‘In the last few years of united Andhra, we were called by the local activists twice or thrice to perform in villages and narrate stories that create a need for Telangana.’ He wipes his wet eyebrows on his sleeve. ‘The party leaders gave us the brief and we adapted it to an old Burrakatha,’ he drawls, pausing to think; he closes his bloodshot eyes for a few moments to block out the lights from the halogen lamps shining on his face. ‘In theatre, there is the fourth wall, whereas in storytelling there is no fourth wall.9 We sometimes change the pace of the story, and its plot, to suit the audience’s reaction. At other performances of the story narrated tonight, we beat up Kamleshkota and have dogs chase him out of the kingdom. But the men in this village are peaceful and avoid clashes. They’d rather not hear about so much blood and gore and so Kamleshkota is penitent instead.’
Anjalayya often innovates while addressing the needs of political parties to take their manifestoes to the voters, adapting the plots to address the problems of the particular village where they are performing. ‘In one village, we tapped on the problem of electricity, in another, we tackled water supply. Address these issues in a form, in a format, with which they are familiar, and they will eat out of your hands.’ He nods his head.
Back in the early years of Indian independence, when the Telangana People’s Movement10 had first taken shape amongst the peasants to resist the feudal government, Burrakatha changed from being merely a local folk art. It was brought into the mainstream by a popular theatre movement in the 1940s known as the Praja Natya Mandali,11 and by Marxist poets like Sunkara and Sheikh Nazir, who used this form to generate local activism amongst the backward castes and middle classes.
The wandering artists reached villages where the government was yet to make inroads—simplifying party propaganda using their understanding of village customs, culture and concepts for the largely illiterate voters. The Praja Natya Mandali used this strategy with great effect, adapting the traditional forms used for narrating historical and mythological stories into political narratives to convey the revolutionary message. Although introduced in the Andhra region, the Burrakatha soon became a popular art form in the Telangana movement.
Since Burrakatha was a medium to educate people about the political situation, the British government had banned it in Madras, where the art form had gained momentum during colonial times, and the Nizam’s government banned the left-leaning folk art in the princely state of Hyderabad.
‘Sunkara Satyanarayana’s Telangana was also written at that time. We often sang it during the last few years of the revived movement,’ says Anjalayya, speaking of the subversive katha, written in 1944, on the heroism of Bandhagi, a Muslim peasant, who fought valiantly against the oppression of the feudal landlord Deshmukh, illustrating that the struggle was not a communal one, but was rather a struggle against oppression. ‘Often, these stories caused an emotional upheaval in the audience too. Such was their effect that by the end of the recital, chairs were broken, protests were launched for a separate state immediately, with villagers proceeding in jeeps to the city. My brother was hurt on his head once during the riots after a session. A shard of glass was hurtled in his direction . . .’ Anjalayya murmurs, unconsciously clicking the andelus, the hollow brass rings that contain several metal balls that rattle and ring. Within the village economies, the andelus are often fastened to bullock carts to provide a hypnotic ching, ching, ching to keep the bullocks pacified, deafening the alarming sounds from their immediate surroundings.
Except for a few, most of the villagers have left for their homes for a quick meal. An organizer stops by to switch off the halogens lighting the stage. Darkness falls. Slowly, one after the other, sounds cease. ‘You have about half an hour left before we start another session,’ the organizer hastily informs Anjalayya before disappearing into the darkness. Anjalayya clears his throat, gulping down the remains of his tea. ‘I have heard that movie singers gargle with honey and clove every morning to keep their voices melodious. We just make do with this ginger tea.’ He chuckles, the moonlight shining on the ridges of his brow and eyes while his face and jaw are swallowed up by the darkness. Although this recital of three or four stories will finish around dusk, some long Burrakatha performances may be serialized over several consecutive evenings, sometimes even taking as long as three to four days.
