Be it the problem of rapid urbanisation or largescale concentration of people in cities; building sustainable transportation solutions or efficient supply and management of water; need f
Trang 1is culture that gave flesh and blood to the idea of India—
and what it left out
Trang 3POINT AND SHARE
Now, open Outlook magazine on
your smartphone instantly.
Point your phone’s scanner on the
code and align it in the frame.
You will be guided instantly to our
website, www.outlookindia.com
This is useful to share our stories
on social media or email them.
Volume LIX, No 4
EDITOR Ruben Banerjee
MANAGING EDITOR Sunil Menon
EXECUTIVE EDITOR Satish Padmanabhan
CHIEF OF BUREAU Pranay Sharma
POLITICAL EDITOR Bhavna Vij-Aurora
BUSINESS EDITOR Arindam Mukherjee
SENIOR EDITOR Giridhar Jha
CHIEF ART DIRECTOR Deepak Sharma
WRITERS Lola Nayar, Qaiser Mohammad
Ali (Senior Associate Editors), G.C Shekhar
(Associate Editor), Jeevan Prakash Sharma
(Senior Assistant Editor), Prachi
Pinglay-Plumber, Ushinor Majumdar, Ajay Sukumaran,
Probir Pramanik (Assistant Editors), Naseer
Ganai (Senior Special Correspondent), Preetha
Nair, Neel Shah (Special Correspondents),
Salik Ahmad, Siddhartha Mishra (Senior
Correspondents), Arshia Dhar (Correspondent)
COPY DESK Rituparna Kakoty (Senior Associate
Editor), Anupam Bordoloi, Saikat Niyogi,
Satyadeep (Associate Editors), Martand Badoni
(Assistant Editor)
PHOTOGRAPHERS S Rakshit (Chief Photo
Coordinator), Jitender Gupta (Photo Editor),
Tribhuvan Tiwari (Deputy Photo Editor),
Sandipan Chatterjee, Apoorva Salkade
(Sr Photographers), Suresh Kumar Pandey
(Staff Photographer) J.S Adhikari (Sr Photo
Researcher), U Suresh Kumar (Digital Library)
DESIGN Saji C.S (Chief Designer), Ashish Rozario
(Design-consultant), Leela (Senior Designer),
Devi Prasad, Padam Gupta (Sr DTP Operators)
DIGITAL Neha Mahajan (Assistant Editor),
Soumitra Mishra (Digital Consultant), Jayanta
Oinam (Special Correspondent), Lachmi Deb
Roy, Thufail P.T., Ipsita Pati (Senior
Correspon-dents), Satata Karmakar (Correspondent),
Adil Rashid (Trainee Journalist), Suraj
Wadhwa (Chief Graphic Designer),
Rupesh Malviya (Video Editor)
EDITORIAL MANAGER & CHIEF LIBRARIAN
Alka Gupta
BUSINESS OFFICE
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Indranil Roy
PUBLISHER Sandip Kumar Ghosh
SR VICE PRESIDENT Meenakshi Akash
VICE PRESIDENTS Bindu Dhawan,
Shrutika Dewan
SR GENERAL MANAGER Kabir Khattar (Corp)
GENERAL MANAGERS Debabani Tagore,
Sasidharan Kollery, Shashank Dixit,
Shailender Vohra
ASSISTANT GENERAL MANAGER
Diwan Singh Bisht
CHIEF MANAGER Shekhar Kumar Pandey
MANAGERS Shekhar Suvarana, Sudha Sharma
CIRCULATION & SUBSCRIPTION Raj Kumar
Mitra, Anindya Banerjee, G Ramesh (South),
Vinod Kumar (North), Arun Kumar Jha (East)
DIGITAL Amit Mishra
For editorial queries: edit@outlookindia.com
For subscription helpline:
yourhelpline@outlookindia.com
OTHER OFFICES
MUMBAI Tel: 022-33545000; Fax: 33545100
CALCUTTA Tel: 033 46004506; Fax: 033 46004506
CHENNAI Tel: 42615224, 42615225; Fax: 42615095
BANGALORE Tel: 080-43715021
Printed and published by Indranil Roy on
behalf of Outlook Publishing (India) Pvt Ltd
Editor: Ruben Banerjee Printed at International
Print-O-Pac Ltd, C 4-C 11, Phase-II, Noida
and published from AB-10, S.J Enclave,
August 2017 • `100
Kyrgyzstan LadaKh grand trunK road
The List Cruising Bikes We Covet
8 9 0 4 1 5 0 8 0 0 0 0 3 8
Road TRipS
ULTIMATE Brad Pitt n roger Federer n City SPaS n BhuBaneSwar
August 7, 2017 Rs 60 www.outlookindia.com
RNI NO 7044/1961
8 9 0 4 1 5 0 8 0 0 0 1 0 2 twitter.com/outlookindia facebook.com/outlookindia youtube.com/outlookmagazinedigimag.outlookindia.com
Outlook crunched data to
industrialised states, Orissa climbing out of poverty, while India’s heart remains sick
Why Bihar and UP Bimar
July 7, 2017 l50 www.outlookbusiness.com
August 2017 • `100
www.outlooktraveller.com
Kyrgyzstan LadaKh grand trunK road
IndIa’s best
RNI NO 7044/1961
8 9 0 4 1 5 0 8 0 0 0 1 0 2
nurses
NOBODY CARES FOR THOSE WHO CARE
twitter.com/outlookindia facebook.com/outlookindia youtube.com/outlookmagazinedigimag.outlookindia.com
Outlook crunched data to
industrialised states, Orissa climbing out of poverty, while India’s heart remains sick
Why Bihar and UP Bimar
July 7, 2017 l 50 www.outlookbusiness.com
All the noise around folk music and what
it will take to save it
Tapati Guha Thakurta
A past painted for the future
Art as the formative nation- building frontier.
SHAPES OF GRACE An Odishi dancer strikes a pose
Cover Design: Deepak Sharma; Artist: Aranyani Bhargav; Photograph: Avinash Pasricha
Trang 4VARANASI Jaideep
Mittra: This is with
refer-ence to your cover story
Down But Not Out (Jan 12),
which characterises the
politics of the veteran Laloo
Prasad Yadav with much
precision Such leaders are
the product of our typical
socio-economically
dis-parate society which is
communal and has a multi-
layered caste system at its
core This clash and struggle
of identities provides ample
space for leaders like Laloo
to capitalise on electoral
opportunities That said, it
wouldn’t be fair to make
Laloo an exception as there are several
such leaders in our country’s political
landscape History is witness, political
leaders who were almost paupers at
the time of the JP (Jaiprakash)
move-ment in 1977—the Emergency years—
have since gone on to amass a fortune
after getting into power with various
portfolios in the ministry Leaders like
Laloo Prasad Yadav, Mulayam Singh
Yadav , Ram Vilas, Paswan , the late
Charan Singh, to name a few, who once
were severe critics of the dynastic rule
of the Congress have emerged as cult
figures and built empires and dynasties
of their own Laloo’s legacy may enable
his party to get an edge over other
con-testing parties this time, but just how
long can the winning streak created by
one man continue?
LUCKNOW M.C Joshi: Laloo
Prasad Yadav was elected as the first
president of RJD and remained so till
his final conviction in the fodder scam
case and life-time imprisonment
which forced him out of active politics
He ruled Bihar for three consecutive
terms leading his party to victory in
elections by his caste (Yadavs) and community (Muslim) equation and the alleged game of booth-manipulation
With regular incidents of crime luding kidnapping and murders, his rule was generally termed as ‘jun-gle-raj’ He joined the Congress-led UPA and became the railway minister
inc-His tenure was known for experiments like serving tea in kulhars in trains and for setting up a one-man commission
to virtually give a twist to the case of the burning alive of 59 karsevaks in the Sabarmati Express in Godhra
His party remained a regional entity with no presence outside Bihar He was not a kingmaker but himself the king of Bihar in his heydays However,
he can no more become king, and probably even kingmaker, irrespective
of whether he is present or absent If your question—will Laloo be the absentee Kingmaker of 2019?—relates
to the national elections, he was never kingmaker at the national level any-way By the way, Laloo got invited to the IIM talks, even film shoots, for his jokes, jibes and comic timing rather than his intellect
Loud and Shady
CHENNAI Kangayam R Narasimhan: Politicians in Tamil Nadu have no inter-est in solving the deep mys-tery surrounding
Jayalalitha’s death (Death
Be Not Silent, Jan 21) They
would want to keep the pot boiling to be able to main-tain Jaya’s votebank intact The inquiry commission appointed by the ruling elite has also tied itself in knots, trying to fathom the circumstances leading to Jaya’s death Medical experts, however, would unanimously agree that the quality of treatment received by the former CM in Chennai was excellent Justice Arumugaswamy will have to go
by doctors’ reports in the end
However, the medical treatment eived by Jaya inside her Poes Garden residence is a mystery to most people The CBI can alone probe the allegedly dire events that took place there bef-ore she was hospitalised Security guards, cooks, nurses and attendants present during those crucial days in the house must be closely investigated What’s also shady and mysterious is that her own blood relations were not allowed to see her during her 75-day stay at the hospital Besides, the CBI must also probe why CCTV cameras were switched off in her hospital ward
rec-as well rec-as in her residence
Great Indian Game
GOA M.N Bhartiya: This is about the article on the BJP, which is supposedly soul-searching after their defeat in three assembly polls and trying to win
the confidence of voters (A Tide To Be
Fixed, Dec 31) But soul-searching?
Really? We thought such people only
letters
Power In Absence
ON E-MAIL Sushant Vishnu
The scope of Laloo’s legacy can be seen in him being politically relavant even in prison
one-liner
January 21, 2019
Trang 6had hard soles But then, a soul is
largely foreign to politicians, and
his-tory is replete with innumerable caste,
communal and ethnic pogroms done at
the instigation of ruthless, soul-less
politicians The 1984 anti-Sikh riots
and the 2002 Gujarat pogrom are cases
in point In recent days, the
cold-blooded killing of rationalists like
Pansare and Dabholkar and the
out-spoken journalist Gauri Lankesh again
show the hatred fostered and
dissemi-nated by political forces
And failure in governance, as the
public is aware, is sought to be covered
up by a cynical programme of cosmetic
changes—mischievously renaming
cities and roads, rewinding history
books, building giant statues… But
Modi may not succeed in fooling all
people, though the 2019 polls are not
connected at all to the December
ass-embly polls That way, 2019 will be an
epic political slugfest—a tale of many
regional chieftains trying to sew up
various caste equations, while keeping
an eye out for their progenies Party
manifestos are a big joke too—they
promise to disburse alms to the
com-mon public using their own com-money,
degrading them in the process
Please, Comment!
DURGAPUR Jyotiranjan Biswal: I
want to request Outlook to reintroduce
the editorial column in my favourite
news weekly It does look positively
orphaned without one! Furthermore, I
urge you to award at least three
out-standing letters in every issue
Police The Police!
HYDERABAD V.N Ramaswamy:
Now, 34 years after the incidents, a
retired police chief writes that more
than 2,733 innocent people of a ticular community were brutally mur-
par-dered in New Delhi alone (Still
Loading Police Reforms, Jan 21) Did
any newspaper of the time report these facts and figures objectivly? If yes, then how did the accused, some of them pol-itical leaders and even some police off-icers, manage to go scott free? Police reforms are urgently required indeed
The Rigged Air
NEW DELHI Vivek Agarwal: A grand gala has just finished and what a
buzz it created (Theory Of Chaos, Jan
21)! I hope it happens with the same regularity every year so that we can spend a good moment thinking about how far we have come since our anc-ient golden age in terms of science and technology Actually, the progress can’t
be scaled in a linear manner, since the claims and references dropped in the Indian Science Congress follow no chronology It’s as if we are living in times at once ancient and modern
Aviation in Rig Veda, sugar syrup as the adhesive for Ganesha’s plastic sur-gery, battery drawings found in ancient texts, test-tube babies and many other such illustrious examples keep the sci-entific arena charged up But, of course, a self-righteous brigade of peo-ple has to always spoil the fun with their limiting ideas of rationality Let’s give them a learning next time, accom-
pany the lectures with models At a personal level, if I may, I would like to see some of these scientific treasures
in practice Let’s build a plane, we can call the airline managing it ‘Rig Air’, and the batteries can be taken from the Agastya Samhita If we need finances, that is if the present government is unable to digest such lofty ideas, we can feed some cows that bacteria that turns into 24-carat gold in its body Smoke Screen
NEW DELHI Anshu Sharma: This
refers to Not A Place To Breathe, the
piece on ‘non lethal’ crowd-control weapons in Kashmir (Jan 21) First, it was the pellets that hurt and blinded many people, even kids, in the Valley, now it’s the tear gas that poses other kinds of health hazards From an ethical standpoint, can one argue to say that tear gas is better than pellets? Tough choice? Let’s just say that anything harmful thrown at the children, teenag-ers and youth of Kashmir will inevitable worsen the crisis and make more and more people from the mainland com-licit in such crimes since, after all, it is
in our name that the security forces are instructed to do these things
ON E-MAILVishvanath Dhotre: In a story about breathing problems due to tear-gassing in the Valley, you have ignored the hardships of our soldiers.SIDE STEP PM Modi and Amit Shah
Stop Shooting
PUNE Anil S.: This refers to your
cover story Shoot Madi (Jan 12) about
the aggressive ‘shoot at stumps’ egy of the Bangalore police for crime control in the IT city It’s not even close to being as bad as the chilling police encounter drive in Uttar Pradesh, where the cops have gone on
strat-a killing spree, but it is certstrat-ainly strat-a matter of concern We cannot be sup-portive of such measures as they give the cops the licence to violence against citizens, even if they are criminals There can, of course, be excep-tional situations where the police have to take the gun into their hands for self-defence, but making shootings a regular policy is not the way Do we know that in all the instances mentioned in your story, the criminals shot by the police were carrying weapons and threatening the cops with fire? No Then it’s impossible to say that each one of these encounters were justified Vigilante culture is already a menace that the country is dealing with The cops can’t be allowed to spill their better judgement into that domain
Movie culture valourises the vigilante cop, making him palatable for the audiences But our fantasies should remain in the realm of fiction
INBOXED
letters
Trang 8PRICE OF THE MOON
ALL stories start somewhere;
some as a phantasmagoric
conversation between a king and
a spirit This story—an enduring,
endearing after-school or bedside
magazine—started the month
bef ore India’s Independence
Chandamama, the monthly packed
with myths, mystery, magic, and
a moral Vikram and Betaal too
It was published in 10 Indian
languages and English, an abiding
companion before TV Sadly, the
Chandamama of B Nagi Reddy,
Chakrapani and K Kutumba Rao couldn’t survive the digital boom, though current owners Geodesic had new-age plans Well, the Mumbai-based software company got embroiled in a money laun-dering case, and the Bombay HC ordered the sale of the magazine’s
intellectual property rights Cha
n da mama is worth over Rs 25
crore The sacks of illustrations and documents lying at a Mumbai warehouse? Priceless
THE SUBCONTINENTAL MENU
I N & A R O U N D
DONKEY’S MILK SOAP
HOW often do you bray about a
shower, lathering out the grime with a bar of soap? Hee-haw, here is your chance to do it with soap made
of donkey’s milk This premium cake
of wash, produced by Delhi-based startup Organiko, retails for Rs 499 apiece A little stiff, no? Got to be,
because donkey’s milk is the costliest dairy at Rs 2,000 a litre, and one ani-mal yields not more than a litre a day The milk is known to have medicinal properties—anti-ageing, anti-wrinkle and anti-bacterial infe ctions The firm sources its raw material from 25 beasts of burden at Dasna in Ghaz-iabad The soap is a hit in southern India, as people there are aware of the health benefits The north’s catching
up too, if sales at a fair in Chandigarh are any indication Up next: a face wash and a moisturiser
BIRYANI IS PRASAD
ck p eas, puliyogara, vada—the choice of offerings
or prasadam in Tamil Nadu temples are normally limited
to these There’s an exception though And it comes in the form of a biryani with 2,000kg of rice, mutton and chicken cooked overnight in 50 cauldrons over wood fires by
an untiring posse of men as prasad for the faithful visiting the Muniyandi Swami temple
in Vadakkampatti village near Madurai during its winter festival The biryani has been
on the temple’s breakfast menu for over 80 years Last year, 200 goats, 250 roosters and 1,800kg of rice went into the prasad—reflective of the Tamil appetite for biryani
as restaurants serving this alltime favourite recorded revenues of Rs 4,500 crore a year in the state Still, there’s more space at the table.
