Echoes
sarnath Banerjee | Gautam Bhatia | Alpana Chowdhury | Vishal Kumar Dar | Anjali Doshi | Andrew Duff
Nathaniel Gaskell | Adam Jacot de Boinod | madhu Jain | Aparna Jayakumar | manjunath Kamath
Amitava Kumar | Jawid laiq | Prashant miranda | Vijay Nambisan | Anuvab Pal | Vibhuti Patel
Amruta Patil | Damien Roudeau | Arshia sattar | Boris séméniako | Jaideep sen | Anand sethi
sondeep shankar | Ketaki sheth | Chetan Raj shrestha | Jai Arjun singh | Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr
volume 1 | issue 3 | April - June 2013
Hunched over laptops, the world at our fingertips, you think it would be easier to navigate life in our globalised, hyperconnected world. It has never been this easy to pull up the anchors that pin us down to the past—and to our traditions. Yet, paradoxically, the interest in our epics, myths and stories has never been so great or as manifest. Artists, writers and filmmakers are increasingly foraging through them and tweaking them for our times. Mythology reloaded has become a flourishing business. The past resonates in the diverse retellings across media.
In the Echoes section of our third issue, Ramayana scholar Arshia Sattar gives us an overview of this epic voyage of rediscovery, analysing changing notions of heroism as well as of good and evil. Painter Manjunath Kamath rummages through what he describes as his “brain library” for images from his childhood, mythology and works of art, which he combines with the everyday present to tell new surreal tales. Graphic novelist Amruta Patil refreshes memories of her grandmother’s stories from the Mahabharata and revisits Mamallapuram, where sculptors have depicted the epic in stone. French graphic novelist Damien Roudeau observes the lives of women idol makers in Kolkata’s Kumartuli. In his visual diary Prashant Miranda lingers on with the Gonds of Madhya Pradesh and listens to their stories. In Raavan Chhaya, a more personal tryst with the Ramayana, artist Vishal K. Dar reimagines the epic in his scroll story. In “Persistence of Vision” British photo archivist Nathaniel Gaskell examines a collection of early 20th century glass plate negatives from Rajasthan and discovers that the past still has many stories to tell and secrets to share.
Writer Jai Arjun Singh hops on board the “Matinee Express”, an imaginary train that chugs down the tracks of Indian cinema, to explore the importance of trains in our films. With a generous pinch of black humour, novelist Amitava Kumar revisits his hometown to paint a picture of “Life in the Day of Patna”. There is more than just food for thought in this issue. Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr delves into the growing obsession with food in “Insatiable Quest”.
Bon Appétit.
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Thank you for bringing out such a superb magazine. At last, we in India have a journal that can compete equally with Atlantic Monthly. It is not easy to pull off something like The Indian Quarterly for it needs a careful blend of gravitas, humour and readability a very rare combination. Now I need not despair: in India we are also capable of being world class when it comes to producing a literary and cultural magazine that is easy on the eye and mind-improving too.
I am particularly impressed by the mix of articles and the professionalism that comes through in each one of them. I do not know how much of that is because of your editorial skills and to what extent it is because you have chosen your writers very carefully. At any rate, as a reader, I am very satisfied.
If you could intersperse the pages of the magazine with a few choice cartoons then that would be splendid. One last thing: please do not compromise on the paper or the font size of IQ. It is a great journal to go to bed with!
Dipankar Gupta
Distinguished Professor, Shiv Nadar University, New Delhi
The Indian Quarterly is godsend for anyone, like me, who lives abroad and longs for India.
I enjoyed the latest number enormously, especially Gillian Wright’s warm memories of Nizamuddin, East and West, Harmala Gupta’s affecting portrait of her extraordinary grandfather, and Raghu Rai’s harrowing long-lost images of the Bangladesh tragedy. I can’t wait for the next issue.
Geoffrey C. Ward
Historian and screenwriter, co-author of Tiger Wallahs
Manhattan
The second issue of IQ left me breathless, as much as it served as a mental jogging track. ‘The Lords of Sand’ photo essay was simply mind-blowing–what great photographs! I have to say the editing and the layout of the magazine is very well done. Raghu Rai’s black and white photo feature is heart wrenching.
IQ has a lot of reading material and I find myself picking up the magazine again and again. I look forward to reading the next issue.
Harinder Baweja
Hindustan Times, New Delhi
I enjoyed your second issue, especially the Crossings Section. I was a bit disappointed though that this issue did not focus on Mumbai as much as your first one.
Also, I understand this is a literary and cultural magazine, but it would be interesting to see some political stories and interesting personality profiles. This is one area in which I believe your magazine could definitely improve.
M Dholakia Mumbai
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Sarnath Banerjee is a graphic novelist, artist, filmmaker and cofounder of the comics publishing house Phantomville. He currently lives and works in Delhi. His first novel, Corridor (2004), was among India’s first few graphic novels. His latest venture is the Pao Collective –a group of artists promoting Indian graphic novels.
Gautam Bhatia has a Masters degree in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Based in Delhi, he has won several awards for his drawings and buildings, and is the author of Punjabi Baroque and Silent Spaces. He is currently working on The Vertical City, a proposal for a new Indian town.
Alpana Chowdhury is an independent journalist who enjoys writing as much about the potholes on Mumbai’s roads as she does about the snow-clad Alps of Switzerland. She has previously worked for Eve’s Weekly, Filmare and The Evening News of India. She has also authored books on Madhubala and Dev Anand.
Vishal Kumar Dar is a Delhi-based artist with a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dar uses satire and scale to address deeper personal, political and sociological issues; and his practice often extends outside the gallery and into the public realm.
Anjali Doshi won the Ramnath Goenka award for broadcast sports journalist of the year in 2012. Former cricket editor with NDTV, she now writes for several publications on culture, travel and sport, including a weekly column for Wisden India. She is deputy editor of The Indian Quarterly. Her twitter handle is @anjaliadoshi.
Andrew Duff is a writer and journalist. He travels in Asia frequently, and writes on all things Indian for UK and Indian publications. He is currently writing his first book, a personal journey into the story of Sikkim inspired by his grandfather’s travels there in the 1920s and 1930s.
Nathaniel Gaskell is curator and creative director at Tasveer Arts. He holds a degree in Fine Arts and a Masters in Cultural Studies. Before moving to India in 2010, he worked as a photo archivist in London and Melbourne. He is a judge for the TFA Photography Prize, a nominator for the Prix Pictet photography prize and editor of the Tasveer Journal
Adam Jacot de Boinod was a researcher on the first series of QI, the BBC quiz programme hosted by Stephen Fry. He is the author of The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World, published by Penguin, and the iPhone App Tingo - the Interesting Word Game
Madhu Jain is editor of The Indian Quarterly. Long-involved with India Today she also worked for Sunday and The Statesman and was formerly Delhi correspondent for La Croix. She curated the landmark art show Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai at the India Habitat Centre in 2001. Her book The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema was released in 2005.
Aparna Jayakumar is a Mumbaibased photographer whose work has featured in Travel + Leisure, CNN Traveller, CNNGo.com, Verve, Lonely Planet and other publications. Her work has shown in Paros (Greece), New York, Rome, Budapest, Bratislava, Mumbai
and Delhi. She has worked with film directors such as Sooni Taraporevala and Vishal Bhardwaj.
Manjunath Kamath is a contemporary artist who explores various themes and media to tell dynamic stories. Born in Mangalore and based in Delhi, he uses painting, drawing, sculpture and video to create unique narratives. His works have been exhibited around the world, including Mumbai, Korea and Germany.
Amitava Kumar is the author of several non-fiction books and a novel, Home Products. His book Husband of a Fanatic was Editor’s Choice at The New York Times, and A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb received the 2011 Page Turner Award. He teaches English at Vassar College in upstate New York.
Jawid Laiq is a Delhi-based political commentator and writer of micro-stories in the form of terse, compact, news items. He was head of a human rights research team at Amnesty International, London; fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi; assistant editor at Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai; special correspondent during the Emergency at The Indian Express, Delhi. He is the author of The Maverick Republic
Prashant Miranda grew up in Bangalore, studied at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and moved to Toronto, Canada. He is an artist, animator and scribe, and balances his life between Canada and India. He documents his travels through his watercolour journals, illustrates children’s books, paints murals and animates short films.
Vijay Nambisan is a poet, journalist and critic who has written for journals across India. He has published several books, including Bihar is in the Eye of the Beholder, Language as an Ethic and Two Measures of Bhakti. His first complete collection of poetry will be out later this year.
Anuvab Pal is a playwright, screenwriter, stand up comedian and occasional columnist. His plays and films include Loins Of Punjab Presents and The Bureaucrat. He has written for several publications, including Time Out Mumbai, India Today, Open, Outlook, Vogue and GQ. He’s delighted to write for IQ because he assumes his is probably not very high!
Vibhuti Patel is a New York-based journalist who has covered arts, culture and India-related subjects for Newsweek International for 30 years. After Newsweek was sold, she retired as contributing editor. Since then, she has been writing on the arts for the Wall Street Journal and continues to freelance for major Indian and American publications.
Amruta Patil is a writer and painter with an MFA from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is the author of the graphic novels Kari and Adi Parva - the first part of a mythohistorical trilogy based on the Mahabharata. To follow her work, visit amrutapatil.blogspot.com
Damien Roudeau is a graphic novelist based in France. He enjoys reporting on offbeat subjects like homelessness and drug abuse, and has worked on several comic books and sketchbooks as well as street art. He is a member of the Argos
collective of documentary makers. www.collectifargos.com
Arshia Sattar is a translator and author. She has a PhD in South Asian Languages and Civilisations from the University of Chicago. Her translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana is a Penguin classic. She writes about and teaches myth and classical Indian literatures at various institutions across India.
Boris Séméniako is a graphic designer and illustrator living in Paris. His images have been published in major newspapers and magazines in France, such as Le Monde, Le Monde diplomatique and L’Humanité. He also designs books covers for novels and has illustrated a French method to learn Hindi.
