The Middle Class Dream

Oh so that's a scholarship, said he

over menthol and black coffee

why not work in a

law firm, or try that exam

for foreign services, and send money

for marble on the mosque floor

What's an investment bank, a good deal-maker

Some securities and shares, for a money manager

traveling between glass-covered towers

be a Hajj, the alms-giver, the neighborhood preacher

Be a management expert, an entrepreneurship teacher,

wear a tie and a shirt, those

speakers in a hall of

covered heads, cloaks of modesty draped over

Write words of god over 

a Friday prayer's  coin box, or better, in

sacred, PIN-code protected donations

You can do Google and Microsoft internships, right? I swear

I fasted for thirty days straight,

said he, not a sip of water when the sun

bakes the air-conditioned cushions behind

dark film windows, it's a Honda City sedan

good for commuting and yearly pilgrimages

This app, gives you

God's great name in stereo

five times a day and finds

where Mecca is, in dark and

in fluorescent brightness

Finance, banking, I hope, said he

so that I can build

a mosque and an orphanage

while my mother sleeps well, thinking

of a savings, in a Syari'ah bank, God-stamped

enough for lifetimes of seeing Medina again and again

Be a doctor,

lawyer engineer and executive

give the father of a girl with a good name,

a prayer mat and gold, and say

I will take care of your daughter,

and raise children with good names

I promise

I won't tell them that their

son-in-law listened to

songs about pot and

had really long hair before

Family recipies

Tales of sick, forgetful great aunts

and of long-gone grandfathers

Praises for oily, glistening dishes

and for perfumed bouquets of six flowers

Cousins astray, with errant boyfriends

and sisters gossiping, ringing phones

Blocks of steamed rice, piled up in chunks

for uncles who are masters of cooks

Orange, sweet concoctions in polka dot cups

for nieces running with flowery skirts

Repeat, rituals, buried under mellifluous talks

faded effigies of smiling kins 

Kahiteri - This Thing

Kahiteri is such a versatile Marathi word - its ambiguity allows it to be used to refer to anything, from the sacred to the profane. And it is also used to introduce a certain neutrality to your noun, such that, even more controversial topics, such as the Ramayana, to not be immediately categorized as a kavya, a "poetry," which, in the popular mind, denotes fiction, or as itihasa, which, among the masses, denotes history with the duty of delivering the hard truth about the world. I wish I could use kahiteri  all throughout my writing, especially when it comes to this dilemma:

“Do you think that the Ramayana, is an epic, or is it history?”

Such seemingly innocuous questions kept coming during my two months in Pune, during which Kiski Kahani has introduced me to the tens and hundreds of Ramayanas. Almost all of these retellings are imbued with a talent to straddle themselves comfortably between “history” and “imagination,” and between “religion” and “literature.” I've listened to people who were enormously happy with how the American animation Sita Sings the Blues brings the Ramayana to a whole new audience, and I've heard been warned that I should be cautious when a copy of the Ramcharitmanas does not come from a certain publisher. I've been taught that Rama is the maryada purushottam, the “ideal man,” and I've been told that Ram-bhakti might not be the best option for those who want their lives to be somewhat less tragic. On the surface, all of these contradict each other, yet somehow the Ramayana fits effortlessly in the everyday language that even modern,urban Indians use. In between chai and bun-maska, “a woman can make a man a Rama or a Ravana,” said one young IT professional to me. In the midst of the 2G scandals, the Supreme Court says to the Indian government that it has “to cross the Lakshman rekha” to make some headway in its investigation. So, as an to answer to this riddle, I would say that the Ramayana is part of history; it is a way of experiencing the Indian way of life through a certain set of idioms.

Kiski Kahani demonstrated that to experience the Ramayana is to go beyond critically edited, meticulously proofread, leather-bound volumes in cataloged libraries. People who attended the theater and writing workshops are already familiar with versions of the epic and the never-ending cast of characters even before the first mention of Rama and Sita. Even at a modest Marathi-medium school in the outer fringes of Pune, Manthara, Ravana, Bakasura, and Sakuni appeared in a short, impromptu play without creating a written script. In fact, a new rakshasa by the funny name of Yakku was comfortably sneaked in on the last day. “I have caused so many people to cry... but now I am crying myself. Look at what I have done!,” says Yakku to the group of conventional antagonists, jumbled up from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. This is one piece of history that keeps itself alive through an endless flow of new stories.

