Articles By Nirupama Dutt

Omkara

2006-10-10T21:56:00.000+05:30

Slice of life . Waiting as metaphor for life

2005-08-20T17:25:00.000+05:30

A winter's night spent in a ladies' waiting room can be something to write home about, says Nirupama Dutt

THE other day glancing at a woman's magazine, I came across a feature that said that said singles experienced grave depression during festivities. It had interviews of women and men in their late twenties and early thirties on the experience of being alone in a coupling world. Of course, it could not be bothered with going on forty-eight likes of me but I found myself identifying with it nevertheless. So perhaps it was not quirk of fate but a sub-conscious choice that I found myself spending the New Year eve but one in the ladies waiting room at the New Delhi railway station. For where else can there be a better cross-sectional togetherness of women alone, at least for some hours?

It was a cold and rainy night and many hours still to the Chandigarh Shatabadi. I still have to get my ticket but the attendant is asleep, huddled on the floor with a blanket covering her. No questions are asked and so I join the crowd of women dozing in chairs and some on the floor in sleeping bags.

The waiting room is not an unfamiliar place for me. The first time I spent a night here was in 1975, when after my graduation examinations my mother was taking me for a holiday with relatives in Secundrabad. Those days a descendant of the Oudh family, a rather beautiful Begum and her teenage children claiming to be descendants of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah were camping there in protest demanding a home from the government. Since then over the years I had spent a few nights and hours of the day here. The Begum, of course, had shifted camp to one of the Delhi monuments long ago.

The waiting room was decked up with grimy wallpaper and some gaudy landscape posters. The quiet was broken by an alarm clock. Four tall strapping young girls stirred out of their sleeping bags and dreams of winning gold, silver or at least bronze medals at the athletic meet down south. Pulling on jackets, boots and gathering their luggage they made their way out. The attendant shrieked, "Shut the door tight. It is freezing cold." In a few minutes, the door opened with a blast of cold wind and a hoard of women and some children and much more baggage followed. In all they were twenty-one young, middle-aged and old women and four children all set to catch Punjab Mail to Mumbai from Platform Number 4 in a couple of hours. Theirs was a long pilgrimage of Kashi, Mathura, Brindaban, Hardwar, Rishikesh and Agra with its Taj Mahal thrown in for an excursion. I engage them in conversation. They take a trip together every other year. A college lecturer, another single woman, arranges it all. They are either related or from the same neighbourhood. The women are only too eager to talk of their pilgrimage. One woman praises the wonderful sights at the Radha-Krishna temple in Mathura and another about the glory of the Ganga at Rishikesh. And a number of them agree that Kashi is too dirty. "We wonder how God lives in Kashi," says a more garrulous one. Then she whispers so that two women wearing burqas sitting behind her do not hear her, "We saw the ruins of the broken Babri Masjid. Yes we saw it all!" I wonder if she saw God wandering through those ruins. "And now we will cut the New Year's cake tomorrow in the train," says another pilgrim. Religion, I think, at least helps women holiday away from home.

The pilgrims freshen up and after a round of tea leave the waiting room without tipping the attendant, who has woken up and is complaining. The night is still long and I look around and a small poster against sexual harassment of women in trains catches my eye. A few years ago, women's groups had organised a protest at this very station against assault on women in a train. By the poster, sits a foreigner making some notes in her diary and from time to time she asks questions about female foeticide in the North. I try to chip in and learn that they are travelling to make a trip of areas with prominent places of worship like Kurukshetra, Chintpurni and Fatehgarh Sahib to study the falling sex ratio rate.

A shiver goes down my spine. Is it the cold, the conversation or the depressing festive season? Or is it a cool cocktail of all these elements? The rest of the time I spend browsing through a magazine and drinking coffee to help me stay awake. A young and comely girl from the North-east comes and her boy-friend takes leave from the door. She too is going Chandigarh wards and tells me that the ticket window should open in half an hour. I am the first in a short queue. The ticket in my bag, I come to say goodbye to the attendant. In the Seventies and the Eighties there used be an old cheerful Nepali woman at this waiting room but she must have retired long ago. The present attendant is young and is grumbling still about the pilgrims who have left the washroom so dirty.

Thus, I spend the year-end a woman alone amidst many lone women, at least for the moment, looking before and after. My ticket in my bag I get into the train that will take me to my old town and the New Year!

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20030309/herworld.htm#2

Romance of the Chenab

2005-08-20T17:19:00.000+05:30

THE Chenab is the largest of the five rivers of Punjab and also the most rapid. It is picture pretty with low but open banks that are still well wooded. Perhaps its scenic beauty contributed to the three love-legends of the land that blossomed around it — Mirza-Sahiban, Heer-Ranjha and, of course, Sohni-Mahiwal. The last romance ended in the drowning of Sohni as she went to meet her Mahiwal, swimming across the river with a half-baked earthen pitcher.

