The Lost Generation

by Nidhi Dugar Kundalia

  Back in the Mughal era, calligraphy was considered a virtuous and pious act, and the katibs, and khushnawis were all deeply revered by the kings, princes and noblemen. It was considered the pinnacle of divinity, and the artist was uplifted along with it. The artisan became the mastermind—inspiring like the Prophet, untouched and pure like a holy man. The royalty often learnt the art from the finest ustads, patronizing them and offering high positions in their courts. Akbar established an independent department called the Aina-i-Taswir Khana, specially meant for training men to compile texts and translations, and he had about 100 calligraphers under his patronage.6 Then there was the Shikasta style, mastered by Hindu royals like Raja Todar Mal and Rai Manohar Das.7

  ‘One’s handwriting is like one’s body shape,’ Wasim says as he puts away the books carefully, folding each of them in a plastic bag. ‘You can’t choose how you are born—fat, thin, round—but you can exercise to shape your body. An artful hand validates good upbringing and good lifestyle. Of course, your pen matters too,’ he says, tugging at the notebook a student places before him, chiding him for using a split qalam. The chastened student hastily pulls out another one, a reed with a tip like a pen. Sharpening the pen with a penknife called the qalamtrash, he tests the reed on the paper; a narrow groove is dented, into which the viscous black ink used in fountain pens, known as the davat, flows and remains contained, satisfied to have found its right place on the paper.

  ‘The best-quality qalams come from Iraq, but they can be expensive. So we use the ones that are made from trees that grow on the banks of the Ganga and Jamuna,’ he explains. ‘Sarkanda, I think, is what they call the tree. They also use sketch-pens these days. Useless things, those are. No guile at all. But the computer-habituated hands these days move flabbily over the paper with a qalam, rambling on them as if lacking a spine.’ He sighs. ‘Look at this poster; like most others, it’s written with a qalam and the Nastaʿlīq is specific to the rules that have to be followed by this script,’ says Wasim, pointing to a hand-drawn poster on the wall—‘Insaan ki izzat hai jab woh kisi ka mohtaj na rahe [A man’s dignity is maintained if he isn’t dependent on anyone],’ he reads out, his chanting tone tinctured with ominousness.

  The annexation by the British and the toppling of the Mughal court was a watershed moment for the community of Urdu calligraphers. While the end of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s rule was desirous for many, it was undeniably upsetting for others—especially for the region’s Muslim population—and caused a severe blow to the Urdu language and the devotional arts. The introduction of lithography in India soon after was the coup de grâce. Katibs went out of business, but were mostly hired back by printing presses and Urdu newspapers, largely because printing technology8 could not be a substitute for the fluid script, which was impossible to translate into movable type. And the last talents of the Urdu calligraphy industry in India continued to work for a while longer, writing out, by hand, any copy to be printed in facsimile. Urdu books were printed at Fort William College, Calcutta, in the Naskh style, which was similar to Farsi. Soon, the book market and the reading public boomed. Calligraphy not only reached a larger audience but also became more affordable. The slips of finger and nerves, and all those ordinary human uncertainties, no longer caused a furrow of worry on their brows. But, soon after, a company in Delhi introduced the Urdu Font Nastaʿlīq for computers. Not only did this take the specific personal performance out of the art, but it finally and completely robbed the calligraphers of their ancient livelihood.

  ‘Zindagi kya hai anasir mein zahur-e tarteeb. Maut kya hai ini ajza ka pareshan hona [What is life but a manifestation of orderliness and method in elements. What is death but chaos within these same elements],’ recites Wasim, the lines by Chakbast,9 machine-printed in Nastaʿlīq on thick glossy paper, ready to be framed. Taking his thin spectacles off his face with one hand, he rubs the tiredness from his eyes, like a man who has been thrust into the sunlight after hours in cool darkness with such swiftness that he can barely make out the new images, aware merely of the speed with which he was thrown outside.

