Part IV – At Home in The World
Ghore Bhaire (translated
as At Home and Outside/ The Home and The
World) is the title of a novel written in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore almost
a century ago Considered a classic in world literature, the English translation
of this novel is widely available, and is part of the recommended list of
readings in the curriculum of Delhi University.[1]
A recently published critical edition of this novel has the benefit of being annotated
and edited by Professor Dilip Basu who taught English at Delhi University for
many years, and who is passionate about the written, and the spoken and
performed word, not just in English but also in Hindi and particularly in his
own language, Bengali. When Dilip Kaka, a close family friend, asked Snehanshu
to design the cover of this book, Snehanshu chose a photograph of a portico – a
space both part of the house and the outside. The house was a large mansion in Birnagar
in Nadia district, one of the ancestral homes of Snehanshu’s zamindar family in
the days of the British Raj. The detail of the Corinthian columns in the
classical colonial mould favoured by many of the richer families of Bengal, was
used by Snehanshu in his cover-design of Ghore
Bhaire. I found it interesting how a colonial form of building had enmeshed
itself so deeply in the landed families of Bengal, that it forms the definitive image to portray a certain time and
ethos of this region.
Snehanshu’s grandmother, whose beautiful Banarasi sari I
wrote about in the first part of this four-part essay, forms another link in
the journey of understanding the role of home and the world in shaping and
re-shaping us. She persuaded her husband to move out of the quieter zamindar
life in Birnagar to the bustling city of Kolkata, capital of the British
Empire, where she ensured that her children received a different view of the
world, equipped with higher education in medicine and engineering. The choice
of the columns framing the interior of their house – one of the many such
mansions the family had in Birnagar – is thus particularly relevant to the
theme of Ghore Bhaire. The novel relates
the differing perceptions of national and individual identity and independence within
and across the boundaries of home, in the days before freedom from British rule
came to India. I had seen the film adaptation of the novel by Satyajit Ray, but
never read the novel in detail, either in the original or in translation. It
was only when I set this as a reading for my post-graduate students in Industrial
Design, that I read it and the critical essays that accompanied the book, with
concentrated attention.
The contrast in the ‘atmokatha’, literally ‘own stories’ of its
three main characters, all extraordinary in their own way – Bimala, Nikhil and
Sandeep – tellingly portrays how fundamentally our decisions in life are shaped
by our awareness of and our search for our identities. The novel, which is
recorded to have evoked varied responses and provoked more ‘vituperative
criticism’[2]
than any of Tagore’s other works when it was first published, also evokes
varying responses on repeated readings. On re-reading the text, I felt that the
novel is essentially the story of Bimala, and through her the story of the
tempestuous journey that her land and her country make, in negotiating the
differences between the codified confines of the past, and the imagined freedom
of the future. Bimala, uneducated in the western system, brought up in the
seclusion of the inner apartments, is patiently drawn out by her husband,
Nikhil, from the physical and mental view circumscribed by, and within, these
apartments. He exposes her to non-traditional music, books and company. He is
eager that Bimala may be more aware of the world outside the compass of the
space that she is traditionally restricted to, and in doing so also discover
her own latent qualities, and accompany her husband as an equal partner in
life.
This ‘drawing out’ of Bimala, brought up on traditional
notions of space, form and propriety in her maternal home, results in events
which both she and Nikhil are unprepared for. Bimala is honest enough in
assessing her own actions as well as her liberal husband’s notions and actions,
while yet according to him the elevated status of Hindu husbands. Yet, despite
her decided individuality and intelligence, and her husband’s staunch support
and love, she is inherently perhaps, insecure about her own identity. She sees
herself through the eyes of others. Though, like the other women of her family,
Bimala too is protected from the gaze of the outside world, she is self-conscious
about how her house and her furniture, and therefore how she by association, appears to those who are deemed important and influential. In the India of that time, this
denoted particularly the Europeans. She observes:
My husband
still sharpens his Indian-made pencils with his Indian-made knife, does his
writing with reed pens, drinks his water out of a bell-metal vessel, and works
at night by the light of an old-fashioned castor lamp. But this dull,
milk-and-water Swadeshi never
appealed to me. Rather, we had always felt ashamed of the inelegant,
unfashionable furniture of his reception rooms, especially when he had the
magistrate, or some other European, as his guest.[3]
Dismissive about her husband’s long-expressed preference for
home-made and regional objects and artefacts, when Bimala encounters the more
emotional and militant form of the Swadeshi
movement to reclaim Swa - one’s own -
desh, it strikes a chord in her own fiery
nature. Not only does she now countenance the rejection of all English people, including
her kind music-teacher, Miss Gilby, but she also energetically espouses the
cult of the home-grown, the swadeshi.
