Tag: Buddha

To Egypt with Syed Mujtaba Ali and Nazes Afroz

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date October 16, 2023
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A discussion with Nazes Afroz along with a brief introduction to his new translation of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Tales of a Voyager (Joley Dangay), brought out by Speaking Tiger Books.

Joley Dangay by Syed Mujtaba Ali in Bengali

Translations bridge borders, bring diverse cultures to our doorstep. But here is a translation of a man, who congealed diversity into his very being — Syed Mujtaba Ali (1904-1974), a student of Tagore, who lived by his convictions and wit. Like his guru, Mujtaba Ali, was a well-travelled polyglot, who till a few years ago was popular only among Bengali readers with his wide plethora of literary gems that can never be boxed into genres precisely. People were wary of translating his witty but touching renditions of various aspects of life, including travel and history from a refreshing perspective, till Nazes Afroz, a former BBC editor, took it up. His debut translation Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe as In a Land Far from Home: A Bengali in Afghanistan in 2015 was outstanding enough to be nominated for the Crossword Prize. Recently, he has translated another book by Mujtaba Ali, Tales of a Voyager (Joley Dangay[1]), a book that takes us back a hundred years in time — a travelogue about a sea voyage to Egypt and travel within.

This narrative almost evokes a flavour of Egypt as depicted by Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937) or The Mummy (film, set in 1932), simply because it is set around the same time period. Afroz in his introduction sets the date of Mujtaba Ali’s travels translated here between 1935 and 1939. The book was published in 1955. This book is a treasure not only because it gives a slice of historic perspective but also weaves together diverse cultures with syncretism.

Mujtaba Ali has two young travel companions, Percy and Paul, who despite being British (one of them is on the way to study in Oxford) seem to have a fair knowledge of Indian lore and there is the inimitable Abul Asfia Noor Uddin Muhammad Abdul Karim Siddiqi, who almost misses a train while trying to argue about the discrepancies shown in the time between his Swiss watch and the clock at Cairo. The description is sprinkled with tongue-in-cheek humour.

The voyage starts at Sri Lanka and sails through the Arabian Sea to Africa, where the ship pauses at Djibouti. Here, Mujtaba Ali expands his entourage with the addition of the long-named Abul Asfia, well-described in the blurb as a man who “carried toffees, a gold cigarette case, and other sundry items in his capacious overcoat pocket and who had the answer to all problems though he barely spoke a word ever.” Afroz himself has given an excellent introduction to the writer and the book — almost in the style of Mujtaba Ali himself. This is a necessary addition as it highlights Mujtaba Ali’s perspectives and gives his background to contextualise the relevance of this translation.

Mujtaba Ali’s style is poetic and humorous. It demystifies erudition and touches the heart simultaneously. His ability to laugh at himself is inimitable. He tells us a story about how the giraffe from Africa was introduced to China by a king from Bengal. At the end, he and his companions reflect about the tallness of this tale!

Mujtaba Ali contends: “‘…One of my friends is learning Chinese in order to read Buddhist scriptures in that language. Possibly you know that many of our ancient scriptures were destroyed with the decline of Buddhism in India. But they are still available in Chinese translations. My friend came across this story while searching for Buddhist scriptures. He had it translated and published in Bengali with the copy of the painting in a newspaper. Or else Bengalis would never have known of this because there is no mention of it in our history books or documents in the archives in Bengal.’”

The irony is not lost that Buddha is of Indian origin and yet an Indian has to learn Chinese to read the scriptures. The narrative continues with more dialogues:

“Percy said, ‘But sir, it didn’t sound like history. It [the giraffe’s story] exceeds fiction.’

“I [Mujtaba Ali] replied, ‘Why, brother? There is the saying in your language, ‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’

“And my personal opinion was that if the narrative of an event could not rouse interest in someone more than fiction, then that event had no historical value. Or I would say that the narrator was not a true historian. In our land, most of our historians are such dry bores.”

As Mujtaba Ali’s renditions are colourful – is he a ‘true historian’ by his own definition? Such narratives dot the travelogue, generating curiosity about major issues in a light vein and linking ancient cultures with the commonality of human needs, creating bridges, taking us to another time, finding parallels and making learned, hard concepts comprehensible by the simplicity of his observations.

Similarly, he says of the rose: “The Mughal-Pathan era of India ended a long time ago, but can we say for how long the roses brought by them will continue to give us fragrance?”

Some of his renditions are poetic and beautiful. Mujtaba Ali watches the sunrise by the pyramids and describes it: “Streaks of light were gradually lighting up the liquid darkness. The white parting in the middle of black hair was becoming visible. There was a light daubing of vermillion on that.”

Borrowing from diverse cultures, Mujtaba Ali skilfully weaves the commonality of cultures, customs and countries into his narrative under the umbrella of humanity. Afroz with his journalistic background and a traveller himself, is perhaps the best person to translate this narrative of another traveller from the past. The depth of erudition simplified with humour has been well captured in this translation too. In this interview, Afroz discusses more about the author, his new translation and the relevance of the book in the present context.

You have translated two books by Mujtaba Ali. Is he essentially an essayist? Were there many essayists and travel writers at that point, especially from within Bengal? Where would you place him as a writer in the annals of Bengali literature?

I don’t think that ‘essentially an essayist’ is the right description of Mujtaba Ali. Of course he wrote many essays but his repertoire included novels, short stories, funny anecdotal pieces based on his experiences (in Bangla they are called romyorochona) and stories from his travels, his encounters with extremely interesting people across the globe. He was deeply interested in culinary experiences. So he wrote a lot about food habits, multitude of cuisine and also gave recipes. Hence, it is difficult to box him into one genre of writing. With the publication of his first book, Deshe Bideshe, (serialised in 1948 in Bangla literary magazine Desh and as a book in 1949) he instantly occupied a significant place in Bengali literature.

His Bangla prose, steeped in effortless and seamless multilingual and multicultural references, swept the discerning readers of Bangla literature off their feet. It was not only the prose that he created but the breadth and depth of subjects his pen touched was unparalleled. No author in Bangla language has been able to write on such a wide range of topics till date.

Coming to the other part of the question about travel writers and essayist in Bengal in early part of the twentieth century: the short answer is, yes there were many. Travel writing has been an important genre in Bangla literature. Bengalis had been travelling – for pilgrimage, for rest and recuperation following illnesses, or just for pleasure since the middle of the nineteenth century, which was the time of Bengal renaissance. Writers who undertook such journeys, wrote about their travels too. So Mujtaba Ali is no exception in that regard. He followed in the footsteps of his predecessors and also his peers.

You have called the book ‘Tales’ of the Voyager — would you say that some of the stories are like tall tales here — perhaps tales to convey an idea or a thought which in itself would be larger than history in explaining the truth of a civilisation, like the tale of the giraffe? Would you see this as a comment on the gap between popular and documented narratives in history and on the different interpretations of history?

Ali was an excellent raconteur. He was also gifted with an almost eidetic memory. This allowed him to learn a dozen languages – some with native proficiency. He was a voracious reader too. So, not only did he read tomes on history and philosophy in many languages across cultures but also he gathered fascinating tales from many corners of the world as he loved storytelling. Whenever opportunities came, he masterfully wove those stories into his writing. Thus the tale of the giraffe’s journey from Africa to China via Bengal found its way in this book as he was narrating stories from the east coast of Africa. There is another thing that makes Ali’s writing attractive. He weaves in fascinating quirky funny stories while discussing something apparently dense and dry. I have not come across many writers who have done that. I don’t know whether to name it as his comment on bridging the gap between popular and documented history. There’s no evidence to prove that he was trying to achieve that as he never mentioned it. We could only conclude that it was a style that he invented and mastered in an effort to engage with his readers.

A writer that came to mind while reading this book of Mujtaba Ali is, one who is really more entertaining than accurate –Marco Polo. We know he lived five centuries before Mujtaba Ali. Mujtaba Ali of course is erudite, a scholar, but he seems to have a similar fire within him, a wanderlust. Do you think he would have been impacted by the writings of Marco Polo? Was wanderlust not a very typical phenomenon that was part of the culture that had evolved in Bengal post the Tagorean renaissance? Did Mujtaba Ali also travel for wanderlust?

Reading Ali’s books, one may think that he had wanderlust in the true sense. It will be correct to assume that he was fidgety; he refused to settle down; he moved jobs; he moved cities and even continents. But to be truly smitten by wanderlust, one has to enjoy the travel, which wasn’t possibly the case for Ali. His son told me that even though he travelled extensively, Ali didn’t enjoy travelling much. There had been many, of his time, who were really smitten by wanderlust — like Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963, walked to Tibet twice and wrote only in Hindi), Bimal Mukherjee (1903-1996, a true globetrotter who cycled to London from Kolkata), Umaprasad Mukhopadhyay (1902-1997, who crisscrossed the Himalayas from one end to another), Probodh Kumar Sanyal (1905-1983, his travelogues of the Himalayas), Premankur Atorthi (1890-1964, author of Mahasthobir Jatok) — to name a few. While these authors were inherently bohemian and were drawn towards travelling only for the sake of it, Ali was more of an unsettled soul who travelled with a particular purpose and wrote about his experiences as he had picked up fascinating stories and observed connections between cultures. Because he loved to tell stories and also because he was infused with the idea of internationalism that he inculcated from Tagore, there was no way he could escape but narrating the stories and cultural experienced from his travels.

Tales of a Voyager takes us on a sea voyage to Egypt. Did you travel to Egypt while translating the book? Would you say that the Egypt of those times still resonates in the present day — especially after the 2011 uprising?

Even before his one night stopover in Cairo that he narrated in Tales of a Voyager, Ali had previous experience of Cairo where he spent a year as a post-doctoral scholar in 1933-34 at the Al-Azhar University. So there are many short pieces on Cairo and Egypt by him in his other books. He raved about the café-culture of Cairo and came to the conclusion that Egyptians surpassed the Bengali in terms of adda—hours of the purposeless sessions of chitchat and chinwag. I have been to Cairo at least half a dozen times and realised how acute his observation was. I witnessed in person why Ali mentioned that this was a city that never slept. The cafes and shops were open all night and the streets were full of people with families including children until well past midnight.

Late night, a cafe in Cairo. Photo Courtesy: Nazes Afroz

As expected, the political landscape that you mention in the question, would be completely different between Ali’s time in the 1930s and in 2010 when I started visiting Cairo. When Ali first went to Cairo in 1933, Cairo had just gained full independence from the forty years of British occupation (not as an annexed state but more of a protectorate). So there are some references of the political figures like Sa’ad Zaghloul Pasha[2] in his various writings but the main focus was on its cultures.

When I started travelling to Cairo from 2010, I witnessed some similarities in the cultural traits as elaborated by Ali. But politically by then, Egypt had moved far from where it was in the 1930. It had become an architect of the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1950s. It was the most prosperous country in North Africa and an important leader among the Arab nations. But it was also reeling under the oppression of one party rule and the youth were bubbling to break away from that. This is something we witnessed unfolding from 2011.

What were the challenges you faced while translating this book? Was it easier to handle as it was the second book by the same author?

The main challenge of translating Mujtaba Ali is transposing his unique language steeped in multi-lingual references into English. Also to get his oblique sense of wit and puns from Bangla into another language, which at times, may not have the right words for them. Translating the second book of the same author doesn’t make it easier as the challenges I just mentioned remain for every book.

Tell us what spurs you on to continue translating Mujtaba Ali. Please elaborate.

Syed Mujtaba Ali’s writing had a huge influence on me from my young age. His writing shaped my worldview, planted the seeds of curiosity about many societies, taught me how to make friends in distant lands and start making connections between cultures. So what I’m today is largely due to his writing. As an avid reader of his texts, I felt that it was my duty to introduce him to a wider readership. That’s the motivation of my taking up the translation of Ali. It is also a tribute to a writer who had such an impact on me.

In your introduction you have written of Mujtaba Ali and his writing. What had he written to be put on the Pakistani watchlist in 1950s?

He had penned an essay opposing the imposition of Urdu as Pakistan’s national language on the Bengalis who were in majority in the newly created East Pakistan. He even predicted how the Bengalis would rebel against such a policy, which came true in 1952 in the form of the Language Movement. He wrote this when he was the principal of a government college in Bogura. So he drew wrath of the Pakistani leaders and an arrest warrant was issued against him. That was the time when he left Pakistan and returned to India in 1949.

