by Ira Pande
Ama, in her own words, was like a calf torn from its mother’s udders. Her mother too wept day and night, till one summer her irate husband bought her another house in Almora where she could see her beloved child from the rooftop. That summer the ingenious mother and daughter, helped by numerous sympathetic aunts and great-aunts of the town, developed a modus operandi whereby the family sweeper, in exchange for a handsome sum of money, would escort the young bride through the back door of the toilet of her father’s house, where the mother joined her with generous gifts of clothes and sweets and family gossip for a few minutes before Ama was escorted back again.
Like all supposedly foolproof plans, this too didn’t work for too long. One day, as she returned, Ama found her father-inlaw coughing and walking to and fro near the back entrance. ‘Where were you?’ he thundered and Ama froze. He then declared that she was dead for the Kasoon Pandes now and could go back to the toilet she’d come from. By this time, an enormous courtyard was filled with curious and interested onlookers, who tut-tutted for the poor daughter-in-law but dared not defy the angry old man. ‘After much ramlila,’ to quote Ama, it was resolved that a mock shraddha—a ghatashraddha—be performed and Ama be rechristened and remarried to her husband. This was duly done. A clay pitcher with holy water—symbolizing Ama’s body—was destroyed and Ama was considered reborn. ‘That was the day,’ Ama said, ‘I ceased to worry about an afterlife or being alone.’
Soon after this, Ama lost her mother-in-law and her husband lost his faith in tradition. He confided to his young wife that he had begun eating meat, and that he too had bought a passage to England. However, she was to keep this secret until he returned from England after two years. So Ama, dying inwardly of worry, lied smoothly to her father-in-law and told him that his son had gone down south to study. Since women were supposed to be vague about most affairs of the world outside, the lie was accepted. Soon, however, an anonymous letter arrived asking the old man sarcastically: ‘How does it feel now that your own son has gone to the land of the mlechchas, huh? Do you still feel the same way about ostracizing the foreign-returned young man?’
Like Bhishma Pitamah, her father-in-law, Ama said, made a terrible vow: that he would go to Kashi and die on the banks of the Ganga like a sanyasi, in expiation of his son’s ultimate sin. He was almost blind in both eyes by now, but he left. Ama was left all alone with her nine children, in a town that in those days did not permit unescorted Brahmin women out on the streets or in the market. Kumaon in those days was an island barely connected with the railhead in the faraway town of Bareilly by a dangerous road, difficult to traverse even for a physically fit male. Yet Ama refused to dissolve into tears. Instead, she gathered her brood, called for her loyal servants, and left by palki, holding in her lap her youngest child and a paandaan with her jewellery. The rest of her children followed with the servants. Somehow this circus managed to reach Banaras, locate and placate the irate and dejected patriarch, and bring him back. ‘Men’s presence you need next to you always,’ she told me, ‘even if they are only man-shaped lumps of dough. No one likes to see a woman managing things, see?’
… Ama was to face greater travails later. She became a widow before she was forty, saw her nineteen-year-old son TK return from Santiniketan and step into his father’s job in the state of Orchcha, then opt for the Indian Police Service and…die young like his father. After this, for most of her remaining years, Ama remained in the ancestral home that went to pieces around her, with poverty, with neglect. Yet no one, not even her own children, mourned the wasted life of this spirited woman, or blamed the socio-political changes for the decline in her life as they did in the case of my uncle. Men had let her down again and again, yet to the women of Ama’s generation, men were the only weapons—even if they cut both ways—women had. And she was determined that men, who are ultimately in control of women’s lives, even if they cannot control their own, must be controlled—if necessary by guile. The lack of this last quality in my mother was always a source of worry to her.
… She often told us that after her husband died suddenly of a carbuncle in Bangalore, there was no one she could turn to. So she had to bring the body home from the mortuary, arrange for the funeral all by herself, and then sell off the huge house and all the furnishings to buy the passage back to Almora for herself, her children and her servants. ‘In that one week my tears went back into my head and my hair turned completely white,’ she used to say. I think she told us that story again and again to purge herself of the horror of a whole week when she was left alone without men, without moorings. This was what turned her into the woman I remember: a lonely, somewhat cantankerous figure, who constantly offended the community and her daughters-in-law with her blunt pronouncements about social mores, but who had an unerring nose for sniffing out hypocrisy.
