Response to the topic for a blog magazine: Encountering the Other in Language/Place
The ‘other’ in place and language pre-supposes that place and language are located. To me they are not. I am often asked which language is my mother tongue. The answer is: I do not know. I was born in Rourkela, Orissa to Punjabi Sikh parents. My parents fought in Punjabi. My friends in the street played in Hindi. Our maids talked in Oriya. My school was in English. Each of those languages became part of my linguistic expression and experience. I laugh in English, feel sad in Hindi, count in Punjabi, and Oriya soothes my ears. As for the next question: where are you from? I again do not have an answer: as I said, I was born in a town whose official history started with a post-Independence steel plant and I have left a lot of places since then – Rourkela, Dehradun, Rajpura, Kapurthala, Bhilai, Hyderabad, Bangalore. Two of these cities have belonged to different states in my lifetime. Being dislocated and not being owned by a language, I have a self that is less defined by external markers and my obvious affection towards them. If all that I am not is the ‘other’ then, to make sense of living is, I need to find my ‘self’ and to confront my prejudices. To do so, I struggle with language and feel at home in the open pages of my drafts.
About a decade ago, I asked myself if my exploration of self would not best start by exploring my own family. I sought to write about my mother’s mental illness, about the care I received from our maid. Though my mother was my subject, I could not and did not want to be completely objective and clinical about her. In fact, the success of Sepia Leaves comes from it not being a cold, objective study of madness but by its being a warm, involved, subjective look at the situation in a family living under the shadow of Schizophrenia. It also posits the fact that a surrogate mother, the maid, actually connects the little boy to the world.
I said above that Rourkela’s objective history began with the construction of the Steeel Plant. That is how we construct our history as a nation – objectively. The reality is that the land for the Steel Plant was acquired from the tribals living in the region for generations, for hundreds of years. These tribals were uprooted, sent to the margins of the new town, made untouchable by the Nehruvian ‘temples of modern India’. Then when there is a crises in a family in this experimental nuclear society whose constituents have migrated from across the new nation, where one does not share culture or language with one’s neighbours, it is the tribal maid who comes to assist the young boy grow up. How can then there be an other in it? The othering is in our minds, in the language we employ, in the tools we use to sharpen our understanding and by which we miss out on the essential truths of the situation.
It becomes trickier in my next book Roll of Honour (due to be published September 2012). That is a story of split loyalties of an adolescent Sikh boy, studying in a military school during the wave of Khalistan, in the year 1984. The story deals with militancy at the national/state level and power hierarchies within school systems, and also with bullying and sexuality. The difficulty in writing Roll of Honour is dual:
a) The fact that the life at school is a sub-culture and almost complete in itself with hardly any reference to markers outside the school walls. It has its own system of punishments and rewards and valourizes its own notions of honour and disgrace.
b) That the language of the school is English but the language among students in a strange mix of Punjabi and their own code of speaking in which words are used more as tokens and less for what they inherently mean: cusswords which perpetuate and respond to a host of power equations.
The othering happens when I try to tell the story of an essentially rustic Punjabi experience in the English language. English is a language that the students learnt from textbooks and not from their environments. Each day of the last several years when I failed to articulate the angst of the protagonist I felt my own self was othering me, othering my understanding of what had happened.
One can write about the school as travelers wrote about Asia and Africa a few centuries ago by painting it in their own point of view, by orientalizing it. But here the storyteller is a native, himself not unfamiliar with what seems bizarre to an outsider. To write about a sub-group the writer needs to access what is being discussed within the sub-group in the language of the sub-group. If one chooses to access it like an erstwhile foreigner would to India or a grouping in India, the knowledge would remain that much bland. But if one wants to really access it, one learns to make it part of oneself, become a subject, and not objectify it. Quite like shop assistants in shoe shops all over Lajpat Nagar Central Market have their own unique register in which they fix prices for the shoes we buy. I remember the grain merchants from my childhood speak amongst themselves in a different language than what they used with the farmers who brought the grain. These language and registers are inherent in sub-groups which can extent to neighbourhoods, towns, cities, states, nations and also to religions, sects, businesses, occupations.