The “Unraveling the Divine” lectured featured, among others, Philip Lutgendorf, an American scholar who talked about his research on Hanuman's presence in Indian popular culture. Nonetheless, it was the audience members, who knew the Ramayana so well, who came up with fascinating questions: “Isn't the vanara army a group of people who have the monkey as their totem, instead of being monkeys themselves?” and even “Have you ever heard this theory about Rama being related to the Egyptian archer-god Ra?” It's the experience of having heard the Ramayana so many times before, from so many different sources, that keeps each person's memory of Ramayana stories inimitable.

Therefore, nobody ever knows the “entire Ramayana,” and each time I mentioned the Ramayana to a different person, new stories came up. From a Maharashtrian, I heard the story of how Ganesha deceived Ravana by dropping his hard-earned shivalingam to the ground, hence saving the world by preventing the demon king from attaining invincibility. From an animal lover, I heard the story of Rama giving squirrels their characteristic stripes through a tender touch after their heroic attempt in carrying small stones to the bridge. When they talk about the Ramayana, people write their own histories, way beyond the tales of Rama, Sita, and Ravana.

Those who grew up in the middle of these stories connect their own experiences with the rich tropes of metaphors in the Ramayana. The ever-growing collection of Ramayana stories now includes memories of how everybody was so teary-eyed during the 10 AM screening of Ramanand Sagar's episodes in the late 1980s, and stories about how somebody's uncle still chants from an old copy of the Ramcharitmanas every day. What makes this an exciting project is that it never gets the feeling of being “completely done,” since, as a text always in the midst of being retold, the Ramayana is happening right now, and it is never finished.   

Hanuman is so Popular!

Last week, there was a talk about the popularity of Hanuman* across India, and an academic, who hails from a major American university, shows the audience a slideshow of pictures of the monkey-god in full-color, all leaping and mid-motion as he reaches towards the sky. In most stories, Hanuman jumped to grab the sun when he was a baby, and, later, he jumped across the sea to reach Lanka, where the abducted Sita is kept in captivity. The academic, who hails from a background of study in Hindi literature, has written a book that argues against dismissing the worship of Hanuman as a minor cult, due to the lack of canonical texts dedicated to him, and tries to show that the meaning of Hanuman as a “liminal” deity plays a major role in his popularity, shown by the number of shrines and temples dedicated to him throughout the nation. The hall, a slowly crumbling structure from the 1970s located in the old Pune neighborhood of Sadhasiv Peth, normally hosts Indian classical music concerts and official functions for a heavily Marathi-speaking local audience. 

The event, hold in English and attended by a very multilingual group consisting of Pune's cosmopolitan, young student population, and the “intellectual” clique, was a slight anomaly in the space. These audience members, proceeded to ask questions, but these questions were not about about how Hanuman became popular, but rather about how storytelling about Hanuman's supernatural feats are facing severe competition from “Western superheroes” in mass publications. The academic jokingly replied, “That's why. I'm here to tell you about the great stories about the Ramayana and the Mahabharata!”

The irony, however, is that the Indian audience already knew about the epics.** A young man, however, said that, “it's not a talk for an Indian audience. We already knew all that.” During a cigarette break outside of the building he mentions that the talk “was more for a Western audience.” 

Telling the epics as an artistic genre, therefore, in spite of assuming certain common elements that enables an Indian audience to recognize a Ramayana or a Mahabharata in them, requires a certain newness in it order to capture the mind of an Indian audience. As Romila Thapar suggests, the epics are not attached to “any singular historical moment.” In other words, the epics are not timeless. Most likely, a copy of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata is not ontologically possible, it is always a retelling. Each reproduction of the epic narrative carries the vernacularities of its own time and space. 

* Hanuman is a simian god who, in most Ramayana stories, performed miraculous feats in order to help Rama, the "protagonist," defeat the demon-king Ravana.