Moving to a darker, quieter corner behind the stage, Anjalayya describes the ingredients of a good tale. ‘Now, a short story can never be a good tale. It has . . . no . . . teaching value,’ he explains in staccato bursts. ‘Epics! Those are great. Our religions, like those of the Hindus and Buddhists, are rooted in beautiful stories. Even Christians have parables on Christ. Those are good stories,’ he adds firmly. ‘They go back to the past, when men and women crossed rivers, jungles and mountains to get where they had to—with witchcraft, animals, parahumans, gods, heroes and powerful villains. There is no beauty in contemporary tales. Because there is only so much that you can experience from the window of a car, train or a bus. The best stories are the ancient legends and epics,’ he reaffirms. ‘The people that the characters met through their journey, the perils they encountered, and the problems that were solved along the way.’
Anjalayya, now in his fifties, learnt the craft from his grandparents in his hometown in Mehboobnagar, a few hours from Hyderabad. His parents were too busy travelling around the Telangana and Rayalseema region, narrating epics at the parties of moneyed landlords for festivals like Shivratri. ‘Nobody in my family ever went to school. We don’t understand letters. But I know at least four epics by heart, which is about one lakh lines in all. Yellamma, Bobbulikatha, Kumara Rama Katha, Ramayana Katha,’ he says with some perfunctory chest puffing. ‘Do you know Daroji Eerama?’ he asks excitedly, disappointed that I hadn’t heard of her before. ‘She was a legend and could recite at least ten kathas from memory. I wish I could have trained under her,’ he adds wistfully. ‘Burrakatha artists just know words, amma, words with magic that pierce through the clamour of the world,’ he says, surprised at having found a catchy phrase. He smiles, satisfied. He does not know where the phrase came from. He did not know that he had the phrase within him.
‘Telling a story is like reading a book without pictures,’ he continues. ‘My listeners make the scenery, depending on their understanding of a character or a word. For some, the king Kamleshkota looks like the rich businessmen who conned land out of them last year, while to others, he may look like a moustachioed Ranga Rao of Mayabazar—that Telugu film of the 1950s.’ He laughs.
Anjalayya, along with his brothers-in-law, grew up in the Mehboobnagar of the 1990s, where a highway had emerged complete with a black top, indigenous fauna and wide lanes that functioned as veins to the economically feeble region of Andhra. A housing project evolved, and an English-medium school catered to the region’s elite. A few government self-employment schemes were introduced to eradicate poverty, but soon, the power project failed to deliver, and the schemes collapsed. A few of the already rich people in the village became richer, but Anjalayya realized his family only became poorer.
He came to realize others things too. That he was a Budaga Jangam. Like his parents, he too would have to beg for a living. Unlike the other children in school, he never wore socks, and never had handkerchiefs in his pocket, the kind with delicate lace trimmings, which made him wonder why anybody would waste so much time on things with which you wipe your nose. While most children lived in villages, he had to walk for miles because the homes of his people were on the fringes of villages and towns. He realized he was different on the days his parents came back home without performing, when they had to fry lizards and rats to fill their stomachs.
Like most people of his community, Anjalayya could never receive his scheduled caste certificate from the government because he belonged to a migratory tribe with no fixed residential address, depriving him of the benefits available to scheduled caste communities in India.
‘Even when we sang songs in praise of the same lo
rd that they prayed to, they never let us into the temples. They laughed when my father attempted to enrol us in high school. ‘“Since when did lower-caste people start getting educated,” they’d jibe,’ Anjalayya recounts bitterly.
‘My brother and I stole the slippers that the upper-caste Brahmins left outside the temples and threw them away in the river. Silly things; their heads can grow soft with all the time they spend plonked on their beds indoors, with no sun,’ he titters nervously. ‘They should start hunting rats in the forests too. That’d sharpen them.’ And then, as the village headman’s wife crosses the path a few metres away from us, he whispers in a guardedly clipped tone, ‘We also took quick sips from their cups while they spoke of village politics.’ He raises his eyebrows at my surprise, waggling them with speed, and then breaks into hearty laughter.
Anjalayya often uses this gesture with his eyebrows to emote ‘paradise’ in his performance. According to him, this is also how the otherwise-teetotaller Brahmins would react if they had their first taste of toddy one day. ‘It will help them loosen up a bit too.’
