Image courtesy Penguin India
Our Ways Their Ways by Gautam Benegal
When I was in school, my first friends were those with whom I played on the streets – local children who belonged to lower middle class families. Their fathers were peons, clerks and small shopkeepers. Later I came to know that these families were not so poor after all – they all possessed land in their villages, owned the houses they lived in – however decrepit – jointly with several uncles, brothers, sisters and aunts, and ran various side businesses – again on joint ownership, like the hiring out of tempos and trucks. But that was much later. At that time the glaring difference between them and I was this: I used to be well dressed, study in the English medium and speak both Bengali and English fluently. I composed my sentences as I spoke and was clear in my pronunciation. Many of my friends went to the same school, but studied in the Bengali medium, dressed a little shabbily, and spoke only in Bengali. Their speech was rapid, the vowels and consonants tumbling upon each other and the sentence delivery often staccato and disjointed as it so often happens if you speak before thinking. They felt severely challenged if you addressed them in English and a little resentful if you kept on at it for too long. You could be accused of showing off. As a matter of fact, they would often taunt me if I did this unconsciously. Although I realized even at the time that this reaction was self defensive in nature, I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed, and, in some way regretful that my bonding with them was never complete, and I was always considered a bit of an outsider. The fact that I had an unusual surname and was of mixed parentage was a disadvantage in this community where everybody’s origins were rooted in cultural and ethnic homogeneity.
Although I was completely accepted into their games and their homes, any attempts at reciprocity on my part used to be met with considerable diffidence. After a hot and rough game of football or cricket on the road we usually felt thirsty and gathered around the porches and stoops at each other’s homes for a glass of water. On the rare occasions when my friends used to come to my home, because we happened to be playing right outside, or happened to be passing that way, they looked very awkward and ill at ease. There they stood outside the front door, peering in shyly at the fixtures, my father’s paintings, and the dim coolness. It was too quiet. Too quiet and too restrained. It was alien. During the water drinking sessions at their homes you’d have mothers and sisters about the place, pleasantries being exchanged, inquiries about their families, all that sort of thing.
None of that here. My parents, of course, would smile at them and be polite, but that certainly did not put them at their ease. It was not the same bouncy familiar manner they were used to in each others homes. My brother belonged to a different world – a world of erudite books and quiz contests and debates and he was discovering Marx about that time along with a few friends of his. Passionate debates about Marx and Engels used to go on between them with acolytic fervour. Of course that did not stop him from remarking darkly to me one evening when I came back hot and dusty, that I was going to “meet my (future) wife one day on the streets.”
My friends studied in the Bengali medium. They even read the classics of Dickens, Walter Scott, R.L Stevenson and Edgar Rice Burroughs – in translation. These books were illustrated by possibly some of the worst illustrators of College Street in terrible and lurid detail, the printing was smudgy and the pages had a peculiar smell, which I cannot describe. I loved these books. I read every one of them. I had read these books in the original too, but that was a different, more sanitized experience.
The penny thrillers churned out by the various small and medium sized publishing houses, mostly situated in and around College street and the printing presses of Howrah are not written with the intent of creating high art. They are unabashedly commercial ventures. Even so, to my mind, these books and booklets about romance, adventure crime and suspense, and humor of the burlesque type, are the life blood of Bengali juvenile literature. Running parallel to this tradition are other writers writing in Bengali – their language more contained, more disciplined. The scientific, geographical and historical information about the world contained in their books are definitely more accurate, and the illustrations boast of a high degree of draftsmanship and stylized sophistication. These writers and illustrators enjoy more security and write regularly in the children’s omnibus magazines that are published every year during the Durga puja vacations. Many of them have good jobs in the Anandabazar Group. This second group of writers is more cosmopolitan in the way they write. The illustrators experiment in various styles, inspired by movements in world art. If you squeezed in one of the penny thrillers in a rack full of these books, it would stand out like a baul in a ballroom. And yet why do I think that these penny thrillers are so vital to children’s literature? If you go into the subtexts, you will find a great deal of prejudice and ignorance about Africa, China and other countries, (specially their culinary habits) and careless comments and misinformation about subjects as diverse as forensics or hunting tigers. There is humour of the crude (and sometimes scatological) variety and science fiction of the most absurd kind with total disregard to basic physical laws. So what is so fascinating? It is the same fascination I feel when I watch a roadside juggler, acrobat, or magician performing tricks with very few props right there on the potholed streets, to the sound of a drum, and pulling it off, maybe with a stumble or two. There is something atavistic that appeals to my nature in watching this performer in his cheap tinsel clothing and incomprehensible chatter (like a litany of spells) struggling in front of me and transforming the mundane