The Changing Face of the Indian Family: Part II

Jhansi and my mother’s larger kin

 Summer in Delhi, for many of its citizens, spells the time to escape the city. A much needed respite, away from its relentless battering sun and the overhang of its polluting air. The social calendar yawns its emptiness and life seems circumscribed by temperature controlled indoors. Facebook updates posted from gloriously exotic locales tell me that most people on my contact list are unreachable.  Yet there is a silver lining to the inhospitable season, for it allows one to luxuriate in the randomly selected passages of memory.   And so it was that I remembered Kusum, my mother, Amma as I called her, and her side of the family backlit against a town, whose cadence sang in their veins – Jhansi!

                                                

Kusum, amma in the fashion of the times

As a child I had often visited Jhansi, a sleepy cantonment town on the border of the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh,  a part of the now geographically fluid region of Bundelkhand, an area that is making news today because of its abysmal economics, but which in the past gave us the brave warrior class - the  Bundelas.   Jhansi has been catapulted into the national narrative by her famous queen – Jhansi ki Rani. But I relate with  Jhansi more as my mother’s home town, her maika  - so imbued in her DNA that it allowed li space for Calcutta, her sasural to form anything other than a fine skin of Bengali sensibilities over the deeply entrenched Bundelkhandi: its dialect, the special Kayastha food, the folk songs of the region and a  particular  love for reminiscing about old times, and amma was prone to that too, and could talk for hours with her older relatives, sans the enforced politeness that such exchanges demand. Bundelkhandis are also known for spoiling their daughters, and amma and her other female relatives tried  to create equal spaces for their daughters as well. Of Bengal, she did love the people, propelled more so by the seductive appeal of Bangla literature, of which Sarat Chandra  and Ashapurna Devi were uncontestably her favourites.

Babba with a young amma 

Jhansi in my child’s memory is a mosaic of impressions. In the 60s the canvas was dominated by Babba, my great grandfather the famous Hindi writer Vrindvanlal Varma. Though a rather remote figure for us children, he transgressed the physical space, by his fame and writing, the awards he received including the Padma Bhushan, and the famous personages visiting him, tales which filtered down to us in tones, which would in contemporary times,  be reserved for  a cricket or a  film star in the family. Babba did come to us as  a  rather extraordinary personality:  a skilled shikari and lawyer, a nature lover and also  a man with a voracious appetite who is famously supposed to have eaten some hundred eggs a day. His great grandfather was Ananda Rao, a Diwan to the Rani of Jhansi who was killed in the battle of 1857, but whose son was allowed to live; a pardon granted by Queen Victoria. The lineage continued, and Babba alludes to it,   both in the introduction to his novel,  Jhansi ki Rani and in his autobiography.  

Laskhmibai, English translation done by me

My child’s memory has a vivid imprint  of the time Babba was going to Soviet Russia to receive the Soviet Land Nehru award. The crowds at the railway station had swelled to several hundreds, some with a clutch of flowers or garlands but mostly empty handed, who saw him off with folded hands as a man going off to conquer remote lands. A sentiment  that made immense sense in a world unconnected by  instant messaging and where a trunk call entailed an endless hollering of ‘Hellos’ into a black mouthpiece.   Babba’s writer’s world however allowed no truck with that of commerce, in fact he was pretty hopeless at it, as he  dabbled in  different kinds of business ventures, which made little commercial sense. In no time he was sucked into a  financial mess, despite  his practice as a lawyer. More worryingly,  the pristine mental space of a writer’s mind was being crowded out by strategies  to deal with his debts.  At this point, my grandfather, universally called Babu,  joined the business to lighten  his father’s concerns.   He  established   a printing press and other small businesses, which eased the  financial pressure, but which, extorted the terrible price of  him having to  bury his own writing ambitions.

Babu was a man given to many eccentricities. Like his father, he too was a shikari, a nature lover, fond of literature, and father and son loved to spend hours discussing the works of Shaw and Stevenson, their favourites. At one stage Babu decided to prepare for the Olympics, both for the hockey team, as Dhyanchand the hockey player was a big role model, and also for wrestling. As part of his preparations he read some self -help manuals, which were meant for  English climatic conditions, and decided to run in the middle of the afternoon, naively ignoring the  45 degrees temperatures scorching the  Jhansi plains. The frenzied preparations in the absence of a coach meant that Babu became terribly ill and so ended the Olympic dream. Babu was a great yoga enthusiast too as well as deeply spiritual, who went unfailingly on Saturdays to his ashram in Datia, some 26 kilometres away. A couple of times, their old car suffered a breakdown.  Transport in those areas, came in the form of rickety overcrowded buses, reeking with bidhi smoke;  and taking this mode would have been challenging.  The family insisted on his giving the temple visit a miss.  But Babu, who followed his favourite writer’s adages as a handbook to building the character of a man, would have none of this vacuous dilly dallying.  He had made up his mind, though by now he was nearing his late fifties. And so he put on his comfortable Bata shoes, slung the puja bag over his shoulder and set out for the twenty-six kilometres distance on foot.  I am not sure about the temperatures though.

 Babu shared an unusually warm relationship with his father -  uncommon because of the rigid formality of the family structures of those days,  allowed little levity between fathers and sons.  This parental devotion extended to his mother Nanna as well.  Nanna presided over an unwieldy household, or so amma told me in her many stories about her, that had an open house for even peripheral members of the family,  which included several widowed relatives, dependent on the household for their survival.  She had the non-partisan eye of the traditional matriarch,  treating all the children as equals, including her only surviving child Babu, though that iron persona cracked a little, when it came to my mother, her eldest grandchild.   

My grandmother, of a more conventional fabric, we had learnt to call Moti Amma, not because she was particularly huge in girth, but Babu inspired by a fit of husbandly humour, a common idiosyncrasy of the times, liked to tease his wife thus. She was widely known for her frank tongue and short temper, which sometimes found her out of line with the delicate manoeuvres that dictated the functioning of joint families, unusual since younger women were often veiled in silence, or atleast their opinions were.   

Celebrations in those days, were given the name of Bulaua literally bulana or invite, and Moti Amma loved calling the women of the neighbourhood for these bulaua sessions, which were celebrated with the singing  of folk songs, in many tones and decibel levels, to the beat of a dholak.  It was simple fare. Ladoos were distributed at the end of the program and a bowl filled with a ghastly red liquid Mahavar , taken around, which was painted on the feet of the women. A wedding in the family saw more of these bulauas where all the neighbouring women and the relatives, accompanied by their many children were invited to the huge hall of the  Haveli, the rambling family house, with its three wings, embracing  a central courtyard.  The large numbers meant that a sequence of sorts had to be followed. So each wave of guests succeeded the next, sitting in pangat style on the floor, to the handing out  of poories and other accompaniments on the leaf plates placed before them. The sizzling temperatures of these summer weddings,   mildly moderated by the hesitant air filtering in through the drenched straw curtains, helped make the feasting more raucous and enjoyable.  

And now circa 2017. The sprawling  Haveli in the narrow alley of the old town,  with its family stories  tucked  into its many rooms, went through several makeovers: from becoming a manufacturing unit for bidhis raw cigarettes, to eventually being pulled down to make way for a modern if convenient atrocity. Before Babu’s death however, the family moved out into what was then the outskirts of the town. Over the years the empty lands have been eaten away with construction.  There are more buildings with little architectural planning; Hathia taal literally Elephant’s lake, where the royal elephants of the Rani bathed, filled and now swallowed by more buildings;  there are more shops with signage some crookedly secured, some in neon  - a scraggy mushrooming, similar to  many other UP towns. Yet over the years the town has developed a swagger, propped up by the arrival of money from businesses and trade, whose backbone initially remained real estate. Beauty parlours and boutiques,  fashion on the streets, air conditioners popping out  of building exteriors, are signs of the good times. The extended families of yore, have been divided and subdivided and now live in small flats or have anchored their lives in more promising cities.  The temple in Datia, doesn’t just have the usual chaotic parking of  motor bikes and lal batti flashing cars outside its gates, even the odd BMW lends its sheen to the vehicular lines.  More testimony to the growing economy of the place,  is that the rural women visiting Datia, have shed their crumpled cotton saris for shiny polyester ones. Many still draw ghoongats  long veils over their faces though,  and while their children still trail after them, I see many more  boys than girls –  the visible face to the region’s worrying gender indices.

The cantonment area built by the English however remains.  And the ramparts of the Jhansi fort, where the Rani had lived, imprint their uneven outline on  the evening sky to this day.

by

Amita Sahaya

amitasahaya@gmail.com