The only way I found out of it was to paint the picture as simply as I could. Use English not for its flamboyance or floweriness but for its ability to say less but to convey the essential. Whether it works or not depends upon the reception the book receives and how I feel just when the edits are over and it is going into print. That is when I will know if I could finally diminish or even erase my own sense of otherness from my own sense of self. I will know if I could move beyond dualities towards oneness and yet tell the story of the drama in the human heart.
Tags: Langauage, Other, Roll of Honour, Sepia Leaves
I have adored Ryszard Kapuscinski for years. Last summer I got a chance to visit Warsaw. I wanted to walk the streets Kapuscinski would have walked and sit in empty classrooms where he would have once taught. But surprise awaits the traveler. Lidia Puka helped me meet Mrs Alicja Kapuscinska and visit Kapuscinski’s study. Here is the interview. Read, enjoy!
Tags: Ryszard Kapuscinski
A few weeks back I found many of my Sikh friends abroad protesting against the would be hanging of Balwant Singh Rajoana. Then the media was full of news. His sentence was deferred and the media went silent on the issue. I traveled to Balwant Singh’s village to learn about the man. The article in two parts:
Tags: 1984, assasination, militants, Punjab, Rajoana
when I started reading Rhythms of Darkness by Anjana Basu it seemed it would follow the life of a politician who has come into power recently but it did not. However, it did more, showed me how Maoism thrives in the Realpolitik. See review here.
Tags: Anjana Basu, Bengal, Calcutta, Maoism, Rhythms of Darkness
I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in Summer 2011 and put up pictures on Facebook. See this. A few weeks back Tisha Srivastav asked for the pictures and a write up and placed them on Yahoo! India. The story was a lead story for a while.
Tags: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland
Jeet Thayil is a famous poet and now he has a new book of fiction to his credit. There are a number of books on Bombay, or its underside, but I have never heard a voice like his expose the city. Read the review of Narcopolis here.
Tags: Bombay, Indian poet, Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis
Vidya Rao has many personas: Thumri-Dadra singer, theatre person, scholar, editor and above all an extremely sensitive human being. It is in her tribute to her Guru that she brings all these qualities together. Heart to Heart: Remembering Nainaji captures the texture of Vidya’s relationship with the legendry singer Naina Devi who was born Nilina Sen in a Bengali Brahmo Samaj reformist family and then married the heir to the throne of Kapurthala Rajkumar Ripjit Singh. Through her seventeen year married life Naina Devi gave up singing. Upon the untimely demise of her husband, facing extreme economic hardship, Naina Devi returned back to music on All India Radio and later as administrator and teacher.
At the book launch Vidya said that she had structured the book as a Thumri. The beginning and ending is not as important as the disciple’s memory of instances and the thoughts on the events from their shared life. For instance, how Vidya portrays a whole gamut of musical threads and inspirations in the fact that Nainaji does not tie the ganda, the sacred thread of a musical inheritance and legitimacy, on Vidya’s wrist or how Vidya depicts Naina Devi’s spiritual leaning and the devotion to the Pir in Bareilly. It is through many such instances that Vidya constructs the gender argument of music.