‘A rich Brahmin landlord hired us to work on his fields long ago. We’d work the ragi fields during the day and sit through long hours of Burrakatha performances in the neighbourhood at night,’ he says, stretching his legs before him, massaging the soles of his feet. ‘We recited our lines while throwing seeds in the field, practised them as we worked on the rethatching of our huts after the monsoon, and tested each other while climbing trees to pick ripe mangoes.’
Anjalayya, by his late teens, had mastered the kathas and was ready to perform like his parents. He, along with his brother and brother-in-law, performed more than ten kathas a month in Mehboobnagar and the surrounding districts. They performed at weddings, Shivratris and birth and death ceremonies.
‘The shorter ones lasted about three hours,’ he says, ‘and the longer ones lasted all night. We charged five hundred rupees for these kathas. My friend Siriyala, who is from this village, demanded double that amount. Telivaina vaadu! He was almost as famous as the renowned Bhakta Siriyala, the great devotee Siriyala, among the people. A film-maker from Madras approached him to record a film song for a Tamil movie, but he only knew Telugu, like us. I wish we had learnt another language. And maybe some new instruments. Like the piano. Or modern drums, maybe. Maybe then we could sing songs for the cinema,’ he says, fingering the andelu, which must have been cold to the touch in the midnight air.
The interval had been extended to an hour and a half as the MLA had an important call to attend. The rajkiya and hasyam are now preparing their dimkis for the rest of the performance. Passed on to them by their grandfathers, the dimkis are at least 150 years old. The rajkiya informs me that no one makes them like this any more. ‘You need to beat the skin very thin and smooth and stretch it over the pot,’ he says, pouring cold water into the open end of the drum, wetting the dried and beaten goat hide drawn over it.
‘It makes a thin, soft sound that way,’ Anjalayya explains. ‘Old wisdom.’
About two decades ago, television started making forays in the Andhra villages; cricket on television and songs on the radio ate into the evening hours of the villagers, leading to a dwindling of the sense of community. ‘People used to get together in the evenings to hear stories around fires, sharing food and toddy. These days, they want everything within their four walls. Farmers here don’t even share their seeds with one another.’ Anjalayya sighs. In the more recent past, musical bands, that sing bhajans and stories and use contemporary instruments and employ marketing teams, have marked the end for Burrakatha artists in the region. About eight years ago, Anjalayya and his brothers migrated from Buranpur, the village where they grew up, in search of better working conditions, leaving behind at least four generations of legacy.
‘We settled in another village in Mehboobnagar and sought help from our friends there. A cassette company called Kamala Videos recorded our songs on Yellama Burrakatha,’ Anjalayya says as he removes his plumed turban to set his hair, the grey bristles on his head as long the ones on his chin. ‘But it never sold. We then went to Vikarabad and performed once in a while at Shivratri or death ceremonies. The rest of the time, we helped carry bricks and stone chips at a construction site. My knotty limbs are too old to do manual labour, but my grandchildren work. They earn enough to keep our family of ten eating,’ he adds.
‘What do they do?’ I ask him.
‘They are garbage cleaners.’ He smiles.
An organizer comes by and, with a grumpy shake of the head, waves at them to begin.
‘The villagers are back from their dinner,’ he says. We cross a dry creek with wild grass growing in its bed. The country is grey and treeless to my left, and on my right, the acacia trees loom over hills like low hung clouds. This small village grows rice every now and then. There is barely any cattle, and no fences—the countryside is too arid for grazing.
‘Change, they say. I knew change was inevitable. I just expected change for the better,’ he smiles as they are hurried on by the MLA’s secretary to the stage.
‘You cannot keep sir waiting. Now rush,’ the secretary chides them. Anjalayya and his brothers will now start a performance on the Bobbulikatha, the most loved epic of the state, where kings kill men like pieces on a chessboard.
