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Happy Diwali everyone! May the light drive away the demons and darkness and lighten all unpleasant burdens! A dear friend’s mom sent me this diya for Diwali: a silver floating lamp. Isn’t it beautiful?
Speaking of burdens. Things have been awful quiet chez Desiknitter lately because I’ve been so hellishly busy. But speaking also of light, there may well be some at the end of a very long tunnel. Somewhere in the chronology of my classes and the semester, there usually comes a turning point – you enter a familiar century, reach materials you can read backwards and all the people you are talking about in class just seem like old friends, you know them so well. I sigh happily, because an unspoken anxiety that dogs me in the other weeks, despite all my reading and prep, just evaporates and I can babble on happily for hours and don’t feel tense. Does this happen to you? I’ve been teaching for years, but this promises to be a constant feature all through for me.
That happened to me today. This is good because I have two important papers to write from scratch by early December, and I need all the extra time and calm I can get. I am also going to a conference at Madison later this week, where the prospect of meeting some friends, esp. a couple of blogfriends is taking some of the edge off my stress. Mary and Orata, if you’re reading this, please email me your phone numbers!
What’s that you said? Knitting? Fine. My red shawl is in the slog overs stage, progressing miniscule row by miniscule row. I am so obsessed with finishing it that I can’t bear to start anything new. But the end is in sight, my friends, I do believe it will be done this year and then I can re-enter the normal world of worsted wool and stockinette fabric. I swear it, once this is done, I ain’t knitting with lace-weight yarn for a LONG time.
bas ishq mohabbat pyaar…. So goes the song from the film, Delhi-6, that I mentioned in my last post. This is Delhi, my friend, nothing but love, it croons…..
I miss Delhi. Over the last two months, I had many a moment to mull over my sentiments about this mad city. It is a cliche to say that people have a love-hate relationship with Delhi, but alas, this is true and I am no different. It’s not just the fact that most of my friends in India live there, or that it’s the nerve-centre of the history academy, or that I have bittersweet memories of past lives. It’s also its many quirks and vices that are difficult to categorize. So here are some random likes and dislikes.
L) I love the months of Feb-March in the city when the dry winter gives way to a hesitant short spring. You can go from woollen vests to thin cotton tops in a span of ten days around Holi. Gardens all over are in riotous bloom, especially the roses at the President’s residence, but I especially love the bougainvillea that pours out on to footpaths like pink paint from a can knocked over, and the silk-cotton flowers strewn all over the ground.
D) For all its greenery, I detest the wasteland that is the central, planned city of “Lutyens” New Delhi. Everyone seems to ooh and aah about its lush elegance, its colonial bungalows, landscaped rotaries and tree-lined avenues, but the area is an effing nightmare for pedestrians. The lack of proper traffic lights turns the mildest of drivers into raving lunatics, while it takes pedestrians an eternity to cross a road or rotary. To say nothing about the fact that this suburban, made-for-cars layout in the middle of the city, with no shops or people to keep it alive after sundown, makes it very unsafe for women to walk around by themselves right in the heart of town.
L) But I gotta say, in the late winter afternoon sun, walking a kilometre or two down these avenues for lunch from the archives to one of the State houses for various regional cuisines, gossiping and laughing with friends, or alone, spotting birds in the trees is wonderful. This is also the time when Delhi comes alive with concerts – classical dance, play competitions in different languages, free music concerts in the parks, food and film and handicraft festivals… it’s hard to decide what to go to and what to miss. In general, I favoured food over film, but I managed a good dose of the rest as well!
D)But the whole place also has a kind of sarkari stench hanging over it. Compared to the crass malls of Gurgaon and the shining lights of privatization all over the country, this Nehruvian-elite govt-servant scene in the capital seems positively benign to many, but it sets my teeth on edge. It’s not just the “lal-batti” culture of politicians with commando security and blinking cars holding traffic ransom at will. Everything from the clipped accents to the ethnic-chic elegance and the hush and rustle of well-heeled power that self-deprecatingly and disingenuously masks itself as middle-class is at once very familiar and quite repellent.
