Monthly Archives: November 2018
Fiction does justice to the remarkable life of the singer Janki Bai in a way that history has not
In ‘Requiem in Raga Janki’, Neelum Saran Gour pays careful attention to the richness and texture of an extraordinary yet forgotten life.
Janki Bai of Allahabad was a star of her time. A contemporary of Gauhar Jaan of Calcutta, she was one of the earliest recording artists of India, and it is thanks to gramophone technology that we can still hear what she sounded like when she sang the thumris and ghazals she was so well loved for.
The broad details of Janki Bai’s life are known – that she was from Benaras, the daughter of Shiv Balak, a wrestler and Manki, that her mother, who was sold into a kotha in Allahabad, made sure Janki was trained in vocal music by Ustad Hassu Khan, that Janki became an accomplished and eventually successful singer, that she wrote ghazals that were published in a collection titled Diwan-e-Janki, that she sang at the Delhi Durbar in 1911 with Gauhar Jaan, that she amassed a great deal of property and wealth, and that she had a marriage that eventually failed.
But perhaps the single most repeated detail of Janki’s life is that she was nicknamed “chappan churi” – she of the fifty-six knives, after a horrific attack on her life that she survived when she was very young.
A long overdue story
To a student of courtesan culture, in which the Indian sub-continent has been seeped for hundreds of years, perhaps it is this last fact that is the most frustrating. Here was a woman who lived a full and fascinating life, who by all accounts reached the pinnacle of worldly success that was possible for a woman in her position and context at the time in which she lived. And yet, when she is remembered at all, it is for what was done to her when she had not yet lived most of this life,.
This detail perfectly encapsulates how stories about courtesans in general are now told in India – the reduction of a long, complex and diverse set of histories into one neat little idea. One interesting way to respond to this reduction is by doing exactly what Neelum Saran Gour has done in a remarkable novel titled Requiem in Raga Janki – by paying careful attention to the richness and texture of one life.
Gour breathes life into her reimagination of Janki’s journeys by inhabiting the voice of a unnamed narrator (presumably a fellow tawaif) who, in her own words, is “pushing ninety” and promises to “tell you what I know of her and also what I guess and imagine.”
This guessing and imagination is essential to a retelling of this kind, for even our chronicles of the best known courtesans’ lives are marked with elisions and erasures. For hundreds of years, courtesans have been represented largely by other people, and these representations have been shaped by the agendas and biases of those telling the stories, whether it is a Mughal morality tale or an iconic Bombay film. The result is that although stories of courtesans proliferate, they are animated less by the courtesans’ lived realities and more by ideas projected onto their lives and persons.
Fiction is best placed to play with, and powerfully challenge, these flattened representations, which is why it is bewildering that Gour’s novel is the first major Indian novel in English that deals with the subject head on.
Restoring the protagonist
Fortunately, Requiem in Raga Janki lives up to this challenge superbly. Gour’s knowledge of her subject is formidable, but her writing is very rarely overtaken by the breadth of her research, whether it is the history of Allahabad, or an exhaustive history of Hindustani music and the many forgotten women who shaped it for so long. With all the noble intentions in the world, a novel only works if it keeps the reader wanting to turn the page, and Gour’s skill as a fiction writer keeps the reader’s appetite whetted.
In Gour’s hands, Janki becomes more than an idea, a courtesan needing to be rescued from obscurity or obfuscation – she becomes the protagonist she always was. The subjects of her musical training, her relationships with her family and her milieu, her conversion to Islam and her navigating both her freedoms and her loves are depicted with remarkable empathy and wisdom. In the process, Gour also chronicles a particularly significant chapter in Indian history – the coming of gramophone technology to the sub-continent, and the way it transformed how music was performed and experienced.
Gour’s device of telling Janki’s story through a conversational, feisty narrator works in her favour, because this way, the guesswork that is necessary to the telling of this story becomes easy to communicate. There are many versions, for example, of the attack that left scars on Janki forever, and Gour’s narrator tells us of all of them. This is the biggest triumph of Gour’s novel – Janki’s story is never caged by one version, but breathes and flowers in its many possibilities, and therefore comes alive in a way that a subject like Janki deserves.
