Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
The year was 1950. In a newly independent India we were a rowdy bunch of Midnight’s children attending one of the many free Hindi medium primary schools run by missionaries. These schools were still using the text books and guidelines set by the British, and classes were co-educational. Ours housed a few girls and many boys from the local Muslim dominant small town where a few male students from remote rural areas were also visible. They had been sent to stay with relatives and acquire learning and, perchance, some manners for a better future. The children from relatively well-off families like ours came neatly attired in nicer clothes and received a hot lunch in a tiffin carrier brought during the lunch recess by some old family retainer. However, at that point we were all unaware of class and caste and uniformly ill-read and curious to learn about the layered world we lived in.
We changed several schools thereafter where the mix remained the same and class room benches always long and few on which we crowded together. One of my bench friends was Mohan, a thin one-eyed boy with pock marks on his face. He had lost his left eye to a pellet as he and his family were running to board the train that saved their lives and brought them from Lahore to Amritsar during the Partition. But why and when did their next door neighbours and families suddenly became a threat to each other and who exactly shot him, this he would not say. His clothes, though old and darned, were clean and his hair well oiled and parted. He was a proud little boy who ate his meagre lunch behind bushes. When he had a bad cough he was given a piece of salted dry roasted ginger to suck. “Does that help ?” we asked sceptically. “Of course,” he replied with conviction and coughed some more. Our classes were predominantly full of poor uncouth first generation learners who wore wrinkled older siblings’ clothes, hoarded their stationary until the pencils and rubbers could be used no more. But there were no communally lacerating words flung around.
Some of us finally finished school and were admitted to universities. In the Nehruvian world, education was the key that unlocked glorious modern knowledge. Admissions were granted without entrance examinations or interviews and the catchment areas stretched from Uttarakhand to Bihar. At the Allahabad University I attended, the admission was free of fuss and all it took was duly filled and signed forms and a cheque appended to a letter from my father and filling of a couple more forms. A few family elders mumbled about wasting good money on daughters’ university education. Who waters another’s crop? One uncle remarked. “We’ll manage”, was the short polite reply from my father.
Everyone in the 1960s was coping: with democracy threatened first by the Chinese and then Pakistan’s aggressive postures. We lost two prime ministers between 1962-65 but the government remained functional and new agricultural and educational reforms did not discard the basic structures of the state to score points.
There were changes happening in our markets and societal structures and the hard working refugees from Punjab and East Bengal were slowly finding their feet and triggering the Green revolution and memorable educational leaps. The people were always expected not to bad mouth the harbingers of change but make room and cope with war periods with grace. Our next door neighbours in Nainital, who had come in from remote Deran Gujranwalla, had lost vast land holdings and had been given tracts in Malaria infested Terai as compensation. Within a decade they turned the region into a veritable cornucopia of food for the whole province. A relative of theirs, Gulzari Lal Nanda, was deputy prime minister. A humble man with a drooping moustache whose visits were neither noticed nor dramatised. At home, our writer mother was coping with her own brood and beginning to write and be noticed. She wrote a gut wrenching story, Lal Haveli, about a woman visiting India after being abducted by rioters to Pakistan where she was married and living with her new family. She talked at length to the Chaudhary women to understand the scars of Partition on simple rural folk. She shared their stories, their recipes, helped their children with homework and their mothers visited mine, often to cry and talk about their lost lives.
With so much coping going on, when I entered the University as an undergraduate, I found I was expected to attend English medium classes in ancient history. Back home parents never wondered if an overnight change in the medium of instruction would be hard to cope with for a teenager. They too were coping weren’t they? Like Mohan, I was too proud to confess of my gut wrenching experiences but truth be told, I did cope as my mother’s daughter.
And then I met the Greek historians who spoke to me across the vast river of Time and space and with that, “Nikal gaya more mann ka sansa jub se darsan payo! (As I met them, all doubts were sorted out in my heart).
