I wrote the piece after I got back from Patna, my hometown. While I was there in July, someone mentioned to me the state of the crematoriums and how bodies remained in the furnace, waiting for power to come back on. It was a story of struggle, of poverty and of indignity. An edited verison of this appeared in the Indian Express on November 30, 2009.
When death lingers on ...
In Bihar, even in death there’s a time lag.
Each time Shiv Dayal pushes a body inside his electric furnace at Gulbi Ghat crematorium in Patna, the crematorium operator prays that power doesn’t play spoilsport.
Given the erratic power supply in the state during the summer, families often had to wait for hours, even overnight, to cremate the dead. They sat in the hallway, their noses covered, eyes watering with the smoke that escaped through the chinks of the furnace room door, as time of death stretched into hours.
Inside the blackened furnace, partly burnt bodies waited, too, stripped of dignity, and short of a last few megawatts of power for the closure.
“What can we do but wait? Often families have waited it out for four to five hours,” Dayal said. “It is sad because even in death, there’s no respite.”
The average waiting time, according to the members of the Dom community, which traditionally engages in scavenging and live at ghats, stretched into at least 2-3 hours on an average.
According to a Dom community member these poor families are from the hinterlands that flock to the city's hospitals seeking medical care and then in the event of death have no choice but the crematoriums for the last rites. When the electricity tripped during summers, it is mostly the poor who hunched against the blackish walls and waited, while flames leapt from the wooden pyres outside.
Death is no leveller here.
"We are used to death but not like this. When we light the pyre, we also are relieved. But when you know the body is still there, you want to hold on. The trauma doesn't end," he said. "Once, a family was sitting outside for 6-7 hours in the night."
While the Gulbi Ghat electric crematorium in Patna sees more than 100 bodies per month, each consuming more than 260 volts per cremation, about 10 bodies end up at the ghats everyday for the more expensive, ritualistic cremation that consumes more than 400 kgs per person of wood pushing the cost upwards of Rs. 5,000 that most poor can’t afford, crematorium operators said.
The municipal corporation only charges Rs. 300 at the crematoriums.
With winters setting in, the power situation in the city has improved. But during summers, the power situation became a concern in the cities and towns as electricity was diverted from 10:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. to keep the pumps running so that crops don’t fail, Sushil Kumar Modi told The Indian Express.
That’s when power failed the dead, too, and the story of families waiting it out at the crematoriums is a story that often repeats every summer.
On a hot July morning, Malti Devi sat under a tin shed with her family waiting for the body of her sister-in-law. Fulti Devi died while giving birth and the women sat hunched gazing at the river front where black soot floated on the water and fat dogs patiently bided their time on the banks for chunks of flesh or bones that didn’t burn out. It was on the periphery of the ghats that Malti Devi mourned their poverty for the umpteenth time.
Power woes aside during the brutal summers, for the poor grieving families, it is the indignity that doesn’t leave their side even in the time of death, they said.
Barring the poorest of the poor, the unconventional use the crematoriums. But it is those who are without choice that suffer, Malti Devi, who waited that day with the body under that tin shed, sweating and sobbing, said.
“We can’t afford the expensive wood,” Malti Devi said. “But if there is no electricity now, we don’t want the body to be in limbo.”
The state’s power deficit - at 31.7 per cent of the state’s required capacity, according to the Central Electricity Authority’s June monthly report- left many dead and decaying bodies in a state of crematory purgatory while the state and central governments embark on ambitious plans to connect the various parts of India to central, state and private lines of distribution.
In fact, more than 70 per cent of villages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar combined are still waiting for electricity.
Even the Municipal Commissioner KS Kumar admitted the situation was bad. It’s not just the power situation, where the deficits not only affected the departed, but also the equipment at the crematoriums that are old and non-functional, he said.
“We have received complaints about the crematorium situation where people have to wait. Power cuts and equipments, which are more than 20 years old, are a problem,” he said. “When crematoriums were set up, these were under some sort of schemes. Later, funds became an issue and enthusiasm died down. We have asked the state to give us money to upgrade the crematoriums.”
Only two out of four crematoriums in the Patna are fully functional. At the Bans Ghat crematorium where India’s first President Dr. Rajendra Prasad and socialist leader Jayprakash Narayan were cremated, out of the two furnaces, only one is working.
“It has not been working for the last one year,” Bans Ghat crematorium operator Ram Lakhan said. “But the bigger problem is electricity. What’s the point of GAP when crematoriums can’t even work properly?”
The crematoriums, their walls lined with soot, look grim. Scenes from Buddha’s famous journey where he saw the stages of death are painted in rich, garish oil colours look more pronounced in their placement and context. This is where the families wait, and mourn endlessly. It is always dark inside.
There are no generators here. Those wouldn’t be able to take the load, Dayal said. The Gulbi Ghat crematorium is one of the nine in the state built when the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi initiated the ambitious Ganga Action Plan to save the river from slow poisoning from the remnants and ashes of dead bodies that are dumped in the river for ritualistic closure.
The grotesque scene inside Gulbi Ghat is just one of the daily reminders of Bihar’s dire straits as a result of the state’s power shortfall. Both its target and generated power are the lowest in the country.
Peak demand in Bihar was 1,729 mw in September 2009, an increase from 1,730 mw in September 2008. However, supply has not been able to meet populous’ demands. Peak supply in Bihar was 1,438 mw in September 2009, an increase from 1,212 mw in September 2008, resulting in an addition of just half the demand needed to meet the growth margins.
Experts in Delhi said Bihar has reached this condition through its excessive dependence on central power supply.
It’s not just a tale of indignity in death and power crisis, but also of a mighty river that has been at the receiving end.
Patna and Kanpur top the list of the 29 cities that were identified under the GAP as the main polluters of the mighty river. The power crisis in Bihar has also ensured that efforts to save the river meet with roadblocks. Even if people were to shift to crematoriums, the load-shedding could drive them away.
And the river would continue to choke with the remainders of the cremation – the flowers, the wood, and parts of flesh and bone, too.
Kartikay Mehrotra contributed to this piece with power figures and quotes on Bihar's power situation.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The tale of the lost and found girl
Her twin sister held her hand, while Anjali talked to us about the time she spent in a home for destitute children. She returned home after 15 months. The family spoke about their reconciliation with the fact that Anjali was gone, and the bouts of hope, and how they never really gave up, and we listened to the fascinating story of faith and loss and of hope.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on November 18, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 17, 2009
Pastor Anil Johnson kept repeating hallelujah over the phone.
Amita Raj listened in, wondering why her pastor had called her on a Thursday afternoon. Then, in a soft voice, he told her that Anjali, her daughter who had been missing for 15 months, had returned, and she was with him at Aaya Nagar. They needed to come to the church right away.
She was safe, he added.
Anjali, who was 11 years old at the time, went missing one afternoon last August after she fought with her younger brother Abin. She went downstairs first to buy biscuits, then came back upstairs and took some money from her mother’s almirah and then disappeared into the narrow, winding alleyes of Block B in New Ashok Nagar in East Delhi. Abin sat at home, waiting. His mother and uncle were at work at the school for handicap children. Anjali’s twin sister Anisha was with them.
But Anjali never found her way back home. She walked to the bus stop, spent the night in a bus parked in the lot, and in the morning walked to the railway station and got into a train. She thought she would go to her aunt in Tamil Nadu, but there were too many trains, and she followed a stream of people and two days later, Anjali got down at the Secunderabad station.
A field worker from Aman Biradari, an NGO based in Hyderabad, found Anjali at the station. She had been standing in a corner, crying. They brought her to the Rainbow Home where Anjali spent a year among other destitute children. She would often cry, and sulk, and withdraw. She would not eat, and urge the NGO workers to take her home. But the teams that they sent out were not able to find the church in Aaya Nagar. The church that Anjali’s family attended relocated from a rented house in the locality. So, Anjali remained among the children in an alien city.
Three months ago, a field worker from Hyderabad accompanied her to Delhi and she started living in the NGO’s Kilkari Rainbow Home near Kashmere Gate with 65 other chidlren. Once in while, she would go with the NGO officials to the places she remembered. It was on one such trip to Aaya Nagar when Pastor Anil Johnson spotted her. He was at a shop, near the site of the former church, when he saw Anjali. At first he wasn’t sure if it was her. Her hair was cropped short, and she was with someone. But Johnson had prayed for her at the church, holding out her photograph to the congregation. He couldn’t be wrong. He called out her name, and she turned back to look at him. It was Anjali.
On Thursday, when their pastor called, Amita was at work, tending to disabled children at the Mata Bhagwanti Devi Chadha Charitable Trust, where Anjali’s twin sister Anisha is a student, too. She ran up the flight of steps to the canteen where her brother Wilson Raj was busy preparing meals. She hugged him, and wouldn’t stop crying. Anjali had raised her children on her own after having divorced her husband and moving to Delhi in 2000. It wasn’t easy, she said.
“It was awkward. Everyone was looking at us. At first, I thought one of the children fell down and got hurt,” Wilson said. “Then she said Anjali has been found.”
For 15 months, ever since Anjali, went missing, Amita has prayed, fasted for days in a row, never losing her faith in her god, hoping that her daughter will return someday.
On August 26, 2008, when Anjali went missing, their mother and uncle came home in the evening and waited for hours, combing the neighborhood for her, finally registering a complaint at the police station. But nothing ever happened.
“The police used to tell us if you find her, let us know,” Amita said. “We had no hope. We only had faith.”
For 13 days, Amita and Wilson went to most of the city’s NGOs asking about Anjali, showing her pictures to the officials.
In the nights, Amita made the bed for her missing daughter, spread the blankets, too. In the mornings, Anjali was the one who would bring tea to her mother, tug at her gently to wake her up.
“I would often turn over in bed and get angry,” Amita said, holding Anjali’s hand at the family’s residence. “After she was lost, I got up angry, and I told God I would never ever scold her. But he should give her back to us.”
Her twin sister Anisha prayed, too. They were born on December 21, 1998, in Kanyakumari. At 6 p.m., Anisha’s tiny feet appeared, and a minute later, nurses brought in Anjali into the world. They were identical twins an their mother dressed them in similar clothes. If it were not for a scar on Anisha’s stomach, even the sisters could not identify themselves in the pictures.
