Khana-Mihirer Dhibi. Bani Basu. Bengali novel.

Posted on March 3, 2011 by secondsaturn

Thousand thanks to Sarvani for introducing me to Bani Basu’s writings. I had heard a lot about this firebrand feminist author but never quite read her works. Sarvani handed me a hard bound book by the author named Khana Mihirer Dhibi as a present. I was immediately taken up by the title of the book, because I never cease to be intrigued by Khana, a maverick forecaster and wisehead, a person whose “sayings” are as relevant to us as they were since they were first uttered. My mother’s mother had a pool of knowledge on simple household remedies (totkas) and whenever I asked her where she learnt them from, she used to casually say that these wisdoms were from Khana.

 Khana’s was one of the first stories that I ever heard, precisely because she got her tongue cut since her utterances were creating trouble for everyone around her for being so true. It was a story that my girl cousins and I had to listen to on hot afternoons when I would be on a vacation visiting my mother’s parental home. Mihir was her husband, or father-in-law, a famous astrologer and one of the nine gems in the court of King Vikramaditya. The king’s rule marked the Golden Age of the Guptas in early mediaeval India. I was always a bit sceptical about Khana’s dates because her couplets were composed in such modern Bengali that I wondered whether the vintage assigned to her was correct. May be many sayings in later Bengal closer to the modern period would pass under her name so that their authors may hide behind her and save their own tongues from getting cut. These wisdoms of Khana, or merely assigned to her, had mainly to do with farming and the rains. The couplets composed in a “meyeli” or womanly tone tipped the farmers about when to sow and when to harvest and how to make sense of the seasons. Clearly, they referred to wisdom about farming practices. Khana, is then the holder of farming secrets, secrets that women have held since time immemorial.

Bani Basu’s novel explores the centrality of women in human civilization. She insists that it was woman who was at the core of settled agriculture because she was the one to have discovered farming. Ironically, it was she who at once ‘seeded” and held the civilization by inventing sowing of seeds and reaping them. Woman tamed animals because they tended them; men could only hunt. Men knew weapons but women made instruments. Hence, it was woman and not man that turned in the giant wheel of civilization to give humanity its settled future. God then was a Woman, the First “Man” was also conceptualized as a Mother and the Feminine was worshipped as a cosmos constituting order. Then the men took over, they misappropriated the women, displaced them and made them subservient in their own order. The mystery is how did this happen?

Exploring patriarchy in the early days of the human tribe, when some tribes knew agriculture and some lived only on hunting, the author shows that patriarchy came when the less civilized defeated and killed the more civilized people. The origin of patriarchy lay not in the reproductive order where men claimed their children as property, something that is somewhat contained in Engel’s theory, because human beings in those days did not as yet learn to connect sex and reproduction. Instead, patriarchy emanated from the moral superiority and hence authority of the medicine man, one who could cure the injured and those mostly indisposed by warfare. Such men had a natural authority over human beings in general and women in particular.

There was another kind of man, the greedy warrior, one who forced themselves on women, the rapist, the marauder, the killer. Other men organized to fight such rogue men; patriarchy could have had its sources here as well. But women in those days were great warriors as well and not always did they have to look towards men to fight. In fact, fighting women, women leading armies were more common than men being involved in battles and raids. Women did not need strong men because in the dawn of civilization women were strong themselves. Women were attracted to the medicine men because it was through them that the tribe could survive. But the medicine man could not have invented the patriarchal social order. Patriarchy was established through the crude physical might of man not over women in general because woman was strong too but at times when women were weakened like the waned moon either when she was pregnant or menstruated.

The motif continues even today as women marry and have children, and because these events make them physically weak they are forced to compromise into the male order. The other problem lies in women themselves, when women move across “tribes” through marriage. The author shows that women across the bloodline can never trust one another; ever suspicious over the motives of those who are not related to her through the blood line, women miss out on female bonding, exploit other women and in such non-reflective ways allow men to take over completely.

It is not as if men want specific things from women. Men want to use women for their own satisfaction, sexual, cultural, social, material and emotional. Women give into this unthinkingly, unreflectively. Woman’s bondage is thus a lack of awareness, a lack of reflection all through civilization. In the aeons of time, woman has been too involved in her own food economy and war management. She has never had the leisure to sit back and reflect. Hence it was another kind of man, too weak to fight or to farm, who sat back and kept account of the periodicity of moon, path of stars and the season of crops. Such men became the scientists and the discoverers, setting out the agenda for human thinking. Such men were also physically weak and jealous of their importance as producers of knowledge. Mihir was one such man; Khana ventured into this guarded territory that was unfortunately Mihir’s. She was impaired because she dared to be equal to her husband.

Then there are three kinds of men namely, the medicine man who women love; the violent one to whom women lose out if they happen to be pregnant and the scientist, a man who actually lays the wickedest trap for women by setting out the agenda for the Mind of Civilization. It is really the last category, the scientist, who is the worst offender and the most potent threat for women for he tells us how to think and what to think about in the world around us. It is this scientist, who behind the cover of his discoveries tells us that women are to be discredited, that they are weak and should be contained and kept. Only Khana realized that women, were they to lead tribes and protect humanity, had to reflect, think, infer and theorize. Khana knew that only command over science and knowledge would be a woman’s path to dignity and equality, to fairness and justice. Only as thinker could women could regain her freedom from patriarchy. Hence Khana was attacked and decimated. And hence was Khana.

Posted in About Books | 3 Comments

Sabaash Suzanna

Posted on February 27, 2011 by secondsaturn

Suzanna Anna Marie had six married husbands and one constant by-stander. She was an Anglo Indian, lived in Mussorie, her father was a contemporary of the legendary Jim Corbett and lived in a huge estate that she inherited as her father’s only child. After her father’s death, she was left an orphan, in her huge estate among servants who were unflinchingly loyal to her. She was a devout Christian, philanthropic and the charming benevolent face of a European civilization that mingled and merged seamlessly with the Indian counterpart. She lived at a time when Victorian values of romantic love and monogamist marriage was at its peak and the law neither allowed men and women to take on spouses while the present one was alive, nor could the marriage be dissolved through divorce. Marriage was made in Heaven and was supposed to be the image of perfect happiness and innocence on earth. In such times, six husbands of Suzanna died one after the other, each one under circumstances those were unnatural. Though there was never any evidence of her involvement in any one of them, interestingly she was always present when the deaths happened. Hence, the great mystery around Suzanna, the protagonist in Ruskin Bond’s novella Seven Husbands of Suzanna and now a film called 7 Khoon Maaf directed by Vishal Bhardwaj.

Suzanna killed each husband in cold blood after meticulous planning and in ways in which the forensic department was thoroughly beaten. In each case the husband was the contrarian image of what she desired in him. The serial murders raise the question in one’s mind whether it was not her who is to be faulted because surely not everyone under the sun can be bad. But as one sits through the film, more than the book, one gets a picture that is startlingly true but is not unfortunately acknowledged to be one. This truth is that romantic love that is consummated in a monogamist marriage and which is supposed to be the ultimate happiness for a woman is one of the greatest lies of our civilization. 7 Khoon Maaf exposes this lie.