atmosphere of the pockmarked street – transporting it to a different plane – magical and exotic. Perhaps it is the same primitive fascination that your own vernacular holds when it speaks to you for the first time, not with reason, not with scientific clarity , but with a cadence that you feel with your pulse, not in the colours of a sober sunny day, but the colours of an imperfect dawn. And so it is with our nursery rhymes and our folk tales and our mythologies – bloodthirsty sometimes, politically incorrect, yes, judgemental, oh yes – but so visceral. I believe that penny thrillers such as these are shaped by some of our deepest instincts for curiosity and exploration and exhilaration in the face of the unknown, with not a thought to logic or prudence. The arts should never become so disciplined as to lose this quality of wild and thoughtless freedom that cheap postcards and lurid thrillers bring to it like fresh blood. Our roadside shows, nautankis, and folk songs are the building blocks of our sophisticated films, our art galleries and literary masterpieces. But they command respect in their own right. (At the same time I have to draw the difference between the above model of popular art and the more corporate world of mainstream cinema which is also an embodiment of popular mores and attitudes. Cinema is not exactly a spontaneous medium. There are many stages before the original idea finally makes it on screen. There is planning and pruning and premeditation taking place at all these levels and a considerable amount of self censorship since the stakes are immense and the fortunes of a great number of people are at stake. Those who gush at the kitsch and gaucheries of an average Hindi film would do well to remember that a great deal of sophisticated thought has gone to work to produce that “charming” effect that has become so fashionable. It would be interesting to ponder how mainstream films have encouraged existing mindsets to build their consumer bases. The enterprise is not an innocent one, but rather highly synthetic. )
Inevitably, it would seem, our worlds separated as we grew older. Around the age of 16, I met new friends. These were the younger brothers of my brother’s friends. They were English educated, their families were well connected, and their ambitions went well beyond the perimeters of the plush localities they stayed in. They could spout Eliot, Auden and Donne with ease. Quite often they would pepper their conversation with funny phrases from the books of Wodehouse and burst out laughing in cosy camaraderie. We played of course, but not on the streets. One of my new friends had a huge house and grounds and we played volleyball and badminton on his lawn. No more dipping your hands to the wrist in the gutters for lost rubber balls.
There was one remarkable point of difference between these and my earlier friends where academics was concerned.
A considerable amount of toil and learning- by- rote backed up by a never-ending stream of private tutors was mainly responsible for the good star marks they used to get in their exams. I have seen some of the dullest of them nodding with fatigue over his geometry or biology (in the Bengali medium, of course), in the dim light of a hurricane lamp – Calcutta used to get a lot of power cuts at that time – and scoring high marks. What effort and determination went into the gathering of reference books, suggestion papers and the dinning of theorems, formulae and nitrogen cycles into their heads! And that was not all. There was a physical regimen one had to follow if one had to shine as a star student and be a Madhyamik topper. You had to get up at 4am and eat a small bowl of chick peas immersed in water the night before. That provided energy in those trying times. You were supposed to eat a lot of curd, with constant reminders that South Indians (known generically in a sweeping sort of way as “Madrasis” ) ate a lot of the stuff and were all mathematical prodigies. After eating the curd you were supposed to swirl water in the bowl, and wash down the rest of the curd. This was supposed to create fresh blood in your body. Fish, the smaller variety found in ponds and lakes, cooked in a light broth with plenty of vegetables was highly recommended for creating brain cells responsible for memory. So was Branolia, a medicinal syrup which advertised itself extensively in the suggestion papers. There were many varieties of hair oil that would help in keeping a cool head in the examination hall. Puja flowers were pressed into the text books. They would also be pressed in your oily hair on the day of the examination. During Saraswatipuja these books would be stacked together near the feet of goddess Saraswati who is the goddess of learning – especially the subjects which one was weak in. This was a community where everyone pitched in during the exams and all attentions were focused on the student as D-day drew near. He was treated like a little dalai lama. (I keep saying “he” because all my friends during those days were boys. I don’t know about the girls, but from the little I have seen of my friend’s sisters, I don’t think they were given the VIP treatment to this extent. Exams or not, I still saw them helping their mothers around the house and the kitchen.) A great deal of individual and collective effort went into these examination preparations. It was as if, and I don’t think I am very wide off the mark when I say this, the entire family was investing time, money and a lot of hope and sending off one of their own, with their prayers, to conquer a place in the world, a higher platform of social and economic success – for them all. In the last twenty years, I have seen families like these growing prosperous, their children doing well, sometimes going abroad and eventually reinventing themselves as world citizens. But it is a long haul and there is much pain along the way. With progress, come the trappings of modernity and materialism, traditional value systems are questioned and the inevitable social tensions arise, ironically, between the first generation Marco Polo and the family that funds him.