L) Delhi-ites reading this will snort in disbelief when they read this, but I actually enjoyed public transportation this time round. I’m not just talking about the Metro, which is fucking amazing. I travelled by DTC and chartered buses every day to work and back, and experienced some of the camaraderie of daily commuters that I hadn’t before. In the green government buses, the conductor sits at the back, making everyone go to him to get their ticket. In the rush hour pickle, this is not really possible. So people sitting on his side of the bus pass money back and forth to passengers throughout the bus. “1 seven,” “2 three,” “1 five,” they chant, telling him how many tickets of what denomination. They also pass back the tickets and change along the same chain, with a dispute occasionally breaking out and some accountant gamely rising to the occasion to solve it. The conductor robotically just dispenses tickets and passes them on. I had to do that once and very quickly lost my patience, but am amazed at how long others’ good humour (given that this is Delhi, after all) lasted.
D)The private Blueline bus-walas are barbarians for the most part, and regularly mow down people on the streets. Their conductors can dramatically improve your swear-word vocabulary in two days. Their status as a haven for molesters is also legendary, and this is easily one of the most hateful things about Delhi, bus commuting having scarred generations of women’s relationships with public space in the city. But I was surprised that I felt safer in them than I remember, with so many more women in all kinds of clothes in the buses, toting phones, backpacks, briefcases… I wonder whether mine was really a rose-tinted one-off experience, or if I’m just older (as a friend suggested, try asking younger women!), or whether Delhi’s male bus passengers are – gasp! – a tad improved on their humanity index?
L) But if the Blueline buses are a tribute to the Wild west, the Metro is positively brimming with civilization. It’s a shining symbol of the new India, but it retains a good dose of old Nehruvian societal improvement through homilies and maxims. Advice on dos and don’ts from watching out for unclaimed baggage, to moving to the centre of the carriage, to not spitting, to minding the gap, is fitted in neatly between station announcements. These regularly made me laugh, because they are so typical of the many faces of Delhi. A male baritone in a sardonic voice straight from a poetry session across in the old walled city, dressed in a sherwani and the grease of many a kabab, does the Hindi ones. “Aglaa station…” it says thoughtfully, taking a pause, as if to repeat the first phrase of the couplet, “Chandni chowk hai. Yahaan“.. (another thoughtful pause)… “Bharatiya Rail ke Dilli station ke liye badleiN.” (pause before the poem’s punchline..) “Saavdhaaniise utreiN.” Just as you are pondering the meaning of the poem, a school-marmy English female voice follows, in a clipped convent-educated-elite voice: “The next station is Chandni Chowk,” it spits out, with all the native elite’s contempt for native words. “Change here for the Delhi station of the Indian Railways Network. Mind the Gap.” You can almost feel the cane stinging your palm as you leave the train, your ears smarting with the punishment she has just doled out, and the sound of r’s correctly rolled.
So many random observations, so little space! All in all, it’s difficult to arrive at a balance sheet with the city. There is so much that I love and despise there, I wish I could keep going back on a regular basis just to keep the debate going in my head. Those reading this who have a similar love-hate relationship with Delhi, what are your pet raves and rants?
(A bunch of people asked why the blog has been so silent, and after digging deep for angsty reasons, I realised a practical one was a mental block against posts with pictures. Well, so here I am, trying to break it, with a post without pictures, totally covering up for not taking interesting pictures of the city while I was there.)
We open the new year’s blogging with a hearty “Good effing riddance!” to 2008, and a polite request to 2009 to please pass uneventfully without any major upheavals. Travels may be included, even arduous ones, especially to see new places and old friends, but please, can we not have any emotional rollercoasters, dramatic events, or surprises, good or bad? If I could wish for one thing this year, it would be that it pass like this:
Quietly, bathed in just the right amount of sunlight, feet up on a couch with an interesting book, wearing comfortable handknits, and a cup of hot ginger tea (just outside the frame). Really, is that too much to ask for?