Suzanna is fiercely loyal to the one she loves, she sets him on a pedestal, worships him, looks after him, completely surrenders her to him. Her marriage is pure romance because she has enough for her material needs to be taken care of and her husbands are looked after by her rather than her by them. Hence her marriage is never based upon any material need; it is based on a strong need, no, not for companionship alone, but on the need for a husband to who she can unconditionally surrender in an unrestrained manner. She is hugely intelligent for she is knowledgeable about wild animals, game hunting, about horses and jockeys, of poisons and potions and has a penchant for poetry and ear for music. When distressed, she does not lose her mind, but gets into the act of carefully resolving her problems. After bad experiences with marriage and romance, she still seeks love and men, which means that her faith in life as a whole and in the human race is unshaken. This is possible because she is confident and capable, materially secure and intelligent and essentially spiritual and charitable. These qualities in her make her capable of unconditional surrender and unerring loyalty. She becomes a Muslim and in love with Sufism, she becomes a Russian maid when in love with a Russian, a Bengali bride for a Bengali husband and a muse for an aspiring musician. These virtues make for her sexuality as well as spirituality.

The husbands in each case are less than perfect; one is an egoist who uses his wife as a trophy and then, despite her complete surrender to him, suspects her of infidelity. He is cruel and violent and hits to kill or to permanently impair. Such a man is a liability in the Kingdom of God that houses only love, compassion, fidelity, trust and loyalty. The second is a cheater, a plagiarist and a womanizer; the third, a poet who despite his rational and progressive lyrics is a male chauvinist and therefore, a sexual pervert. In an age when there is no divorce, a harassed wife must kill him to end the marriage. Yet, Suzanna could have abandoned him and walked off. But Suzanna does not do that precisely because, as a completely contented self-contained person in herself whose sexuality is indeterminately intertwined with her sexuality, she must maintain the world as a Kingdom of God; precisely in the manner she inherited it and which is why she cannot allow the dirt in the form of the mentally and ethically warped men polluting the beautiful world.

The film does not appeal to those sensibilities which do not have a clear sense of the perfect. For most of us, marriage is a compromise; it is a contract to pool resources and live on. We are mediocres, who marry for food, shelter and to bear and rear our progenies. But for persons who are beyond these measures, for whom romance is a spiritual fulfillment and monogamist marriage an obvious outcome of such love, it becomes difficult to tolerate persons who are unworthy of the total surrender that Suzanna gives to them. Suzanna’s journey is thus through the spirituality of the Western civilization, its moral force by which the West once prevailed over almost the entire humanity. If colonialism’s immorality was ever bailed out, it was because of the underlying spirituality of the West, enshrined in its asceticism that held through its Enlightenment and the Renaissance and that lay as the foundation of its world conquering capitalism. Suzanna is this ascetic of the West and hence her life ends in a Church as a nun, where she as Mira, also weds and dances with Christ. Through her many weddings, she had searched for this God and not frail men with fragile spirits. Christ is her only suitable paramour and husband, for none other than He can be a worthy image of perfection for Suzanna.

Suzanna became what she was because of some “big lies” of civilization; she fell into the ideological manipulation that romantic love was the fulfillment of a woman and that a monogamist marriage was the natural progression of that love. She also fell into the trap that women had to surrender, never to assume agency, never to emerge in command of her life. This forced subservience, this perfidy of love, which was manifested in her nudity, suggested in darker hues of the camera when she surrendered to Arun, the man who she did not get to marry, were to constitute the paradoxes of her existence. These lies of civilization made her seek happiness in nonexistent truths and eventually aroused her moral anger manifested in the serial murders.

Observed carefully the murders are Suzanna’s essential personality; she is imperial and inwardly imperious. She kills the bully to protect the weak from him; it is only the last murder that she really “commits” and that too in self defense. Otherwise, just as Suzanna never takes lead in romance but leads men to propose to her, she also drives her victims to their own death. She arranges things out there, as if laying a trap, ensnares her victim where he dies in due course. In each case she draws upon a vast pool of knowledge, presence of mind, steely nerves and the ability to see right into the law of evidences that eventually becomes her defense against accusations.

Suzanna is that soul of the West that it has lost to itself. She is the spirit of Christ, the Joan of Arc, the archetypal Madonna who in the aeons of time held civilization; for it was woman who discovered agriculture, it was woman who knew how to grow grains, how to tame animals and tend them when men only knew to hunt and eat them; it was woman who first rode on horses and made instruments where men only knew how to make weapons; women made houses where men only could divot mounds. This is why women are at the heart of every art, contained within the idea of the aesthetic; she is the civilizing force of humanity, she is also its spirituality. But women were divested of fruits of their labour, made to believe that men could only fulfill them. Hidden under a heap of cultural mores and social codes, she remains buried as a passive force. Only Suzanna tricked us with her grave, she did not die when we thought that she was dead. Suzanna is Christ resurrected, she awakes when the world sleeps, to reclaim that seed of civilization that belongs to her, for she is all, the male and the female, yin and the yang, Creator and the Destroyer, contained in the image of a woman, charming and coy by day like Lakshmi but terrible and ferocious by night like Kali; representing the Woman Power, not merely as a procreator, but as Creator Herself, the Original (Womb)Man that all civilizations know but have decided to forget. Suzanna connects us with the core of our civilization so that we may live beyond the end of Time, by recalling Time’s origins. Suzanna is not the erotic redness of earth, nor the ethereal blue, nor the puritanical white; Suzanna’s colour is Black, signifying a Brahma beyond Light, or an eternal mourning of the mystic on earth, despairing for Perfection, or the colour of the Black Widow, the deathly spider that devours the male after mating.

Sabaash Suzanna !!!

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Eve Teasing – Bengal’s Bane

Posted on February 19, 2011 by secondsaturn

The murder of Rajeeb Das, a teenager in a Kolkata suburb has Bengal all shaken up once again. Rajeeb Das was escorting his sister back from her work when some drunken lumpens in the street corner in a Kolkata suburb wanted to molest her. These drunken vagabonds murdered Rajeeb Das brutally when he protested. The venue of the crime was the front gate of the District Magistrate’s bungalow. As the bad characters were beating up this child, the older sister ran up to the guards at the officers’ gates and begged for help; the policemen on duty refused to relent. The sister helplessly watched her brother being pounded to death. This shameless act of eve teasing has left Bengal gaping because for long the Bengalis pretended that they were one great ethnic group that guaranteed freedom to women. Among many lies in the world, this is indeed one.

I never experienced Bengal as a space where women can move freely. Gazes, eye movements, body language, and lewd comments would make my life miserable in the state of my birth. I always wore loose clothes, had no hair do, never used make up and looked every inch a plain Jane which in no way could ever appeal to any man as an embodiment of feminine desirata. Yet, I and not my friends who were more beautiful than I and who were commensurately conscious of their endowments, was the target of the obnoxious obscenity. I could never understand the puzzle. I started excelling in physical sports so that I would end up looking stronger and more weather beaten but there was little let up in the concerted effort of Kolkata men to make me uncomfortable. I started feeling hemmed in and cornered, molested and mauled in Kolkata. I stopped venturing out. I left Presidency College in eight days flat as soon as my name appeared in Jadavpur University’s admission list only because I could never get myself to board buses where men did not know how to behave. Soon, the road became a nightmare for me. Unable to bear this constraint, I decided to leave home at last to breathe free in Delhi, a city that is supposed to be India’s crime capital apart from being the political capital of the country. Another woman friend, who had similarly migrated to Delhi for her masters education agreed that Delhi was a far freer zone for women to move about than Kolkata. In Delhi, my grand aunt was the other person to second my thesis about Kolkata and her ghastly stories about eve teasers helped me realize that eve teasing has been a part of the city’s culture since aeons of time.

