Unveiling India Read online

  Anees Jung

  UNVEILING INDIA

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1: Outside the frame

  2: The journey begins...

  3: Gods and god

  4: Women and men

  5: Marriage and love

  6: Mothers and children

  7: City women

  8: Women in the country

  9: In her own words

  10: Women find a name

  Footnotes

  2: The journey begins...

  6: Mothers and children

  9: In her own words

  10: Women find a name

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  UNVEILING INDIA

  Anees Jung was born in Hyderabad. Her father, Nawab Hosh Yar Jung, was one of the principal advisers to the last reigning Nizam of Hyderabad. She was brought up as a child in strict purdah, but later went on to study at Osmania University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she took a Master’s degree in sociology and American studies.

  She has been the editor of a magazine, Youth Times, and has written for several of the world’s major newspapers. She has also written two books—When a Place Becomes a Person and Poems in Prose.

  Anees Jung lives in New Delhi.

  To the people of India

  Introduction

  ‘Population deals with the most delicate of human relationships—the act of love, the family and the mystery that surrounds it... how do you tell people how many children to have and not invade people’s privacy or upset their values?

  ‘Population also means increasing the value of each birth; it means guaranteeing that our children are given the fullest opportunity to be educated, to get good health care, to have access to the jobs that they eventually want. I think population and development go hand in hand.’

  These two key aspects of the thinking of Rafael Salas of the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) started me on the search and journey which eventually resulted in this book. But, initially, when the UNFPA asked me to explore the nature of the population problem in India, I was, to put it mildly, staggered. How does one tell the story of a statistic? As Salas writes, one man is a person, a thousand are a community, and a million are a statistic. I decided finally to write something that wouldn’t reinforce the statistics that make India’s millions but would look instead for the faces behind the figures. As each face becomes a person, numbers cease being an abstraction. Written by one among the numbers, it is a story that has moved outward from a core that is integral and become an attempt to understand a condition that is shared.

  The book could not have been written without the inspria- tion of Rafael Salas and the UNFPA, an organization that he directs with the panache of a civil servant and the veiled stoicism of a Buddhist monk. I thank him and his staff in New York and New Delhi for their generous assistance that gave me the freedom to move around and write.

  I also thank the Family Planning Association of India, particularly Mrs. Avabhai Wadia and Dr Sheshagiri Rao and his team of officers in the far-flung regions of India who drove me in their white jeeps, opening up vistas hitherto unseen. I

  thank the health officials of the state governments of Maharashtra, Orissa, Goa and Rajasthan for helping out with transport and sharing with me relevant aspects of their fieldwork. My special gratitude to Drs. Raj and Mable Arole whose work in Jamkhed stands as the best affirmation of what man can do for man. Following a trail blazed by them, I met others who in their different ways are spelling change in other neglected areas.

  I thank my friend Raghava Menon for the hours he spent listening to fragments of my story, and I thank Khushwant Singh, Shiv Kumar, Steve Espie and Jim Beveridge for reading my manuscript and offering tips and suggestions that proved very helpful. I thank my mother who with her silence supported me.

  Finally I bow to the numbers that make up this country, particularly the women among them. They revealed their faces without fear or embarrassment. In them I found the story, not of a country’s doom but of a country’s will to survive. I dedicate this book to them.

  September. 1986

  ANEES JUNG

  New Delhi

  1

  Outside the frame

  I was three years old when I was first photographed. It was a garden party for children—or at least that’s what I assume it was. Dressed in a frock spattered with gold polka dots, a round brocade hat trembling on my head, I am in the arms of a radiant father. None of the little girls is on ground. Each is held aloft by a father or an ayah, but not a mother. There are no mothers in the photograph. The only other ladies besides the seventy beaming nannies are the governesses, who look English, standing at the edge of the crowd in straw hats and summer dresses.