There also the other difficult personal situation. His wife (married in 1951) who was from Dhaka and was working in the education ministry, continued to live in East Pakistan with their two sons while he lived in India working for the Indian Government. So Pakistanis always thought he was an Indian spy while he was under suspicion in India that he was on the side of Pakistan!

Did Mujtaba Ali participate in the political upheaval between Pakistan and Bangladesh? Please elaborate if possible.

Ali was hugely affected in 1971 because of his personal situation as I just mentioned. I don’t know how deeply he was involved with the liberation war in Bangladesh but he wrote a novel, Tulonaheena (his last novel), against that backdrop – based in Kolkata, Shillong and Agartala and told through the story of a lover couple – Shipra and Kirti. So it is likely that he was involved in some capacity with the war efforts.

Tulonaheen( Incomparable), Syed Mujtaba Ali’s last novel

Mujtaba Ali studied in Santiniketan — that would have been in the early days of the university. Would he have been influenced by Tagore himself and the other luminaries who were in Santiniketan at that time? Can you tell us how? And did that impact his work and outlook?

The simple answer is: it was huge. Tagore was the polar star for Mujtaba Ali, which he acknowledged every now and then in his writing. This experience also decided his life’s journey. He imbibed humanism and internationalism as a direct student of Tagore in Santiniketan. He also developed deep apathy towards all sorts of bigotry. So it was not surprising that he would find it very difficult to accept a country that was created on the basis of religion.

Do you find him relevant in the present-day context? Is your writing influenced or inspired by his style?

I feel that his relevance will never fade. His ability to create cultural connection from different corners of the world will continue to fascinate readers for generations. Yes, in this globalised world when information from around the world are at our finger tips with the click of a button but one also needs to learn how to look at those information beyond mere facts and go deep underneath to make a sense. Apart from being fun and entertaining read, I feel his writing is one such training tool to learn how to make cultural connections. This way, if one wants, one can truly become a global citizen.

As for me, my outlook towards the world is massively influenced by Ali’s writing but not my writing style. It’s simply because I’m not a polyglot like him! I’ll not be able to come anywhere close to his style even if I try.

Well, that is for the reader to judge I guess! You have books on Afghanistan. But you do travel with your camera often. Will you write of your own travels at some point — like Mujtaba Ali but in English?

I have only one book on Afghanistan – a cultural guide book that I co-authored with an Afghan friend. I was working on my own book on Afghanistan, which would have capture one decade of Afghan history and interspersed with my own direct experiences of the country between 2002 and 2015. But the research got stalled for lack of funding. I hope to revive it at some point. And, yes I would like to do my own writing from my travels. That’s there in the wish list.

What are your future plans as a journalist, writer and photographer?

Travel more, see the world more, make more friends and photograph more!

Thanks a lot for giving us your time and the wonderful translation.

[1] Literal translation from Bengali, In Water and On Land

[2] 1857-1957, Egyptian revolutionary and statesman

Read the excerpt from Tales of a Voyager by clicking here

(The online interview has been conducted through emails by Mitali Chakravarty)

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Slices from Life

Kardang Monastery: A Traveller’s High in Lahaul

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date October 16, 2023
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Narrative and photographs by Sayani De

I sipped on my cup of piping hot, sugary tea at Kardang monastery, twelve thousand feet above sea level. The chomo who prepared it chatted away the details of the snow festival that happened a few months ago. The edges of her maroon robes fluttered in the wind. ‘Chomo’ — I learned a new word that day – in Tibetan, it means a female Buddhist monk.

The monastery is an important one of Drukpa lineage[1] built in the twelfth century. The beautiful white facade with gold details gleamed in the sunlight. Intricate thangka paintings adorned the walls and ceiling of the monastery. It was perched on the barren mountain of Lahaul with multi-coloured Buddhist flags swaying in the wind. An imposing statue of Lord Buddha sat in the courtyard, looking over the whole valley. There was still some snow on the mountain tops, spring had just set in.

The chanting of the lamas filled the air. It was part of the evening ritual. Gentle drum beats punctuated the chanting. I felt fortunate to be in such a tranquil space. It was a happy concoction of the high altitude, the rhythmic rituals, and the lack of human habitation around the monastery that left me in a self-contained peace bubble.

“How did you know about this place? Not a lot of tourists come here,” the chomo asked me with a twinkle in her eyes. My mind browsed through the incidents that led me here.

It all started two years ago. My penchant for zoning out to Tibetan chanting mantras on YouTube, and love for off-beat places in the Himalayas led me to some serious research. Lahaul district in Himachal seemed to fit the bill perfectly to get a taste of both. It was easily approachable from Manali, where my family could stay with all creature comforts. Our travel group included our one-year-old son and elderly parents.

The beautiful monasteries in dramatic mountainous settings were as much a reason to visit Lahaul as the adventure to travel to such harsh terrains. We based ourselves in Manali and acclimatised ourselves for a few days before climbing to twelve thousand feet. We hired a local car and driver to visit the Lahaul district. When we told our local driver that we wanted to go to the Kardang monastery, he looked at us blankly. It dawned upon me that it was even more remote than I had realised.

We started from Manali towards the Atal tunnel, a nine-kilometre-long highway underpass in the Pir Panjal range of Himalayas, on the Manali- Leh highway that connects two districts of Himachal. The Atal tunnel was opened in October 2020 after several years of work and today connects the remote Lahaul district with the rest of Himachal.

We left the verdant coniferous forests and mountains with gushing streams on one side of the tunnel and gaped at the dry snowy mountains with freshly sowed fields at the base of the mountains of Lahaul on the other side. It was a dry desert with farming done in little patches at the base of the mountains. The difference was stark.

We stopped at the helipad by the Sissu waterfall in Lahaul district, to recharge ourselves with tea and steaming momos. I saw my father-in-law skip around like a little boy, his jaws dropping every time he looked at the waterfall coming straight out of the glacier that cradled it. It was his first time being in such a terrain. All of us, including my one-year-old son, seemed to be breathing fine and enjoying ourselves, in spite of the sudden gain of altitude to eleven thousand feet. I sighed in relief; no acute mountain sickness (AMS) for us.

We set out to the monastery following google maps and stopped for lunch on the way. After some conversation, the restaurant folks told us that we were going in the wrong direction. Apparently, google maps didn’t work very well in this region beyond the well-travelled tourist circuit. They told us how to reach and from the sound of it would involve off-roading. After losing our way twice, we finally discovered a bumpy path that led to the monastery. We found out later that the best option was to take the mud road on the right after the lone petrol pump in Sissu.

The bumpy mud road that we took instead was devoid of human habitation or road signs till the Kardang village. On each serpentine turn, I could see my travel companions digging their fingers deep into the seat in anxiety. On some stretches, there were walls of ice on the mountain side and the car had to cross the several streams that these walls caused. Later, we all laughed about how each of us was praying for dear life during that treacherous journey.

After a good thirty-minute climb we finally reached the Kardang village and the metalled road was in sight. The Kardang village had a few homestay signposts but none were open in spring. Soon we crossed the signs of the pilgrimage trek of Mt. Drilbu Ri and we were at the gate of the monastery. The short walk to the monastery was nice but we did it slowly as the lack of oxygen was palpable. Kardang monastery is nestled in the ridge below the fifteen thousand feet Rangcha peak. Kardang is the starting point for the Buddhist pilgrimage of Mt. Drilbu Ri.

Upon reaching, we found the door of the monastery closed. Soon we were greeted with the Tibetan greeting ‘Juley Juley’ by a smiling monk who opened the door for us. His name was Sonam Dawa. He was happy to show us around and answer our questions about the prolific thangka paintings on the walls and ceiling of the monastery, on Buddha’s life, dakinis [woman spiritualists], and other important figures of Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism with its characteristic animism and symbolism of Bon culture is a hallmark of this Lahauli monastery. A few lamas and chomos joined us and offered us tea. We were touched by their warmth. They played with my son, told us a lot about the snow festival that happens every February and asked us to come back during the celebration.

To this day I am not sure if it was the high altitude, the aromatic incense, or the space itself that made it feel so special. I remembered the chant on Youtube that started this journey for me and am glad I followed that instinct.

[1] The Drupka lineage of Tibetan Buddhism dates back to the twelfth century.

Sayani De is a bibliophile, compulsive traveller and sustainability enthusiast. Her work has been featured on Women’s Web and been selected for publication at Muse India for its May-June issue.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Tags Buddha, Buddhist, Dakini, Drupka lineage, Himachal, Kardang Monastery, Lahaul, lamas, Manali, Manali-Leh Highway, Mt Drilbu Ri, Pir Panjal, Rangcha Peak, Sayani De, Sissu Waterfall, thanka paintings, Tibetan, YouTube

Interview Review

The Man Who Upended Societal Norms

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date June 14, 2023
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In Conversation with Advait Kottary about his debut historical fiction, Siddhartha: The Boy Who Became the Buddha, published by Hachette, May 2023.

At a time, when the world looks for compassion, acceptance, love, kindness, relief from wars, economic downturns, divides drawn by multiple human-made constructs, what kind of a book could provide entertainment, solace and also suggest solutions to human crises?

Perhaps, Advait Kottary’s Siddhartha: The Boy Who Became the Buddha, comes closest to the kind of book that would encompass all these demands. Many people have written about Buddha and Buddhism, but few have attempted to recreate vividly the life of a prince who rebelled against social norms to uncover a path that more than 2,500 years later continues to be seen as a refuge from violence and hatred. For those who misconstrue Buddhism in the modern political ambience, this book could well be a reminder of what Buddhism is all about.

The writer, Advait Kottary, is an engineer turned actor. Perhaps that is why the visual vividness of the narrative is almost cinematic. The story flows like a stream taking the reader back in time to a period we know very less about. What is amazing is the way in which the author has unfolded the story beginning with Siddhartha’s enlightenment and his journey back through his life in that state. This unique situation gives the Buddha the advantage of not just revisiting scenes but also to visit those aspects of his life and that of others which he could not possibly have witnessed in reality. The Enlightened One witnesses his own birth, his mother’s demise, many battles and courts that he had never ventured into. At a point in his journey, Buddha brings to readers Prince Siddhartha’s dejection despite winning a war. Kottary narrates: “Siddhartha burst into tears. The man was right and all his anger was for the war itself, not directed towards the soldier in front of him… They had won the war, but at what cost?” These are pertinent questions that perhaps, if world leaders asked themselves, we would not have had Bakhmut (Ukraine) or the World Wars.

As Siddhartha finds his peace leaving his palatial home, he realises that he is fortunate to have a family that gives him the freedom to complete his quest (though initially with reluctance). He reflects on why he needs to go on this journey, upending the lives of his family, traditions and even his kingdom. He tells his first teacher, Alara Kalama, “At the root of all the customs and the things we consider to be tradition, I could find no answers, other than the ones that said we live in one way, simply because that is what we are accustomed to; whether it is by virtue of following the habits of one’s parents, or the habits of those in the world around us.”

While raising pertinent issues that need to be brought to the fore in the present context through Buddha’s journey, the detailed research that Kottary has put in is evident. People get drunk on Tongba, a pre-historic recipe for an alcoholic brew of millet which is still in use. Authenticity is enhanced by an interplay of historic incidents, including acceptance of Buddha’s beliefs by one of the bloodiest kings of Indian history, Ajaatshatru, who killed his own father, Bimbisara, drove his mother to death, fell in love with his father’s concubine and razed a city down to find her. Reading of the change wrought by Buddhism in such a ruthless man, one can find hope in the darkest of times. Maybe, like Ajaatshatru, mindless, warmongering political overlords will have a change of heart at some point.

The book is racy despite the factual content. It reads like a well-written fiction. Perhaps it is a bit of that for after all, could we really know what Buddha said to his wife? But what we do know is his wife supported him and became a bhikshuni at the end. The narrative flows — sometimes, calm and reflective while Buddha talks, and sometimes, moving through turbulence, war, intrigue and violence providing a counterfoil to Buddha’s own quest. At the end of every episode, there is that moment of stillness induced by the enlightened one’s comment as he moves towards a new scene from his past.