After the Rajeeb Das murder, Nilanjana Sanyal, a teacher of Calcutta University’s psychology department wrote a piece in Ananda Bazar Patrika in which she tried to theorize eve teasing as consumerism. She decided that rapists attack women out of lust and hence murder who ever stands between them and their platter. She suggests that the growing consumerism lies at the heart of a class competition which translates into competitive consumption and hence such men rape women as they would compete to buy a car or an apartment home. Somewhere her ideas have been laid out in a wrong order.

Bengal has never had a record for treating women well; Sati, female infanticide, child marriage, ill treatment of widows, large scale prostitution and institutionalized concubinage seem to have originated in Bengal. This is perhaps why Bengal also had its share of strong women and when the social reform movements started here, modernity empowered women against a tradition that had reduced them to statuses of chattel. Since the men who were on the side of women during the social reform movement were also the economically powerful and socially effectual, to believe in women’s freedom became a statement of culture that often went with the upper class. Throughout the 20th century, it was fashionable for families to send women to schools and colleges and in some families women drove cars and rode horses.

Despite such social reforms, because the economic conditions of the state did not improve commensurately to bring about fundamental changes in the ways in which opportunities were distributed, the Bengali man’s attitude towards women’s independent career, women’s right of inheritance, women’s access to family property remained where they were. While it was no longer politically correct to repress women, but the Talibanistic psyche persisted. Hence, when my grand aunt went out for work, young men would encircle her on the pavements with such verbal obscenity that it seemed to her to lbe no better than a physical violation of her modesty. This was not a male desire for her; this was an act of male intimidation of women to drive her indoors, precisely the effect eve teasers want to achieve.

I realized that eve teasers always gang up; a boy may be perfectly sober as an individual but as an eve teaser he is invariably a part of a gang. Eve teasers operate out of ‘posts’, specific locations along a street, very much like ‘hafta” gangs, or armed goons who ask for extortion money. Both are born out of social envy of non-performers and both ask you to leave the public space if you have done better than them or if they perceive that you have more advantage than them. This is why when my bearded male cousin came to Kolkata with a job, the gang that was tolerant of me around the locality paan shop was obnoxious with him. Eve teasing uses women as a site to attack households and families who they envy. No wonder then in the Rajeeb Das murder case, one of the assailants, Chandan Roy is also an extortionist. Seen in this way, eve teasing falls under the category of kidnapping, extortion, Talibanism and terrorism; the psychology of the criminal in each of the above cases is identical.

The Bengali man’s conservatism about women’s clothing, his discomfort with women driving, his problem with women thinkers and politicians emanates from the same psychology as that of eve teasing; intolerance of women as autonomous individuals and consequently of those families where women are freer. The liberation of women is directly related to the higher rank of families in the social mileu; Bengalis have never tolerated success because they have hardly ever had the opportunity or the motivation to become successful.

Bengalis have been a defeated race. Kolkata has steadily declined, jobs have progressively depleted, incomes have fallen and Bengalis have migrated to other states. Men have been emaciated economically and culturally and the only way they feel that they can hold on to their own is by holding on to their women in doors. The control of women has risen in proportion to the loss of control of the men in dealing with their external world. Bengal is the only state where in the 1970’s and 1980’s, women were openly discouraged by the men in their families do not to appear in competitive examinations because if they qualified they would be ‘taking away” the seat of a man and eventually ruin an entire family. That a woman could work and also run a family seemed to be absent from the mindscape of Bengal. The mighty Ghatak made Meghe Dhaka Tara in which his female protagonist was portrayed as an object of pity because she had to go out and work to support her family !!! Pity was also a way, not unlike eve teasing, to confine women into their homes.

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments

Egypt…

Posted on February 8, 2011 by secondsaturn

There has been a usual enthusiasm about the mass uprising in Egypt over Mubarak’s “misrule”. Most of my friends from India (I do not have foreign friends) were hugely exuberant about what appeared to them as a Freedom Movement totally led by the masses and hence the ultimate expression of liberation. I was of course sceptical and expressed my reservations in my status in which I said that the mass hysteria in the country would end up in the Muslim fanatics replacing the dictator. I eventually removed the post from my status because I felt that Egypt could perhaps be an exception to an ochlocracy. I was thrilled when Supriyadi (Mrs Roy, our teacher from MHS) posted a link in which her son-in-law, Nezar from Berkely expressed similar reservations about Egypt’s Freedom Movement.

We in India take our story for granted. India’s Freedom Struggle has been the largest mass movement that the modern world has ever seen. What is interesting is that this movement has been fairly participatory, commanded almost the whole of our existence and world view, been more or less persistent, somewhat loose and unorganized and often leaderless and what is more striking, it has been basically non-violent. The Indian Freedom Struggle was neither a struggle against political anti-incumbency, nor a cultural assertion; instead it was a humanist effort at securing institutional support wherever oppression existed in whichever form. This is why; the Indian Freedom Movement had such a universal appeal precisely because political power was merged with social emancipation. The Freedom Movement of India became the basis of what we know as de-colonization and the idea of the Third World, a world of nations born out of popular struggles against colonialism, emanated from the Indian soil. Before India’s Freedom Movement, colonialism was looked upon as a civilizing process where the superior Western civilization was supposed to be civilizing savage cultures of the colonized people. The Indian Freedom Movement told them that it was immoral to rule over sovereign people.

My friends who imagined that Egypt’s Freedom Movement would be something similar took our history for granted. Freedom Movements can fall into traps of the military junta, or religious fanaticism or even into crony elites. It took a huge amount of effort for many kinds of freedom struggle leaders to bring such a mass of loosely gathered people into getting into the discipline of democracy, rule of the Constitution, a rational society, universal justice, acknowledgment of rights and establish modern values in everyday life. India undertook a long and a painful journey towards galvanising a mass into a disciplined democracy and a sustainable sovereignty. It required not only sacrifice of life and sometimes of property but also a sacrifice of interests positions when elites colluded into the interests of the masses, the privileged spoke from the point of view of the poor; the Brahmin included the untouchable and the men allowed spaces to women. It was not an easy thing for a society of the 19th century that held customs like sati, infanticide, social seclusion of widows, untouchability as sacred and beyond doubt into a society that outlawed each of these consecrated customs and made them into cognizable crimes. It was not easy for a society dominated by zamindars and other feudatories to abandon such unquestioned domination into equality before law; it was not easy for a society dominated by Brahmins to allow secularism among Hindus to flourish. And each of these have been attained and the processes within our society that made such achievements possible are worthy or exploration by sociologists, especially those in Egypt, Afghanistan or even in Kashmir and Manipur and Nagaland.

