HISTORICAL TRUTHS

This  January end we  do a John Denver. Our destination on this journey is Indore M.P.,  for the periodic appointment with our dhanwantari and we lament the neglected looks of the roads and दरिद्री  looks of the spaces which are almost clad with discarded plastic carry-bags. Indore is a pathetic and poor city inhabited by  rich people because  of  the fondness, not just tendency, of the public to look the other way when bureaucrats and politicians pocket public funds meant for civic facilities. Agra Bombay Road cannot be widened on account of a temple, a masjid and a gurudwara coming in the way. Kyaaaa bhiyo...?

But all said and done, the Mother of all Homes, that is Mother’s Home is @ Indore and the gutsy lady is quite cheerful. Lot of furniture work got done by her. She’s 80. Missus asks us to delve into the piles of paper, says थोडं मंथन करा त्या कागदाचं ....परत तो घोटाळा नको , return ची कॉपी इंदोर  ला राहिली कि बंगलोर ला कि गुवाहाटी ला कि पुण्या ला , .... वगैरे वगैरे ..

We discover something startling, which we thought was lost treasure- a yellowing envelope from ‘Bennett Coleman and Company’ which yields tidings of a Rs. 1,000.00 (Rs. one thousand only) cheque ...and a 1999 newspaper cutting from the Sunday Chimes of India, an article written by Carl von ‘Bailiff under the pseudonym Sanjiv Bokil, God bless him- the context is a PIL filed in the SC by none other than Fali S. Nariman, a closet shair, just like YT, and bears  repetition:

THE TRAIL OF TWO TOMBS

It is heartening to note that the Supreme Court has turned its attentions to historical monuments like the mazaars of Mirza Ghalib and Zauq and one hopes their greatness will be resurrected form the dead. Godspeed to the SC. And here, hangs a tale.

It was about a decade back. My friend Najmi Haidri was visiting Delhi, our home-town. Alone at his hotel on a Sunday, he called me over the phone. Let’s go sight-seeing, but added, not the usual places. Since he happened to  be a history and shayari buff, my choice fell upon two sites unseen by me- the tombs of Razia and Mirza Ghalib. My companion being holed up at Hotel Ranjit,, Razia’s resting place was naturally the first port of call. In those winding lanes of Old Delhi, you would ride only a cycle-rickshaw, or  a bicycle or a two-wheeler. So armed with that giant map of Delhi published by the Surveyor General of India, astride my rickety blue Vijai Super, we left on what turned out to be a little voyage of discovery.

Our journey began opposite Hotel Ranjit, at Turkman Gate, one of the 14 gates to the old walled city and literally a gateway to History. The map showed a meandering road leading upto Empress Razia’s tomb. Reality, alas, it turned out, was vastly more complicated than that excellent map. Sitting on the pillion, Haidri had an issue with the map which was aflutter like a wayward dupatta. “Hum to janaab in cheezon se katraate hain”, I still remember the words so aptly chosen, “aap hamaari taaz poshi karen aur lagaam hamen thaamne dein....”. So the helmet was placed on his head, and the map fell in my lap. And “maps tell you everything except how to fold them back”, someone had said...

Our scooter sputtered along steep narrow lanes, filling them up with metallic decibels. We were quite a sight we suppose, two prim gentlemen, the one on the pillion, with head buried in the giant map. It was a hopeless mess, and even getting out of the tangle of lanes would demand a lot of direction. So we parked the scooter and started with pooch-taach. “isse aasan to jannat me unse milkar aana hota..” said Haidri...”wahan se waapsi ki koi tikat nahi hai huzoor” was the obvious reply.

With his chaste urdu my friend struck instant rapport with the public. There was no kabristan in the area, we were informed. And who was this Razia ? She was a historical figure we said. Razia Sultan and her mazaar did exist somewhere around here, at least according to this map. We were taken to a senior citizen who told us and our local guides that the place was behind bulbulkhana which was a stone's throw away.

I would advise Delhites to really go and see the place. It is a stark courtyard paved with grey stone. A blue Archaeological Survey of India board stands sentinel at the narrow entrance, followed by a short stone inscription. The rough hewn tomb stands forlornly though with an unknown companion, in the middle without even a tree for shade. She was on the wrong side of the ulema when she was killed, my friend explained. It was a tale in stone which spells despair.

How the past brushes shoulders with the present in those narrow lanes of the walled city! Children had drawn three wickets on the platform below the tomb and a regular cricket match was in progress, God bless Razia... Of course the children didn't know whose tomb it was or indeed, who was Razia Sultan. Hema Malini's film had not been made by then...

