The Other Country
Mrinal Pande
The Other Country
Dispatches From the Mofussil
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
MOTHER TONGUES AND THE MEDIA
Rethinking Relaunches
A Flood of Images
Blogspotting in Hindi
Can Pinky Still Smile?
Chronicle of a Suicide Foretold
Euclid versus the Media Manager
News, in Search of a Medium
Night Thoughts of an Insomniac Media Watcher
Perchance to Find My Tongue
Save Hindi from Its Self-appointed Guardians
The Life and Death of Hindi Pulp Fiction
The Strange Case of India’s Official Languages
Writing in the Age of Best Sellers
Is There Life after Vernacular Journalism?
WOMEN TODAY
Abortion, the Unmet Need
Arms and the Woman
Child Marriages in India, Some Questions
Rights in the Age of the Camera
In Which a Martian Marries a Tree, a Shrub and a Man
The Beastly Beatification of Brothels
The Tales Women Tell
The Barber of Indi Village
The Chak De! Girl from Haryana
The Strange Tale of Lakshmi
Nothing Odd about Maternal Mortality
Rediscovering Momma’s Talent at the Workplace
Who Is Afraid of the Real Power Women?
Time to Reject the Man-made Myths of Women’s Bodies
Busting the Myth of the ‘Sacred Mother’
Marriages in the Age of Women Scarcity
Alone in Ivory Towers
A Look at the Panchkanyas of our Times
Is the Shoe on the Other Foot for Real?
Durga in the Year of Meltdowns and Terror
Women Are Still Unhappy, in India and in Bharat
Even the Sutras Allowed Some Alcohol on Happy Occasions
SURVIVING THE ODDS
A Postcard from the Natal Home
Monkeys and Men, a Parable for Aesop
A Fistful of Rice
And Now, Paid Greetings from Your Friendly Neighbourhood Don
Barren Branches under Threat
Buddhi Ballabh’s Buffalo, Another Fable for Aesop
Caste, in a New Mould
Cheating in Exams Facilitated Here
Eat, Drink, Repent, Regurgitate
English Dilli, Vernacular Dilli
Caste and Gotra Ungoogled
The Mysterious Ailments of Agra’s Ambulances
One Hundred and Thirty-eight Benches for a Hospital
Policing the Dark Town
Beware of this Premature Prudence
Some Notes about a Nation at War with Itself
The Demographic Anorexia of Aamchi Mumbai
Their Farmers, Our Farmers
A Shortage of Priests
MUSINGS AND PROFILES
Ama on Marriage
In Praise of Shamans, the Poets of Pain
Midday Meals, Welfare by Rote, not Reason
An Ode to Dashrath Manjhi
Begum Akhtar
Gangu Bai Hangal
Elect a Better Education System
Dipali Nag
The Land of La Tamancha
No Future in Eastern UP
The Mineral Water Baba
Lucknow’s Stone Gardens
The Great Indian Leveller
The ‘Ooh’ of Classical Music
The Facebook Hauntings
Babba
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
Introduction
Small towns and villages in India, considered perennially dramatic and suffering centres of a poor, developing country in Asia, are now rewriting many narratives of success in the twenty-first century. But how far can they, as they hurtle towards the neon-lit expanse of a Westernised economy, identify with a culture that has come in from the cold, even in the sense that places like Latvia, Romania or Serbia do? Good question. The known Indian culture has always harboured within itself numerous unknown but clearly and irreducibly identifiable cultures, each drawing its unique strength from its vernacular and dialects. The populous Hindi-speaking belt in the north is a good example of how each little culture will absorb the outside culture, localize its form and ideas and create a unique hybrid. The Hindi-speaking area comprises no less than eleven states of India and its richly layered culture has thrived on multiple variations of Hindi that constantly borrows words and phrases from its neighbours: in the north among the pahadis living in the central Himalayan states, people from Himachal will use a Hindi laced with Punjabi Urdu, but next door, in the state of Uttarakhand, Hindi nestles closer to the Nepali—spoken across the Kali river—Brij and Awadhi dialects from the plains. Those who live in the western areas speak a version of Hindi known as Kauravi (a dialect associated with the warrior clan of the Kauravas in Mahabharat) in areas close to Haryana, but areas near Agra and Delhi use a sophisticated Urdu-laced variant known as Khadi Boli. The Hindi spoken by those from the eastern parts leans towards the musical Bhojpuri but as one moves further east, it gets heavily interspersed with classical Sanskrit in the region around the scholarly towns of Varanasi and Patna.
