The Ganga Mirrors India: Sacred, Polluted, And Endlessly Complex

 [First published in YouthKiAwaaz]

To many, India and the Ganga are almost synonymous, and rightly so because the river has as many contrasts and contradictions as the country itself. On one hand, Ganga is revered as the Goddess who purifies, but on the other the river ranks as one of the most polluted in the world. If she is playful and wild at her source in the Himalayas, by the time she reaches the sea, she becomes so slow and wide that it is hard to know where she ends and the sea begins. The contradictions are visible in the people who visit the Ganga- people who have renounced their earthly life and embraced spirituality, pilgrims who visit with deep devotion, people who come seeking answers or boons, and tourists who are looking for adventure.

All these contradictions are brought to life in Siddharth Kapila’s “Tripping Down the Ganga”, which is part memoir, part travelogue and part introspection on religion. The author has visited the seventh pilgrim spots mentioned in the book multiple times. Some of those trips were made as a schoolboy who tagged on with his extremely devout mother and participated quite reluctantly in the rituals.

The author made the second set of visits as an enquiring adult who wanted to understand better what the river means to the many people who seek solace on her banks. The two timelines are intertwined seamlessly, complimenting each other and setting up contrasts. It is this juxtaposition that makes the places come alive.

While the author describes the various pilgrim spots and the journey to get there, to me, the book is primarily about people and their faith. Contradictions abound even here. There is a young woman who is willing to go through a ceremonial marriage to Lord Vishnu to rectify a perceived defect in her horoscope in the hope that it might salvage her relationship with a white man. There is a friend who hopes religion might help him reconcile his sexual orientation with societal expectations. There are the pilgrims who dine at a five-star establishment and yet haggle with the rickshaw pullers who will get them to their destination.

The passages that resonated most with me were the ones that talked about the degradation of the Himalayas. In ancient times, the most revered pilgrimage spots were located in inaccessible places to test the devotion of the pilgrims who made their way there. Does the same piety remain when helicopters and highways have made them readily accessible to anyone who can afford them? One questions the wisdom of creating all this infrastructure, which extracts a heavy price for increased seismic activity, frequent landslides and devastating floods.

Kashi/ Varanasi/ Banaras is a city that the author keeps returning to in the book. He meets a vast cross-section of people who live on the banks of the Ganga. He speaks about the changing face of the city. Through the stories of the residents, he describes how the warren of buildings and narrow lanes were destroyed to make way for a grander approach to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. Each of those buildings had its own alters with ancient Shivlings- Hinduism itself metamorphosising from a religion where you have a personal relationship with God to a more community-driven form of worship.

Though the book does not pretend to be a thesis on religion, there are conversations with people, each of whom propounds on their interpretation of religion. That the author has done a considerable amount of research is apparent, yet what emerges is the continuous evolution of religious thought not just of the author but of the people he meets.

At the heart of the book is Mummy- a super-efficient tax lawyer who is also both religious and superstitious. Her contradictions are the contradictions inherent in India, which, on one hand, is trying to embrace the technological world and yet is falling deeper into superstition and ritual.

What shines through in the book is the brutal honesty of the author. He is an upper-caste male who is upfront about his privilege. Instead of glossing over it, he describes his privilege and his biases himself, whether it is in describing how he slipped a ₹500 note into the right palm to get a better darshan or when his partner gets a little irritated with him and accuses him of believing in religious ritual more than he let on. It is a rare person who will point out these inconsistencies himself, and the author does.

The book explores many different themes and will appeal to anyone who wants to learn more about present-day India.

"The Other Mohan" Is A Riveting Blend Of Memoir And History

[First published in YouthKiAwaaz]

 “My maternal grandmother, Damayanti, had briefly attended a reputed Convent school in the city much like mine, a fact that deeply influenced my own mother’s choice of school for me. How did it happen, though, that my grandmother went to an elite girls’ school at a time when women of her social class barely received any school at all? It did not occur to me then, but it must have had something to do with her father Mohanlal and his travels.”