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Death Wish In A Dying Culture – Guzaarish

Posted on February 1, 2011 by secondsaturn

For quite some time now I have been sensing that India is in the grips of a death wish. The growth rate of population is slowly coming down, the size of family is decreasing and while life expectancy is on the rise, the huge scale of female genocide seems to convey that here is a civilization that no longer wants its reproductive capability to be protected. The uncertainty over livelihoods is increasing for most Indians who live off land, depend on forests and work in factories. The middle class who had somehow secured a future for themselves, death also looms large as living gets costlier and requirements of a long list of consumer products portend to throw households into an irretrievable debt trap. Each day prices rise, wages refuse to raise, competition gets intense and need for qualifications grow heavier. The middle class runs fast to stay in the same place, trying to desperately save resources to launch children into respectable income classes. This uncertainty of social position, the precariousness of one’s income class, one’s difficulty in negotiating so many contenders to education and employment makes the middle class invest huge anxiety and paranoia into just maintaining a status quo. This anxiety and uncertainty over a future is the reason translates itself over what we witness as a death wish of our civilization.

Within our families, boys get preference over girls and expectedly enough the more upwardly mobile a household is, more it tries to kill its girls. The declining ratio of female to male is becoming a scandal in our country. We tend to cast off the aged and the sickly and India, a country which is famous for its family now requires laws to ensure that children look after parents. It is therefore only keeping in trend with such tendencies that Guzaarish is a film where the hero, a paralytic patient seeks death.

In the public sphere, we are intolerant of other people. Road rage says that we cannot tolerate our fellow travellers, crime against women says that men hate them in the public space, ethnic and communal politics says that we wish to eliminate a part of our population on basis of ascriptive profiling.  Economic growth excludes the poor, drives them off the land, crushes farmers and chases away migrants. This is a political culture of death wish. Guzaarish is a film that is located in a culture of death wish.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali specializes in the opera style. The opera is a form of musical performance that originated in 16th century Florence, a high point of Renaissance that also saw a clash between the forces of the republicans and the Duke of Florentine, a conflict in which the latter won and imposed a tyrannical order crashing all semblance of a republican system. Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were important persons in this period who showcased their works in Florence seeking perfection of form and order, a perfection that resonated the perfectness of the new institutions of tyranny, often supporting political and/or intellectual authoritarianism. The opera is a form that was born out of this search for a perfection and which has its roots in tyranny as well as despair against it. It is interesting that Sanjay Bhanshali adopts the opera format as his distinctive style.

The opera contrasts with the melodrama, the latter having originated in France during the Revolution some two centuries later in one major score. While the melodrama celebrates the bringing forth of a perfect life by working through the existing conflicts and contradictions, the opera is a monological assertion of deep emotions sharply articulated and acutely intonated so as to silence every contesting voice and expression. Melodrama thrives on drama as its name suggests while the opera needs to be “watched” and “seen” as spectacle, as its name suggests. Melodrama contains melody, or music but that is more as a background score in order to help its thesis grow and resolve, while the opera makes a visual spectacle of its melody emanating from the voice of the singer/actor. The Hindi formula film has adopted the essential form of the melodrama and punched it with the high pitched voices of its singers as in an opera and made a spectacle of its music. The operatic tone of the formula cinema has ensured the cinema’s position as a spectacle. But Bhansali tilts slightly more towards the opera and in this create a whole new genre of addressing the popular film. Guzaarish is an instance of it.

The idea of an opera is death because only death can be perfect in a way in which life cannot be. Guzaarish seeks death only as perfection. The hero of the film suffers from a paralysis that makes him totally immobile and only euthanasia can help him overcome his pain and hence the film becomes a representation or a Guzaarish for mercy killing by the patient. While the hero seeks death, he also shows us not the imperfection of life in general but the imperfection in his own life; a life which had been so perfect for him once that it seems utterly unreal and dreamlike. The life that he leads at present is so unpromising that it leaves no hope for any improvement. The hero, therefore looks to death to help him attain the perfectness of life that he yearns for, a situation that may hold equally well for a terrorist who hopes for a utopia that only death can earn for him. Most of us are lured with such five star lives through media images of advertisements, serials, sets of reality shows, magazines of lifestyle, celebrity role models that the objective conditions of our lives can never deliver unto us. Studies on young boys trained as terrorists reveal such impossible gaps between ideas of perfectness of life and the empirical conditions of their income opportunities. Death comes in as the untested belief that promises to deliver dreams and hence the dream to die and the death desire being the only romantic angle to life.

The other angle in this death wish is of course plain economics of household budgets. With economic liberalization comes the retreat of the State leaving the space to the market and private initiative. This change in the economic game playing requires new kinds of skills and knowledge that requires new kinds of investments into human resources. Since the State has already withdrawn from the arena, education falls substantially on the households. There is a competition over the household resources; what gets cut are expenditures on “non earning” investments like a girl’s education and care of the old and the infirm. Guzaarish, is a desire to get rid of the indisposed and non- earning. The dire financial condition of the hero and the hopelessness over his health gets insisted upon through the defence lawyer and the attendant doctor. In the formula of the popular cinema, the star is the self of the viewer and for those viewers who have liked the film, must have, at some point of time seen themselves in the hero, condemned to live in an insufferable life. For a sociologist, the main research question is why some viewers feel their condition to be like that of a quadripalgic hero; what are the pains of such viewers, what are their despairs, fears and desolations?

It is not as if the film did not contain life; a caring nurse who is self dissolving in that care; a host of fans of his radio show, good friends and loyal staff and a surviving elderly mother. All characters not only care for the hero but their lives seem to have been totally organized around caring for the patient, loving him, desiring him. Yet, the hero wants to die and everyone else eventually agree because of his unbearable pain, perhaps not so much of a physical pain as it is an emotional pain of being utterly physically dependent. It is the pain of imperfection, an imperfection that exists vis-a-vis only an idea of perfection. The concept weighs down upon the content, the abstract is held above the concrete. This is a pursuit of perfection, a perfection that only can be imagined and which is so transcendental that it can never be realized in that which exists. Hence Guzaarish.

Yet there were huge opportunities for the hero to prove a point; he could have proved the superiority of the mind over the body, he could have exerted heroism by winning through his mind, he could have reproduced by training many magicians, he could have either forgiven or ruined his enemy’s child and extended the conflict between the nurse and her husband a little more. In all of these, the hero could have been at the centre of a drama, secured his agency and assumed control of life that tries to deny and defeat him. But were the hero to do this he would have become the star of a melodrama and not of opera. The opera format requires the hero to be cynical of life, disdainful of the lesser mortals who believe in it and by claiming the worthiness of transcendental perfection decries life as it exists. Possibly, the viewers who seek themselves in the hero too conceal such disdain towards life.

