Touchstones: Pant, Lungi, dhoti, salwar
The other day, a reader sent me a funny post about the huge amount paid to Rishabh Pant (Rs 27 crore) while the South African cricketer, Lungi Ngidi, was paid a mere Rs 1 crore as franchise fees. The bottomline said, ‘Knew that a Pant is costlier than a Lungi. But didn’t know that it is 27 times costlier!’
My maiden name was Pant too, and then another funny episode came to my mind. I must have been about 11 years old and studying in Nainital. In those days, the production quality of our Hindi textbooks was pathetic and the broken line sketch accompanying a poem by the poet Sumitranandan Pant in my textbook made it difficult to make out the contours of the poet’s face. Also, I had inherited my textbook from an older cousin (as was the custom in those frugal days), who had added lavish flourishes to the picture: so, earrings hung from poor Pantji’s ears, a bindi adorned his forehead and a nath dangled from his nose. The poet also proudly sported long, curled locks so I had a gender-baffling portrait of this famous Romantic (chhayavadi) poet in front of me.
Our Hindi teacher, who knew my mother was a writer, asked me one day: ‘Ira, are you related to Sumitranandan Pant?’ I looked at that funny picture, and since his name was Sumitranandan, assumed foolishly that it must be that of a woman. ‘Yes,’ I replied airily, ‘she is my aunt.’ For years after that, that teacher would ask me, ‘So, how is your aunt, Ira?’ and I would blush. Funny as it seems today, it is a reminder of how privileged we were to know the literary fraternity of Allahabad, where our family went after Nainital. Allahabad in the 1960s was where some of the most iconic Hindi writers and poets lived. Periodically, they would gather at someone’s house for a sahityik goshti (literary soiree) and discuss their work to each other. Many young and aspiring writers joined such sittings to read out their work and have it critiqued and assessed by such eminent names.
Their modest lives and mutual respect are a distinct memory and something to remember in these times when every young writer wants to write a bestseller, and make a pile of money by selling it to a big publisher. There are actually agencies now that offer their services (at a huge cost, naturally) for editing (and often re-writing the original work), marketing and ensuring high visibility. I suppose these are a sign of our fiercely competitive times for I see such hustling everywhere. In films, music and the performing arts, the shy, self-effacing person stands no chance. The hype created by this ecosystem has seriously damaged creativity in most spheres and many ‘outstanding’ first performers and writers sink without a trace soon enough.
In contrast, the place occupied by an older generation is beyond all this. Whether writers, lyricists, poets or artists, their reputation has been built over time and reading or listening to their work is a perennial pleasure. Related to this is another concern and that is our dismissal of anything that is not written in English. The wealth of talent that exists in our regional languages is something I have written about earlier and now with good translations, I hope this trend will hold. The enormous popularity of Tamil and Telugu cinema is an example of how subtitling or dubbing into Hindi makes it possible for viewers to open their eyes to a new world and genre.
The most visible proof of this is our English language media that had, until quite recently, occupied prime time space. Regional language newspapers and local broadsheets were considered beneath their notice and something that was bought by the sahib log for their staff. The shoe is on the other foot now: our mainstream English media gets left behind, for, the regional language media far outstrips these old ladies of Bori Bunder where advertising is concerned. Look at our Parliament, the glib English speakers who wear expensive handloom and flash designer bags and glasses, grab all the media attention. Most of them are inheritors or dynasts and patnis, crorepatis who look disdainfully when one of the Hindi-medium type (or non-English speaker) gets up to speak. Such class snobbery is more crippling than caste snobbery in an earlier time, but equally disgusting. The rising number of such entitled parliamentarians makes it difficult to imagine that we will see a truly representative House one day. We have birthed a kind of feudal democratic system where the rich and powerful have an unfair advantage when it comes to getting elected. We all complain of the astronomical sums needed to fund an election, yet no one wants to clean up the system.
However, I am an eternal optimist and hope that just as our sports arena is now increasingly looking at merit and talent-spotting, our political parties too will throw out all those who swan into our Parliament only because they were born into a powerful family. The recent state elections have revealed that money and muscle power pale in front of other social factors, such as rural voters and women. These are early precursors of a change that is bound to happen and must.
Pant and Lungi may be subjects of a clever wordplay, but watch out for the dhoti and salwar.
— The writer is a social commentator
