The Lost Generation

by Nidhi Dugar Kundalia

  ‘Aaram se . . . [Be careful],’ Mahendra Kumar chides him as the fellow tries different keys from a bundle, the handle of the inbuilt iron safe squawking as it turns, the rust layered over the years grinding at its hinges. ‘I give you money to help, not to break my precious furniture,’ the Panda says, wriggling his eyebrows, as the boy pulls open the safe from which emanates a smell of times gone by—of paper decaying in the dampness of centuries-old closets. ‘Never trust a Bhangi,’ he whispers to me sideways, referring to the young boy’s caste.

  In the caste world of Haridwar, the Panda’s moneyless help belonged to the lowest South Indian caste, Bhangi, whereas the Pandas were much higher in the societal structure. Mahendra Panda, like most of his ilk, inhabited the role of his Brahmin caste with incontestable gravity.

  Pulling out two elongated registers, called vahis, from a pile of about a hundred-odd files—all about twelve-inches thick and encased in jute covers—from the depths of the safe, the boy places them before the Panda, sending a cloud of dust flying. The Panda puts on his round gold-rimmed spectacles, making him look earnest, vulnerable even, as he carefully sifts through the loosened pages of the books. There are entries of an old business family from Rajasthan whose kin have spread far and wide—to tiny villages in Bihar, to the hills beyond Coimbatore and to the bustling metropolises of Hyderabad and Bangalore. Then there is a Punjabi family from Amritsar with eight sons and their respective family trees. And another one from Gujarat whose pet dog has been listed too. The entries are in Urdu, Sanskrit, Hindi and various other regional scrawls by literate pilgrims and, in other cases, by the Panda himself. ‘Families have changed their religion over the years. A few Muslims switched to Hinduism. Some who were brought up in Lahore were Hindus but could write only in the local dialect, Urdu,’ he explains, peering above his spectacles at the multilingual vahis.

  ‘I still get jajman from the Kathat community5 in Rajasthan; it follows both Hindu and Muslim traditions. They bury their dead in the ground close to their homes, but come here for their last rites and to update the records.’ These registers also became important genealogical sources for many splintered Hindu families, aiding them in tracing their family tree and family history, especially after the Partition in 1947 and, later, amongst the Indian diaspora which migrated to America, Australia and even Trinidad and Tobago and Fiji.

  ‘Let’s look for your history now,’ he says, pulling open one of the two vahis. With time-honoured dexterity, he leafs through the scroll with my family’s genealogy, its pages scrawled with names and dates. ‘So your ancestral village is Ladnun in Rajasthan, you said?’

  I nod.

  ‘Hmmm . . . And the caste?’ he asks.

  Pulling open a sheaf of paper with notes from my father, I inform him that my caste is Oswal.

  ‘Okay, and the gotra is Dugar,’ he reads aloud as he scans the documents.

  Pandas arrange these documents first by the village from which the ancestors hail, followed by the gotra from that village—the Oswals would be in one section, the Agarwals in another and then the Maheshwaris. This enables a Panda to name a pilgrim’s family and ancestors with no information other than the pilgrim’s first name, last name, gotra and ancestral village.

  The basis of this classification also helps in defining the community and its descendants and to derive the areas of incest. This is especially useful in arranged marriages in India where one has to marry within the same caste—for example, an Oswal cannot marry within the same gotra, in this instance, with a Dugar.

  ‘Look at the ink that we used for writing back then. It’s a pure Brahmin product,’ he says, looking up from the book, referring to the rich, dark sooty ink that seems to conjure its own story—of large cauldrons over hot coals and bare-bodied Brahmin men stirring through it, their bodies luminous not with stinky sweat but with age-old wisdom. ‘Once made,’ the Panda continues, ‘the ink was offered to Ganga Maiyya.’ A few drops in the river during a puja. ‘The ink had rich ingredients like almond peels and sap from banana trees for longevity.’ He smiles proudly.