Illustrations by MANJUL
RETURN DARJEELING
WHEN the colonial masters
were playing dice with the
sub-continent, Darjeeling was hived off
as part of an agreement with the king
in Kathmandu The Treaty of Sugauli
of 1815 established the boundary
between the Hindu kingdom and
the British East India Company The
king ceded territories won in earlier
wars, such as Sikkim in the east and
Kumaon and Garhwal in the west
More than a century on, nationalistic
Gurkhas want the pact unpacked
Return Darjeeling and all those land
the British took from Nepal, they say
An NGO is already doing a signature
campaign, as a start What next?
Well, we know Gurkhas are among
the finest soldiers anywhere, but this
one will need diplomacy, more than
the surgical precision of a khukri
Trang 9THE EYE-CATCHING, MUTANT GOD
version of an animated one-eyed Minion
Or simply worship it as a miracle of god That’s
what locals at a village in West Bengal’s
Bard-haman district are doing to a newborn calf with
just one huge eye The humans took over after
its mother rejected it Such oddities aren’t
un-common in the animal kingdom but a cow calf
with an eye on its forehead spawns parallels
with god Shiva’s fire-kindling ‘third eye’
Vil-lagers believe it will bring luck and prosper ity
Problem is, the animal’s survival is at stake as it
doesn’t have a nose and gasps for breath.
HOW Saadat Hasan
Manto would have
reacted to his adoptive
coun-try’s censor board refusing
to clear a Made in India
biopic on him? Perhaps
he portended that Manto,
featuring Nawazuddin
Siddiqui as the
tor-tured writer, would
fall into the same
hostile
India-Pak-istan trap that
underpinned the
comorbidity of his later life
Hence his words: tan had become free Pakis-tan had become independ-ent soon after its inception but man was still a slave in these countries—slave of prejudice.” Legions
“Hindus-of Manto fans are trying to impress the Imran Khan government to
allow Manto’s
release
THEY are modern-day
techies but bullish
about a tradition that
dates back to when
enter-tainment was a clatter of
bull hooves These people,
mostly IT pros, decided
to take the bull by its
horns when Tamil Nadu
erupted in 2017 to demand
overturning a court order
banning jallikattu Success
was on their side And now,
a side show of the famous
jallikattu during Pongal
is proving a boon for endangered native breeds, Kangayam bulls especially
Patrons are breeding and training Kangayams—at seven seconds for 100 metres, faster than Usain Bolt—for rekla or bullock cart races in the Tiru-pur-Coimbatore region
The spoils? The winners take home two-wheelers, gold necklaces and cash
another country, especially a mission where he had been posted earlier But a former Sri Lankan ambassador to Wash ington, Jaliya Wickramasuriya, is being prosecuted in the US since last month Wickramasuriya is former Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s first cousin and it is under his govern ment that he was appointed Colo mbo’s envoy to the US He
is being tried for five counts of offences that range from wire fraud and money laundering to immigration offences.
Under the Vienna Convention, a serving diplomat enjoys immunity that prevents governments of other countries from trying him on any criminal charge But if diplomatic immunity
is withdrawn by his government he can be treated as any ordinary citizen and prosecuted by foreign governments.
Sri Lankan media reports said this was the first time that
a diplomat is being prosecuted by the country where he had served The charges against
Wic kramasuriya are two counts of wire fraud, two counts of money laundering and one count of visa fraud According to the reports, the charges stem from allegations that in early 2013 Wickramasuriya and others embezzled about US
$3,32,000 from the Sri Lankan government in connection with a property purchased in Washington that was intended to serve as the new Sri Lankan embassy.
The report said he was also charged with committing immigra
tion fraud in connection with an immigration application he signed in the US in 2014
Wickramasuriya was in the US attending to his tea export business when he was appointed the consul general to the Sri Lankan mission in Los Angeles in 2005 Three years later,
he was appointed Sri Lankan ambassador to the US
After the fraud came to light the US authorities requested the Sri Lankan government to withdraw Wickramasuriya’s diplomatic immunity The Rajapaksa government ignored that and, instead, tried to transfer him to Canada as Lankan ambassador But the Canadian government refused to accept the appointment Subsequently, his diplomatic immunity was withdrawn by Colombo Later, Wickaramasuriya filed
an appeal in the Supreme Court asking for his immunity to
be reinstated Though the case is still pending, an attempt was made by Rajapaksa and his close aides to give back his immunity in the brief period that he became prime minister replacing Ranil Wickremesinghe.
Now that Ranil is back, it is unlikely that Wickramasuriya will get back his immunity in a hurry.
Shadow Of Immunity
The former Lankan envoy
to the US is charged with fraud, money laundering and embezzling public money there It’s a very rare dishonour
RACING BULLS WHICH BETTER BOLT
MANTO AND UNDYING PREJUDICE
Trang 10JAB WE MEET?
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief minister Nitish Kumar hit the campaign trail in the run-up to the 2019 general elections in Bihar, they will be setting a record of sorts The two leaders have never shared the dais at any election rally in the past Though the BJP and JD(U) had been allies for long and their coalition government was
in power from 2005 to 2013, and from July 2017 until now, Nitish has never sought Modi pull power during polls In fact, it is generally believed that Nitish had argued that Modi’s presence would irk his Muslim voters Several state BJP leaders wanted Modi to campaign because of his popularity But Nitish is said to have always put his foot down That’s why Modi went to Jharkhand to campaign for the party but skipped Bihar.
WRONG ’UN
Experience causes confusion and this appeared to be the case with Sharad Yadav at the recent opposition rally hosted
by Mamata Banerjee The tuagenarian leader, who floated the Loktantrik Janata Dal after breaking away from the JD(U), kept talking about
sep-“daylight robbery of Bofors”
while attacking the Modi ernment Yadav obviously wanted to refer to Rafale He corrected himself after Trinamool leader Derek O’Brien whispered into his ears To be on the safer side, Mamata later explained that the veteran leader has seen so many political wars, some-times old things can come up
gov-by mistake
ELECTION TRACK
With election season upon the
country, many have
discov-ered their latent political
ambitions and making a
bee-line for tickets to contest the
Lok Sabha polls The popular
choice is the BJP despite the
Congress’s latest upsurge IN
the queue is said to be retired
Railway Board chairman
Ashwani Lohani, who is in
touch with BJP leaders It is
widely believed that he will
get an extension to nurse the
ailing public transporter to
health But Lohani may bite
the political bullet if offered a
ticket from home state
Uttarakhand Well, his social
media posts about his desire
to do something useful for his
state are anything but clues
Image of the Week
deep throat
SUPER BLOOD WOLF MOON We don’t know who gave this gory, howling name but our moon during the eclipse
on January 20 was a sight to behold, like when it silhouettes a weather vane in a Spanish village
GETTY IMAGES
Trang 11by Probir Pramanik in Calcutta
WINTER haze hung over the
iconic Brigade parade ground
in the heart of Calcutta A
cut-out of Trinamool Congress
(TMC) supremo and Bengal
chief minister Mamata Banerjee
tow-ered over a sea of supporters And the
bold letters in Bengali on the cutout
proclaimed the collective wish of a
bevy of political leaders gathered for
the ground-breaking event: “Chalo
pal-tai, ebar amra Dilli chai (Let’s bring in
change, we want Delhi this time).”
On January 19, Mamata achieved what
many thought was impossible till a few
weeks ago—barring Odhisha chief minis
ter Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal
(BJD), she brought together virtually
every major opposition party on one
platform to launch what could be one of
the biggest political conglomerations in
India in rece nt times The major takea
way from the gathering
was that the TMC boss
managed to cobble toge
ther a cohesive and viable
alternative to the BJP with
a single agenda to oust the
Narendra ModiAmit
Shah duo It was a rare
show of unity among a
group of parties which
would otherwise be bick
ering; the common refrain
was about burying political
and ideological differences
and together taking on the ModiShah duopoly Speaker after speaker high
lighted the “pain” caused to the common people by demonetisation and Goods and Services Tax (GST) They spoke about the Modi government’s poor record in job creation and a growing agrarian distress
And they made references to the Rafale deal, peppering their speeches with questions on Modi’s integrity
But the event was as much the story of Mamata’s own personal ambitions as it was about the Opposition’s show of unity
For years now, the maverick politician has not made any attempt to hide her prime ministerial ambitions At the rally too, she played the role of emcee with a professional and personal touch, receiv
ing each of the guests, walking them to the dais and introducing them before inviting them to address the gathering She was the master of ceremonies, the show
stealer With Bengal firmly in her grasp, her followers have all the more reasons to
see the general elections as the last leg of her journey
to “Dilli” Bengal has 42 Lok Sabha seats and how many her party manages
to win will determine her bargaining powers, in case the coalition manages to overthrow the BJPled NDA At present, Tri na
mool has 34 MPs and is expecting to win at least 40
This could leave Mamata with the largest group of
lawmakers barring the Congress If it manages to get to or improve its 2014 tally
of 44, that is
Over the past few weeks, the number of leaders endorsing the 63yearold former Congress leader as the potential prime minister too has gone up, including Karnataka chief minister H.D Kumaraswamy and BJP leader Shatrughan Sinha What went unnoticed in the rally is the presence of Pu Lalduhawma of the Zoram Nationalist Party (ZNP) of Mizoram, who also gave the thumps up to Mamata as the
PM It’s rare for a party from the Northeast
to approve a regional leader to lead the country, much less a leader from Bengal.Major challenges still remain for Mamata For one, she may not be acceptable to all as the PM DMK’s M.K Stalin had famously named Congress president Rahul Gandhi as the Opposition’s potential choice The Brigade parade ground rally also skipped the issue as Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav insisted that the matter be left for after the elections Most importantly, the Congress is unlikely to give up PM hopes, not after spectacular comebacks
in three major states recently And the fact that the Congress will be taking on the Trinamool in Bengal, apart from the BJP, makes it murkier
Also, political coalitions are always a messy affair Especially with ideologically diverse parties Mamata may have brought the Opposition together, keeping the flock united would be the bigger challenge The alliance still could be the Opposition’s answer to the BJP’s election winning machine Or it could fall apart under the weight of its own contradictions But the bullet has been fired and Mamata will be remembered as the one who pulled the trigger O
The event was as much the story of Mamata’s personal ambitions as
it was about the show
of Oppositon unity
How many seats the Trinamool manages to win out of 42 in Bengal will determine her bargaining powers.
