NIDHI DUGAR KUNDALIA
THE LOST GENERATION
Chronicling India’s Dying Professions
RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
CONTENTS
A Note on the Author
Introduction
1. The Godna Artists of Jharkhand
2. The Rudaalis of Rajasthan
3. The Genealogists of Haridwar
4. The Kabootarbaaz of Old Delhi
5. The Storytellers of Andhra
6. The Street Dentists of Baroda
7. The Urdu Scribes of Delhi
8. The Boat Makers of Balagarh
9. The Ittar Wallahs of Hyderabad
10. The Bhisti Wallahs of Calcutta
11. The Letter Writers of Bombay
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Follow Random House
Copyright
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
A young journalist based out of Calcutta, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia is an MA from City University, London. She has written extensively on society, subcultures and cultural oddities in newspapers like The Hindu, the Times of India and magazines like Kindle Magazine and Open. This is her first book.
Praise for The Lost Generation
‘Nidhi has touched a fascinating aspect of culture in these stories. As the living patterns of society change, the culture also changes. And the culture left behind is like leaving behind your reflection on the mirror when you move away. These stories are like those pieces of mirrors. They remind me of my own face in the past. Rudaalis, dai maa, chaarpai-banaane wallah, ganderi sellers, barbers, who also used to carry matrimonial proposals before they appeared on the Internet. And many more. This absolutely beautiful piece of writing by Nidhi Dugar Kundalia is an ode to my past and to many others like mine.’
GULZAR, lyricist and poet, Padma Bhushan awardee
‘Nidhi Dugar Kundalia’s The Lost Generation is an enticing collection of first-person narratives woven around her unique encounters with practitioners of rare professions that conjure up a world on the verge of disappearance. These are nuanced stories of living people told with delicacy and panache, whose charm comes as much from the beauty of the minute details as from the power of the macro narrative. An inviting read.’
K. SATCHIDANANDAN, pioneer of Malayalam modern poetry, bilingual critic, playwright and editor
‘A fascinating collection of essays on India’s rare and vanishing professions—from ittar wallahs overtaken by the parfumerie industry to letter writers outflanked by the mobile phone revolution—rendered with genuine feeling, an eye for the telling details coupled with vivid writing, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia’s The Lost Generation is an unforgettable portrait of a disappearing India.’
DR SHASHI THAROOR, member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram and Lok Sabha chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs
‘This wonderful book is not just a chronicle of India’s dying professions, it is also a powerful portrait of our past. After you finish reading these compelling narratives, you are certain to look around for those letter writers and professional mourners with a sense of longing. The Lost Generation is a brilliant ode to ancient India.’
ANEES SALIM, author, winner of the Hindu Literary Prize, 2014
‘This book could not be more timely. As India is swept up by the winds of change, we often forget those home-grown traditional family professions, both cruel and kind, which continue to impact the lives of millions. Written in a light, conversational style, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia unfolds those forgotten worlds before us, taking us through cities and villages where technology and modernity are still foreign words, and there is all abiding faith in the power of human relationships.’
KISHWAR DESAI, columnist and author, Winner of the Costa Book Award for First Novel, 2010
‘Wistful, well-researched, well-written chronicles of professions and professionals we’ve left behind on our unrelenting march towards modernization.’
BARADWAJ RANGAN, film critic, deputy editor of The Hindu, winner of the National Film Award for Best Critic
‘The Lost Generation offers a fascinating glimpse into a world that is either wholly disappearing into glorified anachronisms or is being pushed further into the ignored margins of a city. Going beyond the odd magazine feature or the photo essay that hurries to romanticize these professions, Nidhi’s accounts dig deeper to place their stories within various social and political contexts. The book is a crucial, much-needed documentation of the times and the ways of life [that are] very different from what a lot of us in India experience in our daily lives.’
DEEPA BHASTHI, columnist
To my grandparents, who coloured my childhood with their stories
Introduction
I first saw him in Tiretti Bazaar in the early hours of the morning, when it is still possible to walk and observe the activities before crowds throng Calcutta’s old quarters. Tea-stall owners juggling streams of tea between glasses; a street barber sharpening his razors against a stone; a beedi maker drying his tendu leaves on the cobbled sidewalks. He sat between them, our bhisti wallah—the water carrier—before the corporation taps, suspended between old and modern, waiting to fill his animal-skin bags with water. His ancestors, though, would fill their water from the banks of the Ganga and freshwater springs, serving Mughal troops in war fields, the Nawabs of Bengal and then the British. The bhisti wallahs were crucial machinery in ordinary people’s everyday lives too—watering the gardens of zamindars, filling pots of water for the nautch girls, offering cool water to worshippers at mosques on the days of Jum’ah (the Friday prayer) and filling cups for weary travellers and thirsty lepers. As the century turned, however, they quickly devolved into mere spare parts, only delivering mashqs to those whom the government pipelines had failed to reach. Like the old, abandoned palatial homes of the noblemen dotting this congested market, this solitary bhisti wallah is a testament to significant events and feats of importance from decades ago, but like their deepening cracks and crumbling walls, he is also a stark reminder that, one day, dust only goes to dust.