Amrita Shah was always curious to know more about her maternal great grandfather, Mohanlal Killavala, a well educated man from a reasonably prosperous family who at the turn of the 20th century left the comfort of Bombay to travel to South Africa. By all accounts, he returned to his family and his young bride after a few years, made a career for himself in real estate speculation, built a “house entirely of wood” for himself and was in every way the typical Gujarati patriarch.

What struck her, however, was how little people spoke about his time away- what compelled a man with a predictable future to spend money and risk societal displeasure to travel to a virtually unknown country, what made him return, why were there no physical artifacts from his travel, and why was his journey not a part of family lore. Instead of using a research grant to travel overseas to deliver lectures that nobody would hear, the author decided to retrace the journey of her fascinating ancestor to try and piece together his story.

“The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire” is a book that cannot be fitted into a convenient genre- it part travelogue, part memoir, part family history, part historical recreation. It traces the history of families settled in small towns along the coast of Gujarat from the Medieval age- of how the families contributed to the rise of Surat as the most prominent maritime trading city in India, of the exodus to Bombay when the land of seven archipelagos started developing into a metropolis, of how they contributed to making Bombay a city that almost rivalled London on which it was modelled. Mohanlal was born in this city, and from the few clues available to her, the author attempts to retrace his journey to South Africa.

The author’s exploration of various cities of South Africa and Mauritius is fascinating for an Indian who has not only a faint idea of the history of South Africa. She describes the various types of migrations of Indian to Mauritius and South Africa- indentured labourers who signed up to escape poverty in their country, freed indentured labourers from other countries who chose to make a home and Indians like Mohanlal who purchased (fairly expensive) tickets to seek to make a career. She describes the growing prejudices against people of colour in South Africa, and while MK Gandhi (he hadn’t yet become the Mahatma) makes an appearance, she also speaks of many other prominent Indians who contributed immensely to the Indian community.

The book is full of vivid descriptions of people and events- it is clear that she has done considerable research, but she presents it in a way which is not only accessible to the lay reader, but also extremely enjoyable. While describing her own adventures, she easily slips between the present and the past, with the past perhaps being more important to her. With nothing but the faintest clues, she tries to find out more about her ancestor, and we rejoice with her every time she makes a fresh discovery.

In the Prelude, which sets the context under which the author set off on the quest to unearth more details about her great grandfather, she mentions stumbling upon the fact that Mohanlal was involved in one of the earliest non co-operation movements started by Gandhi in South Africa. “It is not everyday that one hears of an ancestor having played a role in the making of history”, she writes. One expects her to unearth more details, and maybe even find that there was a fleeting friendship between the ‘two Mohans’, but we soon realise that while Mohanlal knew other important personalities, the acquaintance between these two was fleeting, if at all. However, despite this being a work of non-fiction, there is a climatic revelation she uncovers which throws a different light on everything Mohanlal did upto then.  

For most of the book the author doesn’t really tell us much about what might have driven Mohanlal, the picture she recreates is of an ambitious and proficient young man, who consciously chooses not to follow a conventional path. A man who not only prefers to work with white men, but also appears to have intermingled with them socially. Many of his actions seem random (he always throws up something stable to chase a new chimera), but it is clear to the writer that they are backed up with research and carefully planned. One would have thought that his interactions with Gandhi would form the backbone of the book, but they are merely one more aspect to an extremely engrossing tale.

I, personally, loved the parts where she recreates what life might have been like for her great grandmother- how she might have dressed, where she might have worshipped, the places she might have gone to, and the conversations she might have overheard/ participated in. While all of it is speculation on the part of the author, you know she has done considerable primary and secondary research using diverse data sources before coming up with her descriptions. As she says, “These are hypotheses, of course, but ancestry is a complicated business.”

This is a fascinating book, and the notes and references will certainly send the reader down other rabbit holes. The author also has a very engaging style and almost effortlessly brings the people and places to life. While the title may suggest it is the story of one man, it is actually the story of the people who were part of an immigration wave that is not spoken of much. Anybody who is curious about our history would love this book.

