Invisible Immigrations, Furtive Bleedings

Next morning, over coffee I asked Rohan whether he wanted to hotfoot it to Bombay straightaway, or rather stay the night at his house in Kolad which we would pass, about 100 kilometres outside the metro. An exhausting ride the day before was the reason I asked. I felt a little small, because while I benefited from his energy, I rarely contributed to it.

Rohan was a new man, though. The proximity to home had returned his soul to his body. Besides he had already done the route we were to take several times. He had been posted at the Enron complex in Dabhol in Ratnagiri, as part of the workforce from Voltas, the company where he worked, for several months. Voltas had the contract to maintain Enron’s air conditioning system, and my friend had been a supervisor in the Voltas team.

There are some ghats along the way. It would be a fun ride. We should be home by late evening, he said. The highway that had literally been clasped in an embrace with the coast since Mangalore, now got into the hinterland. The road from Kudal did not offer the view of the sea that we had intermittently seen, at other times sensed, from the road after Kundapura.

But this terrain was home to Rohan. His parents were from the Konkan. And part of that great migration of Maharashtrian youth to Bombay, the city of opportunities, jobs, and money. Konkan constantly fed Bombay’s textile mills first, and then all the other fissures in its expanding economics, with often under-educated youngsters from this region. One of the reasons was that farming was difficult in the region.

The region, approximately 330 miles from the Daman Ganga in South Gujarat that cuts through Vapi, my hometown, and the Terekhol river between Maharashtra and Goa is what is known as the Konkan region. The Konkan shelf is between 28 and 47 miles in wide.

The topography of this coastline mostly in the state of Maharashtra, is narrow and broken with several creeks and inlets. This favors the growth of a number of littoral ports, which are naturally protected. This is one of the few areas of the seaboards of India that is sheltered from the sea. You often find the sea foaming ferociously below the rocky and steep precipice that rises directly from the sea. It is so rocky, that the cultivable land and the soil there does not retain water, making farming difficult. Yet it is also a fertile land, and home to the world famous Alphonso mango.

The littoral ports along the Konkan were once busy. At one time or the other major colonialists controlled some of these ports that the locals who stay there may not now know. For example sleepy beach towns, mostly populated with village and fisher folk, were once under influence of the colonialists. Vengurla, for instance, once had Dutch businesses, Malvan was controlled by the English, and there were French and English factories in Rajapur. Bombay’s meteoric growth eclipsed these smaller towns.

After we left our Kudal hotel, we were in what was Rajapur. Rajapur is not really a town anybody but the locals can place. That is because there is no major administrative unit called Rajapur. Actually Rajapur’s remotest resonance nationally was during the general elections. And that too for reasons of quiz show trivia than anything else. A professor of Physics, and a socialist by belief, won from Rajapur in 1984 with the highest margin in the Indian General elections that year. The reason why this particular statistic is important is because Congress Supremo, Indira Gandhi,was assassinated that year. And in the aftermath of the assassination, Indian votes were virtually a deluge in what is called a "sympathy wave" for the Congress.

Rajapur, a Parliamentary constituency, has a fascinating electoral history that mirrors the nature and character of the Konkan region and its people. They have a marked tendency to be extreme. Since Independence, Rajapur itself, for example, returned socialists to the Indian Parliament. A known socialist bastion, it briefly fell to the Congress in 1991, the year the death of Rajiv Gandhi once again swept Congress to power, as the head of a coalition. The Congress won that one election, and then the Rajapur once again moved to the other extreme. Throughout the nineties, barring the very first in 1991, Rajapur moved lock stock and barrel to the Shiv Sena. The nineties saw general elections in 1996, 1998 and again in 1999. The last election in 2004 also saw Rajapur returning the Shiv Sena to the Parliament.

It is almost as if the Konkan hates ambiguities, not only hates it, it publicly and privately denounces anything uncertain, tentative, and unformed. It is unforgiving of uncertainty. They treated uncertainty as a kind of deformity like the ancient Spartans. The land and the people prefer character and commitment to inclination and attitude. In that, its nature is very close to the starkness of the land; sandy beaches, a few feet to several meters broad, run gobsmack straight into black brown rocks. This is also a land that is called Parashuram bhoomi, after one of Hindu mythology’s most fascinating characters. Parashurama was born a Brahmin, but becomes so militant that he vows to finish of all Kshatriyas; the warrior class. The gods step in before he extinguishes the entire warrior class, keeping them alive for a lead role in the caste politics of twentieth century India.

