Gladly Beyond Any Distance

Gangubai once told film-maker Vijaya Mulay, in the initial years of television: “If a male musician is a Muslim, he becomes an Ustad. If he is a Hindu, he becomes a Pandit. But women like Kesarbai and Mogubai just remain Bais.”

Ustad: master/teacher, Pandit: scholar/teacher, Bai: sister.

The horrific massacre of a Dalit family two months ago at Kherlanji. The excruciating social boycott of Dalits in Kadakol for the past four months because they ‘dared’ to take water directly from the village tank (rather than have two intermediate caste representatives pouring water for them, as they have done for centuries). Neither story made the front pages of our national newspapers.

In the midst of it all, Karnataka celebrated its Suvarna Karnataka Rajyothsava (as I’ve said elsewhere, the State’s golden jubilee celebrations), and over this weekend, I finally managed to read The Hindu’s special issue for the occasion. In it, the first article was by Gangubai Hangal, one of the most extraordinary musicians I have ever had the privilege to hear. In a concert we organised in college, over ten years ago, I remember her voice exploding within and without me, making my fanciful imagination feel that it was capable of bringing the house down, in many more ways than one. What power, I had thought then. What unbridled, untrammeled, ecstatic power.

And yet, the story she told in ‘The Golden Song’ (Gangubai Hangal, The Hindu’s Suvarna Karnataka special issue, Pp 4-8, November 1, 2006) moved me beyond the music. Two stories. One of her mother’s, and the other, of her own.

I was born in pre-Independent India, a period when caste discrimination was rampant. Shukravarapete in Dharwad was a locality full of Brahmins. Even now it’s an area dominated by them. My mother, Ambabai, a devout woman, was conscious of this caste factor, and lived a low profile, quiet life. I still remember how one afternoon an old Brahmin mendicant came to our house asking for water. My mother was in a dilemma. She explained the predicament to him and he remarked, “Does water have a caste? Please give me water to drink…” and my mother duly gave him water and a piece of jaggery. He blessed my mother and left. But my mother reeled under the shock of having given water to an upper caste man and was gripped by fears of social ostracisation for many days to come.

The incident reminds me of another from my own life. I was a young girl and faced a similar predicament right under the nose of the iconic figure who strived to abolish untouchability from this country. It was the Belgaum Congress of 1924 and the Mahatma was to grace the occasion. I was thrilled that I was going to sing before Gandhiji, but also scared stiff that I would be asked to clear all the plantain leaves after lunch, as I belonged to one of the lower castes. I sang. Gandhiji came up to me and blessed me. Pandit Sawai Gandharva was impressed too. On the one hand I was overjoyed by their appreciation, but on the other, I was paralysed by the worst fears. I quietly walked up to my teacher and asked him if I had to sit separately for lunch and clear the leaves. He held me close, and said: “Nothing of the kind, don’t worry…”

They were difficult times. But I’m grateful to music in more than one way. It gave me a unique identity and pushed all other identities to the background.

I wonder what Amartya Sen might say about that; perhaps he needs ‘Identity and Violence - Part 2. What I surprisingly missed out in Part 1‘. There’s much to be grateful for, in that Gangubai Hangal could survive the inherent pain of her genealogy through the genius of her music, but others of more mundane identities and lives continue to struggle with the violence implicitly - and very much explicitly - still alive in the caste system. Caste… untouched?

Or in other words, Happy Birthday, Karnataka, it’s been 50 years since you were born. What do I say to a place that’s been part of my childhood and my growing up, but also reason for my growing away? I love you, but that love is mixed with sadness, with disappointment and anger. If only you would be what most in this state (over 50 million of us) imagine you to be - a place of prosperity and joy, of pluralism and peace. Instead, so many of us live unimagined/unimaginable realities, nightmares rather than dreams.

Still, your people wish you a Happy Birthday. Because you might remember then - or at the very least, the people who claim to govern you might remember - that in your people, is your strength.

Here’s a poem I wrote for my friends (and extended family) in Raichur over ten years ago:

I found words in unexpected places
in Deodurg.
In a small stillness among the cattle feet
In sudden murmurings of water
(subdued but brave)
splintering through a vast yellowness.
I found strength
and a terrible humility
in the spurts of laughter
from tired-lined faces.
In the quietness of discovery
I found words
(and a funny sort of peace)
in Deodurg.