**Note: by no means I am arguing against the merits of the said academic's work. It is, in my opinion, a wonderful piece of scholarship. These are simply my thoughts on the audience's response after the talk.  

 

Doing Anthropological Fieldwork

“Good” fieldwork doesn't start until the first half of your fieldwork ends, regardless of whether it is a fieldwork of two months or two years. It's like discovering the inner beauty of something (or perhaps of someone?) after a teary-eyed start.  

Doing Theatre with Secondary School Teachers

Last weekend I went for a theater workshop with Open Space, a Pune-based NGO in the arts, to attend, photograph, and be a small part of a session with teachers at a Marathi-medium school. This means that all the subjects are delivered in Marathi, a regional language of the state of Maharashtra in India, in addition to supplementary subjects in Hindi, the national language, and English.

There was a lot of talk about how Sita, the heroine (if I may say so!) of the Ramayana, is a very complex character, and that the Rakshasa, the demons, are not just figures but rather tendencies in human nature itself. Well, I only followed half of the discussion since most of it was in Marathi, but it was nice to see how these stories are debated and discussed. 

For one of the sessions, Dipalle, the instructor, told us to follow a partner's hands from a short distance across the room, and, for ten minutes, I was following the hands of one teacher, who spoke to me in Hindi, which I don't speak, and with me replying in broken Marathi. That was probably one of my more successful attempts at awakening my own theatrical rakshasa! 

A Play that Plays With Language

In a place that has multiple languages and multiple uses and names for language, one Pune-based group by the name of OQ Works has decided to translate a well-known Marathi play, Vijay Tendulkar's Kamala (1981), into English. Does this signify how a regional issue is still relevant to what is debated and discussed among the educated, internationally connected audience of Pune's English media?

Tendulkar wrote prolifically in Marathi since the 1950s, often reaching issues that were taboo and off the chart at his time, such as women's rights and domestic conflicts. In Kamala, the journalist Jaisingh Jadhav bought Kamala a tribal woman from a market in a remote village in Bihar for 250 rupees and held a press conference for her in Delhi, thus attracting massive controversies that eventually compromised his career. Kamala, nonetheless, is not entirely about the public sphere. Jaisingh's wife, Sarita, discovered that her life mirrors that of Kamala, unable to voice her own opinion and is confined to the realms of her house as a housewife...

Even now many upper-class, educated mothers in both developed and developing countries are sacrificing their professional ambitions to raise a family, and the fact that such thoughts are spoken in English reminds us that it is not only a question relevant for those in the local, Marathi-speaking sphere. In many places, perhaps, mothers are waiting for their husbands and sons to return from far-flung travels, while waiting for chances to engage the world outside of their own house and neighborhood themselves.

Maybe, to provide an alternative ending or even at least to provide a lens into unforeseen disaster, Sarita should have held a press conference about her confined life instead as she had once aspired in a dialogue with her uncle....

Ramayana and ramaya.na

If you have a Google Chrome browser and are willing to read Indonesian, ramaya.na gives you Valmiki's retelling of the epic through what seems like a programmer who chose a new career as a dalang, a shadow-puppet master. Through chat windows and 3D backgrounds, Rama, a king with divine virtues, fights the ten-headed demon Ravana to rescue his wife, Sita, from captivity.

Whether this is an entertaining story for kids or a chance to perform a darshan ("seeing") with the divine depends on the reader, but this is an opportunity to revisit a cross-cultural and cross-religious epic that refuses to settle in any single medium. After TV series and comic books, what else could be more fitting than an animated, multi-directional web narrative? Despite of its trimmings, its reductions, and the stiff, linear GoogleChat dialogues, Google's Indonesian Ramayana is an accessible collection of stories to visit and revisit, with each chapter providing a colorful diversion on its own, especially for those who have known the story before.

Here is a serendipitous beginning for my journey in listening to the epics in their many incarnations, and as A.K. Ramanujan once said, "No one ever reads the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the first time." I will write to you all again soon, most likely from the heart of the Deccan highlands in Pune, or perhaps just a couple of hundred meters away from 15-minute internet station here at the Singapore Airport.