Jaideep Sen is a journalist based in Bangalore. He was editor of the arts and culture publication Time Out Bengaluru, and the music magazines RAVE and The Voice & Web (WorldSpace). Jaideep is also an artist and designer working on canvas art and company logos.
Anand Sethi has advanced qualifications in electronics, international law and international business, and an abiding interest in history, particularly military history. He is the co-author of the bestseller Doing Business in India and is currently working on The Business of Electronics. He lives in Dagshai, Himachal Pradesh and is curator of the Dagshai Jail Museum.
Sondeep Shankar is a Delhi-based photographer. His published work includes a ten-book series on various aspects of Sikhism, Childhood in India and Havelis of
Old Delhi. Winner of the Nikon Photo Contest in 1992, he is currently consulting photo editor of The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle group.
Ketaki Sheth won the Sanskriti Award for Indian Photography in 1992 and the Higashikawa Award in Japan in 2006 for best foreign photographer. She has several publications, including Twinspotting: Photographs of Patel Twins in Britain and India, and Bombay Mix: Street Photographs to her credit.
Chetan Raj Shrestha was born in 1978 in Gangtok, Sikkim. He trained as an architect and specialised in heritage conservation. He has lived and studied in Darjeeling, Bangalore, Mumbai and Sydney, and currently works in a collaborative architectural practice in Gangtok. The King’s Harvest, his first book, consists of two novellas.
Jai Arjun Singh is an independent journalist and critic. He writes mainly about literature and cinema on the culture blog Jabberwock: jaiarjun.blogspot.com. Author of a book about the making of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, he has also edited an anthology of film writing called The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers, and given talks on film criticism at TEDx, the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival and Delhi University.
Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr is the Hyderabad-born, Delhi-based editorial consultant of DNA. He is a political commentator and the author of Mullah Omar and Robespierre and Lokpal: Facts and Arguments. He blogs at parsareport. blogspot.com
Manufacture Zenith has consistently accompanied aviation pioneers by offering them onboard instruments and timepieces to match their accomplishments. Powered by the legendary El Primero movement, this model provides a large date display and superluminova-enhanced hour-markers. Heir to the very fi rst high-frequency automatic column-wheel chronograph, it perpetuates the brand’s unassailable reputation.
Letter from the Editor 04
Letters 05
Contributors 06
Talking Points 12
Acceptable prejudice | Delhi Teaches london | Home is Where the Beer Is Afghan spring | jail Break
Essays
22 Escape Into Architecture Gautam Bhatia builds in imaginary spaces to break free of unaesthetic and conventional design
30 Insatiable Quest parsa Venkateshwar rao jr explores the trend of culinary cosmopolitanism
34 Sound Effect Vibhuti patel attempts to unravel the complex relationship between rhythm and the brain
Life and Letters
38 Life in the Day of Patna Amitava Kumar returns home to find himself absorbed in sifting fact from fanciful fiction
46 Calcutta Mornings photographer Aparna jayakumar and comic writer Anuvab pal let their imagination run riot on the streets of Kolkata
54 A Tale of Two Bookstores Alpana Chowdhury browses through a couple of iconic family-run bookshops
Cinema
58 Matinee Express jai Arjun singh takes an imaginary train ride through Indian cinema to explore its role as metaphor for love, tragedy and escape
Echoes
70 Epical Remix Artist B manjunath Kamath deconstructs, dismantles, rearranges, reinvents and recycles
74 Persistence of Vision nathaniel Gaskell rummages through a cache of early 20th century glass negatives to uncover secrets of the past
83 Kumartuli: In Women’s Hands
Frenchman Damien roudeau portrays the struggles of female sculptors in Kolkata’s historic potters’ district
93 Returning to Mahabalipuram
Amruta patil revisits childhood memories to find inspiration for her pictorial travel journal
98 Epic Voyage of Rediscovery Arshia sattar analyses the growing need to rework our myths and legends
104 Tribal Connections in Madhya Pradesh prashant miranda wanders with the Gonds and comes away enriched by their wisdom
110 Chasing Shadows and Sound
Vishal K Dar paints raavan in a different light in his personal retelling of the Ramayana
120 India’s Little Africa photographer Ketaki Sheth depicts the lives of a little-known east African community in Gujarat and Karnataka
128 The Unreluctant Fundamentalist madhu jain had a sense of foreboding after an accidental meeting with Bhindranwale in 1981
136 Open and Shut Case, Fiction by Chetan raj shrestha
146 Vinaigrettes by jawid laiq
152 New Poems by Vijay nambisan
IQ Points
154 sarnath Banerjee: Bicarbonates
156 Adam jacot de Boinod: Adam’s World of Words
on the cover: How Come He is Here
(Digital print on archival paper. 52 x 80 inches, 2009) by B manjunath Kamath
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By Anjali Doshi
Saturday night at the Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai. Forty-five thousand spectators descend on the party for the hit-and-giggle cricket under lights, the latest Bollywood chartbusters on the 1000-megawatt sound system, the scantily clad dancing girls and the seductive razzle-dazzle of the Indian Premier League.
Four cheerleading squads featuring girls imported from Eastern Europe and South Africa keep the crowd behind tall fences entertained as they gyrate almost non-stop for two hours to songs they barely understand the lyrics to. Then, the party pooper arrives: the deadline that forbids the use of loudspeakers after 10pm. The music stops but the girls continue dancing in eerie silence.
A classic made-for-television spectacle, the IPL’s broadcasters are more concerned with the audience at home than those coming through the gates. So, music or no music,
the show must go on. The camera continues to zoom in and linger lecherously on the women engrossed in making sure the dance steps are perfectly synchronised, smiles in place, and pom-poms all aflutter.
India is no stranger to chauvinism but the overt sexism of the cheerleader culture is a borrowed concept, inspired by the West and introduced to Indian sport in 2008 by the IPL. There could not be a better fit. In a country that all too frequently uses its women as glamorous props in real and reel life, this was an idea whose time had come.
A trend perpetuated by the IPL found a perfect match in broadcaster Max—a division of Sony Entertainment Television—which brought glamour into studio discussions on cricket in 2002 when they recruited female presenters and reporters for Extraaa Innings. Last year, the female quotient during IPL programming was enhanced to showcase cheerleaders in skimpy clothing not just during the match but in the studio as well.
In the past decade, female sports reporters and presenters in India have fallen largely on two sides of the chauvinistic divide—those who are so obviously feminine, they are in it purely for their looks, and those who behave like they are not women at all because they try so hard to blend in with the pack.
The women recruited as eye candy fall spectacularly short of providing any real insight into the game but the broadcasters do not view this as problematic. On the contrary, they elaborate the virtues of appealing to the lowest common denominator—men who want to watch pretty faces on the telly, regardless of whether they know their sport or not.
Sexism in sport is not a notorious phenomenon limited to India; it exists everywhere and frequently rears its head as more women work their way into traditional male
bastions. Female cricket reporters in India being propositioned by players; sports presenters in England being instructed to undo a couple of buttons on their tops, moments before a live segment on television; a Mexican TV reporter having footballs thrown in her direction by a coach during practice, while being heckled by players—all real examples of the sexual politics and power games informing the male-female dynamic in sport. Even now. While it could be argued that sport is only a microcosm of existing attitudes in society, it is undoubtedly among the last of many male strongholds to be breached by women. The men, taking refuge in machismo and male bonding, view female presence as an unnecessary intrusion rather than a welcome change, much less a foregone conclusion. A woman’s right to be there is sometimes blatantly questioned, at other times subtly, but there is no mistaking that there is almost always a question. Male reporters rarely face questions like, “Oh, so you’re actually interested in cricket?”
This issue becomes even more problematic—as women in the US and UK will testify— when female sports presenters not only know their sport but look glamorous too because, the lines get blurred between those who are in the industry for their looks and those in it for their knowledge. To have both is cause for confusion, even intimidation, not unlike the reaction to the beauty-with-brains phenomenon.
If the IPL has exposed the Indian male attitude to female presence in sport at its worst, the issue in America has been brought to the fore by the fierce debate on whether female reporters should be allowed access to male locker rooms for a post-match briefing. While a recent ruling now ensures female reporters entry into male locker rooms and vice versa, opinion is sharply divided as incident after
incident seems to reiterate that it is almost naive to expect an escape from gender politics. American footballer Lance Briggs—a Chicago Bears linebacker—believes the debate about a woman being harassed in a men’s locker room is redundant since they should not be there to begin with.
Describing her unnerving experience with a high-profile basketball player after an NBA game, Kate Fagan, a columnist for espnW, recently wrote: “On this particular night, I made eye contact with him as he sat on his chair, still wet from the shower. Thinking he wanted to get his media obligation out of the way, I walked toward him. His words stopped me. ‘You like walking up on half-naked men?’ A sly smile crossed his lips.” She goes on to say, “A minute later, I walked back into the locker room. The player was talking to the other beat writers, all men, still wearing only a towel.” These incidents are hardly isolated. Whether it’s Indian cricket, Italian soccer or American football, the “bird covering sport” tag may yet take years to disappear. Most women reporting on sport may gain an easy entry into the television industry, compared to their male counterparts, especially if the network is fussed about looks, but they talk, without exception, about having to work twice as hard.
What’s more, men are not alone in perpetrating this sexism. Fox Sports presenter Erin Andrews recently criticised football and hockey players in America for faking injuries with the Twitter hashtag “#taketheskirtoff”. This tweet appeared on the timeline of her 1.8 million followers. On sports radio, insulting sportsmen by calling them feminine is routine.
It may be 50 years since women were first allowed into Harvard Business School, but when it comes to women and sports news, the
equation remains disturbingly skewed even in the country that led the way in the fight for women’s rights.
Earlier this year, the Women’s Media Centre released a report titled Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2013. The report found that the coverage of women Olympians in mainstream media struggles between portrayals of athleticism versus sexualised stereotyping. The report also states that the 2010-11 Associated Press Sports Editors Racial and Gender Report Card, which looked at women in sports news, gave an “F” grade in all five gender categories: 94 per cent of sports editors were men; 90 per cent of assistant sports editors were men; 90 per cent of columnists were men; 89 percent of reporters were men; 84 per cent of copy editors/designers were men.
