Self, Sardarjis, Madrasis & Bollywood - Part 1
Since I want to cover some ideas regarding the Indian identity etc, as I understand them through my personal experiences, I will be writing this post in two or three parts.
So I was huffing up a hill during my daily run, and suddenly, for no particular reason, I remembered a snapshot from my childhood: of sitting on a charpoy with a Sikh, as I was straining at my still limited fund of second or third grade CBSE Hindi to understand his Punjabi inflected speech. You see, in what was then a lower middle class Hyderabadi neighborhood in my childhood, home owners, including my parents, usually let out a part of their house to strangers to supplement their incomes with rents. And this transitory sardarji (how I wish I remembered his name) was a tenant in a single room in the house across the gali - a warren of rooms that was not discriminatory towards who stayed in them as long as they could pay.
My father, who had picked up Hindi in the course of working as a foreman in construction and subsequently in his secretarial study, was quite curious about, and perhaps sympathetic to, this saradarji, who was obviously quite far from his native grounds. So I was encouraged to converse with him; I suppose to improve my Hindi. I don't remember what I might have said to him, and what he might have replied. I even don't recall his facial features, other than that he was powerfully built (for a while I think he was the "gurkha" or night watchman for our half empty colony, which then lay at the fringe of a sleepy city), and very “fair”. (Yes, at a young age a skin color chart is injected into the Indian child)
Soon after he left that house, I think, to take up the job of trucker, leaving in my head these amorphous memories of a man with a steel bangle, long hair, and a beard; who lounged on a charpoy in the open during Sunday afternoons; who ate thick rotis* ; and who perhaps was lonely enough to attempt to communicate with a nerdy boy who couldn’t understand him.
*Rotis/ chapattis/ pulkas played a part in defining my identity vis-à-vis those of my cousins who were (and are) more deeply wedded to their regional & caste markers; they held that rotis were essentially foreign (even Turka, i.e., Muslim) food for South Indians ate rice in their meals, and by incorporating them into our meals, our family had become ‘contaminated’ in some sense. It didn’t help that the Telugu I and my sister grew up speaking had many elements of the the Telengana and Hyderabadi dialect. No wonder, in the recent state elections, a Telengana secessionist party won a considerable number of seats to the AP assembly, on a plank of overcoming "costal" dominance, and creating a seperate state a la Jharkhand or Uttaranchal.
My Daily Notes
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Great Game Shadows: Subcontinental Nukes
After nearly a week of self imposed embargo on death and mayhem, I decided to take a look at the news again while eating lunch today. The first thing I stumbled upon is this Guardian article, which says that Pakistan is building a 1,000MW reactor that is capable of generating more than 200kg (440lbs) of weapons-grade plutonium per year. Yippee General M! What a way to go. Pliss be sending me a kilo in mail around Id for cheering you.
I am now not as anti-nukes as I was before; I have come to believe that in the geo-political jungle, a plutonium tipped spear is a good thing for a "non-dope smoking" pigmy man or woman to have, even though I recognize the fact that to define who is stoned vs. who is not, will always be semantically challenging. But pyare subcontinental bhaiyon, aren't the 50-100 odd nuke tipped "bamboos" we each have enough already for our MADness, i.e., Mutually Assured Destruction-ness, under a nice warm mushroom cloud blankey? I guess not. But then there might be another possibility, yes that of the dreaded "Videshi Haath" aka Foreign Hand:
"There is speculation in Delhi that the new plant may be a fresh sign of China's commitment to a "strategic partnership" with Pakistan. The pair already have extensive military and diplomatic ties.
"China has supported Pakistan since the 80s and it remains the wild card here," Commodore Bhaskar said. "At the time of the Indo-US deal, there were clear indications that Beijing thought if Washington can assist India, China can aid Pakistan.""
So are we now just pawns-boys in Uncle Sam and Bhai Mao's - pedophiles both I tell you, so watch out - chess (or mahjongg, checkers etc) games?