An age-old animosity existed between the houses of Bobbili and Vizianagaram. As a result, many feuds occurred between these two houses, culminating finally in the battle of Bobbili on 24 January 1757. Various reasons exist for these feuds, mainly political, economic and geographical, but some consider caste as the main factor for their enmity. While the rulers of Bobbili were Velamas, the rulers of Vizianagaram were Kshatriyas. According to the Hindu caste system, Kshatriyas are superior to Velamas.
As Anjalayya and company begin, their descriptions evoke a spontaneous wave of enthusiasm from the audience—the pride and valour of the Velama clan; the battle where 250 courageous soldiers of Bobbili were up against the combined forces of more than 10,000 Vizianagaram and French soldiers; and the ploy to kill the king of Vizianagaram. In the end, the brave General of Bobbili commits suicide, rejecting the disgrace of dying at the hands of his enemy, but his stories of glory live on . . .
6
THE STREET DENTISTS OF BARODA
‘Ek mahine se dard hai [I have been in pain for a month]!’ cries out the old man, opening his mouth to reveal more than a few skewbald teeth, mementos from a zealous cigarette-smoking career. Amrit Singh, sitting on his haunches before him, dips his weathered hands in a bowl of blue liquid and jams a fist into the old man’s mouth to feel his gums.
‘Oh, kuch nahi hai bhai [It is nothing],’ Singh says. ‘Torus hai1 . . . It’s just a little extra bone poking your jaws,’ he says, wiping his hands on a soiled cloth.
‘Can you take it out then?’ whimpers the old man.
‘We could consider the possibility. But why do you need to?’
‘Why not?’ the old man persists.
‘I don’t know,’ Singh snaps, suddenly annoyed. ‘Why isn’t the ant as tall as the elephant? Chalo, niklo . . . Kuch nahi hai toh tumhara paisa bhi nahi lenge. [Now leave. Since there is no problem, there will be no charge].’
Singh turns to tell me matter-of-factly: ‘If he would have gone to the doctors, they would probably have performed in-house surgery, use lots of fancy terms that would allow him to feel miserable, prescribe him a long list of medicines and turn him into a victim of daylight robbery.’ His moustache is oiled and smoothened into place; his red turban looks like it has been tied in a hurry.
Singh’s humble office is a tidy, though dusty, street shop outside the iconic structure of MS Baroda University, which was founded by Pratap Singh Gaekwad of Baroda, the last maharaja of the former state of Baroda, in 1949. Beyond the periphery of its walls are wraith-like domes and minarets, and in the looming dusk squats Singh on a cobbled pavement, his tools arranged on a red cloth—a few dentures, blindingly white and intended to dazzle, are displaye
d along with jars, bottles and a tin box that holds extra dental tools. There’s no mortar-and-brick structure, no ritzy chairs, no surgical light-head. He won’t give you long names for diseases, and you can drop in when you pass by the shop; patients just pull up a bamboo stool and hope that Singh will boot out any pain from their mouths with his corroded set of pliers.
‘Yes, I will fill your tooth. No, cavity does not mean you have ants in your teeth,’ he tells a patient.
And then to another, ‘You’ve never had a tooth there? Okay, I’ll make you one.’
‘No, I only take care of teeth. I do not clean ears.’
Amrit Singh is a street dentist, a far cry from his peers at the department of dentistry in the university looming right behind us; men who perhaps toiled on cadavers and practised by giving each other injections. Instead, he was trained by his father, Gurbachan Mehel Singh Digpal, who himself was a street dentist and had blandished his son to join him while Amrit worked at a car garage. ‘Pitaji told me that the work is not that challenging. Almost like fixing punctures and cleaning carburettors,’ he jests, oddly sanguine, snorting every time he finds something amusing.
Dentistry as a practice often surfaces in the everyday history of the Indian subcontinent. The Indus Valley civilization has yielded evidence of dentistry being practised as far back as 7000 BC. Explorers at Mehrgarh, Pakistan, in 2006, reported that eleven drilled molar crowns from nine adults were discovered in a Neolithic graveyard in Pakistan dating from 7500–9000 years ago.2 Skilled beads craftsmen perhaps doubled up as dentists, curing tooth-related disorders by using their tools of trade—bow drills—on teeth.
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