One would imagine if a similar survey were conducted in India, especially for the print and online media, the numbers would make for similar reading. Until the women don’t start ‘‘leaning in’’, to use Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s neo-feminist catchphrase, sport will remain among the last few sanctuaries of acceptable prejudice.
By Andrew Duff
“There was hardly any traffic when I got here in 1947. Connaught Place was really the fulcrum of the whole city then. It used to be wonderful all weekend in the morning we would go and have a cup of coffee, walk around. The only traffic was bicycles, and very few.”
Kuldip Nayar migrated to Delhi from Sialkot, the Punjabi town that fell on the east side of the Radcliffe line. Now 89, and with a distinguished career as one of India’s best
known journalists, he can clearly recall how it felt to arrive in Edwin Lutyens’ recently finished New Delhi. “It felt ‘New’, yes, in the sense that there was definitely freshness about it, something modern. Then the roads were widened, and widened, and widened again. Now it is very different.”
The funeral of former Prime Minister IK Gujral (a close friend of Nayar’s) in December 2012 highlighted the continuing traffic challenges in Delhi. The funeral brought parts of the city to a standstill. “They closed the roads for the VIPs. No one could move. . . now there is an action in the Supreme Court.” The action has been brought by former Solicitor-General Harish Salve who spent two hours stuck in his car that day. “The entire red beacon culture has to go,” said Salve in court, referring to the tendency to close parts of the city at short notice. He objects to the word “sanitisation” used when roads are closed in preparation for
visits by VIPs, pointing out that it makes Delhi’s residents sound like bacteria. The action has gained many supporters.
In London, a city that has had its fair share of traffic problems, a radical new approach to traffic planning is being tested not far from the old School of Architecture where Edwin Lutyens, the designer of New Delhi in the 1930s, learnt his trade. On Kensington’s Exhibition Road, the local council has put a “Shared Space” scheme in place, a system that is designed to break the car’s monopoly on the streets.
The concept of “Shared Space” has more in common with the jostling streets of Old Delhi and rural Indian towns than the widened roads of Lutyens’ New Delhi and its red beacon culture. There are no pavements and no road markings. Cars and pedestrians respect each other more, the theorists say, and show heightened awareness when they know
that they have no exclusive rights to areas of public space. Campaigners claim that accident numbers fall, and that traffic flow is improved.
Bill Mount, lead officer on the Exhibition Road scheme, found inspiration in the approach laid out in the Manasara Shilpa Shastra, a manual collecting ancient wisdom on town planning, in particular the requirement to consider carefully how public space should be designed to best meet the needs of its users.
“Shared Space” advocates argue that policies like road-widening and exclusive car lanes create divisive two-tier structures in cities. “Shared space is about equity-based transportation,” says Eric Britton, a leading thinker on transport based in Paris, who runs the Worldstreets.org website and helps facilitate its subsidiary Indiastreets. “Cities will only really work in the future when we remove and/or tame the cars that are there. If there is no policy of car restraint if planners do not decrease the number of cars and make it more difficult to drive, and certainly to park your car then the city is unlikely to work.” He acknowledges that public transport schemes in Delhi like the BRT are an attempt to break the pattern, but says they must be part of a larger unified initiative.
Other innovations on the streets of central London take their lead from Asia. Cycle rickshaw-taxis are now a common sight; the mayor has created a highly praised bike-sharing scheme. Meanwhile congestion charging (taxing cars to enter the city centre) survived a change in political leadership in the city and is now acknowledged as a beneficial part of the policy mix. It is akin to the taxes levied by “city states” of old.
The traffic challenges in rapidly expanding Delhi are very different from those in London. By some estimates, 1300 cars are being added to Delhi’s streets every day. The population is
still rising fast, and the city now sprawls miles beyond what would have been seen as the city limits only a few years ago.
Nonetheless, there is an increasing global dialogue between cities and cultures as to the right approach to traffic management. Britton and Mount are clear: in the future, it will be too simplistic to think of traffic as just about cars on roads. Competent public authorities must start to think innovatively about public space from the perspective of all users, not blindly follow the advice of engineers who often advocate solutions in which they have a vested interest.
“The situation in Delhi may be drastic,” Britton says, “but the solution will need to be wise.”
By Jaideep Sen
For the generation before mine, Kalyani Black Label was the manly Indian beer. It was the label I’d see as a kid in the hands of my father’s friends. But the name Kalyani meant more to me than the drink, for which I came to acquire a taste much later in my teens. Kalyani, the town in Nadia District, West Bengal—where the brewery was founded in 1960— happens to be my ancestral hometown, a place where I’d look forward to spending most of my boyhood vacations. I got to visit Kalyani earlier this year, over a decade since I’d last been there. An evening of glugging the local produce was on the agenda.
United Breweries Group, which took over this unit on 1 April, 1992, names Kalyani as India’s second-largest-selling lager, a fact backed by the newly packaged Kalyani Black
Label Strong that’s now available in stores. While I found the strong version to be punchy, light and bittersweet in aftertaste, the factory itself stands plastered with Kingfisher signage, a sight that was mildly comforting to the Bangalorean in me. I grew up and live in Bangalore; beer and Kingfisher is an instinctive association for me to make. Between Kalyani and Bangalore, it seemed like I had the country’s two largest beer brands covered. There is more to Kalyani than its beer. For several years now, Kalyani has been hailed as one of the country’s cleanest towns, and is a beacon especially for community-led sanitation programmes. Home to roughly 100,000 people, a handful of universities and a new football stadium, Kalyani maintains an unchanging, unhurried, old-world charm that’s far removed from the bustle of Kolkata’s clogged broadways, less than 60 km away.
Thashathashi, meaning a rough-mannered jostling, a word I picked up in the Bengali daily Bartaman Patrika, fittingly described what I’d left behind in Kolkata. The word was in an article about the boi mela or book fair (which ended earlier this February). At the time, Kalyani was hosting the Ashtam Ramdhenu Natyamela, a community theatre event, largely of amateur mythological productions. Popular local competitions, I was told, include one of haadi bhanga or smashing earthen pots, an event that warrants further bibulousness.
Cycle rickshaws are the preferred mode for getting about in Kalyani. Although, at the Shani Mandir (B Block) stand, the closest landmark to where I was, there were no able-bodied men for rickshaw riders. The average age, I found, is well over 60, and the common greeting offered to them is dadu, or grandfather in Bengali. On Kalyani’s uncommonly shipshape and relatively empty avenues, life appears to go by in slow motion, with the pace of things
set by dadu’s pedalling. Where commuting in Kolkata can be harried and maddening at best, Kalyani seemed to be wound down to a chain sprocket assembly that kept snapping every few hundred yards.
The difference between the big city and Kalyani’s cleaner, cooler air is gradually apparent on a ride on the suburban railways, from Kolkata’s Sealdah railway station. Earlier, typically, my cab had broken down in the middle of a busy street barely half a kilometre from Sealdah. Nevertheless, it’s invariably a delirious scene involving scrambled legs and near-death experiences featuring ‘WB’-plated taxicabs that gets you on the 90-minute Kalyani Simanta Local ride (Rs 15 one way). A new traffic police campaign on the streets of Kolkata, based on The Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover shot, did come across as harshly unfunny. “If they can, why can’t you?” read the campaign line. Well, for one, the Fab Four were Liverpudlian.
Kalyani, the town, was founded as recently as 1950, though popular folklore in these parts dates back to the 1857 War of Independence, and the tales of the two heroic adivasi brothers, Sidhu and Kanu. Unsurprisingly, I discovered the Sidhu-Kanu Memorial Park (in Block A) littered with broken beer bottles and
evidences of drunken excess. By World War II, with an airstrip (now unrecognisable) not far from the park, Kalyani served as a sort of mini military base. The Wiki page on Kalyani notes that it has “roads intersecting each other at 90 degree”. Look it up, it’s a neat little perfectly symmetrical patch on Google Maps. On its streets, the town’s layout opens up like a tidy chequerboard that Le Corbusier would’ve been pleased with. Then again, I realised, my ancestral home is one in a township of gracefully ageing bungalows.
Kalyani’s skyline remains reassuringly green, covered only in parts by neon, even as the bane of mobile recharge outlets and ‘paisa’ bargain booths has begun creeping in. A walk by the lake takes you along rows of mahogany, gulmohar (krishnachura in Bengali, literally “Krishna’s crown”) and the yellow flame tree varieties of radhachura (“Radha’s crown”) and basanti. By sundown, you can head to Central Park, Kalyani’s main crossroads, for a serving of phuchka, the Bengali pani puri (no meetha or sweet in this version) or a bite at quaint sweetshops like Radha Gobindo, makers of the town’s goodh (jaggery) rosogolla. In an aside note, the newest public pasquinade of the Bengali fervour for sweets was being played out in a humongously absurd sales blitz, around a bar of chocolate that was to be ostensibly wedded to a piece of confectionery. (The ingenious proposition is of a new line of traditionally styled sweets made of chocolate.)
Dives apart, there are no pubs or bars to speak of in Kalyani— you’re better off nursing beers with old friends on a terrace (or at a park, if you’re willing to risk it). For a late bite, Chinese street-food is a go-to here as well, albeit in a spice-heavy chowmein chorchuri interpretation. No later than 10 pm, though— by then, the dadus get to bed.
By Jawid Laiq
Carpeted among the dazzling blooms of dahlias, marigolds, petunias and exquisite black-eyed pansies, are hundreds of Afghans feasting on pulao and kebab in the splendour of Delhi’s Lodi Gardens. The vista of dozens of wistful families reclining on their floral Afghan rugs is both poignant and heart-warming. They are refugees who have escaped from their troubled land, celebrating the onset of Spring on March 21st which marks Navroz, the Afghan-Persian-Parsi New Year.
It is a fine historical paradox that Afghan refugees gather every year on Navroz in a park dotted with the grand monuments constructed by an Afghan dynasty, the Lodis, who ruled Delhi and its surrounding areas from 1451 to 1526 when the Mughals from Central Asia ousted them.