Her perception of her own self and the world around her, is transformed even
more dramatically by Nikhil’s charismatic friend and political leader, Sandip.
His exhortation to protect the nation portrayed as a Mother-goddess, is
different from her husband’s ‘dull, milk-and-water swadeshi’. She now clamours even more insistently to burn all her
foreign-made clothes, and is convinced that everyone must do the same, even if
that means starvation for the peasantry.
Openly pitted against her husband, she feels ashamed that ‘from
his estates alone foreign sugar and salt and cloths had not been banished’.
Like the others in her village, ‘old and young alike’ who had hitherto thought
the use of country-made articles was a folly, she admits: ‘When Swadeshi had not yet become a boast, we
had despised it with all our hearts.’ [4]
Sandip, on the other hand, moulds his identity for entirely
selfish reasons. So, while he publicly deifies the nation, he corners all its
resources and is happy to sacrifice other people’s comfort and even their lives,
for it - justifying this predatory attitude as ‘the rule of nature’. Bimala
realises his hollowness despite her fascination, but only after she has
compromised her marriage, her happiness and even her identity. The reason for
this is that Bimala, though certainly not a meekly acquiescent person, is yet
still susceptible to the image that Nikhil or Sandip would like to mould her
into. She is unprepared to unstintingly question or understand - which is the true
purpose of education, and of freedom. Looking back at that time in Bengal and
in India, where women for the most part, had come to be confined both mentally
and physically into restricted domesticity, it is perhaps only natural that
Bimala falls short.
While the novel is an exploration of many pertinent issues –
about nationhood, the role of women in the domestic and the larger arena, the
relationship between caste, community, region and religion – one can also find
in and through its main characters, interesting parallels between the roles of
design and identity. Though the novel demonstrates that you cannot categorise
people into standard, unchanging black-and-white images, yet it does this
through highlighting some definite ‘types’ of different individuals. A great
many of us are like Bimala, conscientious and dynamic in our motivations but insecure about our own value. Swayed by the power of rhetoric and
superficial qualities of design, we are confused about our identities as well
as what national and individual freedom mean. Instead of developing our own
personalities and skills based on our needs and abilities, we cast ourselves in
ready-made moulds of others’ making, ‘ashamed’ to be ‘inelegant or
unfashionable’. This is, of course, something that assails us not merely as
designers or consumers, but in every aspect of our lives, particularly our
persons. The most telling evidence of this, are the print, television and radio
advertisements that have been incessantly promoting fairness creams for years.
This has, since the past decade, been accompanied by more and more Indians streaking
and bleaching their hair blonde in a desperate imitation of the predominant
notion of beauty and fashion imported from primarily European and American
cultures.
The fact that today, more and more Indians want to look like
the West, is not a phenomenon confined to the present form of our cities,
habitats, or political boundaries; nor a whimsy limited to some individuals. The
reason for our deep discomfort with our appearance, an intrinsic aspect of our
perceived self-identities, to a large extent has its roots in our colonial
experience. In the very beginning of Ghore
Bhaire, Bimala recollects her resentment about her dark features. She
believes she is not beautiful, and that others do not consider her so because
of this reason. Contrast this with the assurance that we earlier had of
ourselves. Thus, in the Mahabharata,
Drupad’s daughter, the princess Draupadi, famed as the most beautiful of all
women, has eyes like the petals of the lotus, long and lustrous hair, and
dark-skin – one of her names is Krishnaa, the dark one.[5]
And to Amir Khusro Dehlawi the colour of the Indian skin is ‘like nectar’.[6]
The book Talking India,
records a series of conversations between the Iranian philosopher Ramin
Jahanbegloo and the multifaceted Indian Ashis Nandy, trained as a clinical
psychologist and sociologist. In the book, Nandy, whose work has been described
as an exploration of ‘human potentialities and destructiveness’, speaks about
the reinterpretation of the Orient by the West, where: ‘Not only has the West
forged this construct of the Orient, they have sold the Orient this construct.
