On Rail

The Howrah-Panskura train carries men, women and expectation back and forth every twenty minutes between Howrah station (the first node to Kolkata) and East Midnapore district. In the middle it cuts through the entire breadth of Howrah district – Tikipara, Dasnagar, Ramrajatolla, Santragachhi, Mourigram (my stop), Andul, Sankrail, Abada, Nalpur, Bauria, Chengail, Fuleswar, Uluberia, Kulgachhia, Birshibpur, Bagnan, Ghoraghata. Ghoraghata is the last stop within Howrah district. It takes two hours to cover this spectrum of stations. The Amta line, spoken of in the historical texts as Martin rail, is a sleepier track. The landscape is industrial until Domjur, and then quickly turns into large tracts of open fields and huts tucked in between – the eternal picture of countryside innocence. It is easy for me to take the train from Maju on my way back to Howrah city areas. But on the journey to Maju, I have been rejected enough times to finally come to the understanding that between 10 am and 3pm there is no ‘up’ train on this line. The expectant population is ferried to Howrah by this hour of the morning, and taken back in the evening. The line doesn’t include the possibility of a passenger wanting to go ‘up’ in daytime.

Up was towards Howrah, down was away from Howrah, I learnt conclusively, after many months of confusion. I joined the Howrah- Panskura community of government servants, small businessmen, college-goers, schoolchildren, vegetable-vendors, peddlers of wares as varied as hairclips, almanacs, fruit, ayurvedic pain-relief substances. The Mourigram station has two platforms connected by an overhead bridge. Trains come unannounced. The down-Howrah train on platform one and the up-Panskura on platform two. I figured their routines because I became a regular passenger on this line, but gathered no information about the other lines that pass this station having frequented the station for a year. The timing of trains, over time, converges with the intuition of its regular passengers. Roughly half an hour before the next train, if you missed this one. This was a space for the seasoned commuter public, the sudden traveler was bound to falter here. The space was thickly mapped and inscribed, though not in terms of rational displays of information of the next train, platform number and so on. It did not decode itself to the foreigner, the outsider would have to practice the practices it offered. If a train showed up at an unexpected time or at another platform, people buying tickets, or standing at the wrong platform, would effortlessly jump onto the tracks and run across with their vegetables and children and in their saris, and climb onto the right platform and tuck themselves into a compartment just at the nick of time. The overhead footbridge would stand by and watch this ritual. I tried the jump-and-run routine on a few occasions, before figuring that if I timed by footbridge-climb well, I could get to the train pretty much in the same time (as the footbridge would not be crowded unlike the tracks) without risking my life.

Compartments were almost always covered in wall-advertisements – usually of doctors who promised miraculous cures to digestive and sexual illnesses. Initially, the sweat-laden, asphyxiating environment of the train compartment used to make me wonder why people would be drawn to reflection on their sexual inadequacies here. Surely this space was a scene of desperate attempts to latch onto whatever opportunity and resource passed by. Towards the evening, the compartments would be much emptier, especially on the up route. The down trains, carrying returning workers from the city areas of Howrah and Kolkata back into the rural interiority, would be much more crowded. In the empty compartment, the day’s consumption displays its leftovers. Orange peels, nuts, newspaper, plastic chai-cups. Not only the scene of outmaneuvering modern norms of risk-assessment, safety and cleanliness, but an inscribed space. Many daily journeys, conversations, transactions are marked on its seats at twilight. A day’s race to the city has been clocked, marked and like all historical objects – lives on as a totem of a lost moment. Many a lackadaisical youth hang dangerously out of the open doors (the doors are always open on local trains; except in peaktimes, there is hardly any space to perceive its stark open-ness). A masculine move of this Howrah youth appropriates, momentarily, a slice of pure sovereignty over his bodily being. In the later months, I am far more comfortable standing against backs of seats facing the door, can’t get myself to hang out. A tired vendor-woman crouches herself into a sleep-like repose on the floor at this hour. 

Of Dreamworlds and Catastrophe (Part 4)

I must add to my Ode to Bollywood men with some notes on Ishaqzaade. Having spoken about badland masculinity in the folds of Omkara, Dev D and Raajneeti earlier, I turn to the theme of Bollywood’s return to innocence through the new moral and material canvases of small town north India in Ishaqzaade. An angry young man driving an open vehicle into the open landscape of part-desert part-village recur in these films. Devgan in Raajneeti, Devgan in Omkara, Arjun Kapoor in Ishaqzaade. Parma, Arjun Kapoor is a trainee in his grandfather’s political establishment. Intoxicated with the brute power of gun and automobile. Quite the antithesis of Ranvir Kapoor’s restrained and canny (bespectacled) masculinity in Raajneeti. The predictable dichotomy – vernacular and modern - surfaces. The youth who is unabashed about failing to get beyond first year in college, but drunk on gun-power, thinks nothing of setting an innocent man’s house on fire for not cowing down to his demands – is the irrational, uncontrollable, fearsome patriarch-in-waiting. Ones that feature in the stories of men-in-vehicles in Gurgaon and Noida - who pose a threat to the freedom and safety of the modern, professional women. Agrarian landscape and an agrarian social order suddenly faced with the violent tremors of hyper-modernity. In the case of existing patriarchs, also the sudden threat of facing obsolescence. 


