bag full of reading materials. In it there was an Amar Chitra Katha, most probably gifted to me by Namama and Namani because they were the ones who had introduced me to every kind of children’s literature. The particular volume I had with me was on Meera. As I read through the trails and travails of Meera, the one thing which struck me was her courage; she had walked alone out of the palace to become a wandering sage. In days when Dida would scold us when we went anywhere beyond the Thakur Pukur, the largish pond just behind the house, Meera’s long and lonely walk seemed outrageous. I could understand Gautam leaving home at the dead of night, but Rama who was ordered to be exiled had two very concerned human beings, Sita and Laxman go with him. Roads have never been safe for women in India, it must have been much less safe in the days of Meera and yet she went, went away for good. As I lifted my eyes from the pages of the comic book, the long winding path that led away from the rear door of the house past Thakur Pukur, past bokshi pukur far into the oblivion where the taal trees formed a natural horizon rose before me. I imagined a lonely figure, young, thin, oily and smelly with sweat and covered with dust walking towards the end of the fields, to dip right into the edge of the earth where it met the vaulted sky. Meera was set in the eyes of my mind. I know she never lived in Bengal, but whenever I think of Meera, I don’t know why I always sense her walking down that path in Nirole.

Last Sunday, Shukladi, my cousin invited to a series of recitals on Meera’s compositions. Meera wrote prolifically, set them to tune abundantly. She mixed ragas, talas, dissolved the classical into the folk, twisted the folk to become a classical raga, played on words which sometimes portrayed her as one helplessly in love and at other times into a demanding royalty. Meera was born a princess, married to become queen and when she did relinquish her world, she was to become the Sage-Empress, Rajarshi. This is why folk accounts remember her not only as Meera Dewaani but also as Meera Rani. Even in her abstinence, her selfless devotion, her shameless expression of helpless love, Meera never unseats herself from the fact that she is born to rule. Meera is an Emperor, albeit without a seat, but more so because her Empire has no walls. Meera’s greatest follower was none other than our great Akbar who used music as a thread to sew together an Imperial Unity. No wonder he relied so much upon Kabir, the thread maker. I can sense imperial unity in Meera, her songs range from the aridness of Mand, the swamps of Banaskantha, the rocks of Chittor and rings right through the woods of the Narmada Valley to reach the lush of Madurai. Then she walks towards the sea, in a way that the originator of Vaishnavism had done, to immerse her into the sea never to rise or to be seen again.

Meera’s bhajans must be sung in many ways; sometimes they are in desperate strains mingling with the sands of the desert, sometimes they are calm and non chalant sketched upon the rocks of denuded old mountains; but at other times they grow sultry with sorrow, heavy with desire. But in the compositions which are sung in the heavier tonalities of the early morning or the late night ragas, Meera only chants her own name, Meera, Meera, Meera. In such moments, we know that her Lord is only her alter ego, she rules in the name of the Lord, in her moments of utmost silence, when she is at one with the night and its jasmines, she bares her soul only to herself, it is only her and her. She sings Meera, Meera, Meera.

All the students of Alaap sang her bhajans very well. Some sang with the elan of classical singers, some tried to overpower the listeners with her craft, some were conscious of their training, some sang out of devotion for their teachers and their faces glowing as they renditioned the guruma’s compositions. But there was one singer who I thought was genuinely suited to sing Meera’s bhajans. She was called Ratan, strange because Meera’s husband was called Ratan as well. Ratan was the Guruma’s mother’s maid and the song she sang was the one which Guruma’s dead mother used to sing. When Ratan sang she was beyond herself; in her voice there was only devotion, the tunes seemed to follow her devoutness, her consecration led the song through. She was beyond herself, she invoked her deceased employer with every ounce of gratitude that she had. It was also her gurudakshina, the ultimate gift to her patron. I thought of congratulating her myself.

As Madhusree and I were walking out of the auditorium after the show, I saw Bidisha, the star singer of the group with Ratan. Ratan was talking on the phone; Bidisha said that it was her son calling for Ratan. The little boy was crying profusely because Ratan was leaving Delhi and going away to her village. Ratan seemed unfazed with the boy’s wailings; she was neither happy, nor sad. There was no reaction to this pathetic entreaty. Are you going back to get married? No, no plans she told us. Then why you are going away, I asked. She did not seem to be even aware of the fact that she has a choice but not to go. Where are you from, I ask. She names a village in Bengal. Suddenly I see in my buried memories, that long winding village path, past the Thakur Pukur, past the Bokshi pukur into the ends of the earth and sky where the taal trees are lined up where I first saw Meera.

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Thank God, It Is My Birthday.

Posted on October 16, 2013 by secondsaturn

Thank God, it was my birthday on the 24th of September. So many people called me up to wish me well. It was then that I realized how long I have not bothered to find out about people around me to who I mattered. Mother’s older sister’s was the first call in the morning; I call her Bachi. We talk regularly but on matters of mutual interest but on the occasion of my birthday it was she who did the talking and the listening. Bachi is troubled for a long time by illness of her older in-laws and to watch the senile decay progressively into states of vegetation has been not pleasant atll. I realized that in all those regular phone calls to her, though I asked her about her own health, I never did inquire about her homestead. Phone calls came from parents, brother and his wife and prayers went out of my soul, God, please protect my family. Kaki called up next and since I am not so frequently in touch with her, I did not know that she had in the meanwhile lost her only younger brother. She used to be forever worried of this brother, disapproved of his indolent ways but I never sensed that neither her parents nor her husband was really her world, this brother who she called as lazy and wayward was actually her Universe.

A cousin called up next, she is suffering from a degenerative eye disease and we have been in touch, but this morning she discussed my niece. Unnoticed by me, my niece has grown into a discerning adult, a tough college goer who knew her ways about in the world. Her friends had just let her down and yet she seemed calm and collected. I admit I would have reacted violently to such betrayals but she seemed unfazed.

Ilinapishi called to wish me a happy birthday; so long it was her daughter who did this chore. She died young out of an undiagnosed disease and how it must have pained Ilinapishi to have wished me on a day which is so close to her own daughter’s birthday. I saw Ilinapishi in a new light, a true Brahmo spirit, a soul that calmly surrenders to the Divine Will.

Phone calls came from Jethima in Chennai; please come down and visit me on my birthday in October, will you, she requested. She had never made such a request to me earlier; yes, I sat down on the Internet and bought a ticket. Tulupishi called me up and this was the first time that my pishemoshai was no longer around to wish me. I had a sudden feeling that slowly the people to wish me on my birthday are reducing and hence I savoured each phone call and every wish that came my way. Neela was chirpy as usual and a tad disappointed to learn that this time there would be no eating because I am convalescing from a bout of bad food poisoning.

Friends called and surprisingly each time there was news; Milind’s plot in Lucknow is now ready for construction, Ranjita’s maid has strangely disappeared, most probably abducted by her own male relatives; Ratri is suffering from chronic facebook depression, Sutapaboudi and Titli finally found the market in Amar Colony and were struggling with a design of a console table, Runa decided that I needed to carry only chips for the potlatch dinner. Himadri’s was a welcome phone call and never before now that I realize what a powerful film scholar he is beneath his professional veneer of being a modern historian. Roma’s mother not doing too well and needs to be escorted constantly, Madhuleena was feeling much better and Anu Sengupa’s daughter was now posted to Mumbai. Giri had called up the day before and I realized that I should call her up oftener than I do. Madhusree’s parents called up in the evening to wish me well. I exchanged valuable notes on my irritable bowel syndrome with her because both of us suffer from the same problem. I valued the fact that it is better to beat the disease early in its onset rather than allow for natural healing. Busydey, a fellow Libran discussed a bit of astrology on how the year would pan out in front of us and for the first time in my life I prayed for status quo; thankful to heavens that things are no worse. Monica called up later to remind me of a treat of a Bengali lunch which I promised to her but seemed to have forgotten all about.

Conversations over time become routinized, topics get standardized and perhaps I dominate all conversations with my friends and relatives mistaking mere vocal responses to my queries as being genuine dialogues. May be I was talking at my people because on a special day as my birthday when I have nothing to say and accept all that is being said, people, allowed space and time in my ears pour out a bit of themselves. This is why I rediscovered so many of them in brand new perceptions. I enjoy gifts especially if they are from Life itself. I think that the bouquet of new aspects in the familiar was my special gift for this birthday. Truly as the tarot had predicted for me, this birthday there will be a gift of the new message.

I missed several calls; I could return some but had to let others go; I will catch them in the course of today, the day after my birthday.

I got many wishes on my Facebook and I always take time out to reply each of my wishes. People take so much trouble to wish me perhaps the first thing in the morning and I think that it is being sinful not to spare adequate time on savouring these good wishes.

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Devdas versus Heathcliff

Posted on September 16, 2013 by secondsaturn

One of my blog readers was interested in discussing her work on Devdas, the novel and the film which Bimal Roy made in 1955. She being a student of feminism used categories of the discipline, namely marriage, patriarchy and so on. These were perhaps to highlight the conditions of separation between Devdas and Paro. But these were the excuses to set up the real tale, which is of Devdas. The real tale is not about Devdas not being married to Paro; not even of an unsuitable marriage of Paro; nor a discourse upon Paro’s character but rather about Devdas, the story about an all-consuming love. The authorial intent of Saratchandra, admits my reader is perhaps not to seek vindications of feminist theories and hence Devdas the novel cannot be treated in a similar class of objects whose study constitute the scope of feminism. Sometimes in a haste to apply our skills at theories, we tend to stamp things with categories which are inappropriate for such objects. Theory in the hands of such scholars becomes absurdities. I suggested to my reader that s/he (could not guess the gender) better compare Devdas with similar categories so that a comparative reading of texts might help her derive some patterns.
If there is ever a comparison of Devdas, then it is Emile Bronte’s immortal lover, Heathcliff, in her novel Wuthering Heights. The idea in both cases is an all-consuming love, which destroys the lover and eventually leaves him dead. The difference between Heathcliff and Devdas are merely apparent, not deep. Heathcliff bears an exterior which is harsh, a cultural imposition of masculinity upon him by the various developments in the British society; Devdas is softer only because he emerges from a culture in which masculinity is not constructed as being physically rough and immune to emotions. But apart from these the two characters are similar in the sense that they are bent upon being totally cruel to themselves, no not in a manner of dealing with themselves but in a manner of not dealing with themselves at all. These men are suicidal in a sense and through the intensity of self-destruction; they can only express the intensity of the emotions they feel. In the language of the Bhakti literature, such men are the quintessential image of Radha, the eternal lover who pines for her lost love. Both Heathcliff and Devdas show to us the consequences of being ignored.
I have never understood the sense of either of these novels, though I must admit that as a young reader I would be much taken in by Heathcliff. Devdas, not so much. But I distinctly remember that the boys would love Devdas. If Heathcliff was a ladies man, Devdas was a man’s man. And these polarizations were complete. Heathcliff may have been a ladies man because he was constructed with so much of roughness that he invariably invoked a delicate woman, his beau as a contrast. Devdas, on the other hand was an unfree man, bound by rules of society, spaces of the family, patterns of marriage. His love was a way out of these bindings twined around him. Realistically a man as Heathcliff could have never claimed Lucy; social class stood in the way of what would have been a delirious love affair. Devdas could have married Paro had he insisted but he possibly understood and relented to Paro’s self-pride. He left Paro totally untouched, distance, contained in her totality, unpoked in her wholeness. Heathcliffe, on the other hand desires to consume Catherine totally. There is desire in Heathcliffe, a tendency to intimacy; in Devdas intimacy is displaced into the despised Chandramukhi, a fallen woman in any case. This difference is crucial in order to understand why women love Heathcliffe and men love Devdas. This difference is crucial to the understanding the female desire and male sexuality. Social constraints are placed upon Heathcliffe; Devdas places social constraints upon himself.