RISE AND SHINE Mamata Banerjee speaks at the Opposition unity rally in Calcutta
Didi’s March To Dilli
Mamata Banerjee eyes bigger pie through opposition unity
POLL POSITION
SANDIPAN CHATTERJEE
Trang 12Digitisation has touched every
aspect of human life It is also
altering how organisations look
at business sectors, markets,
service their customers and ideate new
businesses Traditionally, governments
have been slow to modernise, but today
they view digitisation as a panacea that
can save time and expenses, while
enhancing their extend and effectiveness
The three-fold transformation of
consumers, government and industry are
far reaching economic consequences The
number of technologies coming into the
fore, be it internet of things (IoT), Artificial
Intelligence (AI), Robotics and so on, are
touching every sector, reimagining how
goods and services are delivered,
impacting lives they reach and heralding
what is now being termed as Industry 4.0
Hitachi, one of the leading Japanese
companies with a global footprint, has
been engaged in innovating new age
technologies It has been using some of
the most advanced technologies in a wide
range of products/services, ranging from
information and telecommunication
systems, digital solutions and services,
infrastructure systems, industrial
systems like water, oil and gas supply and
management, to transportation and urban
development solutions Together with
localisation, Hitachi aims to contribute to
further fueling India’s digital economy
As the sixth largest and fastest
developing economy in the world, to drive
the advantages of a digital sphere to the
bottom of the pyramid, India faces
numerous difficulties, the most pertinent
being to make the economic growth
inclusive Digitisation is radical, as it can
bring in the much needed inclusiveness
Frontier Technologies
for Greater Good
and a true social transformation for a nation as vast and complex as India
Prime Minister Narendra Modi acknowledges India’s unique challenges but is now focusing all the synergies towards the opportunities a radical digitisation can bring to create the much needed inclusiveness and a true social transformation
Many initiatives were launched to take the ital dream to a billion citizens– ‘Digital India’,
dig-‘Make in India’, ‘Skill India’ to name a few This vision aims at empowering the citizens through the adaptation of e-Governance, a way to infuse technology in governance to drive the last mile delivery of services.
Hitachi in India has envisioned this direction in collaboration with the stakeholders, bringing its rich global industrial heritage and juxtaposing it with its strength in Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) It has its ethos embedded in its businesses that are aimed at touching the lives of millions It is only possible when you innovate and Hitachi’s inherent Social Innovation Business, weaves in a multi-disciplinary approach to problems to build innovative solutions that drive businesses and governance to aid the society at large
It has partnered with the government of India in its initiatives like ‘Digital India’
and ‘Make in India’, leveraging its superior technology innovations and global expertise to address India’s unique challenges
Hitachi has been a leader in OT for industries such as manufacturing, power/
energy and transportation for over 100 years The company has also been a leader
in IT for over 50 years—bringing IT applications, analytics, content, cloud, and infrastructure solutions to market that have transformed the way enterprises do business Combining its broad expertise
in OT with its proven IT, Hitachi gives the customers a powerful, collaborative partner in data
Its extensive presence across industries, enables it to provide a ‘single eye view of macro solutions’, a core competency that the company has earned over the years It laid its solid foundation in India over 80
years back, as it supplied turbines for the Bhakra Nangal project Over the years, Hitachi group has diversified and expanded its presence with 28 group companies in India, across sectors like infrastructure, railways, energy, construction machinery, healthcare, IT, automotive systems, along with payment systems
Be it the problem of rapid urbanisation
or largescale concentration of people in cities; building sustainable transportation solutions or efficient supply and management of water; need for stronger security solutions or advanced machinery
to aid smarter manufacturing to fuel India’s 'Make in India' aspiration, Hitachi’s Social Innovation business has driven solutions for the Indian government, private players, businesses and the citizens themselves, incorporating its vision of ‘Collaborative Creation’ Hitachi Group is coming together to work faster, smarter and towards a sustainable tomorrow for India, contributing
Hitachi
Trang 13and Asia Pacific’s economies In 2017, while 4 % of India’s GDP was derived from digital products and services created directly through the use of digital technologies, such as mobility, cloud, IoT and AI, within the next four years, it is estimated that nearly 60% of India’s GDP will have a strong connection to the digital technologies such as AI and that will accelerate digital transformation led growth even further.
This is a major opportunity for companies like Hitachi, who can amalgamate their global expertise and heritage with complex Indian problems to innovate with products and services
“India is inevitably heading for a social revolution A revolution brought in by the transformation in the way people access technology and the advanced digital capabilities possessed by companies With this social shift, the society has moved beyond from an information to a distinctive culture, built on awareness and technology
The 7 Cs i.e Common, Connected, Convenient, Congestion-Free, Charged, Clean, Cutting-Edge, introduced by our Prime Minister, works as fundamental for
us and drives us to create the necessary novel solutions including efficient infrastructure, transportation, energy, water, and many others Keeping citizens at the centre, we must adapt to the dynamic confluence culture that is a natural result of convergence Hitachi will continue to partner and draw upon its wealth of technologies and expertise to provide a diversified range of information technology solutions in various industrial sectors, empowering the citizens of India, transforming the landscape of Indian economy and aligning with India’s growth,"
says Bharat Kaushal, Managing Director
of Hitachi India
India’s appetite and intent for technology evolution has been applauded globally as well The World Economic Forum comes out with a Global Competitiveness Report every year According to this year’s report,
“The global economy is not prepared for the Fourth Industrial Revolution: 103 of the 140 economies measured in this year’s index score 50 or lower out of 100 for innovation capability, meaning that for many of these, innovation is a drag on overall competitiveness.” However, there
is good news for India The report proves Indian government’s focus is on e-Governance, alongside other reforms like GST and schemes like Digital India,
Make in India and Skill India
India ranks 58th in 2018's Global Competitiveness Index This indicates a rise of five places in the ranking from its
2017 position and is the largest gain among all G20 economies India is a leader among the South Asian economies
consistently to an ever evolving digital
economy
“Lumada” aims to be the core of social
innovation by being a medium for
Hitachi’s customers, helping them be a
part of this digital transformation
Hitachi has been a part of e-Governance
initiatives with multiple governments in
the country While some of them have
used its IT solutions, others use its
technology for various functions These
large data heavy projects include
digitisation of land records; single-window
handling of grievances and maintenance
of essential services; easing tax payments
and other dues to the government; along
with internet based citizen delivery of
services
Digital transformation is expected to
add an estimated $154 billion to Indian
GDP and increase the growth rate by 1%
annually, according to a research by a
technology company and International
Data Corporation The report further goes
on to predict a dramatic acceleration in the
pace of digital transformation across India
This holistic transformation of a country as vast as India has been made possible with companies like Hitachi partnering with multi-stake holders in bringing together the state-of-the-art technology solutions, combined with the implementing agencies driving the last mile delivery of services
To learn more visit - http://social-innovation.hitachi/in/
Itsmarket size (3rd) Innovation(31) - The quality
of its research establishments (8th)
India’s greatest competitive advantages include:
Business dynamism (58)- including the number of disruptive businesses (11th)
Trang 1414 OUTLOOK 4 February 2019
by Lola Nayar
TUCKED away in a
recently-tab-led parliamentary panel report
is a rather telling submission by
Rajn ish Kumar, chairman of the
State Bank of India (SBI) “…In
the current scenario, when the gas
price is so high and when there are
constraints in the supply of domestic
gas, it seems that as if we are groping
in the dark There is no other
solu-tion We have to write off this
invest-ment,” Kuma r told the parliamentary
standing committee on energy which
drafted the report on ‘stressed/
non-performing assets in gas-based
power plants’ The investment runs
into thousands of crores of rupees
and the potential write-off could hit
hard Indi a’s public sector banks,
already groaning under a mountain
of bad loans
An acute shortage of domestic natural
gas has left India struggling to meet even
half of the installed 25 gigawatt power
generation capacity Gas-fired power
plants make economic sense if they are
operated using domestic natural gas and
much of the investment spurt started
around 2008, following
announcements of major
gas discoveries by
compa-nies like Reliance
Industries, ONGC and
Gujarat State Petroleum
Corporation (GSPC)
They promised to more
than double the
produc-tion of green fuel in the
country Barring a short
period of surge due to
Reliance’s output from the
Krishna-Godavari basin,
natural gas production in the country has failed to rise meaningfully, negating expe-ctations of having assured green fuel supplies at economic rates on long-term basis For instance, gas production by private/joint ventures during April-November 2018 was 3736.31 million metric standard cubic meter each day, which is 13.63 per cent lower than the production for the same period the previ-ous year
“There is plenty of blame to pass around, including that investors should not have gone ahead with the projects without a firm power purchase agreement, or the exploration and production companies for promising but not delivering the promised gas, or the ministry of petro-leum and natural gas for holding out hope
of a surge in domestic gas production, etc
But the bottom line is that the country has a large number of gas-based power plants which are not being used,” says Rajiv Ranjan Mishra, chairman of the Association of Power Producers
To bridge the gas shortfall, both public and private sector players are contracting
to procure imported gas and supply re-gassifed liquefied natural gas (R-LNG)
India has four operational LNG import
terminals at Dahej, Hazira, Dabhol and Kochi with a total import capacity of 27.5 million metric tonnes (MMT), while the current level of imports is over 19 MMT Depending on the source of gas, power gener-ated using natural gas can cost as low as Rs 3 per unit, while imported R-LNG-powered electricity price can range anywhere from
Rs 5 to Rs 15 per unit,
depe nding on the gas price Being a traded commodity, the price fluctuates from month to month Mishra points out that while gas is plentifully available for imp-
o rt, but it is not at a price which the power companies are willing to pay
“The fundamental problem with based power plants is that they are not operating Unless they get the right tariff based on the input (gas) price, they are going to turn NPAs,” says S.L Rao, an ener gy expert who was the first chair-man of the Central Electricity Reg-ulatory Commission
gas-Former power secretary Anil Razdan points out that it is important to look at the project report to find out what is the assumed price of gas, the plant load fac-tor or capacity utilisation, and the selling price of power
Many of these gas-based power plants came up when India was facing a short-age of power In that scenario, even if they had gone to the spot market for procuring gas for their stranded assets, their plants would still have been viable Today, with the grid in place and ability
to get cheaper power from other places
to meet peak demand, the more sive gas-based power has few takers Sunjoy Joshi of the Obsever Research Foundation says gas-based power has a place in the grid, especially if India is going to pursue its dream of harnessing
expen-40 per cent of the requirement from renewa ble energy sources The choice before the government is to have energy markets to respond to supply and dema nd
as in many countries pursuing clean
gy policies Else, investments in gas-based power plants will go waste O
India is struggling
to meet even half of its installed power generation capacity of
25 gigawatts.
SBI chairman Rajnish Kumar told a parliamentary panel that banks may have to write off huge loans.
Running On
Low Fuel
India’s power plants are lying idle
because of domestic gas shortage
POWERLESS A gas-based power plant of GAIL
IN THE RED
Trang 15There are 8 other free workshops between 9.30am and 1pm From working with communities and storytelling on social media to creating eco-alternatives, successful start-ups, photography and food!
Come ask bankers, consultants and investors who know
the ropes about structured financing options and raising
funds Get insights on destination management, and learn
why forming collectives might be the next big idea!
Do you run a travel venture or start-up?
Want to scale up (responsibly)?
Sign up for our FREE WORKSHOP*
now on www.responsibletourism.com!
Experts: Ranbir Singh, Former COO & MD, JP
Morgan Bank, and Founder, SoulBrowser Inc.* Tarun
Sobti, Development, Hotelivate, & Former Director,
Hotel Trident, The Oberoi Group.* Rajeev Kumar, LRV
Foundation* Raj K Pathak, Chairman, India Entrepreneur
Club, New Delhi, & more!
Trang 1616 OUTLOOK 4 February 2019
FARM SALVE
by Sandeep Sahu in bhubaneswar
IT is not often that top economists
take notice of a scheme launched
in Odisha Therefore, the fact
that Krushak Assistance for
Live-lihood and Income Augmentation
(KALIA) won universal
approba-tion from people who make or
influ-ence policies is noteworthy Pol
icy-makers and agricultural experts like
Finance Commission chairman N.K
Singh, Commission for Agricultural
Costs and Prices chairman Vijay Pal
Sharma and leading agro- economist
Ashok Gulati have hailed the scheme
launched by the Naveen Patnaik
gov-ernment in Odisha on Dec ember 31,
2018 as a more effective way of
add-ressing farm distress than the
popu-list loan-waiver option
The “best conceived scheme for the
dis tressed agriculture sector”, said Singh,
while Gulati suggested that “KALIA can
be the lighthouse to guide the nation on
the kind of agriculture policy we need in
future for India’s farmers”
Even more heartening for the state
government is that it has received an
overwhelming response from the
peo-ple—its intended beneficiaries A
meeting of the agriculture department
held on January 19 found that over 66
lakh people—way above the 30 lakh
targeted—have applied for inclusion in
the scheme
One reason for this unprecedented
response is the fact that unlike others of
its kind, KALIA targets not just farmers
but includes everyone in the
agricul-tural eco-system, including
sharecrop-pers and labourers, who constitute a
majority, and even the elderly who are
unable to cultivate their land
The ambitious scheme promises
Rs 5, 000 for each farmer, irrespective
of his holding, spread over five seasons
till 2021-22; livelihood assistance of Rs
12, 500 to each landless family to help
generate income in areas like animal
rearing, pisciculture, honey and
mush-room cultivation; interest-free crop
loans and Rs 2 lakh insurance cover for
each farmer As evident, KALIA has
provisions for the entire farm sector,
rather than just landed farmers, who
benefit from loan write-offs
As Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar
has noted, KALIA is a much more
com-prehensive and inclusive scheme than
the Ryuthu Bandhu scheme launched
by Telangana CM K Chandrasekhara Rao, which paid such handsome elec-toral dividends to the TRS
Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik beli eves KALIA will be a real ‘gam-echanger’ Launching a five-day farm-ers’ convention in Bhubaneswar on January 15, he said, “KALIA is an ideal scheme not only for Odisha but for the entire nation It will open new doors of development.”