I keep thinking of Anand, a film that genuinely seeks life over death. Every moment of life becomes beautiful when contrasted with death. It is a film that seeks blessings of life rather than be contemptuous of it. It is a film of the 1970’s, an age when we were still underdeveloped, militarily weak, grappling with food crisis; we did not have millionaires. But we had a polity where we sought to include the poor, the marginal, and the downtrodden. We were also a country that believed in a plural and an inclusive politics, a politics that fought privileges to get more space for the periphery, a culture that imagined itself to be on the side of the downtrodden. In the days such as these, we were a nation that had hope and not despair, yearned for life instead of death. This is why, Anand, a film made in these times looked for life everywhere and tested its limits against death. The hero of Anand faced with a certain death scraped every bit of life as savouries; the hero of Guzaarish, in his desire for death casts every savoured moment of life as crumbs. When compared and contrasted Anand and Guzaarish tells us that while we have seemingly done well in terms of GDP, we have also moved from life towards death, from hope into despair.

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Independent Woman vs Housewife – Ma Exchange 2

Posted on January 28, 2011 by secondsaturn

Apara vs Sarita: The Independent Woman vs Housewife

  • Apara Mehta, separated from her husand Darshan Jariwala, both television actors swapped her place with Sarita Beri, the wife of Sudesh Beri, yet another television star and film actor. While Apara is the famous mother-in-law of Tulsi in the serial Kyon ki saas bhi kabhie bahu thi, Sudesh is better known as Loha Singh, a character he plays in a serial that I have never watched.
  • Apara is a devoted actor and as her husband says of her is that she is so complete in herself that one can neither add nor subtract from her. The husband looks upon her “completeness” as something that leaves no role for him and hence he chooses to remain absent from her life except as an occasional helper. The daughter is devoted to the mother and she looks upon Apara as the Empress of her life and of her fate. Apara is happy being single again, self contained in that single state of being, contended and in equilibrium. For Apara, her own personal journey is important and while marriage, family and even her career can only be a part of that journey, they cannot constitute the whole of it. Apara remains totally independent even without the need to depend on her profession for moral support. She has a sense of achievement in having brought up her child and looked after her widowed mother single handedly and to have given them a dignified life style.
  • Sarita is a housewife in a joint family with a mother-in-law and a sister-in-law (devrani) to contend with. She is a whole time housewife and looks upon her role as a wife, a mother, daughter-i-law and others as the source of her fulfillment. She has no clue to what Apara says about her journey as a person. She and her husband confuses Apara’s self search as being merely a career or a working woman. Were Sarita to work, then her job profile would have added another attribute to her sense of self, which in any case is “defined” by her externalities.
  • In terms of income, social status, access to public worthiness, the two families can be considered as equal. But Sudesh’s family upholds patriarchy, Apara’s denounces the same.
  • Apara’s home has more aesthetic and functional appeal. Its colours are vibrant with distinct theme. Her household is better organized. She does not have a full time maid, something which she perhaps cannot afford as well. Her mother is forever on the phone talking to relatives. Her daughter is loyal and devoted to her and though she is open to the idea of doing some household chores, she leads a much protected life and has never entered the kitchen. Apara’s family is much disciplined and they willingly submit to discipline.
  • Sarita’s home is organized but lacks aesthetic appeal and a theme. Since the house is home to a joint family, it looks somewhat cramped. The house has a full time maid, capable and efficient. Sarita’s home has far less disciplined and they resist discipline. Sudesh accused Apara of being excessively disciplining because she was a “working woman” and hence not kind enough. Kindness, a feminine quality, is seen to be an anti thesis of discipline and is assigned to a housewife. Sudesh looks upon his wife’s discipline as a challenge to his will and hence authority.
  • It needed Apara to groom Sarita’s son as an actor; Sarita because of her confinement within the home proved to be a bad mother as far guidance to children was concerned. Both were equally capable in the kitchen but in child rearing, Apara turned out to be better.
  • Sarita felt that Apara was incomplete because she did not have a “man” in her life, Apara looked upon Sarita as a failure because she had no identity left anymore.
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Middle Class Warfare – Ma Exchange

Posted on January 28, 2011 by secondsaturn

Sony TV’s Ma Exchange programme aired every Wednesday and Thursday between 9 and 10 pm is about swapping mothers. The mothers are chosen carefully because while both families are middle class, yet one family, in terms of income, career and performance is ahead of the other. Care is taken to maintain the difference to a minimum but it is made sufficiently visible. There are some interesting points that arise out of the above differences.

  1. The upper class is hygiene conscious, homes are organized. There is system and order in the arrangement of these homes.
  2. Aesthetic is placed at a premium, colours are coordinated, furniture is organized with an eye towards space; space on the whole is more organized.
  3. The upper class family is routine conscious which makes it more focused in its everyday activities. These families seem often to have distinct goals that they achieve.
  4. The upper class family shows loyalty towards its mother, the lower class families are more concerned about the self.
  5. The lack of routine and order in a lower class home shows that they are somehow living life without a proper goal. The lower class lives life moment to moment without being aware of an overall goal or purpose of life. They have no idea of how an ideal life should look like.
  6. The children are low performers, less focused, less disciplined in lower class homes. Children here have very little idea of what they want to do in life. While they have aspirations they do not have any plan how they can achieve the same.
  7. Parents in lower class homes want children to enjoy life and teach them to become consumers rather than performers. The premium on consumption especially on fast food in lower class homes show an anxiety of not being able to afford things in the market. Upper class homes are less of gluttons because they are more assured of such goodies.
  8. Both parents and children in upper class homes are better informed than in the lower class homes.
  9. Parents in lower class homes feel threatened by upper class mothers and they shout and scream and assert that they are superior.
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Just Having Read Shantaram

Posted on January 3, 2011 by secondsaturn

Shantaram is an unabashed praise for India in its Hindu way of life. The author, named Shantaram by the mother of his hero, Prabhaker finds himself in India in his search for freedom. The book is an autobiography of Lin, a short form for Lindsay, as he escapes from an Australian prison right into India where he knows, for the first time in his life, what it is to be free. India, despite its poverty and squalid slums, sleazy spaces and filthy bazaars, is a free country precisely because its people are law abiding, have an innate sense of civility and respect plurality of view points, attitudes, faith and politics. In India corruption does not corrupt the soul, here people despite their failings have a sense of right and wrong, people are not particularly fanatics, and even while they get wild when they board packed trains and buses, once inside it, packed like sardines, show civility that would not have been possible by citizens anywhere else in the world. It is India with its huge penchant for a “normal” life and its people who seek contentment and equilibrium in everything that makes India into a country that shelters all and absorbs all. And the hero of this India is Prabaker, a tourist guide with a broad smile who has the amazing power at “organizing everything”, solving every problem and answering all questions and one who is a poor migrant from a village and lives in a slum. Prabaker is a hero not because he achieves, he is a hero because he finds his freedom in whichever way he leads his life. This is why, when Lin goes away to Afghanistan to fights its wars against the Soviet occupation, the Taliban fighters listened to tales of Prabaker with rapt attention. In those snow filled mountain crevices and caves of the Sulaiman ranges, the hero of the Universe was not a sword wielding righteous warrior of the Prophet but the Maratha native who had his home in deep and dry Maharashtra and lived in a Mumbai slum.