Each scene brings us closer to the resolution of how the personal and the larger-than-life quest combine to create a sense of harmony at the end. The narrative has the ageless innocence, elegance and wisdom of Oscar Wilde’s stories like “The Happy Prince”. Kottary, a debuting author with the ability to create a compelling tale, explains what went into the making of this remarkable book in this interview.

Buddha is a subject much written about. And yet, you have given this book a unique twist. What made you select the life of Buddha as your debut venture into the arena of historical fiction?

I think I’ve always been fascinated with history and stories from the past, wondering how much of it happened the way we imagine it, and constantly imagining what life was like in any age of the past.

The story of Siddhartha, or the Buddha, came to me at a very interesting time in my life. I had just quit my engineering job, and though I vaguely knew I wanted to act and write, I had no real clue what lay ahead. It was at this time that I found a copy of Old Path, White Clouds by the revered Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hath, at home. At the time, Mom (Gajra Kottary) was reading it for research for a television show she was scripting, and I began to read it, often just opening up to a different random page every time and reading about a fascinating story from Siddhartha’s life. Over the years, I began to read more and more about the life of Siddhartha, beyond the basic facts I had learned in school, and found it so striking that a lot of questions that Siddhartha had from his life and his world, were the same questions that we have from life today. At a stage I was trying to find my feet in life, something resonated within me, and I found so many facets of his life that barely anyone knew about… I felt compelled to tell the story, and it seemed only natural to tell it through his eyes.

What kind of research went into your book? How many years did it take you to create the final product?

If I’m honest I can’t really quantify the amount of research that went into it, I can just sum it up and say, A LOT! Through each and every draft of the book, I’d read more and more about the subject, and there were so many beautiful tales that couldn’t make it to the final manuscript too! But it took more than five years of writing, rewriting, and rethinking. Several drafts were involved. Of course, there were other things I was doing, but putting the book aside for a few months, and revisiting it made me come back with a fresh perspective too, which really helped the process.

How much is fact and how much fiction? Tell us about the journey of the book.

History is certainly the greatest storyteller, and most of what you read in the book is fact. The places, the people, and most of the incidents are all part of recorded history. I had to imagine a lot of the interpersonal relationships involved in the story while weaving the narrative, especially since I was telling the tale from Siddhartha’s point of view. It was therefore critical to understand where he was in his spiritual journey at the time those things happened.

And to be honest that is what fascinated me the most, the lesser-known parts surrounding the known facts and bullet points of history. I couldn’t find Siddhartha’s angst really being dissected before, or his pain being talked about, because history often makes us think of him as a sea of calm, a stoic man. As I went through the drafts, I understood that in this layer of emotions lay something that perhaps we hadn’t thought of before. And of course, we know now that Siddhartha found the answers he was looking for, but back when he left the palace and renounced his life, he had no idea if he would ever find what he was looking for. Can you imagine the turmoil of someone who can surrender the rest of their time to finding an answer they may never actually find? There was a great human tale there, and I wanted to delve into the things in his life that built up to that journey, while learning more about it myself.

You have unfolded the Eightfold Path through Buddha’s personal journey, bringing in his own life experiences into play. Is that something you found in the course of your research or was it your own conclusion? Please elaborate.

A lot of it was down to research, and documented incidents in the life of Siddhartha, but I feel like especially when telling the story of Siddhartha’s life from his own point of view, it was essential to bring his own life experiences into play. Siddhartha’s learnings were often through practice and self-experimentation, a theme that is echoed throughout the book.

There are many personalised details which recreate a distant time period that is unknown to us. What went into giving authenticity to these unknown persons, their thoughts, conversations and tying them up to give us a picture of the times? How did you create characters from the past that could touch on contemporary issues and hearts?

I think it’s easy to think of characters of the past as unidimensional beings. Often that is how history is academically taught to us; good person – bad person, winner – loser etc. But when telling a story, it would be a huge injustice on my part if I did the same. As an actor, the biggest strength one can have is empathy, and every character I’ve played, I’ve always had to personalise the motivations, the desires, the fears and the joys of them all. I tried to think of all the characters in Siddhartha in the same manner. For example, it would have been easy for us to think about Siddhartha’s father, King Shuddhodana, as wrong for sheltering him from the realities of life, like pain, suffering and death. But that would be such a myopic view of what happened, and not taking into account the prophecies that had been told to him, and the fact that Siddhartha had been born after years and years of wanting a child; the stakes were incredibly high!

All it took was a little curiosity and deep thinking into why these characters did what they did; they were simply following their convictions in that moment… Most of it seemed logical, given we knew what each of these characters wanted at different points in time, but of course there was a fair bit of imagination when it came to their conversations. I was always fascinated by how each character would be at their most vulnerable, because that is a part of history that is never touched upon, and I’ve tried to do that in Siddhartha.

You have touched on many contemporary concerns in your book— war, the need to question traditions. You have even said something very deep when you had Buddha say: “Acceptance can only happen when there is no ego.” Was all this done intentionally, or did it just happen in the flow of events? Please elucidate.

When I first began to think about the story of Siddhartha, what struck me was always the contemporary relevance of the questions Siddhartha asked, more than 2500 years ago… Siddhartha always questioned everyone around him, but it was with a view to understand the universe and the world that he was born into. If he didn’t understand, he asked, and with every answer he got from people or the world around him, came new understanding and new questions too. A lot of it happened in the flow of events; but what was challenging was understanding the internal journey of Siddhartha through these events, his emotions and learnings as he grew up, and that had to be intentional in journey and design.

You have been living in London. Did you visit the parts of the Indian subcontinent you have written about?

Yes! It was a surreal experience for me, I had the good fortune of being able to visit Sarnath and Bodh Gaya from Varanasi. I can tell you that photos do not do the Dhamekh Stupa justice, it’s a beautiful and tranquil place, almost like you’ve stepped into a different world.

Did any films, writers or books impact your choices and the way you executed the book? What writers, artistes impact you as a writer?

Growing up as the son of a journalist and a scriptwriter, I’d be lying if I said my parents Sailesh and Gajra Kottary hadn’t strongly influenced my writing. I’ve also been inspired by Antione de Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince and the way it spoke of such beautiful thoughts in such a simple manner, a principle I tried to keep in mind while writing Siddhartha. Some of my favourite films are Dr. Strangelove, the Batman Trilogy, and the television series, Succession. I’m quite fond of storytelling in general as an actor and creator, and I have this weird habit of trying to piece together the narrative in everything I see, maybe even an advertisement in a magazine, deconstructing it and analysing the choices made by the creators.

Your novel is very cinematic. Are there plans afoot to make it into a film, considering the choices you have made, choosing acting over engineering and cars? Did your mother, Gajra Kottary, a major screenplay writer in India, have an impact on the choices you made and your journey as a writer?

Thank you! I’m a very visual thinker, so when I read or write about something, I watch it unfold like a movie in my mind, perhaps that is reflected to some extent in my writing. I have had interest expressed in the book from a couple of wonderful filmmakers, and hopefully I’ll have some amazing news to share soon!

My mother has been the greatest writing influence in my life, and I have to give her credit in that she has only guided and taught me and never tried to influence my decisions in the kind of work or projects that I take up.

So, what are your plans for the future? Any more books coming our way?

Yes, most certainly! I’ve got two drafts screaming at me for attention. One is about the life of another historical figure, closer to modern times, who lead an unbelievable life. The other one is pure fiction and more in the genre of dark humour; a dystopian take on modern civilisation, but again centred around a clear protagonist.

I’m living in London now and continue to act and perform in theatre as well, so there’s always something exciting happening on that front. I’ve also had some interest in Siddhartha from some wonderful film makers, so fingers crossed something visually beautiful can be born from this. So the hunt for great stories continues!

Thank you so much for your time and your lovely book.

(The review & online interview conducted through emails are by Mitali Chakravarty)

Click here to read an excerpt from Siddhartha: The Boy Who Became the Buddha

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Excerpt

Siddhartha: The Boy Who Became the Buddha

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date June 14, 2023
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Title: Siddhartha: The Boy Who Became the Buddha

Author: Advait Kottary

Publisher: Hatchette India

‘King Bimbisara is completely enamoured with Amrapali. He seems to be in love with her, and for that, Ajaatshatru seems to detest him. They are not on speaking terms anymore. Moreover, when I was there, Ajaatshatru did not speak a word even to me…’

‘Are you sure you did not do anything to upset him?’ asked Shuddhodana, concerned. Ajaatshatru giving Siddhartha the cold shoulder was worrying news indeed. He was only a few years younger than Siddhartha and was poised to take the throne from Bimbisara. If, in the future, the rulers of Kapilavastu and Magadha could not see eye to eye, then what would be the point of this trade route that they had so carefully worked on? What would be the point of the independence from the trade route through Kosala?

‘Father, how could I have upset him when he wouldn’t even speak to me? He chose to go hunting both on the day that I arrived as well as the day that I left.’

‘This is not good,’ said Shuddhodana. ‘This is the result of Bimbisara’s own foolishness. The only reason that Ajaatshatru dislikes you is because Bimbisara keeps comparing him to you. He was always very taken by your insight.’

‘But if that were the case, then we have no reason to worry! If I try to establish friendly relations with Ajaatshatru, then perhaps we will not have anything to fear!’

Shuddhodana was taken aback at how optimistic Siddhartha sounded. He wished he could share his optimism but was wary of saying anything to take away his son’s enthusiasm for affairs of the state.

‘But there was still something wrong with King Bimbisara; he seemed to not have any relations at all with Queen Kosala. Instead, he spent most of his time with the courtesan Amrapali. I believe Ajaatshatru took offence to that too, for he didn’t seem interested in spending any time with me.’

‘I wouldn’t give it too much thought, Siddhartha, there are things about that family that you do not know. Perhaps it is not right for us to ascertain from the outside, the merits of their dynamic, but they have shared a very troubled relationship, let us leave it at that…’

‘What do you mean, father?’

‘The stars are powerful, Siddhartha. Great things can be done and undone, depending on whether one has luck and destiny on his side or not. Parents may be invulnerable when it comes to anything else on earth, but they are powerless when it comes to their children. Once the idea that some misfortune might befall their children enters their heads, they will do anything to ensure that this does not happen.’

‘Including banishing every single crippled, injured or maimed person from their kingdom to live in misery?’

Shuddhodana gave Siddhartha a sharp look.

‘Who has told you of this?’ asked Shuddhodana.

‘I have seen Sukhibasti with my own eyes, Father.’

Shuddhodana felt like he had been hit square in the chest with a mace.

‘I did what I believe was right, Siddhartha,’ he said.

‘You could call it that, Father, but I am simply trying to understand how a man as great as you could love his family as much as you have, while showing no mercy to your subjects.’

Shuddhodana was insulted, more so because he was hearing these words from his own son. Siddhartha was crossing a line.

‘Siddartha, I am your Father but I am your king as well. Do not forget that.’

‘Do not threaten me, Father. I have seen what you created. How long did you plan to keep it a secret? How long did you plan to have it hidden from me? How many more lies are there to discover?’

‘Enough!’ bellowed Shuddhodana. ‘I did what I had to, to safeguard the kingdom and its heir from straying off the path that was chosen for him.’

‘Did you think that you needed to take the words of someone who hadn’t seen the future so seriously that it influenced the way you brought up your own child?’

‘He was my Guru, Siddhartha, just as Guru Kondanna was yours.’

‘Guru Kondanna is my guru!’ Siddhartha corrected an angry Shuddhodana.

‘You are overstepping your boundaries, Siddhartha. I have been very patient and understanding, but enough is enough. You cannot take the pain of others and make it your own all the time. At the end of the day, one’s duty must take precedence over everything else.’

Siddhartha calmed down and collected himself. He took off his armour and laid it on the floor of the courtroom at the foot of his father’s throne.

‘Forgive me, Father. I do not mean to disrespect you or my duty but what must one do when he is unable to see the reason behind one’s duty and dharma? When I left Kapilavastu, I encountered nothing but suffering and sadness. The farmers who grow the food we eat are exploited mercilessly by royal guards and collectors. I have been sleepless since I returned from Sukhibasti. Are you aware that our own injured and maimed soldiers are sent there? They fought for us and with us in the war. How can one call this duty?’