Krishan Kumar, the nodal officer for its implementation, lists the benefits:
“First, the coverage is very high KALIA will cover 90-92 per cent of the farming community, while loan waiver would cover only 20-25 per cent Second, it does not incentivise farmers not to repay loans, as loan waivers tend to do
Third, it is a transparent way of giving subsidy directly into farmers’ accounts,”
he says Again, KALIA is spread over
five cropping seasons, unlike loan ers, which are one-time affairs
waiv-While it’s flawless on paper, everyone agrees that implementation is going to pose a massive challenge Reaching out to the existing 12 lakh farmers registered under government schemes may not pose a problem, but identifying new beneficiaries is a mammoth task that will certainly stretch the official machinery
“The government is yet to draw up a list
of sharecroppers—the majority In the absence of a comprehensive list, sar-panches will have the last word on who gets included,” says Natabar Khuntia, a leading agro-economist The meeting on January 19 acknowledged this, while saying efforts are on to reconcile data in the National Population Register and the Socio Economic Caste Status and “find a common key between them”
While it’s evident from the scope of KALIA that it had been brewing for some
Unlike loan waivers to a select few, Odisha’s KALIA scheme aims to benefit the whole farming eco-system
Come All Who Tilled Land
SANJIB MUKHERJEE
Trang 17time, its announcement without making
adequate financial provision has led to
criticism that it is intended to reap
elec-toral benefits in the impending polls The
government says the scheme would cost
a whopping Rs 10,180 crore to the
exc-hequer But, surprisingly, no budgetary
provision has been made to fund it The
first instalments of Rs 5,000 is scheduled
to be distributed by January 25, forcing
the government to source money
ear-marked for other purposes
The revelation that the government has
withdrawn Rs 734 crore from its
contin-gency fund—meant for emercontin-gency
exp-enses during natural calamities—to
meet the initial expense has raised
hackles too “What happened to the
Rs 18, 000 crore the government got by
way of fines from mining companies and
Rs 4,000 crore it received from IOCL as
its share in the proposed petroleum
complex in Paradip? If the government’s
heart bleeds for farmers, it would have
made budgetary provision of Rs 21,000
crore for 36 lakh Odia farmers and given
them a bonus of Rs 1,000 over the MSP of
Rs 1,750 per tonne of paddy, as done by Chhattisgarh This is an attempt to scut-tle our demand for ‘price, prestige and pension’ and hoodwink people ahead of elections,” says Akshaya Kumar, head of the Navnirman Krishak Sangha, which has been spearheading a farmers’ move-ment in Odisha for several years
Jagadish Pradhan, chairman of Sahabhagi Vikash Andolan, concurs “It
is a painkiller that provides temporary relief… The provision of Rs 12,500 for income-generating activities…looks fine But is the system in place to facili-tate such activity? The returns on the investment would come in future How does the landless farmer live till then?”
he asks “While there are some welcome features, it is long-term in nature and will not benefit the average farmer in the immediate future,” adds Sarala Das, who writes on agriculture
Another major challenge is how to distribute the money, given the fact that a majority of beneficiaries are outside the banking system Krishan Kumar, however, disagrees He says the percentage of farmers who lie outside the banking system is minus-cule and alternative measures will be taken to pay them
Much of the criticism against the KALIA scheme is premised on the fact that it was announced weeks ahead of the simultaneous Lok Sabha and ass-embly elections But it matters little to many farmers “Those opposing the scheme are doing so for political rea-sons We farmers think it will benefit all sections of the farming community,” says Bhubaneswar Parida, a farmer in Similipatana village in Khurda district Like in the rest of the country, farmers—their incomes plummeting and their livelihood endangered—have been a sorely disaffected lot in Odisha Naveen Patnaik would hope that the KALIA scheme, irrespective of its inbuilt, teeth-ing problems, can address the wide-spread hurt and anger in the farming community, win its votes and serve as a model for the country to follow O
Naveen Patnaik launching the
KALIA Yojana in Bhubaneswar
The scheme is criticised for not having enough fund allocation and having an eye on polls
But farmers are happy
Trang 20W HERE the republic will stand at the end
of 2019 will substantially depend on the
May general elections We may well be
at the crossroads weeks from now The
outcome matters What the post-poll
government makes of its mandate matters
just as much We take it all for granted but in 1947 few
thought parliamentary democracy would work in India
Democracy had to strike roots in a country with centuries
of monarchy and many layers of privilege and power
When the constitutional convention of the US was
meeting in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked
if it was to be a republic or a monarchy He answered: “A
republic, if we can keep it.” India was not an emerging
power but emerged from a long spell of imperial rule
Battered by war, the famines of Bengal and Travancore
(that killed over three million) and the horrors of Partition
The republic went on to be founded in 1950 in a spring of
hope The first Prime Minister saw the inside of a British
jail for nine long years The home minister had given up a
lucrative career to be christened Sardar for his leadership of
the peasants of Bardoli And, to be noted, six of the 14 first
ministers were not even from the Congress The architect of
the Constitution was the first Dalit in India to be a graduate,
hold a law degree and do a doctorate, Dr B.R Ambedkar
Shyama Prasad Mukheree and N.C Chatterjee were of the
Hindu Mahasabha It was a time to work together for a
common cause, not descend to petty wrangling
Of course, India’s new order had a
sound start Elements of democracy
in India may have sprung under
imperial aegis The secret ballot and
multi-candidate election, the party
system or for that matter merit-based
recruitment to the civil service did not
have precedents in India’s pre-colonial
past India’s Constituent Assembly
believed ‘We the People’ had the right
and ability to govern ourselves Haifa
University’s Ornit Shani has shown
how the electoral rolls were ready by
October 1949 This was nearly two
years before the first vote was cast
The franchise expanded to include the poor and the unlettered, to women and Dalits, tribal people and property-less rural folk The first-ever general elections of 1951-52 showed how democracy celebrated difference Free speech and fair choice were its life blood India endured
as a polity based on law and rights for all The promise has never been fully realised but in many ways the idea took root across different strata of society
Rohit De’s new work, A People’s Constitution, shows how
the Constitution struck roots among the people at large Citizens were among those filing a spate of cases against officials in the courts All who lived through those years could not agree on what was to be done But they were willing and able to join forces for the common good.There were, and are, battles at hand Nehru invoked a
view of India in 1946, in his The Discovery of India It was
defined by shared history and a composite culture A fellow
political prisoner argued on similar lines The book: India
Divided and its author: Rajendra Prasad You were Indian
because you shared a history with other Indians: religion
did not determine nationality Partition did take place
But India as a polity stayed on with the idea and ideal of fashioning common citizenship This had not one but two implications Race or religion did not matter Equally
so origins and status would not be barrier to aspiration Hence, equality under the law
This was an India home equally to all, at variance with
ideas of nation founded on a faith (Pakistan) It was an India without a cadre-based secular ideology imposed from above (as in China) It would not have one national language (not Urdu
as in Pakistan or Sinhala as in Ceylon)
or be a faith-based state (as in Burma
or Thailand) None of this was easy
In 1948 Nehru’s government had cracked down hard using police against militants of the Mahasabha and the RSS Patel’s ‘police action’ in Telangana was against the Nizam and communist insurgents Armed raiders backed by
We The People At
pro-fessor of history and environmental studies at Ashoka University, Soni- pat, Haryana Views expressed are personal.
Mahesh Rangarajan
The nation’s democratic foundations
are firm but our pluralism is on trial
You were Indian because you shared a history with other Indians: religion did not determine nationality
Trang 214 February 2019 OUTLOOK 21
Illustrations by MANJUL
Trang 22the Pakistani Army regulars in mufti moved into the Kashmir Valley The Indian Army, backed by armed National Conference volunteers, halted them ‘Hindu Muslim Sikh ittehad’ was at stake
A territory that was a Muslim-majority region saw no future in a Pakistan defined on basis of ethno-nationalism
It is difficult to believe but in the 1951-52 polls, the small but significant group of Hindu cultural nationalists was the target of many
of the PM’s speeches He was not alone Patel had denounced celebrations by some at news
of Bapu’s assassination on January 30, 1948
A broader idea of India held sway Hindutva votaries, those who saw Hindu-ness as central
to the definition of India, remained marginal for years They first gained wider platform only on anti-Congress platforms of the 1967 elections The anti-corruption movement of JP and the struggle against Emergency gave them national prominence and acceptability But even in 1980, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s creed was one of Gandhian socialism
THE late eighties and nineties were the key
turning point There is no doubt the Congress erred In a remarkable translation of a memoir by advocate Hamid Kureshi of the Gujarat High Court on the riots of 1969, Prof Rita Kothari of Ashoka University (full disclosure, she is a distinguished colleague) shows hope give way to despair at the violence in Ahmedabad on the banks of the Sabarmati But even this paled when compared to the massacres of Sikhs in 1984
In early 1986, and in quick succession, Congress leaders acquiesced in the reopening of the locks
on a disputed structure in Ayodhya and soon after the whittling away of rights of Muslim women The terms had changed
The challenger was waiting in the
wings Lal Krishna Advani attempted a
re-definition of nationhood at a mass
level This was clearest in his Ram rath
yatra in 1990 and the subsequent
election campaign the following
year The two poles of the polity,
he said, would be the Congress
and BJP, and the defining issue
nationalism based on culture
Few will doubt that the
Modi-led government has
trodden new ground in
more than one way Most
significant is the bid to
remake history and our
vision of the future His
party has had the largest
number of seats in four of
THE CULTURAL
REPUBLIC OPINION
Trang 234 February 2019 OUTLOOK 23
the past six general elections, but 2014
saw it win a majority the first time
But make no mistake, the mandate of
the 2014 elections is seen by the ruling
party as one for remaking India There
is a sense of deep hurt at the denial of
an ancient past More seriously, the
unity of the diverse creeds, sects and
communities that are Sanatan Dharmi
or Arya Samaji are to be welded into
one to be the core of a strong India
This necessarily means a series
of campaigns on the temple, the
cow, and Kashmir None of this is new but the backing
of government authority is without precedent Note
the political lineaments of the chief minister of Uttar
Pradesh His predecessor Mahant Avaidyanath was a
Hindu Mahasabha Lok Sabha MP Even earlier it was
Digvijay Nath who led the first major mass movement
against the Nehru government The issue: the Hindu Code
Bill Support for polygamy, opposition to property rights
for women were seen as vital to the family The unity of a
community rested on male privilege Not so very different
from conservative Muslim or Sikh leaders after all
The matter is not of who rules India but the basis on
which they sustain their legitimacy If the grammar of
politics changes, it has implications for the fabric of India
How you view these markers will show where you stand
1977 was a watershed that may well bear a second look
That election saw ouster of a government that crushed
civil liberties, jailed political opponents and denied free
speech It was not a victory for Mrs Gandhi’s opponents,
but a genuine peaceful rising of the people Is 2019 akin to
1977? A critic of Emergency, veteran columnist and author
thinks so Nayantara Sehgal argues that Indira Gandhi was
a democrat gone seriously astray Modi’s government is
greater threat to the democratic ethos of India
2019 is more serious as the threat is of a mindset not a
regime The world view was honed in the period between
the World Wars when the RSS was formed A thorough
remaking of facets of life, of culture and literature, the
sciences and media, the universities and schools, no less is
the stated aim In common with fascism and communism,
a strong state is to be backed by cultural reeducation True
the structure of democracy survives But a mono ethnic
India will be a different place
Will this project at all work in a democracy? And surely,
the others are not exactly spotless There’s no doubt
other parties, virtually all who have held public office,
show strains of such intolerance The Congress and
regional parties have done it all one time or another: jailed
opponents, curbed free speech The argumentative Indian
exists but often not because of her leaders And yes, the
Opposition, especially the Congress, needs to do more to
show it can introspect No less will do If not it will be a
substitute not an alternative
But as the biggest political force it is the BJP that sets the
tone and tenor of debate Also a recasting of the polity is
serious business if the party rules in New Delhi and is a partner in power
in all but 11 of the 29 states And the Prime Minister is not just head of the government, but the pivot of polity The poll is not just about Modi: it is about his way Is it right? Should it remain India’s way?
The remaking goes beyond slogans The new citizenship bill that makes religious identity the basis of refuge and fast-tracking to citizenship makes India akin to Israel (Jewish basis of nationhood) or paradoxically many Islamic Arab states This
is a far cry from the constitutional order that saw citizenship
as equal and based on territory not a uniform culture Equally
so, Sabarimala is evidence that where tradition meets the imperative of common rights equally held, the powers-that-be will uphold the former not the latter After all, it was tradition that forbade Dalits taking water from a tank that led to Amebedkar’s Mahad Satyagraha And Kerala itself was witness to the Vaikom struggles for all to enter temples Tradition does and should have place But it can and should
be revised when it undermines common rights and equality
If not, caste and gender as ground for denial of humanity of a fellow human would be legitimate
THE two most influential leaders speak of these choices
For Narendra Modi’s followers, he is a man who rose by merit and hard work Rahul Gandhi promises a new deal for those left behind and a culture of coexistence Unlike
1977, the choice is not stark at first sight But its consequences will be as long lasting A single-party government in the 1970s promised equality but short-changed liberty It was a coalition that restored those liberties
More so than then this is a question of a federal India
or one that moves towards a more unitary bias The years since Rajiv Gandhi lost power in 1989 had seen regional sentiments and states’ powers get space The worst feature
of Indira’s India in the 1970s have now returned The choices are significant Is a strong leader one who stands apart or one that takes all along? Is uniformity the way to deeper unity? Is it stronger because it accommodates difference? State worship and a common culture are one way to achieve unity But if imposed from above and held together
by fear it can undermine harmony Needless to add the dal-roti, or if you like fish curry and rice, will also matter The aspirations of the young for jobs, higher incomes for farmers, and end to all corruption will come up against the ultimate litmus test The winter of 2018 saw the BJP come
a cropper in three key states: whether they were part of a cycle or a foretaste of the future will be known and soon enough We are at the hinge of history Which door we open will have consequences beyond the next five years Opening
up options may also foreclose some choices
A simple choice may shape the future Never has so much hinged on the choice of so many The vision of India may be
at stake O
Make no mistake, the mandate of the 2014 elections is seen by the ruling party as one for remaking India There is deep hurt at the denial
of an ancient past.