Through the nine hundred odd pages the author takes us through the city of Mumbai, mainly into its slums, its sleazy cafes haunted by members of the underworld, its “palaces of sin”, the torture cells of its prisons, its den for child trafficking, its drug dealers and the prostitution racket. The agitated excitement of the underworld is sharply contrasted with the harsh but peaceful atmosphere of the slum. There are further contrasts between the underworld and the slum; the underworld is largely dominated by Muslim ideologues who believe in wars to end all wars, who follow principles of fair play and justice even in their illegal activities and who scum opportunities in Mumbai to feed Islamic wars in Afghanistan. Lin’s world is divided between the two worlds, the Empire of Khaderbhai, the leader of the largest gang of the underworld in Mumbai and Prabaker, the almost invisible and yet omnipresent tour guide of the slums. In the structure of a melodrama, if Prabaker is the hero, then Khaderbhai is the villain. Yet, it is Abdel Khader who is a father that Lin never had, a patriarch of the most improbable set of people, American woman running away from murder, Iranian refugee absconding from the Savak, Afghan guerillas raising money in Mumbai. But despite this, Khader is still the villain because most of the times he is playing God, or at best the Prophet trying to control people’s lives, guiding them to fall into traps that he lays or them and all in the quest of one single mission, to settle scores with his rivals in Afghanistan, his homeland. Besides, Khaderbhai is a true Muslim, abhorring greed and prostitution and stays clear of drugs.

It is through Prabaker that Lin understands the Hindu way of life and it is through Khaderbhai that he understands the Islamic cosmology. The Hindus win straight on because they have at their core, non violence, peaceful coexistence and a desire for continuity. Islamic philosophy, despite its holism and grandeur is flawed because it tries to control nature rather than fall in line with it, it revolves around the surrender to the “Will of Allah” rather than to the eternal pattern of the Universe, and it relies on violence to solve all problems. The Hindu way is persistent and seeks self sustenance and continuity, Islamic way has a direction, a motion and it is this dynamism that is the reason for so much of anxiety in the Islamic world. This is why, the author condemns the Hindu right very often but does not find too much fault with the Sena. In fact, the militarism of the Sena, in the view of the author is driven by Muslim money and Muslim manipulations. The Islamic way like the burning down of the sinful palace of Madame Zhou is done by the Sena, though the Hindus, who are not religious, can fall into sin as irretrievably as the Chuha gang led by the Hindu leader by a Marathi-Kannada name.

Just as there is a discourse over which is better, the Hindu way or the Muslim way, Lin also shakes out characters that Mahmood Mamdani calls respectively as the good Muslim and the bad Muslim. Qasim, the slum headman and Salman Mastan, Abdel Khader’s successor are good Muslims. This is because, like the Sufis at Haji Ali, they use Islamic ethics to integrate with the world around them and unlike Abdel Khader not use it as a righteous force to shape one’s world according to one’s own will. Good Muslims are born and live in India and put their stakes into seeing India grow inclusively. The Bad Muslims are the foreigners who use the Islam of the sword, with conquest and control inside them and who wage war almost always against fellow Muslims. The only exception is that of Abdullah Taheri, an Iranian refugee, but a good Muslim because he has made India his home. The author suggests at one point of time that if rebirth is to be believed then every human being must have, at some point of time been an Indian. In fact, the author suggests that India has a strange spirituality, which lies in its inclusive and accommodative society, where strangers are provided with shelter without asking any questions. No one even looked at Lint except in curiosity in India whereas in Afghanistan he was stopped at every kilometer of travel by the fighting guerillas. No wonder then Abdel Khader’s own guru, Idris Shah, an Afghan with strong Buddhist leanings made Varanasi his home. Lin is surprised because Khader never acknowledges the existence of Idris Shah, perhaps because like the “bad Muslims” of an Islamic world, he does not wish to accept that Islam has been best understood in the soil of India from the accommodative perspective of the Indian or the essentially Hindu way of life.

There are exceptions to the pattern because an Indian born Muslim, Rasheed exploits his wife and her sister and Anand Rao, a Hindu murders him. Anand Rao hands himself over to the police, accepts his punishment gracefully and cries when Lin arranges a journalist to create sympathies for the offender and get the sentence commuted. Anand Rao wants no mercy and Lin sees in this self flagellation, India’s essential non violence because the quintessential Indian Anand Rao punishes himself as mercilessly as he had offended his victim, Rasheed. Strangely, this is missing in the ideological battle in Afghanistan; the fighters do not wish to do unto themselves what they do unto the others. No wonder then Afghanistan is so tormented because it has none of the discipline of self governance that Indians have. No wonder then when Lin speaks of Prabaker to the Afghan fighters they fall over themselves in discussing life in India as though they were speaking of the mythical jannat.

The self governing society of India manifests itself in many other ways as well. There is no government help for the slums but people organize themselves marvelously before the monsoon rains waterlog their dwellings; the lepers are integrated into the market through the black economy of medicines and though the police is corrupt, it is also human because they let Lin be even when he is a wanted fugitive because the police decide that because Lin attends to the sick in the slum, he must be a good human being. In fact, the Blue sisters, survivors of attempts to murder them and Parvati, Prabaker’s widow live on with the same equanimity as they did before tragedy strikes them, a sharp contrast to Karla, the American, who is so afraid to love and live because of a few bad experiences in life. In India, there is no presupposed idea of a perfect state or a utopia and this is why, Indians can find Heaven in every situation of life without being defeated by adversities.

Lin looks at India from a male point of view and this is why violence against women does not appear among his concerns. He does not seem to have witnessed wife beating, female foeticide, and even when he does learn about Johnny Cigar’s mother being oppressed by her own family and loved ones; he lauds the mother and son for their resilience rather than critique the Indian society for its failures. Lin forgives the pitfalls of the Indians, forgives his tormentors and forgets those who let him down and instead cherishes those who loved him, sheltered and fed him into his freedom which he came looking for in India and found.

Shantaram is an epic that really neither begins nor ends and though one reads from the first to the last page in about a month’s time, one never feels as though one is through with the book. In a way it is reportage rather than a story, a saga of episodes rather than of events, with really neither a beginning, nor an end but only a bulky and bulgy middle.

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Merry Christmas

Posted on December 24, 2010 by secondsaturn

Reading through Akku’s letter to Santa in Paromeeta’s post, I am reminded of the many Christmases where Santa brought many gifts. For a long part of my childhood I spent most of my holidays in my mother’s home that was populated by five uncles with two children each and two as yet unwed aunts who lavished gifts on us. Christmas was a time when Bachi, that’s what I called my mother’s older sister used to be our Santa. We never ever got to know how she managed to read our secret letters that we invariably left at the base of a pomegranate tree at the back of the house for she never step her foot inside it. When I grew up I did ask Bachi about how she did her Santa act, but she has never let the secret out. No, not even now when I am 50 and she 75.