So that a sizeable section of the Orient itself has begun to look at its own
past through the eyes of the West. Because that, they think, is the more
modern, progressive, scientific, and universal outlook.’[7]
Like Bimala and Sandip, not only do we aspire to garb our
individual femininity and masculinity in notions and garments that have little
to do with the realities of our climate and contexts, but also we transpose
these borrowed and ill-understood notions on others. We get enamoured of the
idea of a great, powerful nation, but are impatient with the small, vulnerable
people who actually make up this nation. Invariably, we are also impatient with
the creations of such people and their histories. This is why Indian society
for the past many decades has marginalised craftspeople and their worlds. We
would instead like to link ourselves with dominant, powerful nations or
cultures. The designs or products of such cultures are linked with attributes
deemed progressive and fashionable by most of us. This is also why we
unquestioningly cough up lakhs of rupees to buy industrially produced ‘branded’
products, but find crafts ‘too expensive’. To us, this realisation was brought
home through a master-craftsman from Tamil Nadu, a weaver of reed chattais, so delicate and strong that
they could be rolled up into tiny cylinders and literally wrung without
spoiling their weave. As we encountered these at a crafts fair eleven years ago
and debated whether to buy one at 1100 Rupees, he asked us a question that
brought the debate to a close. Did we, he questioned simply, think so much too before
buying branded shirts at the same or higher cost, produced in a factory, and
identical with many others?
Some of us can, of course, be likened to Sandip – willing to
don or discard a regional or national garb at will in order to exploit an
assumed identity for personal gain. The important thing for many designers is
to sell enough and get a name. ‘Sustainable’, ‘liberal’, or ‘Indian’ become
mere labels grafted on as passing trends, to grab the market for another season.
Contrasted with Bimala-like people who have been denied choices, but are unprepared
to reasonably understand the link between their local, regional, national and
therefore their individual identities, when they do have the choice; or Sandips, who deliberately use their regional
or national affiliations for personal profit, there is another very important category
of people. This is personified in Ghore Bhaire
by Panchu, an impoverished peasant, at the mercy of regional or political
lords, and unaware of, or unable to access any choice in his life.
Nikhil actively cares about the plight of Panchu and his
like. He understands that a nation is not a deified abstract image. A nation is
its people. This feeling was also a very important part of Rabindranath
Tagore’s concerns, in his life and in his work. But for most of us today, the
Panchus of the world do not form part of our imagination or our efforts. So,
for instance, in the summary of Ghore Bhaire
that the students of Industrial Design were asked to submit, only one out of
twenty mentioned Panchu at all. This is perhaps a manifestation of the attitude
of the ‘modern’ Indian designer and also of the fact that most designers,
similar to most people, rarely exhibit the empathy akin to Nikhil, neither at
home nor outside.
Even when we do have positive reasons catalysing our
actions, we resemble Amulya, a pivotal character in the story, rather than
Nikhil. Amulya is so moved by his idea of the nation, that he sacrifices his
life, as well as the ideals of good behaviour and honesty that he otherwise
holds, for what he believes is the good of the nation. He swears unquestioning
loyalty to Sandip, as we often do to our leaders, whether of design or
otherwise – without considering whether what they profess to further as a quest
for good design or good practice, is actually so. Idealistic, brave and
impressionable, Amulya represents in a way, a younger and therefore more
headstrong version of Nikhil, without Nikhil’s qualities of critical thinking,
or forbearance.
These qualities are equally manifest in Nikhil’s
understanding of Bimala’s misery at the disastrous effects of her alignment and
entanglement with Sandip, despite his own pain at her open defection. Amulya
dies with a bullet through his heart, like so many scores of young men and
women in British India. We do not know if Nikhil will recover from the serious
wound in his head, as he is brought back from his efforts to stop the raging
violence that has erupted between and around his people.
Freedom can mean different things to different people, is
what we understand through the characters in Ghore Bhaire. But the unbridled individual quest for happiness, at
the cost of the happiness of others, cannot ever be freedom. As Bimala
realises: ‘But he, whose kin are there, yet no longer near, who has dropped out
of all the varied companionship of a full home-the starry universe itself seems
to bristle to look on him in his darkness’. [8]
Ghore Bhaire, like
many of Tagore’s works, which have outlasted his life by many years, shows that
great creative work is the output of talent applied in the quest for
self-knowledge bolstered by an understanding of our immediate world, and
activated by concern and compassion for our homes as well as the larger world. That
regional and national and even universal concerns affect design, as they do any
other activity in life, is evident.