  ‘The words are still around,’ he murmurs, looking at his students, his eyes momentarily revealing a tenderness, an unexplained fondness for them—that perhaps confuses him as well. ‘They are waiting to be released from the tips of the qalams.’ The students stare at him, swallowing his words like water. ‘Khushkhati . . .’ he continues, mouthing each powerful word slowly, so that the power changes hands, from his memory to theirs. ‘Khushkhati is so magnificent an art that it can be the greatest revealing power of a person. The words, the way the reed is handled, the writing style—they all can reveal a person’s character, moral and cultural integrity, the entire psyche of a person. Each letter, each word, is practised so often that the soul of the art enters one’s fingers. You have to control the concentration of ink, the compatibility of each letter, side by side. If they are to come from a katib’s hands, the letters should carry a message beyond their meaning . . .’

  Waving his hand dismissively, as if shaking out of a trance, he mutters, ‘But this one is from a machine—empty. Anyone with a computer can be.’ Fine print above a barcode in English catches my eye—‘Made in China’. A nation, I faintly remember, whose governing party is officially atheist. ‘So, art then has to disappear.’ He smiles, but it does not reach his eyes. ‘Unless, someone rubs the magic lamp.’

  The class wraps up around late afternoon and the students quietly file out. Wasim stretches his limbs and walks out to the porch, looking at his students exiting the gate, back into the filth, murk and dust, the ordinariness of the megacity. ‘In Japan, calligraphy is not just an ornate style of writing, but an event in itself,’ he says. He speaks of the Kakizome festival, when they write their New Year resolutions10 with fresh ink in their best calligraphy, which they have been practising for the past year. A few days after writing, they burn the paper on which the resolutions are written. The Japanese believe that if a tall fire is created by the burning paper then their writing is going to improve. Wasim turns to smile at me. ‘Such is the regard the entire nation has for calligraphy. It is an art form that must be contemplated . . . not just read.’

  8

  THE BOAT MAKERS OF BALAGARH

  Come monsoon, the colour green parachutes down to this lazy hamlet of Balagarh in the Hooghly district of West Bengal. Creepers snake up tree trunks, draping the roofs and windowsills, wrapping themselves up telephone poles and latching on to wires. Frogs play hopscotch around puddles where worms make their homes in the rains. A drenched dog whimpers on its way, scavenging for leftovers. An oily slick of mud, resembling dirty cotton balls that have been torn to shreds, runs into an isolated home from which a sari-clad woman scurries out, looking up at the dark skies. She feeds fresh grass to her two goats and then places a clay pot beneath the eaves of the roof to catch the spill.

  From a distance, a cacophony of axes and knives chopping through wood is carried by the wind and melts into this irrepressibly elating lilt of the rain as it dribbles on to the pots and pans through thick clusters of bamboo groves. Around the monsoons, every canopy lining either side of this pathway in Balagarh turns into a boat-making factory and the 400-year-old village of boat makers echoes with the sounds of their creation.

  Legend has it that there was once a big, long river that gurgled down the Himalayan slopes and into these green valleys, over which thick willows of coconut trees bent, and a hot, yellow sun sank at dusk, giving way to thousands of stars that played by the night. Through the years, as the river traced its path to the Bay of Bengal, drying up in some places, creating new rivulets in others, it branched out like the thick roots of a banyan tree, intersecting the valley to create canals that flowed through cities and towns and, by the sixteenth century, into this little hamlet.

  Almost a century after Vasco da Gama landed in India, European powers such as the Portuguese, the Dutch and the French followed suit, using the riverine route to reach further inland. Bengal’s wooden bo
ats often appear in the texts of this era, linking together pieces of history. In Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari, they are mentioned as ‘fine Bengali war boats’, employed by Isa Khan in his fight against the Mughal naval forces under Akbar’s illustrious general, Raja Man Singh and, in another instance, as ‘a flotilla of 300 boats’ used for naval warfare by Shaista Khan, the Governor of Bengal,1 bought from local majhis, or fishermen, in 1666 and used to defeat the formidable Portuguese pirates.

  By this time, the Hooghly already had boats bobbing on it—boats that carried fathers, mothers, soldiers, dogs, cats, pots, pans, spices and fruits,2 boats that arrived from Dhaka and Calcutta and the Hague and Rio. And Balagarh, a small village on the Hooghly, beyond its reeds and weeds, turned into a busy boat-making centre, carving boats of all shapes and sizes and, sometimes, ocean liners too.