In the shade of the Sheesh Gumbad (Glazed Dome) monument, we meet a middle-aged man from Kabul, who in the spirit of traditional Afghan hospitality, insists that we share a classic round naan with him. We politely decline the naan but get to chat with him. He subtly explains in Hindustani that he had to leave his country as halaat kharaab thhey (conditions were bad). He and his family have been living in the Malviya Nagar area of Delhi for the past four years. He is a relatively recent refugee.
The influx into Delhi began soon after Soviet airborne commandos landed at Kabul airport on December 25th, 1979, beginning the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in support of a Marxist regime. Fierce Afghan resistance aided by the United States
and Pakistan forced Soviet forces to withdraw in 1989.
The first flow of refugees fleeing from Marxist rule in the 1980s has been followed by subsequent waves who have fled from the wild infighting between various factions of the Mujahideen resistance during 1992–1996, the medieval persecution by the Taliban regime from 1996–2001, and the American occupation from 2001 with its brutal airstrikes killing hundreds of Afghan civilians. The Americans are expected to leave next year in the face of Taliban resistance which has also caused the deaths of hundreds of innocents.
Over the past 30 years of my Navroz walks through the Lodi Gardens, I have noticed the changes in the sartorial preferences of Afghan refugees. The earlier refugees in the 1980s were a mix of modern, western-suited families mostly from Kabul’s mercantile middle class and poorer, traditional burkha-clad families from the Afghan hinterland. The 1990s saw an influx of professionals and Communist-oriented bureaucrats fleeing from Taliban strictures. It was an awe-inspiring sight to witness some young Afghan women in mini-skirts flaunting their independence beside the black burkhas of the earlier generation of refugees. The continued fighting in the past decade has led to another wave of refugees who seem to have largely adopted our dress code of shalwaar-kurta
A large proportion of the refugees are women and children sent away to safety from the conflict. Their varied features and ethnic origins exhibit the polyglot nature of Afghan society. Walking among the groups sitting in the Gardens, I gape at a green-eyed beauty with aquiline features, probably a Pathan. Not far away, I notice a high-cheek-boned woman with a rose pink complexion who seems to be an Uzbek, probably from the
north of Afghanistan. Then I come across a party of sharp-nosed Tajik women. Even the very few who are wearing burqas, do not hide their faces.
Some of the Afghan women and men who came to Delhi over the past 30 years have gone back to their land while others have moved onto the US, Canada and Western Europe where they have been granted the privilege of political asylum. Here in Delhi, they live in limbo in run-down localities like Mehrauli, Savitri Nagar and Malviya Nagar. They are allowed to stay in this country but are not officially permitted to seek formal employment or set up a licensed business.
Navroz is one day they cast aside their cares and celebrate the coming of Spring.
By Anand Sethi
Come summer and winter holidays or even a long weekend break, National Highway 22 is full of vehicular traffic, with the more intrepid travellers heading for Shimla or Kinnaur on the old Hindustan-Tibet Road. Vacationers with a somewhat shorter time frame throng Kasauli, the charming hill station in the district of Solan in Himachal Pradesh. Considering its diminutive size, it’s surprising that this town has its own cantonment, church, club, brewery, air force station, convent school, the much-visited Monkey Point (a hill where Lord Hanuman is said to have rested his foot after finding the sanjeevani booti or magical herb ), and of course, the inevitable cluster of shops. The two principal roads, the Upper and Lower Malls, are packed with day trippers, honeymooners, and students out for a jaunt. For those with a more intellectual bent of mind, perhaps with a love of history, a reasonable fascination for tales of the British Raj, a side visit from Kasauli to the cantonment of Dagshai, situated on the hill across and only a 40-minute drive, would be extremely rewarding.
Dagshai, one of the oldest army cantonments in India, was founded in 1847 by the British after they managed to persuade the late Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala to hand over land comprising five villages on a hill—Dagshai being part of the gift of five. Their objective was to build cantonments in the hills, as they were considered to be above the mosquito line and had a more suitable climate, quite like “back home”!
As for its name, according to a popular legend, it was derived from Daag-e-Shahi
(royal mark). Apparently during the Mughal period the most notorious criminals had their foreheads branded and were then sent packing to the village of Dagshai.
Sapper Robert Napier was tasked with getting the new cantonments built on the double. A testimony to his great skill is the fact that most of the buildings made then are still in perfect condition and in use today. One of the buildings constructed in 1849 was the garrison jail. This T-shaped, fortress-like building is made from solid stone masonry and is perched at the edge of a near vertical slope. Its 54 high security cells, some dark and dingy meant for solitary confinement, have hugely over-engineered iron grill gates and the biggest bolts and keyholes that one has ever seen. Air supply to the cells is provided by an underground vent connected to a manifold system which brings in air from beyond the outer wall. The only illumination is from a heavily barricaded window in the central corridor. If there was a ‘no escape’ prison designed, this was it. Completing the jail complex is a gallows house and an area used by the firing squads.
Dagshai and its jail are replete with history. Many a mutineer has been executed here, be it a handful of Gurkha soldiers from the Nasiri Regiment (later known the 1st King George’s Own Gurkha Rifles), four revolutionaries aboard the Komagata Maru steamship, or twelve Indian soldiers from the 23rd Risala (cavalry). But arguably the jail is most famous for what transpired in 1920. In May that year, Irish Catholic soldiers from the ‘Devil’s Own’ 1st Battalion of the Connaught Rangers who were stationed in the area, mutinied against their English officers after hearing about the atrocities committed by the British against their people in Ireland. The ring leaders were
taken into custody and put into Dagshai Jail. On hearing the news about the incarcerated Irish soldiers, Mahatma Gandhi, a good friend of the Irish leader Eamon de Valera, came to Dagshai and purportedly spent a night in the VIP cell in an act of solidarity.
Sadly, 21-year-old Private James Daly, the so-called leader of the mutiny, was court-martialled and shot by a firing squad at Dagshai Jail. In his last letter to his mother he wrote: “It is all for Ireland. I am not afraid to die.” He was to become the last officer of the British army to be executed for mutiny and was buried in the Catholic Cemetery in Dagshai. Daly. Today, ballads are sung in his memory. In 1970, his mortal remains were taken to Ireland and re-interred with full military honours. Rumour has it that Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, also spent some time at Dagshai Jail while on his way for his trial at the High Court in Simla. His transfer records show that he was sent to a jail near Solan, which could only be Dagshai since there were no other jails in the area.
Unfortunately, after Independence, this historical jail became a complete shambles and was used as a dump yard by the Military Engineering Service (M.E.S.). Over the years I had brought the abysmal state of the premises to the attention of successive brigade commanders. Since it was under army control, I could do little else. Finally, one evening in 2011 the new commander came to my house for dinner. When he glanced upon the archival photographs sourced from the UK, which included the jail, he sprung into action army style! Within a few days, the M.E.S. was ordered to vacate. Tireless efforts were put in to convert the jail into a museum by the commanding officer, the officers and the men of the paltan (platoon)—for security reasons I cannot disclose their names. We pooled
in our resources. I sourced and paid for the exhibits, photographs and paintings from wherever I could. The platoon carried out the cleaning, repairs and whatever bandobust (arrangements) was required. The grounds and cells (including the one supposedly used by Mahatma Gandhi) were cleaned up; several priceless exhibits were found on site such as one of the world’s first few fire hydrants and a 19th-century blacksmith’s bellows; some archaic gas-run motor pumps, paintings, photographs—including the recently acquired rare pictures from the 25th London Cycle Regiment. On October 13, 2011, the Dagshai Jail Museum was declared open. By now we had invested well in excess of the Rs. 72,873 spent by the British in 1849 to construct the jail!
The Dagshai Jail Museum is rapidly becoming a prominent tourist attraction; the state government’s tourism department has even accorded it heritage status. It is to the army’s credit that it took this jail out of the “national dustbin” and made it what it is today—India’s second cellular jail museum. n
If imagined spaces cannot be built on land, let them inhabit a place in the sky
By Gautam Bhatia
AT The lobby of The jahanuma Palace in Bhopal–now a hotel–is a formal portrait of Bhopal’s begums. Fully clothed in burqas, they are seated in tiers, as in any formal group photograph. The photo caption below reveals the names, “Seated from left to right: Begum Jahanara, Begum Noor, Begum…” and so on.
For a long while I stood back and pondered the riddle of the photograph. Was this a form of royal social record, even though no identifiable body part was visible? Or was it some sort of satire? The photograph’s essential criteria to reveal were stymied by the Islamic drapery’s criteria to conceal. It was like someone assessing car designs by comparing chassis numbers. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Perhaps the photographer had even asked the begums to smile behind their veils.
Architecture, too, has learnt to distance itself from the observer. To live behind the veil. Like the invisible begums, for so long, my own understanding of buildings was similarly limited to the façade. Limited, in fact, to that first sighting of deception behind which lay a more pugnacious reality.
When it comes to houses, or for that matter any form of building, people become grand in their ambitions. Buying a fridge or pair of shoes does not impart visibility or identity to the user, architecture does. People swear and sweep across the spectrum of possibilities and become like spoilt, demanding children. A staircase remembered from a European trip, a bathroom recalled from a Japanese hotel, an outdoor Jacuzzi from Indonesia. I want it, I must have it; the cesspool of architecture clouds the eyes and makes the impossible possible.
I once knew someone who treated
architecture like a great heroic adventure, much like a gruelling and hazardous climb up Mount Everest. Design would begin casually. But as ideas poured in, he would become reckless and bold.
“I’d like a heated lap pool outside the bedroom,” he’d propose.
His instruction would cause a minor blizzard at base camp. I’d warn, “But your bedroom is on the third floor.”
“So!”
After a while, he’d venture again up another untested slope, “Do you think we could have a drive-in drawing room”?
This from the man who has to have the latest BMW shipped directly from Germany.
“But why?” I’d ask foolishly. “Do you want to park the car behind the sofa?”
No response. He would have already moved on to thoughts of helipads and rooftop saunas.
I realised then that the new house was merely a stage-set of expensive products assembled like a personalised showroom.
Finally, in keeping with the drift I would suggest, “Have you considered a bathroom inside the lift, that way you are always on the move”?