On Tuesday, a day after she returned home, Anjali flipped through an old family album, and asked her mother if she recognized who was who. Both sisters wore blue frocks that Amita made for them.
“Anjali never smiled. Anisha always did. So you can make out,” she said.
In the corner, sitting by the door because she can’t walk, Anisha smiled mischiviously. Last year, on their birthday, the family fasted, praying for Anjali. On Dec. 21, they will celebrate once again and Anisha will make her sister a card, and Abin will give her a doll set.
“She loves dolls,” Abin said. “At least she won’t run away again.”
Mehnaz Khan, the manager at the Rainbow Home in Delhi, said Anjali had ran away from home in the past, too.
“If someone says something to her, she wants to run away,” she said. “When she first came to us three months ago, she would hardly eat. She wanted to go home. But we couldn’t find the place.”
Last year, Amita moved to New Ashok Nagar from Badarpur to put Anisha in the school for the physically and the mentally challenged kids where Amita too would take up the nurse’s job. Abin and Anjali had yet to be admitted to a school. But then, 11 days after they moved to the new place, Anjali went missing.
Now, Amita doesn’t want to send her to school. Anjali has lost two years of her life, and the family would rather get her private tuitions and make her appear for the open school examinations later.
For Anjali, who hugged her mother tight and kept crying when she met her at the church, it is back to the familiar world.
“I was angry with my brother. I didn’t want to be at home,” she said. “But I wanted to come back home. I cried so much.”
In the home for the destitute children, Anjali learned to paint and draw. She even danced at times when she was happy.
Back with her mother and sister, Anjali is now trying to get back to a life that was lost. In the intervening year, she has outgrown her clothes. So, on Monday when the NGO handed her over to her family, they went to Sarojini Nagar to shop for new clothes for her.
After all, it is yet another beginning. She was lost and found.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on November 18, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, November 17, 2009
Pastor Anil Johnson kept repeating hallelujah over the phone.
Amita Raj listened in, wondering why her pastor had called her on a Thursday afternoon. Then, in a soft voice, he told her that Anjali, her daughter who had been missing for 15 months, had returned, and she was with him at Aaya Nagar. They needed to come to the church right away.
She was safe, he added.
Anjali, who was 11 years old at the time, went missing one afternoon last August after she fought with her younger brother Abin. She went downstairs first to buy biscuits, then came back upstairs and took some money from her mother’s almirah and then disappeared into the narrow, winding alleyes of Block B in New Ashok Nagar in East Delhi. Abin sat at home, waiting. His mother and uncle were at work at the school for handicap children. Anjali’s twin sister Anisha was with them.
But Anjali never found her way back home. She walked to the bus stop, spent the night in a bus parked in the lot, and in the morning walked to the railway station and got into a train. She thought she would go to her aunt in Tamil Nadu, but there were too many trains, and she followed a stream of people and two days later, Anjali got down at the Secunderabad station.
A field worker from Aman Biradari, an NGO based in Hyderabad, found Anjali at the station. She had been standing in a corner, crying. They brought her to the Rainbow Home where Anjali spent a year among other destitute children. She would often cry, and sulk, and withdraw. She would not eat, and urge the NGO workers to take her home. But the teams that they sent out were not able to find the church in Aaya Nagar. The church that Anjali’s family attended relocated from a rented house in the locality. So, Anjali remained among the children in an alien city.
Three months ago, a field worker from Hyderabad accompanied her to Delhi and she started living in the NGO’s Kilkari Rainbow Home near Kashmere Gate with 65 other chidlren. Once in while, she would go with the NGO officials to the places she remembered. It was on one such trip to Aaya Nagar when Pastor Anil Johnson spotted her. He was at a shop, near the site of the former church, when he saw Anjali. At first he wasn’t sure if it was her. Her hair was cropped short, and she was with someone. But Johnson had prayed for her at the church, holding out her photograph to the congregation. He couldn’t be wrong. He called out her name, and she turned back to look at him. It was Anjali.
On Thursday, when their pastor called, Amita was at work, tending to disabled children at the Mata Bhagwanti Devi Chadha Charitable Trust, where Anjali’s twin sister Anisha is a student, too. She ran up the flight of steps to the canteen where her brother Wilson Raj was busy preparing meals. She hugged him, and wouldn’t stop crying. Anjali had raised her children on her own after having divorced her husband and moving to Delhi in 2000. It wasn’t easy, she said.
“It was awkward. Everyone was looking at us. At first, I thought one of the children fell down and got hurt,” Wilson said. “Then she said Anjali has been found.”
For 15 months, ever since Anjali, went missing, Amita has prayed, fasted for days in a row, never losing her faith in her god, hoping that her daughter will return someday.
On August 26, 2008, when Anjali went missing, their mother and uncle came home in the evening and waited for hours, combing the neighborhood for her, finally registering a complaint at the police station. But nothing ever happened.
“The police used to tell us if you find her, let us know,” Amita said. “We had no hope. We only had faith.”
For 13 days, Amita and Wilson went to most of the city’s NGOs asking about Anjali, showing her pictures to the officials.
In the nights, Amita made the bed for her missing daughter, spread the blankets, too. In the mornings, Anjali was the one who would bring tea to her mother, tug at her gently to wake her up.
“I would often turn over in bed and get angry,” Amita said, holding Anjali’s hand at the family’s residence. “After she was lost, I got up angry, and I told God I would never ever scold her. But he should give her back to us.”
Her twin sister Anisha prayed, too. They were born on December 21, 1998, in Kanyakumari. At 6 p.m., Anisha’s tiny feet appeared, and a minute later, nurses brought in Anjali into the world. They were identical twins an their mother dressed them in similar clothes. If it were not for a scar on Anisha’s stomach, even the sisters could not identify themselves in the pictures.
On Tuesday, a day after she returned home, Anjali flipped through an old family album, and asked her mother if she recognized who was who. Both sisters wore blue frocks that Amita made for them.
“Anjali never smiled. Anisha always did. So you can make out,” she said.
In the corner, sitting by the door because she can’t walk, Anisha smiled mischiviously. Last year, on their birthday, the family fasted, praying for Anjali. On Dec. 21, they will celebrate once again and Anisha will make her sister a card, and Abin will give her a doll set.
“She loves dolls,” Abin said. “At least she won’t run away again.”
Mehnaz Khan, the manager at the Rainbow Home in Delhi, said Anjali had ran away from home in the past, too.
“If someone says something to her, she wants to run away,” she said. “When she first came to us three months ago, she would hardly eat. She wanted to go home. But we couldn’t find the place.”
Last year, Amita moved to New Ashok Nagar from Badarpur to put Anisha in the school for the physically and the mentally challenged kids where Amita too would take up the nurse’s job. Abin and Anjali had yet to be admitted to a school. But then, 11 days after they moved to the new place, Anjali went missing.
Now, Amita doesn’t want to send her to school. Anjali has lost two years of her life, and the family would rather get her private tuitions and make her appear for the open school examinations later.
For Anjali, who hugged her mother tight and kept crying when she met her at the church, it is back to the familiar world.
“I was angry with my brother. I didn’t want to be at home,” she said. “But I wanted to come back home. I cried so much.”
In the home for the destitute children, Anjali learned to paint and draw. She even danced at times when she was happy.
Back with her mother and sister, Anjali is now trying to get back to a life that was lost. In the intervening year, she has outgrown her clothes. So, on Monday when the NGO handed her over to her family, they went to Sarojini Nagar to shop for new clothes for her.
After all, it is yet another beginning. She was lost and found.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
"We live under the shadow of the tree that fell and the earth shook in 1984."
An edited version of the two stories on Sikh riots of 1984 appeared in the Indian Express on Nov. 1.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 28, 2009
They chose to return
On that day, murder leapt up from the ground, it was unleashed from the swords the men carried, it cavorted with the mob, and it danced shamelessly in men’s eyes. That day murder came a long way, making its way into small alleys, spilling blood, dismembering limbs, and broke all rules. It was October 31, 1984, the day former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated.
In the 25 years since the carnage, the worst the city experienced, the families have picked up the pieces and moved on. Many relocated to the resettlement colony in Tilak Vihar in Eest Delhi where the government allotted housing to them, but a few remained, returning to the area where the neighbors turned against neighbors, and each block bore the marks of tragedy that cut short many lives, killed dreams of going to college, and heaped them with a life where they woke up in the nights shrieking, angry, afraid and hurt.
The journey was littered, as was the neighbourhood with remainders from the past. But the few families had made their choices and tried to make the best of it – the nightmares, the stereotyping, everything, changing and adapting, often willing but mostly reluctantly.
Sardar Harminder Singh’s neighbor Bheem Singh who sheltered him in his house urged him to chop off his hair.
“For a Sikh, it is like dying,” Singh, 67, said, who has since grown back his hair. “But did we have a choice?”
His two sons – Charanjit Singh,39, and Inderjit Singh, 36 – too had to cut their hair for fear of being recognized as a Sikh. For their mother Kulwant Kaur, the sons died that day, and what remained were two boys who had no religion, no faith.
“Now I think I should have pushed them through the door and let the mob run their swords through them,” she said.
The 1984 carnage turned Kaur into a bitter woman. She had watched helplessly when the mobs knocked at their homes. And she first felt fear, the raw, gripping, and numbing force taking over all the anger that had built up inside her. She revolted. Till date, she is shameful of the day she hid, and let them cut her sons’ hair.
But then, life moves, in spurts and in bits. There’s regret but there’s hope, too.
When the grandchildren were born, she made sure they wore the turban and some of the guilt wore off.
“This is our legacy, this is our identity. They are Sardars,” she said. “We can’t let it all go. We need to claim our past and future.”
On the third day of the massacres that killed more than 450 Sikhs in Trilokpuri, an army truck picked up the family and took them to a refugee camp in Vivek Vihar and from there they went to Chandigarh to live at Guru Gobind Singh Bhawan but were later asked to leave and were given Rs. 500. The family with their two sons and a young daughter then went to Kapurtala in Punjab and lived there for around two years. The sons had to give up their education, and learned to stitch clothes like their father. If life had to go on, the dreams would have had to wait. So education was the first luxury the family had to toss away.
“We returned two years later and went to Tilak Vihar but the houses were small and it felt as if we were cowards,” Harminder Singh said. “Besides, I had been a tailor in Trilokpuri for years. How could I start all over again? I had a family to provide for.”