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Santiniketan
In 1902, the poet Tagore created a new academy of learning in the deep recesses of the tribal Santhal belt near Bolpur in West Bengal and called it Santiniketan, the Abode of Peace. Although he belonged to one of the most prominent feudal families of Bengal, Tagore displayed little interest in the life of leisure and idle pursuits that others of his birth revelled in. In fact, he held its lifestyle responsible for creating unbridgeable rifts between parents and children and has written evocatively of the remote relationship he had with his own parents. By the time Tagore created Santiniketan, he had lost his own children— both his daughters to tuberculosis and his only son to cholera. He was already a famous man, India’s first Nobel laureate and hailed as a quintessential Renaissance figure of those times, so in material terms there was nothing more that he sought from the Calcutta crowd. The creation of Santiniketan was for him, in a sense, a retreat into a life of contemplation far away from the mannered life of the Bengal aristocracy.
More than a radical educational experiment, Santiniketan was a defiant nationalist gesture against the Macaulayan educational system the British had introduced to create babus and clerks for their government. A great wave of patriotic resurgence was sweeping across India under the inspiring call of Mahatma Gandhi, and Tagore was one of several Indian thinkers and prominent educationists who wished to make pedagogy an instrument of change. Diddi’s own grandfather was one of the founders of the Banaras Hindu Viswavidyalaya, a university to provide to Indian students an Indian education that had its roots in the ancient oral tradition and where teachers and students shared a relationship based on that of a family. Yet, strangely enough, it was not to Banaras but to distant Santiniketan that he decided to send his own grandchildren. The reason is not far to see.
Among the pictures I inherited from Diddi’s collection is a framed photograph of her father, called Hubby by everyone. It shows him, a handsome young man in his thirties, sitting on a chair in a studio, cigar in hand, dressed in a morning coat and cravat. On his head is a dashing turban that all officials of princely courts wore in those days and he exudes an unmistakable aura of elegance and confidence. He also looks remarkably like Diddi.
Hubby was the antithesis of his father: he smoked and drank, lived a westernized life and was more at home in the club than in his father’s austere Brahmin world. Among his friends were princes and rulers, thinkers, writers and poets. He was a regular contributor to the Asia Magazine and the library in Kasoon had several books on English poetry and essays with his flamboyant signature on the flyleaf. One of these was an autographed copy of Jim Corbett’s Man-eaters of Kumaon, signed ‘To my affectionate friend Ashwini, Jim Corbett’. Hubby’s father could not understand these Anglophile leanings and was alarmed at the prospect of his grandchildren turning into brown sahibs. This is why my uncle Tribhi was drawn away from Miss Mumford’s clutches and the three eldest children were kept under the eagle eye of Lohaniji in Almora. When it was time for them to go to regular school, their grandfather chose to send them so far away that their own father would never poison their lives with the hedonistic lifestyle of the princely state
s. In fact, Diddi’s grandfather looks remarkably like Tagore—he wore the same long habit and had a long, flowing beard, and hair.
In those days, there was no motor road between Almora and Kathgodam, the nearest railhead. Diddi and her siblings walked the 25-odd miles to reach it, chaperoned by Lohaniji and two old servants. The caravan consisted of some Nepali coolies who carried their luggage and the journey was accomplished in two stages. Lohaniji supervised the food for the children when they set camp but they preferred to sneak across to the tantalizing ‘fish curry’ that the Nepali coolies cooked. Diddi told us how the coolies were so poor that they picked smooth pebbles from the stream near their camp and dropped them in the broth of onions and water to flavour them with a ‘fish’ taste. Both she and my uncle Tribhi—lifelong epicures and devoted carnivores— dodged the eagle-eyed Lohaniji and Jayanti to beg the coolies for a portion of their dinner.