[I was sent a review copy by Harper Collins. The views are my own.]

How “trad wives” Deny Women The Right To Choose

 [This was written for the USAWA Newsletter- Matchbox 06]

At the Presidential Inauguration, it was impossible to ignore the adoration with which Usha Vance stared at her husband while he was being sworn in as the Vice President. With her wide-eyed, unblinking gaze, and the beaming smile, she projected the image of a teenager who had not yet come to terms with the fact that the object of her veneration had chosen to bestow his attention on her. This was a carefully curated aesthetic, and her intention clearly was to make herself the object of countless “find yourself a woman who looks at you like Usha Vance looks at her husband” memes.

In reality, Usha Vance is anything but the vacuous Barbie doll that she projected herself as. The daughter of professionally qualified parents, she is a graduate of Yale Law School with a fairly impressive legal career. Her husband often refers to her as the more privileged, the more sophisticated and the more intelligent person in the relationship. In his memoir he describes how on more than one occasion he sought her guidance on how to behave in social settings that were awkward for him. Despite being his equal in every way, she chose to present herself as a docile and devoted wife and mother who couldn’t believe her good fortune!

If you really think about it, was there any reason for a woman to carry a three year old child in one hand while holding the family Bible in the other? When my child was three, I often made him oversee his younger brother while I was busy- even if the Vance child couldn’t have been left in charge of her older siblings, she could have been made to stand next to her mother and hold her hand. But that would not have made a dramatic picture would it? The adorable “baby” sucking her thumb, the pink dress, the devoted gaze- it was all created to fit into the “trad wife” aesthetic that is so popular in the United States, especially among the alt-right.

Who is a “trad wife”?
A “trad wife” is someone who consciously chooses to adhere to traditional gender roles where the man is the provider and the woman is the homemaker. This phenomenon is driven by social media influencers who typically adhere to a 1950s aesthetic of frilly aprons and tow-headed children, and who have their make-up and high heels firmly in place while they whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies from scratch because their husband asked for it. Without exception, “trad wives” also espouse the conservative Christian ideology and reserve special scorn for feminists, who, they claim, look down upon their “choice” to be “trad wives”.

If feminism is about women having the “choice” to be and do whatever they want, then, is being a “trad wife” incompatible with feminism? Doesn’t the “trad wife” have the right to choose to be one- isn’t being a “stay at home mom” is a perfectly legitimate choice? The incompatibility is because of a subtle difference between a “stay at home mom” and a “trad wife”. A “stay at home mom” believes in gender equity and chooses to prioritise childcare under certain circumstances. A “trad wife”, on the other hand, specifically views homemaking as her duty and chooses to submit to her husband’s authority. In effect, by making marriage the ultimate objective for a woman, by linking their self-worth to the cleanliness of their home and the quality of food they prepare and by telling them that “husbands must come first if you want a happy marriage”, trad wives are romanticising the ideology that the second wave of feminism fought against. Feminism is certainly about giving women the choice to bake banana bread if they want to, but the “trad wife” ideology implies that the self worth of a woman should be linked to the quality of banana bread that she bakes. Interestingly, trad wives are almost without exception white and married to white men who earn enough to support their decision.

By openly endorsing the traditional “Christian” values, “trad wives” willingly or unwillingly reinforce the alt-right philosophy which is based on denying women the fundamental right to make decisions that directly affect her. By choosing to present herself as the adoring wife and doting mother, Usha Vance (like many others) showed her allegiance to an ideology which will deny girls and women a future which she could aspire to, but chose to turn her back on.