As a nation and a people, we seem to have lost those
qualities of compassion, choosing brutality for the fulfilment of perceived
individual, regional or national reasons. Land, which evokes such complex
emotional and philosophical attachments, is now being often forcibly acquired, from
the very people who are most deeply linked to it – farmers, villagers,
adivasis. This dispossession of the country’s most vulnerable people is
happening at, as Amit Bhaduri explains at length, a huge scale by our
governments for three major purposes: mining, industry and special economic
zones – all large-scale industrial activities that concentrate power and money
in the hands of a very few at the expense of very many.[9]
Zealously enforced by government agencies,[10]
it is explained away, Sandip-like, as a necessary sacrifice in the name of
development, by often the country’s most powerful minds.
In an open letter to Dr. K. Kasturirangan recently
published in The Hindu, Madhav
Gadgil, Chairman of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, notes his surprise
and dismay at Dr Kasturirangan’s being party to the report of the High Level
Working Group on Western Ghats. This report, Gadgil writes, partitions the
ecologically sensitive ghats into ‘natural landscapes’, one-third of which are
to be ‘safeguarded by guns and guards’, and ‘two-thirds of so-called cultural
landscapes’ to be thrown open to large-scale and exploitative development,
while ‘remarking that local communities can have no role in economic
decisions’. Such development, Gadgil writes, as shown clearly in the case study
by the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel of Lote Chemical Industry Complex in
Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra, has caused pollution beyond all legal limits
so that 20,000 people have been rendered jobless while only 11,0000 have
obtained industrial employment. In this context, Gadgil observes that it ‘would
appear that we are now more British than the British’, reminding us of Francis
Buchanan, ‘an avowed agent of British imperialism, who wrote in 1801 that
India’s sacred groves were merely a contrivance to prevent the East India
Company from claiming its rightful property’.[11]
The disturbing scale of land
grabbing in the name of national development can be observed today all
across free India. It is explained away as
‘inevitable’. So, the forcible takeover of
agricultural, forest and common lands by governments and real-estate agencies
for SEZs and industrial uses, despite sustained people’s protests, continues to
be a rising phenomenon.[12] Statistics
analysed by P. Sainath (described as ‘the only rural affairs editor in India’)
show that ‘at least 270,940 Indian farmers have taken their lives since 1995, which
translates into around 46 farmers’ suicides each day, on average. Or nearly one
every half-hour since 2001.’[13]
This means that by the time you have read this essay, at least one more farmer
has taken his own life. Yet, despite the rise in suicide rates of Indian
framers, this chilling phenomenon rarely gets any mention in our media or
provision in our political planning.
As Ashis Nandy notes, ‘Ultimately, modern oppression, as
opposed to the traditional oppression, is not an encounter between the self and
the enemy, the rulers and the ruled, or the gods and the demons. It is a battle
between dehumanized self and the objectified enemy, the technologized
bureaucrat and his reified victim, pseudo-rulers and their fearsome other
selves projected on to their 'subjects'.[14]
We are all party to this oppression and will indeed continue to be so,
till we are secure with our own individual and regional identities, and share a
concern beyond ourselves.
One cannot become a global citizen by renouncing
local resources or by renouncing one’s local links and responsibilities. The
journey has to be individual and from within. As the example of Ghore Bhaire shows, true freedom and
identity stem from having and realising the choice to inhabit both your inner
and outer worlds – not an either/or situation. It is only then that we can
question conventional dominant notions, even when we are suddenly confronted
with choices, and can explore and adapt – instead of abandoning – our own
inherited values or designs in the light of increased awareness of the values
or knowledge-systems of other cultures. It is not one or the other, or the individual
pitted against a region or a nation, but all these together which will create
confident, creative individuals and nations. Just as, to Nikhil, and to Tagore,
political freedom is nothing if it results from coercion of individuals,
especially those who are poor or deprived, similarly independence means nothing
if we cannot exercise it to achieve not just channels for our own creative
self-expression with dignity, but also for that of others who are destitute of
such opportunities.
What Sri
Aurobindo said so many years ago is even more relevant today:
A reshaping of the forms of our
spirit will have to take place; but it is the spirit itself behind past forms
that we have to disengage and preserve and to give to it new and powerful
thought-significances, culture-values, a new instrumentation, greater figure.
