Guddu, I and the Qawallis at Vijay Mandal
Sambudha Sen Several years ago, when I was only twenty eight, I spent an extended period as a tenant in a flat in Vijay Mandal Enclave. The Delhi Development Authority had built this relatively new block of apartments in a terrain that was typical of Delhi. As part of the rapidly developing South Delhi , Vijay Mandal Enclave had been squeezed into a bit of spare land in vicinity of Mother’s International School and the Indian Institute of Technology. And because we lay directly under the air routes that connected Delhi to the world, I’d often hear the roar of low flying planes and dream about the day when one of them would carry me to Berkeley or Cambridge. But air routes and institutions of modern learning were only recent additions in a neighborhood wedged in by Kalu Sarai and Begumpur, two ancient settlements that had never really separated themselves from a Delhi ruined centuries before Shah Jahan began building, what is for us, the old city . The ruins of Kalu Sarai were clearly visible from the narrow balcony of our cramped fourth floor flat. One morning, when I’d stepped into that balcony to enjoy the cool, damp monsoon breeze with my coffee and cigarette, Kalu Sarai’s ruined 14th century mosque had looked particularly picturesque behind the fine rain screen. I believe that my long and intense relationship with that place began from that moment. I visited the ruins that very evening and was lucky enough to have run straight into Guddu singing a qawalli. Khazan Singh told me, after Guddu had finished, that we were sitting around the mazaar of a saint whose name nobody remembered but who was universally acknowledged to be a kind and benevolent spirit. Several people from Begumpur and Kalu Sarai visited the spot to solicit the unnamed Baba’s help and ten or fifteen of them were sure to be there on Thursdays when Guddu sang his qawwalis. A retired plumber from IIT, who called himself Maula, would come in early to sweep the area around the grave. Khazaan Singh also helped in the upkeep of the place with small financial contributions. He was a Jat from Begumpur but he put on a Mussalman’s skull cap whenever he visited the mazaar. And then there was Guddu whose qawallis, more than anything else, sustained the astonishing after life that the ruined mosque at Kalu Sarai had acquired. Guddu always struck me as a very responsible man. He worked as an auto rickshaw driver and was married to a hardworking woman who’d found employment as a full time domestic servant in a Vastant Vihar house. They had a five year old son and they seemed like a decent, stable, even upwardly mobile family when I’d visited them at the clean, well lit room that the employers of Guddu’s wife had provided for her. Guddu’s ordinary life, however, turned extraordinary in the evenings after he’d finished plying his auto rickshaw. He would then immerse himself in the activity he really loved – singing qawallis. He had a magnificent singing voice – melodious, supple but also rough and passionate. His repertoire of qawallis was large, and like many qawalls he did not hesitate to insert verses of his own into the compositions of Habib Painter or even Amir Khusro. And although Guddu never went to school , he was an extremely gifted teacher. He spoke of the complex analogies and metaphors of qawallis, of their deep ambiguities, and their effortless ability to move between different languages with such clarity that I rapidly abandoned my research in 19th British culture to pursue anything that would help me to understand the amazing longevity of the qawalli. I began purchasing translations of Jallaluddin Rumi and Fariduddin Attar and the music of Jaffar Hussain Badauni, Ghulam Farid Sabri and even Nusrat Fateh Ali who was very far, then, from international star he was to become. A close friend led me to Regina Quereshi’s book on the qawalli and I made several trips to the Nizamuddin Basti to cultivate the friendship of Miraz, whose knowledge of qawallis was, as Quereshi acknowledged , boundless . In an fit of enthusiasm, which I sustained for several weeks, I even made arragements to learn Urdu. The Urdu primer and dictionary with which I hoped to educate myself , together with the other books and music acquired during that period remain lovingly preserved and I do what I can for Miraz who ,despite his great knowledge of qawallis, languishes in a one room hovel in Nizamuddin. But a combination of ( I suppose predictable) factors caused me, many years ago, to abandon the work I began on the cultural afterlife of the Kalu Sarai masjid. Last month , though , while listening to Jafar sing Man Kunto Maula I was struck by a deep sense of longing for the work I’d set aside many years ago. Rummaging among my old papers I found a dusty notebook full of hazy and embarrassingly overwritten accounts of what went on at the mazaar : Guddu’s explanations of the songs he sang and of where they came from, the Maula’s descriptions of the unknown saint who regularly visited him during his sleep, my own immature thoughts on popular culture and on our syncretic traditions. One sequence , which I reproduce below, is typical of the notebook . It falls repeatedly into rhetorical excess and is completely lacking in the analytical sharpness that I aspire for in my academic writing. Please think of it as you would of photograph taken long ago by an amateur with a primitive black and white camera-a photograph that is blurred, badly composed but which preserves the shadow of a light that faded long ago. It had begun to rain quite hard now. I went across our narrow sitting room to shut the window that was letting the rain in. Beyond the broken walls of our compound, on a gently rising mound, overgrown with tangled shrubs, the nameless saint lay restfully in his grave. The crumbling eastern wall ,that was all that was left of his ruined
The Blind Kingdom