My Daily Notes
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Neruda's Passage To India
I first discovered the poetry of Pablo Neruda in 2001. How I precisely came into the shade of his beautiful words I have forgotten. But I suppose it has something to do with love; more precisely I needed words to express things to a girl I was involved with then. So like countless other young people who have come under that Great Chilean’s spell, I religiously acquired and imbibed poems from “Twenty Love Poems & A Song of Despair” and “100 Love Sonnets”.
I read them to the girl; I was even was foolish enough to write some verses, as they say under the influence. And as is expected, those poems were insufficient as threads (not to mention as real breathing poems), and that threadbare love didn’t last. Perhaps this was because instead of a hundred poems I only managed to write a fistful of them in those early months of winter, and that boat was too porous to sail the stormy sea of uncertainty. But Neruda has stayed with me like a talisman. I read somewhere every dire experience is like the revelation of a new passage of the Minotaur’s maze at whose center the soul waits. Neruda then is that durable passage that ‘laughable’ love wrought, which I traverse through as I read his books, especially his “Elemental Odes”, whenever either the world or the word seems to have become too gloomy.
...
Then few days ago, looking at some photographs of the monsoons in India reminded me of a passage from Neruda’s Memoirs describing the southern rain of his Chilean childhood. So I took down the book, and started looking it again. I saw that I had previously made notes on Neruda’s sojourn as a Chilean consular officer in the colonial subcontinent: Burma, India, Sri Lanka, and Java. This was when I decided to look into the question: what was Neruda’s passage to India like? How did he experience it? How did it impact him as a poet? In what fashion did the “Orient” seep into him?
The Britannica Encyclopedia on this period in Neruda’s biography:
“Yet his poetry was not a steady source of income, so he translated hastily from several languages and published magazine and newspaper articles. Neruda's future looked uncertain without a steady job, so he managed to get himself appointed honorary consul to Rangoon in Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar). For the next five years he represented his country in Asia. He continued to live in abject poverty, however, since as honorary consul he received no salary, and he was tormented by loneliness.
From Rangoon Neruda moved to Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He increasingly came to identify with the South Asian masses, who were heirs to ancient cultures but were downtrodden by poverty, colonial rule, and political oppression. It was during these years in Asia that he wrote Residencia en la tierra, 1925-1931 (1933; Residence on Earth). In this book Neruda moves beyond the lucid, conventional lyricism of Twenty Love Poems, abandoning normal syntax, rhyme, and stanzaic organization to create a highly personalized poetic technique. His personal and collective anguish gives rise to nightmarish visions of disintegration, chaos, decay, and death that he recorded in a cryptic, difficult style inspired by Surrealism. These puzzling and mysterious poems both attract and repel the reader with the powerful and awe-inspiring vision they present of a modern descent into hell.
In 1930 Neruda was named consul in Batavia (modern Jakarta), which was then the capital of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). There he fell in love with a Dutch woman, Maria Antonieta Hagenaar, and married her. In 1932 Neruda returned to Chile, but he still could not earn a living from his poetry.”
In a subsequent Paris Review interview (pdf file), Neruda when questioned as to what he remembered most from your years in India, replied,
“My stay there was an encounter I wasn’t prepared for. The splendor of that unfamiliar continent overwhelmed me, and yet I felt desperate, because by my life and my solitude were so long. Sometimes I seem locked into a Technicolor picture – a marvelous movie, but one I wasn’t allowed to leave. I never experienced the mysticism which guided so many South Americans and other foreigners in India; people who go to India in search of a religious answer to their anxieties see things in a different way. As for me, I was profoundly moved by the sociological conditions – that immense unarmed nation, so defenseless, bound by its imperial yoke. Even the English culture for which I had a great predilection, seemed hateful to me for being the instrument of the intellectual submission of so many Hindus at that time, I mixed with the rebellious young people of that continent; in spite of my consular post, I got to know all the revolutionaries – those in the great movement that eventually brought about independence.”
Also later in the interview when questioned in he wrote Residence when in India, Neruda revealingly added, “Yes, though India had very little intellectual influence on my poetry.”
to be continued
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