The tailoring shop in Block 29 of Trilokpuri, a a trans-Jamuna resettlement colony in the east of Delhi in set up in 1975, opposite the Madina Masjid too underwent a cosmetic change. From Sardar Tailors before the gruesome killings that went on for three days, it was rechristened “Happy Tailors”.
Charanjit Singh and Inderjit Singh could never go back to school. Even though, the situation had stabilised, they were teased, and even threatened. So they worked on the sewing machines in their space.
The sons went to the government senior secondary school in Block 27 but post riots, they didn’t find many of their friends there. His other friends who were with him in school have gone on to become journalist, and teachers and he often curses the day the tragedy struck.
“Who knows what I could have become,” he said. “Now I want my children to become engineers, or doctors, do what we couldn’t.”
The shop is doing well. But it is not like before when so many of their clients were from their community. After 1984, many in the area stopped coming to their shop.
“They discriminated against us because we were Sikhs,” he said. “Some people are nice but some are not. We still can’t laugh freely or crack jokes because you never know. We didn’t know then. We still live in fear but we can’t live. We can’t start afresh.”
Singh was married in 1996 and has three sons who attend the local government schools now.
Inderjit married in 2003.
Their sister Sukhwindar Singh was married off to a man in Gandhi Nagar in 1998, years after the family started looking for a groom. She was past the age but no family wanted to marry a girl from Trilokpuri.
It wasn’t a good marriage, Charanjit Singh said.
“She never went to school. She used to go to school in Block 27 but left her studies after the riots. We didn’t let her out of the house,” he said. “Her husband does some embroidery work and is uneducated. Nobody was willing to come to this area. They said who knows if they are mentally stable or if they are traumatized. This match was the one we didn't really like. We wanted an educated family. Even in our marriages, we encountered difficulty. No families were there in Trilokpuri. No families wanted to send their daughters to this area.”
Even 25 years later, fear hasn’t receded into a forgotten corner of the mind. Their own neighbors had helped them, packing three sardars into a tin trunk where they had poked holes for fresh air to get in, hiding them under the bed. Bheem Singh, a rickshaw driver, who had told the mobs to back off and guarded Harminder Singh’s house when the riots raged, is an old man now. Both men often sit outside the shop, reminiscing about those dark days.
And then several other neighbors drop by. In many ways, like the family, the neighborhood too transformed, its demographics changed and its spirit, too.
In Block 32, where Sardars owned more than half of the houses, the worst happened. In fact, it was the mob’s first stopover in a string of organized killings, where men had voters list in hand for reference. No Sikh family lives there now. Almost all those who remained, the widows and the children, relocated to the resettlement colony.
Houses that were not occupied were sold off for peanuts. Now, many Muslim families are settled there.
In other blocks, a few families chose to return. And so they have, battling the odds.
Parabjot Singh, nine-year-old grandson of Harminder Singh, often refuses to go to the nearby Municipal Corporation of Delhi school.
“They call me ‘joori’,” he said, shyly. “The teachers and the students call me names.”
But then, the family has limited options. Private schools are out of bounds for their limited means.
“They have to cope with it. They have to survive,” Charanjit Singh said. “We can’t turn our backs this time. We have to go on.”
On the door, a gash is still prominent. When the angry mod had come, shouting, torches in hand and brandishing swords and knives, they had struck the door. But then someone shouted “Come here, there are more Sardars here” and the mob turned, and that’s when Harminder Singh knew life would go on.
“It’s the pole.”
Nazar Singh can never get past the electricity pole outside his tenement in Block 36 of Trilokpuri.
At least not without going back 25 years when an angry mob had pulled out his father from the house, stabbed him, and then burned him alive. He had been away at his workshop in Mehrauli, and later when he returned, he had stood near the pole and wondered why it happened.
The family’s dog Jackie had not left the spot for three days, and while the city burned, the family debated whether they should leave like the rest, or if they should stay back, and fight the demons.
In the following days, his mother Naseeb Kaur sat outside their corner house and started at the pole. She hardly spoke, and she cried often.
In 1992, she died, too.
“She couldn’t take it. You couldn’t move on because the pole was right there in front of your eyes and it held you, stopped you, forced you to think about the tragedy,” Nazar, 46, said.
He had been only 22 at the time. And suddenly he had felt old, and without hope. But moving on wasn’t a choice. It was survival that was at stake. There was his family to be taken care of, his sisters had to be married off.
The house in Block 36, tucked in an alley near the gurudwara that was a site of many ghastly killings in 1984, was their only property. If they moved to what the government offered them in Tilak Vihar, it would be admitting defeat, and forsaking what their father had built.
So they lived on, with the pole in front of their house, trying to not look at it. But in denial too, the memories didn’t leave the family alone.
Now, Fauji is a sevadar at the gurudwara earning a mere Rs. 2,200 a month. The government’s promises of jobs and compensation never came through. And over the years, he felt too tired to pursue it. That would mean more humiliation, and it would hurt, he said.
“We are like beggars now and for no fault of ours,” he said. “They shouted when they came to kill us that Indira Gandhi was their mother. But we loved her, too.”
His young daughter Kirandeep Kaur stood near the door, watching her father as he recounted the horrors and narrated the family’s journey in the 25 years hence.
Fauji never discussed the gruesome and gory past with her. She is in high school and she didn’t need to know, he said.
But as she grew up, the past came to her in neighbour’s tales, haunting her, exciting her, and disturbing her. They pointed to the pole and told her this was where her grandfather had been killed, and she asked questions, uncomfortable, painful questions from her father.
“He told me little things and he sat in front of the pole when he told me how death came upon us,” she said.
In the same block, yet another victim is trying to shut out the past. But she can’t because forgetting is betraying her husband and her community that were punished for no fault of theirs, she said.
“The world forgot us. The government forgot me. When the tree fell, and the earth shook as Rajiv Gandhi said, we were buried in its cracks, we became zombies,” the 59-year-old widow said.
Gurcharan Kaur was in Karol Bagh when her husband Naik Teja Singh was killed outside the Gurudwara as he walked home with his three children. The children watched in horror as their father fell, blood colouring the streets, and his shouts piercing through the raging mob that wielded sticks and knives, and their eyes shone through the fire and the smoke.
The neighbors brought the children home and kept them in their house until the mother returned. Gurcharan was picked up in an army van that also carried her slain husband’s body. Four children were in her brother’s house at Karol Bagh when the curfew was imposed.
“My husband’s body was burnt, his one hand was cut off. It was terrible,” she said.
She opened a chai stall in the front verandah of her house and brought up her seven children. She married off her first daughter when she turned 16. The youngest is now studying in Australia, the son is employed in a private firm and lives in the apartment upstairs.
Kaur chose to stay back because her neighbors helped her get on her feet, helping with money, food and everything else. The gurudwara where she spent a lot of time in the aftermath of the riots helped her heal, and move on.
Her husband’s medals are now displayed in her house and so is his photograph in all his army glory. The young couple had moved to Delhi in 1982, hoping to bring up their children in the city. But then riots happened.
Kaur tided through her life with a meagre pension of Rs. 365, and her earnings from her tea shop raising her seven children on her own.
“There was no time to think, no time to point fingers,” she said. “I was too busy getting by.”
At the gurudwara in Block 36, the Sikhs, the few families that remain in the area, will organize a Shahidi Diwas beginning Oct. 31 through Nov. 2 for the men that were murdered during the three days of the carnage.
The tradition started in 1985 and has gone on since. For three days, the granthis will read the sacred texts and remember the “martyrs” and pray for them.
They haven’t forgotten. Because if they forgot, the betrayal would be too much to bear, more than loss itself.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 28, 2009
They chose to return
On that day, murder leapt up from the ground, it was unleashed from the swords the men carried, it cavorted with the mob, and it danced shamelessly in men’s eyes. That day murder came a long way, making its way into small alleys, spilling blood, dismembering limbs, and broke all rules. It was October 31, 1984, the day former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated.
In the 25 years since the carnage, the worst the city experienced, the families have picked up the pieces and moved on. Many relocated to the resettlement colony in Tilak Vihar in Eest Delhi where the government allotted housing to them, but a few remained, returning to the area where the neighbors turned against neighbors, and each block bore the marks of tragedy that cut short many lives, killed dreams of going to college, and heaped them with a life where they woke up in the nights shrieking, angry, afraid and hurt.
The journey was littered, as was the neighbourhood with remainders from the past. But the few families had made their choices and tried to make the best of it – the nightmares, the stereotyping, everything, changing and adapting, often willing but mostly reluctantly.
Sardar Harminder Singh’s neighbor Bheem Singh who sheltered him in his house urged him to chop off his hair.
“For a Sikh, it is like dying,” Singh, 67, said, who has since grown back his hair. “But did we have a choice?”
His two sons – Charanjit Singh,39, and Inderjit Singh, 36 – too had to cut their hair for fear of being recognized as a Sikh. For their mother Kulwant Kaur, the sons died that day, and what remained were two boys who had no religion, no faith.
“Now I think I should have pushed them through the door and let the mob run their swords through them,” she said.
The 1984 carnage turned Kaur into a bitter woman. She had watched helplessly when the mobs knocked at their homes. And she first felt fear, the raw, gripping, and numbing force taking over all the anger that had built up inside her. She revolted. Till date, she is shameful of the day she hid, and let them cut her sons’ hair.
But then, life moves, in spurts and in bits. There’s regret but there’s hope, too.
When the grandchildren were born, she made sure they wore the turban and some of the guilt wore off.
“This is our legacy, this is our identity. They are Sardars,” she said. “We can’t let it all go. We need to claim our past and future.”
On the third day of the massacres that killed more than 450 Sikhs in Trilokpuri, an army truck picked up the family and took them to a refugee camp in Vivek Vihar and from there they went to Chandigarh to live at Guru Gobind Singh Bhawan but were later asked to leave and were given Rs. 500. The family with their two sons and a young daughter then went to Kapurtala in Punjab and lived there for around two years. The sons had to give up their education, and learned to stitch clothes like their father. If life had to go on, the dreams would have had to wait. So education was the first luxury the family had to toss away.
“We returned two years later and went to Tilak Vihar but the houses were small and it felt as if we were cowards,” Harminder Singh said. “Besides, I had been a tailor in Trilokpuri for years. How could I start all over again? I had a family to provide for.”