In the foreground is a pair of Regia Silk socks my sister has been demanding for ages now. Pune used to have a decent winter in November and December, but now you can bear to wear warm clothes only for about a week around the new year. So over a couple of lovely, lazy days at home spent gossiping with her and watching old films, I made these anklet socks. Quick, easy pair, 60 stitches, 2×2 rib, cuff down stockinette on size 0 needles. Good thing her feet are tiny and these are tight for me, cause I really don’t feel like taking them off.
I also got a delightful gift for the new year from my lovely knitter niece Gargi. A couple of years ago I had helped her make a hairband for herself, and she made one for me this year, complete with sewed elastic at the bottom. The most hilarious part was helping her through this one, joining a new piece of yarn, picking up dropped stitches, etc. while she weaved an elaborate tale about how this was actually for her best friend in school. Now, it turns out, the best friend is really asking for one after seeing mine!
May 2009 bring you what you ask for, dear readers.
Tragedy predictably descended into farce this past week. Film and advertisement personalities became political spokesmen, vying with TV anchors to recommend carpet-bombing Pakistan to avenge the terrorist attack. Politicians stumbled over one another to offer condolences and compensation to families of slain officers, in full view of a gawping nation. Grief and sympathy, in an age of 24-hour news, it appears, simply cannot be experienced or conveyed any longer outside the script of patriotism.
Some critical voices of sanity and caution in the Indian press, amidst the jingoistic, militaristic cacophony:
Mukul Kesavan on the English language channel coverage:
I can’t remember the last time that social class so clearly defined the coverage of a public event, or one in which people spoke so unselfconsciously from their class positions….The novelist, Aravind Adiga, said in an interview with the BBC: “One of the differences between India and other countries is that a lot of our civic space is contained within the five-star hotels. They have a different function here for us, they are places where marriages happen, where people of all economic backgrounds go for a coffee. For the Taj Mahal to be attacked is somewhat like the town hall being attacked in some other place… .” I’d wager that 99 per cent of VT’s commuters haven’t seen the inside of the Sea Lounge. Whatever else they are, five-star establishments in India are not democratic civic spaces. Few Mumbaikars think the Taj Mahal Hotel is their city’s hôtel de ville.
And Adiga got the Booker prize for his depiction of the “Other India”? I simply cannot *wait* to read it! Other novelists have also mined Mumbai nostalgia for various newspapers, but Amitav Ghosh, mercifully, spoke some sense and refrained from telling us about how much he loved the Taj:
This has been another terrible year. Even before the invasion of Mumbai several hundred people had been killed and injured in terror attacks. Yet, let us recall that the attacks on Jaipur, Ahmedabad, New Delhi and Guwahati did not succeed in setting off chains of retaliatory violence of the sort that would almost certainly have resulted ten or fifteen years ago….The question now is: will the November invasion of Mumbai change this? When commentators repeat the metaphor of ‘9/11’ they are in effect pushing the Indian government to mount a comparable response. If they succeed in doing this the consequences are sure to be equally disastrous. The very power of the 9/11 metaphor blinds us to the possibility that there might be other, more productive analogies for the November invasion of Mumbai. One such is the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, which led to a comparable number of casualties and created a similar sense of shock and grief. If 9/11 is a metaphor for one kind of reaction to terror, then 11-M (as it is known in Spanish) should serve as shorthand for a different kind of response: one that emphasises vigilance, patience, and careful police work in coordination with neighbouring countries.
Siddharth Varadarajan in the Hindu:
Rather than threatening a ‘limited war,’ surgical strikes or a suspension of the peace process, the logic of this metastatis is the most compelling argument India can marshal in its quest for the international community to insist that the Pakistani military make a final break with jihadi groups. The war that was launched in Mumbai will only end when the Pakistani military is compelled by the world and its own people to end its war on its own society. India can help this process by finding ways to help tilt the balance of power further in the direction of the civilian government. At the very least, it should do nothing that will tilt things the other way.