The streets in the ancient cities of India are suspended in a time warp—not the lofty, shiny lanes of the city, but the old, faded, deceived to-be-pulled-down-any-time-now streets. A perpetual sense of nostalgia lingers in these old neighbourhoods, a sense of belonging to a time you were not born in. Buildings, lives and occupations that were integral to existence in the past still exist here, although you only catch glimpses of these in the cities’ decaying old streets, below disintegrating edifices and, often, in the villages on the fringes of the vast metropolises. Bhisti wallahs, beedi makers, wigmakers, postmen, wooden-boat makers, entertainers, storytellers, letter writers, ittar wallahs—the professionals who were such an integral part of everyday life centuries ago are fading into oblivion, fast giving up their ancestral professions.
Scribes who manually copied books were replaced by printing presses followed by the computer. Radios and televisions cut into the livelihoods of nomadic storytellers. SMS technology caused the death of letter writers. Much has been said and written about this Disneyfication of the subcontinent, but little has been said about the debris left behind by the globalization that is rapidly transforming the originally diverse and syncretic Indian society. Resultantly, the hapless last generation of these ancient professions have been left wondering about the bleakness of their futures. The scribe who teaches calligraphy at an academy in Delhi told me while we chatted in his class, ‘We struggle to make Urdu survive, let alone Urdu calligraphy, in this digitalized world. It is like being on a small raft in the middle of the ocean, drifting on it for days and nights, with the only incentive being more
of the same—blue against blue.’
On my travels around India, I found the new and old worlds intersecting in unpredictable ways even as modernization spreads through the country. Outside Vikarabad, in Telangana, I met in a church compound a lady gravedigger who had taken up her father’s job—a lower-caste job originally reserved for men—despite protests from her community. On the one hand, her Christian community objects to this feminist stance and, on the other, they lobby and protest outside government offices against caste discrimination, asking to be granted scheduled caste status. The members of the community were originally Hindu Dalits who had converted to Christianity over the years, but the retrogressive practices and prejudices against them haven’t changed much. Indian law, unfortunately, does not say anything about ‘Untouchable Christians’.
In Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, a midwife, or dai, provides training to other women in midwifery practices because of her distrust in modern birthing practices at today’s hospitals. She limits her teachings to traditional midwife castes, which were essentially a lower caste. ‘It is to preserve our ancestral professions,’ she told me defiantly. In villages, it is not uncommon for affluent families to bestow land grants to a dai’s family and give her the sole rights to deliver babies in their household.
India’s professions have always been interlinked with caste practices that dictated the professions of castes and its many subsets. Occupations were meant to be passed on from father to son, and the option of transitioning from one profession to another was generally outlawed. The Kayasth class, who comprised the upper layer of Hindu society, occupied high governmental positions, often serving as administrators or advisers. The lower classes such as the nais or the chamars performed the menial jobs of barbers and tanners, respectively, while their wives doubled up as masseuses or pedicurists for the women of the aristocratic families. The rudaalis, or the professional mourners, whom I interviewed for this book are an example of caste-induced professions too. It is customary in Rajasthan for higher-caste women to not mourn publically, and so the rudaalis—mostly helpless, impoverished women caught in the web of caste hierarchy—step in to mourn on behalf of these upper-caste women, representing their sorrows for the traditional twelve-day mourning period. But the changing times, enculturation and automation are all slowly eliminating these mourning practices, consigning them as some sort of an anthropological curiosity. Increasingly, jobs are being taken up for monetary reasons, and technology is helping them switch quicker to economically viable jobs. No caste exists for a call-centre employee or a computer operator, for example.
To those who belong outside caste-bound practices—the calligraphers, the kabootarbaaz, the ittar wallahs—their professions have suffered because they lost their patrons in the kings, noblemen and moneyed zamindars of pre–Independence India. I must mention the incredible contribution of the Mughal empire, particularly Emperor Akbar. Almost five of the eleven professions I cover in this book gained prominence during the regime of the empire which was steeped in Parso-Arabic values along with Hindu influences.
Sometime during my travels I started working on this book, The Lost Generation. A few stories had taken me to the boondocks, far beyond the urban reaches of the states. I bumped into Naxalites, activists, thugs and ruffians, but rather than obstructing the story in any way, they helped me understand the complex social fabric of our vast country. To protect their identities and interests, in some cases I had to change their names or modify the factual matrix. Through our conversations, I saw that their paradoxes provided for a deeper understanding of issues rather than cause moral obstructions—all contributing to appreciating the frailty of the human condition. Like one of the readers of an early draft of this book said, ‘There are hardly better ways to expose vulnerabilities and contradictions than reproducing the seemingly banal conversations about people’s “ordinary lives”.’ In some instances, though, because of certain limitations faced by my translators and to best represent the views of the individuals, I have paraphrased conversations rather than document them verbatim. I have tried, then, to keep the stories free of authorial interference, something I have allowed to creep into the narrative only when necessary. Inescapably, however, I ended up directing the conversations to areas of my own interest, and I hope these areas interest you, the reader, as well.