Perhaps, these were historical circumstances around which the Bengali patriarchy chose to pen English, spout liberalism and get on the band-wagon of colonial (modern) power. Emasculation battled with a bulwark of the authentic/traditional core - inviolate against the compromises made in the public, political, economic domain. In democratic India, this transition from one form of patriarchy to another, makes shrewd jugaad inside the edifices of state. The electoral and governance machines induct these worlds of alliances, loyalties, betrayals, hates and loves. Parma does not even aspire to the seat of pure power. The murky concoction of lumpen-power is enough for the pleasures of instant annihilation and masculine celebration. Morality is a thin envelope for his animal impulses. He operates without ever denying the absoluteness of morality, only seeking the cracks through he can slip out and not be caught. A bit like Langda Tyagi of Omkara – one that drinks to his frustrations at brushing shoulders with power everyday, never crossing the invisible line of sovereign and associate. Tyagi feeds his frustration with ambition. Parma simply thrives on the raw hunger for vengeful collisions. A festivity of blood is indeed nourishment for this vernacular masculinity. Devgan in Omkara and Devgan in Raajneeti (portraying the Mahabharat equivalent of Karn) harness this raw impulse into the quest for Machiavellian principality. Parma is less tuned to the possibilities of his brutality, and a concatenation of feminine influence turns his energy towards protection, nurturing and maybe (I am not convinced) love. Bollywood deploys the mother-figure yet again to rein in the raw brutality of the vernacular man, as captured in a filmic register that is constantly battling questions about its own modernity. Mention might also be made of Irfaan in Paan Singh Tomar – the simpleton who turns bandit in ravine-land. 


These are men who are mirrored by (in each film) an apt terrain of rawness, thwarted aspiration and brutality. Each maintaining a corridor to the big city – corridor of escape, erasure, freedom, anonymity. And yet in each, the big city is feared. In the face of a dozen guns, the hapless lovers of Almore think of their planned escape to Agra or Jaipur as only temporary, to be followed by a reconciliation and re-integration into the fold of authentic society. The rational, modernist promise of a wider range of possibilities of being doesn’t bear equivalence with the condition of pure belonging in community. It was Partha Chatterjee, who in response to Charle taylor, had proposed that the battle-line with capital in the postcolony lies between capital and community. Bollywood, uncannily, has been showing us exactly that in the past few years. The more the drives of dispossession of land, natural resources, communitarian sovereignty in rural India, the sharper the images of badland belonging and the renewed desire for community on the canvas of Bollywood. It is as if the travails of Parma are enacted in the rhythm of a ‘national’ man one that is drawn to the corridor of escape when pushed to the corners, one that dreams of a return to innocence in the end.

Our Father

Forgive us for we forgive those that trespassed against us.
Us filthy children.
Pricking, stroking, licking
with our nimble fingers soiled
We like the hint of blood
the call of war
the war of rains
the rains of heaven
for they cleanse these soiled fingers
forgive us our prickly nails
our biting fangs
our caressing palms
our bleeding hearts
our salty tears
our blood-stained hands
and we will forgive you too.

Fasting Spirits

My last fight will be with god himself - Baba Bholanath , she says. I will fight this fight until the last drop of blood is shed. She has been just come out of a seven-day amorone onoshone (fast unto death). For casual labor at the District Hospital - called special attendants. Who are hired by the patient's family, but operate out of hospital premises, supplementing the services of government nurses. For their regularisation is her lifelong crusade. She has been one herself, and was made permanent towards the end of her tenure. Political parties, with whom she has campaigned all her life, are now turning their backs. Reporters covered her dharna, interviewed her all of last week. And no channel, no newspaper spoke of it. It was a fast of waste. An invisible fast. She now waits only to hear from god that he exists in the time of dystopia. Her last and only worthwhile battle.

Hymns for our heroes

They dance at the hour of worship of deities. Nodding their heads, spinning deftly, turning their wrists in anticipation of the feminine grace that will dawn on them in a few years time. Their mothers wait patiently in the wings, worrying about a possible mis-step, a loosened accessory, a melting brow decoration. They have adorned their little ones in flower wreaths, pronouncing their own victory as mothers. They have found the best possible opportunity for their child's newly learnt steps and cultural acclimatisation to be staged. It could be a political meeting, a birth anniversary of a dead nationalist, a call of mirth, outrage or sobriety. Men of letters, matters of statecraft take a break for the joy of these innocent feet. Having enriched themselves with potion of childhood and cultural sacreds, they resume talk of power and struggle. Strengthened by the blessing of dead poets.