Sukumar Muralidharan on the scary, militaristic mood in the electronic media:
The question the Indian media face is not a trivial one. Is it going to be an exclusive forum for the more extreme voices? Or can it find a sensible way forward, even in a conjuncture as trying as Mumbai 26/11, to promote a genuine social dialogue that is attentive to the true risks and benefits of any particular strategic course? From the huge variety of voices seeking to be heard in India, the media seemingly distils out only those that serve its prior conceptions. Though difficult in trying times such as now, can the media hear voices from across the border? Would it have any use for instance, for the following observations from the December 2 editorial in Dawn, one of the most restrained and sober voices in the Pakistan media: “…what cannot be condoned is the behaviour of the Indian media, that taking its cue from the politicians — and from a culture of nationalism that is especially apparent where Islamabad is concerned — came down hard on Pakistan, often conjuring up fantastical descriptions of the way the siege of Mumbai was laid. Not only does this put pressure on the Indian government to keep up its accusations and resist moves for a cooperative stance, it also damages people-to-people ties, for after all, the media is meant to speak for the common man”.
Farce in the political establishment matches that on TV. Heads have rolled: Union home minister Shivraj Patil, prone to changing his suits in-between TV appearances after major bomb blasts, finally slunk off. So did Maharashtra’s chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, who took his actor-son and the famous purveyor of gangster chic films, Ram Gopal Varma with him on his first, official tour of the Taj after security forces had taken back the hotel. Deshmukh (at least one banner in a political rally aptly called him Deshmurkh – the nation’s fool) has been one of Maharashtra’s most ineffectual CMs ever, failing at law and order well before the capital city of the state was held ransom like this, but somehow, this particular crass act was too much for the Congress higher ups in New Delhi. His deputy, R.R. Patil, went a step further and brushed aside the attacks – “Such incidents are bound to happen in big cities once in a while,” he said. This from a man who banned dancing girls in Mumbai’s bars because he thought them too dangerous for the city’s moral fibre!
Our Oracle of 10 Janpath The Congress party, meanwhile, took nearly two days to find their successors because the state’s caste arithmetic for the upcoming polls has proved to be too sticky – prioritizing the investigation and security effort be damned. Narayan Rane, the leader spurned for the chief minister’s position, threatened to bring down the government, but magnanimously refrained in these pressing times of internal security. Will it any wonder, then, if tragedy were to once again replace farce? A very real, and immediate danger for Maharashtra is that with these guys being our “secular” options and beloved incumbents, the upcoming state elections next year will leave the field wide open for more overt chauvinists of various stripes to step in as viable alternatives – Raj Thackeray with his fresh Marathi nativism (beating up on poor north Indian migrant workers) and the Shiv Sena (excellent track record of Hindu majoritarianism). If that does happen, then God help us all.
§ November 29th, 2008 § Filed under Life § 18 Comments
Thanks to everyone who emailed me in the last few days; sorry I couldn’t give an earlier update. I was actually in Bombay – I chose the worst three days to go in all the six months that I have been here, just four hours away – but I was not near the sites of attack, and am safe.
I went to Bombay to meet some friends, attend a workshop and finally visit the state archives for some work. The day of the attacks, a bunch of us briefly talked about visiting the Gateway of India, looking around some downtown sights, and maybe choosing a fancy place nearby for dinner – like the Taj coffee house nearby! But then we found something better to do and stayed in our northern suburb. An excellent idea, as it turned out! The scale and audacity of this attack, the high profile, upscale targets, Westerners among the dead, etc. has stunned everybody, I guess, including the global media*, even though it is hardly the first time the city has seen such senseless and sudden killing, and this is the seventh or eighth militant strike on an Indian city in the last six months. This is the second time I’ve been in the same city as a serial blast – I was in New Delhi in September, too, and this routine of texting friends to find out if they’re okay and thanking one’s stars that one was not too close to the scenes of carnage is becoming sickeningly familiar. This one rattled me a lot, and the atmosphere of fear, tension and utter exhaustion in Bombay was palpable.