By contrast, my new friends, who were the end products of several generations of social and economic progress, didn’t have to sweat so hard for academic laurels. Nor did they go through all the colourful rituals I have described. They didn’t need to. They had libraries, and reference materials, and most importantly, they had contacts. They had professors and academicians in their families. They had above all, an analytical approach to their studies from a very early age and didn’t have to memorize mindlessly by rote. They were sharper and quicker to grasp and conceptualize different problems and possessed none of that blind reverence for the printed word. They could cross check, compare and contrast facts from a world of letters that lay in easy access. Naturally they had an edge over their less fortunate counterparts. Whether they chose to utilize these advantages to the fullest possible extent is however another matter. Very often it was the classic case of the tortoise vs. the hare.
It takes extraordinary perseverance however, to rise above ones given circumstances and become a P.T. Usha, Anil Kumble or a Sumita Laha. And it takes a lot to get over the feeling of shyness and fear and approach secure, articulate and superior people of a different class for help and support, even advice and information, that could give you that little push in life that makes all the difference. It is unreasonable to expect this of these people and altogether unfair to blame them of lack of enterprise and a spirit of enquiry. It is criminal to mock them.
Vernacular medium schools are less expensive than English medium schools. The traditional tols and madrasas are even less expensive.
It’s not just the expenses in books and fees, but also expenses that mount in keeping up with the social pressures that are involved.
A simple thing like the brand of sweets that are distributed by a child in class on his birthday, can pose a challenge to the self esteem of a poorer child in that class whose parents cannot afford such luxuries. (Our advertising and marketing industry has already succeeded in ensuring that no one who earns legitimately is ever happy with his lot.) There is a lot of loose and competitive talk even among very small children about their parents’ financial prowess. Fathers and mothers on the lower end of the social spectrum already suffering from an acute feeling of inferiority and helplessness would rather put their children in a vernacular medium school with lesser facilities, true, but with fewer harassments. There is also a feeling of defiance – a closing in of ranks that I have noticed, attached to this. Parochial sentiments are expressed and reinforced in the child and the superiority of the mother tongue emphasized over and over again. There is another reason why some of these parents are loathe to admit their children in English medium schools. They feel they will not be able to “cope” and things are likely to get “out of hand”. Since they themselves have grown up in traditional and conservative homes where respect and obedience is due to elders, and how much wisdom you possess is seen as directly proportional to your chronological seniority, they are uncomfortable with their children being exposed to western liberal concepts that might undermine their authority. And then, what would they do in their old age? Traditionally, the son and his family are supposed to support his parents economically at that time.
At the same time, my English speaking missionary schooled friends were hopelessly out of touch with the ground realities of their own country. And I mean the ground realities – in the sense they had never encountered communal problems, caste problems, dowry deaths, malnutrition, religious bigotry, and all that curses our country, at first hand, nor were they likely to. The causes of the French Revolution three centuries earlier and the brutal burning of Roop Kanwar in a suttee in Rajasthan a couple of days back could be discussed in the same clinical, academic manner, between drinks, as if we were watching Animal Planet on TV and not something that could be happening a hundred yards down the street. In retrospect I find this monstrous. We learnt to emote and relate to the abstract – and not to the immediate and the concrete! We could read Flaubert (In translation) and empathize with the lot of the peasant, but remained unmoved by Premchand’s Godaan. We understood the industrial hell of Dickens’ London, but did we realize that something similar was happening in Calcutta during the 70’s ? And today, we are shocked by the sight of Afghan refugees on CNN sitting in our cosy living rooms, while we are unfazed by the terrible poverty all around us, all the time. Something has gone very wrong in the shaping of such sensibilities that cannot respond spontaneously to events that happen right under their noses – without the refractive medium of the soundbyte or the printed word to shape their responses. No, on the contrary, our orientation made us more insular. We mocked and mimicked the habits and ways of speech of the “vernacs” as we called them. We are still doing that on MTV and Channel [V]. To us they were stupid, bumbling buffoons with superstitions and habits that were detrimental to their material progress. They had too many children, talked too loudly, had no concept of privacy and were unaware of their civic rights and duties. They made a public display of their physical functions. They were, in short, screwed. Hell, they deserved to be screwed! We are viewing a sizeable portion of our own citizenry in much the same exasperated way as a white man would view his burden not so very long ago.