If he could be silly, I could be stupid.
‘I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and turns and spits and extends and is blunt and coarse and sweet and stupid as life itself’.
I often remember the Oldenburg line, only as a continual reminder of the necessity of stupid in architecture. Clever had been the desired apprehension in buildings that had long pretended to be more than what they were. But without the bittersweet experience of risk and pleasure, architecture fell lamely into a
Public Baths: A string of tubs in a desert the irony of Indian architectural juxtaposition
professional trap. The monochromatic practice of building with a straight face and following the stifling rules of cultural obligation, social status, and the physics of gravity, left every new design a mere mock drill in industrial assembly, tinged with the architect’s personal aesthetic armoury, a defeated deflated spirit.
Architecture, to me, had become the most scathing indictment of failure, my failure. So I began to move away from the proper and the just, and all the singular entanglements of professional life. I knew if I thought too long about all the things precious to me, there was always the fear that little by little, they would invade my mind and make it infertile. Architecture’s memory is the hardest to ignore; it is reinforced day and night, in the mind, in the neighbourhood, in the city.
I have caught myself on occasion with a deliberately destructive and perverse urge towards my own work. I want to make privacy public and take public actions into the innermost sanctum: a bank vault made in glass, exposing money and gold to the street, a man urinating in public knowing full well that he can’t be seen outside, a woman bathing without a wall surrounding her but in complete privacy. Then blur the definitions of inside and out: make a road that runs inside a building, a building that sits on top of a road. Even reverse the conventions of movement and repose: build a home as a bridge between the two banks of a river, make a living room in a moving elevator. Or confuse the
relationship with the Up and Down: a basement with a glass floor viewing the mud ground beneath, a sky experienced in a basement, an attic without a roof. How about furniture hung on walls or attached to the ceiling, paintings on the floor, a mall with no glass, a hotel without corridors, a bookshop that is also a diner, a restaurant in a moving bus. The dual nature of such buildings is a myopic, almost obsessive claim.
I need to draw that which I will never build. I want to make privacy public and take public actions into the innermost sanctum: a bank vault made in glass, a woman bathing without a wall surrounding her but in complete privacy.
In my neighbourhood, I see a woman buying fresh flowers for her puja room every day. The florist display is against the local market’s public urinal. Strangely, the urinal’s stench and proximity don’t seem to diminish the sanctity of the fresh flowers and their intended place in a religious setting. Choosing to be blind to all that you don’t want to see makes life tolerable.
However hard I’ve tried, I am unable to cultivate that blindness. Every time I move out of the house, onto the street, it is with fear and trepidation. Something of what we build, the way it relates to its surroundings, the way it eventually falls apart, grates on visual memory. If there is a professed spatial, humanist or artistic spirit to architecture, it is impossible to see it in the daily encounters with the city. Flagging in spirit, unsightly, blemished and depressing, the clutter of shops and houses and offices and malls are like wounds on the skin of the earth, spreading like parasites, smudging skylines, and slowly sucking out the visual pleasures of ordinary life. The city is a wasted
(Facing Page) Cabinet Apartments: So precious, they are enclosed and protected inside a cabinet
A log hut inside a log, redrawing the world in mechanical simplicity
A tennis club in the shape of a racquet, drawing that which will never be built
making private spaces public
Confusing the relationship with the Up and Down, the dual nature of architecture
Car Wash:
Three cars in a tub, making public spaces private
place, and the architecture that rises within it only contributes a daily dose of hostility and conflict in an already chaotic environment. Even when buildings are made with grandiose intentions, collectively they become a jumble, inseparable from each other–like garlands of marigolds piled on a dead body.
When that happens, there is little to do but retreat. I want to move away from the clutter and chaos, to the quiet promise of the drawing board. With pencil in hand, there is a desperate wish to break free, to build in imaginary space, unconnected to the ground by gravity, to make an earth yet uninhabited, where architecture is an idealised presence. I need to draw that which I will never build.
A house in an apple, an office floating in the clouds, a hotel made of suitcases, a car wash as a tub. Apartment houses so precious, they are enclosed and protected inside a cabinet. For a while such drawings help me escape into childhood and I begin to redraw the world in mechanical simplicity: a tennis club in the shape of a racquet, a villa as a WC, public baths as a string of tubs, a log hut inside a log.
But not for long. Sometimes, architecture’s most persistent refrain does not just demand a rebellion against convention, but a complete physical reversal of convention itself. The absence of water in the desert concludes with a silver faucet that drenches revellers suspended in a well. The absence of groundwater in an ancient water tank is substituted with a mineral water bottle. Partly, such drawings are done to state the persistent irony of Indian architectural juxtapositions, the phenomenon of puja room flowers against the urinal wall.
My own break away is not diminishing the importance of architecture, but an enlargement of its possibilities for me. It is hard to expect
that ideas will assume a personality of their own, that a minor significance in drawing will raise its voice loud enough to be heard. It is only a hope, an architectural missile aimed at a dark threatening sky. Where it will land, if ever, is another matter. n
Excavation: A complete reversal of convention itself
Parsa
The 1991 economic reforms unleashed a gastronomic revolution in metropolitan, middle class India. Myanmarese khau swe and Korean kimchi became everyday favourites, while India’s own diverse culinary traditions –from Rajasthan’s fiery laal maas, mutton curry cooked with red chillies, to Mangalore’s rice flour-based fluffy neer dosa – moved centre stage.
India’s innate sensuality found a new expression in the revelry of the palate. For Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, the duo whose policy imagination was confined to foreign direct investments and exchange reserves, this must have come as quite a shock. After all, food was not on the policy menu of market liberalisation.
The change in the tastes of liberalised India has been little short of a social revolution. Italian and French restaurants now compete with Thai, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese outlets, and there is a willingness to try them all. Foreign cuisine had at first been confined to European and Chinese fare. European food remained the preference of the well-heeled for decades, while the middle class preferred Chinese food. It was cheaper and, with its rice and spice base, appealed to the Indian palate. When the relatively static socialist milieu changed with the economic reforms of the early 1990s, the government looked for foreign investments and the middle class eyed the foreign goodies—branded apparel, exotic cosmetics and gadgets for geeks. Rao and Singh certainly did not have food on their minds. Rao was vegetarian and an unwitting gastronomic provincial; Singh’s tastes were spare and austere at best—a complete
contrast to the epicurean Punjabi’s delight in everything appetising.
Previously the preserve of embassies and homes with money to spend and taste to flaunt, Italian cheeses and French wines lost their sense of exclusivity. In India, the numbers are always overwhelming. Haute cuisine could no longer be reserved for the privileged few. Yet the desire for different food has not been confined to foreign fare; there is a growing interest in authentic preparations from different parts of India—from Mangalorean neer dosa to Panjim’s pineapple curry, from Kashmiri yakhni to Tamil Nadu’s Chettinad chicken. There is growing pride in the culinary diversity of the country, which is more uncomplicated than taking pride in its linguistic and religious diversity. It is the young, nomadic IT brigade that is exploring with curiosity in the new millennium the multitude of cuisines that have existed here for ages.
In India, Descartes’ dictum “I think, therefore I am” takes a different form; it becomes “I am what I eat”. Food marks virtue and sin. The triad gunas sattva, rajas and tamas—enunciated in the Bhagavad Gita is instructive. When Arjuna, the warrior-hero of the epic Mahabharata, feels disinclined to fight a war over his family’s just claims on the kingdom, Lord Krishna explains to him that the universe contains three inherent qualities or gunas Sattva stands for the ethereal and subtle, rajas for tension and activity, and tamas for inertia. These qualities manifest as tendencies when applied to individuals; and this metaphysical taxonomy is equally applicable to food: there is sattvic, rajasic and tamasic food. Sattvic food calms the senses and allows the soul to soar; rajasic tingles with extremes of heat
In India, Descartes’ dictum “I think, therefore I am” takes a different form; it becomes “I am what I eat”. Food marks virtue and sin.
and cold, sweet, sour and spicy; tamasic is stale and toxic, driving the soul to the nether regions. Hence the mind-boggling dietary prescriptions which evolved over centuries, crystallised, and then, calcified into irrational caste-clad restrictions of do’s and don’ts.
The 21st-century Indian, experimenting with different foods, carries this subconscious baggage of food’s effect on both body and soul. Modern medicine has piled up tangible evidence on what food does to the body and how eating right carries a reward of good health.
The Indian of today still has a vague civilizational memory of the soul side of food. So when vegetarians go hunting for strange foods, they seek pleasure in vegetarian dishes. Indians who eat halal meat stick to halal exotica, and non-beef eaters remain thus. It is within a broad traditional framework that modern Indian epicureans venture into new territory.
And this is done without losing sight of the future goal. The Indian never abandons spirituality—nor sensual pleasures. Instant gratification takes precedence over long-term good, and that is the Indian solution to the dilemma of choosing between the here and hereafter, which coexist sequentially. Pleasure is no sin, and salvation is there to be had at any time. There is no conflict or contradiction between the Bhagavad Gita and the Kamasutra. The soul and the senses form part of a perfect whole.
But there is a historical and sociological dimension to the change in contemporary Indians’ eating habits. Food is an unacknowledged aphrodisiac. It is also the social bond that keeps families, friends and communities together, in good times and in bad. So when
Indians are eating different foods from far and near, a new social contour emerges. As individual tastes differ, food ceases to be a social bond, and leads to new groupings that centre on a willingness to experiment, rather than loyalty to a particular cuisine. Slicing, not fragmentation, of groups is the new social morphology, though it has not become endemic yet.
It is surprising that Sigmund Freud and his brood of cultural psychoanalysts did not make sufficient connections between food, Eros and the mental states of society. Food is an intimate affair, setting the senses on fire, like love and sex. Where does this intimacy lead to? What does food do to the way you think and feel? In India, certain inhibitions are falling away. It is a good beginning. Initiation into another society best begins with food. In the 2008 film, Grand Torino, Clint Eastwood is introduced to his Korean neighbours through a family meal. And food becomes a celebration of family and social bonding in Babette’s Feast. But in the new Indian social phenomenon of reaching out to other cuisines, this aspect of initiation into another culture or forging a sentimental social bond with a strange land, does not occur. It remains episodic, and can be a lone ranger’s affair.
