Unveiling India Page 2
Gomti allows me to enter her world and that of women like her. She does not know the world I come from, the lands I have travelled, the books I have read, the faces I have met and loved. Yet we recognize each other. Something unvoiced connects us—perhaps the simple fact that we are women. I see her living close to the earth, bound to a reality that is natural, almost predetermined, a reality that has not changed with time. I am not a part of Gomti’s tradition. Her gods are to me fragile dolls of clay. If not for her, Gangaur would have no immediacy or meaning, would have remained a local holiday marked red on a calendar. I have moved away from celebrations that are the inheritance of a particular community or religious group. I do not associate my joys with seasonal days and events. My moments of celebration occur without warning and are very private occasions. I do not share my joys as naturally as Gomti does nor can I wholly identify myself with the larger joys that fill the circle of my existence. I live on two planes—my own and the larger seasonal one. I would be lonelier if I had to derive sustenance from either to the exclusion of the other. My reality is fluid. I move in and out of the timeless and the collective. Women begin to be an enduring part of these various realities— whether it is Gomti, distant and durable in the desert, or the frail austere widow in white who on a dark moonless night among the paddy fields of Orissa sold me green bangles so that I might savour the joy of being a young woman; or my mother, fragile but constant in her affections and loyalties, allowing my various realities to enter her small, bare room and find a place to rest, a space she created a long time ago that continues to be charged with her silent energy. I had not known then that silence could be a language through which women in this land realized themselves. I owe that legacy to my mother, a legacy which I am just beginning to unravel and understand.
This book is a journey into those energy-filled spaces of silence which women like my mother continue to inhabit. In the macrocosm of a vast land I find the microcosm of my own experience repeated and reaffirmed. In all women, strangely, I see a mother. Coiled within the lives of these women I sense a resonance and a faith recognizing which I find myself transformed. The effort here is to probe the mystery of this experience and look beyond to another that is beginning to spell change and is centred in change. Where the two experiences meet lies a revelation, and a story. It is the story of women who understand what survival is—a survival with grace.
2
The journey begins...
The journey began for me three days after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. I left the frenzied city of Delhi accompanied by T. S. Nagarajan, a photographer who shares my faith and passion for India. Indira Gandhi dominated our thoughts. In many ways she symbolized the women of India—’fragile, withdrawn, a muted, delicate-toned thread in the strong aggressive colours that crossed and recrossed to weave the background tapestry of her life...’* Many invisible traits enriched her inner world, beyond which she powerfully lived and reigned. A close friend who knew her without veils says that the centuries entered into her when she was with the women of rural India and that she shared ‘that primordial knowing which the women of this land hold and communicate’. In spite of the elevated position she held she was strangely unified with the spirit of women in this country. Talking about the quality of life she had once said: ‘It does not lie in what an individual has but what he or she is. It can only be measured in that person’s capacity to achieve harmony and resonance with her fellow beings and with nature; to perceive the meaning of thought and experience the beauty of action. In short to find joy in life.’
How does one perceive a people’s quality of life when it lies veiled behind a face that is ragged, creased by struggle and pain? To look into such a face one needs almost a third eye, an eye that reaches out to life at more than one level. The Indian, man or woman, rich or poor, lives on many levels. Some of these I travelled through and tried to understand. Each level revealed more than a physical reality. In each I sensed essences that were strong, dramatic, tragic, often lyrical and stoic, as grounded to the earth as the trees and the colour of the land itself.