In today’s Times of India, an article on an innocent man who spent 11 years in jail for allegedly raping and murdering a six year old girl.

Kounder was released from the Yerawada prison on the directives of the Bombay High Court which took cognisance of a suicide note left by police inspector Iqbal Bargir in 2000 who said that Kounder was not guilty of the crime he was charged with.

The court order said that Kounder, who at the time of his arrest in 1995 was employed as an illiterate sweeper with the Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation, was suspected to have been wrongly implicated in the crime.

And what if Kounder had been given capital punishment? Surely raping and murdering a six year old girl justifies it (after all, the last time a Manila rope was made at Buxar jail was in 2004, for Dhananjay Chatterjee)? The next time I rise in righteous anger against rapists and murderers and shout ‘off with their heads’ in a grotesque imitation of the Red Queen, I will have to remember Armogam Munnaswami Kounder. A poor man, from a family of casual labourers in Tamil Nadu. A family he had lost all contact with in the past eleven years. As I write this, he is on a train - somewhere between Pune and Vellore - wondering whether his wife and son will recognise him.

In the midst of the on/off line (in more ways than one) debate around the death penalty, I think Shivam said it simply and effectively. Dilip quotes Nandita Haksar, the civil rights activist representing Mohammed Afzal Guru:

Can the collective conscience of our people be satisfied if a fellow citizen is hanged without having a chance to defend himself? We have not even had a chance to hear Afzal’s story. Hanging Mohammad Afzal will only be a blot on our democracy.

However, Rahul Mahajan gets into the act, saying he will sit on dharna to register his protest against those seeking pardon for Afzal. Perhaps he feels the Delhi police will then help him get elected.

Collective conscience? I leave you with an excerpt from Seamus Heaney’s extraordinary poem, that asks from us the greatest and deepest responsibility of all time: to be an ambassador of conscience, beyond the platitudes, beyond the politics of expedience. Please read the whole poem on the Art for Amnesty site.

When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway

At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather

The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared

[...]

I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself

The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen

He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved

You can be Bangalore-d in many more ways than one. It’s not just our world-class infrastructure that we can boast about at the moment. We are also, solely from anecdotal evidence, the world’s flu capital. No, not bird flu (for which we now have a cheap vaccine developed by Indian researchers), not chikangunya (’that which bends up’, from the Makonde, a matrilineal ethnic group from east Africa… and you thought it sounded like it originated in north Karnataka? So did I), though these have added weight to the honours list. But the common, garden variety, seven-days-or-a-week influenza is… well… everywhere. Especially in me. Twice over in the last two weeks.

You think the world is outsourcing flu, amongst all else? Sigh. It feels like it at the moment in my little corner of the blogosphere. And I’m the privileged back-end office. Working overtime. Triple sigh.

In the hope of recovery - and for all the others who I know are suffering too - here’s a funny something from the master of cheerer-ups: Ogden Nash. And just in case you’re wondering: when I have a snuffle, my temper is uffle.

The Sniffle

On Saturday, Ashwin and I went to watch ‘Kaifi Aur Main’ (Kaifi and I), Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar’s tribute to Kaifi Azmi and Shaukat Kaifi, Shabana’s parents. Based on Shaukat’s book ‘Yaad Ki Raah Guzzar’ (Down Memory Lane) and Kaifi’s own poetry and interviews, it was a wonderful evening in memory of a strange and wonderful man.

Ashwin, unfortunately, found the Urdu too difficult, so all he could do was to watch my delight (hardly entertainment, I fear)… It did help that the performance was at the St John’s auditorium, round the corner from home - everything one does/not do in Bangalore these days is a locational hazard.

The evening had been billed as a theatrical presentation by IPTA Mumbai, but as Deepa Punjwani points out in her review of the performance in Mumbai, it was not quite theatre. It was quite a mehfil (particularly with Jaswinder Singh’s music), and certainly a tribute. Both to Kaifi and to Shaukat, interestingly. For instance, Shaukat remembers how she thought the feminist in Kaifi was speaking directly to her, when she first heard his poem ‘Aurat’ (Woman):

Rut badal daal agar falna foolana hai tujhe
Uth meri jaan mere saath hi chalna hai tujhe
(Change the season to grow, to flourish
Wake up, my love, my soul; walk with me).

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