It was the Chenab and the Jhelum that were lost to East Punjab as the Radcliff line cut through Punjab. Yet, the Chenab became the most important metaphor of love, longing and pain in the works of writers and painters in our Punjab of two rivers and a half. Amrita Pritam in her famed Partition poem called out to Waris Shah to see the misery of the land and said that the Chenab was full of blood.

In the fifties, Andretta-based Sobha Singh painted Sohni-Mahiwal in ecstasy in the waters of the Chenab. Earlier, an 18th century painter of the Pahari School, Nainsukh Sen, had painted a miniature of Sohni swimming across the Chenab. But it was Sobha Singh’s work that became so popular that its print found its way for many decades into the drawing rooms of middle class Punjabis. In recent years other Punjabi painters like Satish Gujaral, Manjit Bawa and Aparna Caur have re-painted the romance.

During a recent visit to Wazirabad in West Punjab, one got a chance to see the beauty and bounty of this vast old river that keeps rolling on. The people call it Pir the Chenab and as they pass it they throw coins and flowers into its waters.

Across the river from Wazirabad is the area of Gujarat, which according to legend was the home of Sohni. The inevitable question that comes to the lips as one walks through the rushes on the side of the mighty river is that at what place did Sohni cross the river to be at Mahiwal’s hut? This because the enchantment of the Chenab is such that past and present; myth and truth all blend into magic realism.

Sodara, some four miles away from Wazirabad towards the east, is believed to be the place for the midnight rendezvous. But it is in the woods on its banks at Wazirabad that a wood engraver of the town named Shaadi Khan, a migrant from Gurdaspur, has etched out the image of Sohni on a tree. Well, Sohni is the symbol of the collective Punjabi imagination. So reach out and she will be there and here, never mind the Radcliff line!

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2004/20040410/edit.htm#6

Mum’s the word

2005-08-19T23:14:00.000+05:30

The mom mania on the small screen can be traced to the surefire success of mother-fixated films like Mother India and Deewar, writes Nirupama Dutt

The Mother India myth has been one of sure success in Hindi films. Popular Indian cinema is indeed mother-centric with a host of graceful matriarchs having done honours to the Indian screen from Durga Khote, Leela Chitnis, Nirupa Roy, Sulochana to Nutan, Waheeda Rehman and Rakhi. The famous dialogue from the Amitabh Bachchan blockbuster Deewar is still repeated. Amitabh, the baddie, tells Shashi Kapoor, the goodi-good younger brother, "Mere paas bangla hai, gadhi hai, paisa hai. Tere paas kya hai?" Pat comes the reply, "Mere paas maa hai."

Mama-mania is a way of life in the Indian cinema and it succeeds many a time. But the man who gave the archetypal Mother figure to the Indian screen was the great filmmaker Mehboob Khan in Mother India in 1957. Mother India was a remake in technicolour with a brand new star case of Mehboob’s earlier Aurat (1940). Iqbal Massod once writing on this archetypal mother said, "The mother upholds the dharma which the good son follows. When the bad son transgresses it, he is killed." The ever-lasting myth of the big screen has been providing a catharsis to audiences as they sit every night at half past ten to watch Kyunki Saas bhi Kabhie Bahu Thhi. Smriti Irani, playing Tulsi Virani in the serial has done the Mother India act with aplomb by killing Ansh and winning the approval of the viewers.

The mother figure in the Indian psyche is different from that in the West. Julia Glancy, a Britisher and wife of a pre-Partition Punjab Governor once during her stay in India remarked in surprise, "The strongest relationship in India is between mother and son and not husband and wife." To the Indian mind, deeply entrenched in the concepts of Mother Earth and Mother Goddess, there is nothing strange or surprising about this.

They do not have the Freudean theory of the Oedipal complex to bother about.This concept has been liberally splashed in popular art, including calendars, posters and advertisements.

When Mehboob made Aurat in 1940, it was the time of the national struggle against the colonial rule. Mehboob combined in his creation of the mother figure the two concepts of Mother Earth and Mother Goddess. The film thus gave a vigour to the national movement as this was the time when posters were being printed of Bharat Mata in chains and suffering. Or martyrs like Bhagat Singh offering their heads to Bharat Mata. Post-Independence India saw the image of Bharat Mata with her chains broken, the tricolour on the border of her sari and a smile on her face to encourage her favourite son Jawaharlal Nehru.