One of the revelations of the book is how Vidya traces the history of what is considered a lighter form of music – the Thumri. She traces the history through generations and historical events. Here is an instance I found particularly striking:
…while all artists confront the paradox of the aesthetic and the erotic, perhaps for women this is experienced in a particularly poignant way. For the woman singer, for the thumri singer, there is always the memory of the tawaif. The tawaif performs for an audience, revels in their admiration and applause, is thrilled by a responsive audience, speaks to each person, directly, completely without barriers, seduces each one, insists that each person, for the brief lifetime of the performance, falls irrevocably in love with her who is a nayika. Yet she sings for no one…
The beauty of the book lies in the fact that Vidya has talked about music, the history of music, the role of an important singer and of how she learnt music from the singer in a way that makes sense to a layman like me. It is how she seamlessly weaves history with genres with personalities and with lyrics that the book comes alive. Through it all what really shines forth is how she depicts the value and importance of that ancient system of education: the Guru-Shishya tradition. Not only in her relationship with Naina Devi but also in Naina Devi’s relationship with Rasoolan Bai and with so many other pearls that adorn Naina Devi’s crown. My only regret is that such an important book is too short. I wish Vidya writes more and brings more music appreciation to us.
Publisher: HarperCollins
Price: Rs 199
Pages: 146
Tags: Hindustani, Naina Devi, Thumri, Vidya Rao
I admired Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Gabriel Club. Partly because, like him, I too am a steel town boy who loved Central Europe and the way Joydeep brought the Danube in Budapest to life. Of course, I am nowhere close to his reading of philosophy. His next book on Morocco is different. Here is the review of The Storyteller of Marrakesh.
Rosalia Scalia, writer and columnist from Baltimore, US interviewed me a few weeks back and Mr Sher Singh from sikhchic.com has carried the extensive interview on their website. Please click here to read. Suggest, please comment. Either here on the parent website.
Wish all a prosperous New Year 2012. May you succeed in your dreams.
A few episodes at a psychiatric hospital in Ludhiana.
I was leaning against a door looking into the male ward. The young man on a bed, about sixteen years old, had just thrown away the drip administered into his arm. The cannula had ruptured and he was bleeding. Drop by drop, the white bed sheet was turning red. The nurse was trying to calm him, adjust the catheter. When she was leaving the room I asked, ‘What is wrong with him?’ She answered, ‘Not eating anything.’
The young man wanted to skip a ritual. A ritual that we don’t allow each other to skip. The ritual of eating. A hungry he would, on being given energy fluids, find ways of throwing away the feeding mechanism. As the nurse moved away, the young man tried to sit up in bed. Weak, he collapsed again. The society, the legal system, the public opinion, are all tilted in favour of fulfilling the ritual. The society demands that the young man give a coherent explanation on why he does not want to eat. Until then, we try to feed him, try to make him ‘see’ sense.
While we try to make him see ‘sense’, he also sees us. Like did another man who approached me while I was still standing at the door. A 40-ish Sikh man with an open beard. His tummy swollen. He reaches near my face, almost whispers in my ear, ‘You look familiar.’ I think to myself, ‘I have lived in your head a long long time.’ I asked him why his tummy was swollen. He says, ‘One week. I have not gone to toilet.’ I ask him to go to the medical counter opposite the ward and ask for a tablet to relive constipation. ‘Go get it. I am watching over you,’ I said.
He goes, gets the tablet. When he is ready with an open bottle of water and tablet in another hand, he looks at me. It is a ritual. In the hospital he takes tablets every few hours. He might be taking tablets every few hours even when he is not in the hospital. Who knows whether he has a home or if he lives on the streets or in a Gurdwara. I do not know him. Standing at that door, I am watching him. Our eyes meet. We both smile, add a personal touch to the ritual.
Another man sees us smiling at each other. In white kurta pyjama, his hair well trimmed, he must be around 65 years old. He holds my hand. ‘When I came here 2 weeks ago I was insisting that they give me something that would kill me.’ He wanted to end another ritual: of living. ‘And now?’ I asked. ‘Now I want to go home. Come to my room.’ We sit on cots across each other. The light is off, it is dark, we can barely see silhouettes. He counts all the times he takes food and all the tablets per dosages. Rituals. ‘Do you feel better Baba?’ I ask. He answers, ‘Yes.’ I will go home and pray. He is ready for another ritual. ‘Oh! I forgot to switch on the light,’ he says, and puts on the tube-light. I touch his feet, he pats my head. I leave him in his lit room.
Tags: psychiatry