Parashurama embodies the extremities of personality more concretely than any other character in Hindu mythology. From a saatvic Brahmin, meaning the traditional idea of a Brahmin; soft, not given to excesses, and above all in such control of his senses as to be incapable of violence in any form; the kind of temperament that is suited to pursuit of knowledge, physical, spiritual and above all transcendental. From being a saatvic Rama he becomes a Parashurama, or the Rama of the axe, for parashu literally is axe in Sanskrit. The transformation is both dramatic and profound.

Our journey back to Bombay from Kudal did not excite the kind of curiosity the other places had done for Rohan, for he was familiar with the place. I too had transversed the Konkan districts of Maharashtra frequently enough for it to be familiar. There was little of the Konkan that would interest either of us for special attention that would bite into our tight timeline set to reach the city. And yet we were bound to that land by very strong alliances. Rohan was a child of the Konkan, transmogrified only by Bombay. I belong to the state at the end of the Parashuram bhoomi, the land where Parashurama’s axe landed in the Arabian Sea, Kerala. But there was another connection that I had to the region. My wife was from there, from Ratnagiri, the fount of a fascinating community that both dominated as well as reflected in them, the idea of the Konkan.

And it was in the district of Ratnagiri that we decided to first stop for a smoke break, and a minor stopover, lured by the famous Ratnagiri mangoes. By March end the mango trees of the Konkan were in their bridal finery. The mango bloom adorned small, almost demure but decidedly deep-rooted trees. The small bursts of white spray held bunched by the stem were an embarrassment of blooms that erupted profusely across the treetops. By April end and May it would be mango season. The world’s most preferred mangoes, the Alphonso mangoes, were native to this strip of land. When we were passing Ratnagiri, these trees, lined the national highway with the same nonchalant disregard for public opinion or civil authority as they crunched into private orchards and farms. In March Ratnagiri’s famed Alphonsos were an adolescent crop.

Rohan and I stopped our bike in the middle of the highway, next to a paddy field, and under a mango tree. After we finished our smoke, Rohan decided that we should carry some of the raw baby mangoes home. I told him that in Kerala we made a kind of oil-less pickle using kid mangoes with their stems on. Kadu manga is what it is called. The distinct sting in the pickle came from the practice of retaining the stem, which when separated from the fruit, let out an acidic white secretion that could burn the skin. I was talking from experience. As a child I have had the skin near my lips and mouth torn open by the inexplicable urge to bite into little raw mangoes before they were sufficiently cleansed of this acid.

Rohan got up from the grass, and moved to the edge of the road. He picked up a few choice stones, and started to hurl them at the trees. In no time we had collected enough baby mangoes for a pickle bottle each.

"Yaar, do you climb trees?" He asked.

"Yes. When I needed to, I have done it. Why?"

"I want to take our photograph on this tree."

"Theek hai, you climb up. I will take the picture."

He climbed to the first steady branch of the tree. Sat uncomfortably on it, and stared at the camera. I locked him into his camera.

Then he insisted I should get onto the tree too. I did.

"Can you give me a different pose? The picture will look the same otherwise."

I climbed further into the foliage, and found a less sturdy branch. In a moment of inspiration, I locked my legs on that branch and hung down, head and arms swinging.

"Arrey kya kar raha hai?" What are you doing? Rohan panicked.

"Tujhe different pose chahiye tha na. Now just click." I said, upside down. That was a small trick I had learnt as a child waiting for a 14-kilometre ride to my third school in Silvassa. The bus stop was a rectangular shed made of spherical iron beams, and just tall enough for a 6-year-old to hang upside down to kill time, and invite a scolding from civil citizens at times, or benevolent advice against the practice from others.

"We will have lunch at Chiplun. It is not too far now. Hold the camera till then. I will pack it into the bag at the restaurant."

He handed me the camera, I fastened the raw mango booty to the rope that tied up the baggage. He then darted off to take a leak. He moved into the brambles, when I had the bright idea of getting another good picture into the camera I would have to lug till Chiplun.

Presently we reached Chiplun. This place is not far from a village called Guhagad where there is an ancient Shiva temple. The custodians of the temple were the forefathers of my wife. Chiplun itself said to have been called by another name long back; Chitpol, which gave the name to a most remarkable community unheard of before 1700, but since then, have made extraordinary contributions to Indian history. This community in its relatively brief history gave India’s first pan-Indian Brahmin empire, some of the stalwarts of the Independence movement, social reform, jurisprudence. They were at the forefront of practically every progressive movement in British India, and yet their primary claim to fame was their famed brahminical conservativeness.

The Chitpavans or the Konkanastha Brahmins are a community connected directly to Ratnagiri district. Some of India’s most hallowed names in social reform and the Independence movement belong to this conservative community. Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, D K Karve, MG Ranade, men who led some of the most enduring social movements in the country before Independence. The list is practically unending. And every one of these hallowed personages paid their share for belonging to the conservative Chitpavan community. Ranade was forced to offer penances, Tilak was forced to visit Varanasi as penance, Karve was ostracized from the community for his brave attempt to encourage widow re-marriages, a practice frowned upon by the Hindu community. For all its progressive credentials this community has also another face to its personality; another side of the famed Parashurama kind of extreme schizophrenia; political terrorism.

In 1970 The Illustrated Weekly of India ran a cover story on the community written by a student of the weekly’s then editor Kushwant Singh. The author was Linda Cox, a 20-year old American student of Swathmore College, Pennsylvania, and was studying Marathi at Pune’s Deccan College. Here’s her take on the other side of the community’s pro-active instinct.

"But there was another side to the Chitpavan’s political activity: terrorism. The Chapekar Brothers formed the Society for the Removal of Obstacles to the Hindu Religion. One of the obstacles, apparently, was Plague Commissioner Rand, and on a June night in 1897 he was ‘removed’.
“Other conspiracies brewed, sometimes among students of Fergusson College, which had been established by such eminent Chitpavans as Tilak, V. S. Apte and Gokhale. Another pair of young brothers Vinayak and Ganesh Savarkar, planned with their friends ways of overthrowing the British. When Ganesh was convicted of writing inflammatory verse, in 1909, the District Magistrate of Nasik was murdered in revenge. Twenty-seven men were convicted as members of the conspiracy. Most of them were Chitpavans."
The Chitpavans retain the Konkan’s unforgiving and unforgettable nature till date; they head the list of some of the most extreme ideological positions in India’s political spectrum. Some of the most hallowed names in the Indian Communist movement and that of the RSS, bear Chitpavan surnames. They have been described as essentially extremists, and yet their history shows a great panache for pragmatism.

Interestingly, this fascinating and intriguing community too is considered to have their origins outside India. Some place their origin in Egypt, others in Greece. One strand of the immigration stories of Bene Israelis says that the Chitpavan Brahmins were a set of Jews that was separated from the main group when they washed up on the Konkan shores, and assimilated into Hinduism. The main reason for speculation about this community is their distinct racial features; fair skin, and light eyes.

While traveling up the Konkan coastline, Nagaraj’s parting shot outside Jassema refused to leave me. ""If my brother is mad, I do not throw him out of my house, do I?" It is what is called in American elections, "Asian Values." The love and dedication to the family. This is one of this country’s strengths, in fact the strength of the culture that binds India. The stress on the family. The inviolability of the family, the most holy individual unit of society.

In fact, this might also be one of the reasons the fight of the individual is that much more difficult in India. The cult of the family being all pervasive, the struggle of the individual is even more insurmountable. The Geeta voices this with a cold blooded, metrical severity, when Krishna tells Arjuna " For the benefit of the country, a region may be sacrificed. For the sake of a region, a village can be sacrificed. And for the sake of the village, an individual can be sacrificed."

It is why that much amusing term "arranged marriage" is not amusing in the country of its origin. Most marriages in India are still an alliance between families, where individuals’ vote is of no importance. This of course is changing. And at the speed of thought, too. But some of the ideas that govern thinking are still rooted in the idea of the supremacy of the family and the home, which, by default, becomes the background to a worldview. One often uses similes, metaphors, analogies and allusions to the family in one’s attempt to formulate one’s views and opinions. Not only opinions and views, often even mental struggles with ideas that are distasteful, or opposed to one’s own position, get embroiled in the vocabulary deeply connected and inextricably linked with the institution of the family. It is this that sometimes, like oneiric symbols, scatter across one’s speech to reveal the part of a personality unbeknownst to the speaker himself.

In Vapi, for example, I remember talking to two friends from the two extremes of the communal divide, Suresh and Zakir. The question I popped Nagaraj, was asked more seriously to these two. They both had already sewed up the answer much before anybody arrived at the question.

"All people are good. But it is best that they stay among themselves," Zakir had said.

"That is all. Each to each. There will be no trouble. Let Muslims stay where they do, among their own, live as they like, according to whatever rules that their community reveres, and legislates for them. And the same with the Hindus. There is no need to intermingle, except in social spheres for common interests. Schools. Festivals. Parliament." Suresh had almost continued from where Zakir left.

I have heard this argument, usually among those who do not engage with the polemics of secularism. Those not too taken in by the Buddha-like insistence on love winning over obstacles. About lesser suspicion, greater trust, creating and sustaining more inter-community bridges. These are also the people who are survivors of the catastrophes that the fault lines between the two communities spawn. So, in many ways it is the practical survivor’s solution to the problem. And its primary concern is cutting cost. In this case, the cost is about the most precious thing on earth; human lives.

This again is a solution spawned by the family ethos. Individual Indians of various religious and other sub-groups, interact in social spaces outside homes. If intimacy were to happen, then that interacting space is extended to our respective living rooms. That is it. The living room is the neutral no man’s land that allows intimacies between individuals of distinct faiths and different ethnicities to play out, at the edge of the family.

To me, this survivors’ short term practicality as long term policy smacks of an overdependence on the kind of the security a society seeped in the values flowing from the primacy of the family once took for granted. This security of "we are among people like us" is also by extension the security of the insularity of communities. And this policy, of dissuading, and if possible forcefully keeping the social segregation, thus maintains the status quo of society. This kind of social appeasement is akin to not fixing what is not fully broken. Indian society needs to get some things in place before a breakdown, and the status quo in this sphere will especially make the society a Churchillian appeaser. An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
This is a kind of collective social appeasement, as different from political appeasement that feeds the diatribes of political polemics, is a more equal enemy.

This insularity also has some illustrious and long history in the sub continent. This refusal to intermingle. The nationalist historians and other benign scholars call it lack of unity among the Indians. If at the beginning it was the fear of pollution that kept the differences of caste alive, the colonialist’s interests fed the insularity according to the European sensibility. Caste is bad, but division among the ruled is good. Now, in democratic India, the eruptions of riots between the majority and the largest minority seem to be brought under the similar ancient tradition of live and let live. The keeping alive of insularity to avoid confrontations that leads to carnage. It is considered the best, most practicable way out of the situation by a large section of moderate citizens. It is almost as if it is more practical to prefer an unjust peace.

The problem is that this worldview, despite the various costly knocks the country counts in its historical evolution, persists. It is however, another of the unquestioning belief in a tradition no more in tune with the organic changes of the Indian society. Twenty-first century India is very different.

Besides the immigrations of people and the concomitant intermingling that blunts, and sometimes erases old dividing lines, and over time, actually fills up the fault lines, there are new immigrations. The immigration of unseen, intangible forces. Like ideas. The osmosis that this engenders makes insularity almost impossible, if not wholly impracticable. It might be simplistic to imagine this as only an urban phenomenon. The myth of India being primarily rural, has itself gone to seed. The proponents of this benign insularity to avoid confrontation still feed their harangues on an India that was schoolbook geography in the seventies and much of the eighties. It cannot be the solution to the ills of a far more intricately wired and far too well connected India.

The idea of separating and compartmentalizing had its social uses, despite its obvious moral abuse, when societies served to enhance and consolidate the dominating ethos of the time, however repulsive they seem today. The servants’ quarters separated from the masters’ quarters. The dalits’ squalor outside the village precincts. The Hindu village and the Muslim village, far, separate, and impervious to each other. The replication of this obsolete compartmentalizing, this quarantining, is what magnifies the scale of riots in cities now. There it is called ghettoisation.

Unfortuntely, the ghetto is moving into the city. The city is bleeding into the ghetto. The tent is spreading over the Arab and his camel. Destinies are converging constantly and very swiftly in the globalised and globalizing world. The formula to keep peace might not be the insistence on armed neutrality of insular, autonomous communities. It needs to be blocs of divergent people with unified destinies. It is this bleeding of the outside world into a village that upholds its long held tradition of sati that scandalises the entire globe, because it gets reported globally.

This constant bleeding of previously pristine and independent worlds into each other underlines of the obsolescence of the old theory. The seed idea for a new policy, the very first atom of that process, might be in Nagaraj’s sentiment. His parting shot outside Jassema. That sentiment is powerful. In the background of India’s history, and its pan-Indian sensibility pickled in the ethos of the family, the idea’s holiness, the sacredness attached to it. That sentiment, so ancient in a way, also is suitable to the idea of forming a unified bloc of divergent peoples, under a unified destiny. Somewhere, the erroneous, and obsolete security attached to insularity has to crumble. It is already crumbling in many metropolitan areas. It is also falling out of favour in smaller outposts of urbanity.

There are countless invisible migrations taking place across India. While, on one hand there are legitimate and serious fears of how modernity is mowing down small independent cultures, there are also less alarmist, and more hopeful stories of cultures, languages, and lifestyles migrating to new homes. The fear of homogenisation swallowing distinctions of individual cultures is valid. But like most moves, it can also be negotiated with, engaged with, to secure precisely what is prized in distinction. Little cultures and ethnicities too can ride the acceleration of technology in mobility and communication. The twenty-first century has not only made migrations easy, it has also facilitated the migration of culture. And like the Jews, Arabs, Parsis, and perhaps the Chitpavans, the west coast has been offering unwavering hospitality to immigrants.

The latest immigrant to the Konkan is not from foreign shores but a language exiled from its traditional home: Urdu. Professor Omar Khalidi of the Masachussets Institute of Technology has authored a paper on the Konkani Muslims where he says that Urdu has migrated into the Konkan region from its traditional home in Uttar Pradesh. He says, " Muslims of Konkan, the coastal region of Maharashtra, are increasingly learning Urdu, a language not native to the group. Primary through secondary schools with either Urdu as the language of instruction or at least as a mandatory subject have sprung up not only in Mumbai, but deep into the hinterland of the coast. Evidence of Urdu literacy is found in the large circulation of Urdu newspapers and periodicals in the region, to the extent that Urdu newspapers have a larger circulation in this region than in Uttar Pradesh, traditionally considered the Urdu heartland."

The sky gathered darkness all around us as we rode silently through the Raigad district towards Bombay. Soon we saw the bright neon lights arcing in a speckled garland flat ahead of us. Rohan was once again excited. We were just a few kilometers from home. And the reserve of the journey seemed to burst forth. We were about to join the main flow of traffic into Panvel, just outside our metropolis. Rohan stopped at a traffic signal, even as auto-rikshaws, scooters, motorbikes joined the melee at the highway. The trucks were slowly getting outnumbered. Rohan was peering into our city traffic companions, when the lights turned green. Most vehicles burst forth. However, Rohan was tentative, almost as if searching, focusing, concentrating. After cruising slowly, he seemed to have been aflush with new vigour. Then, the bike started swaying. Once, then twice, then I realized Rohan was also cutting lanes. Then he slowed and then started the constant, almost metronomic turns.

"Kya hua?" I asked. Wondering if there was a problem with the bike.

"Woh dekh na" See that.

I looked ahead. I did not see much. Except that there was an auto rikshaw ahead of us, and Rohan was playing second fiddle to the buglike auto by remaining steadfastly, obstinately right behind.

"What is there to see? Why are you swerving the bike?" I had not hit the panic button because the speed was close to a crawl.

"Just look."

I strained and did not see much.

"See what?"

Arrey dekhna, chumma chaati chal rela hain. Heavy petting happening.

I was even more beguiled.

"What are you saying? I can’t see anything."

"Look into the auto."

It is then I realized that the paroxysms of gait that our Bullet had developed were the result of some deft manouvring to tail the auto. Rohan was desperately trying to keep the headlights of our bike on the single oblong tinted glass behind the auto ahead of us. And sure enough he had spied a couple canoodling their last canoodle of the evening before they hit the train station and head to their respective homes. We were in college territory, and youngsters from the colleges often found weird places, mobile republics as if were, for uninterrupted petting.

Our three week trip ended. On Monday morning I met the Chief Technical Officer of my company Hemant Adarkar outside the lift. After some small talk, he asked why we didn’t make the kind of money out boss, Agarwal, made.

"Because you are not a Gupta or an Agarwal. Adarkars don’t make money."

We slip into the lift. I ask after his daughter.

"Oh Hanan is fine. Enjoying herself."

Hemant had named his daughter after a woman he had developed a fancy for after watching too much television in early nineties. Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s forceful and pretty spokeswoman Hanaan Ashrawi.

He was married to a Muslim woman. I will soon meet Sandhya Chitale who has just become mother to a child. She married her Kerala Muslim colleague. As I swipe my card and enter the office, I see Jaunaid’s wild mop bobbing over the cubicle partition, where I sit. Junaid, son of a professor from Pune, is set to marry a Kannada Brahmin, daughter of a central bank executive Madhavi Rao. Incidentally, Adarkar, Chitale and Rao are all Brahmin surnames.