It was in the renewed scenario that Nargis was reborn as Mother India, striking a famous pose with the plough on her body. To save the honour of the village, she even kills her son, played by Sunil Dutt, who turns a dacoit and is making way with the wicked money-lender’s daughter. She kills the son she loves the most for she upholds dharma.

People just loved it and the film has the reputation of running till date in one cinema hall or the other in the country and still attracting audiences.

Every decade has seen one or more films which played with the myth in one way or other. It was Ganga Jamuna in the 60s, Deewar in the 70s, Ram Lakhan in the 80s, Vaastav in the 90s and Koi Mere Dil Se Poochhe in the new century.

And now the small screen has appropriated this myth giving Tulsi Virani the greatest status that the Indian imagination can envisage. Women in the neighbourhoods are talking of little else and when the story was leaked out a couple of weeks before the trigger was actually pulled, it made front page news in national dailies.

So the moral of the story is when all other formulae fail, it is best to have a good mother and an erring son. Mama mia! A killer mother never fails for the Mother India myth is forever.

A total commitment to writing

2005-08-19T23:10:00.000+05:30

WHENEVER an unbiased literary history of the Twentieth Century is written, it will be remembered as the century of the woman writer. Even though the literary woman dates back to the ancient times, it is this century that saw the woman writer come into her own and wield the pen with a confidence that was long denied to her. And this is a phenomenon that cuts across countries and cultures. And this is not to be judged by just numbers but the quality and the literary merit of their writings. These were writers who could break through the given sexist politics of literature and make a place for themselves as writers who happened to be women.In India, this century sees the rise of the woman fiction writer. We have Asha Purna Devi (Bengali), Ismat Chughtai and Qurratulain Hyder (Urdu) and Krishna Sobti (Hindi) as the pioneering writers in their respective languages who paved the way for many other writers to follow. The importance of Krishna, lies merely not in the fact that she chose a language, which spreads over a large region of the country. Or that she came from the then Hindi-speaking state of Punjab, but the fact that she could tell a story like none other conscious of the history of the century that she was born to. It is the very pulse of the times that she has captured through the everyday people and their lives. And this, while experimenting with language and coming out a winner always.

Of course, to Krishna's credit go many firsts. Her novel Zindaginama, a work of epical scale set in the pre-Independence Punjab which was to be partitioned by the Radcliffe Line to be drawn across it in 1947. The writer who began with a short story first published in 1944 and written a number of novels till she penned Zindaginama was finally given the recognition of being a formidable talent. For creating Zindaginama, Krishna dipped into her childhood and adolescence spent in the ancestral haveli in Gujarat , a part of Pakistan, to relive the rich experience of the lives of the peasants and the landlords. This celebrated writer of a large body of fiction was born in 1925 in Gujarat in West Punjab. She had her early education in Delhi, Shimla and Lahore with fond holidays in the villlage where she built a storehouse of fragrance and memory. However, partition with its bloodshed and migration intervened and her aristocratic family lost many of its holdings. Krishna had to take the post of governess to Tej Singh, the then Maharaja of Sirohi, Mount Abu. Two years later she took up the post of Editor, Adult Literacy, Delhi Administration. It is said that any language has only a writer or two whose writings appear as a 'happening' but Krishna has had the unique distinction of having each of her books welcomed or criticised as a major event. This, not because Krishna was a sensationalist. Krishna remains one of the most serious of writers always but with the courage to write what others may choose to sidetrack. This was more so the case with the powerful women characters she etched. " The writer has to take the second place after etching out the character. Then a spiritual space has to be given to the character to chart out the course of her/his life," says Krishna.

Krishna had made a name for herself in short fiction when her first novel came out in 1958. This was Daar se Bichuri and it told the story of a Pasho who is forced out of her flock and bought and sold like cattle in the strife-torn climate of the Afghan wars. It cuts across religion and culture and written in the decade that followed the Partition of the country in which hundreds of women of women were abducted raped, abused and killed because they belonged to the other religion. Thus Pasho's story is the story of every woman and she yet survives to nurture the child she has given birth to. The story was told with great linguistic economy, an art Krishna was to master, as she moved from novel to novel. This made it more powerful and just the stark description of the events that take place in Pasho's life were enough to send shock waves through people. Pasho was to be the forerunner of the amazing Mitro of the second and much-celebrated novel Mitro Marjani which came out in 1966 and is today hailed as a modern classic. Mitro created an instant stir for it spoke of female desire in no uncertain terms and that too of a married woman in the joint-family framework of a lower middle-class Hindu family. It created an

instant stir. It was translated into Russian, English and Punjabi. Many decades later, Mitro still continues to be a subject for debate. The intensity of emotions she evokes in those who love her and those who hate her is that which would be directed toward a real woman in flesh and blood who dares to tread the forbidden path. This again is a victory of the writer whose characters are so true to life.