No Country for Old Man

Feminism – good ole feminism – has been on my mind, since I attended Gloria Steinem’s recent talk at JNU on the abolitionist stance on prostitution. As also the recent collage of rape-exposes on Tehelka. Gloria Steinem said at JNU that for every cordoned-woman that is produced, another prostitute is generated somewhere else. For every virgin, a slut. It has been a while since I read feminist theory, participated in feminist debates. I have even become squeamish in the past few years, of calling myself a feminist. There were too many instances of feminist outrage in the Indian scenario in the past few years, that had a neoliberal rejoicing against the vernacular, boorish man that troubled me. This man does not know the hip ways of sexual approach. He is implicated in shock-and-awe narratives of rape and murder. The urbane, good-liberal could only condemn his unthinking patriarchy, his boorish rampage across the expanding city. Cities like Bangalore and Delhi expand into formerly small-town on agrarian fringes to build idyllic homes for the returning NRIs, expats and triumphant professionals, and landscape, economy, social order suddenly moves around in a kaleidoscope. I was moved by the Tehelka interview of a seventy-something old man, on the fringes of Noida asserting his fragile patriarchy against a social order gone astray. Young people drink and dance and sexuality flows about without the check of marriage and other social control mechanisms on Noida wastelands. He says all the things that patriarchy can say about rape – women who drink are responsible for what happens to them, women who wear skimpy clothes have no morals. Much as these things cannot be tolerated and must be spoken against by women who live, work and struggle to access freedom and safety at the same time in cities, a helplessness struck me to be at the root of this old man’s misogyny. He was crying out not at the vibrant sexualities of boys and girls swooning at Noida clubs, but importantly, against this sudden kaleidoscopic spin in landscape, aesthetic and morality that has made him an obsolete citizen, an obsolete man. We have reached a crossroad in liberal-conservative argumentation, where a demand for an insular social order, selective accessing of the fashionable freedoms offered by capital, are almost laughably irrelevant. These characters of the fringes of Noida are presented veiled Priyanka and Sonia, at the time of elections, as these men are revealed to an abashed Indian metropolitan citizen, and a sad-and-awed Western audience, as the man who will never be modern. Whose political sensibilities will be woven around traditional networks of patronage, whose spoilt sons will roam Noida with no understanding of sexual agency of women, whose mothers and daughters will forever remain numb to fashionable feminisms. By no means am I pulling attention away from the seriousness of the demand to make cities safe for women accessing transport and public spaces. Although, I am worried that perhaps the narrative production in the liberal media that goes into making this point about safety and freedom, contributes to a large network of words, images and action that go to fossilize the Indian un-modern man. One that will never know his table manners or dating cues. In doing so, the popular feminist texts one accesses in blogs and magazines effaces significant new faces of patriarchy that are produced in the world of fashionable freedoms. I find very little written and said of the new patriarchal underpinnings of dating and sexual liberation, and ones that produce a twenty-year-old happy internet stripper. At no point am I arguing for censoring of Bollywood or other media portrayals of sexuality. I am simply pointing towards this constellation of forces that create the peculiarly neoliberal gender-anxiety about body, liberation, hedonism, sexual overstatement, constantly marking the obsolete periphery. The seventy-something was probably pointing to the same thing, except in pointing to the cutout of the Noida partygirl as a metonym, he implicated himself in a string of illiberal sins.

Narrating the Real World

(An excerpt from my discussion of non-fiction as narrative genre, and Katherine Boo's recent book. Read the rest of it here. )

Annawadi is as much a microcosm of power as the grand stage of the neo-liberal state is. As much as legitimate quarters of power keep alive this community of want as a source of political patronage, swinging between the threat of dispossession in a ‘demolition’ drive and gasping afloat over surprise gifts of brick and mortar, Annawadi throws up its own protectors and providers. Boo’s story, in a seventies Amitabh Bachchan movie, would have turned Abdul into a Vijay who romances the Hyatt-owner’s daughter, Parveen Babi, swings his ‘chor’-tattooed wrist, and collects his pound of flesh from a corrupt police officer. Boo’s story, in Aamir Khan’s Rangeela, might have turned Manju into an Urmila Matondkar who ‘by-hearts’ English poems and swoons atop sea rocks in sarongs. Boo’s portrayal of the deadening yet hopeful struggle for survival – ‘in relative peace’ of the ‘great, unequal city’ – resonate somewhat with the rustic Bollywood tales of desperation fortified by the foolish hope and flights of fantasy that only the Sunils and the Mirchis might encourage in their hearts. Bollywood shelters us from the gory suicides and treacherous in-fighting in undercities. When it does tell us of lockup-beatings, it packs with it the crucial condiment of justice at the end.

Boo takes on many structures of narrating want and desperation that are embedded in the Indian intellectual and reflexive worlds. She sees the under-subject not through the lenses of self-conscious empathy, overstated heroism, angered protest against the agents of capital, or despairing collusion with forces that be, but in a humanistic rhythm that distils a classic human motif out of the particulars of the Indian, postcolonial juggernaut. She narrates violence without enveloping it in the narrative tool of tragedy. She narrates want without resorting to the easy tool of aesthetisation. She steers clear of mirroring the standard-format-liberal-self on the under-subject which makes them seem closer home, seeing components of the liberal quest for freedom, privacy, and dignity in the piecemeal undercitizen.