The tailoring shop in Block 29 of Trilokpuri, a a trans-Jamuna resettlement colony in the east of Delhi in set up in 1975, opposite the Madina Masjid too underwent a cosmetic change. From Sardar Tailors before the gruesome killings that went on for three days, it was rechristened “Happy Tailors”.
Charanjit Singh and Inderjit Singh could never go back to school. Even though, the situation had stabilised, they were teased, and even threatened. So they worked on the sewing machines in their space.
The sons went to the government senior secondary school in Block 27 but post riots, they didn’t find many of their friends there. His other friends who were with him in school have gone on to become journalist, and teachers and he often curses the day the tragedy struck.
“Who knows what I could have become,” he said. “Now I want my children to become engineers, or doctors, do what we couldn’t.”
The shop is doing well. But it is not like before when so many of their clients were from their community. After 1984, many in the area stopped coming to their shop.
“They discriminated against us because we were Sikhs,” he said. “Some people are nice but some are not. We still can’t laugh freely or crack jokes because you never know. We didn’t know then. We still live in fear but we can’t live. We can’t start afresh.”
Singh was married in 1996 and has three sons who attend the local government schools now.
Inderjit married in 2003.
Their sister Sukhwindar Singh was married off to a man in Gandhi Nagar in 1998, years after the family started looking for a groom. She was past the age but no family wanted to marry a girl from Trilokpuri.
It wasn’t a good marriage, Charanjit Singh said.
“She never went to school. She used to go to school in Block 27 but left her studies after the riots. We didn’t let her out of the house,” he said. “Her husband does some embroidery work and is uneducated. Nobody was willing to come to this area. They said who knows if they are mentally stable or if they are traumatized. This match was the one we didn't really like. We wanted an educated family. Even in our marriages, we encountered difficulty. No families were there in Trilokpuri. No families wanted to send their daughters to this area.”
Even 25 years later, fear hasn’t receded into a forgotten corner of the mind. Their own neighbors had helped them, packing three sardars into a tin trunk where they had poked holes for fresh air to get in, hiding them under the bed. Bheem Singh, a rickshaw driver, who had told the mobs to back off and guarded Harminder Singh’s house when the riots raged, is an old man now. Both men often sit outside the shop, reminiscing about those dark days.
And then several other neighbors drop by. In many ways, like the family, the neighborhood too transformed, its demographics changed and its spirit, too.
In Block 32, where Sardars owned more than half of the houses, the worst happened. In fact, it was the mob’s first stopover in a string of organized killings, where men had voters list in hand for reference. No Sikh family lives there now. Almost all those who remained, the widows and the children, relocated to the resettlement colony.
Houses that were not occupied were sold off for peanuts. Now, many Muslim families are settled there.
In other blocks, a few families chose to return. And so they have, battling the odds.
Parabjot Singh, nine-year-old grandson of Harminder Singh, often refuses to go to the nearby Municipal Corporation of Delhi school.
“They call me ‘joori’,” he said, shyly. “The teachers and the students call me names.”
But then, the family has limited options. Private schools are out of bounds for their limited means.
“They have to cope with it. They have to survive,” Charanjit Singh said. “We can’t turn our backs this time. We have to go on.”
On the door, a gash is still prominent. When the angry mod had come, shouting, torches in hand and brandishing swords and knives, they had struck the door. But then someone shouted “Come here, there are more Sardars here” and the mob turned, and that’s when Harminder Singh knew life would go on.
“It’s the pole.”
Nazar Singh can never get past the electricity pole outside his tenement in Block 36 of Trilokpuri.
At least not without going back 25 years when an angry mob had pulled out his father from the house, stabbed him, and then burned him alive. He had been away at his workshop in Mehrauli, and later when he returned, he had stood near the pole and wondered why it happened.
The family’s dog Jackie had not left the spot for three days, and while the city burned, the family debated whether they should leave like the rest, or if they should stay back, and fight the demons.
In the following days, his mother Naseeb Kaur sat outside their corner house and started at the pole. She hardly spoke, and she cried often.
In 1992, she died, too.
“She couldn’t take it. You couldn’t move on because the pole was right there in front of your eyes and it held you, stopped you, forced you to think about the tragedy,” Nazar, 46, said.
He had been only 22 at the time. And suddenly he had felt old, and without hope. But moving on wasn’t a choice. It was survival that was at stake. There was his family to be taken care of, his sisters had to be married off.
The house in Block 36, tucked in an alley near the gurudwara that was a site of many ghastly killings in 1984, was their only property. If they moved to what the government offered them in Tilak Vihar, it would be admitting defeat, and forsaking what their father had built.
So they lived on, with the pole in front of their house, trying to not look at it. But in denial too, the memories didn’t leave the family alone.
Now, Fauji is a sevadar at the gurudwara earning a mere Rs. 2,200 a month. The government’s promises of jobs and compensation never came through. And over the years, he felt too tired to pursue it. That would mean more humiliation, and it would hurt, he said.
“We are like beggars now and for no fault of ours,” he said. “They shouted when they came to kill us that Indira Gandhi was their mother. But we loved her, too.”
His young daughter Kirandeep Kaur stood near the door, watching her father as he recounted the horrors and narrated the family’s journey in the 25 years hence.
Fauji never discussed the gruesome and gory past with her. She is in high school and she didn’t need to know, he said.
But as she grew up, the past came to her in neighbour’s tales, haunting her, exciting her, and disturbing her. They pointed to the pole and told her this was where her grandfather had been killed, and she asked questions, uncomfortable, painful questions from her father.
“He told me little things and he sat in front of the pole when he told me how death came upon us,” she said.
In the same block, yet another victim is trying to shut out the past. But she can’t because forgetting is betraying her husband and her community that were punished for no fault of theirs, she said.
“The world forgot us. The government forgot me. When the tree fell, and the earth shook as Rajiv Gandhi said, we were buried in its cracks, we became zombies,” the 59-year-old widow said.
Gurcharan Kaur was in Karol Bagh when her husband Naik Teja Singh was killed outside the Gurudwara as he walked home with his three children. The children watched in horror as their father fell, blood colouring the streets, and his shouts piercing through the raging mob that wielded sticks and knives, and their eyes shone through the fire and the smoke.
The neighbors brought the children home and kept them in their house until the mother returned. Gurcharan was picked up in an army van that also carried her slain husband’s body. Four children were in her brother’s house at Karol Bagh when the curfew was imposed.
“My husband’s body was burnt, his one hand was cut off. It was terrible,” she said.
She opened a chai stall in the front verandah of her house and brought up her seven children. She married off her first daughter when she turned 16. The youngest is now studying in Australia, the son is employed in a private firm and lives in the apartment upstairs.
Kaur chose to stay back because her neighbors helped her get on her feet, helping with money, food and everything else. The gurudwara where she spent a lot of time in the aftermath of the riots helped her heal, and move on.
Her husband’s medals are now displayed in her house and so is his photograph in all his army glory. The young couple had moved to Delhi in 1982, hoping to bring up their children in the city. But then riots happened.
Kaur tided through her life with a meagre pension of Rs. 365, and her earnings from her tea shop raising her seven children on her own.
“There was no time to think, no time to point fingers,” she said. “I was too busy getting by.”
At the gurudwara in Block 36, the Sikhs, the few families that remain in the area, will organize a Shahidi Diwas beginning Oct. 31 through Nov. 2 for the men that were murdered during the three days of the carnage.
The tradition started in 1985 and has gone on since. For three days, the granthis will read the sacred texts and remember the “martyrs” and pray for them.
They haven’t forgotten. Because if they forgot, the betrayal would be too much to bear, more than loss itself.
The fifth Beatle
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express Sunday Eye on November 1. This is how I wrote it, and felt it.
"Almost Famous ..."
Chinki Sinha
October 27, 2009
Pete Best almost made it.
For two years, when he was the drummer with the Beatles, he felt he was on his way to something, someplace out of the ordinary.
But then, on their way to fame and everything else that comes with it, the Beatles dumped him and replaced him with Ringo Starr. And for most fans, the Pete Best story ended in 1962.
And Best, 67, became the fifth Beatle, someone who could have been there, posing for the shutterbugs as the paparazzi chased the band, a legend like the rest. But he was forced to pick up the pieces and start all over again.
Although it was only from 1960 to 1962 that he played the drums for the Beatles, the tag, and the unfortunate split clung to his identity, overshadowing his own talent, and he could never completely shake it off. Forty-seven years later, he is still known as the “ex drummer for Beatles”. But there was never any bitterness, only sadness.
“No, I admired them for what they achieved. They took what we started to another level,” Best said.In their early years, when Beatles went by another name, they belted out some of their most memorable songs, including Love me do, My Bonnie , Ain't She Sweet , and Like Dreamers Do . When Best was the drummer, the band hadn’t signed any record deals.
On his tour to India this week, where he will play at the British Council as part of the Liverpool tourism promotion campaign for Visit Britain and The Beatles Story, it’s his connection with the Beatles that is the selling point. That he was the forgotten drummer for the band that then was only a start up band that began playing at Casbah, a basement café owned by Mona Best, Pete’s mother, is till date Best’s
claim to fame. When he plays for the first time in India decades after he left the country on the last troop ship out of India(his mother was planning a visit when she unexpectedly died of a heart attack and Best always wanted to come and relive the days when he was a child growing up in India), The Georgic, that carried the remainder of the British Major-General Gilmore Simms army, in 1945, it will be in a space that will be set up like Casbah where he first played with the Beatles, the
ceilings of which were painted by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. In another part of the city, at the Select City Walk Mall, the original wax works of Beatles from Madame Tussauds’ that were made in 1964, two years after Best was dropped, would be displayed. And Best would yet again be part of an association with Beatles.
“The Casbah Coffee Club is the Holy Grail of the Beatles trail. No true Beatle fan should miss seeing it. I'm happy it's open,” Best said.
Before the café closed in 1962, the Beatles were the last group to perform there. Three years ago Casbah reopened as a tourist attraction in Liverpool, one among a string of places the Beatles Story has taken over.
But years later, Best and many others including Bill Harry, the journalist who founded the Mersey Beat, a newspaper that focused on the city’s music scene for there was much going on, and the energy was infectious, and first featured the Beatles and introduced Brian Epstein to them in 1961, have themselves become a part of the story of the band, a piece in its history, an element of its legend. The band
itself is long gone. Lennon was killed, others moved on, but the ones
on the fringes got together to piece the story together, recounting
their moments with the Fab Four.