There’s so much to rage about – the rotting, utterly bankrupt and corrupt political system, the bellowing TV anchors and their hysterical, irresponsible and speculative reporting (Note to media: adding a question mark to a rumour – “another bomb at CST Station?” on a moving ticker-tape, or inserting the caveat “Are these rumours true?” above a list of wild, front-page speculations is not ethical journalism!), the blame game among political parties that has already begun, the utter horror of 20-something, smiling youth spraying bullets into crowds, the bewildering cascade of global and local causes and chains that makes such mayhem possible, the knowledge that this will not be the last – but for now, my heart and condolences go out to a fellow Raveler, who lost her mother in the indiscriminate firing that day.
*Although someone told me that Deepak Chopra, of Yoga-lifestyle-living fame, was interviewed by CNN in the US as an expert on the matter – is that true? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about that.
Today my blog is three years old. It feels like only yesterday that it turned two, even though this has been an horribly long and exhausting year. When I came to India a few months ago I was worried that with the higher temperatures the knitting would fall by the wayside and then so would the blog. But with each passing year I realise how prescient and apt my choice of tag-line was. The blogging (about the knitting, but much else besides, as it turns out!) really does keep me sane through some incredible highs and lows in my life. I hope I don’t tire of it anytime soon – or do you, my dear readers. Incidentally, my stats have spiked quite a bit in recent months, but I don’t really have an idea from the comments about who many of the new readers are – If you are a relatively new visitor, knitter or non-knitter, I hope you’ll stop to say hello today! I’m curious.
Above is another reason to celebrate. Much of the BPT sweater you see above was knit watching the glorious India-Australia cricket test series (The Border-Gavaskar Trophy), which India won 2-0, giving the Aussies a severe drubbing. I watched a well-played, drama-filled test series after years and it was most wonderful. Watching the Indian team, which has always specialised in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, methodically beat the mighty (and might I say snooty) Australians was only part of it. (Okay, a big part of it.) It was bittersweet to watch old favourite players play fiery final games before retirement (although Sourav Ganguly’s golden duck on his final test innings was too painful to watch, however Bradman-esque) and great to discover many cool and sexy new players (hellooooo Mahendra Singh Dhoni!) that I had seen in a lot of annoying TV ads, but never actually playing.
A third reason to celebrate is that the BPT is not only progressing very rapidly – it also looks like it will fit quite well! I have about 40-odd rows left to do on the body, and then the sleeves. I’m thinking of adding pockets in addition to the hood, depending on how much yarn I have left. The India-England one-day cricket series is beginning on Thursday. Here’s hoping that this encounter is as exciting, and at its end there’s a finished sweater to enjoy.
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:
I miss knitting. I have this awful gnawing feeling inside me; first I thought it was my research, which is sort of stalled at the moment for various reasons. I’m having a hard time conceptualizing some of it, which makes it difficult to go look for specific stuff in the archives – and while randomly losing myself in the catalogues is providing unexpected joys, these aren’t enough to tide over my anxiety that I should be More Organized And Have Something To Show At the End of My Sabbatical. Then I thought it was just the usual exhaustion that comes from so much travelling – I just booked a whole lot of tickets for many more trips over the next few months, and just looking at my itinerary is tiring me out. But it’s not just all this. I’m a bit out of sorts because I haven’t knit anything substantial since May. Here’s what I have to show for my efforts:
One lousy sock, a foot of lace, and some cables. I can’t even bring myself to properly cast on for the second sock, even though the anklets my sister has asked for should not take more than 2 days to knit, really. The lace is, well, stalled, and the cables for the Tweedy Aran Cardigan are so not calling me to extend them even though I know they have the potential to look like Neither Hip Nor Funky’s gorgeous version.