For centuries ancient Indian cities like Varanasi in the east, Kanchi and Kochi in the south, cradles of the great Aryan and Dravidian cultures and renowned seats for learning, have tried hard to assimilate and easternize cultures that began streaming in through the Khyber Pass in the north and a few centuries later, through India’s western coast through merchant ships and missionaries. Western culture continues to pour down from the skies through dish and cable, and through bourses and BPO centres that never sleep. But it is not just the sight of a Central Asia laid waste in the name of democratization that makes the Western winds seem so alien and threatening to most Indians. India’s popular vernaculars, which over 90 per cent of the citizens still use for communication, have also always stood as an opaque glass wall between India and the West. It is an interesting term, ‘vernacular’. From the Latin root Vernac it denotes a language of slaves who have had a long association with the master race over many generations and who can double up as interpreters for the masters should they wish to communicate with new slaves.
Outside the borders of the Indian subcontinent, practically everything known about India today is based on information gleaned at second hand after knowledge has been filtered through many vernaculars and then rendered into a European language. Indian history has been known largely through the works of Indologists, mostly of British or German (and lately American) origin and Indian writing largely means Indo-Anglian writers. The works of writers such as Subramanya Bharathi, U.S. Ananthamurthy, Munshi Premchand, Amrita Pritam, Saadat Hasan Manto or Mahasweta Debi, when they are discussed in international book fairs and litfests, are discussed clinically without an intimate knowledge of their lives and times, their friends, the addas they regularly attended, their historic love–hate relationships with contemporary fellow writers, editors and publishers, their actual literary sources and their mostly uncared for families who sacrificed so much to keep the usually self-absorbed genius alive.
Brilliant speculations have been similarly advanced about Indian intellectuals’ brush with political censorship during the days of India’s freedom struggle, or later during the Emergency years, or even the great flowering of India’s media in the twenty-first century, without any reference to the rise of vernacular newspapers like Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhaskar, Eenadu or Malayala Manorama and writers like Madan Mohan Malviya, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Durga Bhagwat who have led it from the front, and how! The great Bollywood saga has swept over and drawn praise from the entire world, but available writings and conversations of those who made it possible, from Dadasaheb Phalke to Shailendra, V. Shantaram, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Sahir Ludhianvi and Jan Nissar Akhtar, have not been translated because they speak of films that are largely unknown in the West.
The articles in this volume have taken shape through my experiences as a Hindi writer and journalist who grew up in various small towns in Uttar Pradesh—including what is now Uttarakhand—studied in various government-run schools that taught in the Hindi medium. My own background, and later my travels as a journalist, have made me realize that the changing face of India’s villages and small towns needs closer scrutiny. Cross-pollination of cultures does not occur in a vacuum. The already existing culture is a strong determinant of the features of the hybrid that is the final results. Cultural trends that come in from the outside will mutate differently in each little cultural zone in India and often the little guy’s outlook, so markedly different from the big man’s, may come to rule national tastes. In Bollywood the recent rise of Bhojpuri films and the great success of Mumbai masala films like Ishqiya, Omkara, Dabangg or Peepli Live based on the dialects and cultural quirks of small towns in Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh underscore this.
Actually, most of what we in India call the mainstream media is not actually breaking new ground but often just looking over its shoulder and eyeing the obvious benefits to be accrued by communicating in an internationally accepted language. But, access to India’s largest markets is currently available only to the vernacular communicators of Little India. The India that communicates in dialects and whose official language gets invariably tinged by the local cultural practices. Markets of this India offer a perspective and culture that is completely at odds with the newly-branded image of India as a fast-growing modern economy with a large, upwardly mobile, English-speaking middle class. Actually, India’s fabled middle class cuts through the rural and urban divides and converses in multiple Indian languages increasingly laced with English words. The number of English-speaking households is small but they are important as they do have an aspirational value for the rest. This group insists on sending its children to English-medium schools, shelling out enormous amounts of money for schools with ‘brand value’. This group is preyed upon freely by fashion designers, makers of beauty products and planners of lavish weddings and theme parties. Towns like Ranchi in Jharkhand and Kota in Rajasthan have coaching classes to help children from these upwardly mobile local families clear entrance tests for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Indian Institutes of Managements (IIMs) and even coveted boarding schools like the Doon School or Mayo College in Ajmer. As the family rises in the social scale, it tries to distance itself from its small-town roots and begins to reserve use of the vernacular to order servants around.
An early morning drive through the lanes and bylanes of small towns like Banka, Latihar, Kapkot or Jhumri Talaiya, with people reading the day’s news over glasses of tea and discussing politics in each wayside tea shop will show a very different face of the middle class. You do not have to be a Barack Obama to spell out the urgent need to address the problem of unemployment in small-town India. The vernacular newspapers and periodicals that the local population subscribes to have large per copy readership and the intense preoccupation of the readers with democratic politics and information about coaching schools and training institutes for the ambitious young is unique to the language media. On a particular day, usually Thursday, all the dailies publish their weekly education supplements which are displayed in kiosks with the pull-out on top. The readers are free to compare the information on offer and buy the day’s paper accordingly.