Requiem in Raga Janki: A Novel, Neelam Saran Gour, Penguin Random House India.
source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Book Review / by Shreya Ila Anasuya / October 21st, 2018
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The Allahabad in Prayagraj
Renaming places creates ruptures in the people’s lived experiences.
The naming and renaming of places is not new in India. The British, for example, renamed Kochi to Cochin, derived the name Calcutta from Kolkata and affirmed their power through urban planning and architecture. Recently, several cities as well as streets and bazaars in the country have been renamed. Modern communication methods ensure that such changes in nomenclature have an instant impact.
Such projects are deeply political. They aim to politicise community memories. But not only do such endeavours not acknowledge the ruptures they create, they also overlook the history of cultural consciousness. Cities, streets and bazaars evolve their own identities with time. In doing so, they reflect historical experiences and changes. This is why the public often resist the overt manipulation of renaming. For example, though several years have passed since Connaught Place in Delhi was renamed Rajiv Chowk, the public relates to the market by its colonial name. The new name is only linked to the metro station — a new public space within the larger one.
Re-naming results in tangible changes, but several intangible aspects of places continue to be associated with the lived reality of communities. For example, Varanasi may today be the official name of the historical city, but culturally, its idea will always be “Banarasi”. The local carefree, bold and energetic lifestyle of the city’s people is still called Banarasi bindaas and the old name is still the identifier of the sarees produced in Banaras as well as the paan and the Langda mango.
The recent renaming of Allahabad as Prayagraj ignores the existence of a Prayag railway station in Allahabad district. Enormous resources and paperwork is required to establish the new political/official identity of not only the city but of the entire district. The renaming could create confusion. It overlooks memories of the city’s cultural identity that is linked to poets like Akbar Allahabadi, artists like Jankibai “Chhappan chhurivali” and even guavas (Allahabadi amrood). Allahabadis pride themselves on producing writers like Firaq Gorakhpuri, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Nirala, Dharamvir Bharati in much the same way as Banarasis are proud of Premchand, Bhartendu Harishchandra, Kishan Maharaj and Bismillah Khan. Often places in cities are named after such people, and the nomenclature, anchors the cultural histories of urban centres. The distinct identity of institutions very often go against re-naming projects. The Banaras Hindu University is one such example. In the case of Allahabad, questions will be raised about the names of institutions like the Allahabad University or the Allahabad Bank, with which millions identify.
Re-naming Bombay as Mumbai, after Mumba Devi, by the Shiv Sena government in 1995 — along with renaming the Santa Cruz Airport as Chatrapati Shivaji Airport — was not merely about shedding associations with the colonial past. The renaming also marked an assertion of Maratha identity. The American political scientist, Myron Weiner’s work, Sons of the Soil, Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India, is useful to understand the politics of renaming. New names are cultural tools to overcome the fears of economic subordination by adventurous immigrants. The changes create fissures in local and regional political arenas and make them rife for conflict.
Renaming cities results in economic and logistical upheaval. A large amount of the tax payer’s money is spent on changing signboards on public properties such as railways, metros, buses and street signs, not to mention the time and energy invested in bureaucratic, administrative and legal procedures. Maps have to keep pace with the frequent renaming. Mayawati changed a number of names of cities, locations, public spaces and streets to assert Dalit identity when she was the UP chief minister. Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi government reversed many of her decisions. One can imagine the amount of resources that were spent on both the projects.
Satellite cartographic networks often fail to keep up with the frequency of changed ground realities and people and transporters waste time to reach their destinations.
Several instances of renaming are simply preposterous. For example, there is a proposal to rename Shimla, that receives a lot of snow, as Shyamala or the dark one. Or renaming Humayun Nagar as Hanuman Nagar. In the absence of a comprehensive cultural policy, the politics of renaming is inimical to urban community consciousness. Those in power may want to escape their responsibility by saying that they are merely following the footsteps of preceding governments. However, the point is that they were voted to invest in development and not to continue fragmentation and create more ruptures.
The writer, a dancer, is the vice president of the Centre for New Perspectives
source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Opinion> Columns / by Navina Jafa / October 25th, 2018