The homecoming
By Chanchal Sarkar

IT has become compulsory, every day, to curse the growing degradation of Delhi: Its atmosphere, traffic and the swelling population. But there is a silver streak. Despite the curses there is a flowering of cultural life and a surfacing of talent that grows every year.

The Durga Puja has always been a great patron of the arts, particularly of theatre, jatra, vocal music and the film. Much of it is amateur, the men and women who get together for a community Durga Puja stage plays, for instance. But the professionals and semi-professionals are also on the upward rise and it is the performance by one such that I enjoyed enormously at the Habitat Centre.

In the Durga lore is the story that young Durga, at the age of eight, was married off to a much older Shiva who was addicted to bhang, frequented cremation grounds and was a bit of a vagabond. The Puja is the season for married daughters to come home and Durga (who has many other names like Uma, Annapoorna, Gouri etc) is yearningly remembered by her mother Menaka who has not seen her for many years and entreats her husband, King Giriraj, to go and bring Uma home for the days of the Puja. He doesn’t like Shiva at all and is unwilling to go but Menaka keeps after him till he agrees. So after years Uma (Durga), now a mother of four, comes for a tearful and joyous reunion with her mother. Alas it is only for three days and Shiva who arrived to take her back refused; to let her stay longer.

This story used to be enacted in Bengal’s villages through what is called the Kathokatha where one narrator enacted the whole story with songs, dialogue, explanation and dance. The name of this form of drama is Agomoni (the Coming).

For the habitat programme the narrator (Kathak) was Ashish Ghosh who teaches in a Delhi college. He took all the parts, now the distressed Menaka, now the reluctant Giriraj, now Durga in her home in Mount Kailash, now Shiva obstinate but very fond of his wife, now Durga’s old friends and neighbours who have come to take part in her homecoming, and now Durga herself who has become Dasabhuja, with the strength of ten.

It was a masterly performance with the very minimum of props and with four accompanists, one a percussionist, one with a harmonium and one with esraj. Habitat has lights and they were used well. When Kathokathia Agomoni originated in the villages there are no props or lights — the very moving story is all. Even in the sophisticated Habitat I saw many eyes streaming with tears as Ashish sang and told the story of Uma’s homecoming.

I couldn’t help thinking that if this were in Europe, America or Japan someone like Ashish would earn much fame and wealth. Here it is Bollywood that brings in the gold. Given financial support the Kathokatha mode could be used for my stories about social problems. In fact Ashish has dedicated his Agomoni to preventing children — like Uma — being married off at eight!

Buddhism in India

Very saddening in Indian history has been the waning of Buddhism in India and the disappearance of the Buddha and his teaching from our people. Yet Swami Vivekananda has described himself as: I am the servant of the servants of the servants of the Buddha."

The departure of Buddhism has also meant the severance of our ties with South, South East and East Asia. For the people of the countries there their ties with the Buddha and the areas where he walked are intense. The number of pilgrims who come and visit the places sacred to the Buddha is very large. Our own arrangements for such pilgrims are not so good so nowadays they make their own. A Thai friend of mine once described to me a large pilgrim delegation of which she was a part. The arrangements were honed to a fineness. In places like Bodhgaya, Kusinagar, Rajagriha, Lumbini and such others countries like Japan, Thailand and Tibet have built excellent pilgrims’ rests.

These thoughts came to mind while reading a journal called Seeds of Peace published from Thailand by a progressive Buddhist group. From it one gets an idea of the concern of the Buddhists with contemporary issues, of the criticism of the role of the Buddhist sanghas when they are inactive and with the training of nuns and priests.

The publisher of the Seeds of Peace, Sulak Sivaraksha, is a Thai who has been a stormy petrel in Thai Buddhist life. Sulak has been a very strong critic of the Buddhist Sangha, as a body indifferent to the lack of discipline among some Buddhist monks and the commercialisation of some monasteries.

One of the most moving of the pieces in Seeds of Peace, is the account of a peripatetic seminar for Buddhist nuns held in Sri Lanka with participants from Ladakh, Bhutan, Thailand, Cambodia, Taiwan and Sri Lanka.

Most interesting was it to learn that from Vietnam and Burma permission is not given for nuns to travel abroad. In Bhutan there is no arrangement to teach nuns and the few there have to go to Dharamsala. Things are compartively free in Taiwan. There are 10,000 nuns in Thailand but they are given no recognition. Ordination at a high level of nuns from Sri Lanka has still to be done at Bodhgaya. I don’t know what, if any, arrangements there are for those Indians who want to be Buddhist nuns. Sri Lanka has several training institutes and nunneries and nuns there number about 4,000.

The 23 nuns at the seminar were from six countries and from all the three schools of Buddhism — Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana. Their discussion of their problems, the exchange of experience, their thoughts on what they could do for society added up to a most touching and interesting account.

Money ill-spent

Why don’t people complain about being made the catspaw of the media bigshots? During every election we get the same television format only we now have some half-a-dozen channels doling out the same fare. What a waste of resources and communication facilities. How many people, how many of the 75 per cent of the population who live in the villages, have television and how many of them would understand the gobbledegook that the so called psephologists and commentators talk? How many are interested in swings, vote shares and in the reason why the Samajwadi Party made a killing and why Subramaniam Swamy lost his deposit? It is all most unsatisfactory; the owners of channels and the planner of the election programmes are duping us and making money from the advertisers.