(Extracted from Siddhartha: The Boy Who Became the Buddha by Advait Kottary. Published by Hachette India, 2023.)

ABOUT THE BOOK

His family was happy to see him, but they had hoped to meet the Siddhartha they knew, not the Buddha he had become.

Long before Siddhartha became the enlightened leader [Buddha], he was a boy oblivious of the world. As the young prince navigates politics and relationships, he slowly begins to question his oppressively perfect life. Meanwhile his family struggles to maintain their deception in the hope that they can mould him into a dutiful king – from banishing the old and sick to hiding their own advancing age. In Advait Kottary’s intricately woven narrative, raw human emotion and conflict is tempered with the boundless compassion of the Buddha. Exciting and insightful in equal measure, Siddhartha is at once a riveting story and a profound meditation on our shared quest for truth.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Advait Kottary is a writer and actor residing in London. Passionate about cars and engineering, he worked as an engine designer before quitting his job to pursue his love of writing and the performing arts. He went on to lead the world’s biggest Bollywood musical Jaan-E-Jigar, and act in international productions such as Beecham House. Advait has also co-conceptualised the award-winning television show Molkki and voiced several audiobooks with Swedish platform Storytel. Siddhartha is his first novel, which stemmed from his own quest to understand the Self and his encounter with the Buddha’s teachings.

Click here to read the review/interview with Advait Kottary

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Tags Advait Kottary, Ajaatshatru, Beecham House, Bimbisara, Buddha, Hatchette India, Kapilavastu, Kosala, London, Magadha, Siddhartha: The Boy Who Became the Buddha, Storytel

Essay

When ‘they’ Danced…

Ratnottama Sengupta is riveted by the phantasmagoric Bhooter Naach, the Ghost Dance, in Satyajit Ray’s legendary film — Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne — that has no precedence nor any sequel in cinema worldwide.

Some years ago, I was preparing for my talk on dance in Hindi Films, given to the Film Appreciation students at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune. I noticed that every major director in the earlier years, from Uday Shankar (Kalpana, 1948), V Shantaram (Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje, 1955), and K Asif (Mughal-e-Azam, 1960), to Guru Dutt (Saheb Bibi Aur Ghulam, 1962), K A Abbas (Pardesi, 1957) and Sohrab Modi (Mirza Ghalib, 1954) had started with Indian classical dance in its purest form – Kathak — and the leading ladies Vyjayanthimala, Waheeda Rahman and Padmini came equipped with the dance of the devadasis, Bharatanatyam. Subsequently however, most filmmakers diluted the purity of these dances, perhaps to suit the situation in their films. And in recent years that dilution has gone further to take the form of fusion dance, westernised dancing, and group dancing to add volume to the glamorous visual of female torsos in movement.

Suddenly it struck me that Satyajit Ray (1921-92) too had used Kathak in its purest form in Jalsaghar (1958) and then ‘diluted’ the purity of classical movements to design the rhythmic footwork of disembodied spirits. And it dawned on me what level of genius could create a dance that becomes a visual statement on the history of the land itself! Of course, I am talking about the ‘Dance of the Ghosts’ in Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969). The towering presence had ‘choreographed’ this dance which has simply no parallel in the world of cinema. Yes, the director — who also penned the lyrics besides screenwriting his grandfather’s adventure story first published in Sandesh in 1915 – had diluted the classicism of Kathakali and Manipuri. But he had fused in so many more art forms like masks, paper cutouts, shadow art, pantomime, celluloid negatives and special effects that it emerged as a class in itself, giving even today’s viewers an experience nonpareil.

In this fantasy that ends as a fable with a timeless moral, Ray experimented with a psychedelic burst of dancing. The narrative pivots on a tone-deaf singer and a bumbling drummer. Essentially though Ray’s telling of the ‘fairytale’ was a garbed plea against war. The message he sent out loud and with laughter: “When people have palatable food to fill their belly and music to fill their soul, the world will bid goodbye to wars.”

But Ray’s recounting of the story was far from didactic. Indeed, he himself is known to have said, “I don’t know if you can truly demarcate fantasy and fable.” So, instead of categorising it as one other the other, he recommended that we see Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (GGBB) only as the story of a duo of untalented musicians. Their playing earns ridicule from fellow villagers and contempt from their king but appeals to the upside-down aesthetics of ghosts. The charmed King of Ghosts appears with an eerie twinkling of stars and a disembodied voice to bless them with three boons. With an enjoined clap of their hands, they could feed to their heart’s content, they could travel where they want to in their charmed shoes, and their music could entrance their listeners.

Building upon this children’s story, Ray himself wrote the dialogue, designed the music, the costumes of the entire cast, and the choreography of the Ghost Dance that is redolent of Uday Shankar’s Kalpana. The dead come alive when Goopy-Bagha play and perform a surreal dance that briefly echoes the past of India — because bhoot kaal in Bengali means ‘past tense’.

The celluloid representation depicts in minute details the division of society into caste, class and creed since time turned ‘civilised’. Ghosts in the first group are the royals – from the age of Puranas through Buddha’s times to the rule of Kanishka Gupta. The shadowy, amorphous shapes in the second lot belonged perhaps to the lowest strata of those they ruled – peasants, artisans, Santhals, Bauls, Mussalmans. The third set of ghosts recall the story of colonisation by people who are suited-booted, wear hats, walk with a stick, indigo planters who drink whisky from bottles and strike awe with their body language. The fourth group comprises potbellied ghosts whom Ray identified as ‘Nani Gopals’. They wear costumes that remind us of city-dwelling zamindars, money lenders, padres who try to teach Bible and orthodox priests who run away from them. Their bulky forms contrast the skeletal shadows that precede them on the screen – perhaps because they thrived by exploiting the plebians?

All these ghosts are described later by Goopy and Bagha: they are Baba bhoot Chhana bhoot, Kancha bhoot Paka bhoot Soja bhoot Banka bhoot, Roga bhoot Mota bhoot. Thin or fat, short or tall, crooked or straight, simple or strange… between them, they are the world we inhabit across time and space!

Each group appears separately, in harmony; then they reappear to fight a war and kill one another. The pantomime is danced only to the clash of percussion instruments – and makes us wonder, when did homo-sapiens get so divided?

The allegorical dance in four segments is a phantasmagoria of styles and moods that mesmerises at every repeat viewing – as much by the visuals as by its conceptualisation. But what were the technical feats that shaped the fantastic performance? In an interview given to Karuna Shankar Roy for Kolkata, a magazine edited by Jyotirmoy Dutta, for its special edition on Ray (published on May 2, 1970), the master himself had guided viewers through the Bhooter Naach. Let me retrace part of the journey.

Ray had, since Teen Kanya (Three Daughters, 1961), scored the music for his films as the ustads he earlier collaborated with were too engrossed in their ragas to understand the needs of a film script. In GGBB, in addition to the theme music that has always borne his signature, the songs had to speak, act, develop the characters…

Let me elaborate. The original story simply said Goopy is a singer. But when Ray sat down to write the songs he had to draw upon words, and since words have meaning, the songs “say” something. When Goopy sings to arrest the march of the advancing soldiers, what could the words say? Clearly they couldn’t say, “Dekho re nayan mele jagater bahar! Open your eyes to the wondrous beauty of this earth” – that is the ditty Goopy sings right after being blessed by the King of Ghosts. Set in the calming morning raga Bhairavi, it would not be appropriate here. So he sings, “O re Halla Rajar sena, tora juddha korey korbi ki ta bol! Tell us, oh soldiers of King Halla, what will you achieve through war? You will only sacrifice your life at the altar of weapons!” At once the song becomes a diatribe against wars worldwide and through history.

So, the words are fed by the situation in which the song is being sung – and the movements were stylisation that sometimes leaned towards the Western classical form of Opera and sometimes towards Bengal’s very own Jatra[1]. GGBB is in that sense a complete musical. Yet, I notice that the songs here don’t carry the story forward – instead, they arrest movement. In that sense they can be said to owe their lineage to Jatra where the songs act like the Greek chorus, commenting on the action and acting as the conscience keeper.

Ray did not settle for the obvious, much heard folk songs of Bengal, be it Baul or Bhatiali, Bhawaiya or Gambhira, Kirtan or Shyama Sangeet, Agamani or Patuar Gaan. Nor did he entirely shun the robust classicism of ragas. He crafted his own folksy scheme that was close to the soil of the rustic protagonists yet uncomplicated enough to appeal to the strangers inhabiting the land where they find themselves amid scholastic vocalists. Here, in the distant land where Goopy-Bagha had travelled in their magical shoes, their music had to transcend the barrier of language. In Ray’s own words, “it had to be deshottar, kaalottar[2]”. And in being so, every one of their songs has become timeless. Be it Mora sei bhashatei kori gaan/ We sing the melody of that or any language, or Aay re aay manda mithai/ Rain down on us, sweets for every taste – today they are a part of Bengal’s cultural ethos.

Ray may have caricatured the learned ustads seasoned in ragas but, repeatedly and in various ways, he uses Carnatic music. When Goopy and Bagha are fleeing from the lock-up, the stylised flight parodies Bharatanatyam movement – “Goopy re Bagha re Pala re pala re! Run run run…” Contrast this with the forlorn music of “Dukkho kise hoy? What causes sadness?” The score uses merely two string instruments – a dotara, a two-stringed instrument, and a violin which is widely used in Carnatic music “but here it is played much like the sarinda that is popular in East Bengal,” Ray had explained in the 1970 interview reprinted in Sandesh.

However, I am most fascinated by the use of Carnatic musical instruments in the Ghost Dance at the outset. As in the rest of the film, this sequence too has heavy orchestration — but the movements are choreographed not to a song, only to a quartet of percussion instruments.

At the risk of repeating myself I underscore that Bhooter Naach has no precedent nor any sequel in any movie made in any country at any point of time. So, to understand the process of its creation, we can only listen to Ray. “The story simply said, ‘the ghosts came and danced’. But how could I realise that in visual terms? Bengal of course has a conventional description of ghosts: their ears are like winnows, their teeth stick out like radish, they are pitch-dark, with arched back. But this would not be artistic. Nor could this meagre description sustain me through an entire sequence that had to create an impact deep enough for the film to rest on. Besides, there is no convention about their dancing. That is why I started to think: What if those who actually lived and died, were to come back? How would their bhoot look and behave?”

Here, let me add that for Satyajit Ray as for Upendra Kishore too, the term bhoot was not synonymous with the English ghost or spirit. Indeed, ghosts have been part of our folklore since our forefathers peopled Bengal, so much so that villagers still won’t utter the word after sunset, preferring to refer to them as “They”. In fact, the bhoot always had a different connotation in Bengal’s literary convention that has an entire genre thriving on bhoot-pret-jinn-petni-sakchunni-dainee-Brahmadaitti… Not only is the phantom celebrated in Sanskrit literature’s Betal Panchavimsati, Tagore, talking of his childhood, writes how he expected one of them to stretch out a long arm from the trees after nightfall. Ray’s ‘Lilu Pishi’ – Leela Majumdar – had authored Sab Bhuturey[3], a collection of ghost stories, while Ray himself gave us Baro Bhuter Galpo [4]a fun collection of 12 stories meant to exorcise fear! The tradition continues to live on, through the pen of Sirshendu Mukherjee, author of Nabiganjer Daitya[5], Gosain Baganer Bhoot[6], and Rashmonir Goynar Baksho[7]that was made into a film by Aparna Sen.

Now, to circle back to the Ghost Dance: Once Ray had transformed the ‘positive’ – read, live humans — into their ‘negative’, the dead, he realised that they could be kings and colonists as in history books, and they could be farmers and sepoys, Buddhists and Bauls, preachers and rioters too. After all, there were miles of burial ground in Birbhum — the location where Ray was shooting — that were the resting ground for Europeans who had breathed their last in Bengal. Thus, organically, came the thought of the four categories of ghosts distinctly identified through the visuals: A) the royals; B) the exploited class; C) the firangees or foreign imperialists; D) the bloated exploiters – baniyas or shopkeepers, capitalists, preachers.