  In the next photograph I am older—already solemn at the age of nine or ten, looking at the world with wider eyes. Dressed in white lace but without the round brocade hat, my head seems bigger, my body contorted in the manner of a young girl beginning to grow. I look ill at ease seated in the lap of a gentleman. He is an elderly man with an air of distinction, dressed in a black coat and a black bowtie, unsmiling, slightly stern, despite me on his lap. Poised on his right and left, and behind him in a row, are more gentlemen in black. Among them is my father. They are a group of men who seem to know each other, bound in the portrait by the colour black, a colour that connotes formality, solemnity, ceremony. Some of them though have small white garlands around their hands, a touch that softens the gravity of their demeanour. The garlands tell me that it is an after-dinner portrait. The garlands also evoke the sense of a Deccan night scented imperceptibly with jasmines, the small white flowers of summer that women in back rooms of the house would knit into strings and send out for the men to wear on their arms. After the last of the lush mangoes, the gentlemen would dip their fingers in crystal bowls circled by the white garlands. Slipping them casually around their wrists they would walk away carrying the fragrance of an enclosed garden.

  Dinner parties such as these were a regular summer ritual in our house. As were good food and camaraderie.

  But the good life it would seem was designed only for men. Page after page in the old album unfolds groups and groups of them, ceremonially dressed, naturally guarding a rite which they deemed was bestowed on them. No women are part of this rite except those from abroad, usually the West. Dressed in gay chiffons, wide plumed hats and high heels they seem at ease with men. Do the men enjoy their presence and also accept the fact that the women in the portrait have forfeited their claim to privacy, a tradition treasured amongst women of Hyderabad?

  My mother remains absent in the only family portrait that rests on the last page of the album. Her seven children are grouped solemnly around a father, proud in the colour black. The inscription below the picture reads ‘Hosh ki Duniya’, Hosh being my father’s pen name. My mother, it appears, has no claim on this happy world which she has helped create.

  Where was she when the portrait was taken? In one of the back rooms perhaps or standing behind a chilman, the ubiquitous bamboo curtain designed to conceal women from the outside but not the outside from them. My mother, like all mothers of children photographed in the garden party, remained behind the chilman—their part of the house which was never allowed to enter the picture frames that ceremonially documented the high points in a family history.

  The inside though was like a little city in itself. Enclosed but not shut, this city of women, defined and strengthened by its own norms and rituals, was charged with essences that gave the house its sense of being. From here generated the aro
ma of food and flowers, the exuberance of henna that stained feminine hands, the rainbow dyes that coloured yards and yards of cotton that garbed the bodies of women; the tinkle of bangles, the glitter of jewels, the chatter, the tales, the gossip that served like a social glue binding woman to woman in a circle, where their supportiveness became their strength. Even their survival.

  I was among five sisters who grew up in this world, which I took for granted. My mother, like all the other women, was part of a landscape that I never questioned or tried to explore. It was the men on the outside who held our fascination. Larger than life, their attentions mattered. Father, the only familiar male figure, who dominated a world outside, also filled the inside forcefully and invisibly. He embodied the ideal, exhibited courage to look into the future, nourished the tenuous links between the outside and the inside and helped create balances that spelled harmony within the family. His will governed the essential patterns of our life. He set paths for us to travel on, paths that would lead us into a city bigger than our own. He gave us names that were to become our identity. Names normally given to boys he gave to his five girls as if he saw implicit in them the roles that would be their emerging destiny.

  The black Plymouth that drove us to school had dark draperies. Seated in the back seat we felt suspended like spring dolls in a magic box. We emerged every morning from a house that in many ways was like a citadel. It had high white walls, courtyards that were never without flowers and stone terraces above which the sky stretched. The outside always beckoned. Once I pulled at the dark draperies and tried to peer out. The ayah—who combined the roles of matron, guardian and, to a lesser degree, servant—rebuked me. No one was to see us, she warned gravely, for we were little treasures to be claimed in time by those who had earned the right to it. Twenty years have passed. I have still not been claimed. The old ayah, I have learnt, died some years ago. Her little treasures, unguarded, have scattered, have been pushed into worlds where Plymouths with dark draperies do not exist.

