Aimless Musings

It just occurred to me that earlier this year, I completed 25 years of living outside of India, eight or so in the Middle East and seventeen in Canada. Almost every year I have gone back to India, sometimes to spend a few days, and, sometimes a few weeks. The experience has always left me wanting to go back again, wanting more, almost, like meeting a woman one is in love with…’age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety’ are the words that come to mind…

It is an exercise in simplicity to say that India has changed. Of course, everything sounds more costly than it was in the days I lived there. I still remember eating a Masala Dosa for thirty seven paise at Rama Nayak’s at Kings Circle. (That should give the reader an idea of how old I am) Today, the same masala dosa perhaps costs twenty rupees. However, that is inflation and I am sure Torontonians can talk of similar things. What occurs to me is that the way of life I grew up in the ‘60s is changing…and, more often than not, I am not missing it…what I am just trying to say is that a more fundamental, deeper change is occuring than what is happenning to the price of masala dosa...and yet some things will perhaps never change…

Having said this, I must make one caveat…I know of only the urban centres today…the heart and the bulk of India is in its middle towns and villages…and my current lack of immunity to e-coli and other bacteria that come as dressing on food in those places has not permitted me to explore much in rural and small town India.

If I were to go back in my mind’s eye and think of the first real change that I noticed after leaving India in 1984, it was the emergence of the little PCOs (Public Call Offices) in the ‘80s. One of the challenges I faced for a major part of my working life in India was to get a residential phone connection. I was the Personnel Manager of a large Indian corporation, and, the company was willing to do anything to get me a residential phone connection…but, no luck. Starting from the ‘80s I began to realize how easy (relatively) it was becoming to connect to the outside world. I remember the days when I would want to connect back to HO, from say Gauhati (now Guwahati) and the operator would put through a ‘demand call’ through the exchange at nine times the regular rate. The arrival of the PCOs in the ‘eighties, as I look back, was the first sign that the way of life I had grown up with, was changing…almost like what Thomas Friedman says the fax machine did to life in Eastern Europe…

The PCO network has grown and stabilized itself over the years in India, and, today everyone has a cell phone. Drivers have cell phones with only incoming calls allowed so that their ‘masters’ can call them to the front of the five star hotel where they (the masters) have been partying. And yes, everyone talks of how boys and girls are SMS-ing coochie coo messages, and, what is happening to Indian moral values…. However, as we will see with all the social revolution that the cell phone is ushering in, somethings never change...

One of the social evils in India (and in several other societies) has been the abuse of women by their husbands demanding money for liquor…on a recent visit to India, I found that the house help woman did not have her cell phone…when we inquired she sheepishly confessed that her man had made a noise demanding money for liquor and since she had no money she had pawned her cell phone to ward off the beast…somethings never change, eh ? In stories written during Prohibition days, it was the woman’s jewellery that she pawned to pay her husband’s liquor bills, now cell phones…

But that was an aside…a serious one, nevertheless, a reminder to my friends who say that with the arrival of Kit Kat things in India have changed…PS pls check with the servant woman referenced above before making that statement…

Which brought to my mind, yesterday’s news item about the death of Gangubai Hangal. Gangubai was one of the foremost Hindustani music singers. It is not about the quality of her music that I would like to comment. It is about the system she was born into and grew up in…the system of patronage (known in some instances as the Devadassi system) under which some of the best known female artists of the Carnatic and Hindustani music scene grew up and ‘flourished’ (is flourished the correct word ?)

Art and artists have always needed a patron…and patrons demand a price for their support, and, that was the origin of the system…some of the stories that Gangubai has talked of portray the twilight zone that this operates in…and the clutches of the strict caste hierarchy..

Her ‘father’ was a Brahmin, though he and her mother never married…as a child she would go stealing mangoes in the Brahmin areas of the city…the inhabitants were not so much concerned with the mangoes being stolen as their being stolen by a girl whose Brahmin paternity had not been sanctified through marriage…

Another very touching reflection that Gangubai talks of…brings tears to my eyes as I write this…she was called to sing at a session of the Congress Party which Gandhi was attending…after singing, her biggest worry was that indeterminate paternity and subsequent caste affiliation might decree that she could not eat with the others…luckily she says that was not the case…and she wept when she was asked to sit and eat along with everyone else…

There is a very curious dichotomy to all this…some of the best music and dance grew under this system…the association with the Devadassi system made it impossible for girls to study Bharata Natyam till Rukmini Devi, a Brahmin woman who married an Englishman, brought it out of the twilight zone…interestingly, to make it ‘safe’ Rukmini Devi downplayed the ‘sringara’ (erotic) element of Bharata Natyam…Balasaraswathi, a renowned dancer, and, herself a product of the Devadassi system is quoted by TJS George as saying, “let this Brahmin women do what she is good at, and, leave dancing and sringara to us who are good at it…”

As a system of sexual and economic exploitation there is no justification for the Devadassi system, notwithstanding the fact that some relationships, like that of Gangubai and Gururaj Kaulgi grew to be based on mutual respect, and, that at one time Gangubai was his ‘patron’ and not the other way around…

The question I am raising is: We can think of several such exploitative situations all over the world…is anything changing in terms of human relationships ? Or, is the exploitation of the Devadassi just being replaced by that of the starlet by the producer ?