In the Kheror Khata, notebooks where he drafted every frame for GGBB, Ray actually names his ghosts. So, Warren Hastings, Robert Clive and Cornwallis are resurrected with their guns and their swords. This reminded me of the Terracotta Soldiers I have seen in Xian: the funerary sculptures depicting the army of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, were modelled on actual lived soldiers, I had learnt. Similarly, the thought of Chatur Varnashram[8]may have led to the four classification of ghosts – and the depiction of rows of simplified human figures on many of our temple walls – including Konark — could have inspired the vertical arrangement of the four groups, one on top of the other.

In execution, these ‘disembodied’ figures were given body by actual dancers. “We spent long hours together choreographing the sequence,” Ray said of Shambhunath Bhattacharya who had trained students in his dance school to take turn in dancing the classical footsteps. Their costumes and make up were, of course, designed by Ray and devised by art director Bansi Chandragupta, in keeping with their station in life. The exception was the Europeans: Ray used shadow puppets dancing 16 frames a second to evoke their mechanised manner. The action was in ‘five movements’: They come, they dance, they clash and war, they build up a frenzy that is resolved in harmony. The ghosts, after all, cannot die again!

Realising the movements was a challenge that the genius overcame technically. “If the four rows had to be physically shot, with four rows of dancers standing one over another, it would have needed a three-storey space. So, we arranged two rows at first, photographed them by masking top half of the film. Then we reversed the film and operated the camera to capture two more rows. The camera was on a crane and at the precise moments marked by music, we had to zoom back from the close up…”

The music for Bhooter Naach has its origin in the Carnatic taal vadya kacheri – an orchestra of percussion instruments that Ray first heard on radio, then witnessed at the inauguration of an International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Delhi. He decided to use a unique quartet comprising of mridangam, ghatam, kanjira and morsing. For the uninitiated: mridangam is a double-sided drum (somewhat like Bengal’s terracotta drum, khol) with a body made from hollowed jackfruit wood and the two mouthpieces covered by stretched goatskin. Ghatam, known as ghara in Punjab and matka in Rajasthan, is a clay pot with a narrow mouth whose pitch varies with its size. Kanjira, belonging to the tambourine family, has a single pair of jingles on it. And morsing, a plucked instrument held in the mouth to make the ‘twang twang’ sound, is also found in Rajasthan and Sindh. Ray used mridangam for the royals “because it is classical,” and their dance movement is also purely classical. Kanjira, with its semi-folk sound, he used for the farmers, and ghatam with its somewhat rigid sound was right for the rather wooden, mechanical movement of the Europeans. And the croaking sound of the morsing? Yes, it was just what the comical bloated figures needed!

Finally, we come to the most haunting part of the stellar performance: the Ghost King who grants Goopy Baagha the three boons that change their lives, the lives of the kingdoms of Shundi and Halla, and the definition of fantasy in cinema. Chumki, the decorative spangles predominantly used in zardozi, combined with a soft light that diffused the reflected shine of the beads to work ethereal magic. The radish-like teeth crafted from shola pith – the milky white Indian cork that is hallowed by its association with Puja in Bengal — stuck out of the pitch-black body that had eyebrows whitened with paint. Finally, a thick white ‘sacred thread’ across its chest completed the appearance of the gigantic holy demon, Brahma Daitya.

The matching intonation? We all know by now: It was The Master’s Voice. Sound engineer Babu Sarkar had recorded Ray’s baritone, then played at double speed, and rerecorded it…

Only a genius of Ray’s stature could visualise this!

This essay is part of the online website dedicated to the Kheror Khata Satyajit Ray maintained, detailing the making of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. This was launched to celebrate the Birth Centenary of the legend. Republished with permission from TCG Crest.

[1] Folk theatre from Bengal

[2] Beyond the bounds of countries or time

[3] All ghosts

[4] Big Ghost Stories

[5] Nabiganj’s Demon

[6] Gosain Garden’s Ghost

[7] Rashmoni’s Jewel Box

[8] Four categorisations

Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award.

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Discussion

How Gajra Kottary Weaponises Words

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date December 14, 2022
1 Comment on How Gajra Kottary Weaponises Words

In a medium that is known for its regressive content, Gajra Kottary, novelist and short-story writer, has time and again gone against the tide and broken taboos. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri looks at five shows she has written that went against the grain and emerged triumphant…

Growing up in the 1980s, one of the many pleasures of a less cluttered and leisurely time was the birth of the TV series. Many people I know would swear by the fact that the first of these represented the best of Indian television. Even close to forty years later, I can still rattle off the days on which each was telecast: Karamchand on Mondays; Hum Log[1]and then Buniyaad[2] on Tuesdays and Saturdays; Khandan[3] on Wednesdays; Ados Pados[4]on Thursdays; Yeh Jo Hain Zindagi[5]on Fridays. You had stalwarts like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal and Basu Chatterjee make fine works for the television.

Sometime by the end of the decade kitsch entered in the shape of Ramayan and Mahabharat. I moved on and lost touch. A resurgence of sorts happened with the coming of cable television, and we had path-breaking shows like Shanti and Tara. And then it became increasingly difficult to keep track of TV shows. The shows changed beyond recognition. Led by the likes of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi,[6] they became more and more ridiculous in the worlds they represented. One word came to be bandied about regularly with respect to soap operas: regressive.

However, like all generalised judgements, a blanket application of the word is unfair to a number of serials that tried to, and often succeeded in breaking taboos, while operating within the limitations dictated by the medium and the grammar of its narrative. And the one writer who has time and again bucked the trend, gone against the tide, is Gajra Kottary, the creator of historic shows like Astitva: Ek Prem Kahani[7]and Balika Vadhu.[8]

Gajra Kottary with Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri. Photo provided by Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri

Journalism and Fiction Writing

One of the reasons Gajra manages to break new ground in her television narratives might have something to do with her training as a journalist. “IIMC [Indian Institute of Mass Communication] was a tough course to get into and we had a few fresh graduates like me, and a whole lot of older and established professional journalists from other non-aligned countries studying with us, a great mix,” she says. It provided her with a grounding in fact-based narratives while polishing her skills as a writer, of which she had provided glimpses in college, when two stories she wrote got published in Eve’s Weekly, along with two fiction-style middles in The Times of India. “The IIMC stint helped because as I have observed over the years, I have more respect for the sanctity of facts even while taking my flights of fancy than others in the business. I take fewer creative liberties than others. I have done more realistic shows on television which helped forge a distinct identity for my writing.” But it also left her confused since political and economic writing held no interest for her and Delhi offered avenues only for those.

Destiny intervened in the form of Cupid. Falling in love with Sailesh Kottary, a “hotshot and hardcore journalist”, she moved to Bombay. It was here, as a “stay-at-home mom”, that she gave wings to her imagination and honed her writing skills. Watching serials like Saans[9] and The Bold and the Beautiful might also have helped imbibe certain aspects of writing for a visual medium. Her first work of fiction, Fragile Victories, a collection of stories, led to her first assignment in television. She had sent a copy of the book to Mahesh Bhatt, who passed it on to Soni Razdan. Impressed by the collection, the latter signed Gajra up for the story and screenplay of her first TV production, Hamare Tumhare[10](2000), which marked her TV debut, before Astitva made everyone sit up and take notice.

If IIMC shaped her in some ways, another skill-set that has held her in good stead probably came from her experiments in writing fiction. Fragile Victories was followed by another collection of stories, The Last Laugh, and the novels Broken Melodies, Once Upon a Star, Girls Don’t Cry and Not Woman Enough. These helped her to keep to a discipline that could go missing in the never-ending juggernaut that is the TV soap opera. They also are testimony to her willingness to push the envelope when it comes to narratives and characters. Not many know that much before Indian writers, particularly women, began addressing issues of sexual identity and same-sex relationships, Gajra had written about these in her fiction. As she puts it, these themes “continued to ‘consume’ me”. Not Woman Enough may have been published as an e-book only recently, but it evolved from a story that she had published way back in 2003. “I felt that I hadn’t done justice to the theme in the short format, so I wrote a full-length novel titled Not Woman Enough and felt finally relieved of my obsession.” Another story, ‘Two Gold Guineas’, evolved to her third novel Girls Don’t Cry, a pun on the expression ‘boys don’t cry’ and “an ode to the bravery of women and the friendship between a grandmother, mother and daughter”.

What is startling about these works of fiction is her ability to address taboos. Not Woman Enough not only deals with a same-sex relationship, but Gajra has the audacity to set it in rural Rajasthan as opposed to an urban setting, where it would have probably been just another story. She has the perspicacity to understand that the stakes are so much higher for first-generation characters experiencing the forces of social liberation while battling age-old customs. It is the same acuity that she brings to bear upon her iconic TV shows, which have time and again shown what is possible in a medium that allows little leeway for out-of-the-box thinking.

Astitva: Ek Prem Kahani (2002-2006, Zee TV)

Running 668 episodes, over a period of three-and-a-half years, this is the series that launched Gajra into the big league. Today, twenty years after the first episode was aired, an older woman-younger man relationship might appear staid. But back then it was bold, and Indian television had not seen anything like it. It made an icon of its lead, Niki Taneja, who plays a doctor who falls in love with a man ten years younger. What stood out is the maturity with which the series unfolds, largely devoid of the excesses that came to mark television in later years. “The first TV show maker I decided to call upon was Ajai Sinha, who had directed shows like Hasratein [11]and Justajoo[12]. He had been planning a show called Astitva with a bold theme and my timing was bang-on. It spoilt me enough to believe that television too was conducive to the kind of work I felt happy doing.” That this show managed to hold its own against a raging Kyonki[13], speaks volumes of the writer.

Balika Vadhu (2008-2016, Colors TV)

2167 episodes! Yes, you read that right. One of the longest-running shows on Indian television, this cemented Gajra’s reputation as a writer. Here again, Gajra was going out on a limb addressing a much-abused tradition prevalent in large parts of India. And sure enough, the press wasn’t flattering. It is one show that divided opinion like few others. “Yes, we received some negative press, because Anandi was this irrepressible kid, a happy child who kept bouncing back despite dealing with the dark consequences of child marriages of the past playing out in the present. It was a calculated approach as child marriage is a dark and gloomy issue. It was a conscious decision here as we needed to keep the cheer, but critics felt that we were glorifying child marriage. I think they were missing the woods for the trees.”

One possibly needs to understand the medium and its viewership to get a sense of what Gajra means. Unless the packaging is glossy enough – colourful clothes and jewellery – audiences might have been put off entirely by what is a repulsive subject. “And that would mean we would not be able to get across the underlying message of the show. These tactics are important due to the challenge of the medium of television, and the terror of the remote control. It was a classic case of the sugarcoated pill doing its work.”

Apart from the writing, the series was also recognised for its iconic performances and comments on several social issues that ail Indian society, which were woven in organically without being preachy. It also had an authentically rustic feel thanks to Purnendu Shekhar, whose concept it was. Those decrying the glossy packaging forget that the issues the series addressed included girl child education; peer, sibling and parental pressure to do the best; child labour; the begging racket; forced prostitution behind a legal façade; quacks and medical malpractices; date rape; adoption; alcoholism; divorcee and widow remarriage; trafficking in women; surrogacy; juvenile delinquency and teenage crimes, among others. From the comfort of our air-conditioned condos and offices, far removed from these realities, it was easy for the elitist press to criticise the series.

One standout episode dealt with the protagonist’s first experience of menstruation. This is a subject still, despite Padman and the increased conversation around it, spoken of in hushed tones. It is fascinating to hear Gajra’s take on this: “I remember how we involved Avika’s [the child actor who played Anandi] mother to explain to the child privately about menstruation before we shot the scene showing a young girl’s trauma when it happens to her as a bahu in a conservative household. Lots of people wrote to us about delaying the marriages of their girl children after watching Balika Vadhu. There was a girl who was emboldened enough to annul her marriage that had happened as a child when she turned eighteen. We received mails even from parents of city girls who were now reversing their decisions to get their girls married by the time they were sixteen.”

There was of course the flipside of popularity, when the writer received a death threat on Twitter if she dared to kill off the character of Shiv (played by Siddharth Shukla). “Those were the early days of social media, so real people started to write in with their reactions which were usually very intense and sometimes downright ridiculous.”