When Bachi got married my stint at my mamabari ended. I “returned” home and my paternal grandfather was my Santa. He could never keep a secret and though I never saw him dropping off gifts on the roof of my mosquito net, I knew, through his own unguarded speech that it indeed he. Christmas, Santa, letters and gifts were so much a part of my normal life that I never noticed that in my home in Dover Lane, I was the only child who ever got gifts from Santa. My neighbours had no idea of what this system was and looked quite puzzled imagining that Dadu might have been a Christian, a small surprise given his acutely westernized ways. I was also the only child in my locality to have possessed an egg cup for eating half boiled eggs from. I never realized that Christmas, Santa, egg cup and the plum cake had huge class implications; Christmas was a culture that was specific to a social class of a certain kind. This culture of the Santa was not the same as attending the midnight mass in St Paul’s Church. While the latter was the participation in Christmas celebrations as a public event, the Santa cult was an internalization of Christmas as a ritual that had to be followed as a part of a family praying together and wishing all close friends and relatives Merry Christmas just like Shubho Bijoya. We had no idea of what Santa stood for and why he brought gifts for us, but that was just the way one led one’s normal routine everyday life with certain kinds of rituals built into it.

Along with this cult of the Santa, Christmas also had another ritual and that was among the Bihari and UP migrants who worked as street sweepers in Kolkata, or as Coolies in the Howrah Station or as vendors selling fruits. For them it was “bara din”, a great day, or a big day. There was no bakshish, nor was there food, nor clothes, but it was a day that they counted. Much later in my life I realized that Christianity had a big role to play in the lives of the poor all along the basin of the mighty Indian River, the Ganges, precisely because All along the “Ganga Kinara”, the Dalits have celebrated Christmas in their own way. Not all are Christians but they are poor and ignored, marginalized and oppressed by the reprehensible caste system that make life a living Hell for them. For these people, Jesus lives on, not always in the Church or through baptisms but often as a secret religion, a secret assurance that one day a savior like the Son of God will appear again as the messiah of the poor and take them under His wings of mercy. Many moons ago in the aeons of time, it is rumoured that while Jesus still lived, a sect in India started following his teachings even before that was formalized as Christianity. This sect is called the Naths, or the Nath panthis, or the followers of the Lord unspecified as Rama or Krishna or Shiva or Vishnu. One does not know how Jesus reached the poor people along the Ganges, whether the missionaries worked hard, or whether some secret mantra from the Naths trickled down here. My mother construed that bara din may have been called so because the Winter Solistice was assumed to be on the 25th December and from that time the day turns in to become longer than nights. May be, this is baradin. Whatever it may be but for my driver, domestic help, sweeper, cleaner, and my parents’ helpers in Kolkata, Christmas is a “bara din”; no nothing really is done on that day, no special food, or special prayer, but that’s just a day when they say that they just feel good and get a distinct feeling as the day turning into a longer sunshine, a newness which is beginning.

Well, happiness to all. Merry Christmas and a very happy bara din.

Posted in Family Matters | Leave a comment

Ajmer and Pushkar, Winter 2010

Posted on December 8, 2010 by secondsaturn

Strange things were happening around me. On the last Saturday of November while driving back from office one early evening, a Nilgayi emerged out of nowhere and in the midst of a busy Delhi street rammed into our running car crashing the window on the side in which Madhusree was sitting. The window cracked and collapsed on her showering her with grits of glass pieces like confetti. Vinod did a fine job by keeping the wheels under control but our vehicle was badly damaged, a repair that cost us somewhere around 20k. As we were reeling from this shock, way back home in Kolkata, a two year old toddler slipped under Pam’s car as he was reversing it and the child got caught between the wheel and the axle. It was sheer miracle that she escaped unhurt. These two episodes shook me up and I found that these were very difficult things to have happened. I inspected the spot during the day from where the Nilgayi had shot through and though the railing collapsed at one place, but it was leaning into the forest area and the animal would have had to jump at least ten feet high in order to clear it. This was therefore, an exceptional high jump. Similarly when I asked Pam to retrace the steps of the toddler, he found it hard to explain how the child could have emerged through locked closely grilled gates. These strange incidents call now for Divine Intervention and the Spirit of Light and Darkness all at once; Khwaja Garib Nawaz was the One to visit.

The first time ever I visited Ajmer Sharif was with a party of Modern High School. I was then in Jadavpur University and Mrs Dutta and Chakri roped three ex-students into the team as “helping hands”, euphemism for slaves. Anuradha Sen nee Chowdhury, Susmita Dasgupta, nee Roy alias Lazy and I, unchanged as Susmita Dasgupta visited the shrine with a large party of cackling girls and teachers in holiday jubilation by trying hard to look stern. The travel agent had arranged a special visit in one of the lean hours of the dargah and we went there to a specially arranged “darshan”. Ajmer remained etched in my memory as a peaceful place. But on the subsequent visits, I encountered only crowds and more crowds, pushing, pressing, elbowing and sharving. Hence on this particular visit to the Holy Shrine, my heart really sank as the car entered the parking area. But fortunately, a dark, stout young man with oily mane wearing a black embroidered kurta and white salwar with a crinkled dupatta emerged literally from a hole in the wall and offered to take us around. I knew that Ajmer was a lost case without a “panda” no matter how much we would have wished to avoid them. The “panda” introduced himself as a Astana-e-Alia, a category which is equivalent to the “sebaaye” in Hindu Temples, meaning that these are temple insiders, a minority that are allowed to touch, bathe, clean and clothe the deity. As our stocky Astana-e-Alia led the way for us, the crowds silently parted and Madhusree and I cut across the mortal bodies of human beings as if they were only air.

We walked into the Dargah across the pond that Queen Mary donated for the pilgrims to wash before the prayers, looked at the half- tonne of gold at the spire that the Raja of Rampur donated, and the various areas that kings and Emperors have added to the shrine in aid of the pilgrims. Two huge cauldrons on either side of the entrance are used to prepare daliya, both salty and sweet, the only food that Khwaja Saheb used to eat. The alley leading to the dargah is wholly vegetarian with one shop selling fish and chicken tandoori. The alley has temples of Radha Krishna and Jhoolelah (of the Damadam mastaqalandar fame) and there is also a Church somewhere at the beginning of the narrow path that leads up to the shrine. The crowds represent India and hence have an overwhelming proportion of Hindus, Sadhus who descended from the Himalayas on the start of winter, Ayappans from Kerala. Skull capped men and abeya wrapped women are busily making offerings in the Radha Krishna Temple, as much as the Christians, Jews and Hindus are thronging into the shrine for the lighting of evening lamps. The qawaali is soulful and the audience is almost wholly Bihari women who have come in busloads to visit the shrine. Women are sitting in namaz, a corpse is brought to Khwaja’s shrine to bid goodbye to the earth one last time and girls are running up and down the steps to witness a meal of daliya being cooked in a cauldron that can churn about 24000 kilos of cereal. Everything gets mixed and cooked in this shrine just as the daliya in the cauldron- Khwaja Moinuddin is a huge melting pot of all religions, all souls, all faiths and beliefs and disbeliefs. Khwaja Saheb is at one the Light and the Darkness, at once the sight and the blindness, the silent and the articulate, the living and the dead, the dead and the living, so the qawaals sing passionately, assertively and insistently.

I am in a rush to come out of the crowded space but not before I have peeped into Akbari Masjid, a serene space amidst the hustle bustle of the pilgrims in the dargah. Our Astana –e-Alia reads my mind as he says that any monument associated with Akbar is invariably peaceful. I have noticed this too. Monuments by Shah Jahan are regal but they bear a certain level of anxiety, nervous energy that make them seem to be too much self conscious in desire to be eternal. Akbar’s monuments exude power, a power that is so invincible and unchallenged that it turns into peace.