Trang 24India: A Danse Penumbral
Trang 254 February 2019 OUTLOOK 25
by Arshia Dhar
I T’S an inconspicuous little one-storey dot in a
largely peaceful, middle-class neighbourhood
in Tamil Nadu’s Viralimalai, a stone’s throw away from the glitzier airport city of Trichy
The walls are cement-washed—sturdy, yet reeking of an antiquity buried under layers of consolidating, mundane grey The unceremonious clamour of utensils echoes through the backyard (that doubles up as a bath) and right into the humble home
of a past that remains mostly forgotten An old woman
in a plain cotton sari trundles back in after spitting out a mouthful of paan outside her door “My leg has been hurting for a while,” her eyes flinch a little in pain, adding a few lines to the ripples on her skin left
by time—80 years to be precise, all spent trying to salvage an art that defines her legacy, and India’s too
Even if India doesn’t know it
Just last year, R Muthukkannammal was invi ted to duct a workshop on Sadir near Chennai Sadir what? do
con-I hear you ask? The word sounds almost alien to a nation propped up on feet relentlessly practising Bharatanatyam,
or the “Dance of India”, for decades, among other classical forms—none sounding remotely like Sadir But rummage through pre-Independent India’s yellowing archives, and one might stumble upon this word It belonged to a land quite different from what the British left behind, and a time whose rhythm was set by feet dancing on temple stone—the feet and bodies and minds of Devadasis, the custodians of Chinnamelam, alternately known as Dasi attam or Sadir, whose ghost now lives in its distilled and
‘purified’ incarnation as Bharatanatyam
Muthukkannammal is the last fruit of that original tree
THE CULTURAL
Leave aside the Constitution,
the hardware of the State
The Republic was in reality
brought into being by an elite
consensus around a ‘pure’
culture, what it should have
and what must be left out
And Exhibit-A is dance.
STILL AROUND R Muthukkannammal is the last surviving of the 32 Devadasis of Viralimalai, Tamil Nadu, the only legatee
of Sadir, the precursor of Bharatanatyam
Photographs: USHA RAMESH
Trang 2626 OUTLOOK 4 February 2019
THE CULTURAL
REPUBLIC DANCE
The Devadasis of the south, and
Maharis in Odisha, were demonised
and outlawed by the British, in line
with the Victorian morality that still
governs our laws and social attitudes
Nor did Independence bring freedom
from that obscurity and shame—the
stigma pretty much informed the new
canvas of ‘pure’ culture painted in
Nehru’s India The old female
custodi-ans retreated to the bottom layers of
the palimpsest, still seen as corrupt,
sexually deviant beings to be
ostra-cised But the old world still shines
through Muthukkannammal’s sharp
words and glittering eyes “I would be
up by 3.30 am every day to rehearse I
was in a family full of dancers, who
woke up even earlier to practise,” she
says, as her school-going
great-grand-daughters come running for a hug
Muthukkannammal accidentally
found herself in the spotlight after
spending years in relative oblivion
when DakshinaChitra, a cultural
forum, opened its doors to her,
conferring her with a cash award on
learning about her meagre livelihood
“I am one of the 32 Devadasis of
Viralimalai, from the period of
Maharaja Raja g opala Thondaiman
My father, Rama chandran, was my
guru…he also trained me in music
You see, unlike Bharatanatyam, we
have to continue singing while
danc-ing Bharatanatyam has emulated our
dance and become popular,” she says
Ruing the lack of off cial patronage,
she says, “As the only surviving
prac-titioner, I am scared that the history
of my mothers, the Devadasis, will be
wiped out in my absence.”
Without patrons, any form of art
suf-fers For Indian dances, British
domin-ion uprooted the entire ecosystem of
patronage, squeezing dry the
treasur-ies of all kingdoms that funded temple
and court performers The attack on
the arts, however, went deeper—it was
fundamentally moral The British
con-demned the dances by linking them to
prostitution and debauchery Sample
civil servant William Hunter’s words
in the 1878 Bengal District Gazetteer,
after he apparently watched a
perfor-mance at the Jagannath Temple in
Puri: “Indecent ceremonies disgraced
the ritual, and dancing girls with
roll-ing eyes put the modest worshipper to
the blush.… The baser features of a
worship that aims at a sensual tion of God appears in a band of prosti-tutes who sing before the image.… In the pillared halls, a choir of dancing girls enlivens the idols’ repast by their airy gyrations The indecent rites that have crept into Vishnuvism are repre-sented by the Birth Festival (Janam),
realisa-in which a priest takes the part of the father and a dancing girl that of the mother of Jagannath, and the cere-mony of his nativity is performed….”
This is one of many such colonial-era reports—words that slowly corroded the bedrock of India’s classical dances,
covering their delicate aesthetics in a cloak of moral horror
What of the charge itself? Well, it was not right or wrong in a bald factual way as much as a cultural miscogni-tion In a male-ordered world, gender politics is decidedly unequal, but this old world was one in which sexuality had a life-affrming status And ironi-cally, the British projection of temple dancers as prostitutes became a cruel, self-fulfilling prophecy “As a people,
we did not have the kind of shame around sexuality our colonial masters did,” says Odissi exponent and scholar
IGNORED NATIVE “We barely find representation in official bodies or festivals,” says Gaudiya Nritya practitioner Banani Chakraborty
SANDIPAN CHATTERJEE
Trang 27Ananya Chatterjea “We certainly had
patriarchal contexts in which these
dances existed, but the dancers were
constantly navigating a complex
force-field to find space for their work
When these dances were re-situated,
in re-choreographed form, onto
pro-scenium stages, we made them in
effect hold space for middle- and
upper-class women who could speak
for the ‘nation’ and its long stream of
‘tradition’ What you are speaking to
are the ravages of that history.”
Indeed, the British made it
impossi-ble for these dancers to find space in
Hindu society, which too started to
stigmatise them as corrupt
tempt-resses, and they were left with no
room but that to scavenge for food and
money From being at the centre of
power structures, vested with bearing
the spiritual burden of the kingdoms,
the Devadasis and Maharis were now
thrust to the abhorred peripheries
Their art, naturally, withered In the
new aesthetic regime, sensuality or
‘eros’ (sringara rasa in Natyashastra
terms) had been rendered morally
dub ious The victims, expectedly, were
women; male practitioners remained
largely insulated, though forms of
fluid sexuality flowed as much from
their dance “It was a gender-biased
campaign, largely driven by Christian
missionaries It only forbade women
dancers Male performers flourished
as custodians of art and became the
ustads I feel this is the most criminal
thing we did to the brilliant women
performers of the 19th century,” says
Manjari Chaturvedi, Lucknow-based
Kathak practitioner
Chaturvedi’s long-standing mission
has been to revive the dance of the
Tawaifs, or the “fallen women” whose
progeny still face brutal rejection The
recreation of the old, intimate
perfor-mances involves careful study of
sur-viving gramophone records of songs, movements depicted in paintings and literary descriptions by 20th-century scholars Chaturvedi’s reading of the misogynistic onslaught the colonial state unleashed on India’s dances cor-roborates the erosion, or conscious mutation, of the three older, majorly female, precursors of the modern-day
‘classical’ forms—Bharatanatyam, Odissi and Kathak
‘Epidemic’ of Dance
This was a kind of cultural genocide
Like the Devadasis and Maharis, the project to ‘eradicate’ the social epi-
demic of dancing girls also hit the Muslim Tawaifs of the north and the Baijis of Bengal The social upheaval of
1857 did not spare their kothas: the British seized their lands and ordained them to society’s darkest recesses An
‘anti-nautch’ campaign in the late 1800s aimed to decimate ‘nautch girls’, a col-lective term for temple and court danc-ers In 1890, a missionary called Rev J
Murdoch launched a full-blown print campaign against ‘nautch parties’ He called upon British offcials to not be witnesses to amoral acts of seduction
India was soon flooded by such paigns, the Madras Christian
cam-Literature Society being edly responsible for a large percentage
single-hand-of anti-nautch literature Earlier British offcials had slipped into the same congenial relationship that India’s feudal lords had with the danc-ers, but the practice of inviting Tawaifs and Baijis to entertain visiting British dignitaries soon gave way to ballroom dances The air of shame was infectious, and local sources of sustenance also started drying up The Bai-Nautch of Bengal also started to lose its feudal pat rons, now influenced by the Brahmo Samaj Court dancers sought to survive
by shifting from their older patrons to the nouveau riche, but the suffocating air of ‘ethical cleansing’ now infected even the new bourgeois classes
As the walls of the kothas started to close in on the female practitioners of Kathak, the venerated temples of Odisha began to exorcise Mahari, a dance-form that modern-day Odissi heavily borrows from “Odissi is for commoners, Mahari is only for Lord Jagannath,” says Rupashree Maha-patra, the sole practitioner of the age-old dance Rupashree practises and conducts her dance lessons in the same room that houses her miniature Jagannath temple The home of her in-laws in the beach town of Puri is a crumbling 200-year-old relic, held together by the embracing arms of wise, old banyan trees, as old as humanity A creeper artfully manoeu-vres its way through a gap on the wall between Lord Jagannath’s portrait and a photo of her guru, the last-known Mahari Sashimani, who passed away in 2014, aged 93
“After I got gold medals in Odissi from four universities, I aspired to do something more,” says Rupashree, Sashimani’s adopted daughter—a cus-tom followed by temple dancers to perpetuate their legacy as a result of
While sexuality had a life-affirming status, the British view
of temple dancers as prostitutes became
a cruel, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Trang 2828 OUTLOOK 4 February 2019
being married off to male Hindu ties at a young age Now in her 40s, she seems to slip into a trance as her body
dei-lilts to the tunes of Geet-Gobindo
play-ing in the background She bends ever
so slightly, as if delicately balanced on
a spring, a far cry from the heavy lar motions of Odissi To one accus-tomed to the latter form, what leaps to the eye in Mahari is the tremendous emphasis on bhaav or expressions—
circu-the eyes have it, and circu-the subtle twitch
of the lips, almost betraying a smile res erved only for her lover, the Lord
The equation here is decidedly ent “I hope I’m born a woman in every life so I can dance for Jagannath Why
differ-should one do so much kasrat to
express, like in Odissi or natyam? A little bhaav is good enough
Bharata-These are like conversations with your partner, intimate and beautiful We dress in gold jewellery, a sari, and do elaborate make-up, with emphasis on our eyes I feel I completely transform from within when I dance for
Jagannath It’s like an out-of-body experience,” Rupashree explains
Visually, Mahari seems to be set on a pole diametrically opposite to that of
THE CULTURAL
REPUBLIC DANCE
CODE ARBITRARY Chhau is not recog nised as a classical dance form despite being among the oldest and most codified, with three dis tinct strains practised in Bengal, Odisha and Jharkhand
‘MARGI’ VERSUS ‘DESI’? NOT QUITE
In official parlance, only eight dances (in the first column) are certified as
‘classical’ A glance at a few that aren’t shows why the division is arbitrary
older Sadir or Dasi attam,
Bharatanatyam is said to have
originated in Tamil Nadu, though
its literature shows heavy Telugu influence
Among the first to be declared ‘classical’;
many culture czars were its practitioners.
Yakshagana: A traditional opera associated with Karnataka, it’s set up
by its striking costumes, masks, bright make-up, and performances lasting the night Its not-so-gentle movements and high jumps give it a ‘folksy’
feel, perhaps why it’s still beyond the pale.
themes like the Rasleela, this
dance benefited from Tagore’s
interest in it Performed by both
sexes, the stiff, barrel-shaped skirts worn by
female performers mark Manipuri out as
strikingly different sartorially from the rest.
Koodiyattam: The oldest evolved dance from Kerala, with an explicit link to Natyashastra and Sanskrit texts, besides Malayalam literature, this ritual form, recognised by UNESCO as a masterpiece, is a curious absence in the classical pantheon.
Mohiniattam embodies the
Lasya principle Traditionally a
gentle and ‘feminine’ solo dance
by women, conventionally attired in white
and gold, it got great impetus through royal
patronage in the 18th-19th centuries.
Chhau: An ancient dance from the Rarh region of the east, Chhau has three variants—
Mayurbhanj, Saraikela, Purulia
Said to be based on movements related to hunting and combat, some of its robust moves may have coloured its perception as ‘folk’.
Odisha, this dance entered the
‘classical’ pantheon in the second
wave A consolidated form that
borrowed from regional traditions and
practices like Gotipua and Mahari, Odissi is a
temple dance dedicated to Jagannath of Puri.
Vilasini Natyam: The ‘forgotten dance
of Andhra Pradesh’, this near-extinct sister of Sadir was once owned by the Telugu Devadasis A casualty of the cultural renaissance that kept it out
of the elite club, Bharatanatyam danseuse Swapnasundari helped revive it.
the ‘classical’ forms, titled so as
late as 2000, Assam’s Sattriya
was originally performed by monks in sattras
on the river island of Majuli, where 15th c
saint Srimanta Sankaradeva founded it Now
it finds itself on the ‘secular’ proscenium.
Gaudiya: Named after the Gaur region of Bengal, Gaudiya nritya is steeped in the Natyashastra A research-based revival by Dr Mahua Mukherjee has sought to codify its grammar and form, focusing on its antiquity, but classical status has still proved elusive.
genre, this once male-only form
was a shoo-in into the classical
pantheon, with its rich gestural
repertoire Its dramatic masks and costumes
show its kinship to older Keralan temple and
folk arts from which it evolved in the 17th c.