Male Voices That Capture the Female Experience

[This was written for the USAWA Newsletter- Matchbox 05]

Log onto X (formerly called Twitter) or Instagram, and you find scores of accounts abusing assertive and articulate women while declaring that “feminism is cancer”. Turn on the TV, and there are prime time debates that without even a proper discussion conclude that all Indian men are victims of women who misuse the legal system for their benefit. There are forwards on WhatsApp and shares on Facebook which misquote statistics to demand that the laws which were created to protect women from social evils be scrapped and replaced by “gender neutral” laws. Clearly, this systemic backlash is because while society has worked towards empowering women, it has failed in enabling men to live harmoniously with empowered women. There are, however, a few male authors who write with great sensitively about a society which is not yet ready to accept gender equity either at home or outside.

Atharva Pandit’s ‘Hurda’ is based on a real life crime where three sisters disappeared, only to be found dead a few days later in a village well- till today nobody knows if it was an accident, suicide or murder. By constantly referring to the “green top” that one of the girls was dressed in, the author subtly points out to how by asking by “What was she Wearing?”, the blame for sexual assault is often shifted onto the victim who was “Asking for It.” The book also has multiple examples of how men indulge in sexual harassment and even sexual abuse, while either remaining oblivious to it, or by continuing to justify their action.

In Venkat, the narrator of ‘Sakina’s Kiss’, Vivek Shanbhag has created an extremely nuanced character- one who thinks he is “progressive”, but who in fact not only contributes to the unequal distribution of labour at home, but also weaponizes the vulnerability of women to feel good about himself. He constantly talks about how he knows how to brew a cup of tea, but when he sees his wife cooking all the meals, instead of pitching in (or at least appreciating the work she does), he suggests she get a cook. This is the kind of passive aggressive behaviour that is common in many households, but which is largely invisible men. I amazed that male author was able to create a character who is so nuanced in his misogyny. Venkat isn’t the only such character in the book- there is a self-professed “revolutionary” journalist who encourages a female journalist to travel into the hinterlands without an escort, but expects his beautiful wife to stay home to serve him meals at exactly the right temperature.

Nisha, one of the two narrators of Prayaag Akbar’s ‘Mother India’, is one of the most nuanced female characters I have met in recent times. She is a small town girl working in an upmarket retail establishment in a big city, who gets into a relationship with a man who doesn’t reciprocate her feelings. It would have been very convenient to develop her character around stereotypical lines, but the author has taken care to create a woman who intelligent, resilient, and independent, in addition to being very attractive. In a society where women are often accused of filing “fake rape cases” against men to coerce them into marriage, Nisha’s reaction, while entirely believable, was not what one would normally expect. The other female characters, similarly, are well etched and resist being pigeonholed.

When male authors like Shanbhag, Akbar and Pandit successfully capture the female perspective, it provides how, however faint, that eventually we will be able to move towards being a less misogynistic society. 

The Black Hill: A Story from the North East

 

‘The Black Hall’ is based on an historical account of a French missionary who tried to find a route to Tibet by travelling through the Mishmee Hills. He managed to establish some semblance of a mission on his second attempt, but he disappeared soon after. A chieftain of the Mishmee tribe was tried and convicted for the crime, setting in motion a series of events involving rivalries between tribes and brutalities by the colonial powers. Mamang Dai takes the historically documented account and weaves around it a love story which is at the same time as harsh and as enduring as the landscape in which it is set.

The book is set in the early days of the foreigners trying to establish themselves in North East India, and at one level it is a story where history is told not from the perspective of the colonisers, but from the perspective of  original inhabitants of the land, who do not want to see their way of life taken over by someone else. At another level, the book beautifully describes the geography of the North-East. Of a land where modern political boundaries have little meaning. A harsh land, well suited to the resilient people who live there. There are several journeys in the book- journeys which involve fording streams, walking through forests, following the river, climbing hills that shimmer in the sunshine and using river passes to cross the mighty mountains. You can almost visualise the protagonist using a rope to lunge herself over a river in spate! The book describes the customs and beliefs of the various tribes who live in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh (long before the states were even given these names)- the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the spirits they worship, the stories they tell, and the taboos and superstitions that govern their life.