Our next destination was on the other side of the city. There was a wager between the two of us- how tough will be Quo Vadis?  The map was folded back into its original folds with great difficulty and put away, for after all we had simply to reach the dargah of Nizamuddin Aulia and anyone would show us the way to mazaar of the greatest of shairs or so we thought. But we, the bhardralok, it seems, live in a world apart. We parked our scooter at the entrance of the dargah but no one was able to tell us where the mazaar- which we were dead sure was only a minute away somewhere –lay. Of course everyone had heard of Ghalib, he had starred in a number of movies. His mazaar was at Agra one lad in skull cap informed us much to the chagrin of our shair. “shakl-o-surat se tum Muslim bachche dikhte ho, itna to urdu shayari ke baare mey maloom hona chahiye...!” he exclaimed. A few steps away, fortunately, we spied a board saying ‘Aiwan-e-Ghalib', and entered its precincts. The mazaar was beside the building, but was locked. By the ‘Government' we were told. Of course we were free to look over the gate and pay our respects.

My friend sadly surveyed the decrepit tomb and the dilapidated structure, vegetation appearing from every crevice. Fali S. Nariman had quoted the ‘huwe mar ke ham jo ruswa' couplet in the petition to the SC. The one uttered then by my pensive friend was just as apt, written by the great shair with foresight and characteristic impishness:

“Ugg raha hai dar-o-deewar pe sabza Ghalib, hum biyabaan me hain aur ghar mey bahar aayi hai!”

Greenery sprouts on the walls, on the doors Ghalib, we trudge in the wilderness and spring it is at home...!

(PS: 1999 vs. 2012: minor changes in style noted, foremost, sun sets over first person singular)

TRAVELNAMA

As a compulsive traveller the author had always at the back of his mind a commitment to write Travelogues with a small ‘t’. The sort Pico Iyer wrote. During the days we sowed our wild oats, that was the only Indian sounding name that made appearance in the credits in the Time magazine. That makes him the only tourer of Indian origin, for Alberuni, Vasco etc. were tourees,he,he,he! Pico Iyer who wrote “ I hadn't realized 'til that day that you travel to stumble into the unvisited corners of yourself.” And:

“we travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate....”

Another favourite travelquote of ours is of course “And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” (T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland)

Thanks to Chabiwala Bank we were air- dropped in ‘arguably’ the most fertile tourist theatre of our vast land. ‘Arguably’ is used by Arnab Goswami and his tribe when he /it is pretty certain that the object of their adulation doesn’t really deserves that superlative. Gives credibility. But then we are pretty confident about OUR claim and are just making a sporting concession to the reader, he,he,he!

No prizes for guessing, we are talking about the North East. Our captive readership, which has exploded by 25%, i.e. gone up from four to five, is expecting our despatch, esp. as our present stint is already 8 months old. However as has been felt in the past, the blogs are getting a shade too long and with the disclosures to be made, it has to be a serieeeee...s of travelogues, sorry pals!

There is a lot to write and the challenge is not to sound like a text book. Or sound like a culture-vulture. But where to begin, because the melting pot of humanity that the country here is, the threads are in a delicious tangle without an end in sight, an end with which to tug at, and unravel the ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. The obvious way is to “Begin at the beginning and go on till you to come to the end: then stop” (King of Hearts to Alice in ‘Wonderland’) mince- to proceed chronologically. But then that would sound like the ‘Holiday Home-work’, middle-school vintage.

We’ll launch by musing about the most fascinating subject- the people- outward appearance, to begin with.

Dad in one of his avatars, the Professor of Econometrics, had absent-mindedly asked one of his freshers “are you from Burma?” to which he received the most deserving rebuke “ no Sir, I am Manipuri, and you people want us to believe we are Indians!” Dad not only apologised ‘profusely’ one supposes, but also thoughtfully warned us against such crass insensitivity, a lesson remembered by us to this day.

Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Mori Gate, Delhi 110006, and not Chowdhary or Choudhuri or Chaudhury, was on the curriculum of Liberty Cinema adda, cited as an example of what cheez an Anglicised Bengali could be, displaying tendencies steadfastly to be avoided by the liberal and progressive Bengali. “How much learning and how little wisdom” Ashok Mitra had remarked about NC. Well, poor chap, he had written extensively about the North Eastern People. There were only three ethnic types in India, Blacks, Browns and Yellows, he had said. He rued the ‘fact’ that the Bengalis had brought the Ahoms, kindred of the Shans of Burma, into the folds of civilisation, and then they turned against the Bengali. “Had they remained the primitives that they were when they came, like the Garos, Nagas, Khasis or Kukis, there certainly would not have been massacres.” (Continent of Circe). Fortunately few now remember NC, but unfortunately the tendency persists in the minds of you-know-who-s. As we have no axe to grind against the North-Easterners, no patronising past, we continue to enjoy our stay here, enjoying the hospitality, and consider ourselves lucky to have become part of the North East, if only briefly.

Nature has been most generous to the North-East and the people have reciprocated. Nowhere else in India have we found stretches of dense teak forests, running hundreds of kilometres. Of course most NE tribes including their educated members, are integrated into living food-chains (mince..ahem..some hunt crows, some hunt sparrows, some pangolins, some dogs etc.) but how can you blame them for that? One man’s meat is another’s poison.... or something.

