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

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.

Review of Rahul Pandita’s book on Maoism Hello Bastar. Please read it, we need to read these books, understand what is going on …

Dear Bhopal,

I know I have not been around but I have heard your story. I have seen it umpteen times in print and on TV. I have known the figures (15000 plus) dead and I have known that at least two generations of children born in and around Bhopal suffer from congenital diseases. I have known that the water in the bore wells outside Bhopal is contaminated. I have read books on Bhopal.  There is a lot more but I can’t recount.

I am after all an average bloke trying to earn a livelihood. After all no one from my direct family suffered the gas leak on the night of Dec 2, 1984. I empathize with the victims but try to avoid them when they protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. They carry posters and banners. The cry hoarse. Their voices choke. Here there are mothers who have lost their children. There are daughters who have lost their fathers. There is someone there who has lost something. I am trying to build my life, I do not want to loose my chance at it. I take care of myself. I eat well, exercise, swim, work hard, and so on. After all if I have good health and some wealth, I will have a long life. But how will i protect myself from the air? The Gas leaked out and people died. As simple as that.

At the entrance to Jungpura from Hospital Road, Ram Jagrit Lal stands under a mud coloured tarpaulin behind a red cart. He used to be our neighbourhood’s favourite cigarette-walla. Then the police struck, owing to the Saint Paul school nearby he went out of business. “I will be back Sa’ab, just one or two days’, he assured all his customers those days, six months ago.

He stayed unshaven, unkempt. He did not know what had hit him. He would park his old grey Bajaj Chetak scooter near the stall, its glove compartment shut but not locked. On being asked for a cigarette he would dip his hand in and quickly pass out the pack, pocket the money without counting. All of this sneakily, not wanting the police constable to notice.

‘Why do you not shift 100 meters away?’ I asked him.

‘I have paid for this place.’

‘Paid whom?’

‘Government. They gave me this place for bijness.’

‘Government?’

‘Yes I paid tax. In the MCD. I make regular payment.’

‘And police?’

‘They too.’ He did not pay the government any tax. He paid someone a bribe in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi but he did not care to know the difference. It was money gone.

‘So won’t they give you a new stand?’ He shrugs his tired shoulders. ‘What will you do now?’

‘Kuch karenge Sa’ab. This business was wrong. Even I don’t smoke. How can I sell poison?’

The two days stretched. I stopped going to him. The local, bigger, store started stacking cigarettes. It’s owner remarked, ‘Ram ji’s customers come to us. I feel sorry for him. But my business has picked up.’

Ram ji kept his place but changed his business. He started keeping a stove and a pan. ‘I will make tea,’ he said with a smile. But he still looked haggard. His tea too was no match to Mahender, the guy on the other side on Mosque Road or even the Chottu at the auto-stand. Ram ji’s son too stopped coming to the shop. A few months later, when I passed by his stall I waved to him. He looked much better, a clean shirt, hair combed. That evening I went up to him for a glass of tea. Just for old times sake.

His tea was so different! It smelled of cardamom, tasted of ginger. He looked at me and smiled. ‘Sa’ab, I had never made tea in my home. How could I make it here? But I learnt. Now tell me, how is it?’ It was the best tea on the street. Why? It is one of the finer teas I have tasted.

‘So, do people come now?’

‘Yes, they are coming back. See me in the winters.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Bring in an angeethi (mud fireplace), a mud vessel to boil the milk, even mud cups for tea.’

‘Aha?’

‘Yes, once one has four people standing near the angeethi in the cold, others will automatically come.’ He says assured. His business is picking up. ‘No wastage of milk now’.

For those of us who seek to understand what happened to the kind of writing that Munshi Prem Chand and Mulk Raj Anand did, and that nourished and stirred us, but has faded away, Mere Hisse Ke Roshnai (Hindi) is an essential read. That was a kind of writing which provoked us into action because it advocated equality and attacked social injustice and backwardness. The style was important, but the message was more important, and the writer was always less important than the book.

We remember our Godaan, Adha Gaon, Rasidi Ticket, and ‘woh intezaar tha jiska yeh woh seher to nahin‘ (This is not the dawn we longed for). That was when branding hadn’t defined the business. In fact, writing itself was not a business. Ideas and writing were a way of life around the time of Indian independence and for a few decades after that. The writers sought meaning, not jazz (based on Bulbul’s feedback I recognise that I used the wrong word, so read as: hype or mere publicity).

Mere Hisse Ke Roshnai is part memoir, part character-sketch of the founder of the Progressive Writer’s Movement (most Hindi, Urdu, Bengali writers of the times belonged to the group) the Marxist thinker and writer Sajjad Zaheer (Bannay Mian) and the famous Urdu short story writer Razia Zaheer by their youngest daughter Noor Zaheer.

In a long time I have not laughed as hard in the beginning or middles of the chapters of a book and not cried as I did towards the end of each chapter. Sajjad and Razia Zaheer were pillars of the movement which created a plethora of good writing in India in the last century. Sajjad Zaheer was also a major force within the Communist Party of India before it split into two. Sajjad Zaheer even went to prison and was awarded the death sentence, later commuted and then freed, in the famous Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case 1951 (when the Pakistani Army planned a coup against the PM of Pakistan Liaqat Ali Khan).

Noor brings to us anecdote after anecdote from their lives that were suffused with humanity. Such that though one knows these people were towering individuals who had a huge public persona but what comes across is the simplicity of their being human beings first. What stood out to me were their views on religion: Sajjad did not believe in a God and Razia believed in Khuda but dreamt of Saraswati. Their devotion to the movement. Sajjad’s role in the Shimla Agreement in which he prompted Bhutto to participate and the sad erosion of the house in Lucknow where the movement started in 1936 (Wazir Manzil).

My only complaint with Noor is that the book is too brief. Yet, one can see that every step of those tall individuals, Sajjad and Razia, is possibly fraught with critiques and arguments and counter-arguments. They inked a lot of lives beyond the confines of a family, in fact for them the world was a family. In the face of which a daughter has done her best to bring about a humane and personal perspective on her parents. I strongly recommend this book to gain a historical view on the writing we dish out today where Page 3 appearances and 5-star Hotel launch parties seem to be more important than the books and the readings. Notice, India is much more literate today than in the 50s and can read more meaningfully but have we moved beyond the need to write about the serious flaws we still live with, in an unequal society?

Paramita Ghosh from Hindustan Times wrote a well rounded piece on a memoirs being written by Indian novelists. Felt glad to notice that Rupa and Co would publish Roll of Honour by end of this year. It is a story of split loyalties of a Sikh boy in a military boarding school during the Khalistan movement. See more here …