Best’s India ties date back to 1941. He was born in Chennai. His mother Mona Best was born in Delhi in 1924. Perhaps it was here in India, that he first began to experiment with the tabla.
“I remember playing with a tabla. I don't know if you would call it actually playing one, but they were around the house, the servants had them,” he said in an email. “I will get to see my mother’s birthplace which I'm very excited about.”
This is also Best’s first trip to India after he left for Liverpool from Bombay in 1945. Among the little treasures the family carried with it were a silver-christening rattle, a mini hand-carved sitar and a number of items Best inherited from his mother like Indian Buddhas, Tiger skins. Elephant tusks. Those are part of the family archives now.
And although he was too young at the time, Best remembers his long walks on the beaches with his nanny Lakshmi, and the lullabies she sang to him.
“I also remember Indian and Western music being played in the house. My mother had very cosmopolitan tastes,” he said. “My memories of the Indians we were with are of happy times. I remember them as hard working honest, happy people. Our house was always full of laughter. I'm expecting India to bring memories alive.”
Even at Casbah, where Best met the Beatles first in 1959, his mother’s nostalgia for her days in India was reflected in the Aztec ceiling studded with stars because it looked like a mosque.
“The name the Casbah was definitely something my mother remembered from India,” he wrote in an email.
The Casbah had closed on the 24th of June 1962 but became a tourist attraction three years ago. It started in the basement of Best’s house where Mona Best sold coffee, and sodas and sweets. The Quarrymen, the name Beatles went by at the time, helped decorate the café, painting its walls, drawing dragons, spiders and stars on them. They also played there on the opening night in 1960.
Cafes were important spaces then. That’s where people met, smoked, talked and played music.
“It was the start of Beatlemania,” Best recalled. “Nobody knew them at that time. They were a start-up band.”
In her café, Mona Best, who regaled the band members with stories of her India days, wanted an Indian element. She missed India and often talked about her happy days in the country. In fact she was planning a trip to India when she died of a heart attack in 1988.
“Yes, what memories I have are good ones and the stories my mother told us always left a yearning to return. I'm happy that I am returning and playing there,” Best said. “It was always one of her dreams to return. She would often get upset thinking about India because she had such happy time there.”
Mo Best
"People will learn how it was that Mo threw the pebble, that made the ripple, that caused the wave that shook the world." – BEATLES: THE TRUE BEGINNINGS
Behind it all, the music scene and the Beatlemania that gripped the world, was a woman and her love for her son.
Mo, who had Irsih parentage, has more to her than just being the mother of the drummer who was sacked from Beatles. She was born in India during the Raj in 1924 and worked for the Red Cross. She married a army official Johnny Best who fell in love with her.
Later, when they left India, she carried back a lot of memories. She gave birth to her two sons – Pete and Rory.
The third brother, Roag Best, will be in India with Pete.
It was Mona Best who first made Casbah the Rock n’ Roll place, and let the Beatles play. Her son performed with the boys and those were good times. She had noticed his young friends who came over and started the café in the cellar first as a private club for him and later turned it into a café, which was also one of the first cellar clubs in Liverpool to play rock ‘n’ roll exclusively. It opened in 1959 two years after Mo Best bought the house in Haymans Green after winning a bet on a horse that was called “Never say Die”.
“Due to her upbringing in India she did attract a lot of attention, as many of her ideas were Eastern and not something that the people of Liverpool had come across before,” Best said. “Many of the Indian rhythms helped many years afterwards with my drumming. However, a larger influence with regards to the Beatles music came after my time with the group.”
The Beatles, then known Quarrymen, disbanded and George Harrison joined another band called the Les Stewart Quartet, but later got back to his friends and took up residency at Casbah and performed on the club’s opening night on
August 29, 1959. It was then that the Beatles were born.
When Pete joined the group as drummer in August 1960, his mother took up a more active role in his career and the band and helped them get bookings at other places.
When Pete was sacked, Mo tracked down George Martin, the recording manager for the Beatles to ask why her son was dumped.
Later, she told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies that she had helped the band get on its feet, even fed when, and was “far more interested in them than their own parents.”
In 1967, despite the unfortunate fallout, she lent John Lennon her father’s medals that he received in India after John Lennon asked her for it to wear them on the montage of the cover of the album ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’
Liverpool - the city, the man, and Beatles' music
It was in Liverpool, the family’s hometown that Best began his music career, at first wanting to play guitars but later settled on drums and at 16 years he started to drum in his bedroom above the Casbah.
“I saw the famous Gene Krupa playing drums and that was it, I wanted to be a drummer,” Best said.
He first started playing with Ken Brown and formed a band called the Black jacks.
Then the Beatles discovered him, and he went on to Hamburg for a tour that tested the band’s limits, the gigs often lasted for eight hours at a stretch. That was the start of something.
If the impossible had happened, it’d be a story of success, loads of it. But instead it became a story of hopes that crashed, of resignation and of a life in an “almost” phase. He was not where he was supposed to be.
“There has only ever been six (Stuart Stucliffe who played the bass guitar but left Beatles shortly after their Hamburg tour) members of The Beatles and I was the fifth member. I am very proud to wear that tag. Who wouldn't be,” he said. “The shadow of The Beatles hasn't left any former Beatle. None of us could shake it off. Who'd want to? It is what it is.”
In the later days, people told stories, put in their bits and came out with their conspiracy theories. They said Best was so good looking that others in the band felt insecure, felt he could easily overshadow them, that Best was never a Beatle, he was a loner, and he didn’t fit in. But who knows what really happened in the August of 1962. He was told the group had decided to let him go, and he drove back home and
broke the news to his mother Mo Best and girlfriend Kathy. It had hurt. The dumping he could have taken, but not the way it had been done. The manager had called him and said the group had decided to replace him.
“I was hurt because I felt I had been let down by my friends,” he said. “Ringo was a good drummer, not a great drummer.”
“It is one of the most difficult things we ever had to do,” Paul McCartney said in Anthology, a collection of Beatles’ compilations.
For days after the split, there were times when Best looked at Beatles as they walked up the stairs to the stage, and as he descended those steps in one of the cafes at Liverpool, the place where it all started, but never a word was exchanged. No explanations came his way.
“I saw The Beatles on two occasions after I was dismissed, but we didn't talk. Everyone looked embarrassed,” he said.
When Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, told Pete he was sacked, that the boys didn’t want him anymore, Best went to a pub, downed a few drinks and drove home to break the news to his mother and girlfriend Kathy.
“I just went off and had a few pints - numb, I'd been cut and dried and hung out on the line,” he later said in an interview.
Ringo even alleged Best was on drugs, Best sued him and won.
"It was nonsense," Best said.
The original members of the band were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and a painter Stuart Stucliffe who left shortly after the Hamburg tour and died soon after.
It wasn’t easy moving on when the world was going crazy over Beatles.
When a man falls, only the dark phases of his life resonate, and live long in public memory. That’s what happened to Best. In all his appearances on television, he was asked about the fallout. The uncomfortable truths never left him. All the years that he had worked through long hours to survive, he had witnessed the rise of the
Beatles. He never met them again, though he said John Lennon was his closest friend.
Best, after all these years, has left the door open. After all he shared memories with the band members and of the Fab four, only Paul McCartney is alive.
“I want to talk to him about our families and life,” he said.
Best tried to get on, but there was his young family and they had to be taken care of. After he was sacked, Best stayed home for weeks and then joined Lee Curtis & the All Stars, which then broke off from Curtis and became Pete Best & the All Stars. They signed to Decca Records , and released the single "I'm Gonna Knock On Your Door”.
Best moved to United States and the Pete Best Combo toured America with a combination of 1950s songs and original tunes and eventually released the Best Of The Beatles ; which wasn’t a complilation of Beatles’ songs but was a play on Best's name.
Best married Kathy in 1968. The couple had two daughters, Babs and Bonita. The only job he could find was of a baker on the loading dock of a large bakery in Liverpool, where he worked long hours and often during the nights.
And so Best lived, within the limits, with no higher destiny to chase.
He didn’t play drums for almost 20 years. All these years, he refused to talk about Beatles. He was never bitter, only sad.
In fact John Lennon once said in an interview that the band’s best works were in Liverpool and in Hamburg and other dance halls.
“I had to start again, which I did. I finally hung up my drum sticks because I had children and needed to provide for them,” he said.
“Because I had been a musician for so long nobody would employ me. They felt because I had been a Beatle that I would go back to show business. They were scared to employ me. The Baker job was all I could get.”
Later, the Civil Service employed Best.
He had made his choices and was making the best of what remained.
In 1988, he returned to his drums, trying to get back to what he loved doing best and formed the Pete Best Band, and gave interviews on television.
“I had been asked for about five years to do a one off date in Liverpool, I always refused, eventually my mother persuaded that one date wouldn't hurt. What about my fans. So, I agreed,” he said.
In 1995 when Beatles’ Anthology released, it included some of the tracks that had Best on the drums in those early days.
“The money was nice, but it was better to receive the recognition for
the years I played as a Beatle,” Best said.
Although it was a rough ride in the beginning, Best put it all together, bit by bit. A grandfather who adores his three grandchildren, Best has got back to music, drumming and writing songs yet again, touring the world with his band that includes his younger brother Roag on drums and percussion, Phil Melia, Paul Perry, and Tony Flynn, the lead singer. Haymans Green, the band’s latest release, has songs that Best and the rest of the band composed.
But even the decades that had come in between, didn’t really distance him from the music he once played with a band that moved on, and left him behind. His days with the band permeate his music. Perhaps those were the days when Pete discovered his own style of Rock n' Roll. But even now, his music is reminiscent of his Beatles' days.
“My current group captures my time with The Beatles. However, the group is a force in its own right. If you like The Beatles, you'll like this group. We are not a copy band. How could I copy myself,” Best said.
So, the man will once again go back in time, and beat on the drums. And in between, he will perhaps look at the ceiling with the stars, and wonder yet again. He is reconciled, has even expressed a wish to speak to the living Beatles’ member, is happy they made it that big, but he can’t help but go back to the old days and think why it happened, and why he became the fifth Beatle that was left behind. But
even in his tragedy, it was the Beatles’ who eventually resurrected him. The world will always know him as the shy, good looking drummer who played with Beatles and never said a word against those who left him to figure out his own life.