It’s not like I don’t want to knit these. To paraphrase the great George Costanza, it’s not them, it’s me. It has been hot, to be sure, and not really wool-handling weather. But it has also frequently been quite pleasant, and it’s not like my work is keeping me too busy. For some reason, I’m just not picking up the projects and enjoying them. I have actually been helping my mum figure out a couple of simple baby projects, but she’s the one knitting them.
Any ideas on how to overcome this? I so want to get back to it, cause I do miss it. I haven’t been on Ravelry in ages. Sometimes the threads, knitting and non-knitting, seem so distant. Even apart from Big Issues Debate, so much of it is so totally removed from any non-US concerns that it depresses me. Surfing all my friends’ blogs and seeing the gorgeous stuff they are making or queuing on Ravelry is increasing the gnawing feeling, plus after having been off Ravelry for so long there was virtually a deluge of new patterns. I thought of junking the aran cardigan and making something simpler – like I need yet another stockinette hoodie, but maybe it will give me a sense of accomplishment. Any pattern suggestions? Anybody else in the same boat as me (trying very hard not to use the words “knitting mojo”…..)?
Two posts in a week! Truth be told, I should have posted about this year’s Ganpati festival before my jewelpron, because the festival already came and went a couple of weeks ago. What can I say, the post on earrings took precedence, and as a lover of good things, may the portly deity forgive me!
This is the first year I am in Pune for the Ganpati festival in a decade. Neighbourhood groups or mandals host the god, who visits annually for ten days during the Hindu month of Bhadrapad, in elaborate themed decorations, around which revolve a lot of cultural activities. At the end of his visit he is immersed in water, after he has promised to visit again next year. A big part of enjoying the festival is to wander around the city at night, seeing all these themes brightly lit up. The festival itself began in the 1890s as a means of bringing anti-colonial politics into the public sphere, and these themes have always been explicitly political – about history, contemporary politics, social reform, etc.
In this past decade, a lot of my research has involved examining how this region’s (Maharashtra’s) past is invoked in the public sphere – festivals like this one included. This particular installation commemorates the escape of Shivaji, Maharashtra’s most famous king and founder of its independent state in the 17th century, from the clutches of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb at Agra. Shivaji too got a festival for himself in the 1890s, but it’s really during the Ganpati decorations that a lot of the history of his times and its meanings are commemorated. A good deal of this historical imagery has very sharp Hindu nationalist overtones.
The festival, with its social history, has been in my consciousness mainly as an object of analysis, a thing. We also don’t properly celebrate it at home any more because of a death in our immediate family during the festival some years ago. Plus, all everyone does nowadays is complain – with justification – about how the loudspeakers and traffic and piped devotional music during these ten days are straight from hell. Remover of Obstacles Ganpati might be, but his annual sojourn spells chaos in the city. So I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it.
But after a long time, my mum wanted to go check out some of the historic Ganpatis in the area where she grew up, so I went with her. These historic ones are called “Maanache Ganpati” – especially respected idols that have pride of place in the city’s public immersion procession. (The term “maanache ganpati” is also colloquially used to refer to high-maintenance people, usually fussy sons-in-law!). Here is Kasba Ganpati, with pride of place # 1, in one of the 18th c. neighbourhoods:
Next is Tambdi Jogeshwari, # 2. This year, they featured women priests for all their rituals. Women priests are quite the thing now in Pune – a soft reformist move that has become very popular. Lots of institutes train women to take up historically male ritual tasks and become professional priests – some, I gather, are also open to women from all castes.
Women’s participation in this public festival is actually something worthy of more scholarly attention. On the one hand, as a classic public arena, it is heavily male, with female participation disciplined along national/familial lines. Personal safety, especially in the insane crowds at night, is always an issue, so “mandal hopping” or dancing crazily in the streets to the heady and insistent drumming during immersion, however tempting, is not always an option for women.