Véronique Tadjo Chapter One; Earth Jolts The earth jolted, violently – all of a sudden – while most inhabitants still slept. In a matter of seconds, the world turned upside down. The ground split open, trees fell, walls shifted and collapsed, stones rolled around, torrents of dust darkened the new morning. The ground trembled, furiously. The earth revolted. Everything appeared to sink into an immense abyss. Sleepers awakened into the middle of a nightmare. Roofs crumbled down on their shoulders; wailing destroyed their throats; panic seized their entire being… Then the world’s belly burst open. An atrocious heat bore down. Death knocked and the sky remained merciless. From everywhere, those who survived got out from the ruins screaming out of fright and running in every direction. Mothers fled with their newborn babies; old people staggered; children crawled around; men shouted out commands. Dogs barked incessantly. Livestock escaped from their pens. Horses went crazy. No one knew where to go. Fear, and it was a disfiguring fear, sculpted faces. In a lightning flash, the empire had collapsed. They found themselves hurled into the same fear, the same fate. Moaning stabbed the atmosphere. People died by the thousands, crushed under ruins, lost in crevices, drowned in the river’s muddy waters that flowed, flooded and swept across the land with thunderous sounds. Beings and things floundered in the water, fell and disappeared beneath the surge. Within seconds, glory was destroyed; the past disembowelled; riches annihilated. But what followed was worse. When the earth stopped jolting, finally, and the inhabitants were left facing each other, fear became unbearable. The terror of destruction took hold and paralyzed them, totally. Horror asphyxiated them. Awareness of the end of the world froze their consciousness. They ranted and raved. They muttered unintelligible words. And then – all of a sudden – the slaves began the work of digging out. They were the only ones who still had strength to react. With their bare hands, they dug through the debris and handed over the bodies: entombed children; vanished mothers; injured fathers. They called out the names. They waited. They dug. Like prehistoric people, they were at nature’s mercy. Gradually, the others awakened from their heavy inertia. The memory of what had once made up their lives, pushed them to move. They gazed at each other, went down on all fours, and dug. When they were able to get someone out, they felt like they had conquered death. Clouds of loneliness and despair colored the days – the tears – the distress. How many more days? Time stood still. They looked only to survive – to eat and sleep – tightly holding on to each other, hoping that the new day would come for them, once again. No longer were there any chiefs, no aristocracy either. No longer were there slaves. People had lost their vanity, their hierarchies, their injustice. Death had taught them a lesson in humility. Death had shown them her unrivalled might by swallowing whomever she wanted. No more stratification. No more empire. Simply men and women such as they were at the beginning of time. This is when, coming from the other side of the mountains, the BlindPeople arrived. The survivors saw them approaching in a solid mass. Their army was sparkling. Dazzling rays of light streamed from their missiles and firearms. Their power was unmatched; their superiority invincible. Within a short while, they invaded the empire and installed their kingdom. Chapter Two; The King’s Palace Built on a gigantic hill, the palace spreads its wings over the city like a monstrous bat. The huge room with a hundred mirrors where the king held court formed the body of the beast and its wings were the raised ballrooms where banquets and meetings were held; the king’s chambers and those of his daughter were located in the head of the creature. They jutted out and were decorated with fine fabrics and gold encrusted ceilings. At the top of this structure, surveillance radars scanned the kingdom and picked up every sound-wave that moved across the realm. A bat was carved on the throne and the royal scepter because the bat inhabits the night and masters the sky despite blind eyes. Because the bat with its mysterious cries is the possessor of infinite powers. Because darkness is the bat’s force. Bats lived freely in the gardens of the palace. City-dwellers heard them from afar especially at the king’s consecrated feeding time. He stood up straight among them and followed the rustling of their beating wings. He knew, exactly, the special way they sounded if they liked the mixture of ripe fruit, fresh vegetables and insects he threw to them. These creatures multiplied at an uncontrollable rate. In this way, they colonized all the trees in the city and drove away the sparrows which fled, gradually, towards the North. They attacked the children, getting entangled in their hair. They scratched and emitted piercing cries like needles on eardrums. Every morning servants washed down the palace’s steps and facade. They had to rub, scrape and scrub to get rid of the excrement that these flying mammals left everywhere. The atmosphere was invaded by a stifling stench and the gardens resembled garbage dumps. Green and blue flies buzzed up around the ears of His Majesty Ato IV. While feeding his bats one particular day the king was pensive. In the evening he was to host a huge marriage banquet with the entire court in attendance. Normally, this should have put him in a good mood yet he was very unhappy because he would have preferred to spend all this money in honor of his own daughter. His only child. But she categorically refused to get married so instead he had to celebrate the wedding festivities of a young cousin. He was thinking: “Ahh, how I would have loved to marry off Akissi!” Ato IV was thinking as he returned to his chambers. I would have had made for her a