Interestingly, years later feminists were to criticise Krishna for making Mitro choose the family. What is pertinent here is that Krishna has never worked in the feminist frame-work as we understand it. Krishna is too major a writer to be taken in by any such trap. The novel comes in the Sixties when feminism as a movement was yet to take shape. Then it was the case of a movement needing writers to support it and thus feminists groups turning to the writings of say an Ismat or a Krishna who have an existence that goes much beyond the ism. The writer herself says, " Mitro Marjani was not a writer's story. It was Mitro's story. I was amazed at the surprises she gave me at every turn. Brought up by her mother outside the walls of patriarchy, Mitro is her mother's daughter who can voice her desires and get away with it. She has no inhibitions about talking of things tabooed by tradition without being offensive. She really impressed me." Krishna's other novels like Yaron ke Yaar,which speaks the language of the clerks in a government office in Delhi and unravels corruption in public life; Teen Pahar, a charged romantic narrative set in the tea gardens in the Darjeeling hills of a woman abandoned for another; Surajmukhi Andhere Ke, which sensitively explores the problem of child rape in which the victim survives to come to terms with her own desire; and Ai Ladki, a remarkable dialogue between a dying mother and her single daughter; Dil-O-Danish,which dwells on the dichotomy of two women and a man set in the cultural climate of Delhi of the early Twentieth Century; and the most recent Samae Sargam, a story of old age; are all milestones which mark a remarkable journey which seems to converge to the centre point of Zindaginama, a saga of love, life and strife told with a truly great flourish. In each of these works she sharpens her style with care to authenticate the situation portrayed. Zindaginama established her instantly as one among the greats. Suffused with the ethos and ambience of pre-Partition rural Punjab, this novel is a visual and dramatic recall of early memories in episodic form. Nand Kishore Naval has referred to it as the most comprehensive, sympathetic and sensitive treatment of the peasant since Munshi Premchand. The narrative flow in the novel is symbolised by the 'the river of life' and the narrative voice is depersonalised. Of this novel which is a gift to the very earth that she was born of, Krishna says, "One fateful morning I woke up with echoes of the Azaan in my ears, and before my eyes stood one minaret of a mosque. I knew then that I was committed to carrying the eternal echo of this voice through the century—Allah-O-Akbar." In this saga of life the experiments with language reached their climax with Krishna incorporating Punjabi dialects into the narrative in Hindi and suffusing the language with a new life. Poet Ashok Vajpayee says of this novel, " The test of a great writer is that she/he take the language where it has never been before. And Krishna passes this test with distinction." Krishna also writes under the pen name of Hashmat and has published Ham Hashmat , a compilation of pen portraits of writers, friends and unforgettable characters. Hashmat for her is not merely a pen name but aspiritual double. "We both have different identities," she elaborates, "I protect and he reveals. I am ancient, he is new and fresh. We operate from different directions. Among the folks Hashmat writes about are taxi driver Jagga Singh, a nameless waiter of La Boheme restaurant, and leading literary contemporaries like Bhisham Sahni, Nirmal Verma, late Srikant Verma, Namwar Singh and many others.

Krishna is a zealous guardian of her freedom as a writer and as an individual. In her own words, " I have always been my own person. It is easier to exaggerate or simplify the difference between people. My biological history says I am a woman. History and individuals cannot ignore each other. I believe that your individuality embraces our innermost uniqueness. And this individuality could be qualitatively different from person to person. And this individuality could be qualitatively different from person to person, not necessarily from male to female. I am a writer who happens to be a liberal, middle class woman. I need to have my freedom for the smooth flow of my creativity. I see in myself a creative writer who has total commitment to her creativity and art." Krishna's life and writings stand testimony to the beliefs she upholds. A very gifted writer reporting on the unreported history of love, loss, of battles won and battles lost. Writing in a climate rife with the hierarchies of literature, Krishna has yet been an influence and inspiration for hundreds of readers: both men and women. And what is it that makes her tick? Krishna says: "Writing for me, is the main activity of my life, not an alternative. In spite of this, I have not written anything in reaction. If I am sad, angry or happy, I do not go near my writing." Here is a writer deeply rooted in the integrated human experience who believes in combining both male and female elements creatively in the content.

A writer who confronts, discovers, defines and redefines with the help of memory. A wordsmith if there ever be one with memory, imagination, experience and study going into making her a great writer of the times.