  ‘You do not make this ink any more?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, who has the time? And yes, the ingredients can be a bit unaffordable these days, so we make do with the locally available stuff in the markets. Anyway, don’t you want to look at your family records?’ He snaps, muttering something about a family from Punjab that was due to visit him any time now. He finally opens the page to my family tree. A list of members of the family running back five generations unfolds, with the dates of their death, the relative who came to perform the last rites and their respective signatures. Disappointingly, only a few of my female ancestors are listed in the records. But it’s hard to supress the joy of seeing a tangible link with my own history, one that I can perhaps pass down to my children some day.

  Nobody will be conducting me to the Hindu heavens just because my ancestral history lies with this man whose community is sometimes branded as charlatans using religion to swindle the naive. After all, from a pragmatic viewpoint, they seem to be obtaining lot of money and respect for merely writing a line or two for each family, perhaps twice in a decade—or thrice if misfortune strikes. But at the same time, Mahendra Panda is the man who maintains my family’s death records, ensuring for me a little sense of my roots and a robust sense of history.

  My great-grandfather is only a name and a few photographs to me, but I remember my grandfather and loved his stories of the days of yore, including a few about his father—the burly, authoritarian owner of jute fields who switched off all the lights in the house before he went to sleep, regardless of when the rest of his family went to bed. He spoke of his two cousins who poked a pair of scissors through their own eyes in separate incidents, and his brother with whom he often played kushti.

  I first came to know about these records from this same kushti-loving brother of my grandfather. He had come to Haridwar to immerse my grandfather’s ashes when he died, like his ancestors had done. His signature, a thumbprint, is stamped over my grandfather’s date of death in Mahendra Kumar’s vahi. ‘It’s incredible,’ my grandfather’s brother had said when we last met. ‘Those weren’t the times of Facebook and instant messaging. I had forgotten the names of a few of my ancestors and there they were in the records. We got in touch with our extended cousins soon after and met at a wedding.’

  Curious to know how relationships between Pandas and families were established, I ask Mahendra Panda how our ancestors chose a particular Panda.

  ‘You don’t choose a Panda; a Panda chooses you,’ he snorts. ‘It is a hereditary relationship ultimately defined by the jajman’s paternal ancestral home. So those who live in Jodhpur and its surrounding areas are handled by a particular Panda because this Panda has developed relationships with them as they came for their pilgrimages. Somewhere along the way, the records of Jodhpuri citizens would get divided along the way and be distributed among, say, three Pandas who were his sons, each having a selection of gotras. So if you know the region and the gotra you come from, we know which Panda to direct to you to,’ he explains.

  ‘During my grandfather’s times, most people came by foot, travelling for months on end through forests and hinterland,’ Mahendra Kumar recalls, pulling out a picture of his office from the days of the horse and buggy—a monochrome picture of a small cubicle made of khus sheets, with his grandfather sitting on a chair outside it. ‘Many of these pilgrims died because surrounding Haridwar were jungles infested with dacoits, tigers, elephants and diseases.’

  ‘So I have five generations listed here. What is the earliest record you have of others?’ I ask.

  ‘Some records go back to 1799, but before that they used to write in this now-lost form of record-keeping known as the bhojpatra,6 on the barks of the Himalayan birch tree. We used to inscribe the details on the bark and place them in layers of cloth. This was before the Mughal emperor Akbar introduced paper in the sixteenth century. Nobody seems to have these bhojpatras any more. They were de
licate and sensitive to weather changes. We didn’t have iron safes back then.’

  Besides the vahis written by the Pandas, India has other forms of genealogical records too—such as those maintained by the Manganiyars,7 the singing community from Rajasthan that make shubhraj, which is a sort of panegyric. Then there are panjis, the extensive genealogical records maintained among Maithil Brahmins in Bihar. But, by far, the most extensive and widespread records are those maintained by the Pandas, especially the ones in Haridwar.