Apart from the Assamese tribes, we became familiar earliest with the Khasis and the Mizos. We proudly say that we can recognise the Khasis, the Mizos and the Manipuris with ease, but the Assamese flummox us. This is so because the umpteen Assamese tribes have inter-married- amongst themselves and with Bengalis- to a greater extent than the tribes in other parts of NE. Their society is rather like a palimpsest, a papyrus which has been erased and over-written many a time (Pandit Nehru’s idea, not ours). Of course amongst others also there has been lot of ‘fusion’, and the North East seems to be a cauldron of ethnicities. Add to this the fact that any number of non Easterners like Sikhs, Malayalees, Kashmiris have married into matriarchic societies like Khasis and Mizos and have settled in their sasural. Among many tribes like the Khasis, property goes to the youngest daughter. Property in the tribal areas cannot be transferred to non-tribals and if a company incorporated under the Companies Act has to lease it in, there has to be a tribal share-holding.

We, alongwith or without missus travel a lot especially in Meghalaya, Mizoram and to some extent in Manipur, law and order permitting. The Mizos and the Khasis practise Christianity and are highly educated, which you can always expect in areas with Missionary presence. In fact Shillong, heart of Khasi Hills, boasts of some of the finest schooling in India. And then the Mizos are remarkably law abiding, to the letter, to the extent possible. You’ll rarely hear a honking vehicle in Aizawl however the traffic jam, and even the CM’s convoy patiently waits in the traffic without the repulsive sirens whining. Hornless society. And no overtaking at all. Mizos will be very tech-savvy and musical. Lot of guitar carry-ers you see on the streets. Happy-go-lucky, of course. They use the Roman script to write their eponymous language. In fact only three scripts exist in the NE, Bengali (Assamese), Manipuri (Manipuris or Meitei) and for the remaining, Roman. North Easterners are an artistic lot. Handicrafts bring in more than 25% of the States’ Income. Only in Assam have we seen house-maids named Deepanjali or Kalashree. It’s called ‘saundaryabodh’ in Sanskrit.

The Mizos will always address men as ‘Pu’ so-and-so, and women as ‘Pui’ so-and-so. These are the equivalents of ‘Sri’ or ‘Srimati’ and it is considered impolite to pronounce a bald name. Mizoram is the cleanest state one has seen and there are clean loos even in dense forests- mince for people! They are an extremely inward-looking society and tend to be and reticent to begin with, but will readily open up, and after you have earned their confidence, they will bare their minds and emblazoned on it is the bitter truth that in 1966 Mrs. Gandhi had Aizawl bombed! Imagine, bombing your own country! No one else’s! One feels immensely sad. But then take heart, she was a semi-literate who screwed the whole country and some of her near relatives as well, and bumped-off a number of close colleagues and friends. She answered faithfully to the description of the despot by John Dryden : “In friendship false, implacable in hate/Resolved to ruin or to rule the state.”

In pairing, the Mizo youth are quite interesting. On a bike, you invariably see a heterosexual couple, while in Manipur you’ll always see pairs of girls wherever you go, no offence meant!

And the sights, are they glorious! We travelled from Aizawl, clouds beneath us, right to the south-most point, strode the highest peak of Mizoram, the Blue Mountain, and beheld the legendry river, Kolodyne which empties into the Bay of Bengal.

As you know, the seven states owe much of their legal set-up to the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. The Village Durbars and the District Councils do not have too many teeth, but at the informal level, custom favours settlement of disputes by compromise and consensus and people do not favour approaching the Courts.

But as has been noted widely, today you’ll find a sophisticated class of North Easterners, qualified and well-heeled, studying or serving and administering a growing number of establishments all over the country.

We keep watching for evidence, if any, of ‘sanskritisation’ in various walks of social life. One observation with which missus agreed, concerns the ‘mekhala’, the two piece women’s attire, the lower being a wrapper 4-5 feet long, the upper piece a kind of drape. The fabric of both is identical, but traditionally both pieces had different patterns. The wrapper will invariably have horizontal stripes in Manipur. However naturally, if both the pieces have the same pattern, it gives the illusion of being a saree. Increasingly, you will find women adopting the common-pattern style, and now they look like any other saree-wearer on the sub-continent.

Assam Mekhala

Sanskritised Mekhala

About feminine beauty and fashions, on the oh-ther side!

Tail-piece:

A verse by Charwak, the heretical philosopher-sage, easy to understand:

Yawat jeewet, sukham jeewet, runam krutwa ghrutam (*) peewet,

Bhawati bhasma bhutaani, punaragamanam kuta?!

"Live merrily, so long as you live, borrow to savour ghee (not liquour haan!). For, it’s all going to end up in ashes, and there is no coming back!"