Theyyam: A ritual-based dance from Kerala, proponents claim Theyyam predates 500 BC It has over 400 variants, all of which are performed to worship ancestors or local gods Despite its antiquity and evolved nature, it’s always deemed ‘folk’.
the same name in Andhra
Pradesh, Kuchipudi made it in
the ‘second list’ of classical
dances With elements of both Lasya and the
more robust Tandav principles, this formerly
male-only form was codified in the 17th c.
Oja Pali: Considered one of the seminal forms from which the classical Sattriya derives, Oja Pali is a song-and-dance ritual performed by
a group of five to six men The leader Oja is assisted by Palis, who gather to recite/sing local lores with loud gestures Hence, ‘folk’.
Gotipua: Evolving in the akhadas of Odisha circa 17th c, Gotipua is an acrobatic dance practised by young boys in drag Its age-gender stipulation continues to identify it as one of the precursors to the ‘classical’
Odissi, while not qualifying itself.
Graphic by SAJI C.S.
kathaakar (storyteller), Kathak is
attributed to the travelling minstrels
of north India One of the first to be
labelled classical, Kathak has three
gharanas—Jaipur, Benaras, Lucknow—the
latter leaving a distinct Muslim imprint on it.
Trang 29Odissi The latter has embraced a part top and dhoti trousers made of the local Ikkat or Kotki with minimal silver jewellery; Mahari goes all out in red and yellow saris and gold orna-ments—39 pieces as we counted, with
two-an elaborate headgear two-and, yes,
make-up It’s sringara, after all Much
like Bharatanatyam/Sadir, the nents of Odissi wish to have nothing
propo-to do with its mother form and its contested history “The big practition-ers create disruptions Unless they let
go their ego, it’s impossible for this tradition to survive How much can one person do? We really need more help from the government and the Sangeet Natak Akademi,” says
Rupashree, the sole flag-bearer of Mahari after Sashimani’s death, a tragic milestone in India’s cultural history that no one even noticed
In many ways, colonial and post- colonial India carried the hearse together The final leg of the cleansing process began in 1934 with the Bombay Devadasi Protection Act, which ‘protected the interests’ of Devadasis by lawfully recognising their marriage to a man and their chil-dren born out of wedlock The dedica-tion of a Devadasi to a deity was made illegal; any third person involved in it would henceforth invite a jail term
Unfortunately, what the rehabilitative law safeguarded was not the ‘interests’
of the dancers; nor did it have anything
to do with their craft The Madrasi Devadasi Act of 1947, originally floated
by Muthulakshmi Reddi, the first woman legislator in British India, followed the one in 1934 and finally by
1988, the practice of Devadasi dance was completely outlawed in India This final nail in the coffn of the ancient, erotic dances sealed a cultural
‘renascence’ on the lines of a Hindu spiritual realignment of the forms, whose core emotion would now
change to bhakti.
The Asexual Nation
As Indian leaders internalised the European concept of ‘nationalism’, based on Enlightenment ideals, India’s art forms were reformulated to fit the new identity of Brand Bharat An exp-licitly shared heritage was necessary for this, and thus the various ‘classical’ dances were herded, catalogued and certified, Kathak exponent and social anthropologist Pallabi Chakravorty writes in her essay This ‘renovation’ of heritage had two broad, specific condi-tions: 1) cleansing the dance forms of their erotic traits, modifying the movements from the sensual to the sublime and spiritual 2) reinventing the history of the dances on a pre-dominantly “Hindu” philosophy, consonant with the tacit ethos of nation- building This purging was a sine qua non for new India to have an ancient, untainted ‘classical’ culture The spirit was oriented towards saving the “nautch” (in purified form), but not the “nautch-girls”
Evidence of the sweeping influence European Renaissance had on our cultural resurrection is found in the architects who led the movement Lawyer, classical artist and activist E Krishna Iyer, Bharatanatyam dancer Rukmini Devi Arundale, Rabindranath
Chhau is not recog nised as a classical dance form despite being among the oldest and most codified, with three dis tinct strains practised in Bengal, Odisha and Jharkhand
SANDIPAN CHATTERJEE
Trang 30o-Bharatanatyam’s history is not
unco m plicated as it is often made out to
be—as if it were an ancient, unbroken
and pure tradition untouched by
colonial-ism and post-colonial nationalcolonial-ism In
fact, what it was before the onset of
colonialism, in the hands of the original
masters, the devadasis, and what it
eventually became as it passed through
a socio-political prism—the evolving idea
of a newly independent India—are
arguably two very different dance forms
Sure, they shadow and echo one
another, but they are distinct in terms
of their relationships with the body and
sexuality, their narrative content, the
spaces in which they are performed and
the very dancers who practise, perform
and teach them.
Nehru, within the rubric of ‘unity in
diversity’, sought to appreciate and
acknowledge regional, religious and
sub-cultural identities, but he also
envisioned a strong, unified nation that
would ultimately transcend these
smaller identities to evolve into one
pan-Indian identity In the cultural
sphere, those in the nationalist
movement who considered themselves
custodians of art interpreted this to
mean finding one pan-Indian national
dance form This dance form was
Bharatanatyam But it could not become
India’s national dance in the form it
existed in pre-colonial times Colonisers
made an example out of the Devadasis
and their dance to demonstrate the
sexually unrestrained and barbaric
nature of the natives, creating a sense
of shame in Indians Revivalists and
nationalists, therefore, felt impelled to
transform both the dance and the dancer
in order to make it fit its new ‘national’
role The result is now widely known.
The nationalist-revivalist visionaries
set out to suppress erotica and
sens uality, focusing instead on devotion
(thereby ‘sanitising’ the form); make
Bharatanatyam available to ‘good
Brahmin girls’ (i.e not Devadasis); take
it out of temples and onto proscenium
stages; and institutionalise its pedagogy
(establishing Kalakshetra and
form-alising dance education) Thus, what
was actually in India’s dance tradition
was thoroughly morphed in this modern
secular-nationalist reformulation
Those who represented the Devadasi’s Sadir fiercely opposed these transforma- tions But in that transformative air of newly independent India, the change came with the force of an idea whose time had come.
What resulted was an arguably modernist version of the Devadasi’s Sadir, a dance form that belonged not to the Isai Vellalar community of
Devadasis, but to what the nationalists saw as a wider spectrum of practition- ers comprising Brahmin ‘girls of good families’, and performed not in temples, but in ‘secular’ spaces accessible to a more diverse audience It also tilted fa- vourably towards ‘devotionalism’—pos- sibly seen in line with patriotism and nationalism—and away from questions about the body and sexuality, now seen
as shameful and best avoided.
Over half a century later, practitioners are often asked how they feel about the history of the dance form When I learnt
of Bharatanatyam’s tumultuous and complex history, I was fascinated, but also felt derailed My idea of this flaw- less dance form became somewhat tainted While my love for it never dwin- dled, I felt betrayed by the ‘lie’ that resulted from the post-colonial reimagi- nation of Bharatanatyam—the idea that the Devadasi era was a brief, unfortu- nate and corrupting hiccup in an other- wise pure history But, had it not been for the post-colonial revivalist move- ment, the dance form would never have been accessible to me There are indeed many facets of that transformation that
I deeply respect, such as the structure and codification of technique, and I have retained many of these facets in my practice and creative expression Yet, I
Trang 31Tagore and art scholar Kapila Vatsyayana were among those who remodelled cultural India for posterity The iconic Rukmini Devi, a
convent-educated Brahmin whose father was a member of the elite Theosophical Society of India, is near-synonymous with the ‘invention’
of Bharatanatyam On watching her friend, the renowned Russian balle-
rina Anna Pavlova, perform Dying
Swan, Rukmini Devi was inspired to
learn dance, and the call to roots soon touched her, coloured by a strong lean-
ing towards bhakti That’s the point at which Sadir nac was transformed
Ananya Chatterjea writes about the symbolic “weight” of the nomencla-ture: “Supposedly it reflects the amal-gamation of bhava, raga and tala, bha-ra-ta, at the confluence of which dance is located However, its simulta-neous…claiming of affliation to
Bharata, the author of Natyashastra,
suggesting its adherence to the ards of “classicism” outlined in that scripture, as well as to Bharat, one of the indigenous names for India, implying its status as the national dance form of India, are hard to miss.” Under the guidance of her friend (and theosophist) Annie Besant, Rukmini Devi deterged the dances of their toxic association with prostitution, by
stand-“shifting the foundational emotion
from sringara, the erotic mood, to
bhakti, the devotional mood,”
Chatterjea writes This turn was tutionalised through the establish-ment of Rukmini Devi’s Kalakshetra College of Dance and Music in 1936, where the new, spiritually exalted form of Bharatanatyam, born from the ashes of Sadir, was propagated A large-scale sanitisation and Sanskritisation of India’s dances were witnessed across the board A system-atic suppression of the physicality that
insti-could not allow myself to be blindly and
dogmatically devoted to the form.
As I grew confident as a dancer and
choreographer, I found my own creative
expression in Vyuti, my dance company,
through which I chose to deal with
some of the bones I had to pick with
the ‘nationalised’ dance form I had
devoted myself to for over two
dec-ades I wanted to challenge the ways in
which classical dance deals with the
body and direct physicality As a solo
dance form, it managed to circumvent
this almost entirely since there is no
other body on stage to physically touch
Even in dance dramas, the touch and
even eye contact is largely superficial,
not real But Vyuti’s work is all about
touch—physical and visceral touch
between multiple and interweaving
dancers The dancers interlock arms,
put their arms around each other, hold
hands, lean on one another, and even
share each other’s weight—lifting each
other off the ground At the very least,
they look directly into each other’s
eyes, acknowledging each other and
honouring the idea of intimately
shar-ing a vulnerable space—the stage.
Re-situating the dance from a temple
setting to a proscenium theatre, too,
had implications on the
form—signifi-cantly, the introduction of a singular
front where the dancer is on stage,
fac-ing an audience in front of him or her
The proscenium, unlike the proximity
between dancer and audience that the temple allows, creates a formal distance between performer and spectator, which compromises some interaction between them In my prac- tice, I attempted to examine how the singular front changed dance and recre- ated how dance may have been viewed
in pre-colonial times
Using alternative spaces, Vyuti’s work invites audiences to sit closer to and all around the performers, enabling audiences to view the work closely from multiple angles and challenging the dancers to be aware of the audi- ence in more than one direction.
Vyuti’s work also removes itself from the sringara-bhakti binary through its narrative content Sakhi, Vyuti’s sole narrative piece, is about female friend- ship Neither sringara nor bhakti, yet it has elements of both In one instance, the female protagonist reminisces about erotic and intimate moments with her lover to her friend; in another, they discuss the lover’s devotion towards the nayika Dealing with emo- tions and human interactions, it is far removed from the religious, mythologi- cal and devotional narratives dominat- ing classical dance.
Vyuti’s second narrative piece, rently in its nascent stages, is based on kama This piece rebels more boldly against the post-colonial nationalist rejection of the erotic by directly addressing it through Vyuti’s corporeal technique and interweaving vocabulary
cur-As a practitioner of Bharatanatyam, I find myself constantly negotiating with its nationalisation I respect, adhere to and adore some elements of its post-colonial form, even as I seek to question and challenge others like the touch taboo, erasure of the Devadasi’s imprint, and rejection of the sensual and the erotic The constant negotia- tion between Bharatanatyam’s pre- colonial past and post-colonial present
is essential to me as a practitioner of this beautiful and complex dance form,
a bearer of its tradition and a living
and question others
like the touch taboo.
Trang 3232 OUTLOOK 4 February 2019
had seeped in from the Mahari
reper-toire—with the scope of movement of
the hips restrained—defined Odissi
And Sanskritisation? That’s a kind of
pseudo-movement in itself, with a
similarly purged, spiritual Sanskrit
itself deployed to de-eroticise and
‘classicise’ dance “If you really study
the literature and texts, you’ll see a
strong influence of Telugu in
Bharatanatyam The padams, javalis,
kirtanas are all in Tel ugu It shows the
art traversed that reg ion too,” says
Helen Acharya, secretary of dance,
Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA) In the
new order, the literature of the dances
in their original, local tongues began
to be rewritten in Sanskrit Chatterjea
mentions how the Odissi mudras or
hand gestures were also rewritten to a
uniform grammar for “movements”
Many, like Odissi master Guru
Debaprasad Das, objected to this brutal
codification, but many rode the wave
“The sanitisation happened in every
artform,” says Manjari Chaturvedi
“The classic case is of the composition
‘Phool gendwa na maro lagat jobanwa
ma chot’, changed to ‘Phool gendwa na
maro lagat kalejwa ma chot’ Jobanwa
clearly meant breasts, kalejwa was
more abstract.… Even Kathak
devel-oped as a bhakti-dominated art with
stories on Krishna and Radha, which
was fair because Krishna is a favourite deity for all performing arts, but the weeding out of amour from dance and music was deliberate.”