  The oldest records with the Pandas come from the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Punjab, which each have strong links with Haridwar, possibly because of their trade route. Meanwhile, records from the eastern region of India, like Bihar, appear only in the late-eighteenth century, thanks to the growth of the railways in 1886. Most of the earlier records are of the status-conscious Brahmins, which the Pandas themselves ensured they recorded, so as to secure potential future patronage to these high-caste moneyed landlords. Soon, families from castes lower than that of the Brahmins started undertaking expensive pilgrimages to Haridwar, serving their status aspirations, elaborate death rituals being one of the prime ways of showing hierarchy in society.

  A Punjabi family soon gathers outside Mahendra Kumar’s door. They have made an overnight journey by train from Sonam, Punjab. One of their kin has passed away, the help explained to me later, and his last wish was for his body to float down the Ganga. ‘Jai Ganga Maiyyaji,’8 the Panda greets them, smiling broadly—a mysterious beaming that seems to have a larger meaning, putting one in the awkward position of trying to figure out what that meaning could be.

  Giving instructions to his help to serve tea, the Panda turns to pack things up so that he can take the family to the ghats for the last rites. ‘They are a religious family, this one. They come to me after every death in the family. For them I am the kul purohit, and I am summoned to their village for every religious ritual. I get such people from everywhere—Jodhpur zilla, Ajmer zilla, Beawar . . .’

  ‘Who takes care of your work when you are gone?’ I ask as we walk out to the bank. Beads of sweat form on his brow in spite of the cool breeze; the drops loosen and trickle down, like the old man’s future. ‘My brother’s son Prashant will take care of my gaddi9 after I’m gone. He sits here from nine in the morning to seven in the evening and then goes back to our place in Jwalapur. Most of the married Pandas live there to maintain the sanctity of Ma Ganga’s Haridwar—since relationships in the bed are prohibited here,’ he whispers, his breath shortening. ‘It’s a two-hundred-year-old gaddi. Someone has to maintain this legacy,’ he adds, looking out at the river shining under the sun, despite the filth beneath. ‘My two sons work in Bangalore in banks.’

  ‘Won’t they take up your job?’

  ‘No, no. They can’t all sit in the same room, right?’

  The times are changing, and the family trees in these ancient books may soon be quaint relics. The scientific world view is increasingly eating into the Pandas’ work, raising greater doubts about the value of ritual and religious actions. Some Pandas feel bound to their clients by way of inherited religious pledges, and for financial reasons. But few things have changed in their record-keeping methodology over time; being a traditionalist community, they are averse to change and resort to conventional methods of record-keeping. Many have dropped out of the profession, finding lucrative options in the growing tourism industry in Haridwar as hotel managers and owners. But except a few, most Pandas rebuff the idea of making all their records public.

  The information in the vahis could be used against their clients, one hears, or could undermine some of the Pandas’ own claims that the records are their inheritance if they could possibly be purchased from other Panda families. Even the Genealogical Society of Utah10 has microfilmed about 500 vahis since 1977, when they first undertook this project in India as part of their genealogical research project spanning the globe. Pandas, who are technologically averse, are wary of this research, and most refuse to share their records, fearing that multiple copies will be made, possibly resulting in them losing their everyday livelihood—in spite of the fact that the contracts are drawn between the society and the Panda and state that they will not ‘sell, assign, give, or part [with them] in any way . . . except with the prior written permission of the Compiler [the Panda].’

  When I ask him about the films at Utah, Mahendra Kumar clicks his tongue in disapproval. ‘I refused to give it to them. Everything in Haridwar these days is done keeping foreigners in mind,’ he rants. ‘A lot of our Pandas gave away their details, but I don’t think they are secure. They want to make a . . . what do you call it . . . yes, a website of it. There is a legacy associated with this work; it is what the gods have asked us to do. You can’t commercialize everything. But it’s not completely their fault. More generally, it is the moral corruption that the market has unleashed on everything. They want to wear Western clothes, listen to Angrezi songs and eat Italian . . .’

  In that instant it is hard to tell if these are purely the maudlin yearnings of an ageing man, or whether Haridwar really has undergone as much globalization as he claims. Then, suddenly, the Panda catches me by surprise and says, ‘Kaafi fayde bhi hain in websites ke; wahaan koi aapse caste nahi mangega [There are benefits to the website as well; no one asks you your caste there].’ He cackles to hide his mounting panic.