Diddi loved her years at Santiniketan and imbibed all she could from its free and open teaching system. She quickly learnt to speak Bengali and, in fact, her first short story was written not in Hindi but in Bengali. I have a theory that those who have a good musical ear also have a natural facility for learning languages and am convinced that Diddi’s perfect musical ear was behind her talent for being able to communicate in so many languages. This musical talent was nurtured at Santiniketan and Diddi was among those who sang for the dance dramas that Tagore created. Their troupes were often taken to Calcutta to sing on air. From whatever I can gather of her time there, Diddi was a chatterbox, a person who made many friends and was always eager to take part in all of Tagore’s experiments. Her photo albums have scores of photographs that document her life. Diddi and her friend carrying their holdall slung from a pole to their hostel. There are others that show Diddi chewing sugar cane, sitting on a bullock cart, on a barge with other students from Santiniketan when they accompanied Jean Renoir, the film-maker, to Banaras as he made his film on the Ganga. There are pictures of many who were to become iconic figures later—Satyajit Ray, Balraj Sahni, Mrinalini Sarabhai, Jaya Appaswami, Kanika Devi and Sankho Chaudhuri to name just a few. It must have been bliss to be in Santiniketan then and to be young and beautiful must have been very heaven.
Tagore’s relationship with his students was inspirational in a way that is difficult for us to understand. It was something to do with the atmosphere of Santiniketan and its liberal teaching styles that brought out the best in all the students who came under its spell. Till the end, Diddi’s face would light up at the mere mention of Santiniketan and a part of her remained forever the child she was when she first met Tagore.
In those days, Almora was also a sylvan retreat where several talented artists arrived to be inspired by its scenic landscape. Uday Shankar, the renowned dancer and elder brother of the legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar, had set up a dance academy just outside Almora. Its members included exotic foreign women, dancers and musicians and the estate came to be regarded as the Bohemian quarter of Almora. While the toffeenosed Brahmin families guarded their daughters from its cosmopolitan culture, Diddi and Jayanti, because of their Santiniketan connection, were frequent visitors. They were often called upon to help in sourcing costumes and jewellery for the operas that Uday Shankar composed. Every summer, Tagore would travel to the hills and, whenever he came to Almora, he was a regular visitor to Kasoon. He stayed in a small hotel in the main town, called The Deodars, and since he was accompanied by his granddaughter, who was Diddi’s friend, Diddi spent as much of her time with them as possible. She would take folk singers to Tagore and some of the tunes he composed were no doubt inspired by the pahari folksongs that he had heard in Almora.
Diddi’s years at Santiniketan are recalled in a small book she wrote sometime in the early sixties. Called Amader Santiniketan (My Santiniketan), it is among her finest works. The following article, not from the book, is a piece she published on her favourite teacher there—the famous Hindi and Sanskrit scholar Acharya Hajari Prasad Dwivedi. I have chosen this essay over an extract from Amader Santiniketan because it captures the spirit of Santiniketan and Diddi’s response to its romantic atmosphere so vividly.
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How Can I Forget?
Diddi writes:
I first met Acharya Hajari Prasad Dwivedi in 1935: I was twelve years old and he a teacher at Santiniketan. For the next eight years, he was my teacher, guide, confidante—a guru in the truest sense of the word. When I shut my eyes to remember those halcyon days, I see silken curtains lift and a stage in my mind’s eye. I am back in the Ashram, and a part of the audience that awaits the opening of a play.
I can see the wide swathe of red earth that separated the Ashram from a vast dusty field. On the far side of the field lies Gurupalli—where the gurus of the Ashram lived. Covered with creepers and lined with tall palms, they stand in a neat row like dolls’ houses. The largest of these modest mud and thatch cottages belonged to the ‘Big Guru’, Hajari Prasad Dwivedi. It was a clean, spartan space, like its occupants, and was flanked by two verandas. In one corner of the front veranda lay a wooden divan, and in the other stood a battered wooden cupboard, tilting drunkenly on one broken foot, with books tumbling out in a heap. The back of the house had another veranda facing a courtyard and a small kitchen leading off from it. This was Panditji’s wife’s domain and Bhabhi (as we all called her affectionately) would rustle up good North Indian food for all of us non-Bengali students who missed our homes. Soon this house became our adda, a favourite hangout for all who wanted to eat spicy snacks. Bhabhi added onions, chillies and mustard oil to puffed rice and placed a whole heap before us, watching us fondly as we fell upon it with cries of delight.