We make donations for the girls’ madrashah at the Anjuman office. This is better than spending money on the chaddars and other offerings. The office bearers present us with booklets on stories about the shrine. We suggested that in view of the large number of Bangladeshis who visit the shrine and the fact that West Bengal still has one of the largest Muslim populations in the country; booklets should also be printed in Bengali. The Anjuman stiffened at this suggestion and said that Khwaja Garib Nawaz was of universal religion, religion of man, and not specifically Islam. Of course, of course, this is so. There are numerous faiths around saints in India, the bauls, the fakirs, of Jhoolelal, Kabir, Lallan, Saibaba that are neither Hindu nor Muslim. These are faiths unto themselves that are not necessary to classify in terms of major religion; something like the Bhojpuri, a complete language in it but appended as a dialect of Hindi.

There is only one shop on the way to the dargah that sell fish and tandoori chicken, the rest are strictly vegetarian. Right at the car parking area there are tea vendors selling boiled egg. Nothing inside the shrine is from dead animals, neither the fans, nor the nakkaras, nor the bhistis for sprinkling water. The shrine has its own festivals, none of the animal chopping and blood flowing ids. There is only sweet nokuldaana, fragrance and flowers and lamps.

We move away from Ajmer, climbing the hills to reach Pushkar, appearing barren and deserted with silhouettes of champa tree as the sun sets on the Aravallis leaving an unpeopled stretch sink into the twilight. It is a moonless night and a few electric bulbs from far below Ajmer blink and disappear into the curves and bends of the ghat road; another day is sucked into the eternity of Time. We emerge out of the completely lifeless stretch to take the long winding path to Pushkar Fort Hotel.

I remember my colleague Parameswaran telling me the myth of Pushkar, the south Indian version, in which Brahma and Vishnu wanted to get one up against the other. They approached Shiva for a judgment as to who was the greater of the two. Lord Shiva gave them a task; each would have to find either the head or the foot of Shiva as he reveled in his Vishwaroopa. In the appearance of Vishwaroopa, Shiva became so vast that neither could find the limits of his body. Vishnu, who had chosen to seek the Lord’s feet, confessed that he could not locate the feet at all because of the infinite dimensions of Shiva. But Brahma chose to lie to Shiva and on seeing a falling flower on the ground, the same as the one that Shiva wears on his head; he told the Lord that he had seen his head. Shiva immediately found out that Brahma was lying and instantly cursed him that he was never to have a temple and would have to remain contended with the only one in Pushkar, a land of the flower. In north Indian myths, Brahma took a Gujjar woman who he purified by passing through a cow and named her Gayatri, when his wife, Savitri took a long time to dress and got late for the grand yagnya that he was conducting in the presence of all the deities. Savitri, angered by Brahma’s infidelity cursed him and all the Gods badly. The gods cursed were Indra, Pavan, Vishnu, and several other rishis.

When we arrived in the vicinity of the Pushkar lake, the main one known as Senior Pushkar, for there are the middle and the junior Pushkars as well, I found that people dressed in traditional Rajasthani attire moving about asking for “cow donations”. Rather short and sweet looking animals that looked like bovine yaks were strutting with contended faces with splashes of dry sindur on them. These cows were supposed to represent the sacrificial cows that the Vedic people used to chop off during yagnas. The entire ritual is a survivor of the days of cow sacrifice by Hindus ! Then in a flash I got the story of Pushkar; Brahma versus Vishnu in which the former loses the battle, the curse of wife of a monogamy marriage, the Holy Cow who purifies the Gujjar girl Gayatri, the curse on Indra, Pavan, typical Vedic Gods and the curse on Vishnu that he will be born as Krishna, Rama, Varaha and so on, possibly hints that at Pushkar, there was a battle between the Vedic and the later Brahminical Hinduism. I reach for the dates of the various temples, numbering to over 400 around the lake and I realize that all of them have been built between the 10th and the 18th century, highly medieval instead of ancient India. The Vedic rituals of which cow sacrifice was an important part is replaced by a strict vegetarian zone and every deity in India including the now disappeared God Jhoolelal has a temple here.

The crowd of temples as each tries to nudge the others in order to get some space along the lake hints that some battle must have taken place in this very land as Hinduism throws out Vedas and brings in the epics and the Puranas. The population consists of Gujjars, the caste of Lord Krishna and of Gayatri and of Parashar Brahmins, a low caste Brahmin who hails their descent from the dark skinned Ved Vyas, the author of the Mahabharata. There is no business in Pushkar except as priests especially because this is supposed to be a place where one washes sins and prays for souls to have moksha. The spiritual business, however, is only a tip on the iceberg, because the real bulk business of Pushkar is in drugs. Anyway, what endeared me was the surfeit of girls’ schools all over the town and indeed the education of the girl child is a credit that the Brahmins must deserve. One of the modes of Sanskritization before Independence was to educate one’s girls that today unfortunately have come to rest in teeny clothes but with honour killing.

I try to use my time in the car well and divide the prasad from Ajmer into small packets for distribution. We discuss how similar anything to do with Vishnu and Lakshmi is so like the Pirs. The prasad of Satyanarayan is so much like the Arab breakfast that Marriott had laid out in Dubai, pirs always have the same food prepared and same stuff offered as Radha Krishna and lo and behold, Garib Nawaz was seated just at the place which according to the south Indian Pushkar myth, Lord Vishnu was supposed to have found the feet of Shiva. Khwaja Saheb was already there in Ajmer when the temples were starting to get constructed in Pushkar. I read in the Ajmer pamphlets that Garib Nawaz sat in Ajmer, the outskirts of what was to become Prithviraj Chauhan’s kingdom and challenged the then king, by saying that love and not the sword was the true weapon of universal suzerainty. It was a political move through the spiritual path predating the Muslim conquests by at least two hundred years.

Prithviraj Chauhan hailed on his mother’s side from Bengal, Ballal Sen, the founder of the Baidya caste, being the maternal grandfather to this great hero and in one of the Pushkar myths, cursed Vedic God had turned into Kali of Kolkata !! The religious contests between the Vedic and Gujjar alias Krishna cultists must have had something to do with the establishment of the kingdom of Prithviraj Chauhan. Pushkar has a surfeit of Bengal and Bihar presence and also a discernible Sindhi and a Maratha one. There is also, at Pushkar, a Sankaracharya temple. Ajmer, on the other hand has a marked presence of Southern Indian Sultans. It is then definitely a space in which Hindus and Muslims, each in their own way had tried to combine the north and the south of India and for the Hindus, it has been a shake out within Hinduism as Brahma, with his monogamist family and cow sacrifice clearly bowed out to a polygamist and vegetarian culture of the Krishna worshippers and also a rise of the Gujjar community in defiance to the greater ritual statuses of Brahmins.

As these thoughts crowd my mind and I decide to sound Anirban, a adventuring historian on these passing ideas, I am animated by a appealing smell emanating from somewhere around me. I detect the fragrance as being from the now shriveled pink rose that I got at the dargah – Khwaja Saheb’s rose smelling jolly sweet.

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