About the fifth Beatle
Pete has released various Cds after he got back to music including Back to the Beat, Once a Beatle Always, Casbah Coffee Club, and his latest Haymans Green, the name of the place where Casbah is located.
Her also co-authored two books, including The Beatles, The True Beginnings that traces the band’s beginnings and his mother’s influence on Liverpool music scenes. Best recorded several demos with group, which feature on the Beatles 1995 anthology album.
In 2007, Best was inducted into the All You Need Is Liverpool Music Hall of Fame as the debut Charter Member. Haymans Green was released on last year in the USA.
Back to Casbah
"I think it's a good idea to let people know about the Casbah. They know about the Cavern…but the Casbah was the place where all that started."
– Sir Paul McCartney forward in BEATLES: THE TRUE BEGINNINGS
Casbah, a café that Mona Best started after she pawned her belongings, and operated from the basement of their house in Haymans Green, was also the place where the Beatles first performed. The coffee club is now part of The Beatles Story, a visitor attraction that seeks to recreate the life, times, culture and music of the Beatles.
It was here the Beatles when they returned from Hamburg honed their talents honed.
Visit Britain and the Beatles Story are organizing a festival called "Imagine Liverpool" at Select CITYWALK, Saket District Centre,Saket, New Delhi.
The festival will showcase Liverpool as a destination and will see musical performances, beatles memorabilia, souvenirs travel information on Liverpool etc.
Liverpool, home to 'The Beatles' and the famous Liverpool Football Club was voted the '2008 European Capital of Culture.'
"Almost Famous ..."
Chinki Sinha
October 27, 2009
Pete Best almost made it.
For two years, when he was the drummer with the Beatles, he felt he was on his way to something, someplace out of the ordinary.
But then, on their way to fame and everything else that comes with it, the Beatles dumped him and replaced him with Ringo Starr. And for most fans, the Pete Best story ended in 1962.
And Best, 67, became the fifth Beatle, someone who could have been there, posing for the shutterbugs as the paparazzi chased the band, a legend like the rest. But he was forced to pick up the pieces and start all over again.
Although it was only from 1960 to 1962 that he played the drums for the Beatles, the tag, and the unfortunate split clung to his identity, overshadowing his own talent, and he could never completely shake it off. Forty-seven years later, he is still known as the “ex drummer for Beatles”. But there was never any bitterness, only sadness.
“No, I admired them for what they achieved. They took what we started to another level,” Best said.In their early years, when Beatles went by another name, they belted out some of their most memorable songs, including Love me do, My Bonnie , Ain't She Sweet , and Like Dreamers Do . When Best was the drummer, the band hadn’t signed any record deals.
On his tour to India this week, where he will play at the British Council as part of the Liverpool tourism promotion campaign for Visit Britain and The Beatles Story, it’s his connection with the Beatles that is the selling point. That he was the forgotten drummer for the band that then was only a start up band that began playing at Casbah, a basement café owned by Mona Best, Pete’s mother, is till date Best’s
claim to fame. When he plays for the first time in India decades after he left the country on the last troop ship out of India(his mother was planning a visit when she unexpectedly died of a heart attack and Best always wanted to come and relive the days when he was a child growing up in India), The Georgic, that carried the remainder of the British Major-General Gilmore Simms army, in 1945, it will be in a space that will be set up like Casbah where he first played with the Beatles, the
ceilings of which were painted by Paul McCartney and John Lennon. In another part of the city, at the Select City Walk Mall, the original wax works of Beatles from Madame Tussauds’ that were made in 1964, two years after Best was dropped, would be displayed. And Best would yet again be part of an association with Beatles.
“The Casbah Coffee Club is the Holy Grail of the Beatles trail. No true Beatle fan should miss seeing it. I'm happy it's open,” Best said.
Before the café closed in 1962, the Beatles were the last group to perform there. Three years ago Casbah reopened as a tourist attraction in Liverpool, one among a string of places the Beatles Story has taken over.
But years later, Best and many others including Bill Harry, the journalist who founded the Mersey Beat, a newspaper that focused on the city’s music scene for there was much going on, and the energy was infectious, and first featured the Beatles and introduced Brian Epstein to them in 1961, have themselves become a part of the story of the band, a piece in its history, an element of its legend. The band
itself is long gone. Lennon was killed, others moved on, but the ones
on the fringes got together to piece the story together, recounting
their moments with the Fab Four.
Best’s India ties date back to 1941. He was born in Chennai. His mother Mona Best was born in Delhi in 1924. Perhaps it was here in India, that he first began to experiment with the tabla.
“I remember playing with a tabla. I don't know if you would call it actually playing one, but they were around the house, the servants had them,” he said in an email. “I will get to see my mother’s birthplace which I'm very excited about.”
This is also Best’s first trip to India after he left for Liverpool from Bombay in 1945. Among the little treasures the family carried with it were a silver-christening rattle, a mini hand-carved sitar and a number of items Best inherited from his mother like Indian Buddhas, Tiger skins. Elephant tusks. Those are part of the family archives now.
And although he was too young at the time, Best remembers his long walks on the beaches with his nanny Lakshmi, and the lullabies she sang to him.
“I also remember Indian and Western music being played in the house. My mother had very cosmopolitan tastes,” he said. “My memories of the Indians we were with are of happy times. I remember them as hard working honest, happy people. Our house was always full of laughter. I'm expecting India to bring memories alive.”
Even at Casbah, where Best met the Beatles first in 1959, his mother’s nostalgia for her days in India was reflected in the Aztec ceiling studded with stars because it looked like a mosque.
“The name the Casbah was definitely something my mother remembered from India,” he wrote in an email.
The Casbah had closed on the 24th of June 1962 but became a tourist attraction three years ago. It started in the basement of Best’s house where Mona Best sold coffee, and sodas and sweets. The Quarrymen, the name Beatles went by at the time, helped decorate the café, painting its walls, drawing dragons, spiders and stars on them. They also played there on the opening night in 1960.
Cafes were important spaces then. That’s where people met, smoked, talked and played music.
“It was the start of Beatlemania,” Best recalled. “Nobody knew them at that time. They were a start-up band.”
In her café, Mona Best, who regaled the band members with stories of her India days, wanted an Indian element. She missed India and often talked about her happy days in the country. In fact she was planning a trip to India when she died of a heart attack in 1988.
“Yes, what memories I have are good ones and the stories my mother told us always left a yearning to return. I'm happy that I am returning and playing there,” Best said. “It was always one of her dreams to return. She would often get upset thinking about India because she had such happy time there.”
Mo Best
"People will learn how it was that Mo threw the pebble, that made the ripple, that caused the wave that shook the world." – BEATLES: THE TRUE BEGINNINGS
Behind it all, the music scene and the Beatlemania that gripped the world, was a woman and her love for her son.
Mo, who had Irsih parentage, has more to her than just being the mother of the drummer who was sacked from Beatles. She was born in India during the Raj in 1924 and worked for the Red Cross. She married a army official Johnny Best who fell in love with her.
Later, when they left India, she carried back a lot of memories. She gave birth to her two sons – Pete and Rory.
The third brother, Roag Best, will be in India with Pete.
It was Mona Best who first made Casbah the Rock n’ Roll place, and let the Beatles play. Her son performed with the boys and those were good times. She had noticed his young friends who came over and started the café in the cellar first as a private club for him and later turned it into a café, which was also one of the first cellar clubs in Liverpool to play rock ‘n’ roll exclusively. It opened in 1959 two years after Mo Best bought the house in Haymans Green after winning a bet on a horse that was called “Never say Die”.
“Due to her upbringing in India she did attract a lot of attention, as many of her ideas were Eastern and not something that the people of Liverpool had come across before,” Best said. “Many of the Indian rhythms helped many years afterwards with my drumming. However, a larger influence with regards to the Beatles music came after my time with the group.”
The Beatles, then known Quarrymen, disbanded and George Harrison joined another band called the Les Stewart Quartet, but later got back to his friends and took up residency at Casbah and performed on the club’s opening night on
August 29, 1959. It was then that the Beatles were born.
When Pete joined the group as drummer in August 1960, his mother took up a more active role in his career and the band and helped them get bookings at other places.
When Pete was sacked, Mo tracked down George Martin, the recording manager for the Beatles to ask why her son was dumped.
Later, she told Beatles biographer Hunter Davies that she had helped the band get on its feet, even fed when, and was “far more interested in them than their own parents.”
In 1967, despite the unfortunate fallout, she lent John Lennon her father’s medals that he received in India after John Lennon asked her for it to wear them on the montage of the cover of the album ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’
Liverpool - the city, the man, and Beatles' music
It was in Liverpool, the family’s hometown that Best began his music career, at first wanting to play guitars but later settled on drums and at 16 years he started to drum in his bedroom above the Casbah.
“I saw the famous Gene Krupa playing drums and that was it, I wanted to be a drummer,” Best said.
He first started playing with Ken Brown and formed a band called the Black jacks.
Then the Beatles discovered him, and he went on to Hamburg for a tour that tested the band’s limits, the gigs often lasted for eight hours at a stretch. That was the start of something.
If the impossible had happened, it’d be a story of success, loads of it. But instead it became a story of hopes that crashed, of resignation and of a life in an “almost” phase. He was not where he was supposed to be.
“There has only ever been six (Stuart Stucliffe who played the bass guitar but left Beatles shortly after their Hamburg tour) members of The Beatles and I was the fifth member. I am very proud to wear that tag. Who wouldn't be,” he said. “The shadow of The Beatles hasn't left any former Beatle. None of us could shake it off. Who'd want to? It is what it is.”
In the later days, people told stories, put in their bits and came out with their conspiracy theories. They said Best was so good looking that others in the band felt insecure, felt he could easily overshadow them, that Best was never a Beatle, he was a loner, and he didn’t fit in. But who knows what really happened in the August of 1962. He was told the group had decided to let him go, and he drove back home and
broke the news to his mother Mo Best and girlfriend Kathy. It had hurt. The dumping he could have taken, but not the way it had been done. The manager had called him and said the group had decided to replace him.
“I was hurt because I felt I had been let down by my friends,” he said. “Ringo was a good drummer, not a great drummer.”