True, on the face of it, provincial India with its non-existent roads, frequent power blackouts and perennial water shortages seems to be turning into a microcosm of metropolitan India with its millionaires and consumers. From Aurangabad to Alleppy, Jalandhar to Jamui, the demand for expensive goods: tractors, luxury cars—a car dealer in Aurangabad was in the news for having placed orders for 150 Mercedes cars—plasma TV sets, the latest mobile phones, branded sports goods, shampoo sachets, bottles of nail varnish, branded clothing and expensive accessories, has never been better. Literacy levels, even among women and the marginalized communities, are rising and the vernacular media that caters to the newly literate India is registering an explosive growth. The mega Hindi dailies like the number one best seller Dainik Jagran boasts of thirty-five local editions in eleven states with more than 5 crore readers and Dainik Bhaskar claims to have fifty editions in fifteen states. With such large footprints both the papers are gathering millions of new readers among the neo-literates in rural areas and raking in revenues from advertising each year. Both have declared large profits with Jagran leading at a declared growth of some 10.5 per cent in its profits in 2010. This is no empty boast either. Come state assembly or panchayat elections or even district-level elections, the vernacular dailies and cable channels will have their coffers full, thanks to a generous release of Department of Audio Visual Publicity (DAVP) advertisements by the state governments for wooing the voters. But most of this explosive growth, particularly in the rural areas, still rests on tenuous grounds: good monsoons, a continuous revision of the minimum support price for food grains, subsidies—offered close to state assembly elections and seldom discontinued—the massive waiver of farm loans made before the general elections of 2009, and the recent cash incentives for families living below the poverty line.
Given the tenuous nature of its prosperity, a certain edginess, even bitterness, marks the present-day relationship between the larger but less noticed India, and the glittering and globalized urban India of our metros. I can recall countless conversations over the last three decades with some of the most powerful editors, academics, feminists, managers, bureaucrats and corporate tzars who confessed to me that they have never actually read a vernacular daily. The only ones in their house who read language papers turn out to be their drivers, ayahs or servants and occasionally an aged parent who grew up in the Gandhi–Nehru era. They did not think it terribly important for globally connected Indian writers or journalists to be able to communicate flawlessly in their mother tongues. Many knuckles whiten out of sheer rage whenever someone points out a fact about rural or urban poverty they should have known but did not, such as the lack of good handbooks for grassroots workers in local vernaculars, the abysmally high maternal mortality rates in prosperous states with higher-than-average female literacy or the near invisibility of men and women from the vernacular speaking out in national seminars on feminism and poverty. The anger they let loose against small-town India’s eccentricities and the dominance of Hindi in the field of communication during TV debates or in their columns, using a pejorative like ‘the cow belt’ for the Hindi-speaking areas and declaring all users of Hindi to be extreme right-wing Hindutva supporters, is puzzling. Are they then writing off all those who speak in vernaculars, like the environmentalist Sunderlal Bahuguna or activists like Medha Patkar and Aruna Roy who protest against the forced evacuation of villages for building dams or removal of urban shanty towns without adequate compensation for the evacuees? Do they who write copiously in defence of ‘the Other India and its neglected citizens’ think that real-life farmers protesting on the streets of Delhi against inadequate support prices for their produce, outside their well-cared-for colonies, ought to be thrown out forcibly if need be before they pollute the city’s maidans with their boorish personal habits and bring traffic to a halt? A socialite, who often voices politically correct ideas on TV, after the 26/11 incidents in Mumbai, was seen spewing venom against the terrorists holed up in slums next to her posh hotel. How can the green flags fluttering in shanty towns in Mumbai signify complicity with terrorists from across the border? Their rage, so disproportionate and also mostly unfair, will give you some interesting insights into the enormous power the silent, powerless Little India has come to have over the few and seemingly self-assured rich and powerful of Big India.
Perhaps the linguistic distancing of the vernacular-speaking India that occurs as our academics and English language media begin to attach abstract adjectives to brand India, such as ‘Secular India’, or ‘India, the Welfare State’, makes it easier for policy planners to speak of India’s future without biting their tongues. Weekend pull-outs and TV debates also strengthen the ruse by using titles such as, ‘India Rises’, ‘India Marches ahead to Meet Its Destiny’, ‘India Declares War on Poverty’. Once we stand at such a high plane of generalization, millions of simple everyday questions emanating from Little India: When will the curfew lift so that our children can resume their classes and not have to waste a year? How soon can we get safe drinking water? Will we have uninterrupted electricity supply during harvest time at least? When will we have a doctor visiting the primary health centre in the village? How can one open a bank account to deposit the wages from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) without a PAN card, may dim into insignificance. It is only when, one day, the ground erupts over a seemingly insignificant incident such as a child caught among stone-pelting crowds getting hit, the city centre and the police post burning, buses being torched and the highways being jammed by protesters, that we begin to wonder what could have enraged so many over so little?