Prerna End Term Assignment

Prompt 6

A History of Outsiders

Growing up, it was pretty easy for me to believe I had no family. I did not have a house filled with a bunch of people, I did not have a father to help me with math sums, and I did not have any set of grandparents either, to take me on long walks to the beach. But I always grew up around people who had large, elaborate sets of families. And according to these people (well, most people) families had to meet certain definite criteria to be considered families.

People, too. The world of my childhood existed in neat sets of binaries. You could either be Hindu or Muslim, Man or Woman, North Indian or South Indian. There were no in-betweens. And those who were—like me—were more or less, invisible. Or freaks.

It took me years to learn that I did, indeed, have a family. That families were not just people who lived in your house and told you what you to eat for breakfast. Families were what you carried around with you when no one was looking. Families were the faces you walked around with, and your unusual ways of counting. Families were friends looking at you, with these rather puzzled expressions on their faces right in the middle of a conversation, exclaiming with wonder, “Are you sure you’re a South Indian?”

Memory as History

As a child growing up in Bombay, I had no photographs to remember my time spent in Kashmir at the age of two. I had no material records. But I did remember things, evocatively. (Years later, as an adult, I could attribute it to my synaesthesia). I could remember for instance, the apple orchard in my family house/estate, and my aunt admonishing me severely, wearing a light blue (or was it mauve?) pheran. I could remember my teeth chattering for several minutes after a brief bath every morning.  I could remember being lashed frequently by my grandfather. I could remember gasping at the sight of the trees—at their sheer beauty—while spending my time in play. But these were only flashes of my time spent there, and, try as I might, it has been difficult for me to stitch them together into a comprehensible narrative.

My being part Kashmiri, of course, helped me attract an undue amount of attention growing up. It was in my complexion and in my small, regular features. Kashmir existed in myths, state propaganda and newspaper articles. Kashmir existed in my mother’s recounting (without the gaps) of our time spent there. But to me, Kashmir existed only as Trauma.

There were things I had to block out, in spite of my synaesthesia, perhaps as part of a survival mechanism. I was glad that even though I was cursed with an ability to remember, Remembrance was kinder to me.

My mother however, was not so fortunate. She could recount things with far more clarity and in greater detail. She could recount incidents in the dead of the night. She would narrate events and ordeals in small, measured amounts. To protect me. To let me savour it.

My father’s family was not originally from Kashmir, she’d say. While dating my father, she had once heard him say that his grandfather was, in fact, from Kazakhstan. And of course she hadn’t believed him. He was trying to woo her, perhaps. It had made her laugh.

But while staying with his family a few years later she’d noticed a strange dilemma. They were often referred to as Pardesi, or Outsiders, by the other villagers. His family had been in Baramullah for decades, and they had yet to be accepted by the other folks around them. And strangely, I could connect it to my own dilemma growing up when, living with my mother in the aftermath of my parents’ divorce, in cities that were not my own, I would also be referred to as an Outsider. These incidents were perhaps less blatant than in a provincial Kashmiri village, but they were more similar than I had realized.

The Other Side

The other part of my family is Konkani. They are referred to as Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmins and trace their ancestry to Kashmiri pandits. I could say I was more fortunate in recounting their history as I was still able to interact with relatives and distant relatives in community halls and at funerals. I spent these meetings trying to meet someone, anyone, who looked even a little like me. I tried speaking Konkani too, but it was difficult for me to practice when I hardly ever lived around people who did. Konkani was eerily similar to Marathi. My mother said it was even similar to Kashmiri.

In recent years there has been enough research to suggest that Saraswat Brahmins were, in fact, originally found along the banks of the Saraswati river and had migrated to various parts of the subcontinent in around 1000 B.C. when the river began to dry up. A sub-section of my ancestors were said to have settled in Goa, while the others migrated to Karnataka. Research also suggests that traces of their Kashmiri heritage can still be found in the Konkani language and the distinct Chitrapur Saraswat cuisine. I still have doubts about the cuisine as Konkani food being primarily vegetarian seems entirely different from the heavily meat-based Kashmiri cuisine, but according to researchers (and my mother), Kashmiri and Konkani have many similarities.

According to my mother, she could comprehend Kashmiri quite easily during her time with my father’s family, to the astonishment of those around her. There were syllables and intonations that were too close and too many to have been attributed to mere coincidences.

The fact that my parents’ ancestral histories are so tangled has often been a source of great distress for me. How do I explain to most people—especially people who come from fixed communities—that not only do I belong to the in-between spaces, but that those spaces connect the two parts of my ancestors in more ways than one? Both sides of my family have been perpetual outsiders, stuck in places that weren’t their own, and creating their own hybrid versions of cultures to compensate for the pain of not belonging. Perhaps in this knowledge, if nothing else, I have been able to find a space of my own.

Later Migrations

Both my parents travelled far and wide and have not remained tied to their adopted states, much like their ancestors. As have the rest of their families.

My mother’s immediate family was based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, and it is where a number of her relatives still live to this day.

 In Chennai the Chitrapur Saraswat community has a community hall, and as a teenager it was a place I absolutely loathed going to. I disliked the customs, especially the guru parampara, the tying of the sacred thread Janeu, and the elaborate poojas. 

There were many other migrations. For instance, there were the partition stories that often seem so distant for communities from the South.

My great-grandmother was the family member who had witnessed the partition. She loved to talk, was a famous gossip, and would narrate ancestral anecdotes to her grandchildren the way my mother would one day narrate to me.

She would go on to narrate that she had been married at the tender age of 13. Her parents were rich businessmen based in Karachi, and the man she married was a businessman, too. These were partition stories so similar to those I have heard in Delhi- stories of extreme wealth and landed property that were destined to be lost in the aftermath of the Incident. She had had a great many miscarriages—a common occurrence in those days, for girls married rather young—and had about 7 surviving children.

After the partition, instead of migrating to Delhi, the family settled in their native Karnataka. They were to experience the stereotypical riches to rags story; they had become so poor, in fact, that most of their children had to be sent away to live in ashrams. My great grandfather had to take to selling popadams to earn a living. Years later, when their descendants went on to do rather well, these stories were to fade away into their immediate surroundings like wall hangings; repeated and handed down, sure, but ceasing to cause much surprise or discord.   My mother greatly admired her grandmother as a child, and believed her to be a wise old woman with far too many secrets.

There were signs that the memories of the Partition had lived on with the witnesses much after the said incident. My maternal grandmother suffered ill health and an acute case of depression. Unlike her own mother, my grandmother found it hard to speak about what she had witnessed or experienced. It was a time when speaking out was considered rather shameful, and I often wondered about what exactly she had seen that had sent her into such a hibernation of perpetual silence.

When my mother was still a child of about ten, her mother died from rheumatism —and I suspect, depression—and had to live with her extended family of old grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. These experiences would contribute to a great many anecdotes and stories that she would hand down to me, and were perhaps my only window to a family life that I would never experience.

My mother, of course, went on to live a much more colourful life than any of her female ancestors. Although the Chitrapur Saraswat community was quite progressive in those times, and had many women who received education and were permitted to work, it was primarily patriarchal and placed a number of restrictions on them.

With the death of her own parents freeing her from some of these constraints, my mother travelled to places like Bangalore and Delhi to study and to work. It was also in Delhi that she met my father, a Kashmiri Muslim man so different from members of her state and community.

In the aftermath of their divorce, the story of parents’ love and marriage has been a source of constant inspiration. The fact that they were nothing alike, and had completely different childhoods, cultures and belief systems and were still able to marry and create a family, however briefly, continues to baffle many people today. I half been referred to as a half and half, an impure Brahmin, and even a terrorist by some. I can only understand such reactions by the fact that most people in a country like ours can only understand communities demarcated from others as being complete. But if we really look at our histories, we begin to learn that, perhaps, the story of my ancestors isn’t so uncommon after all.

The history of community formation in India has been complex and chaotic. Much of what we know to be states in India today were formed in the time of the British Raj, and even during the Partition many states were split and communities butchered. The idea of a nation has damaged our understanding of the nuances that continue to exist today and the fact that interactions between societies were what contributed to their development.

Perhaps if we were to look closely into the stories of each of our communities, we would find that they were always in a flux and that individual identities have always been fluid. With the story of the Sentinelese people hogging the limelight this past week, a new perspective of Belonging has begun to dawn on many people. The existence of uncontacted peoples alongside a great many turbulent ‘civilized’ societies with their own concepts of governments and borders has forced people to consider the difficult question of what exactly we mean today when we talk about boundaries or even privacy.

In the current political scenario, where many people increasingly experience communal hatred and xenophobia, it would be interesting to look towards a history where intermingling was often necessary for survival of entire groups of people and where the idea of Identity or Community was ever-changing, as it is today.

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Reading as a Writer

Looking back at these past 3-4 months, I have come to realize that the Ways of Reading elective has challenged me in a manner I did not anticipate. I have always considered myself to be a writer, but choosing this elective has opened me up to the many processes and layers that contribute to a single piece of writing.

The first half of the elective then, was spent exclusively on the techniques of composing poetry, an experience that I found rather challenging and eye-opening. Before starting this semester, I wrote poetry mostly in free verse, and had never thought about how techniques like line breaks and repetition can create such emotional effects in a reader. The classes were so interactive and interesting, and although attendance was not compulsory for this elective, I absolutely could not afford to miss a single class.

The first half of the semester was spent primarily studying the art of writing poetry, and reading some of the poets assigned to us also impacted me greatly as a reader. Perhaps the most important change in me after taking this elective has been to read writing material as a writer and not a reader, something I hadn’t thought about before. The first half was also a time when I did not participate in the class as much as I did later, maybe because there was so much I felt I had to listen and absorb, even from my classmates. The workshop by Aditi Rao also helped me clear up my writing process that I feel has often been cluttered.

The concept of the graphic novel has also been new to me. I am also a visual artist, but I have always considered visual and literary art as separate exercises, and had never thought about the effects of merging them. Later on in the semester while studying John Berger’s Ways of Seeing this concept became clearer to me, especially of how visual work can change according to the text we assign to it, as well as the context.

This concept of merging has interested me greatly. It has also made me consider merging other aspects of creativity, like video and text, photography and music, etc. I absolutely loved reading Maus, especially the fact that it merged not only text and visuals, but also Form, in the way that it was History and Autobiography, Memoir and Fiction. The lightness of the narrative also appealed to me, as did the whole concept of depicting communities as animals and what it meant while exploring the novel.

While reading The God of Small Things, too, I learned how to view a familiar text in newer, more nuanced ways. I have read The God of Small Things innumerable times, and I really did not expect to learn anything new about it, but the fact that the entire debate surrounding caste was viewed in connection with contemporary issues made the novel so much more than I was convinced it was. I was able to see the chinks in Velutha’s characterization, and my own socio-economic context as an aspiring writer.

I was also very interested in the whole discussion in the class regarding the vernacularization of the English language by writers of the subcontinent in the aftermath of the Independepence, something that also informed my CD&E presentation. As I hope to explore the concept of Language for the rest of my two years in University and my dissertation, the discussions were helpful to my understanding of how other Indian languages affect the way Indian writers write in English. Again, the focus has been on Context.

And last but not the least, exploring Ways of Seeing was an experience I will not forget for quite some time. The fact that we were able to watch the film before discussing the text really made the class so interactive and interesting. I also really enjoyed interpreting the 6^th chapter of the text that has been composed entirely of visual works of art and their context in history. We were able to contribute so much by forming groups, not only by our own understanding of the discussions, but also by what the others had to say on the topic.

The Ways of Reading class has been extremely interactive; there were film, video and PowerPoint presentations that I really enjoyed, as well as the workshops and the class discussions. It taught me that writing is complex but also informative, and has many layers that contribute to a single process.