  We arrive at the ghat where families hold each other’s hands at the steps while the water rushes past them—green and viscous, sometimes like an oil slick. Piles of flowers, varying containers of ghee, red cloths used for rituals and other refuse bobs in the water by the pier.

  ‘Would you want buy your own computer to keep a more permanent electronic copy of the records?’ I ask him, wary of facing his wrath.

  But he smiles instead. ‘Would you come to me if I wrote these records on fancy computers instead of in these legendary old books? I don’t know, really, how many more generations will continue this work. But I will live by this holy Ganga till I die. It is a duty bestowed on us by the Gods . . . How can I run away from it?’ he says, darkly, staring at his own reflection in the rushing waters, each wave washing it away, leaving behind a mere bleak grey silhouette.

  People have trod this way for centuries now, along the banks of the Ganga. At the main ghat, barbers shave the heads of the men from the Punjabi family, to signify mourning, while the Panda gives them his blessings. He then summons a Mahapatra sitting under an umbrella by the ghat, who quickly puts out his chillum. ‘Now, this is the only way for poor men to relax. We don’t earn thousands from customers, do we?’ The red-eyed man with a hunchback mocks the Panda, who, in turn, stands a few feet away from him, turning a deaf ear.

  The Pandas themselves do not perform any rites for the first twelve days after a death. Instead, they pass on the work to the Mahapatras who help the men of the family light cotton wicks soaked in ghee, snuggled in a basket made of leaves and marigolds, flickering as they go downstream—amidst a hundred other such vessels sent out by many other sons, brothers, nephews and uncles, honouring their dead in this dark, muddy water, reeking of death and decay. The Panda closes his eyes, swaying back and forth, lips moving furiously as he chants the mantras.

  And then, just like Lord Bhagiratha laboured to pull down the Ganges from paradise so that the river’s holy touch would release his ancestors from the cycle of birth and death in the Ramayana, the men pour out the ashes from a brass pot, feeding it to the holy river. Once, a humming, gurgling eager river with crystal-clear water that purified one’s body and soul, it is now just an endless convoy of din and dirt, dung and death, where men, women, Pandas and the dead, all immerse themselves in its cold, mythical embrace.

  4

  THE KABOOTARBAAZ OF OLD DELHI

  Pigeons were the bane of our existence in the years growing up. A pigeon would often sit on our room’s window ledge, its grubby feathers and excrement propelling in every direction. It would coo its imprudent brains out
with an eerie, unnerving, bone-chilling sound that announced its arrival every morning at 5.45 a.m., like clockwork. This would be followed by my sister and I aiming all the pillows we had at the window on the bed to send the bird flying off the ledge, only to hear it return and coo again within the next five minutes—wagging its tail, blinking its deceptively innocent eyes, bobbing its neck forward, craning its neck, scavenging for leftover food in bins and gutters and adapting almost too well to our urban environment.

  Life is brief, especially with eagles and electrical poles around, so the pigeon stuffed itself with vegetable peels from the rubbish bin and pickles left out in to dry in the sun. It established itself in the neighbourhood trees, its droppings coating the branches like thick sleet. One fine day, it laid eggs in the corner between the air cooler and the wall in spite of the spikes installed on the sill—and then there was a whole family of them. We knew the worst was upon us. It was war!

  Our domestic help poked into the pigeons’ empty nest with long brooms and knocked it off. Nets were installed between the windows and we even kept a bottle of water with liquid detergent handy to spray them off the ledges. About a month later, the ‘plumed rats’ were finally gone, but they didn’t merely disappear from the windowsill. They vanished from the other homes in the colony and every tree, electrical wire and veranda in between. The neighbourhood gathered at the community hall for a pigeon-themed party, complete with paper beaks and a cake with a model pigeon perched on it, but we still ended up waking up every day at 5.45 a.m. for weeks after that. A few months on, we saw an impressive white pigeon indulging in histrionics at a local mela and suddenly felt guilty for the loss of this familiar creature.