Look at the droll and slightly contemptuous way in which Agastya observes the Indian drama enacted in Madna in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s book, English August. It brings a smile to our lips as we readily identify with an Agastya caught in the perplexing maze of Indian reality – quite like Alice in an unbearably scorching wonderland populated by strange, coarse creatures.
There is a parallel example in our own history of the same mockery of native customs and beliefs. Parallel yes, but not similar. There are some delightful instances of enthusiasm of this kind going to extremes in the 19th century: The students of the Anglo-Indian poet Henry Vivian Derozio,(1809–1831) displayed an abundance of zeal bordering on exhibitionism. They ate beef, drank alcohol, held mock pujas of the godess Kali, (naming her “madam Kali” and dressing up the idol in skirts) and scandalized their traditional contemporaries. And this is where the likeness between our contemporary form of derision and theirs ends.
These were all westernized young men, true. Many of them had converted to Christianity. To them Christianity meant progress and a breaking away from the old much as to us consumerism and youth culture represents freedom from the old and stuffy world of thrift and the socialist middle class values of our parents. But they were influenced by the philosophy of Hume and Bentham and radical thinkers like Thomas Paine. Theirs was a reformist movement. Reason, rationality and logic were the yardsticks by which they wished to measure their world. And change it. It was essentially political in the sense they were trying to buck the system. This was the Young Bengal Movement – thoroughly iconoclastic in its denouncement of the Hindu religion, its superstitions and its exploitative excesses, its apologists and zealots who had vested interests and who were powerful lobbyists in the administration of that time – much like now. The Young Bengal Movement was a boisterous child of the Bengal Renaissance, an intriguing period of our history and a fascinating chemistry of events. That period brought to the fore a dialogue between disparate cultures that were uneasy bedfellows to a large extent. In its present avatar that still continues. This time not between two landmasses separated by the kaalapani, but within this subcontinent. Two cultures uneasily coexist side by side – the so called “cosmopolitan” and the vernacular. We have new words in our lexicon such as “pseudo-secular”, “vernac”, “orange brigade.” The vitriolic arguments between the camps of Radhakanta Deb (a reactionary conservative and a philanthropist ) and of Raja Rammohan Roy 200 years ago, are uncomfortably similar to that happening now between the votaries of militant Hindutva and those with a secular outlook. But it is worth comparing those avowedly westernized young disciples of Derozio (misguided though they may have been) with the apolitical and self motivated, cynical and socially apathetic “gen-next” of our times, as the media likes to describe them.
To what extent does the English educated middle class, their young raised cocooned away from the burning heat of the Indian sun, have a say in the governance of this country today? The model of progress in which they have reposed their faith, and around which they have fashioned their world views, has its origins in the colonial histories of present third world countries. Improvement and reform have traditionally been seen as an endowment from the West. Did an English medium education, progressive, liberal and cosmopolitan as it is made out to be, equip us to communicate with or reform others less fortunate? Did it motivate anyone towards greater understanding and empathy? Has it prevented bigotry and xenophobia? The arguments or issues regarding models of nationalism/self-determination have been internalized in the geo-political stratums of this subcontinent. Are we really a Hindu country in self denial of our true nature – our dharma as it were, all these years blindly aping and trying to follow the tenets of Western liberalism imposed upon us by colonial rule? This was inevitable. I am not one of those who subscribe to the view that the missionary activity that gathered momentum during the Industrial Revolution concealed sinister designs to ensnare the rest of the world into industrial slavery. It is true however, that along with the political submission to a superior power, a gradual belief in the superiority of its spiritual heritage and cultural example is created as well. This would have been true even if India had colonized Great Britain at a time when we were a powerful nation state under, say, Chandragupta Maurya and they were motley groups of bickering tribes. (Ulatpurana, a short story by the great Bengali satirist, Rajshekhar Basu, creates a fantastical scenario in the early 20th century where Londoners try hard to ape their Indian masters in their attire, speech and cuisine.)
According to Sir Mark Tully, who has covered India as BBC’s correspondent for 22 years: India is a Hindu nation forced to wear the ugly formless garb of Western secularism. Hindu nationalism is a backlash against this pedantic Nehruvian aspiration, the 50 year old soulless construct that sunders religion from its natural place in Indian public life. The Congress has to realize that public religiosity, not the private spiritual search was Gandhi’s way. And this is the one true way for India. ( Ref: Times Of India, 18th August – Rashmee Z. Ahmed.)
