Ram, Lokhon, Sinta. And Sabin.

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Altaf Mazid’s film on the Karbi version of the epic underlines why we need all our many Ramayanas.

It’s not yet Diwali, and the Ramayana season this year already feels more disturbing than festive. First, the Shiv Sena successfully prevented actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui from acting in the annual Ramlila in his hometown Budhana (which is in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar, a district that was torn apart by Hindu-Muslim riots in 2013). So what if Siddiqui is the town’s most famous export by far and actually wants to return to fulfil a childhood dream? No Muslim had ever acted in the Budhana Ramlila, said the Shiv Sainiks, and there was no way they’d let one start now.

Then, timing it carefully to coincide with Dussehra, the Modi government announced a Ramayana museum with a Rs.151 crore budget. Part of a projected Ramayana tourism circuit, the museum - to be built in Ayodhya – clearly targets the BJP’s Hindutva voters in UP: building a Ram Mandir at the site where the Sangh Parivar demolished the Babri Masjid in 1992 has been part of the BJP’s manifesto for years. While a Ramayana Museum is a wonderful idea in itself, the present project — to be carried out in UP’s most politically sensitive town, in an election year, by a pernicious and culturally insecure government — does not inspire confidence as being anything but a sop to Ram temple enthusiasts.

The Ramayana museum I’d love would be one that lets us marvel at how communities across our vast and varied subcontinent have made the epic their own. Such a museum is unlikely to get built in the near future — but it would have benefited greatly from the knowledge and enthusiasms of Altaf Mazid, the Assamese filmmaker, critic and restorer who died in April this year.

I say this because I recently watched Mazid’s striking 50-minute film Sabin Alun (titled ‘The Broken Song’ in English), about how the Ramayana story is told and lived by the Karbis, an ethnic group in the hill areas of Assam. Although screened as ‘documentary’ (at the 2016 Mumbai International Film Festival and at Delhi’s Open Frame festival organised by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust which also funded the film), Sabin Alun refuses to fit into a pre-established genre. It rolls around playfully between ethnography and storytelling; between serious-minded, unadorned documentation of the epic and a tongue-in-cheek contemporary staging (in which the geeky Ram keeps adjusting his spectacles while the dark-suited Rabon drives Sinta off in a big black car).

Mazid’s film assumes — correctly — that we know the epic inside out. He does not so much describe the Karbi version as draw us into it, demonstrating with quiet beauty and unspoken ease how a story can be entirely retold while still remaining recognizable as the same story. The extent of reimagining is apparent from the very name — of the Karbi story as well as the film. Sabin Alun means ‘Song of Sabin’, and Sabin is what the Karbis call Surpanakha, Ravan’s sister.

It seems both marvellous and fitting that Surpanakha, as Sabin, comes to occupy centre space in the Karbi narrative — rather than being stuck on the periphery as the snub-nosed, dark-skinned villainess so horribly rebuffed by Lakshman that the episode is what triggers Ravan’s revenge, the abduction of Sita. Marvellous, because to those of us raised on upper-caste Hindu tellings of the Ramayana, there is still a shock when we’re made to see the tale from the other side, to perceive our fair-skinned heroes as the arrogant, marauding, misogynist outsiders they are in Sabin’s forest home. Fitting, because as a Karbi woman explains, “Sabin has her nose chopped off, and there is no mention of Sabin. So it is ‘Song of Sabin’.”

Even more than Sabin, it is Sinta — the Karbi Sita — who demands our attention. Of course, there are many other Sitas stronger than the prettily useless version thrust upon us by Tulsidas and Ramanand Sagar — in the Oriya 15th century Vilanka Ramayana, based on the older Adbhuta Ramayana, Sita is the one who finally kills Ravana, having assumed the form of Kali, but lets the world believe that Rama did the deed.

But Sabin Alun gives us a truly earthy Sita (though ironically Sinta is not found in a furrow, but in an egg). In the song sung in the film, we hear Sinta ask her mother for a knife. “And holding it in her hands... Sinta while on a tour... Felled trees big and small... So mighty was she.” Mazid maps these words onto a staging: a modern-day Karbi woman riding angrily off on a tractor. Later, he reiterates the epic’s agricultural basis among the Karbis, by asking an interviewee why Ram, Lokhon and Sinta had to go into the forest. She responds without a moment’s thought: they had to take up farming, and there were no fields like there are now. “So they went to clear the forest... and then they stayed to supervise the farming.”

Perhaps the finest moment of revelation for me, though, was the quietest: an old lady sings of how Lokhon refused to leave Sita when she bade him go to Ram’s rescue. “I am not going, my brother is not dying,” proclaims Lokhon. But Sita is not one to give up so easily. “Oh Lokhon, if you do not go,” she says, “You want to marry me. And this is what you have in your mind.”

The line is delivered in the same drone-like monotone as everything before and after it, and one can only wonder why it is such a shock. It is, after all, a perfectly imaginable dynamic to emerge between a woman and her attractive (temporarily single) brother-in-law. Or perhaps it is too imaginable? There is probably a reason why a man’s relationship with his saali (wife’s younger sister) and a woman’s with her devar (husband’s younger brother) are categorised as ‘joking relationships’ across North India. It takes the matter-of-fact frankness of the Karbi telling to let us see this aspect of the Sita-Lakshman relationship that we have suppressed for years.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 23rd Oct 2016.