Buddha (2013-2014, Zee TV, DD[14] National)

This series, spanning 55 one-hour episodes, was a huge challenge, involving as it did a historical figure, and one of the most important religious figures of the world. But trust Gajra to approach the subject from a refreshing point a view: as she points out, in school textbooks we go straight from the story of Gautama leaving home to being under the Bodhi tree and achieving enlightenment. But his experiments to arrive at the truth had many stages to it. As she says, “What it did was to dispel my own myths about the Buddha’s life. I had always felt disturbed about his abandonment of his wife and child for his own spiritual search.”

It helped that the show came to her at a point in life when the strong opinions and idealism of youth, both professionally and personally, had given way to the realisation that nothing is or can be ‘perfect’. By the time the show was done she too had evolved to accept that the Buddha had to be true to his heart’s calling. “I understood the ‘larger purpose’ of his life. I came to terms with the ‘abandonment’, though my heart still bleeds for Yashodhara and Rahul. What also helped was learning about Yashodhara’s evolution, albeit painfully, to want to join his sangha voluntarily, and him helping her find her ‘larger purpose’.” The series focuses on aspects of his life after the Enlightenment that many are not aware of. It is this larger view that shapes the series, making it a departure from the dime-a-dozen ‘mythological/religious’ shows with ‘special effects’ that blight our senses.

Silsila Badalte Rishton Ka[15] (2018-2019, Colors TV)

Extramarital affairs are the oxygen to the beast that is the TV serial. Offhand, I can think of not one serial that does not have a million and more permutations and combinations of the theme. So, it takes a really perceptive writer to give this tired trope a new perspective, and Gajra manages that in Silsila, upending the traditional way that extramarital affairs are portrayed. “Is the ‘other’ woman necessarily a femme fatale, a super-cool career woman, and the wife a boring domestic goddess or could it be the other way round also?” she asks.

The series provides further proof of her ability to give a new spin to a theme that’s been done to death. As she says, “I am emotional about this show as it was inspired by what happened with some close friends and associates. I needed a relief from all the social stuff in Balika Vadhu. Also, I believe that an author’s voice in terms of standing for the right thing can and should reflect in any kind of story, even if it’s not apparently one on a social issue. The classic extramarital affair with the eternal conundrum is a fascinating aspect of human relationship … does a third person enter the picture because a marriage is already collapsing or does the entry of a third person lead to the collapse of a marriage. Is it the cause or effect?”

Molkki (2020-2022, Colors TV)

After Silsila, it was back to a classic social issue for Gajra. At the heart of this show is the tradition of bride-buying in Haryana, which in turn has its roots in the scarcity of brides due to female feticide/infanticide. As Gajra says, “Molkki was a Covid baby, my second project with Ekta Kapoor and it was made keeping in mind all commercial considerations.”

Female infanticide is a recurrent theme in several of her stories. She writes about it in her novel, Girls Don’t Cry, while Not Woman Enough, published as an e-book by Juggernaut, has this as a strong strand, being part of the protagonist’s backstory impacting her psyche. Again, what needs to be noted here is the writer’s willingness to explore issues that contemporary television is not known for, even if the execution falters given the demands of the medium.

Addressing the Regressive Nature of Television

But Gajra does agree that on the whole, television is regressive. Though it is described as a writer’s medium, there’s only so much that writers can do in terms of trying to infuse new ideas and nuanced storytelling in the face of TRPs[16] and other market considerations and entrenched beliefs that ‘bas yahi chalta hai’[17]. So, writers take the easy way out, churning out what the studio executives want. “For the handful of people prepared to take the risk and at least try to do things differently, there are scores of others who would like to use every gimmick in their book and keep regurgitating bad content.”

In terms of audience profiling too, what’s happening with television is that most of the intelligentsia has shifted to web shows. The television viewership class has gone lower down in the social scale. So when content is being made and consumed by a non-thinking class, it also starts reflecting in the TRP studies. The classic chicken-and-egg syndrome.

Looking Ahead

Gajra is currently basking in the success of her latest show, Na Umr Ki Seema Ho,[18] which recently celebrated its hundredth episode. The show is being hailed as ‘different’ by many. As she says, “The most heartening comment that I often get to hear is that ‘it’s the first TV show I have started watching after many years’, from people who had switched full time to watching web shows.”

Shantanu and Gajra with the lead actors of *Na Umr Ki Seema Ho*. Photo provided by Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri

Any grand obsession, a show she would like to write? “As far as TV goes, I have always dreamed of doing a version of one of my all-time favourite films, Abhimaan[19], with or without the music background. The subject becomes more and more relevant every decade. Frankly, no channel wants to touch it. Though the people one speaks to share my admiration for the story, the ‘system’, they say, is not conducive to making it. I also want to adapt my first novel, Broken Melodies, as a web show or film. It’s the story of a girl growing up in the seventies, torn between the values and stifling world that her classical musician father [an autobiographical element given that Gajra is the daughter of the classical maestro Pandit Amarnath] represents and the liberation that the English education sponsored by her mother affords her.”

One can only say, more power to writers like her, and the breaking of glass ceilings and taboos.

(Originally published in The Telegraph, Kolkata)

Addendum

Shantanu: You grew up in Delhi in the 1980s. That was the birth of the TV era with Hum Log, Buniyad, and all those glorious serials. Did any of these influence you?

Gajra: You’re so right, Shantanu, they hugely did, except that there was no plan that I had then, to actually use that impact to write something similar. I loved both these shows purely as a viewer. Hum Log did tackle social issues, for example, dowry, but why I liked it was that it showed the clash of values within a family with different generations, and through that, it entertained and made one feel and think – the sensitization process as its termed. Later, I learned that Hum Log was inspired by the Sabido method (originating in Mexico) where TV is used as a medium to bring about positive social change by making viewers ‘feel and think’ rather than preaching to them.

I loved Buniyaad for a purely sentimental reason. My parents were from Lahore and Multan respectively and had come as refugees to Delhi, so we had grown up hearing stories of Partition and here was a show that brought that era alive for me in an extremely moving and entertaining way. So maybe subconsciously both these shows did impact my psyche – as in it was possible to talk emotions that were universal, even while having a responsible author’s voice.

Shantanu: What do you attribute the change in the style and content in TV soaps, first with Tara and Shanti, and then Kyunki Saas Bhi…

Gajra: Tara and Shanti were the first movers, coming in like a breath of fresh air after the DD days which were associated with somewhat stodgy storytelling, Buniyaad etc., being the shining exceptions. Tara and Shanti were great in terms of revolving around thinking and evolved women, but perhaps were ahead of their times…they still are, given where TV storytelling has gone.

By the time Kyunki Saas came to TV screens, middle- and lower-middle-class homes could afford a TV set, so there was a genuine need for TV to go more middle class in its appeal. So, we had a plethora of shows with joint families and generations under one roof, which truly was the reality of such homes, and which therefore connected with the masses easily. Ekta Kapoor also upped the drama quotient hugely, so there was no way it wasn’t going to work with the masses.

Unfortunately, however, everyone went about copying the formula and there was the overdose factor. So, TV honchos were afraid of trying different subjects and worlds and that for a very long time became the bane of TV writers.

Shantanu: On Buddha: ‘dispel your own myths, you say …’ What apart from his abandonment of his wife and child haunted you. Do you reconcile with the abandonment once you had done the writing for this? Did it make sense now?

Gajra: Buddha, the show, came to me at a point in life when the strong opinions and idealism of youth – both in professional and family life – had given way to some acceptance and the realisation that actually nothing is or can be ‘perfect’. And certainly not any decisions of life that we might make. So, we might as well make the decision, and accept and live with the consequences as positively as one can. I know that that’s so ‘anti’ the way today’s youngsters think!

So yes, from his wife and family’s point of view his decision seemed ‘selfish’ but he had to be true to his heart’s calling and that so-called ‘selfishness’ of his is what made him give so much to the world to make it a better one. I understood the ‘larger purpose’ part of the Buddha’s life after I started researching more and more while writing the story for the show. I came to terms with the ‘abandonment’, though my heart still bleeds for Yashodhara and Rahul, when I think about them. What also helped was me learning the historical truths about how Yashodhara evolved, albeit painfully, to want to join his sangha voluntarily at some point, and him helping her find her ‘larger purpose’.

Also, what I realised is that in school textbooks we go straight from the story of Buddha leaving home to being under the Bodhi tree and achieving enlightenment and uplifting the world. This had been my myth too. But, in reality, the Buddha’s many experiments to arrive at the truth had many stages to it. He went through extreme deprivation, abnegation, self-loathing and much else, before he arrived at the eight-fold path – the most practical and fair way to lead life in any time and space.

And he certainly did not advocate renunciation for all or even the perception of Buddhism as a religion. His was the ultimate live-and-let- live approach to life – just that his methods helped his followers lead a life of peace and equanimity within their chosen path. Through writing the show I realised that there could be no other way of life that was so compatible with the modern way of thinking and doing. So I am not a ‘Buddhist’ but I still try to recall the eight-fold path at various difficult points in my life and it really helps me.

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer. Books commissioned and edited by him have won the National Award for Best Book on Cinema twice and the inaugural MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Images) Award for Best Writing on Cinema. In 2017, he was named Editor of the Year by the apex publishing body, Publishing Next. He has contributed to a number of magazines and websites like The Daily Eye, Cinemaazi, Film Companion, The Wire, Outlook, The Taj, and others. He is the author of two books: Whims – A Book of Poems(published by Writers Workshop) and Icons from Bollywood (published by Penguin/Puffin).

[1] TV series, translates to ‘We – the People’

[2] TV series, translates to ‘Foundation’

[3] TV series, translates to ‘Dynasty’

[4] TV series, translates to ‘Neighbours’

[5] Comedy TV series, translates to ‘This is life’

[6] TV Series, translates to ‘Because the Mother-in-law was a bride too’

[7] TV Series, translates to ‘Identity: A Love Story’

[8] TV Series, translates to ‘Child Bride’

[9] TV Series, translates to ‘Breath’

[10] TV Series, translates to ‘Ours & Yours’

[11] TV Series, translates to ‘Desires’

[12] TV Series, translates to ‘Search’

[13] TV Series, translates to ‘Because’

[14] Doordarshan or DD, Indian public service broadcaster founded by the government of India

[15] Translates to ‘Changing Relationships’

[16] Target Rating Points

[17] Hindi phrase: ‘This is what works…’

[18] ‘Age is just a number’, literal translation ‘Age has no boundary”

[19] Translates to ‘Ego’, 1973 Bollywood film

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Essay

The Call of the Himalayas

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date April 14, 2022
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Narrative and photography by P Ravi Shankar

Pokhara with Annapurna towering in the backdrop

Pokhara, Nepal is one of the few places in the world where towering snow-clad mountains are easily seen from a subtropical setting. The town is at a height of around 900 meters and within a span of around 40 kilometres, the land rises to the summit of Annapurna at over 8000 meters. The view of colourful poinsettias and bougainvillea against the blue sky and the white peaks creates a picture postcard setting. The soft limestone rocks are easily eroded by powerful glacial-fed rivers creating deep gorges. The hills surrounding Pokhara have many charming villages and one can also follow the river valleys to the Annapurna Sanctuary (a pasture situated between the Annapurna peaks) and to the land of Mustang.

I was at Kalopani in Mustang. The morning was bright and sunny, but the air was still chilly. The dining room was heated, and many tourists were having their breakfast before continuing their treks. The Nilgiri Himals (snow-covered mountains in Nepali) were clear in the bright morning sunshine. We were waiting for our pooris to arrive.

My friend and I were hiking up toward the Thakali (the major ethnic group in this area) settlements of Tukuche and Marpha. The dining room was big, and the glass windows had spectacular views of the pine forests. We were at the Pine Forest Lodge in the twin settlements of Lete and Kalopani. The settlement continues for over thirty minutes on both sides of the trail. The lodge is big by trekking lodge standards and has sixteen rooms. Run by the Dhawlagiri Technical school, this facility is often used to train tourism students. The manager informed us that the number of tourists they can accept every day is limited due to an agreement with similar businesses in the area. Now, it also offers free wi-fi services. When we visited in the early 2000s, cellular and internet services were still in the future.