  Many other things have taken their place. Albums filled with pictures of women looking into the camera with unveiled eyes, for one. I am among them: sad-eyed at seventeen, leaving home; with hair cropped and a bag slung over my shoulder at the top of the Empire State Building in New York; hiding rubber boots under a sari while struggling to walk over the Michigan snows; seated among strangers from lands whose names were once part of a school atlas; laughing without concealing my mouth with a hand; dressed in a formal black sari with my hand resting timidly in the hand of a man with smiling blue eyes; proud in a gown that conferred on me a distinction; dancing at a New Year’s Eve gala in New York’s Grand Central Station; behind a polished table with senators in Washington; in front of the Eiffel Tower; throwing coins in a marble Italian fountain; sailing down the Rhine; riding a horse on a Colombian ranch; trembling in a Siberian autumn; drinking toasts with mao tai at a round table in Peking; deep in conversation with luminaries, monks, men, women, children; beaming again with a family of seven, grouped now around a mother, whose head is serenely draped and whose eyes, though watery now, continue to watch. She has finally stepped out of the chilman and entered the frame. My father is dead. The citadel that he raised with pride and love to house his happy world has been sold. His children have scattered. They come together once in several years in Bombay where in a flat with several windows lives their mother. Beyond the windows the sea and the sky meet in a haze of grey and blue. There is no horizon.

  ‘What is at the end of the sea?’ asks my young niece, tying a jasmine garland she has knitted, around my mother’s greying braid.

  ‘There is land behind the haze and people and houses they have built. Each house is a dream realized,’ says my mother.

  ‘Where is your house?’ asks my niece.

  ‘Where my children are,’ my mother tells her.

  Home for her children too continues to be where she is, where everything touches roots. Sounds, of a distant courtyard that once housed a city in its precincts, return. Tiny and staccato they break the surge of the waves outside. Spaces no longer enclose the sky or the earth. I go down to the beach in a dressing gown. Men sit by the limpid waters and defecate. Women dressed like men go jogging. My little niece builds castles in the sand, gets bored, wants to play another game, ‘I do not know many games,’ I tell her.

  ‘What then did you do as a child?’ she asks.

  ‘I looked at the world with wide eyes.’ I tell her. Though I had not seen the beach when I was her age, had not gone for a walk even on the street where we lived and never seen a city other than the one where I was born. And yet I had known of the sea and the hills, of the mythical rivers and the lands to which they brought water and life and sustenance. Games were played indoors. We would pitch our stakes at pachesi and cards, play ‘lone- part’ with servants in the outer courtyard when father was away, listen to music played softly in our rooms and read books by Jane Austen, Marie Corelli and the Bronte sisters, turning the heroes of fiction into our own; also, when the nights were lit by a round paper moon we would climb up to the stone terraces and sing sad songs.

  ‘I lived in a veiled city of women so I never went anywhere,’ I tell her.

  ‘Where is your veil then?’ she asks, ‘It blew away in a strong wind.’ I say, wondering if it really did.

  ‘I think of you—demure, tentative, rather frightened, very warm but in semi-purdah, asking sophisticated people to tell you what they never will,’ comments a writer friend. I have returned to the circle, to a family and a country which is not on the outside but is part of me. While returning to them, I have returned to my self, to the calm centre of the land and its life, quietly inherited it and resumed from where I had left off. I have returned—though with eyes that have learnt to see and perceive. The sense of being veiled, however, continues to cling. I have graduated from the magic box into the hurly burly of a working world. I no longer peer at landscapes. They have begun to peer at me as I move amidst them. I have become a ‘memsaheb’, one who symbolizes the new species of women who have crossed the ‘Laxshman Rekha’, the mythical line that was not to be crossed even by the gods.

