Flooded
Warm and fuzzy childhood memories, mixed feelings about the joys and trials of filial duty as well as solitude, colour, silk, food and laughter, and annoyance at cooky relatives and the shit that goes on in the name of tradition. That’s what the last few days were awash with, when I travelled down south in Karnataka to my ancestral town Bagalkot for a cousin’s engagement ceremony.
One of the fringe benefits of a year-long sabbatical – you get to attend ceremonies that are not held keeping the US academic holiday schedule in mind! I saw people I haven’t seen in ages – some mercifully the same as they were a decade ago; others depressingly unchanged, still others quite unrecognizable. This was, of course, a mere appetizer; the wedding with the full extended family in attendance will surely magnify all these feelings ten-fold. Here are some snapshots – and there’s more where these came from.
No doubt, all family reunions are inundated with such mixed feelings. But this time I also encountered a literal flood. Since my last visit over a decade ago, much of Bagalkot has been submerged under the backwaters of the Almatti Dam over the mighty Krishna river (which, incidentally, takes its birth in the town where I grew up, several hundred kilometres to the north!). Hundreds of thousands of people were resettled 10 km away – at Navanagar, lit. newtown, designed by fancypants architect Charles Correa. There have been concerns over the quality of resettlement, and there continue to be severe conflicts between different states over the fate of the dam’s catchment areas during periods of low and excessive rain. But the dam did not witness the kinds of protests and politicization that have marked big dam projects in India; folks I encountered seemed excited about the prospects of a newer town in exchange for their crumbling buildings. I wonder how many voices of protest also got submerged along with old houses.
Old Bagalkot, for its part, was not a shining example of semi-urban bliss, and those parts that have remained, stubbornly maintain this feature.
Navanagar, despite being all about right angles and wide roads and long-term planning, is a tangle of electric poles and an overall feeling of malevolent dust that my camera resolutely refused to capture. Sort of like the utter hideousness that is Gurgaon, but for poorer people, with all the flat ugliness and none of the skyscrapers or crass malls. The electric poles were like so many hopeless fishing boats afloat in a dead sea of dry brush. The folks who live there are upbeat about all the possibilities for the town, which is fast growing into a major centre for educational and administrative institutions in Karnataka. Meanwhile, this is what remains of the road leading to our old house:
And this is where the house used to be.
I am not a nostalgia hound, and rose-tinted, sepia-tinted memories of joint family tradition bore me. Set-piece family photos and stories about large meals and festival gatherings always make me wonder cynically about how many women toiled to make endless cups of tea to keep the conversation oiled. But it was still shocking to actually see all the changes, and the old bungalow and neighbourhood, with all its pigs and dust, just gone.
Some classic features of old Bagalkot, however, happily remain – the photos (more here) below are for my dear friend Sepoy. He will be annoyed at the lack of food pictures, but I think these will do nicely in their place:
