Other Country , livre ebook

Mrinal Pande
The Other Country
Dispatches From the Mofussil
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
MOTHER TONGUES AND THE MEDIA
Rethinking Relaunches
A Flood of Images
Blogspotting in Hindi
Can Pinky Still Smile?
Chronicle of a Suicide Foretold
Euclid versus the Media Manager
News, in Search of a Medium
Night Thoughts of an Insomniac Media Watcher
Perchance to Find My Tongue
Save Hindi from Its Self-appointed Guardians
The Life and Death of Hindi Pulp Fiction
The Strange Case of India s Official Languages
Writing in the Age of Best Sellers
Is There Life after Vernacular Journalism?
WOMEN TODAY
Abortion, the Unmet Need
Arms and the Woman
Child Marriages in India, Some Questions
Rights in the Age of the Camera
In Which a Martian Marries a Tree, a Shrub and a Man
The Beastly Beatification of Brothels
The Tales Women Tell
The Barber of Indi Village
The Chak De! Girl from Haryana
The Strange Tale of Lakshmi
Nothing Odd about Maternal Mortality
Rediscovering Momma s Talent at the Workplace
Who Is Afraid of the Real Power Women?
Time to Reject the Man-made Myths of Women s Bodies
Busting the Myth of the Sacred Mother
Marriages in the Age of Women Scarcity
Alone in Ivory Towers
A Look at the Panchkanyas of our Times
Is the Shoe on the Other Foot for Real?
Durga in the Year of Meltdowns and Terror
Women Are Still Unhappy, in India and in Bharat
Even the Sutras Allowed Some Alcohol on Happy Occasions
SURVIVING THE ODDS
A Postcard from the Natal Home
Monkeys and Men, a Parable for Aesop
A Fistful of Rice
And Now, Paid Greetings from Your Friendly Neighbourhood Don
Barren Branches under Threat
Buddhi Ballabh s Buffalo, Another Fable for Aesop
Caste, in a New Mould
Cheating in Exams Facilitated Here
Eat, Drink, Repent, Regurgitate
English Dilli, Vernacular Dilli
Caste and Gotra Ungoogled
The Mysterious Ailments of Agra s Ambulances
One Hundred and Thirty-eight Benches for a Hospital
Policing the Dark Town
Beware of this Premature Prudence
Some Notes about a Nation at War with Itself
The Demographic Anorexia of Aamchi Mumbai
Their Farmers, Our Farmers
A Shortage of Priests
MUSINGS AND PROFILES
Ama on Marriage
In Praise of Shamans, the Poets of Pain
Midday Meals, Welfare by Rote, not Reason
An Ode to Dashrath Manjhi
Begum Akhtar
Gangu Bai Hangal
Elect a Better Education System
Dipali Nag
The Land of La Tamancha
No Future in Eastern UP
The Mineral Water Baba
Lucknow s Stone Gardens
The Great Indian Leveller
The Ooh of Classical Music
The Facebook Hauntings
Babba
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
Introduction

Small towns and villages in India, considered perennially dramatic and suffering centres of a poor, developing country in Asia, are now rewriting many narratives of success in the twenty-first century. But how far can they, as they hurtle towards the neon-lit expanse of a Westernised economy, identify with a culture that has come in from the cold, even in the sense that places like Latvia, Romania or Serbia do? Good question. The known Indian culture has always harboured within itself numerous unknown but clearly and irreducibly identifiable cultures, each drawing its unique strength from its vernacular and dialects. The populous Hindi-speaking belt in the north is a good example of how each little culture will absorb the outside culture, localize its form and ideas and create a unique hybrid. The Hindi-speaking area comprises no less than eleven states of India and its richly layered culture has thrived on multiple variations of Hindi that constantly borrows words and phrases from its neighbours: in the north among the pahadis living in the central Himalayan states, people from Himachal will use a Hindi laced with Punjabi Urdu, but next door, in the state of Uttarakhand, Hindi nestles closer to the Nepali-spoken across the Kali river-Brij and Awadhi dialects from the plains. Those who live in the western areas speak a version of Hindi known as Kauravi (a dialect associated with the warrior clan of the Kauravas in Mahabharat) in areas close to Haryana, but areas near Agra and Delhi use a sophisticated Urdu-laced variant known as Khadi Boli. The Hindi spoken by those from the eastern parts leans towards the musical Bhojpuri but as one moves further east, it gets heavily interspersed with classical Sanskrit in the region around the scholarly towns of Varanasi and Patna.