  The years move, the seasons change. I move with them seeking my peace, my alternatives. The road which I have travelled has emerged on its own. And the road that lies ahead is not clearer; the landmarks emerge only on arrival. People tell me I have ‘arrived’. I do not know what it means. For I never planned a career, just grew into it. Hence I make my norms as I go along. They cannot be shared with others as they are strictly mine. I have not yet found a face that suits a ‘modern’ woman and a graph that determines the patterns of her life. I continue to live out an experience for which I have yet to find a name.

  *

  I am a Muslim woman from Hyderabad, a city whose name conjures up images of fragile women languishing behind veils. How then can I be ‘modern’, work, live alone? I live alone but not by choice. Secretly I long for courtyards filled with the laughter of children, for stone terraces where I once slept and heard others breathe. Living alone I feel narrows one’s concerns, reveals the inadequacy of joys that are not shared. Even freedom without sharing becomes abstract and unreal. Childhood’s walls have fallen. Flowers are no longer the pride of courtyards. Nor are young women.

  My reality no longer has one face. I have stepped out of an enclosed reality into one that is larger, more diverse, and mobile. A reality that has its own rhythm. I am travelling through the desert in Rajasthan—brown, bleak and alien. I miss the gentleness of the terrain where I was born. Yet these miles of desolation, the gods vivid against a stark land, the women revealed in their fierce brilliance—slowly these make themselves felt.

  Twenty years ago, Gomti, the woman with the river’s name, would not have entered my consciousness. Today, nothing inhibits me from walking into her courtyard. I have come to explore the way she lives, in a home that encloses her with a husband and a child. Gomti greets me as if we were acquainted, offers me a bowl of water. Water is a dri
nk more precious than anything else, even the usual cup of tea, among the dwellers of these desert lands. Gomti walks miles every day to fetch from a well water that she then cools in large, round jars of red clay. To honour a stranger is a natural part of her tradition. She brings me water, serves me food and stands fanning the flies away as I eat. She says little for she lives her thoughts. When she speaks she discloses her dreams without embarrassment, even the ordinary dreams, dreams that with time have acquired the drabness of the land.

  Large and plain-looking she exudes womanliness, a quality of giving. Intimacy pervades her courtyard; an unspoken strength links her, the black-eyed baby asleep on a rope-strung cot, the white cow tied to a leafless tree, and the man whose picture hangs high on a white wall. He wears a bulbous turban, has a regal moustache, and looks like a prince.

  ‘My husband,’ she murmurs and looks away, suddenly shy. ‘Today is Gangaur, the Hindu festival that is special to women,’ she tells me.

  She dresses herself in a bright green chunri, with spangles of gold, and with a tray of ritual offerings, walks over to a neighbour’s house. Gathered under an aged banyan tree is a group of women, radiant in red and gold. Against a wall smeared ritually with kum kum, sit two small idols of clay. The women have made these and decked them with their own hands. They represent Ishar and Gangaur, the mythical man and wife, who through the ages have remained the embodiment of marital love. The women sing, praying for long life and prosperity for their husbands. Their soft, frail voices soar out of the courtyard to join other voices from other courtyards, chasing away the stillness of the long desert afternoon. Some of the women look old; some are girls beginning to turn into women. The meaning behind Gangaur dissolves the barriers of age. The women appear to quiver on the threshold of a new life, given by an ancient rite. Krishna tantalized the women worshippers of Gangaur; He was the dream consort who stole their garments as they bathed in the river. And each woman came face to face with him in order to reclaim her own: woman to man, soul to God. Gangaur returns every year to the desert when the grasses are green and the harvest is ready. To love and be loved symbolizes to the traditional Indian woman her security, her happiness and her fulfilment. The rite of Gangaur binds woman to woman in this common wish, consolidates the ties between individuals and family, family and community. And the land gives each an identity that is part of the larger whole.