“It is one of the most difficult things we ever had to do,” Paul McCartney said in Anthology, a collection of Beatles’ compilations.
For days after the split, there were times when Best looked at Beatles as they walked up the stairs to the stage, and as he descended those steps in one of the cafes at Liverpool, the place where it all started, but never a word was exchanged. No explanations came his way.
“I saw The Beatles on two occasions after I was dismissed, but we didn't talk. Everyone looked embarrassed,” he said.
When Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, told Pete he was sacked, that the boys didn’t want him anymore, Best went to a pub, downed a few drinks and drove home to break the news to his mother and girlfriend Kathy.
“I just went off and had a few pints - numb, I'd been cut and dried and hung out on the line,” he later said in an interview.
Ringo even alleged Best was on drugs, Best sued him and won.
"It was nonsense," Best said.
The original members of the band were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and a painter Stuart Stucliffe who left shortly after the Hamburg tour and died soon after.
It wasn’t easy moving on when the world was going crazy over Beatles.
When a man falls, only the dark phases of his life resonate, and live long in public memory. That’s what happened to Best. In all his appearances on television, he was asked about the fallout. The uncomfortable truths never left him. All the years that he had worked through long hours to survive, he had witnessed the rise of the
Beatles. He never met them again, though he said John Lennon was his closest friend.
Best, after all these years, has left the door open. After all he shared memories with the band members and of the Fab four, only Paul McCartney is alive.
“I want to talk to him about our families and life,” he said.
Best tried to get on, but there was his young family and they had to be taken care of. After he was sacked, Best stayed home for weeks and then joined Lee Curtis & the All Stars, which then broke off from Curtis and became Pete Best & the All Stars. They signed to Decca Records , and released the single "I'm Gonna Knock On Your Door”.
Best moved to United States and the Pete Best Combo toured America with a combination of 1950s songs and original tunes and eventually released the Best Of The Beatles ; which wasn’t a complilation of Beatles’ songs but was a play on Best's name.
Best married Kathy in 1968. The couple had two daughters, Babs and Bonita. The only job he could find was of a baker on the loading dock of a large bakery in Liverpool, where he worked long hours and often during the nights.
And so Best lived, within the limits, with no higher destiny to chase.
He didn’t play drums for almost 20 years. All these years, he refused to talk about Beatles. He was never bitter, only sad.
In fact John Lennon once said in an interview that the band’s best works were in Liverpool and in Hamburg and other dance halls.
“I had to start again, which I did. I finally hung up my drum sticks because I had children and needed to provide for them,” he said.
“Because I had been a musician for so long nobody would employ me. They felt because I had been a Beatle that I would go back to show business. They were scared to employ me. The Baker job was all I could get.”
Later, the Civil Service employed Best.
He had made his choices and was making the best of what remained.
In 1988, he returned to his drums, trying to get back to what he loved doing best and formed the Pete Best Band, and gave interviews on television.
“I had been asked for about five years to do a one off date in Liverpool, I always refused, eventually my mother persuaded that one date wouldn't hurt. What about my fans. So, I agreed,” he said.
In 1995 when Beatles’ Anthology released, it included some of the tracks that had Best on the drums in those early days.
“The money was nice, but it was better to receive the recognition for
the years I played as a Beatle,” Best said.
Although it was a rough ride in the beginning, Best put it all together, bit by bit. A grandfather who adores his three grandchildren, Best has got back to music, drumming and writing songs yet again, touring the world with his band that includes his younger brother Roag on drums and percussion, Phil Melia, Paul Perry, and Tony Flynn, the lead singer. Haymans Green, the band’s latest release, has songs that Best and the rest of the band composed.
But even the decades that had come in between, didn’t really distance him from the music he once played with a band that moved on, and left him behind. His days with the band permeate his music. Perhaps those were the days when Pete discovered his own style of Rock n' Roll. But even now, his music is reminiscent of his Beatles' days.
“My current group captures my time with The Beatles. However, the group is a force in its own right. If you like The Beatles, you'll like this group. We are not a copy band. How could I copy myself,” Best said.
So, the man will once again go back in time, and beat on the drums. And in between, he will perhaps look at the ceiling with the stars, and wonder yet again. He is reconciled, has even expressed a wish to speak to the living Beatles’ member, is happy they made it that big, but he can’t help but go back to the old days and think why it happened, and why he became the fifth Beatle that was left behind. But
even in his tragedy, it was the Beatles’ who eventually resurrected him. The world will always know him as the shy, good looking drummer who played with Beatles and never said a word against those who left him to figure out his own life.
About the fifth Beatle
Pete has released various Cds after he got back to music including Back to the Beat, Once a Beatle Always, Casbah Coffee Club, and his latest Haymans Green, the name of the place where Casbah is located.
Her also co-authored two books, including The Beatles, The True Beginnings that traces the band’s beginnings and his mother’s influence on Liverpool music scenes. Best recorded several demos with group, which feature on the Beatles 1995 anthology album.
In 2007, Best was inducted into the All You Need Is Liverpool Music Hall of Fame as the debut Charter Member. Haymans Green was released on last year in the USA.
Back to Casbah
"I think it's a good idea to let people know about the Casbah. They know about the Cavern…but the Casbah was the place where all that started."
– Sir Paul McCartney forward in BEATLES: THE TRUE BEGINNINGS
Casbah, a café that Mona Best started after she pawned her belongings, and operated from the basement of their house in Haymans Green, was also the place where the Beatles first performed. The coffee club is now part of The Beatles Story, a visitor attraction that seeks to recreate the life, times, culture and music of the Beatles.
It was here the Beatles when they returned from Hamburg honed their talents honed.
Visit Britain and the Beatles Story are organizing a festival called "Imagine Liverpool" at Select CITYWALK, Saket District Centre,Saket, New Delhi.
The festival will showcase Liverpool as a destination and will see musical performances, beatles memorabilia, souvenirs travel information on Liverpool etc.
Liverpool, home to 'The Beatles' and the famous Liverpool Football Club was voted the '2008 European Capital of Culture.'
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Pride in his veins
The story was published in the Indian Express on October 25, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 23, 2007
The girl, with her happy eyes, didn’t falter one bit. She looked into the camera and announced to the whole wide world she was lesbian. No justifications. No fear. No shame. Only pride, the raw, unfiltered pride tinged with hurt and anger, shone in those dark eyes.
Behind the camera, Ranjit Monga, the filmmaker, gasped, and let the camera roll. Yes, the young girl, who walked in the city’s pride march, came out to the world on the camera, beaming, defiant and yet tragic. And he shot her just like that, recording each moment of her coming out. Later, in his film on the pride march just days before the Delhi High Court gave its landmark judgment, the girls’ story became
one of the many personal tales that the six-minute documentary captures in their honesty and their unhindered optimism.
For Monga, the expression, the coming out was all part of the pride march, induced by it, and upheld by it as hundreds marched to Jantar Mantar, the designated protest street, in anticipation, carrying the rainbow flags, wearing head gears, and smiles.
A year ago, he had felt the rush, too, at the city’s first gay pride parade. For many years, the filmmaker and journalist had lived a life in the closet, attending underground parties, dodging uncomfortable questions, and hoping people would understand he was gay, that they will accept, and they will let him be.
Then, the city’s gay pride march happened. And it liberated him, he says.
From the other side of the street, Monga had watched the swelling crowd approach, he then crossed over, and marched with the rest of them, mingling with the young students as they danced drunk on the freedom, the opportunity, and the old who watched with a certain satisfaction as the city’s first gay pride march gained momentum. They had been in denial, in a limbo, not sure if the famed gay pride
marches of the west would ever happen here.
“It was an intense experience for me,” he said. “I came out. I celebrated. I was able to tell people I was gay. There were so many of us. There were others like me.”
So, next year, armed with a camera, Monga again crossed over.
The six-minute film New Delhi’s Pride 2009 will be shown at the Nigah Queer Festival on Sunday. In its third year, the festival, one of the very few in India to showcase films and arts that focus on LGBT issues and lives, has become a popular forum for filmmakers and artists who otherwise had a tough time negotiating for space. Until this year, homosexuality was illegal. After the Delhi High Court’s landmark
judgment, that space has expanded and more artists have dared to experiment with “unusual stories”.
For many years, entries from South Asia even in international film festivals have mostly been documentaries, or independent films.
Mainstream commercial cinema focusing on LGBT relationships are a rarity, Ponni Arasu, one of the organizers said.
“The lack of funding and screening opportunities is major hurdles,” she said. “From the western world, we receive a lot of mainstream film entries. I guess things will change because now homosexuality is not illegal here and public will be more accepting.”
The LGBT film movement started years ago in the west when filmmakers cast such characters like the comic homosexual, the tragic transgender or the villainous dykes, in their films. The movement itself can’t be categorised as one. It was a trend that slowly emerged. Most of these came from independent filmmakers who didn’t have to justify their stories or the theme to corporate and mainstream interest, or
preference. It didn’t matter if the public recoiled at the idea, or rejected the unusual love. It was an expression, unfettered.
The films, and its themes, reflected the movement’s journey over the years, including a barrage of films and television serials in the 1980s like Early Frost that focussed on AIDS. In the West that had an awakening to the alternative, to the other and to the queer side much before the other world, the world where being gay was condemned and was dismissed as deviant behaviour, finally the films gave way to
mainstream cinema that celebrated the gay life like Transamerica, Milk, and Brokeback Mountain.
But in India, the journey has only begun. In fact it started in the 1990s, but then the films were on the fringes, almost never making it to the mainstream cinema. A few attempts like My Brother Nikhil, a low-budget drama telling the story of a gay man’s tryst with AIDS and his struggles with his family and society were brave but except in the urban settings where the audience is perceived to be educated and
aware and fashionable, the film didn’t really make an impact. Not that it was made to be a success. A few producers even refused to fund the difficult project.
But that’s the story any filmmaker would recount.
Monga too went through a similar ordeal. When he decided he wanted to make a movie on the pride march because it made sense for him as a filmmaker to express his own struggles and his own pride that he claimed at the pride march itself years ago, he could not find sponsors. He put in the Rs. 6,000 that he had towards the project and
then a friend said he would pitch in the rest.
When he told his friends at Nigah he was planning to make a film on the pride parade, they were more than happy to showcase it during the festival.