To my mind, the categories of feminist thought do not do justice to either character. Neither character is located in patriarchy and similar discourses about suicidal lovers about the Bhakti poetry about Radha and Krishna. In medieval India, both men would have been the classical kalankini Radha; one wonders what makes ideal lovers become male in the modern age. This is perhaps the masculinity of modernity when all categories of perceptions are thought through the men. But little else; why were such characters created, what kind of intellectual tools does one use to analyse or justify such characters? To the best of my mind, both these characters were created in the backdrop of cultural contexts of their times.
If we look at the cultural milieu of Emily Bronte, she faced a life of deep uncertainties just as did so many girls of her age and her times. Men could die in disease and war, they could go away into wasteful voyages or spare away in distant colonies leaving women utterly distraught precisely because women’s economic rights as estate owners depended on their male relations, father, brother and husbands. A good marriage could turn the wheel of fortune in favour of these women and it was mostly marriage that women looked towards to release them of their bondage. Jane Eyre, a creation of Emily’s sister, Charlotte was rescued by the rich and melancholic Mr Rochester, a ladies man too and Jane Austen’s girls were rewarded for their pleasant personalities by finding very rich men as husbands. These heroes were thus products of feminine imagination, of female gaze.
Devdas is rather different. He is a man who allows free will to women; unlike Heathcliff, Devdas is not a man who rescues woman, but is a man who surrenders to women. He is the product of his times when Bengal was agog with projects that would humanize women, rescue them from being burnt as widows, not incarcerate them as young widows and accept their rights of being educated. Such projects around women could work only if men allowed them space and refrained from making women objects of their will, desire and lust. Devdas refrains from entering Paro’s space and the more and more he immerses himself in his addiction, the more and more space he gives to Paro, creating an ever greater scope for her to develop herself. We know very little of Paro which is not Devdas’s construction of her and all the regard we have for her is because Devdas makes her so worthy of it. In many ways, Paro does not exist except through Devdas; his dissolution of his own self actually breathes life into Paro’s character. Devdas is like a devoted worshipper who sacrifices himself as an offering for his Goddess. Devdas is the male fantasy because the enormous ability to suffer creates value for his character as the ultimately refined man because he raises women to such heights. The male sexuality which seeks Devdas as a model seeks surrender to the feminine force and not its control. Devdas’s self-dissolution gives a meaning to his life; it makes him into a whole, renders him a totality.
Heathcliff, on the other hand is a product of female sexuality, one who can tear through social constraints and claim a woman. The female sexuality which seeks Heathcliff as a lover is passive and is in need to be rescued. Female desire in this case is subdued, subjugated while Heathcliff as a man seems to be fragmented in his desire for Catherine; Heathcliff would have conquered the world had he not loved Catherine. His love for Catherine robs him of his potential for the fulfilment of his promises as a young man of capabilities. Heathcliff’s love contains him, constricts and stifles him, brings him from the wide world into the dungeons of Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is a construction of feminine possessiveness for their men.
Heathcliff is a female fantasy because he is a strong man who can be bound and captured. Devdas expands his existence with Paro’s love in his heart, he makes a pilgrimage into a world he has never seen, widens his experience, meets new people, and relishes new cultures. He is a male fantasy because through him men can be expansive and free from any real commitment. To the best of mind, Devdas is a novel about structures of male feeling, attempt at inventing a new male sexuality, a new idea of masculinity that is graced by granting more and more space to women.

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