Star struck

2005-08-19T23:07:00.000+05:30

REMEMBER the old fable in which the benign spirit granted three wishes and no more. If a foolish choice were made, the next wishes would be lost in rectifying it. A modern-day parallel for an adolescent would be a hundred bucks to spend and three things to buy.

Now adolescents these days are quite pragmatic and rarely make foolish choices. Still, I was curious to see what my daughter would do with the hundred bucks an indulgent aunt gave her to spend any which way. So while I spent some time in an art gallery, she went to the nearby market to do her shopping. The three things that she bought herself were a margarita pizza, a can of fizzy drink and a Hrithik Roshan poster. Now the Pizza and drink were probably decided by the time of the day. She had just returned from school and was probably in need for some refreshment. But the stomach had nothing to do with the third buy. That was a dictate of the heart.

I had been hearing murmurs about at Hrithik Roshan poster for some time and these increased when the sci-fiction film Koi Mil Gaya promos started appearing on the television. I had put off the demands by saying that after we had painted the house she could buy it. Once the house was painted, I invented another excuse that she would get the poster only if she cleared the mess out of her room. But now with money to spend any which way, she exercised her choice.

Back home, the poster was pasted on the wall with much ado. I quite enjoyed it all. I like it when she has these small crushes. I must admit that even in my middle age, I am an incorrigible romantic although most of my youth I spent making pretences at being a progressive. Often, I find my daughter much too pragmatic. Perhaps that is the mood of the generation that she belongs to. That night when I went to her room to wish her goodnight, she said, “Mama, what’s with Hrithik? If I sit on the right side of the bed, he is staring at me. If I move to the right, he is still staring at me.

Emboldened by this new turn in conversation, I sat down to tell her how I had worshipped Dev Anand when I was her age. “Do you know I saw Tere Ghar ke Saamne as many as three times!” She was listening in a distracted manner. Dev Anand was quite a pain in the neck for her because she had to suffer him when I insisted on seeing his old classics like Baazi, Jaal or Badbaan on the television.

“But Mama, what’s the point to it all!” she finally said. “Point to what?” I asked in surprise. While I had been talking about my long lost fascination for Dev Anand, she was probably figuring out about her crush on Hrithik. “Point to putting Hrithik’s poster in my room and having him stare at me. You see, I am never going to get him.”

“So what,” I told her, “one doesn’t stop liking someone or something just because one is not going to get it.” I got another bored look from her. I wanted to launch off on a treatise that the ultimate in romance was the unrequited. But I stopped myself. None of my outdated fundas were required. She had to sort out all this for herself. Maybe she would do better than her Mama!

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20031014/edit.htm#6

Egg pakodas at Laala Moosa

2005-08-19T21:20:00.000+05:30

MEMORIES are recalled through the senses. There are the memories of the seen, the heard, the felt and the touched. There are also the delicious memories of the taste buds. And if it were not for these mouth-watering remembrances, I would never have known the name of some obscure little town in West Punjab called Laala Moosa. The memory came down from my mother who had not really seen the town but had passed it many times by rail during her sojourns from Rawalpindi to Kharian. What made the name of this town stay alive in her mind long years after Partition, migration and much else were the delicious egg pakodas that were sold at the Lala Moosa railway station.
“I have never eaten egg pakodas as tasty as those sold at the Laala Moosa railway station!” She would say this and go onto describe in detail how hard-boiled eggs would be slit sideways, stuffed with spices and then dipped in garlic-flavoured besan batter and boiled to a rich golden brown. On an occasional winter Sunday evening she would prepare this delicacy for us and we loved it. But biting into her own share, she would exclaim, “All right! But the Laala Moosa fare was exceptional.”
So this time when I got a chance to visit the Punjab of my parents, I would ask people of the various things I had heard from my elders of the land lost to us in an effort to put together some kind of a patchwork quilt of memories. In the process, I discovered many missing links and a lot more information about things that were still vague in my mind. But when I tried asking people in Lahore about Laala Moosa railway station and the egg pakodas that used to be sold there, I always drew a blank. The imperious Lahoris so proud of their own elegant city had little or no time for some God-forsaken Laala Moosa town.
On the last day in Lahore, I sat chatting with Basheer Ahmad who owns an antique shop in the Falleti’s Hotel. Asking him about the rugs, doorknobs, silver jewels and much else that was littered about, I casually asked him of the place he belonged to. “I am from Laala Moosa,” he said. I almost jumped up crying Eureka! but stopped myself in time and launched off on the egg pakodas at the station that my mother used to rave about. The old man smiled and said, “Yes, you still get them at the station there. So many vendors sell just that. It is the speciality of our town.” I had found a missing link.
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2004/20040705/edit.htm#5