At the heart of the book is a tender love story of Gimur, a young girl who falls in love with an apparition, who gives herself up to him, then gives up everything she has ever known to follow him to his village. She returns home when she feels she can no longer live with the secrets and silence between them. She is a woman in love, who will do anything for that love. She is also a woman who despite the limited options available to her asserts her agency at all times. She is a woman who many men use as their load star. It is the story of the men who love her in different ways- her childhood friend who never stopped watching over her, her husband who was willing to brave societal displeasure to be with her, and the French missionary who’s path crosses hers many times. The historical account doesn’t include any women, yet they must have been there. By placing Gimur at the centre of the story, the author reminds us of how history traditionally treats women. While Gimur does not find happiness of the kind she expected to find, by the end of her life, she realises that she lived the life she was meant to lead.

The author often comes back to words and narratives. Is the written word more important than oral traditions? Are words needed to capture your thoughts, or do thoughts transcend words? What is more important- words, or the silence that speaks without words?

The book uses the historical narrative to raise questions about civilisation, development and colonization, and these questions remain relevant even 150 years after the period in which the story is set. Who owns the land? Is land even meant to be owned, or is it something that is held in trust and passed on? Who determines which faith is superior? One is struck by the passion of the missionary who crossed over from Assam to Tibet not once but twice. But isn’t the faith of the people who trust the spirits to cure their sick just as strong?

The book is harsh. The book is lyrical. The book is unforgettable, just like the land in which it is set.

Shadow City: A Story of the Many Kabuls that Were

 I picked up Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul soon after the Taliban returned to power in 2021 after waging insurgency against the US backed government for two decades. Fresh from reading reports of the many restrictions which the Taliban had placed on women, and seeing archival photographs of a westernised and cosmopolitan city, one was, of course, immensely curious to know more about how the two realities could have been simultaneously true about the country.

Taran Khan is an Indian who lived and worked in Kabul for extended periods of time as an expat after the ouster of the Taliban in 2001. Unlike most expatriates, she chose to step outside the sanitised spaces to explore the city and interact with the residents. This book is the culmination of her effort to understand the many layers of Kabul.

Having grown up in India, the author, like most Indian women, viewed walking for leisure as a luxury. We have all been conditioned into staying away from public spaces, and pretending that our walks are purposeful because that is the only way a woman can justify being out on the street alone. In Kabul, she was subject to similar restriction- she was told it was dangerous to venture out on her own, yet she walked, and as she walked, new layers of the city revealed itself to her.

The book is divided into seven sections, the first and last of which are called “Returns”. In the first “Return”, she talks about how her family was originally from Afghanistan and of how she viewed going to Kabul as a way of returning home. While she can read the Persian script, she didn’t know the language, so most of the written word was inaccessible to her. But her grandfather, who like many educated Indians of his generation was fluent in Persian, helped contextualise most of her experiences by relating them what he had read about Kabul. The “Returns” with which she concludes the book is her return to India after her last tour in Afghanistan. Over the years, she has seen the city change, till it is almost unrecognisable to her. The optimism she encountered in her first trip has been replaced by apprehension, and there is the fear of what might happen when the US troops withdraw and international aid dries up. People were worried about the growing power of the Taliban and making plans to escape. Would the country return to what it was before the boom that she witnessed?

The each of the other five chapters, she picks up a different aspect of life in Kabul, and shows how in Afghanistan layers always peel away to reveal the same story being told over and over again. The history of Afghanistan is of cycles where there is a complete erasure of history, only for the same story to be told again and again. She talks about books and writing, about mental illness, about weddings, about movies and even about Buddhism. In each of the topics, she brings her own viewpoint which is simultaneously that of a curious but empathetic outsider and an insider. Her own childhood in Aligarh finds resonance in what she sees in Kabul, and reading her account, you are struck by how deeply intertwined society in Afghanistan and India is.