But of late, women’s participation seems to have swelled – not only through these priests, but through enormous public ritual chants before popular Ganpati idols that attract them in the thousands. It is tempting to immediately bracket this upsurge as part of the religious right’s reformist mobilisation of women for a very reactionary politics. But there seems to be, at least through an anecdotal glance, a wide variety of class and caste or even political backgrounds among the women who participate in this public devotion – certainly worth investigating the nuances of this “politics of piety.”
This one, above, is the Guruji Talim Mandal’s Ganpati, # 3. This one, also of 1890s vintage, was explicitly conceived as, and continues to be, a space where Hindu and Muslim folk from the city could participate in the public celebrations together, as a counter to some of the other more exclusivist and majoritarian ones. We wandered around some others that were open during the day. Directly below is the Dagdushet Ganpati, possibly the most popular one in the city, followed by the Mandai Ganpati (in the main vegetable market of the city), and a few random others that had nice installations.
My personal favourite is the Tulshibag Ganpati (the very first photo in this post), which sits amidst the oldest and best trinkets, crafts, cosmetics, undies, crockery and what-have-you market of the city. A place I adore. They had a beautiful installation about the temptation of the austere and angry sage Vishwamitra by the heavenly siren Menaka.
Much remains depressingly the same, especially the simplistic nationalism, now of course combined with a new flexing of consumerist and globalised aspirations. The scale of things has changed. Some big urban manDals are corporatised, their turnover running into millions. TV channels hook up with popular manDaLs to transmit their rituals, mobile phone companies issue fresh Ganpati devotional ringtones and a whole host of bad singers do brisk business selling off-key devotional CDs. I can’t tell if the overt religiosity on display is recent, or whether I just wasn’t that observant back then and more focused on the food and floats.
And yet, the public platform is not as politically homogeneous; the festival’s decentralized, neighbourhood format continues to allow irruptions of these large, bombastic, chauvinistic celebrations. Environmental themes seemed to be popular this year – there was a big drive to make soluble clay idols rather than harmful plaster-of-paris ones, the nirmalya (ritual detritus) was aggressively collected for disposal in large pots on bridges rather than people throwing them randomly into the river. Lots of installations about female foeticide, farmers’ suicides in eastern Maharashtra due to severe debt and agricultural decline, environmental awareness… it was most interesting to follow it in the papers and on TV. The ones we saw were mostly on mythical tales and religious themes, and it’s a pity I didn’t get to photograph these more interesting ones, some of which were in fairly far-flung places. But still, it was fun walking the crowded lanes – and down memory lane – with my mother, who hitched up her sari and biked all over the old town as a teenager many decades ago.
Ah well. When Ganpati comes back next year. Or when I do!
Hi there! Recognize me?
This is standard issue traffic-head-gear for Pune’s women two-wheeler drivers, a result of the horrible vehicular and dust pollution in this madly expanding city. I used to madly criss-cross it on a scooty when I was in college, and I still take my father’s Kinetic Honda out occasionally, but don’t really enjoy it any more. I still love the city to distraction, but its traffic drives me insane, especially one thing about it. My friends who live here rib me about my “NRI meltdowns” (expat inability to handle rough local conditions), but with honking traffic it’s different. I always hated it, still do, and will never get used to someone blaring away behind me.
It is an old cliche that cows roam India’s streets. But the bovine irritants are nothing compared to the human ones. These too, incidentally, are distinguishable by their horns. The horn is the Indian road warrior’s most important weapon. With a loud horn, you don’t have to stop and look at crossings, you can just charge into them, finger pressed. You don’t have to glance into the rear-view mirror, but just honk as you change lanes, or honk back at the guy who just did the same and cut you off. Naturally, as horns grow more ubiquitous, nobody pays them any heed. So they get louder and louder, multi-toned and customisable, to frighten the life out of you, if not deafen you outright. The horn is not to warn about danger, or to signal extreme irritation. It is to doggedly get ahead in traffic, and, therefore, indispensable.