Our pooris finally arrived. They were fluffy and brownish red. A potato and peas gravy accompanied the pooris. The dish was thick and spicy. The small hill potatoes were tasty.

The lodge constructed of stone can be cold during the nights, but comforters are provided to guests. I always had pleasant stays at this lodge. I never had the opportunity to meet trainee students as usually they started their sessions only after nine in the morning. By that hour, we were already out on the trail.

The Village of Kagbeni with the Kali Gandaki River

The Tibetan shrine with the five foot statue of Buddha in the background

The Red House Lodge in Kagbeni is a bewildering warren of rooms and passages. Kagbeni is on the way to the holy shrine of Muktinath and hikers without the expensive permit to Upper Mustang can watch the trail meandering through the Kali Gandaki River and the barren brown hills. The Red House Lodge is an iconic establishment and several stories and blogs have been written about it. The lodge is a traditional, red-coloured Tibetan house and was started by Pema Doma in 1997 when the region was opened to tourists. She developed a beautiful friendship with an Australian lady, Sydney Schuler. The small house that served as the lodge did not have a name and she then decided to install a signboard inscribed with ‘Red House Lodge’. There are Tibetan religious texts and a Tibetan shrine with a five feet statue of the Buddha at the centre. Firewood and provisions dry in the harsh sun on the flat roof and there is a large pole with prayer flags flapping in the wind.

From the roof, you can gaze at the dreamy landscapes of upper Mustang and watch the constantly changing play of light on the barren hills. By mid-morning strong winds roar from the Tibetan plateau. Tibetans use both the wind and water to carry their prayers far and wide. The lodge was used to store rations by the Khampa resistance fighters, who struggled against cultural hegemony in the mid-twentieth century. Kham in eastern Tibet was one of the three traditional provinces and the Khampas (the inhabitants) have a reputation as tough fighters. They eventually migrated to Nepal along with other refugees and waged armed resistance to free Tibet till they were eventually disarmed by the Nepalese army in the 1970s. Kesang in the Mustang region was one of the main centres of the Khampa resistance. The food at the lodge in Kesang is excellent and it is a good place to rest either on your way up to or down from Muktinath. The sense of history is strong in this lodge as a comfortable familiarity with the past blends into the present.

Ghandruk is a large Gurung village near Pokhara and the headquarters of the Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP). Gurungs are an ethnic group dominant in the hills around Pokhara. Along with other ethnicities they constitute the famous Gurkhas known for their courage and valour. Gurungs are believed to have originated in Tibet and practice a mixture of animistic, Hindu, and Buddhist religious practices. They live on the southern slopes of the Himalayas in central Nepal and call themselves Tamu. Many serve in the Nepalese, Indian, British and other armies and police forces and have seen action in several conflicts.

Due to the civil war, many Gurungs migrated from their villages to settle in Pokhara. Ghandruk (also called Ghandrung) is the second largest Gurung village in Nepal after Siklis. The village sprawls over a hillside with terraced fields. From the road head at Nayapul (new bridge), Ghandruk is a four-to-five-hour trek initially along the riverbank and then through well-maintained stone staircases. The Himalaya Lodge (a Kerr and Downey resort) is located right at the top of the village. This lodge lets out rooms to independent trekkers if not occupied by those who have reserved their rooms through Kerr and Downey.

The lodge has spectacular views of the Annapurna Himals. The dining room is decorated in the Gurung style. The food at the lodge served in traditional copper utensils is excellent. The freshly plucked green leafy vegetables and the radish pickle are tasty. The rooms are well-appointed with attached bathrooms. You sleep between freshly laundered white sheets. The lodge provides guests with slippers and down jackets for their use during their stay. There are tables and comfortable chairs placed in the stone-paved courtyard for al fresco dining and you can watch the clouds gather and eventually cloak the Himals. Butterflies and birds flit among the flowers. The lodge also has different handicrafts for sale. I was first introduced to the singing bowl or the Himalayan bowl here. The traditional bowls were originally made of a variety of metals including mercury, lead, silver, iron, gold, and copper. I found it fascinating that by moving a wooden stick around the bowl a rich harmonious note could be produced.

Ghorepani at around 2800 m is famous for the views of the Annapurna and Dhaulagiri Himals. The viewing of sunrise at Poon Hill is a highlight of the trek. I usually stay at the Snow View lodge located close to Poon Hill. The lodge is made of wood and has an excellent solar hot shower. They have a single room with a window providing excellent views. The cast-iron stove in the dining room is warm and the food is excellent. Ghorepani is a long day’s climb on steep stone staircases from Nayapul and Birethanti. Climbing to Poon hill from the lodges using flashlights in the predawn darkness is a unique experience. Ghorepani was a watering hole for horses till it was discovered by tourists. The settlement has several lodges both down in the main village and higher up at Deurali (the pass). The rhododendrons during spring bloom in various shades of red and pink. The cornbread baked at Snow View lodge is excellent and is my breakfast of choice.

The last few years have been hard on the trekking lodges. First, there was the devastating earthquake of 2015 which damaged the infrastructure, and then the global shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. The lodge owners are resilient and resourceful. The lodges offer comfortable alternatives to staying in cold tents and also contribute to the local economy. Now, as the world is beginning to open its doors again to tourism and travel, I look forward to returning to the magic of the Himalayas and revisiting these wonderful lodges.

Dr. P Ravi Shankar is a faculty member at the IMU Centre for Education (ICE), International Medical University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He enjoys traveling and is a creative writer and photographer.

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Review

Turmeric Nation: A Passage Through India’s Tastes

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date November 15, 2021
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Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: Turmeric Nation: A Passage Through India’s Tastes

Author: Shylashri Shankar

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Shyalashri Shankar is an academic whose third non-fiction, Turmeric Nation: A Passage through India’s Taste, won a woman author’s award in India called the AutHer Award (2021). This book is a detailed and rich journey through India’s multiple cuisines and culinary cultures divulging interesting facts like Aurangzeb was a vegetarian.

In the literature of food writing, we have both advocates of diversity, food fusionists as well as food fashionistas. Shankar’s approach is fairly eclectic and informed, drawing on the anthropology and sociology of both food and the cultures they originate from. Professing to write a “food biography” of India, she also realises that such a task is both “challenging and daunting”, given the magnitude and diversity of the task involved. She describes Indian cuisine as layered and pluralistic, where there is no one cuisine which can be described as ‘Indian’. Her book proceeds to map these regional diversities not only in food and food cultures, but also cooking styles.

Giving veritable gastronomic glimpses into the fascinating world of the great Indian kitchen, Shankar explores food histories of ancient India dating back to Harappans, while keeping a keen eye for networks of customs, habits and styles of living. From time to time, the cuisine has absorbed new methods of food processing and cooking and been hospitable to new and foreign influences. At the same time, it has at times exerted injustices since the sociology of food is shown to be intricately linked to the that of the caste as shown in the section on Dalit foods. Shankar rightly refuses to mythify or romanticise food, instead she refers to social anthropologist James Laidlaw’s notion that nowhere in the world are food transactions socially or morally neutral, and that the politics of and around food are probably the sharpest in South Asia.

She draws from the theories of ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who, she argues, analysed different cooking techniques to put forward an influential structuralist idea of the raw and the cooked. Food, according to this theory, is a medium between nature and culture. The activity of cooking performs a process of civilising nature.

Shankar asks more fundamental questions: Did our ancestors determine the way we eat? What is the DNA of food preferences? Which is a better diet — vegetarian, non-vegetarian or paleo (what Is paleo)? Does food have a religion? What food creates ardour and desire? What are the transgressions and taboos on certain kinds of foods? What is the purpose and function of certain rituals around food — for instance, the logic of feasting and fasting? As Shankar takes us on this fascinating journey of culinary exploration, we see the emergence of a rich map of cultural anthropology.

Turmeric Nation is an ambitious and insightful project which answers these questions, and then quite a few more. Through a series of fascinating essays—delving into geography, history, myth, sociology, film, literature and personal experience—Shylashri Shankar traces the myriad patterns that have formed Indian food cultures, taste preferences and cooking traditions. From Dalit ‘haldiya dal’ to the last meal of the Buddha; from aphrodisiacs listed in the Kamasutra to sacred foods offered to gods and prophets; from the use of food as a means of state control in contemporary India to the role of lemonade in stoking rebellion in 19th-century Bengal; from the connection between death and feasting and between fasting and pleasure, this book offers a layered and revealing portrait of India, as a society and a nation, through food. It takes us on a fascinating culinary journey through the length and breadth of the subcontinent.

The proof of the pudding, many might feel, is in the eating. Why such a learned dissertation on food, gastronomy and culinary traditions? Is it ultimately to map unity, diversity, and work towards an idea of syncretism? Either ways, the book is worth keeping on our shelves and stocking in libraries, swelling the corpus on food studies which is now studied as an important part of Cultural Studies in many universities. The book ultimately gives us much food for thought as it theorises the practices of cooking and eating across Indian cultures.

Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is Associate Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Tags Aurangzeb, Buddha, Claude Levi-Strauss, Dalit, Harappa, Kamasutra, Meenakshi Malhotra, Shylashri Shankar, Speaking Tiger Books, Turmeric Nation: A Passage Through India's Tastes

A Special Tribute

Peace in the footsteps of Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date August 6, 2021
1 Comment on Peace in the footsteps of Hiroshima & Nagasaki

The mother of a soldier once told me she did not agree that winning a war was a solution to peaceful living. She said, “If our army kill the enemy, some other mothers lose their sons; some other wives are widowed; some other children lose their fathers…”

Her summation of the war seems like an accurate description of the current day scenario. While politically the bombs that killed 140,000 in Hiroshima and 74000 in Nagasaki on 6th and 9th August respectively(1945), destroyed two cities, ended the Second World War (1939-1945) which claimed a total of 70-85 million lives over six years and led to the celebration of VE Day (Victory Europe Day), can we afford such horrors of violence and annihilation again? This is a question that remains in the grey zone as nuclear non-proliferation looks like agreeing to peace because the terror of war frightens. Will we ever have a world where peace is loved for the sake of what it brings and not for the fear of annihilation?

Writers in this special commemorate the horrors of the atom bomb and write their plea for peace. While American-Japanese writer, Suzanne Kamata, and Manjul Miteri of Nepal explore victimhood, Michael Burch talks of the Enola Gay, the legendary bomber that dropped “Little Boy” and annihilated a whole city. He reflects on the testing that continued on Bikini Island and further to ‘maintain peace’. We also have the words of Kathleen Burkinshaw who continues impacted by this terror — though it was her mother who was the hibakusha or survivor of the bomb blast. We round up this section with Candice Louisa Daquin’s reflections on peace and the reality as it is.

Poetry

Commemorating Hiroshima: Poetry by Suzanne Kamata that brings to life August 6th and the impact of the bombing on the victims and the devastation around them. Click here to read.

Oh Orimen! A poem in Nepalese about a victim of the blast written by a sculptor, Manjul Miteri, who while working on the largest Asian statue of the Buddha in Japan visited the museum dedicated to the impact of the blast. The poem has been translated to English by Hem Bishwakarma. Click here to read.

Mushroom Clouds: Poetry by Michael Burch that reflects on Enola Gay and the Bikini atoll. Click here to read

Prose

Surviving Hiroshima

Kathleen Burkinshaw is the daughter of a woman who survived the Hiroshima blast. Burkinshaw suffers neural damage herself from the impact of the bomb that her parent faced. She has written a book called The Last Cherry Blossom recounting her mother’s first hand experiences. Her novel has been taken up by the United Nations as a part of its peacekeeping effort. She has been actively participating in efforts to ban nuclear weapons, including presenting with Nobel Laureates. Click here to read the interview.

Peace: Is it even Possible?

In the post second world war scenario, Candice Lousia Daquin explores war and peace through history. Is peace possible? Click here to read.