And so long as we recognize these essential things and are faithful to their
spirit, it will not hurt us to make even the most drastic mental or physical
adaptations and the most extreme cultural and social changes. But these changes
themselves must be cast in the spirit and mould of India and not in any other,
not in the spirit of America or Europe, not in the mould of Japan or Russia…Our
means must be as great as our ends and the strength to discover and use the
means so as to attain the end can only be found by seeking the eternal source
of strength in ourselves.[15]
And so we come back to the image and function of the sari,
and the qualities it embodies – where the functional and the decorative may be
part of the same whole; where resources can be used optimally but frugally;
where an artefact can be simultaneously functional and decorative; where
infinite variety and complexity are possible within an idea of striking
simplicity; where work, despite being a necessary means of survival can also be
part of a daily decentralised, individual quest for creative expression; where
a rigorous knowledge and appreciation of aesthetics can enable the creation of
distinctive design within a shared language and structure.
As individuals and as groups, as designers and as consumers,
we can consciously decide to eschew materials, processes, and designs that
depend on their production or existence on centralised, dehumanising and
exploitative practices. In the choice of what we wear and use in our daily
lives; what and how we design; and who we design for; we can seek to further
the possibilities of human freedom and creativity, while seeing how we can
improve living and working conditions for everyone – especially those who
actually create things for us, using their hands. And for those who still crave
novelty and endless variety, they can still patronize the sari, which can be
draped in 108 recorded ways. So I would like to end, as I began, with the image
of a sari. Not one woven a hundred years ago, but a beautiful Kerala cotton
sari woven in today’s time. At Rs. 650, it is less expensive and far more
valuable than the industrially produced plastic watches that are now the trend,
and that Snehanshu had originally intended to buy for me. We are fortunate that
we still have such a choice. But we may not for long.
Images © Anisha Shekhar Mukherji; Text © Anisha Shekhar Mukherji
[1] The
Home and The World (At Home and Outside), Rabindranath Tagore, English
translation by Surendranath Tagore; ‘Bimala’s Story’, Critical Edition edited
by Dilip Kumar Basu and Debjani Sengupta, WorldView Publications, Delhi 2011
[2]
Tanika Sarkar, ‘Many Faces of
Love: Country, Woman and God in the Home
and The World’, p.265, as reproduced in The Home and the World, At Home and Outside, Critical Essays p.265.-84.
[3] The
Home and the World, At Home and Outside, Critical Edition; ‘Bimala’s
Story’, p.99. It is interesting in this context to recollect the furniture that
Tagore chose to use in the colonial spaces of his family home at Jorasanko. Not
only is furniture sparely used, low in scale and well-crafted in the Indian
tradition, but also internal objects such as the evocative light fittings made
of sea shells, apparently by Tagore himself, combine the traditional Indian
features of practical and decorative use, utilising local materials.
[4]
Ibid.
[5] Mahabharata,
Kamla Subramaniam, p. 98, Bharthi Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai, 1st Edition,
1965, 16th Edition, 2011
[6]
Amir Khusro, Dr Parmanand Panchal, p.
14, Hindi Book Centre, New Delhi,
[7]
Talking India, Ashis Nandy in
Conversation with Ramin Jahnabegloo, ‘Looking in the Mirror of the East’, p. 27, OUP 2006
[8] The Home and the World, At Home and Outside,
Critical Edition; ‘Bimala’s Story’, p. 205
[9]
The Face You Were Afraid to See, Essays
on the Indian Economy, ‘A Failed World View’, p.36-7, Penguin Books, 2009
[10]
The documentary film, Earth Witness, Reflections on the Times and the Timeless, directed by Akanksha Joshi, 2011, shows how farmers, shepherds, adivasis
in different parts of India are being mercilessly pushed off their land by
decisions taken by national agencies
[11]
‘Shocking Betrayal on Western
Ghats’, Madhav Gadgil, p. 13, Op-Ed, The
Hindu, May 18 2013
[13] P. Sainath, The Hindu, May 18, 2013, ‘Farmers’ Suicide rates soar above the
rest’; for more writings by Sainath, see also https://www.facebook.com/pages/P-Sainath/313138165368369
[14] Ashis Nandy, ‘The Psychology of Colonialism, Sex, Age and Ideology in British India’,
p. 16, The Intimate Enemy, Loss and
Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Delhi,
Oxford University Press 1983
[15] The
Right Object of Education – And India’s National Education, Words of Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother, http://www.esamskriti.com/essay-chapters/Education-~-words-of-Sri-Aurobindo-ad-Mother-1.aspx
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