“I am like one of those old books that ends up mouldering for lack of having been read. There is nothing to do but spin out the thread of memory and from time to time, wipe away the dust..”, Seneca told me. Then there was Herodotus, master of the ambiguous and sly referential signs history sends mankind, its winks and nods, in his recording of cultural clashes and wars between the West and the East, much much before Fukuyama. His ‘Histories’ resonate in my head as I watch the India I was born in, the US and Europe I, at various times in my long life, visited as student, mother, scholar, writer, shed their skins and renew the clashes election after election.
And no one wants to cope ever since George Bush Sr. revived the ghosts of the ancient wars. What is new is cyber money and tech working 24×7. Ironically, both have been weaponised for multiple attacks on history and its real heroes, their meticulously crafted policies and global networks of roads, canals, farming systems and trade. ‘Five Year plans’ that helped India remain and grow as a democracy were the first to go when the fever to forget and erase memory caught up with us. Faced with constant wily trends for doing this, I have come to share Herodotus’s obsession with memory and an individual’s stubborn resistance to its uncouth and brazen erasure by the state. He wrote history, he says, because:
“The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time and to preserve the fame of important and remarkable achievements,..in particular the cause of hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks”.
Our younger generation, whose violent words spill over from streets into cyber space, are mostly disinterested in getting themselves registered as voters. Not surprising. They’ve come of age in two decades resonating with messages of communally divisive hatred in the social media in which they live and love and have their being. They do not obsess over lost memory because they have a surfeit of memory sticks and search engines and AI at their disposal. But you also see an alarming lack of curiosity about the past and the future they are hurtling towards. The ‘cool’ ones live for here and now. They go on planned excursions, cruises, treks. Hardly any of them bother to wander among alien lands driven by simple human curiosity. They are frequent travellers, not leisured wanderers like Herodotus or the Buddhist pilgrims or the Alavar saints, Nath monks, Sufis. The wanderers were gatherers of tales that they strung together as history of mankind and handed to us. You see, as you read how history is crafted, when people sit together in amicable companionship and someone begins to tell a story. Everything about human events said Heraclitus, and also the writer of the Bhagwat Katha, is in eternal motion and as each story is recounted, is renewed.
Why should this be so ? Why should tiny Greece take on the might of the Persian empire ?
Why should Israel crush Palestine even more ruthlessly than its founders were not too long ago, and Europe which was subjected to mass destruction again begin to splutter and fumble for words of condemnation?
Why should Persia stare back at the West via Tel Aviv?
Why should Hindus and Muslims who survived the Partition and rebuilt ruined lives and businesses, fail to dismiss contemptuously the crass propaganda from power hungry leaders so similar to that which flew about the subcontinent in 1940s ?
Not unlike Herodotus and Heraclitus, we too are living at the juncture of two epochs: between the era of oral history being overtaken by the era of written history and bloody wars that erupt suddenly. While the world is shaken to its core by wars and global meltdowns, do we notice how written history is being eradicated and stories about wars and peace are being transformed into visual images and sounds. Once again, two eternal laws dominate every democracy: revenge and ambitious leaders’ ultimate propensity for self destruction by unleashing pointless cruelties to win elections.
In the middle of all this, while hundreds of refugees drown trying to flee their war-torn arid lands, most of our young read and watch their WhatsApp messages, X and Instagram accounts. To them, wars are being served as a game. You play it and then move on. So in one steamy tropical noon, when electoral rallies are sending them terrible lies and campuses full of agitated students demanding freedom are being beaten back by state police forces, people still keep recording the scenes on their smartphones or taking selfies.
Recently in India, when asked, they happily flashed the torches on their mobiles by way of sending a flying Surya Tilak to a deity within a half built temple that most of them have yet to see.
“After all, no one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace, in peace sons bury fathers, in war fathers bury sons. However God must have wanted this to happen..”says Croesus.
Good tagline for media cells.
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.