If not, then why this mass wave of acceptance and enthusiastic joyous reception at every street corner, in so many educated drawing rooms, and schools and colleges – of the strident trident? Repugnant as the thought may be to many who have grown up otherwise, you simply cannot wish away the fact that there are temples multiplying in the roads in violation of civic rules, vast numbers of schools have changed their curriculums and the interpretation of history, an extreme pop nationalism of the sort associated with far right movements the world over, has taken hold, and every minor Hindu festival is an occasion for celebration and an unofficial holiday. If democracy is the rule of the people and it is the majority whose voice carries the vote, why, then the transformation of the saffron into an aggressive shade of vermilion is quite legitimate. And as everybody knows, history is written by the victors…
I know that a certain way of life for some people have come to an end. They are now a minority. They may mourn it through nostalgia columns in the newspapers but it has come to an end. Rural India, Small town India, has come into its own. And in a way not even dreamt of by the intelligentsia years ago. They define their goals and priorities without having it defined for them – not through armed struggle and revolution, no, nor by the bhadralok reform that would have them dovetail into an idealized world where tradition (purified of its caste conflicts and superstitions and other backward trappings) would sit comfortably with the ethos of western liberalism.
In this new dispensation, the quiet bylanes of Khotachiwadi, Girgaum and Bandra in Mumbai and the gullies of North Calcutta and Lucknow stand as threatened as the genteel old houses and their gentle occupants opposite Azad Maidan and the residents of Hindu Colony, Dadar.
In this new dispensation, rite is divorced of aesthetics – festivities, whether to celebrate a wedding or a religious occasion take on the nature of public proclamation and aggressive assertiveness. Our man has left the bullock cart for the Lancer that makes loud backing noises in a number of tunes so that you know he’s arrived. Genteel remonstrance about the environment, and the disappearing greenery are mere irritations to be crushed with the ruthlessness that the progress of an expanding frontier demands. This is the self-actualization of millions of people who have been declared a significant market to be taken seriously – and therefore a legitimate voice irrespective of the moral or ethical choices they may make either as individuals or collectively.
And so the shy and self-effacing “vernac” who wouldn’t step into my house for a glass of water has evolved. He learns English with a newer determination – in myriad accents – and is the backbone of our BPO industry. Advertisers pour in crores of rupees for the kind of entertainment he can relate to – the burlesque of the country fair, the retelling of mythology and the politics of the joint family. But remixed and packaged in modern idiom and with the gloss of modern technology that takes them away from their contexts and distorts them. It is a lot similar to the mass produced plastic version of the organic and natural plantain leaf and the stitched saal leaf plates that used to be available in markets years ago. Or the small thermocole or plastic cups that have replaced the earthen pots one drank tea from.
So the demand for Mc Donald’s burgers is satisfied, but made acceptable by the innovative inclusion of veg burgers and potato preparations like Mc Aloo tikkis that lack beef and chicken. And no worries about cholesterol in a nation that was, till very recently comparatively safer from obesity than the USA because our diet consisted mostly of grains and pulses. And a large sandwich chain sells vegetable sandwiches that are scooped out from inside – the bread thrown away – a colossal waste in a country like India – so that it can be served with filling that is presentably tidy and sealed. Buying into international brands – with first world soft cultural associations – are a sure index of success. In a civilization that the popular imagination of the rest of the world paints as spiritual and ascetic and the land of Gandhi, social status is actually determined by the capacity to consume rapaciously. Concepts like personal hygiene and harmful additives and fertilizers are alien to those who evaluate a luxury soap or packaged foods not by their utilitarian value, but as aspirational icons.
The notions of past glory and our superiority as a 4000 year old ancient civilization exist in the abstract in our minds and are held very sacred and fiercely defended, through tokenisms. Sectarian politics and pressure groups that represent different castes and communities find them most convenient. But there is no real concrete concern for our dwindling inheritances – old historical manuscripts rotting in libraries, our flora and fauna, the heritage buildings and monuments abused with neglect and scarred with graffiti. Our “vernac” holds his 4000 years high like a trophy but is embarrassed of our immediate past – all that which went into the years of his growing up – so much so that he is in a tearing hurry to break the house down without even a viable and alternative blueprint of growth.
The colour and variety that I held dear in the years of my childhood and youth in the festivals and customs of local people and their ways, and the language they spoke is fading as well – replaced by a new homogeneity of mindless conformism. And with that the vitality and life one recognizes as this country’s identity.
What kind of self actualization lies at the end of this road? Not “ours”, nor even “theirs.” For if it is true that form follows function, then the thoughtlessness of design all around us, from civic works to the minting of a 5 rupee coin that a blind man cannot differentiate from a 50 paisa, must speak volumes. Of what manner of creature we would like to be, and of what we would do, should we one day realize our adaptation of the American dream.
The Vanguard 