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
Subjects and Persons
Supriya Chaudhuri In the preface to his late and incomplete novel Jogajog (1929; trans. Relationships, 2005), Rabindranath Tagore attempted to distinguish, in a way that might seem eccentric to European discourses of the self, between subjects and persons. He used the term which I translate as subject (‘bishay’) in the sense of ‘subject-matter’, matter for exposition, which he saw as distinct from persons (‘byakti’), defining the latter as an expressive designation, if such a phrase may be allowed. This is the passage: Proper names are a form of address; subject names indicate nature. When we consider human beings not as persons but as subjects, we title them according to their qualities or states — thus one is called ‘Barabou’ (Elder wife), another ‘Mastermashay’ (Respected teacher). When the time comes for literary name-giving we fall into uncertainty. The first question is this: is the nature of literary composition to do with subjects or persons? In science the thing itself is all, the only criterion is a qualitative one. When we see a work of psychology entitled ‘A Husband’s Jealousy Concerning his Wife’ we understand that the title will be justified only through analysis of this subject. But if ‘Othello’, the play, bore such a title, it would not have pleased us. For in this case it is not the subject, but the play that is important. That is to say, a totality made up of the plot, the style, the portrayal of characters, the language, the metre, the significance, the dramatic quality. This is what we might call the form of a person [personhood]. From the subject we gain information; from the person we gain the pleasure of self-expression. We bind the subject to our minds, adjectivally; we remember the person through her or his name, by addressing him or her. The purpose of this entire excursus on names, whether belonging to subjects or to persons, is to justify Rabindranath’s re-naming of his own work, though in fact the name he chose for it is not a particularly good illustration of his thesis. But what he says has its own interest. The individual Rabindranath identifies as the subject of address through the use of a proper name is, rather oddly, not the fictional person, but the fictional representation as a whole, the text. Persons, that is, are possessed not only of a certain self or identity; they are identifiable, or interpellated, in a social sense. We can, he says, address them. It does not seem to matter to him that the person thus addressed may be a text, a fictional projection of identity which is not so much a matter of linear persistence in time as composite, made up of the juxtaposition of different elements. Relatedness is important, but it is not something that the text can assume as a psychological or physiological given, since textual persons clearly do not exist in real time. Yet European notions of personhood have usually been founded on the sense of continuity or relatedness. Richard Wollheim begins his book, The Thread of Life, by quoting Kierkegaard: It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting-place from which to understand it – backwards. The problem of understanding a life in time is one that occupies Wollheim too, in a study centrally concerned with the nature of persons and of personhood. For it seems clear to him that persons are being conscious of leading their lives in time, beings whose identities are both subjective and relational – capable, that is, of reflecting upon themselves and the continuity of their physical and psychological experience. This continuity, this sense of an identity conferred upon events, upon the life that is led, is what Wollheim terms the thread of life. In his cultured, humane, philosophically post-Freudian study, he follows this thread, like Theseus in the labyrinth, as far as it will take him, even to the recesses of madness and death. But one classical premise of personhood that he will not abandon is that there is a thread: that persons are, in one sense or another, continuous with themselves, and therefore identities. The narrative representation of persons in European literature has historically been dependent on types of unity-relation established through moral and physical continuities, continuities of experience. But this notion begs several questions, one of the most pertinent of which has to do with the boundary of the self and its event-history. One speaks of persons, and one speaks of them leading lives in time, but is the life led in time – i.e. a relation (in two senses) of events – itself the person, or is there a person distinct from the life that is led? Western metaphysics (contra physicalist interpretations of consciousness from Locke to Dennett) encourages us to prefer the latter possibility, and this is essentialism of a kind, one signally assisted by the triumph of Cartesian philosophy in the seventeenth century. Personhood in the European novel from Richardson to Kafka is located in the indivisibility of the single consciousness, a consciousness attached to a body which acts and suffers, but exceeding that body in its reach and curiosity. In European representations of the self, moreover, identity is doubly constituted: as a sign, a means of being known to others, or identified – and as consistency, as being identical with oneself and one’s event-history. Historically, this double implication of identity is crucial to the political, economic and moral arguments of Western culture, arguments premised on such terms as freedom, knowledge, and responsibility. It is as an identifiable human being who recollects and is conscious of her (more usually his) past actions that an individual can be held to be free and responsible. And as we all know,
Excerpt from The Folded Earth
Anuradha Roy [This is an excerpt from Anuradha Roy’s second novel, The Folded Earth, releasing this week in India. Roy is an editor with Permanent Black. Her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, was published in 2008 by Picador in India and in the UK by MacLehose Press. It was shortlisted for the Crossword Prize, longlisted for the Impac Award and went on to be translated into thirteen European and Scandinavian languages. This, her second novel, is being published by Hachette in India and MacLehose Press in the UK. Both books will be published in the USA by Free Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. Image copyrighted by MacLehose Press] My companion in the bus that morning reached her stop, still chattering of Would-be. She said smiling, “Tomorrow I’ll bring you a card; you must come for my wedding!” I got off two stops later, and walked towards Father Joseph’s office, feeling disembodied, weakened and sleepy, as if I would be compelled to sit on the pavement and then not know how to get up again. I found myself outside a hotel painted pink and yellow, and walked through its gates to a swimming pool at the back. There was a sheltered staircase next to the pool. I sat on one of its steps, before the shining blue emptiness of the water, the stretch of green tiles around it, the damp towel discarded on a chair. There was a line of plate-glass windows on the other side that produced mirror images of everything I saw. A bird passed overhead, low enough for its shadow to ripple across us. At the other end of the pool, a little girl was being urged by a swimming coach to plunge from the diving board. She shouted, as if in a movie: “Let me go! I want to live! I want to live!” My eyes blurred and I began to see human skeletons and bones at the edges of the pool, on the green tiles: skulls, clavicles, fibulas, tibia and femurs. Mandibles and ribs, foot and hand phalanges with ancient silver toe rings and gold finger rings on them still. Necklaces of gold beads intertwined with vertebrae. I saw skulls at the bottom of the pool, turning their blind gaze this way and that in the clear water, magnified by it. They bobbed to the surface. One of them splashed to the edge of the pool, next to my feet, and the face streaming away from it in dissolving ribbons was Michael’s. The windows, the towels, that screaming child, the green tiles, the fire-blue sky with its shadow-birds, retreated. The step I was sitting on crumbled and I began to fall dizzily through a vast sky, as you do in dreams. It was only when a face rose from the water close to my feet and in a French accent said, “Are you alright?” that I realised my face was wet with tears, my nose was running, my hair was dishevelled, and I was late for Michael’s priest. I ran up the stairs to Father Joseph’s room and burst in without knocking. I stopped and held the back of a chair to steady myself. A house with a trident-shaped peak framed in its window, Michael had said: a house that looked out at the Trishul, and at its base Roopkund, the phantom-lake. He had seen such a house once, he had told me where it was. He had dreamed we would live there and wake each morning looking at the Trishul emboss itself on the sky as the sun lit its three tips one by one. “Father, find me work in Ranikhet. Please,” I said. “I can’t stay on here a single day longer.” * * * Four months after Michael died, I climbed into the train that had taken him away from me. It went from Hyderabad to Delhi, a northward journey that took a day and a night. One more night on a different train brought me further north, to Kathgodam, where the train lines stopped and the hills began. It was another three hours by bus over twisted, ever-steeper roads to Ranikhet, a little town deep in the Himalaya. In my bag was the address of the school in which Father Joseph had fixed me a job. I was going to be two thousand kilometres from anything I knew, but that was just numbers. In truth the distance was beyond measurement. adminhumanitiesunderground.org