Tags Bikini Island, Buddha, Candice Louisa Daquin, Enola Gay, Hem Bishwakarma, Hiroshima, Kathleen Burkinshaw, Little Boy, Manjul Miteri, Michael R Burch, Nagasaki, nuclear non-proliferation, Peace, Suzanne Kamata, Victory Day

Interview

In Conversation with Arundhathi Subramaniam

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date April 14, 2021
No Comments on In Conversation with Arundhathi Subramaniam

Arundhathi Subramaniam, Photo Credit: Meetesh Taneja

Does she need an introduction? Arundhathi Subramaniam who has taken the world by storm with her poetry, reinforcing God, using English as a medium of writing over what we call a mother tongue, and voicing her stand on her own concept of national identity, and yet she has won the Sahitya Akademi award for 2020 for her collection, When God is a Traveller. She has broken rules that defined the modern literary world and moved towards creating her own individual brand of writing. Her writing is full of vivacity and makes the reader emote. She writes from the core of her being — that is clearly evident in the flow of her poems. Clarity, preciseness and perfection in linguistic usage enhance her ideas and grasp the reader in their fulcrum to lever their thoughts and emotions into her world. In this exclusive with Borderless Journal, read about Arundhathi’s journey.

Tell us about your journey as a writer and a poet. When and why did you start writing?

I’ve been excited by poetry for as long as I can remember, Mitali — the swing, the rhythm, the velocity, the precariousness of it. Thankfully, none of my early efforts at writing it have endured! But I composed many bits of doggerel as a child. In my adolescence and early adulthood, poetry was catharsis and emotional self-expression, as it is for so many. I think it was in my late twenties and thirties that I began to come into my own as a poet.

My first book, On Cleaning Bookshelves, happened in 2001. I felt I’d been waiting a long time to be published. But in hindsight, it was a good thing. It took me time to find the timbre of my voice, to allow it to embody a mix of assurance and doubt. At least I now began to know the poetry I aspired to. It is what I still aspire to — a kind of textured clarity, a poised uncertainty.

What gets your muse going?

I’m still finding out! I know some measure of quiet helps. Long days, devoid of agenda, help. And yet, so much writing also happens on flights, in cab rides, in coffee shops, waiting for a friend to arrive. Poems happen when I’m able to strike a certain creative tension between urgency and unhurriedness.

When you were a child, what were your aspirations? What did you want to become?

There was a fleeting aspiration at age five to join the army. But I think I realized pretty soon that the path to field marshaldom was an arduous one. It was always poetry after that!

In 1997 you had a life changing experience. What was it and has it impacted your writing?

It was a naked-wire experience of emptiness, if you will. A brush with life without form, without any graspable meaning. There was terror in it, but later, also a kind of freedom. I’m never quite sure what brought it on. But the experience faded in a week, leaving in its wake a strong, unwavering awareness that I needed to live my life differently, to commit myself to making my peace with this vacancy. That turned me into a seeker, first and foremost. All the writing – both prose and poetry – that came afterwards probably reflected this shift in some way.

What have been the influences that impacted your writing?

The literary influences have been as varied as all the poets whose work I’ve ever loved: TS Eliot, Basho, Wallace Stevens, Donne, Neruda, Rilke, Anne Sexton, Denise Levertov, Arun Kolatkar, AK Ramanujan, John Burnside, and so, so many more. But as my spiritual journey took on a certain momentum, I also rediscovered the Bhakti poets for myself, and realized they were an integral part of my literary lineage. They are my ancestral guides and companions, in a sense: Nammalvar, Annamacharya, Tukaram, Akka Mahadevi, among others. And there are so many other mystic poets I’d add to that list: Issa, Buson, Ryokan, Ikkyu, Dogen, St John of the Cross, Hafiz, Rumi, among them.

But we aren’t shaped only by what we read, are we? My life experiences have also impacted my writing. I’ve met some extraordinary people, had some fascinating conversations, travelled to some unforgettable places, had some deeply life-altering (and not always easy) experiences, and I’m sure all of those have contributed to who I am and how I write.

You have done a book on Sadhguru and another with him. What was it like working with him?

Sadhguru can be funny, profound, provocative, compassionate, a friend, a remote spiritual master — sometimes all in the course of a single interaction. So, I learnt to go into every book session, prepared to be startled. It’s been interesting — the way I have felt provoked, unsettled, singed, during many of our meetings, and still emerged, feeling oddly energized, invigorated, alive. As the writer of his biography, I was struck by the freedom he allowed me, his refusal to micro-manage the writing.

You have written books on Buddha and Sadhguru. Why did you opt to write on men associated with religion?

Well, I’ve also edited an anthology of Bhakti poetry, Eating God, and have a forthcoming book on four contemporary little-known women who walk the spiritual path in their own deeply individual ways, called Women Who Wear Only Themselves. So, my fascination is with the realm of the sacred – and not just with men who commit themselves to it, but with women too.

I am emphatically not fascinated with the exoteric aspects of religion. But I am interested in the nascent experiential insights around which faiths are often built. So, the Buddha has long interested me as the fearless amateur questor, the compassionate guide who showed us a direct path back to ourselves – one that allows us to bypass all the institutional middlemen who ‘sell water by the river’, as it were. Sadhguru fascinates me for similar reasons, as a contemporary mystic – irreverent, flamboyant, and deeply human all at once.

You have got God back into poetry. Eating God, a recent book of yours, even says it in the title. What made you opt for bringing God back in where the modern trend is to shun the spiritual? What is your perception of God?

Eating God is an anthology of sacred verse – of devotional poetry. So, it was difficult not to have god on the menu. The bhaktas wouldn’t have forgiven me for it!

My own book of poems, When God is a Traveller, also uses the word ‘god’. But the god of this book is not a deity in a temple, but a heroic adventurer who, like so many others in world myth, takes off on a journey around the world and returns to find the answers lie within him. So, the god, Muruga, is a kind of alter ego in this case; a pilgrim/ traveller/ vagabond archetype who mirrors us back to ourselves.

My perception of the divine? It’s still unfolding and is best implicated in poetry. So, let me simply share my poem, ‘Goddess – II’, with you. It’s from my most recent book, Love Without a Story.

Goddess II 
(after Linga Bhairavi) 
 
In her burning rainforest 
silence is so alive 
you can hear  
 
listening.

Have you ever written in any other language other than English? Why?

No, I haven’t. English is my first language, and it is an Indian language. It may be ours due to unfortunate historical circumstances. But it is no longer a foreign import. It is as much ours today as democracy, or cricket, or chai, or the chili, or tamarind, or okra, or the nose ring! I have translated poems from Tamil and Gujarati into the English, however, working with fellow-translators for whom those are their first languages.

In your poem, To the Welsh Critic, you have said: “This business about language, / how much of it is mine, /how much yours”. By saying this, in a way you critique the commonly held belief that writers should write in their mother tongue to express themselves. Can you explain your views on this?

Well, I often say that my mother speaks many tongues. She is a Tamilian, raised in Burma and Delhi, married in Mumbai, and has chosen now to live in Chennai. Consequently, she speaks Tamil, English and Hindi fluently, and is now studying Spanish online! Like most Indians, she has bequeathed to me a multilingual inheritance. I grew up in Mumbai where I heard Bambaiyya Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil and English around me. English, however, was the language I formally studied, and the language I heard plentifully at home, so it is my first language. It is the language I dream in, express rage and grief in. It is the language closest to my skin; it is the language I need, therefore, to write poetry in.

Rather than impose some doomed project of cultural jingoism upon ourselves, rather than try to aspire to some mythic state of cultural purity, it would make our lives infinitely richer and more exciting if we embraced our pasts. My ‘Welsh Critic’ poem is addressed to all those – in our country and elsewhere — who offer us absolutist formulae for belonging, who would have us believe there is only one way to be ourselves. As I say in the poem, ‘I stammer through my Tamil,/ and I long for a nirvana that is hermetic,/ odour-free, bottled in Switzerland’. My cultural identity is polyglottal, happily hybrid, and for those very reasons and other indefinable ones, I believe I am as Indian as they come.

How do you think language should be perceived? Should it be bound to the umbilical bonds? Or should a writer, like an artist, be free to choose his medium of expression — for language is merely his tool, his colour or paintbrush?

Language is and must always be about freedom of choice. Only when we choose freely can we express freely. Rather than chop and hack at a diverse cultural legacy, it makes sense to enjoy its abundance and savour its many flavours. This is why so many Indian poets I know are translators as well. We enjoy the challenges of bringing the textures and insights of one literature into another, opening up new worlds of aesthetic experience. I have worked for years as editor of the India domain of the Poetry International Web, a small but significant online archive of contemporary Indian poetry. It entailed working with poets working in over twenty Indian languages. The work on this website, as well as all my book of Bhakti poetry, has been about translation – allowing literatures to roam freely from one linguistic context to another.

It is time to talk unapologetically about the language of poetry. Poets everywhere recognize each other because of this kinship. It has nothing to do with jaded arguments around language politics. Those belong to politicians, not poets.

Some of your poems talk of establishing an identity as a woman and express a fierce desire for an independent existence. “I erupt from pillars, / half-lion half-woman.” Do you think this need is gender related? Or is it the call of poetry?

Well, yes, some of my poems do consciously assert a female identity. It is one of the many identities I own – alongside being Anglophone, Indian, contemporary, among other things. In ‘Confession’, the poem you mention, the entity that erupts from pillars, ‘half lion-half woman’, is clearly an allusion to the Narasimha avatar of Vishnu – and yes, I’m definitely presenting a female version of that archetype here. I remember the surge of freedom and joy when crafting that metaphor.

There is an early poem, ‘5.46, Andheri Local’, in which I speak of a women’s compartment in a peak-hour Mumbai local train being transformed into ‘a thousand-limbed, million-tongued, multi-spoused Kali on wheels’. And in my most recent book, I have a song for ‘catabolic women’ – women who are happily ‘unbuilding, unperpetuating, unfortifying, disintegrating’. These are some of the poems in which the female identity is asserted strongly, emphatically.

‘Catabolic Woman’ is a poem that binds you to both your identity as a woman and an Indian. Do you see nationalism as a necessary part of a writer’s identity?

Well, there’s a playful paradox in one phrase — ‘proudly Indian, anti-national’ — but other than that, the poem doesn’t really dwell on national identity. It’s more about growing into oneself as a woman (something that happens usually in one’s forties and fifties, or at least, did for me), a woman who’s no longer fooled by self-serving rhetoric, vested interests, hidden agendas. As I said of the poem, ‘To the Welsh Critic’, I see myself as deeply Indian. But I’m uncomfortable with dogmatic definitions of what it means to belong to a particular country, a particular faith, or even a particular gender. There are many ways of being not just Indian, but woman, as well. I would like to believe that my work reflects that complex sense of identity.

Tagore, perhaps the most acclaimed poet from India, wrote in the start of his essay on Nationalism, “Our real problem in India is not political. It is social.” Would you agree with that?

Well, I know that there are ways of belonging that lie beyond a glib cosmopolitanism and what I think Tagore called ‘the fierce idolatry of nation-worship’. Belonging anywhere is not about passivity. It is always an act of negotiation. It takes time to see plurality as a possibility, rather than a liability. As richness, rather than confusion. Countries everywhere are grappling with this in their own way – how to celebrate diversity, but without hierarchy, a diversity rooted in justice, in equality. That is our challenge too.

What is your perception of the role of a poet or writer in the world? Is it only aesthetics or something further?

We sometimes tend to polarize the morality-aesthetics debate. Being morally attentive doesn’t mean turning heavy-handed or perennially indignant, and valuing aesthetics doesn’t mean turning ethically laissez-faire or politically indifferent. The role of a poet, as I see it, is to be true to the way she sees the world and to use language with precision and thoughtfulness. A mix of authenticity and artistry, integrity and craft – both are essential to poetry.

Poetry alters human beings in very deep and enduring ways. But those changes aren’t accomplished by turning self-conscious, but by growing more conscious – aiming for greater exactitude and greater nuance, but without losing intensity, without losing the fire that burns, and must always burn, at the core of this art.

Thank you Arundhathi for giving us your time.

This interview was conducted online by Mitali Chakravarty on behalf of Borderless Journal.

Click here to read more works by Arundhathi Subramaniam.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Tags Ak Ramanujan, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Basho, Buddha, Hafiz, Mitali Chakravarty, Neruda, Rumi, Sadhguru, Sahitya Akademi 2020, TS Eliot, Tukaram