A ‘Hindu’ Confection
Chakravorty has talked of how, under
an aggressive governmental push for legitimising Brahminical renderings
of dance, Kathak started losing its
Islamic traits of salami or thata, even
farmaayishi The Muslim headgear,
worn well into the 20th century, started to disappear as well
“The national ideology of a pan- Indian Hindu culture, derived from ancient Sanskrit texts like the
Natyashastra, helped textualise Indian
dances regardless of their specific regional or religious histories The
Brahminical lineages of Kathak were emphasised by dance historians such
as Sunil Kothari… (He) shows the strong relationship between Kathak and the Raslila tradition of Vraja and Mathura in medieval times but fails to show how they are traced back to Vedic antiquity…a gap of over 2,000 years,” Chakravorty argues in an essay The Islamic influences were gradually diluted by the overpowering Hindu-Sanskrit dialogue, propagated through the new male custodians who steadily replaced the banished female artistes not just in Kathak, but in Odissi too.Rather than ridding dance of gender politics, it was key to the conscious desexualising of dances that had tradi-tionally been female-led, as opposed
to Kathakali, Kuchipudi or Sattriya, which opened their stage to women only after the renaissance
Masculinising dance was a ruse to weed out soft, sensual feminine move-ments, and thwart condemnation The takeover of men became a parallel tool for the suppression of female practi-tioners in the 20th century revival By the 1930s, Kathak saw the rise of the Maharajs—Shambhu, his brother Acchan, and then the latter’s son Birju, all of whom went on to become house-hold names More and more elite Brahmin girls were brought under
THE CULTURAL
REPUBLIC DANCE
“The weeding out of amour from dance and music was deliberate,” says Lucknow-based Kathak practitioner Manjari Chaturvedi.
EXORCISED ORIGINAL Odissi heavily borrows from Mahari, which, says sole practitioner
Rupashree Maha patra, “is only for Lord Jagannath”, but has been banished from Odisha’s temples
Trang 33their tutelage—submissive subjects of
the male guru (This while female
reformers like Madam Menaka and
Sadhana Bose found themselves
receding into the background.)
In Odissi, the most widely practised
form emerged from the school of
Kelucharan Mohapatra, an exponent
of the Gotipua style of acrobatic dance
The gotipuas are young, pre-pubescent,
cross-dressing boys, whose art is said
to have part-martial origins, evolving
in the akhadas or gymnasiums set up
in the court of King Ramachandradeva
of the Bhoi dynasty (circa 17th
cen-tury) The Vaishnav saint Chaitanya
Mahaprabhu too is said to have invited
young boys to dance in the procession
for Lord Jagannath when ing Maharis were barred from per-forming by temple priests “At any rate, the typical markers of Mahari, the rounded lines, the overt sensuality, the
menstruat-displaced hip marked by the bengapatti,
the heavy silver belt tied around the hip, are overshadowed by the Gotipua insistence on a much more acrobatic, linear style, characterised by jumps and extensions Several of the current gurus of Odissi, largely responsible for its reconstruction, were trained in this style,” Chatterjea writes Post-independence, the SNA, formed in
1952, pushed for reviving the gurukul system; again a picture that placed men at the top and in the centre
Folk vs Classical
The old forms, powerful and sensual, now lay like debris at the nation’s construction site It wasn’t exactly a conspiracy, but a collective zeitgeist
“They did what they thought to be right
at the time We should do what we think is right for our time, without dragging them down,” says Padma Shri Leela Samson, a disciple of Rukmini Devi, who has headed Kalakshetra and SNA “Whatever styles can be revived should be revived.” One strand in the story, however, is also about how we define things The inherent many-ness
of the Indian gene can scarely be made
to fit into boxes, but one order of sification has been as pervasive as it is
clas-Photographs: VIVEK TRIPATHI
Trang 3434 OUTLOOK 4 February 2019
arbitrary: the divisions of
art-forms into ‘folk’ and ‘classical’,
or desi and margi The new form
of Bharatanatyam showed the
way, and the SNA conferred
‘classical’ status on it, as also on
Kathakali, Manipuri and Kathak
first, followed by Odissi,
Kuchipudi and Mohiniattam
Assam’s Sattriya joined the
pan-theon as late as the year 2000
Bharatanatyam was an
unsur-prising choice in the ‘first list’
Kathakali, Kathak and Manipuri
too were upheld by influential
individuals Kathak boasted of
names like Jaddanbai (Nargis’s
mother) and Gauhar Jaan, close
associates of the Indian
Natio-nal Congress Manipuri received
extensive visibility thanks to
Tagore, who incorporated it into
some of his Rabindra Nritya
cho reographies It was
renow-ned Malayalam poet Vallathol
Narayan Menon who
evange-lised on behalf of Kathakali; using all
his resources and social authority, he
was instrumental in convincing young
men in Kerala to not leave the
art-form marooned His connections with
Rukmini Devi and Uday Shankar
helped Kathakali go global too at a
very early stage And Sattriya’s entry
coincided curiously with Assamese
singer-songwriter Bhupen Hazarika’s
tenure as SNA chairperson
“It’s always a conscious decision to
make a dance ‘classical’,” says Sudha
Gopalakrishnan, Koodiyattam scholar
and executive director of Sahapedia,
an online resource on Indian arts The
so-titled eight ‘classical’ dances were
offered as forms grounded in the
Natyashastra, a comprehensive
trea-tise on the performing arts dated to
the 2nd-5th c AD Desi/margi is a
slip-pery classification, and “caused
prob-lematic erasures”, according to
Chatterjea Margi, referring more to a
specific marg or aesthetic ‘pathway of
development’, was “inaccurately
translated as classical”, she writes
And desi was literally interpreted as
‘folk’ An artificial class hierarchy thus
came to be instituted, because it’s not
always very self-evident why one form
deserves to be in or out
“We’ve been trying to get classical
status for years Every time we meet
Akademi authorities, they tell us they consider everyone to be classical, but that’s not true! Gaudiya Nritya
follows the Natyashastra to the core
and yet we are in the waiting line,”
says Banani Chakraborty, a tioner of Bengal’s native form The classical tag naturally brings inc-reased state patronage, hefty scho-larships, research grants, larger platforms “We barely find represen-tation in offcial bodies or festivals At the recent Uday Shankar Festival in Calcutta, Gaudiya received merely two slots despite being the state’s own art,” says Chakraborty
practi-While a dance’s level of sophistication
in terms of grammar is upheld as the
litmus test for ‘classicity’, forms like Gaudiya and even Koodi-yattam, with its part-Sanskrit lit-erature, are stuck in a limbo des pite checking off all the boxes
“Norms apply to all, so-called classical or folk Those who refer
to our art-forms as classical haps do so because they believe they are codified in ancient Sanskrit and regional texts, in sculptural evidence and in cul-tural memory It’s time to ques-tion nomenclatures based on specific periods of European his-tory They do not refer to us,” Leela Samson says However, the definitions have already colo ured our perceptions, and in ways not reflective of the complex contin-uum that marks the arts
per-“The ‘classical’ is dep endent on the folk, and folk also draws a lot
of energy from classical,” says Gopalakrishnan, citing the example of Kerala’s Theyyam It can’t be considered as “just a performa-nce”, she says “There’s ritual and belief involved…an involvement of the com-munity.” With Sattriya, she says, per-formances suddenly became ‘solo’, and got modified “Changes are made to the text The entire aesthetic changes when there’s a conscious decision to turn a dance ‘classical’,” says the scholar, who believes codifying exclusively by the
Natyashastra is detrimental to the
health of our dances “Koodiyattam is unique as it draws from Malayalam and Sanskrit literature, local traditions, everything Why should our dances have to follow only one text in order to
be recognised as classical?”
The arbitrariness leaves no room for negotiation even for forms that appar-ently satisfy all criteria for classicity
“Chhau is a 20,000-year-old dance that was practised by the soldiers of the Rarh region It’s perhaps older than any known Indian classical dance, is highly evolved and codified, with three distinct strains practised in Bengal’s Purulia, Odisha’s Mayurbhanj and Jharkhand’s Saraikela If Chhau doesn’t qualify as classical, I don’t know what does,” rues Chhau scholar Sharmila Banerjee Such are the elu-sive prescriptions left behind by the architects of our cultural republic O
with Usha Ramesh in Tanjore
CLASSIC/ FOLK Kerala’s Theyyam is embedded in ritual, faith, community
Trang 3636 OUTLOOK 4 February 2019
A T the very outset, I would like to
state that dance is not
peripheral, but critically
central to the construction
of Indian nationalism
And the Devadasi, the
temple dancer, also derogatorily
remembered by some as the
temple-prostitute, plays a very
central role in this enterprise The
unexplain-able paradox of the sacred/profane Devadasi
put the Hindoos on the backfoot as they
were categorically shamed by the British for
harbouring such a “degenerate” belief
system that mixed the sacral with the sexual
Therefore, her obliteration became
imperative for India—a modern nation-
in-the-making—for two main reasons: a)
because she was an unspeakable
embarrass-ment within the frame of Victorian morality,
and b) because her liminal status, that of being
both/neither priestess and/or pleasure woman,
could in no way be accommodated within the
categorical schemata of ‘modernity’.
It is quite a coup, the way this rather “indelicate”
issue was high-handedly resolved by
Annie Besant, president of both the
Theosophical Society as well as the
Indian National Congress In one
sweep-ing statement in 1919, she proclaimed
that the Devadasis were originally meant
to be chaste and virgin—like the Catholic
nuns—who now, having lost their
chas-tity and fallen into a life of immorality
had to forego their station in the temple
This marks the beginning-of-the-end of
paradox in Indian thought and practice,
and the onset of the
Reformist-Nationalist movement which would
fos-ter the envisioning of a “perfectly glorious” past, and correspondingly, the (re)construction of a categori-cally-sacred dance practice, emblematic of an ima gined “authenticity” that was eternally pure, morally chaste and glorious —not to mention, also profoundly self-congratulatory. What ensued is history While the anti- nautch activists lobbied vociferously for the banishment of the Devadasi, Rukmini Devi Arundale, a protégé of Besant,
in all sincerity, strove to the-baby-from-the-bathwater and founded Kalakshetra, within the precincts of the Theosophical Society, in 1935 Her pri-mary aim being the preservation and dis-semination of the lofty and sac red part of the tradition of this holy land to its new mid-dle classes, cleansed of any moral corr uption Severing the art from the centuries-long lived-his-tories of the Devadasis, she proceeded to align the
save-dance to a long-lost golden age, and asserted the Natya
shastra (2nd-5th c AD) as its original and sole authority
Incidentally, the Natyashastra was rediscovered by the
British in the mid-1800s Thus, a foundly evocative, tried and tested prac-tice, finely distilled over generations, was reduced to the rules of a book or a man-ual; its poetic resonances overshadowed
pro-by middle-class moral correctness. The destruction of the Devadasi’s sub-culture led to the domestication of her very fragile, exclusive art practice—the poetic efficacy of which, to my mind, rested squarely upon and flo wed from the paradoxical histories of its liminal practitioners Now, trusteeship devolved upon Kalakshetra, my alma mater, which
The old grammar of aesthetics boiled things down to their
essence Expansivist Hindu ‘Kultur’ killed that delicate dance.
The Expired
Lightness
of Being
An exponent of Bharatanatyam and choreographer,
he is an alumnus
of Kalakshetra
Navtej Singh Johar
The poetic efficacy
of the Devadasi art flowed from their liminal lives Rukmini Devi, in her sincerity, severed that fragile link to lived history.
THE CULTURAL
Trang 374 February 2019 OUTLOOK 37
is still seen as the primary institution of classical dance
The 19th century saw India emerge as the spiritual capital of
the world, and in time, the cleansed and moralised forms of
temple dance (as well as yoga, for that matter) came to be
viewed as its spiritual, embodied practices To my mind, one
of the gravest faults committed by the visionaries of modern
India was the decision to flaunt culture as India’s USP. Dance
was quick to become a prime object of cultural exhibition The
fetishised female form, studiedly demure, seductive, yet
inno-cent, became emblematic of exotic, mysterious and spiritual
India A highly nuanced art-practice, nurtured dialogically
over centuries within the exclusivist intimacy of a salon,
sud-denly found itself within the harsh, projective and expansivist
arena of the proscenium stage Also, the fanfare of cultural
exh ibitionism always remained susceptible to cultural
chau-vinism—whether pan-Indian or acutely parochial
As a young, modern nation, India not only bought into
Victorian morality, but also into the Western definition of
cul-ture We have to realise that to talk of culture and sanskriti in
the same breath is to talk at cross-purposes Yes, both do refer
broadly to a civilisational project, but are paradigmatically
opposed Culture, in the West, stands categorically in
opposi-tion to nature It implies the
overpower-ing or tamoverpower-ing of nature: an expansivist
agenda that seeks to control and exploit
nature for economic gain Critically, that
inc ludes the proselytising outlook, both
zealous and patronising, of civilising the
uncultured heathen Sanskriti, on the
other hand, is reductionist by mode It
does not aim to overpower Prakriti, i.e
matter or nature, seen as unpredictable,
pollutive, transgressive and expansive; or
to further expand or exploit its mutative
potencies Rather, it seeks to stall and
progressively involute its mutative cycle,
striving to gradually percolate or reduce
it to its principle latency, the mula, that is further irreducible.
