Simple lessons learnt well
I am writing this column days after the momentous US presidential election results. Enough has been written about them for us to be able to see the deep fault lines between the ‘woke’, left-leaning academic elite and the rest of middle-class America. I am, perhaps, not the only Indian who sees a similar divide here between our two main political groupings.
So, let me make this more personal. Our family moved to Allahabad in 1963 from Nainital, and it seemed to us hillbillies like no other town we knew. Perhaps, this was because we saw and savoured many new sights and sounds in a ‘big city’ for the first time. Vegetables such as tinda (which I first thought were raw tomatoes), parval and kundru were discoveries to us simple pahari folk nourished on greens, radish and many varieties of gobhi till then. This was also the time when I became aware that as a young girl, there were certain places that were never to be visited because these were ‘unsafe’. Large swathes of the city areas with evocative names — Muthiganj, Alopi Bagh, Attarsuiya — were declared out of bounds, so that we spent years in Allahabad without ever going there. Once, during the 1966 Kumbh Mela, my two older sisters and I were allowed to go all alone to spend a night at the camp of the mela officer (an uncle). Moving unescorted among the crowds late in the night, bathing in the Ganga the next morning and changing into dry clothes in full public view was the closest we ever came to skinny-dipping and flashing, I think. How we savoured every moment of freedom because it was so hard to wrest from parents who guarded their daughters like gold!
Perhaps, the greatest lesson we all received was to deal creatively with boredom. One of these was writing letters to each other. My friend Harini and I wrote to each other every week after her parents were transferred to another town. Often, we had to use three envelopes because there were too many sheets to stuff into one or two. We had also devised a code so that no one could decipher our secrets. I think that was my first lesson in creative writing.
The 1950s and 1960s were the years of my childhood and girlhood, so naturally nostalgia makes me look back at them fondly, erasing the unhappiness and the misery that was also so much a part of growing up in small towns. Our lives were light years from what happened in the metros. For instance, we only heard of the Beatles and Flower Children: to us in our small towns, these were a large generic lot called ‘Hippies’. For years after, perhaps, even now, in small-town India, the word ‘hippie’ denotes an evolutionary stage of being that is just above the cockroach.
We went to English-medium schools but led Hindi-medium lives at home. Then, this was a fact that we hid from our posh, Anglicised schoolmates: today it is something that I am profoundly grateful for. We read ‘Chandamama’ and ‘Parag’ while ‘they’ read ‘Schoolfriend’ and ‘Girl’s Weekly’. ‘Their’ mothers read ‘Woman and Home’ and ‘Woman’s Weekly’: ours read ‘Dharmayug’ and ‘Sarika’. It was considered stylish to know only English and pretend that you could not spell or speak grammatically correct Hindi, perhaps because we still carried the burden of the Raj then. Pride in our heritage, our languages and customs, and in our simple but spartan lives, were hidden from our teachers and fellow students. My brother and I were given private lessons in Sanskrit by an old Panditji, who came largely for the tea and snacks served everyday by our mother. As he slurped his tea, he would place a greasy finger on the book in front of us and say, ‘Explain this’. Naturally, we never could, so with another noisy slurp, he would start the explanation with, ‘To hum batlavain?’ (Shall I explain then?). We hated those lessons because we felt that exposure to ‘Hum Batlavain’ (our cruel nickname for him) would — like prolonged exposure to deadly UV rays — dim the patina of the English education we were receiving in our schools. Today, such a cross-cultural experiment may result in some kind of bipolar disorder but we bore the schizophrenia this created in our childhood cheerfully, oblivious of those mental conditions that then had no name, and so did not exist.
At some point, small-town India (to say nothing of rural India) fell off the map of modernity. Simple folktales and popular writing, particularly in vernacular languages, were ignored or rubbished as arcane mumbo-jumbo. The academic fraternity that controlled history writing mostly addressed each other in jargon-ridden polemical debates that alienated the interested lay reader from a knowledge of indigenous events and memories. William Dalrymple’s new book ‘The Golden Road’ is a fascinating account of a lost history and forgotten dynasties beyond Delhi. A terrible consequence, he says, of this was a near-amnesia of Vedic texts and the cultural civilisation that connected the Indian subcontinent from Afghanistan to modern Indonesia.
The Democrats in America paid a high price for overlooking popular concerns in favour of ‘woke’ issues. Our own politicians would be well-advised to become aware that most Indians want money in hand, food in their bellies, dignity and safety from usurious and sexual predators.
It’s as simple as that.
— The writer is a social commentator