In Bakarpur, a wilderness in Bihar, in a hamlet of mud huts and some tired brown trees lives a potter’s family. The potter’s is an ancient role. At marriage a man and a woman go to the potter for the blesings of the wheel. His pots, carved with fish, parrot and mango leaf, are part of every Indian home. They augur prosperity, fertility, a happy home. The potter’s house is a hut of mud, stained by the sun, weakened by the rain. ‘Nothing has changed.’ says Balkeshar, the potter, son of a potter, grandson of a potter. ‘Nothing grows here. When there are no roots and leaves we do not wash our mouths for a day or two to keep the hunger down.’ Circled by a field of clay pots and clay cups is his wheel, and his grizzled father, as dark and weathered as the earth that he rolls in his hands with such ease, and fashions into pots, cups, gods and goddesses. The potter’s mother is a small, shrunken woman with warm, limpid eyes. Her sari is a bright green, the colour of paddy, a myth in this parched land. Colours do not level age in this part of the country. Colour signifies the fullness of being a woman, one who is a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. This shrunken woman is all three—a wife, a mother and a grandmother. Six bright-eyed children tower above her. They are her joy and she is a point in their lives that neither shifts nor changes, a point of rest but not of knowing. Two of them work in the fields and bring back a little money that they hand over to her, the head of the family. The other four walk a mile every morning to sit under an ancient banyan which is the village school. There, a wiry young woman, who never smiles, teaches them the alphabet and tells them stories of gods and demons. They return home in the afternoons to sit in the field of clay cups with their father and grandfather. They play with the cups, break some, stack the others in large round baskets which their mother and grandmother carry on their heads to the market. A hundred cups of clay are sold for half a rupee! These cups and pots of many shapes speak of a family’s heritage, as much a part of the old woman as they are of the six bright-eyed children.
‘You are our guest,’ says Balkeshar’s mother, placing me on a string cot she pulls out into the winter sun. She sits at my feet, takes my hand in both of hers. They are thin and scaly, having known years of work with the clay of the earth. ‘Why have you come? There is nothing in our village. What can we give you? All we have are these clay cups. Take some home. The tea tastes as fragrant as the earth if you drink out of them.’ I leave Bakarpur without the ritual cup of tea that the poorest of the poor offer in India. But in my lap I hold delicate clay cups fashioned by strong hands that have effortlessly mastered an art that ensures that whatever they mould will carry the fragrance of the earth. The tonga jingles back through the wilderness. In my mind move images—not of hunger and desperation but of a family together sharing pride and love and hunger.
*
‘Women derive status from their husbands and power from their sons’ is an old saying no longer relevant in Attani Markulam, a village with squares of green, circled by sentinel-like grey hills. In a land as deceptive as a dream live a few hundred poor people. Amutha, the colour of ebony, strong-boned and twenty-two, is one of eight young women in the village who is not married. A remote smile deepens her face when I ask her the reason. She is too poor to be married, the others say. She listens to them as if they are talking about someone else. She is the eldest of three girls born to bear the honour and the responsibility of the family. She works in the paddy fields, grinds cotton seeds for the cattle, helps an ailing mother at home and sends her two younger sisters to a typing school. She has not seen the school nor set eyes on a typewriter.
Does she have a dream? ‘I do not dream,’ she says tonelessly, standing at the edge of a paddy field, lush and not her own.
‘I do not know the man who owns this field. He lives in a distant village they say. I work for him. I earn a few rupees each day.’
Is there anything else she would like to do? Her eyes suddenly light up, as if my words
hold a promise. ‘Teach me a craft. Show me how else I can use my hands. I want to earn more, live better. The girls in the village across the bridge are learning to spin. I would also like to.’
The girls who weave cloth in a shed with a new red roof are as dark and fragile as Amutha. Amidst the whirr of looms, alien to this green silence, they sit stooped, their eyes glazed, their hands moving like the controlled arms of a machine.
Are they happy? They stare, say nothing. They have not been outside the village nor have they had occasion to meet strangers. Hence they are shy, I reckon. ‘They earn Rs. 25 a month,’ says the instructress, as if it is an answer to my musings. ‘The girls hand over their wages to their parents. When enough money is saved for a dowry they will get married. They will not be so young then. And there will be fewer children.’ Earning money has begun to command more stature in these poor paddy villages than gaining a husband and bearing children.