Indian thought has been always preoccupied, if not obsessed,
with this process of reduction The ideal experience being that
of absorption in that ultimate, irreducible, causeless principle,
within which lies contained the infinite potency of all
causa-tion The same way that Panini, the 4th century Sanskrit
grammarian, reduces all speech to the phenome bhu.It is also
for this reason that the evocation of rasa in dance or poetry
hinges so critically on the experience of the sthai bhava—that
constitutes the “permanent” or irreducible emotional
condi-tion of bhava Therefore, the underlying drive of both Sanskrit
and sanskriti is an ever-reducing economy, which works to
counter the expansive nature of Prakriti, by progressively
abbreviating and boiling down any form of expression to its
latent degree of irreducibility Therein also lies the contrast
between the reductionist linguists of Sanskrit and the
expan-sivist, mundane enterprise of Prakrit, the dialect-forms The
ever-reducing economy thus lies at the core of both the
prac-tice as well as the ethos of Sanskrit as well as sanskriti And
proselytising, the idea of spreading the “gospel” through
pub-lic preaching, as Gandhi rightly points out, is not only foreign
but grossly antithetical to both Sanskrit and Hindu sanskriti
I go into this long-drawn exposition in order to talk of the
current state of dance, seen as a prized emblem of Hindu skriti. The thing to note is that we, and in this I include all sides and factions, i.e the Left, the Right, the Liberal as well as the Extreme, have lock, stock and barrel bought into the Western idea of ‘culture’, expansivist, capitalist and evangelist
san-by its very nature Within this, we are trying to place, define and propagate our sanskriti The irony, nay, the tragedy is that the minute we place an expression, a gesture, a poetic phrase, the very aspiration of which is self-erasure, within a self-agg-randising paradigm of cultural propagation, we not only gro s-sly miss the point, we annihilate the very thing we seek to preserve The delicacy of art or poetry cannot withstand the self-consciousness cultural propagation necessarily warrants!I’m afraid to say the grand custodians of Indian culture, most of them self-appointed, may have succeeded to police the fabricated “idea” of Indian culture but failed to nurture sanskriti In fact, they may be at the risk of running it dry Grandstanding and beauty are mutually exclusive The glib, smug, patronising self-righteousness we see rampant within the dancers of India (both classical and contemporary) is not incidental; it goes with this territory of such grandstanding The zeal of cultural retrieval—this grand nationalistic narra-
tive that “once we were lost, but now we are found” —is killing the profoundly evocative reductionist truths of sanskriti Both the earnest clarion calls of the plur-alists, as well as the shuddhi drive of the Hindu Mahasabha, equally share and subscribe to this vision of an imagined golden age and endorse the drive for its retrieval What we need to be wary of is that this impulse of retrieval and expan-sion of a lost (or stolen) golden age, which so many of us have participated in wholeheartedly, is in essence a form of soft fundamentalism!
While the pluralists have historically trumped culture as the USP and subscribed to cultural exhibi-tionism, the parochialists have used culture as a frozen piece
of kitsch calendar art to enforce religious/caste hegemony The former at least betrays a naivete and earnestness that has
an innocent charm to it, no matter how ‘cosmetic’, as alekha famously pointed out Their synchronist vision of this Ganga-Jamuna culture has a beauty that is inherent and symptomatic of ‘openness’ But the majoritarian use of cult-ure by the latter, which projects a spectacle of sangathan through, say, dance jamborees in stadiums, is revelatory of a scheming communal arithmetic that leaves in its wake a hol-lowed sanskriti without redemption—it does not remotely entertain the reductionist criteria of resonance, absorption, beauty or aesthetics It only foster an unbearable sub-medioc-rity, conflating sanskriti with stridency, reducing it to a slogan For a very long time now, when I am forced to watch dance—which I seldom do these days—I actually see no space for aes-thetic experience, leave alone the promise of transformation
Chandr-I don’t see the dancers somatically engaged with their own bodies, the body is actually absent! All they are doing is pro-jecting an idea And frankly, for such a variety of dance, they
do not need the body at all, a placard saying “Mera Bharat Mahan” would suffice! O
Both reformists and parochialists bought into the West’s idea
of ‘Culture’ Both share the sense of a
‘golden age’ and the urge to retrieve it.
Trang 3838 OUTLOOK 4 February 2019
Intangible, fluid and a lived experience of
communities, folk music is a heritage that
has had to fit in the compelling, reductive
moulds of the mainstream music industry
and governmental networks In
conversa-tion with Arshia Dhar, renowned
Hindustani classical vocalist Shubha
Mudgal explores the perceptions around
this complex aural territory and their
implications Excerpts:
In music, we’ve been seeing something
of a folk revival of late But, in a
sub-continent blessed with such aural
richness, how did we come to a stage
where we would need a revival at all?
I am afraid I cannot agree with the
premise that there has been a recent
rev ival of folk music While folk music is
by no means extinct in India, it
contin-ues to swim in troubled waters One of
the many problems folk music currently
faces is that a large part of the repertoire
is at risk of being lost forever because
exponents find acceptance only for
catchy tunes that can be danced to
Therefore, even among the more
suc-cessful of folk artistes, for example the
popular Langa and Manganiyar artistes
of Rajasthan, there is a growing concern
that their once large and diverse
reper-toire is shrinking rapidly A large part of
folk music is linked to life cycle rituals and work activities and may therefore never find acceptance in proscenia presentations For example, laments sung only as part of death rituals may never make acceptable concert reper-toire Current exponents of these forms may end up never learning them from their elders.
But to get back to your question, it comes as no surprise or shock to me that
we are discussing the need to revive folk music For decades, support for folk arts came from State-funded organisations set up in the Nehruvian era, such as the Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA), or from private trusts and individuals with a keen interest in conserving the arts In
recent times, the Jaipur Virasat Foundation and its Rajasthan Rural Arts Program as well as the Mehrangarh Museum Trust have been working on providing sustainable livelihood pro-grams for folk artistes in Raja-sthan. However, with State-funded organisations like the SNA, there has been little or no attempt to review strat-egies Maybe, we need to accept that State funding of this nature is now irrel-evant and work towards re-building institutions with realistic goals.
What of representation in other ums of broadcast, which have multi-plied considerably?
medi-With over 3,000 traditional and online radio channels operational in India, the broadcasting boom has also ignored the folk arts to a large extent
Further, folk music often found its loyal audience in regional communities Today, exponents of folk music aspire to move to cities for better opportunities, where the standards of success and popularity are set by Bollywood As a result, urban audiences accept folk music only if it is packaged in the Bollywood mould What message are we giving then? That if you present a beau-tiful folk song with traditional instru-ments, you are orthodox and not moving
“Some of the biggest recent hits in film music have been item numbers that often borrow entire compositions from folk music.”
Trang 394 February 2019 OUTLOOK 39
with the times, but if the same song is
presented with an urban band, you are
“contemporary” and can even claim to be
a modern day saviour of folk music. As
an artiste, I feel musicians must have the
freedom to present their work as they
wish to And, as a student of music, I feel
I would like to hear and learn from both
the conventional and new formats of
presentation.
Popular Indian cinema is famously a
‘musical’ genre, and folk’s near-eclipse
has to do with how it saturated the
whole space Did it create a new
aes-thetic that was too ‘smooth’ and ‘thin’?
I would not lay the blame solely on
Bollywood It has mass appeal that
cur-rently extends beyond India to other
parts of the world and it comes from its
ability to do aggressive marketing But
blaming Bollywood for the eclipse of folk
music is as unfair and unreasonable as a
recent malicious article in a publication
that blamed the eclipse of musicians on
the many concert opportunities that a
popular young star of Hindustani
classi-cal music is able to secure through what
is perceived as her marketing talent and
not musical merit If a singer gets a large
number of concert opportunities, what
is he/she supposed to say to organisers
who approach them with more
invita-tions? No no, please call other artistes
and not me, because I have too many
concert opportunities?
Bollywood has the money and mass
appeal to buy media space in every
for-mat available to us today And the media
too must accept some part of the blame
When was the last time you read or saw
a cover or lead story on a folk artiste? We
are all to blame as a society, which is
insensitive to its many art forms
Film music often filters the ‘coarse’
sound of folk for the public, all the
while cannibalising on it for melody
and other musical resources
In recent times, some of the biggest hits
in Indian film music have been the
raunchy, item numbers that borrow
dia-lect, rhythm and often entire
composi-tions from folk music No one has had a
problem accepting them On the
con-trary, people, young, old, children, all
take great delight in these numbers with
little thought for context and content.
The ‘Golden Age’ of film music also
coincided with the dawn of the
new Republic Singers like Lata
Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi
have been called the ‘voices of the Five-Year Plan’ Would you agree that part of their popularity stems from how they embodied the new ideals…
Lata as a kind of pure, virginal ninity and Rafi as the ‘new man’, both cleansed of the old ‘impurities’? The sexually aware, melancholic, mature voice of thumri, for instance?
femi-I would say that their popularity truly rests on their indisputable mastery over their art and their ability to bec-ome the singing/playback voices of an absolutely amazing range of on-screen characters Lata ji has been the play-back voice of actors of all ages from child actors to young heroines to dowager matrons The expressive range is also enormous and so convinc-ing that she remains the gold standard for all playback singers even today
Similarly, Rafi sahab could sing for act ors as diverse as Shammi Kapoor in
Junglee and a melancholic Dev Anand
as he sings “Kya se kya ho gaya,
bewa-faa tere pyaar mein” The very nature
of playback demands this ability to be
a singing chameleon of sorts Therefore despite the quintessentially pristine quality of Lata ji’s bell like voice, it cannot be cast in any one mould Neither could Rafi Sahab’s I am unable
to agree with Sanjay Srivastav’a sis of Lata ji’s voice in an article tit-
analy-led Voice, Gender and Space in Time
of Five-Year Plans: The Idea of Lata Mangeshkar.
The rupture between folk/classical and the cinema aesthetic has to do, centrally, with voice cultures As a practitioner, you almost consciously exemplify an older tradition: open-throated singing, coming from open spaces, the fields, the valley… Are you reacting against a kind of tyranny of the ‘golden voice’?
No, not at all Reacting against the gested tyranny would mean a conscious, cultivated decision on my part to sound different The truth is that even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have sung in that
sug-‘golden voice’ simply because I don’t have a ‘golden voice’ I just have a Shubha Mudgal voice which, with its inevitable limitations and strengths, was nurtured and developed by my gurus and which I keep examining and working on as I continue to study To be honest, the tra-dition of Hindustani music gives stu-dents the freedom to find their own voice, which is why in every generation
of vocalists, there have been voices with such diverse timbres and textures, such diverse aural personalities. What I have reacted against are the hierarchies and caste systems that exist in the arts, where classical arts are often considered superior as opposed to the folk and popular arts
This is a bit out of context, but I find it interesting that you say I exemplify an older tradition Not so long ago, maybe
just over two decades back, Outlook
re-used my photograph, shot by Gauri Gill initially for a feature on me, without
my permission, for a special pull-out ad campaign for a travel company I don’t remember the exact copy that was used with the photograph but it was to the following effect: “Want to do your own thing and tradition be damned? Shubha Mudgal did it, so can you.”
I sent the magazine and then editor
Mr Vinod Mehta a legal notice and rec eived a response which said it
“When was the last time you read or saw
a cover story on a folk artiste? We, as a society, are to blame for being insensitive
to art forms.”
Trang 4040 OUTLOOK 4 February 2019
was meant as a compliment as I was
exemplified as someone with an
unor-thodox approach.
But obviously perceptions do change!
While the landscape of Indian
music changed in the 1950s in a
way similar to what happened to
dance with its nationalist
redesign-ing—the earthier, more sensuous
styles being pushed to the margins
in service of the aspirational,
re-vamped ideal—how do we rescue
‘folk’ from the image trap it is in
now, as just exoticised specimens
of a ‘diverse India’?
I think we would need a multi-pronged
approach to do so And any discussion
on how to go about achieving this
should involve the principal
stake-holders themselves, leaders from
among folk musicians We need their
direction instead of constituting
exp-ert committees that only include
bur-eaucrats, classical musicians and
culture czars and czarinas, however
knowledgeable they may be.
Also, the support offered should not
only be performance based It should
also add ress welfare schemes such as
health insurance, insurance for
musi-cal instruments, taxation etc Today,
the film industry with its organised
unions can approach the finance
min-ister for bringing down GST rates on
cinema tickets There is no collective
of folk musicians or, for that matter,
classical musicians, that can approach
the government for solutions, unless
they find a mouthpiece with clout in
high circles.
Did AIR and the music
establish-ment in general—governestablish-ment or
ind ustry—consciously facilitate the
upliftment of certain categories of
Indian music over others?
Initially, AIR certainly promoted
classical music more than other forms,
even though its regular programming
inc luded folk music, geet, ghazal,
bhakti sangeet etc But credit must
also be given to them for treating all
forms with equality Exponents of all
forms of music had to audition, were
graded, and based on the grade
awarded to them, they rec eived a
broadcasting fee An A grade classical
artiste would therefore receive the
same broadcasting fee as an A grade
folk artiste This remains a
praisewor-thy aspect of AIR policy.
In general, decisions taken by the government and its agencies are influ-enced by the party in power and its political agenda For example, if the North Eastern states are to be wooed
by the government of the day, in the sphere of art and culture, some fund-ing for the arts may be sanctioned
Otherwise, no clear policy is arti- culated by the government with regard
to music.
Would you say the earthier, brally richer styles are ultimately impossible to abolish? You see them filtering back into the main-stream in one guise or the other—
tim-the ersatz ‘folk’ singer of film, a qawwal like Nusrat
Indian film music may include folk mus icians or Qawwals or classical musicians in the occasional track as a novelty But other than that, I do not foresee a more mainstream role for these genres.
It is only when audiences/listeners/consumers ask for more variety and are ready to put their paying power to test that a change may occur For example,
if a radio channel for folk music were to
be started by some intrepid soul, would subscribers even pay a nominal, rock bottom subscription for it?
Does the converse also happen? Would you agree the pop/cinema aesthetic has infected classical and folk? Perhaps in the kind of voices
we see now in classical, as opposed to the days of, say, a Krishnarao Shankar Pandit or an MDR? Or in the eruption of cheap studio versions in the case of the latter?
The use of amplification for live certs as well as recording is largely res ponsible for the change in voice projection in classical music Earlier, singers had to project their voices without microphones to reach every-one in their audience whereas now all concerts are amplified In fact, many are amplified at ear-shatter- ing decibels.
con-The short duration format of film songs has also influenced some classi-cal musicians who believe that dis-carding the crucial element of detailed elaboration of and composition and presenting classical compositions/bandish with backing instruments like drums and guitars will be more attrac-tive to listeners So we are seeing many such renditions O
“If a radio channel for folk music was started by some intrepid soul, would people even pay a nominal subscription for it?”
THE CULTURAL
REPUBLIC MUSIC/INTERVIEW
TIME AND SOUND Folk musicians in Bombay, 19th century