‘I Want To Disengage From The Activist Mindset’

Mizo poet Mona Zote, 36, shuns both the overtly political and the sentimental

THE QUICKEST WAY to introduce Mona Zote is to describe her double life: by day, she works in the Income Tax department; by night, she’s a poet. But Mona is quick to refuse easy romanticisations. “It is discordant but having this job keeps me balanced. You meet people with different needs: it keeps you connected to everyday life here”. Reading her poetry, one sees what she means. In ‘What Poetry Means to Ernestina in Peril’, she writes, “Poetry must be raw, like a side of beef/ should drip blood, remind you of sweat/ and dusty slaughter...” In another poem, ‘Rez’, her voice is even more bitter, ironic: “if they ask you about life on the reservation/ if they say they want to hear about stilt houses/ and the dry clack of rain on bamboo/ and the preservation of tribal ways/ give them a slaughter.”

But Zote gleefully informs you that ‘Rez’ came out of an obscure news item about a shootout on a Native American reservation. She does acknowledge she was “wrestling with things here too – but not just the Northeast. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, we’re all in our own reservations.” An IAS officer’s daughter, Mona spent her childhood in Bihar before moving to Mizoram in her 20s. “Maybe I came with fresh eyes,” she muses. “But if you’re sensitive and wield a pen, you can’t help writing about things around you.” The violence, the museumisation of tribal life, the stifling grip of the Church have all figured in her work. But she’s ready to move on. “I want to disengage from the activist mindset,” she says, “but I don’t quite know what will come after.”

TRISHA GUPTA
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 36, Dated September 12, 2009

‘I Write In A Language The Elite Frowns Upon’

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, 45, writes in Khasi and English. His work in both is fuelled by the Khasi land and language


TIMES HAVE CHANGED/ the sound of our lives/ dwindles into different tongues/ and every day, tongues/ lap up our sound.” One first heard the poet of these lines at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2009, reading — aptly — in two tongues: the clipped, steady rhythm of his Khasi followed by a sharp and robust English. Kynpham is that rare thing, a truly bilingual writer. A Reader in English at North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), he has 12 books in Khasi and seven in English, the most recent being Around the Hearth (Penguin 2008), a retelling of Khasi legends. He has just published the first-ever book of Khasi haikus, and has a volume of poetry out with HarperCollins next year. “The desire to be read by my people makes me wish to write in Khasi,” he writes. “But how can one write in a language whose writings are, without being read, frowned upon as biblia abiblia by the elite? Most of my poems are begun in Khasi, simultaneously translated into English, and the Khasi thoughts often directly transformed into English. The creation of each poem becomes the birth of twins.”

His poems can provide an acerbic take on contemporary life in the Northeast (“the timid afternoon/ was slinking out like peace/ from this town”), but he returns constantly to the idea of roots – sometimes couched in the figure of a mother, sometimes as land or language itself. If the lyrical ‘Ren’ retells the Khasi tale of a fisherman who “loved so madly” that he left home for a river nymph, the scathing ‘Agartala Nights’ declares, “I learnt/ that the most effective way of silencing races/ was to cram them with one’s mother tongue”. He might count among his influences figures as far-ranging as Neruda, Seferis, Arghezi, Milosz, Amichai and Darwish, but his writing, he says, emerges from “the roots of my beloved land; the roots of my times; and most of all, the roots of the past that is ‘lost’ to me.”

TRISHA GUPTA
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 36, Dated September 12, 2009
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‘Don’t Read Me To Improve Your General Knowledge’

Graphic novelist Parismita Singh, 30, says she will always be Assamese but wriggles away from a Northeastern ‘slot’


PARISMITA SINGH ISN’T good with labels. She is amazed at a review that called her book, The Hotel at the End of the World (Penguin 2009), “an Assamese graphic novel”. She used to describe herself as “working on a comic book”. Now that she’s resigned herself to the more heavyweight “graphic novelist”, occasionally “woman writer”, there’s a new tag to deal with. “I will always be Assamese,” she says. “But the book is in English, and I consciously haven’t located it anywhere. What’s fun for me as an author is for people to read the book and make their guesses.”

Certainly, Parismita’s droll, angular, often scratchy images of this black-andwhite nowhereland are strewn with cultural references and visual cues that would satisfy the most dogged graduate student. A bridge to China, a mythic floating island that is everything to everyone, constant rain that blocks mobile phone networks, the ghosts of Japanese soldiers who dream of the snows of Echigo while fighting in a “land of rain and jungle”– if these aren’t enough to make one think of the Northeast, what is? She doesn’t deny the references, but is stunned at people’s desire for authenticity. “I’m not retelling folktales. It’s not anthropology!” she says despairingly. “Yes, the night walker – whom Death sends to gather people’s souls – is a familiar figure, and Kona and Kuja are Assamese folktale characters. But a lady in Guwahati kindly informed me that the ‘original’ Kuja is a hunchback, not legless. But that’s the point! The names are the same, but that’s it. At the AIIMS crossing in Delhi, I once saw a man carrying another on his shoulders. That image is as much to do with my Kona and Kuja.”

Part of her reluctance to be pinned down as representing the Northeast is a discomfort with ‘serious things’. “I don’t want people reading me to improve their GK, or fulfil some national responsibility!” she shudders. “I’d be very flattered if people in Assam decided I was an ‘Assamese writer.’” Then, with a flash of characteristic self-deprecation, “But with the comic book, I’m probably not a writer anyway.”

TRISHA GUPTA
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 36, Dated September 12, 2009