For centuries ancient Indian cities like Varanasi in the east, Kanchi and Kochi in the south, cradles of the great Aryan and Dravidian cultures and renowned seats for learning, have tried hard to assimilate and easternize cultures that began streaming in through the Khyber Pass in the north and a few centuries later, through India s western coast through merchant ships and missionaries. Western culture continues to pour down from the skies through dish and cable, and through bourses and BPO centres that never sleep. But it is not just the sight of a Central Asia laid waste in the name of democratization that makes the Western winds seem so alien and threatening to most Indians. India s popular vernaculars, which over 90 per cent of the citizens still use for communication, have also always stood as an opaque glass wall between India and the West. It is an interesting term, vernacular . From the Latin root Vernac it denotes a language of slaves who have had a long association with the master race over many generations and who can double up as interpreters for the masters should they wish to communicate with new slaves.
Outside the borders of the Indian subcontinent, practically everything known about India today is based on information gleaned at second hand after knowledge has been filtered through many vernaculars and then rendered into a European language. Indian history has been known largely through the works of Indologists, mostly of British or German (and lately American) origin and Indian writing largely means Indo-Anglian writers. The works of writers such as Subramanya Bharathi, U.S. Ananthamurthy, Munshi Premchand, Amrita Pritam, Saadat Hasan Manto or Mahasweta Debi, when they are discussed in international book fairs and litfests, are discussed clinically without an intimate knowledge of their lives and times, their friends, the addas they regularly attended, their historic love-hate relationships with contemporary fellow writers, editors and publishers, their actual literary sources and their mostly uncared for families who sacrificed so much to keep the usually self-absorbed genius alive.
Brilliant speculations have been similarly advanced about Indian intellectuals brush with political censorship during the days of India s freedom struggle, or later during the Emergency years, or even the great flowering of India s media in the twenty-first century, without any reference to the rise of vernacular newspapers like Dainik Jagran , Dainik Bhaskar , Eenadu or Malayala Manorama and writers like Madan Mohan Malviya, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Durga Bhagwat who have led it from the front, and how! The great Bollywood saga has swept over and drawn praise from the entire world, but available writings and conversations of those who made it possible, from Dadasaheb Phalke to Shailendra, V. Shantaram, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Sahir Ludhianvi and Jan Nissar Akhtar, have not been translated because they speak of films that are largely unknown in the West.
The articles in this volume have taken shape through my experiences as a Hindi writer and journalist who grew up in various small towns in Uttar Pradesh-including what is now Uttarakhand-studied in various government-run schools that taught in the Hindi medium. My own background, and later my travels as a journalist, have made me realize that the changing face of India s villages and small towns needs closer scrutiny. Cross-pollination of cultures does not occur in a vacuum. The already existing culture is a strong determinant of the features of the hybrid that is the final results. Cultural trends that come in from the outside will mutate differently in each little cultural zone in India and often the little guy s outlook, so markedly different from the big man s, may come to rule national tastes. In Bollywood the recent rise of Bhojpuri films and the great success of Mumbai masala films like Ishqiya , Omkara , Dabangg or Peepli Live based on the dialects and cultural quirks of small towns in Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh underscore this.
Actually, most of what we in India call the mainstream media is not actually breaking new ground but often just looking over its shoulder and eyeing the obvious benefits to be accrued by communicating in an internationally accepted language. But, access to India s largest markets is currently available only to the vernacular communicators of Little India. The India that communicates in dialects and whose official language gets invariably tinged by the local cultural practices. Markets of this India offer a perspective and culture that is completely at odds with the newly-branded image of India as a fast-growing modern economy with a large, upwardly mobile, English-speaking middle class. Actually, India s fabled middle class cuts through the rural and urban divides and converses in multiple Indian languages increasingly laced with English words. The number of English-speaking households is small but they are important as they do have an aspirational value for the rest. This group insists on sending its children to English-medium schools, shelling out enormous amounts of money for schools with brand value . This group is preyed upon freely by fashion designers, makers of beauty products and planners of lavish weddings and theme parties. Towns like Ranchi in Jharkhand and Kota in Rajasthan have coaching classes to help children from these upwardly mobile local families clear entrance tests for the Indian Institutes of Te