*
Miles away in Garag, Rukmawwa was married and abandoned by a husband. She returned to her mother’s village where an elderly Gandhian couple had started a handloom spinning mill. She was given a loom and taught how to spin and weave khadi. Years ago, seeing a woman in a half-torn sari, Gandhiji had started a movement—to spin and weave and wear native cloth—khadi. I wear what gives me bread,’ says Rukmawwa, after working at the loom for 17 years. At forty she has found her peace—a livelihood, a home and a backyard of fruit trees. ‘Have one child, plant two trees’ is the motto at the mill. Rukmawwa has no children. But she has trees in her backyard. ‘They are like children,’ she says, her face radiant amid the green she has grown around her. Her pride in trees goes back to an ancient tradition. Trees are an abode of female deities. In them rests a divinity worthy of worship.
Rukmawwa insists that I visit her home and see her backyard of trees. She has placed two blooms of red hibiscus on either side of her frail wooden door. They signify welcome. As do the brass platters on which she has carefully arranged sweetmeats and bananas. In steel tumblers tea spiced with cardamom is ready. ‘You have a long way to go,’ she says, putting her leathery arm around me in the manner of an old friend. ‘You must eat a little, drink a little and take a fruit from my garden. I have no flowers to give you as I have no daughter.’
In Rewati Ramanna the trees are green, the sands golden and the sea not distant. In this village, which was once a garden growing basil for the gods of Puri, wild grasses grow today. They sustain the poor. Women gather these grasses and knit them into baskets. Men, dark and sturdy, pull rickshaws, a vocation associated with the lowly. It is a harijan village. Born to be ‘untouchable’ they were renamed harijans meaning ‘Children of God’ by Gandhiji. When these people, shunned for centuries by other men, fold their hands in greeting one automatically bows to them in humility. Poverty has not robbed them of courtesy nor an inner refinement that has its roots in a larger way of being. In a dust-filled yard I meet an old woman bent over a pile of dry palm leaves. ‘Child, don’t sit on the ground. Let me spread a mat for you,’ she says without looking up, pulling from under her a tattered mat which I realize is the only one she owns. She is eighty years old and lives alone. Her three sons are married and have gone away to bigger villages. Who looks after her? She points to the pile of palm leaves and goes back to cleaning them.
*
In a sun-baked village in Mathura there are few shadows at noon. Women are circled in song around an old banyan tree whose roots hang above their heads like the blessings of an elder seer. As summer descends, women gather around the tree, clean it, paint its trunk with white chalk, and tie a red thread around it. That’s the way a banyan is worshipped, a tree revered through time. It is the seed of the banyan that contains the nature of creation, says an old Hindu parable. The story goes that the sage Uddalaka once asked his young son to break open a fruit of the banyan and find out what was within. The boy saw only tiny seeds. The father asked the boy to break open the seeds and see what was within. ‘There is nothing at all,’ said the boy.
‘My son, that unseen subtle essence within the seed contains the huge Nyagrodha banyan,’ said the sage, in that unseen essence all things exist. It is the truth. It is the Self. And thou art that.’
The banyan tree does not exist for itself. Its shade is for all who come under its circle—family, clan, community, often the village itself. The story is part of folk mythology, as is the worship, kept alive by women.
The prayer is the same. The culture is of gratitude. Poverty perhaps can sear the body but not the spirit. A guest, a stranger, even a passer-by, is accepted as a divine messenger. A house that is not open to guests is not open to God. In Jamkhed women wear saris woven by hand in the colours of the earth. Lallan Bai brings for me a deep brown sari that I had admired on her the day before. She has washed and brought it as a gift. It is one of two saris she owns. She makes me wear it, insists on tying my hair in the manner of village women, puts a large dot of red powder on my forehead and takes me into the square holding my hand. Women rush out of small thatched homes and surround me with ripples of laughter. ‘You look like us,’ they say. I feel like them, wrapped in the coarse fabric woven by caring hands. Their sari, in a strange way, has taken me out of my form and put me in another. Barriers break. We laugh like friends who share one world. ‘Bring a mirror from somewhere and show her,’ says an elderly woman smiling toothlessly. The women run in different directions and return empty handed. Finally. Suman Bai emerges and triumphantly holds in front of me a broken piece of mirror, the only one in this village of thirty homes. All I can see in it is the tip of my nose. But I had already seen myself mirrored in their faces.