Is there gnawing loneliness at the heart of feasting on foreign foods? Or is there a sunny side to the cultural encounter? There is something significant happening when people at a birthday party relish sashimi at Wasabi in Mumbai, or when a young man devours nasi goreng at Mamagoto in Khan Market. There are no dark social undercurrents here. These are expressions of unmitigated joie de vivre. Indians are not content to merely
discover the landscape of Coorg, Kerala, Arunachal Pradesh or Goa—they want to eat the food. The diverse colours and sounds alone no longer satisfy: there is a need to grab the tastes as well. So the hunt is not just for authentic Greek or Korean, but also for genuine local tastes. However, the desire has not yet created a market for high-end Indian ethnic cuisine. The Delhi Haat in the capital is a rather shabby exhibition of India’s diversity. There is still no fine-dining Gujarati restaurant outside the state. Agashe in Ahmedabad has become a mecca for foodies from elsewhere. The Rajdhani chain which serves Gujarati platters in Mumbai may have opened an outlet in Delhi but has failed to retain its authenticity and is willing to satisfy the Punjabi need for paneer, for example. The pitfall is never far. The Malayalee restaurants have been trying to make a name for themselves in the big cities along the lines of the ubiquitous Udipi restaurants that serve South Indian vegetarian fare. The ethnic restaurant in India is waiting to emerge. When it comes to fine-dining, India is still very focused on foreign food.
It seems that, like ancient Indian art, where the artist invariably remains anonymous, so is it with India’s food wonders. The cook remains in the stuffy kitchen, not quite a chef. Sanjeev Kapoor remains an exception. Five-star hotels have been trying to create a chef culture where, like the best artists, the signature of the dishes is distinct. They have been trying to uncover the cooking genius who can turn a family recipe, preserved for centuries, into a popular gastronomic hit.
The celebrity chef might not be a working model for a large country like India. There are too many magical cooks who are legendary in the back-alleys of their own towns and
cities, whose fame has spread through word of mouth. The great unknown cook remains hidden behind that distant relative’s daughter’s friend’s marriage feast. The Amitabh Bachchan–Tabu starrer, Cheeni Kum, which starts off with an argument over authentic Hyderabadi biryani, and leads to love, shows that it is not the chef who is the secret behind Indian food, but that mysterious, mystical recipe. The chef as hero has to wait for his turn to appear on the stage of Indian culinary history.
Cosmopolitanism flourishes when people are exposed to economic and cultural crosscurrents. It can lead to a more humane and tolerant milieu, expand local traditions and enrich sensibilities. Or, it can end up as cultural flotsam and jetsam—a dazzling puzzle of no significance. There is an interesting battle of minds and souls in cosmopolitan centres such as Singapore and Dubai, where world cuisines jostle for a place in an acceptable cultural stream. Are India’s metropolises moving towards Singapore and Dubai—world cities without a provincial hinterland?
Will the tastes and flavours of alien cuisines retain their lure, or will they become indigenised in the manner of Persian, Turkish, Portuguese and Chinese food? Will the passion for international tastes fade away, as did many other novelties? At the moment, the Indian love affair with global foods is in its first flush and it promises to be a lasting relationship. The Indian taste buds are getting the feel of exotic flavours, from Finland’s reindeer meat to Beijing duck.
Indians have long understood that food is the spice of life and hearth. The family dinner symbolises warmth and bonding across generations. n
By Vibhuti Patel
Music on the Mind: Horowitz (right) requests Hussain to demonstrate the fastest and slowest rhythms he can play to explain the connection between sound and the consciousness
AT nEw York’S rubin MuSEuM of Art, curators looking for answers to the enigmatic question of illusion and life’s many mysteries have initiated “Brainwave: Illusion”—a series of conversations that brings together neuroscientists and individuals as diverse as a pickpocket, a chef, a congressman and a spice connoisseur to study how the mind works and how our perception of the world is shaped by the surprising adaptability of our brains.
A recent exploration—involving India’s most acclaimed classical percussionist, Zakir Hussain, and Brown University professor, Seth Horowitz—attempted to unravel the
connection between the brain and rhythm; how and why rhythm affects us and the possibility of inviting certain patterns of rhythm to change our state of mind.
Horowitz, an expert on brain development and author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind, is a neuroscientist whose research on hearing has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and NASA. The scientist begins the conversation with Hussain by recounting an experiment he conducted with astrobiology undergraduates, asking them to imagine communicating with aliens who did not understand words. They found that the
only way they could communicate with possible visitors from outer space was through a drum solo because rhythm is universal—it transcends culture and language.
Horowitz then requests Hussain to demonstrate the fastest and slowest rhythms he could play. “My mind is working but my brain is rebooting,” the musician says half-jokingly, making a clear distinction between the two—the brain being the physical and the mind the abstract, the software to the brain’s hardware.
Buddhists often refer to the mind as “monkey mind”, jumping as it does from one thought to another, a perennially active con-
sciousness that can be calmed through meditation. But rhythm? What is its connection with the brain and the mind?
“The slowest one can play a percussion instrument is 60 beats per minute,” explains Hussain. “One could go down to 30, but 60 is what we respond to.” Horowitz adds that 60 bpm is biologically relevant too since it is the rate of the heart at rest. “What we hear facilitates change in our bodies—slowing from 70 bpm to 60 makes the heartbeat drop,” he elaborates. “Hearing gets in under our consciousness.”
Interestingly, the aural sense is 20-50 times quicker than sight. Hearing offers a
“Rhythm affects us so much, it can alter our state of being. The deep connection between rhythm and the brain affects us physically.”
closer map of reality because the brain processes sound at a faster rate than sight. Light travels so fast that it bounces back and forth millions of times in a nanosecond; sound travels slower but is decoded faster by the brain. A more profound insight on this relationship reveals that the brain runs on certain internal rhythms while also seeking rhythmic patterns in the external world. Activities like walking, dancing, sleeping alter the rhythm of the brain. In fact, sleep is measured by studying brain rhythms that change as we go from wakefulness to deep sleep to dreaming to shallow sleep—or rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep cycles.
“Just as fast music gets your heart pumping, and often compels you into dancing, slower music brings down your heart rate. Very slow music can even induce meditation,” says Horowitz. “Rhythm affects us so much, it can alter our state of being. The deep connection between rhythm and the brain affects us physically.”
Hussain wonders how spontaneous musical creation is. “I grew up in a world where we create music based on a raga and tala. When I go on stage, I have no idea what I’m going to play. I never plan; I improvise. I feel I’m going to create from scratch. There are familiar patterns, thoughts that I draw upon. And I rely on my fans to catch those as I connect with the audience. Am I fooling them into believing that I’m improvising, while I’m picking and choosing from my repertoire?” He further adds, “And in a concert, as I’m thinking of a rhythmic pattern I’m about to play, some listeners in the audience get it—at the same time! How can they anticipate what I’m about to play?”
Horowitz explains that in both instanc-
es, it’s a combination of factors. Those in the audience who anticipate rhythms are “regulars” who instantly recognise patterns they’ve heard before. As for spontaneity, “You start playing before you can think. When you hear or play music, your nerves establish a basic pattern in the brain. Anytime you play something, you lay down new overlapping tracks, based on your history.” People familiar with Hussain’s music recall these patterns.
“But then am I really improvising?” Hussain persists. “Your brain is a pattern-seeking machine. The basic pattern is subconscious: you’re working within its constraints with your material and your audience. There are just so many rhythms you can play because you only have two hands. Taking the basis of what you have, you build new patterns, moving between your conscious and subconscious.” There are only a finite number of rhythms available? After years of following Hussain’s progress, his fans could have sworn otherwise.
Hussain counters: “Is there anything new that’s not been done before? Haven’t all notes been played in every permutation and combination? Done a zillion times before? Is it just nostalgia or is it really new?” His concern is, perhaps, his legacy. Is art accidental or is it conjured up intentionally from the artist’s soul? Has all music been played before or is Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” unique? Is our mind not the repository of art and spirituality but merely an illusion? Some sort of “pattern-making machine”?
Where does it all originate? Horowitz notes that from the third trimester onwards, a foetus can hear its mother’s heartbeat—the auditory sense is already functioning. This prompts Hussain to mention that his father talked to his
mother in rhythms while he was in his mother’s womb. Hussain’s anecdote sounds similar to the famous story of the chakravyuh—a complex defence formation—in the epic, Mahabharata Arjuna discusses the intricacies of the battle formation with his pregnant wife Subhadra. She falls asleep and Arjuna never finishes telling her how to escape the labyrinth once inside. Their son, Abhimanyu, who heard this conversation while still in his mother’s womb, never learned how to find his way out of the maze, and was killed on the thirteenth day of the Kurukshetra War.
Horowitz doubts whether a foetus can hear distant or faraway sounds outside the mother’s body. But then, what explains Hussain’s prodigious talent? He played on his mother’s kitchen pots at three and performed at his first concert when he was just seven. His father, the great Ustad Alla Rakha, had run away from his non-musical family to pursue a childhood dream and find a mentor who would
teach him music.
So where does creative genius come from? DNA? Genes? Horowitz is not sure. “A lot has not been explained and won’t be until we have a better handle on the mind.” Hussain prefers not to dwell too much on scientific hypotheses that challenge his parents’ mystical belief that the baton passed on from the father to the unborn son. Instead, he offers a humble tribute to the tabla as his final comment. “It can be played fast or slow, rhythmically or melodically. Having a drum is wonderful because you can get your frustrations out, experience the joy of creating something new, and even dance to it.”