While recording the interviews, I found myself being critical of the patriarchal, casteist, classist and sexist world-view seemingly espoused by these professions and the organized religion they practise. But at the same time I was grieving the loss of these ancient vocations, the cultural diversities and mysterious characters they have produced over the years. By the time I finished working on the book, I hoped to have arrived at a conclusion. I wish I could have assertively stated that these professions have been culturally exhausted, that they have lived out their natural lives, that they, then, have to go—that the world doesn’t need the bhisti wallahs to exist if they have become an anachronism.
But then I don’t make my living as a bhisti wallah.
1
THE GODNA ARTISTS OF JHARKHAND
The Naxalites here in Jharkhand are formidable; they can hang you to death for beating up your wife in their kangaroo courts1 or behead women for blackmailing men. In 2014, they bombed an empty school in a nearby village because they suspected the teachers of being informers to the police. The Naxals usually lurk in the shadows of the surrounding jungles like wildcats, preying on forest officers and moneyed travellers, and they recruit tribals living in hills and forests from the surrounding areas where people’s lives are not important enough for the rest of the country to notice—enmeshed and embroiled in caste traditions and, most importantly, deprivation.
Salim, a local from Ranchi who has agreed to escort me through this Naxal-infested jungle, tells me all this in a low voice as we walk on the stony path. ‘But they are tribal at heart—happy with a bottle of foreign liquor,’ he adds. He stops as we jump over a rivulet with more mud in it than water. We have been walking for a while now through the thickets of Khunti district in Jharkhand, less formidable than some of its inhabitants. The early-morning views are idyllic—rolling hills, black, white and ochre cows grazing on the slopes, the occasional waterfall in the wildernesses—and make for an excellent picnic spot. There are rows and rows of palash trees on the horizon, lit up by the astounding eruptions of their beautiful orange-red flowers, like sparks raging from a forest fire beneath.
A tribal hamlet appears a few kilometres into the jungle, about thirty thatched huts scattered about like drunken men after a merry revelry. A gathering of women have formed a circle in a cleared patch of land, some with chubby babies hanging at their waists. Two musicians from the village—a drummer and a man plunking at a stringed instrument—sit in a corner outside the circle. There is a volley of hooting cries and then a rattle of drums, the soundtrack to which a mother from a nearby hut drags her squealing daughter by the arm. Thick tears of protest flow down the child’s cheeks and on to her sleeveless frock as she is pulled to the middle of the circle.
‘This is the child’s godna ceremony,’ Salim whispers as we watch from a distance. If a girl child is old enough to walk, she must be tattooed; the tattoo is known as ‘godna’. Rarely is the ritual deferred until the early teens, and in any case it must be accomplished before the girl is married.
Tears drip down the face of the child, her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs as her mother whispers something in her ear—perhaps the promise of rice boiled in sweet milk to be prepared for her later in the evening. The mother rocks her rhythmically, soothing the harsh, painful thoughts in her daughter’s head; perhaps she is hoping the next child she is carrying in her visibly pregnant belly is a son who can escape this pain.
The malhar,2 or the tattoo artist—who will engrave the godna—pulls out the tools with his soot-covered hand. The crowd cheers as he picks up a three-pronged metal implement and meticulously begins to make a tilak on the child, Nekka’s, forehead—a teardrop-
shaped mark between her eyebrows. With each rap of the malhar’s old instrument, droplets of blood begin to form around the lesions. They converge to form a stream of blood that spills down the child’s cheek. A few women break into song and dance, a ritual, going round and round in circles, the child momentarily distracted by them.
Ningan koy Nekka pello kakro parmiya
Ningan pelo ne chhorabao
Ninghai joodi jonkhas koda raji keras,
Ningan pelo ne chhorabao . . . Nekka
The crab is nibbling on you dear girl, Nekka,
Who will save you from it?
Your boyfriend has left for foreign lands
Who will save you from it?
They sing obscene songs about loose pyjamas that falls off a man’s smooth backside and then another about a cat chasing a dog up to the river, diverting the child’s attention with the debauchery. The child cackles with laughter, even as tears hang precariously on her jaws, like dewdrops from a leaf.
A few more songs later, the singers plunge down on to the dust with arms stretched out, signifying the celebration of the girl’s definite journey to heaven after death and her reunification with her ancestors. Just then, a needle slips and digs a bit too deep into the child’s skin, pulling it upwards like an earthworm on a fishing hook, making the child scream in pain. The singers sit up, shaking their heads, disapproving of the child’s weak will. An old lady—tall, lean and bent at the waist, with tattoo marks folding into a graceful network of fine wrinkles along her neck and face—jumps up and the drummer steps up the rhythm in anticipation.
‘The road to the Lord is full of obstacles,’ she addresses the audience in Kurukh, a Dravidian language. ‘The door is guarded heavily by large, black demons,’ the old one narrates, clawing her fingers and sticking her tongue out to signify the demon. The child quietens down, drawing images of the dark, the perilous dungeon of the Lord, in her head. ‘Those without the godna,’ the old lady roars, ‘will be branded with hot coals in hell, thrown on cacti and pushed through sugarcane extracting machines.’
The Lost Generation Page 1