Bakarpur, Kanyakumari, Garag, Mathura, Jamkhed. All Indias within India, not one landscape and not one people but many that slip in and out making the Indian state of mind. In this complex pantheon of diversities the Indian woman remains the point of unity, unveiling through each single experience a collective consciousness prized by a society that is locked in mortal combat with the power and weakness of age and time. She remains the still centre, like the centre in a potter’s wheel, circling to create new forms, unfolding the continuity of a racial life, which in turn has encircled and helped her acquire a quality of concentration. ‘The nobility of her being does not depend merely upon race though but upon ideals, is the outcome of a certain view of life.’†
To return to the words of Indira Gandhi the Indian woman is not just the conserver of tradition but also the absorber of the shocks of the future. Therefore, ‘she must be a bridge and a synthesizer. She should not allow herself to be swept off her feet by superficial trends nor yet be chained to the familiar. She must ensure the continuity which strengthens roots and simultaneously engineer change and growth to keep society dynamic, abreast of knowledge, sensitive to fast-moving events. The solution lies neither in fighting for equal position nor denying it, neither in retreat into the home nor escape from it....’‡
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Gods and god
I inherited my mother’s god—a god without a face. He lived in a distant heaven. I regarded him less with love than awe. He is all truth, all goodness, all justice, said my mother. She taught me to pray to him in Arabic, a language which to my mind was meant only for prayers. Like a parrot I recited the high-sounding saluations five times a day, never questioning, never knowing what they really meant. Prayers are a way of remembering God, of acknowledging His goodness and kindness. So said Venkatamma, my ayah, who was a Hindu. She would go every morning to a temple to thank a shining black stone for the blessings bestowed on her. And on Fridays she would take us to the white shrine on the hill, raised in the name of Moula Ali. There she would drape her head, clench her eyes and pray as fervently as she did at the Hindu temple. Why do you pray in a Muslim shrine? I once asked her. God is everywhere and the restlessness of the human heart is everywhere, she said. I did not believe her then. I do now. Every time I pass a wayside shrine now I stop to look at the god’s face. I put a coin at his feet and remember Ven
katamma. If not for her, I would not have known that gods had faces.
As a child, I missed the fact that my god was faceless. He neither had a human head nor an elephant’s trunk. He did not play the flute nor indulge in pranks with those who loved him. I missed the intimacy of decking him with flowers or keeping him in my room as a constant presence. Born in a Muslim household I learnt to live with a faceless god. Around me though abounded gods with faces, attributes, names. In the city of my birth, people shared each other’s shrines, naturally revered each other’s gods. The way Venkatamma did. If remembrances are indicative of a heritage, then mine is a mixed one. I am as much a Hindu as I am a Muslim. The rituals and ways of celebrating God that grow around a shrine, a temple, a saint’s grave are neither Hindu nor Muslim. They reflect a people’s emotional fusion, a unity of thought, a faith that grows out of meeting and confluence.
My father lent reason to this belief, talked of humanism as the focus of religion. Purdah, my father would say, is a state of mind. He would tell us the story of Zainab, grand-daughter of the Prophet, who had the courage to set aside her veil to tell the world of the injustice of the tragedy of Karbala. When the chador was ripped off her head, after her brother was killed, and an entire clan of men wiped out, she garbed her face with her hair. That was the veil, which symbolized her privacy, her personal grief. At the opportune moment though she rose, pushed back her hair, and spoke. The court of Yazid shuddered as the voice of a woman rang out to right a wrong. That was the strength of a woman traditionally seen as veiled. Women, though secluded, commanded respect, my father explained. The Prophet would rise to receive his daughter. It was his young wife Ayesha who lived to verify his sayings. To seek knowledge men and women should travel and explore, said the Prophet. They were partners in life, in war, in a home. My father in his own way pushed the ideal. Stand on your feet, do not stretch out your hand in front of a man, work with men but do not forget that your strength is your own, that of a woman. He trained me to live in a world of men like a woman. You don’t look like a Muslim woman, people say. My religion has no face I tell them, and move on. Faith is an energy, which along with other forces, lends a dimension to my life. It is not as integral to my life, though, as it is to most women around me.