Talk over, Hussain walks up the steps to the dais to play a 15-minute solo in a 16beat tala—building up to such a fast rhythm that the fingers on his right hand are a mesmerising blur. The count does not change, but it gets faster and faster in a magical denouement that his fans had waited to hear all evening. n
Creative Genius: Does prodigious talent come from DNA or genes? Hussain and Horowitz turn to art and science respectively to find the answers
Amitava Kumar returns to the chaos of his hometown to find himself absorbed by the endless sifting of fact from fanciful fiction
It isn’t necessary to have visited Patna in order to dislike it
“I’ve never been to Patna, but it is a place very close to my heart.” That was British columnist Hugo Rifkind’s ironic comment in Newsweek. Patna had fired Rifkind’s imagination because he had heard that an effigy of a producer of Big Brother had been burnt to protest Shilpa Shetty’s unfair treatment on the TV show. Then he came across the news of riots in some places over the film Slumdog Millionaire, and discovered that Danny Boyle’s effigy had also been burned in Patna.
“Good old Patna!” Rifkind exclaimed. (Such touching intimacy! You’d be forgiven for thinking that his great-grandfather was the district magistrate there when the British ruled India.)
However, Boyle wasn’t the last person whose effigy was put to the match in Patna. Those who had burned brightly around the time Rifkind was writing his piece included “an Australian cricketer, George W. Bush, a local minister, Pervez Musharraf and, with an admirable lead into the surreal, a giant cigarette.” A local newspaperman had told him that the effigy business was booming and Rifkind had expressed satisfaction that Patna’s effigy-makers were “still doing OK in these troubled times.”
“Effigy manufacturing” has an industrious ring to it, like “car manufacturing” or even “toy making”. People used to joke that kidnapping was the only growing industry in Patna, but that was then! A decade later, Rifkind was saying that if you gathered together some straw for effigy making, you were on your way to owning a business! But was this true?
At the Patna office of the Hindi newspaper Prabhat Khabar, the journalists sitting around
the conference table looked at me with something like pity. I felt they were wondering whether I had been taking bhang, or maybe the opium that made the city famous around the time that I imagined Rifkind’s ancestor had governed it. The oldest among the journalists informed me that one couldn’t buy an effigy at any place in Patna. There were, in fact, no professional effigy-makers in the city. Each major political party made do with someone on its staff who was considered a specialist of sorts. At this, every one in the room nodded. Effigies took about four hours to make. First the straw would be collected and then bound to a tall bamboo stick with coir rope. Then, this frame would be outfitted with clothes and a suitable mask, and hoisted up to be carried in a procession. Kerosene or even petrol was kept at hand for lighting the effigy. The Congress party’s effigy-maker was an old worker; in the case of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the expert was the son of a local MLA.
The endless sifting of fact from fanciful fiction.
I had gone to Patna in the summer last year with the aim of working on a small book. Some months earlier, David Davidar had asked me to write a book about my hometown. I have been living abroad for many years but feel that Patna is the only place that is in my bones. Yet, how was I to write about it?
During an earlier conversation in Delhi, Davidar had mentioned E.B. White’s classic essay Here is New York as a possible model. I bought a copy from a second-hand bookstore in New York. The little book had a note inscribed inside to a previous owner: “Nancy, You may be leaving New York but hopefully New York will never leave you. It has been a pleasure and a delight. Best always, Robert. 06.08.2001”
I didn’t desire insulation but neither did I seek the chief minister’s rally or a Bollywood star’s banquet. I only wanted the fullest encounter with the ordinary
Was he saying that he wished and hoped that she would never forget him? The city a giant stand-in for his own presence in her life? And what was one to make of the fact that the book had been sold to a second-hand bookstore?
I wondered whether the owner, or someone else, had sold it after the September 11 attacks. White’s essay had been granted a prophetic tone during the aftermath because of the following lines near the end: “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers. . . .”
For me, the promise lay in the very first sentence of White’s Foreword: “This piece about New York was written in the summer of 1948 during a hot spell.” It gave me hope that if I braved Patna’s heat and humidity, I too could put together an essay about the city. The New Yorker writer Roger Angell was White’s stepson and, in the edition of the book that I had bought, he had noted that White came down to the city by train from New England and took a room at The Algonquin Hotel. After his brief stay, White went back home to Maine and wrote Here is New York
I took White’s book with me to Patna. According to him, “New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation.” White had written that in a city like New York, the individual is always insulated from all kinds of events going on around. “The biggest ocean-going ships on the North Atlantic arrived and departed. I didn’t notice them and neither did most other New Yorkers.” When I read lines like these, I felt they expressed a truth not about cities but about writers. Or at least the kind of writer that E.B. White was. He wasn’t hunting for headlines. He wasn’t even
outgoing. He didn’t want to be everywhere or, in fact, anywhere.
Unlike White, who had no interest in claiming witness to the Lions Convention, or the governor’s visit, or the death of a man from a falling cornice, I wanted to be a camera with a thousand eyes. Patna is a big city, and a heavily populated city. The individual can never really be removed from the events around, not least because he or she is most likely to be surrounded by family. I didn’t desire insulation but neither did I seek the chief minister’s rally or a Bollywood star’s banquet. I only wanted the fullest encounter with the ordinary and, although this became clearer to me later, I was often inclined to search for that which would have engaged me most fully if I were living and working in Patna. Each day I would go out with a thin, brown Moleskine notebook. Here, chosen almost at random, is a log of a single day, August 21, based on observations I had made that day in my notebook No. 18:
9am. On a visit to Patna railway station to pick up brochures at their tourism booth. Women with bright yellow vests with anti-polio slogans. A coolie leading a blind man to his train. Then I see a father holding the hand of a crippled child. And immediately afterwards, an old man who manages to walk by himself but his arms and even his torso are propped up by his three sons. His less frail wife lags behind. You want tenderness—a sapling that is to be watered daily—come to the train station. Just like the old times, the A.H. Wheeler book stall on platform 1. And like before, along with treatises by Vivekanand and Nehru, also displayed for sale is Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I notice that there are now electric outlets for charging mobile phones. Outside, the line of lepers sitting in a line, begging bowls in front of them, just as I remembered from my youth.
10am I sit crammed in the back of a Maruti with a journalist and a young cultural activist. The car belongs to a soft-spoken magistrate who sits in front. The air conditioning is not working; we are all sweating at the back. The activist belongs to a group called Abhiyan Sanskriti Manch. He tells me he is interested in “cultural studies” and his model is Jacques Ranciére’s Proletarian Nights. I mention to him that I’m supposed to watch a play rehearsal that evening and he says that Patna is an important centre of theatre with 12–15 groups active at any given time.
11am. Our small party reaches Patna city. The government press here is in Gulzarbagh. This building served as the opium warehouse under the British. The journalist has promised to take me inside but then we learn that permission is required. We wait in the office of the area’s deputy superintendent of police, a man in his thirties, a graduate in English literature from Patna University. He is candid and admits that his degree was of no use to him. He goes on to say that his daughter has been learning about lilies at a local school run by missionaries; he would prefer she learn about marigolds.
NooN. Permission has not yet been granted. A fax needs to be sent with a document attesting to my scholarly interest in the press. But then there is a power cut. More time passes while the electric generator is started. The police officer tells me that the best opium is still made in the area, in a nearby town called Raghopur. His district, he says, is the main site of transportation. I have an appointment elsewhere at 3pm, so rather than wait for the bureaucrats to fax the permission letter, I walk over to the press building.
The sun is hot and out on the dusty street the heat produces a feeling of near-suffocation. Any shade is a blessing. On the boundary wall of the
press are painted graphic warnings in prominent yellows and reds, listing the diseases that result from using open areas for passing human waste. In a picture painted alongside, a man with a can looks at the blue door of a pink brick toilet. He looks unhappy, perhaps because he is waiting. There is another figure in the picture. He is washing his hands under a tap. He is smiling. Next to this wall poster is another of a couple with a newborn baby.
The man, with a moustache covering his upper lip in such a way that you doubt the lip’s existence, is saying something. The words are painted below in Hindi: “We will give each other another child in another three years.” The condom that is being advertised has as its symbol a black stallion standing up on its hind legs.
The press is a large two-storey whitewashed building with wooden doors and borders around the windows painted an earthy red. I see that it is dark and cavernous inside, but don’t try to get access. The heat has a way of making you feel dull and opiated. The heat and also history. I learn that Patna was the main site of opium production under the East India Company. Roughly thirteen million pounds of opium was produced annually and sent down to Calcutta by boat on the Ganges before being shipped onward to China.
1pm. I am a few minutes late for class at Patna College. Professor Muniba Sami has allowed me to attend her lecture on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I count 20 female students. A male student sits alone in the third row. Sami tells her students about the theatre of the absurd; that the West lost faith in rationality after the two World Wars; about Jacques Derrida and the play of the signifier. Everyone busily takes notes, but with the avidity of the crammer—I deduce this from the fact that no one asks questions or comments in any meaningful way. I can see the Ganges from where
I attained puberty in Patna, but left the city not long after, and so it is nearly inevitable that when I now return to it I find there the confusion of youth: lost innocence, guilt and irrepressible lust.
I’m sitting in a back row, on an old wooden bench that is bolted to the floor. Sami’s husband, Shanker Dutt, also teaches in the English department. He has ordered coffee for me. It arrives mid-session and I drink it gratefully. Dutt sits down next to me with his camera.
When the lecture is over, Sami invites me to talk to the students. I remind them of what their professor had said about loss of faith, and ask them to write down on a sheet of paper what is it that they are waiting for. Later that night I will read their notes, some of them badly misspelled but sincere: most are waiting for the eradication of corruption, a better education system, roads. Unlike the characters in Beckett’s play, the students are full of hope, but it is easy to sense the despair. “My father, an honest officer, is waiting for a time when he can work without pressure from his minister or secretary or registrar or the chief minister.” (The next day’s Patna edition of the Times of India will report on my appearance in the classroom. It will be my turn to experience despair. For on the same page will be a report about a sixteen-year-old girl in a neighbouring district losing her eye after she was shot by an enraged customer at her father’s barber shop.)
3pm. Lunch with Professors Sami and Dutt. Masala dosa and kaathi roll. Sami is from an old distinguished Muslim family from Patna. She met Dutt on stage. But Sami says she didn’t marry until she was in her forties, and remained busy with teaching and performing theatre. She tells me she had unusual parents: she felt little or no pressure from her family to marry early. She used to go to movies with her mother. In Patna’s Cine Society, she had watched Kurosawa’s Rashomon and several of Bergman’s films. In September each year, there used to be a three-day one-act play festival, and this would fill her life with excitement. This festival
has not been held since 1982.