In true academic fashion, I shall attempt a typology of horns I hear everyday, in the hope that abstracting something into an object of study might render it tolerable.
1. The Bully I: Persistent, short bursts of two honks, usually in a volley of about fifty. A well-dressed man in a large SUV or shiny new car (like the blue one above, right behind the fruit-cart), angry that while the extra money spent has got him more room for his arse inside the vehicle, it has not translated into more room in traffic. Pissed off at the roadblocks around him, he hopes his horn will make them vanish.
2. The Bully II: Same as above, but louder and more imaginative and multi-toned. Usually on a shiny motorcycle. Often customised and enhanced to suit the young driver’s belief that he is immortal, and the road is for him to weave in and out of as he pleases and terrorise other drivers out of his way. This species is easily the worst scourge on the roads.
3. Perpetual Amazement: Random bursts of indiscriminate honking. Sub-species of aforementioned scourge. Usually male on motorcycle, often with something female and squealy hugging its back, just so thrilled that something large and powerful is throbbing between legs and carrying them forward. Look at me! Look at me!! I am so cool!!! Tran-tran-tran!!!! Shall I scare you by getting too close at high speed? Yayy!! Tran tran tran!! Nowadays, with increasing regularity, this species jumps red lights with impunity, disengaging from waiting traffic at the signal like loose boulders from a cliff and scaring the daylights out of those who have right of way. Guess what those guys do in anticipation of these lunatics? Yup – they honk pre-emptively.
Some of these guys now work while they drive – ie, they talk on the mobile phone, even as they are about to plunge into an already chaotic intersection:
4. Scared: Tentative, but very regular bleat, with touch of desperation. Mild-mannered drivers fresh out of the local driving school and terrified of species # 2 and #3. They rely on the horn every time they even see someone in their entire visual range. OMG, OMG, I hope I don’t hit him, they say, eyes firmly in front of them and honk in the hope that this will make everyone else jump out of their way. Car drivers who keep their side mirrors closed because someone can hit and break them use this horn, but so do the smaller two-wheeler ones terrified of the bullies. This terror, however, doesn’t stop these lambs from honking their way through red lights.
5. The Merger: Loud and authoritative, five-six longish sounds. This one is a beauty, and it is amazing that more people don’t die on the roads everyday because of it. It signals a two-wheeler driver merging into a main thoroughfare at full speed – like an arc of vigorous and long-shackled urine. Glance back at the flow of traffic before merging – whatever for? Are you deaf? What’s that about police regulating traffic? Pune’s finest, as always, are busy earning a hard day’s work -
6. Leap of Faith: Continuous, desperate bleating. Usually in snarls and gridlocks, when it becomes absolutely clear that nobody can move in any direction. That’s when the desperate driver thinks that full-weight-of-body-on-horn, amidst all the other cacophony, is miraculously going to air-lift him out of there and into his office on time. He is not upset or anything; he is genuinely puzzled when you tap on the window and ask him what’s the point. Whattodo, he will say. Have to do something, no?
7. Matter-of-fact: Short, functional beep.Used by highway bus and truck drivers to say “can I overtake?” or “I’m about to overtake you” as a courtesy on single lane highways. The guy in front, or his co-rider then waves you on. The old custom underlying the immortal phrase painted on to innumerable trucks on Indian highways – Horn OK Please. Nowadays, though, these large vehicles don’t trust your ears and install electric horns. Just in case. So you’ll jump out of your skin in fear and right off the road. Mild exposure to these ensures that if you do have any hearing, it won’t be for long.
Today is Ganesh Chaturthi, the big festival when we welcome the deity Ganpati into our homes for his ten-day annual visit, bringing good cheer and banishing obstacles and evil. Given the decibel at which we welcome our gods, or call the faithful to prayer, with deafening loudspeakers everywhere, I doubt he can hear very well any more. But if he could, it would be wonderful if he could silence horns and loudspeakers, and bring everyone some earplugs instead of good cheer, before we all go wholly and comprehensively deaf.
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