It is, however, impossible to read the book without remembering and being reminded of what is happening in Afghanistan today. The same women who danced at their weddings dressed in the latest designs from European catwalks have been rendered completely invisible today. The people who carved out joyful lives for themselves within the constraints placed by society are today reduced to baby making machines. There is despair while reading the book, but there is also hope because the cyclical nature of history in Afghanistan shows that one should never give up hope. The book is also a clarion call to not take a freedom for granted because freedom is precious.

Amitava Kumar’s ‘The Green Book’ Uses Creativity To Offer Hope

 [First published in YouthKiAwaaz]

Amitava Kumar’s “The Green Book: An Observer’s Notebook” is the third and final book in the trilogy and comes close on the heels after “The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal” and “The Yellow Book: Traveller’s Diary”. Amitava Kumar always maintained a journal where he captured his throughs and observations through words and watercolours. The work, for him, took on greater urgency during the Covid pandemic and the subsequent months of lockdown.

As the world watched and waited in dread for things to get back to something close to normal, the writer poured out his anxiety, his grief and the faintest glimmers of hope into his journals. He dealt with personal tragedy, and responded to two international conflicts. His art and his words make up this trilogy which also offers a deep insight into the writer’s creative process.

“I am committed to writing every day. I’m also an advocate of walking every day. The mantra I offer my students is that each day they write 150 words and walk mindfully for at least 10 minutes.” The book offers advice on the process of writing. Through his art and by sharing excerpts from the journals kept by other writers, Amitava Kumar makes two important points- when you observe and record you are capturing what you might otherwise forget, and once you have captured your first thoughts writing is actually the process of re-writing.

“We can’t make a reader care about nature. All we can do is to share strong stories of people who do care and hope the caring is contagious.”- Jonathan Franzen

The writer is deeply disturbed by the climate crisis, and this shows up in various forms in many of the chapters. He wonders whether a writer can do anything to avert the climate apocalypse that will soon be upon us, but after examining the issue in detail concludes that even creating awareness and offering hope should be enough. The book talks about many of the books and writers who are writing about nature and the climate crisis and can send many readers down rabbit holes of discovery.

One of the most powerful chapters in the book is where he follows the Ganga from source to mouth, and describes first hand how the environment is being destroyed in the name of development. He speaks to people who are trying to save the Ganga, and wonders whether merely treating her as a Goddess will be sufficient to protect her and the people who depend on her. The juxtaposition of words and watercolours brings this alive in a way which neither could not have done alone.

The writer offers no solutions, because there are no easy solutions. But he does say that while it is easy to give in to despair if by writing about it, writers can get earn even a small respite it is worth it. He shares his thoughts, and the thoughts of others, on how closely interconnected human beings and the natural world are, and reminds us that at a time like this, any positive action we perform can be considered an act towards climate justice.

“Am I an Indian? Yes, if it means finding the common cause of freedom across religious lines. No, if it means the idolising of a nation built around a singular religious identity and the cult worship of a single leader.” According to the writer, in a world writers, journalists, thinkers and even students are getting arrested, it is impossible to separate the personal and the political, and he does not even try. He speaks of the “many words for heat and the many words for hate”, and of how common people fall prey to the politics of hate because they “imagine themselves as protagonists in a powerful story about the destruction of their enemies.” For the Indian diaspora, he reminds us that “the soft emotion of nostalgia has been turned into the emotion of fundamentalism.”

The author also discusses Gaza in great detail. He speaks of the “military bootprint” of the war, as also the loss of human lives. “Why measure carbon emissions? Why even try to save the world if you cannot save the children?”

Though the book offers a lot for the reader to ponder over, it is never heavy reading because the words are interspaced with images. Many of his watercolors elaborate what he tried to capture through his words, and going through them you understand exactly what he means when he says that often looking deeply at an object gives it a particularity that did not earlier exist.

The Green Book is the final book of the trilogy, it can also be read as a stand alone book. I have not read the previous two books but after reading The Green Book, I am tempted to go back and read them.

[I was sent a review copy by Harper Collins. The review reflects my honest opinion.]