That last detail told a story about Patna’s decline. Or, there was another way of looking at it. Maybe things had improved from where they were only ten years ago. In 1992, Dutt was sitting in an auditorium at the University, watching a cultural show. There was a loud bang. People shouted that a bomb had gone off. Dutt said, “I tasted thunder”. Then he saw that there was blood dripping on his trousers. He had a bullet embedded in his wrist. Our conversation turned to their job. I told the two professors that I thought their students, when they spoke to me, didn’t inspire me with their grasp of the English language. Sami said that earlier when students chose to study English literature, it was because they were good in the language. She said that when you asked students today why they were getting a degree in English, they were likely to reply that they wanted to learn the language. This was disheartening. There has been a great deterioration in education, and not only in English. The professors had friends teaching in the Hindi department, and they constantly complained that their students didn’t know Hindi.
5pm. I stop at Tricel Bookshop and ask Raghu, the owner I have known since my boyhood, what kinds of books do his customers buy these days. He says, without hesitation, Wings of Fire, the autobiography of former President Abdul Kalam. In his shop there are children’s books on the floor; a shelf of scholarly titles from Oxford; two shelves with Penguin titles; a shelf devoted to Hindi literature; and on the opposite side, in a riot of blood, lust, and loathing, titles by John Grisham, Robert Ludlum and Ayn Rand.
6pm. The traffic constables are women, and yes, I see this as empowerment. We pass a small restaurant called Subah Ka Nashta. The menu is painted
under the name (6 puris, 2 jalebis, Price: 23 rupees). It doesn’t get less crowded away from the railway station. In a few minutes, the car creeps up to Exhibition Road. We move so slowly it gives me time to look out and search for the hardware shop owned by a friend who was in school with me. I haven’t seen him since that time, decades ago, when his father was knifed in a hotel room by a boy he had brought up since childhood. I don’t find the shop, and, after some difficulty, am able to locate the building where the rehearsal is taking place. There are no lights on the ground floor. I’m told to go a floor up for the lift; a small red glowing button in the dark to tell me that I’m in the right place. Then, in near total darkness, the lift appears and the doors part. A thin, old man sits on a stool inside and asks, “Which floor?”
On the seventh floor, members of the Patna branch of the IPTA are rehearsing a Girish Karnad play. The original was in Kannada but the Hindi version is called Rakt Kalyan. Shoes have been left outside. On one of the walls, framed portraits of Bhagat Singh and the poet Kaifi Azmi. Red plastic chairs are arranged in a large rectangle in the room. The actors sit with the script in their hands. The play is about Brahmins and the revolt against caste. While the actors read out their lines, I study the dirty soles of their feet.
Most of the actors are young. But the older ones, three men and two women, are experienced theatre activists. When they speak their lines, time seems to slow down. There is enough time for meaning to take shape and even grow. One of the older actors plays a Brahmin who has renounced all trappings of caste. He is impressive. But so is the actor who plays the low-born king. The play is set in the 12th century but it has great relevance for Patna where caste is the currency of social exchange. The king has a crude, candid manner—it makes me think of Lalu Prasad Yadav—and he tells his
interlocutor that his low birth is branded on his forehead: “You ask the most innocent child in my empire: what is Bijjala by caste? And the instant reply will be: ‘A barber!’ One’s caste is like the skin on one’s body. You can peel it off top to toe, but when the new skin forms, there you are again: a barber—a shepherd—a scavenger!”
10pm. My sisters are talking in the room that is at the far end of the house. This used to be my room when I was a boy. I’m downloading photographs on my computer but I eavesdrop on their conversation. My elder sister is a doctor, married to a doctor. He has a sister, who is a doctor—and her husband, also a doctor, is having an affair. The woman with whom he is having the affair is not a doctor. She is the receptionist at his hospital. They meet for sex at a gym that is across from the hospital.
All of this can happen anywhere. In fact, it does happen everywhere. But that’s not how I look at it. I attained puberty in Patna, but left the city not long after, and so it is nearly inevitable that when I now return to it I find there the confusion of youth: lost innocence, guilt and irrepressible lust.
In the public imagination, Patna is an open city. It has surrendered to the might of stories. Kidnappings! Corruption! Crime! Here is one that was a favourite of mine for several years. The journalist Arvind N. Das wrote in The Republic of Bihar about a conversation overheard in a train from Patna in 1991: A woman, distraught at her husband’s prolonged illness, was telling her son that she sometimes found herself wanting to commit suicide. “Why should you die?” asked the son. “Why not kill babuji instead? If he goes away, we will get his gratuity and provident fund money and it is possible that I might even get a job on compassionate grounds. What use will
your dying be?” Das had noted in his book that the boy was only twelve years old.
And yet, as often happens in Bihar, it is also possible to tell the opposite story. Arvind N. Das features in this one too. In Delhi, during a visit last summer, I went for a walk in the garden around Humayun’s Tomb. My companion was the esteemed social thinker Ashis Nandy. We were talking about Bihar and Nandy said that there were many news reports, back in the Nineties, about young Bihari men being forced to marry at gunpoint. In most cases, a youth travelling in a train would find himself looking up into the barrel of a gun. He would be asked to disembark and would be taken to a town or a village where he would be married off to a girl whose family had guns but not the means to pay expensive dowry. Nandy told me that he asked Arvind Das, who was from a village only a couple of hours away from Patna, whether there wasn’t a lot of fear on the part of the bride’s family that their daughter would be abandoned or killed? Das had said to him, “But that too is Bihar! So far I have not heard about a single case where the young woman has been harmed.
But that too is Bihar! When I heard Nandy’s story about Das, I thought of a line from John Berger’s Booker Prize-winning novel, G. “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one”. It could be a credo for writers. To show on the page that despite what you’re saying, there is another story waiting in the wings. I’m trying to do this in what I’m writing these days about Patna. But there is also another motive or search that is alive in my book.
In the last paragraph of Here is New York, E. B. White wrote about an old, battered willow tree in the city. He wanted the tree saved.
White hadn’t escaped the vision of the tall towers and the terrible errands of the flying planes, but what mattered was the tree. “If it were to go, all would go. . . .” In the pages of the book I have been writing about Patna, I too have something that I want to save. I have in mind two residents of Patna who have spent a lifetime there. They have survived the city’s troubles and celebrated its achievements, and will not be around forever. Patna is the place where I grew up, but those two are my real place of origin. And when they are gone, my link to Patna will be broken. n
In the public imagination, Patna is an open city. It has surrendered to the might of stories. Kidnappings! Corruption! Crime! Here is one that was a favourite of mine for several years. The journalist Arvind N. Das wrote in The Republic of Bihar about a conversation overheard in a train from Patna in 1991: A woman, distraught at her husband’s prolonged illness, was telling her son that she sometimes found herself wanting to commit suicide. “Why should you die?” asked the son. “Why not kill babuji instead?
by Anuvab Pal Photographs by Aparna Jayakumar
Some time ago, Aparna Jayakumar, a talented young photographer, came to me with seven striking photographs and asked me to write something about them. They were of typical Calcuttans who, although flesh and blood, look like they are part of a fictional narrative: a movie, a detective story, a cartoon. I’ve always thought of Calcutta as a place where fictional characters live, who also happen to be real. It wouldn’t surprise me if a Bengali disappeared into a Bengali story and someone from a Ray film jumped out and joined a real adda. It is a city where art doesn’t just imitate life, it becomes life. So while figuring out what to do with these men in the photographs, the idea of describing Calcutta’s bhadralok (gentlemen) seemed rather generic, not to mention that there was no suggestion of demureness about them. And the idea of the Bengali babumoshai seemed like a relic from a Rajesh Khanna movie—a Bollywood construct. That’s when I decided to write a short story that unfolds over three hours, featuring characters inspired by these men. Something about the grey skies in August makes the city just a little more cinematic than it already is. As a disclaimer, this is a work of fiction. None of the names, professions, situations are real and the photographs just serve as inspiration; they are in no way connected to the specific people photographed.
9.30am It was a muggy Thursday morning, Ardhendu (Tony) Chatterjee, 65, recent widower, English teacher at Don Bosco, Rabindra Sangeet fusion band member by night (357 likes on YouTube, including The Bengali Association of Boston), a lothario in the staff room (Mrs Das loved his recitation of Tagore), did what he usually does. He walked down to the nearby Subway and bought himself a chicken junglee sandwich (extra barbeque sauce, of course). He had the discount coupon (a promotion in that day’s Telegraph), so it cost half. He enjoyed these secret victories. There was no need to feel guilty anymore; he was alone and there was no one to shout at him. Also, he could now ask people to call him Tony, a name his band members loved and his wife had hated. His band, Juto, which, although it means shoe in Bengali, was the name of a Japanese fictional detective they liked. Whenever people asked, “As in shoe?” he’d correct them. As he bit into his sandwich, he felt like he was forgetting something...
10am He was forgetting he had to meet Ronesh Sen, his broker. Ronesh (Ronny) was one of the people who’d liked Juto’s “ska” version of Tagore’s “Boshonto”. Ronesh had called saying it was urgent. Were his investments in trouble? He should have listened to Mrs Das and not bought the Saar Medium Term Fund. Mrs Das didn’t trust the chairman’s moustache. She felt men with thick moustaches often aren’t honest. Eventually Ronesh showed him a photo of a moustachioed Steve Jobs from his hippy days. That convinced him to stay invested. However, the scheduled meeting wasn’t about money; it was about Ronesh. Having worked as a sales manager for years at Sengupta Tiger Securities, he’d had enough. He realised that Mahesh Bani controlled everything. It wasn’t the Economic Times that broke the news to him—it was a dream, which coincided with drinking binge with a friend in the TV business, who’d said, “Quit. You have the face that every Bengali home needs to see.” So today, he’d told his boss Mr Sengupta: “I’ve had it up to here with you!” How he wished he had a hand gesture to go with it! He now had to tell Tony that Diben Bagchi would manage his money and get them introduced.