  A lean, wiry man sits with his lungi tucked between his legs in one of the empty sheds, smoking tobacco and taking shelter from the soft drizzle. ‘When I was a little boy, my mother called me to take a puff. I took a puff. Then I loped down to the river and drank water from it, drinking so feverishly that most of it poured on to my shirt. Why would she or, for that matter, any person, put into their mouth something so nasty?’ he inquires in a candid, boisterous manner, his voice gruff from all the smoke clouding his lungs. When he was sixteen, his neighbour, a fisherman who bought cigarettes from Calcutta’s sailors, introduced him to smoking again and, since then, rolling beedis has become a necessary practice of thrift. ‘I simply understand wood better when I smoke. It listens to me, moving with my hands and eyes.’ Mohak Chandok has been practising boat making for a living in this yard for the past forty years as a seasonal rigger. The rest of the time, he takes his father’s boat to fish in the waters around the coastal town of Digha, five hours away by boat.

  ‘I grew up around the water,’ he murmurs, taking long puffs of his beedi. ‘In the evenings, we’d walk down to the river and I’d help my mother fish in the warm spots near the bank—throwing in cooked rice which the fish would gather around like bees to a hive. We would then quickly jab them with a spear and drop them into a bucket.’ By the time he was ten he had started accompanying his father to the river on his motorless flat-bottomed boat that he had himself made. They’d be out for hours and he’d happily watch the oars hit the golden ripples in the afternoon waters—even though he’d miss a meal or two.

  ‘Baba taught me how to build boats,’ he says. He learnt the craft soon after he dropped out of school when his mother lost her life in a drunken brawl with his father. Mohak’s father was a Rajbanshi.3 With their place in the lower strata of the Hindu caste system, Rajbanshis are a fisherfolk community that claim to have been building boats for at least six generations.

  Squashing the beedi against the rock that he sits on, Mohak lights another with a match. Taking a long drag, he continues, ‘When my father wasn’t passed out on the cheap chullu,4 he’d tell me, “Feel the wood beneath your fingers, every time you start working on it. Learn to hone the chisel first and feel its vibration against the wood—all kinds of wood: babla, segun, sirish, khirish, arjun. Some woods might need a sharper blow.” And when I would forget to sharpen my chisel, he’d smack me below my ear’—thaad—‘like this,’ he says, slapping himself on the cheek and then laughing as he rubs the sting away. ‘“Understand the quality of the wood,” he’d say. “See the sal or the cheaper babla, and then understand the blade. Lastly, know how to govern your strength against the wood.” Once, I cut my finger,’ Mohak says, showing a scar on his finger. ‘“Put your finger in your mouth and suck the blood if you cut yourself,” he’d say. Then looking at the gash, caressing it, he’d add, “Good, next time you’ll do a better job on the wood.”’

  The rain stops and, for a while, only the roof of the shed drizzles water as it trickles down the slanted sheets—creating thin rivulets that make their way to the river. Mohak flicks his beedi on to the floor just before it touches his finger. The orange ashes scatter around the butt, turning grey. He watches it for a while and then takes off his slipper. For boatmen and oarsmen like Mohak, the boat is like their mother—the mother who steers herself away in danger, protecting the sailors in her sheltering womb—and one must not insult her with filthy slippers.

  He stands up to join another worker engaged on the carcass of a boat, perched on stilts to the rear of the yard. They grunt to each other in acknowledgement and work without talking, each pounding on an end of this 15-feet long boat skeleton, the sound of their hammering echoing through the village, alternating with the threatening, thunderous sky.

  For hours, they create the hull of the boat, pulling logs of wood towards themselves, hunching over them, measuring them to trim the plank and then heating them according to the arch of the boat. The woodchips have been burning for a few hours below the planks so that the rising smoke softens the timber. These planks will soon be joined by both the men and the cotton thread will be beaten into the gaps. A composite of cow dung and tar will then be pasted over these joints of the boat’s body.

  Mohak and his helper are the only two mistris, or carpenters, in this workshop, while most others have five to ten workers at least. Together, they usually finish a boat in three months’ time. After the boat is complete, they leave it to dry in the sun for a few days. Next, employing the ancient pulley-wheel apparatus, they noisily move the boat on a cot of oily logs to the river—amidst angry outbursts and curses in Bengali—and submerge it in the shallow waters to make the wood sturdier and, according to Rajbanshi tradition, baptize and ceremonially consecrate it as a ‘boat’, before giving it away to the boat owner the way a daughter is given away in marriage.