Panditji, with his dhoti, loose khadi kurta and a shawl thrown carelessly over his shoulders, was a familiar figure in the Ashram. Tall, with a high forehead and twinkling eyes hidden behind a pair of glasses, he was best known for his spontaneous and open laughter that would erupt at the slightest provocation and ring out over the Ashram.
Panditji’s style of teaching was pretty unique too. He told us hilarious stories of his teachers and at the first hint of a raindrop, he would dismiss the class for the day. I must break off to tell you that Santiniketan was the only school in the world where students were given a holiday to soak themselves the day it rained. So whenever it rained, shrieks of delight could be heard all over the campus as bands of students danced and sang noisily in the rain.
To go back to Panditji’s classes: apart from the rainy day holiday, he offered us a host of other excuses to run away from class. Fetch me some blades (or soap) for shaving, he would tell one and the delighted student would trot off happily to the Ashram’s lone cooperative store. Since there was always a little something for the volunteer at the end of such an errand, often the whole class obliged Panditji by accompanying the lucky student. Yet, like all placid people, when his temper was roused it was an occasion to remember. For some unknown reason, someone had introduced a new fad into the Ashram those days: sucking the stone of an amla. All over the Ashram, you could see mouths working round the delectable amla stones. Panditji, like all the other Ashram gurus, had warned us to stop, but has any reasonable plea ever worked on schoolchildren?
One of the most timid boys in our class was Sharan Prasad. One day, Panditji caught him crunching the offending stones. ‘So this is what you come here for? To crunch these wretched stones?’ he thundered. ‘How many are there in that mouth? Open it!’ he ordered. Sharan Prasad quickly hid the one he was sucking under his tongue and opened his mouth.
‘Hmmm,’ said Panditji. ‘Don’t think you can hide it from me. It’s under your tongue, isn’t it? Go stand in that corner for the rest of the period. Shame on you,’ he went on. ‘Look at her,’ he pointed to me. ‘She has just come from the hills and see how quietly and obediently she listens to every word. And look at you! Been here for God know how long, but it’s made no difference to you, it seems.’
I was so chuffed at this praise in front of the whole class
that had turned by now to stare at me that I choked. A violent coughing fit ensued and, with it, out popped the stone I had hidden under my tongue. It landed neatly at Panditji’s feet. He looked a little nonplussed for a while and then burst into a loud guffaw. My ears still ring at the sound of that generous shout of laughter. His laughter shamed me more that day than a shout would have.
Another scene: we are all sitting with Panditji under the sky, and he is reading the ‘Sundar Kand’ of the Ramayana. When his deep baritone reads the text, everything seems so easy that there are no questions to ask. We listen entranced to the story of Lord Rama’s exploits with the same attention that we listen to Abanindranath Tagore’s Galper Class (Class for Storytelling). The most boring textbook prescribed in Panditji’s course was a selection of poems that nobody (least of all Panditji) wanted to ever tackle. ‘Why do you want me to read you this?’ he would ask us. ‘Read it by yourselves at home.’
‘But Panditji,’ I begged one day, ‘who can we go to ask when we don’t understand something? You have to help us—what will we do in the exams next month?’
‘Stupid child,’ he shook his head at me. ‘What is there in it to ask?’
I still remember the lines and I am sure he does too.
‘Speak, O koel!
Spread some sweetness in my life…’
‘Look,’ he clucked at me, ‘we are talking here of a koel, a cuckoo, not a crow. Obviously it had a sweet voice and that is what must have pleased the poet. Got it? Enough, now vamoose! Class over!’ What could I possibly say to him after this? But this same Panditji became a tyrant when he took lessons in Hindi grammar. He would make us slog for hours until we got it right.
‘If you sleep through this class,’ he warned us, ‘you will never be able to write a line straight. Understand? This Gowra,’ he suddenly turned to me one day. ‘She was like a meek cow when she came here and look at her now! Don’t think for a minute that I can’t see what mischief you are up to,’ he wagged a fat finger at me. ‘I’ll pull your ears out from your jaw one day! I am going to report you to Jayanti today, you watch!’