  A Rajbanshi pandit is summoned for this ceremony. No women are allowed during the sanctimonious boat-building process, although they may help in cleaning the boat. The pandit bathes the boat with holy Ganga water, brushes its teeth with mango leaves, and several items that are gifted to a bride during her wedding ceremony are then placed on the boat—sindoor, conch-shell bangles, alta, a red sari—marking the beginning of a new life for the vessel, just as they signify a new life for a married woman. And then, in about two weeks, the boat is ready to set sail, away from the nerve-racking din, to find its own horizons and be caressed by the gurgling waves of the rivers, the music of eternity . . .

  The boat-making business in Balagarh, though, isn’t as old as the one in Tamralipta in Odisha, which couldn’t withstand the fury of the seas, the higher production levels of seafarers from Arabia and China as well as the constant invasion by pirates. Balagarh, meanwhile, from various accounts in history, seems to be the natural descendant of Saptagram, near Bandel, a little further north from Balagarh. During Mughal rule, Saptagram became the centre of the local governors for sea-trade activities, giving rise to the development of the boat-making industry.5 But in the sixteenth century, the main waters of the Bhagirathi river, which earlier used to course through Saptagram, started flowing through the Hooghly channel. The river flowing through Saptagram silted, gradually making it inaccessible to boats. The boat-making units, with skilled craftsmen trained by international crews who came with the traders, moved to Balagarh, abandoning the old town.

  Around 1707, Raghunandan Mitra Mustafi, of Ula Birnagar in Nadia, migrated to Balagarh. The Europeans had made inroads in the incredibly navigable canal system, encouraging the boat makers, but Mitra finessed the craft by establishing an indigenous boat-building industry. He would carve out large, fat-bellied boats for the traders which would earn him a fortune while also encouraging migrants to swerve into this little hamlet, which soon turned into an industrial town where skilled craftsmen—both Hindus and Muslims—worked together in the hot, humid mulch. Mitra developed the wetland, building temples, a fort complex and homes. Soon, villagers dropped farming and took to carpentry, making Balagarh’s boats the gold standard in India’s boat-making industry. A moss-covered wall at the edge of the village that vanishes under the mounds is indicative of what was once a great for
t, but temples with golden-yellow stones still dot the horizon, a robe of shining jewels in the green valley of ruins, just as old as the boat-making workshops.

  Models of all kinds of boats, even steamboats with little glass windows, are lined up on a shelf in Mohak’s shed. ‘We make all these boats—whichever one you like—by hand,’ he says. Mohak and most other boatmen can make a variety of boats—patia, a clinker6 style, which has a small room where you can sleep and cook, can be traced back to the eleventh century with little variation as well as Balgarhi dinghies, bali tolar nouko, a slightly wider stapled boat.

  Mohak builds the boats ‘with [his] hands’, a few tools and the river which, he says, is the ‘ultimate authority’ of his work. Quite assertively, it tells him if each plank of wood actually adds to the whole, and whether his craftsmanship is up to par. ‘If the boat floats for a day or two without sinking and endures both nature and time, you know then that you’ve mastered this craft.’

  Soon after his father’s death, a decade and a half ago, Mohak awoke from a nervous dream, determined to build a boat in which he could sail up to the metro city of Kolkata and drift below the majestic Howrah bridge, where boatmen sing the soft, elevated notes of Bhatiyali7 songs—the same ones his mother sang while smoking, Gopini kirtan or Kamla Ranir gaan, as they fished in the meandering river. Using his lifetime’s earnings to buy expensive wood from Assam, he started working on the logs. He used the soft sal for planking, the cheaper babla wood for the decks, and bamboo, locally known as gudda, for the mast. ‘There are boat owners,’ he says, ‘who look for aluminium seats and a steering wheel.’ But he shunned them and anything else on the boat that was unrequired. He was not interested in self-glorification. He only needed something with stability in the shallow waters of the Hooghly—yielding to both breeze and billows. So he worked on it on the days that he had off from work. The dinghy took a year’s time. ‘Perfection,’ he insists, ‘takes time.’