“It is difficult but things are looking better,” he said. “I want to stick to this theme. We need more commercial cinemas on LGBT community.”
In 2006, an attempt was made to bring lesbian lovers into mainstream cinema by Ligy J. Pullappally who wrote, produced and directed a film depicting the love story of two lesbian lovers in The Journey that depicts the story of Kiran and Delilah, young Indian women who grow up together in a small rural village and then fall in love. But the film didn’t get the permission to screen in theatres in Kerela, Arasu said.
The first gay film in India was made by a young filmmaker Riyad Vinci Wadia. Called Bomgay, the documentary released in 1996 and is based on the poetry of gay poet R. Raj Rao and is a depiction of gay life in urban settings, in a metropolis where men accost other men in subways, and in dark, dank rooms. Many more came, made films, and showcased them at international film festivals, earned accolades but back home,
it was a muffled existence.
And even though the gay and lesbian expression is at an all-time high in the country now and many artists are coming out like Monga who hesitated for years before he mustered enough courage to shoot the film on gay pride.
“I was afraid. I didn’t want everyone to know. But I felt I must do it,” he said. “It took years but I did it. My next project will be a story on gay love in hinterlands, the acceptance of it. I don’t where the money will come from but I will see.”
But slowly, such films be it documentaries or low-budget films that play in multiplexes are testing the waters, teasing the audience, tempting them, challenging their limits, urging them to step out and see the other life. And festivals like Nigah are one of the first steps towards breaking the boundaries.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 23, 2007
The girl, with her happy eyes, didn’t falter one bit. She looked into the camera and announced to the whole wide world she was lesbian. No justifications. No fear. No shame. Only pride, the raw, unfiltered pride tinged with hurt and anger, shone in those dark eyes.
Behind the camera, Ranjit Monga, the filmmaker, gasped, and let the camera roll. Yes, the young girl, who walked in the city’s pride march, came out to the world on the camera, beaming, defiant and yet tragic. And he shot her just like that, recording each moment of her coming out. Later, in his film on the pride march just days before the Delhi High Court gave its landmark judgment, the girls’ story became
one of the many personal tales that the six-minute documentary captures in their honesty and their unhindered optimism.
For Monga, the expression, the coming out was all part of the pride march, induced by it, and upheld by it as hundreds marched to Jantar Mantar, the designated protest street, in anticipation, carrying the rainbow flags, wearing head gears, and smiles.
A year ago, he had felt the rush, too, at the city’s first gay pride parade. For many years, the filmmaker and journalist had lived a life in the closet, attending underground parties, dodging uncomfortable questions, and hoping people would understand he was gay, that they will accept, and they will let him be.
Then, the city’s gay pride march happened. And it liberated him, he says.
From the other side of the street, Monga had watched the swelling crowd approach, he then crossed over, and marched with the rest of them, mingling with the young students as they danced drunk on the freedom, the opportunity, and the old who watched with a certain satisfaction as the city’s first gay pride march gained momentum. They had been in denial, in a limbo, not sure if the famed gay pride
marches of the west would ever happen here.
“It was an intense experience for me,” he said. “I came out. I celebrated. I was able to tell people I was gay. There were so many of us. There were others like me.”
So, next year, armed with a camera, Monga again crossed over.
The six-minute film New Delhi’s Pride 2009 will be shown at the Nigah Queer Festival on Sunday. In its third year, the festival, one of the very few in India to showcase films and arts that focus on LGBT issues and lives, has become a popular forum for filmmakers and artists who otherwise had a tough time negotiating for space. Until this year, homosexuality was illegal. After the Delhi High Court’s landmark
judgment, that space has expanded and more artists have dared to experiment with “unusual stories”.
For many years, entries from South Asia even in international film festivals have mostly been documentaries, or independent films.
Mainstream commercial cinema focusing on LGBT relationships are a rarity, Ponni Arasu, one of the organizers said.
“The lack of funding and screening opportunities is major hurdles,” she said. “From the western world, we receive a lot of mainstream film entries. I guess things will change because now homosexuality is not illegal here and public will be more accepting.”
The LGBT film movement started years ago in the west when filmmakers cast such characters like the comic homosexual, the tragic transgender or the villainous dykes, in their films. The movement itself can’t be categorised as one. It was a trend that slowly emerged. Most of these came from independent filmmakers who didn’t have to justify their stories or the theme to corporate and mainstream interest, or
preference. It didn’t matter if the public recoiled at the idea, or rejected the unusual love. It was an expression, unfettered.
The films, and its themes, reflected the movement’s journey over the years, including a barrage of films and television serials in the 1980s like Early Frost that focussed on AIDS. In the West that had an awakening to the alternative, to the other and to the queer side much before the other world, the world where being gay was condemned and was dismissed as deviant behaviour, finally the films gave way to
mainstream cinema that celebrated the gay life like Transamerica, Milk, and Brokeback Mountain.
But in India, the journey has only begun. In fact it started in the 1990s, but then the films were on the fringes, almost never making it to the mainstream cinema. A few attempts like My Brother Nikhil, a low-budget drama telling the story of a gay man’s tryst with AIDS and his struggles with his family and society were brave but except in the urban settings where the audience is perceived to be educated and
aware and fashionable, the film didn’t really make an impact. Not that it was made to be a success. A few producers even refused to fund the difficult project.
But that’s the story any filmmaker would recount.
Monga too went through a similar ordeal. When he decided he wanted to make a movie on the pride march because it made sense for him as a filmmaker to express his own struggles and his own pride that he claimed at the pride march itself years ago, he could not find sponsors. He put in the Rs. 6,000 that he had towards the project and
then a friend said he would pitch in the rest.
When he told his friends at Nigah he was planning to make a film on the pride parade, they were more than happy to showcase it during the festival.
“It is difficult but things are looking better,” he said. “I want to stick to this theme. We need more commercial cinemas on LGBT community.”
In 2006, an attempt was made to bring lesbian lovers into mainstream cinema by Ligy J. Pullappally who wrote, produced and directed a film depicting the love story of two lesbian lovers in The Journey that depicts the story of Kiran and Delilah, young Indian women who grow up together in a small rural village and then fall in love. But the film didn’t get the permission to screen in theatres in Kerela, Arasu said.
The first gay film in India was made by a young filmmaker Riyad Vinci Wadia. Called Bomgay, the documentary released in 1996 and is based on the poetry of gay poet R. Raj Rao and is a depiction of gay life in urban settings, in a metropolis where men accost other men in subways, and in dark, dank rooms. Many more came, made films, and showcased them at international film festivals, earned accolades but back home,
it was a muffled existence.
And even though the gay and lesbian expression is at an all-time high in the country now and many artists are coming out like Monga who hesitated for years before he mustered enough courage to shoot the film on gay pride.
“I was afraid. I didn’t want everyone to know. But I felt I must do it,” he said. “It took years but I did it. My next project will be a story on gay love in hinterlands, the acceptance of it. I don’t where the money will come from but I will see.”
But slowly, such films be it documentaries or low-budget films that play in multiplexes are testing the waters, teasing the audience, tempting them, challenging their limits, urging them to step out and see the other life. And festivals like Nigah are one of the first steps towards breaking the boundaries.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Of Saints and Fakirs
When I first saw the fakirs, they were encircling the shrine, and I asked them if I could come with them and then this fakir led me through lanes to the dhuni where many of their community members sat smoking and singing.
I spoke to Barshad and kept asking him if the feats of endurance that he performed didn't hurt him and he said he didn't care. The faith carried him through.
We came back in the night for the Dhammal. One fakir pierced a sharp sword through his cheeks, the other lashed himself with a whip. An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on Oct. 12, 2009.
This one is for the fakirs.
"Come, come, whoever you are. Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter.Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come." Rumi
Saints and fakirs
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 10, 2009
Barshad Ali Khalifa Rifai emerged from a throng of fakirs chanting,and dancing on the third day of the Urs at the famous Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin Aulia, knelt down and put a dagger right through his shoulder.
His face twitched, his eyes rolled, but no blood colored the floors.
And no shouts of pain rose through the cacophony of drum beats and clanging cymbals.
Jaws dropped, cameras flashed, and nobody blinked through the Dhammal, a combination of magic tricks like walking on fire, endurance of physical torture like flagellating with chains dangling with knife-blades, and rhythmic skipping from foot to foot. The faith seemed infectious. It was as if they were all awed by the feat, yet they all knew he would be fine, and that he won’t die. Nobody cared to probe further, to question the antics, to get into a debate.
All this while, the fakirs who had gathered at the Rifai Chowk, the site of the scared fire or the dhuni at Nizamuddin Basti, from all over the country, traveling hundreds of miles to pay homage to Sufi poet Amir Khusro, the disciple of the 12th centrury saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, shouted “Mast Kalandar”, and whipped themselves as part of the performance.
The air was heavy with sweat, the scent of rose petals, the dying embers from the dhuni, and the waft of hashish from the chillums the fakirs smoked. It also throbbed with anticipation, dread, and disbelief.
Then Barshad stood up, and in a state of rapture pulled out the dagger, smiled, and walked back to his seat, swaying wildly.
No, he never felt any pain. It was a sweet trance, he said.
“I don’t think about the pain. It’s ecstasy. This is for Sarkar (Nizamuddin Auliya). Jis wali ke dar par fakir na gaya toh Urs kaisa. (No Urs is complete without the fakirs) So we come, we dance, we do dhammal, and we smoke,” he said. “He sees us through this. We keep the faith and he sees us through.”
The three-day Urs at the 705th death anniversary Khusro, culminated on Friday, a fortnight after Ramzan. The annual affair that celebrates the death because it signifies the ultimate union with God is an orgy of qawallis, mushairas, feasts and prayers and also intoxication, both literally and spiritually because the fakirs claim they are drunk on God’s love, and the tricks are to add to the enigma of the saint. Urs is also Arabic for marriage. For Sufis, it is time to celebrate, to
feast and pray. Thousands attended the Urs.
Rongila Bibi came from Bengal for the blessings of the saint.
"He is a special man of God. Khusro is his companion," the pregnant woman said. "I have come here to ask for his grace at the Urs. They say this is the best time."
For the wandering fakirs who converge at shrines, smoke, and do Dhammal, the Urs at Nizamuddin holds special significance, too. They claim they are sent invites to come and pay respects to the saint.
So they come, dressed in long robes, eyes lined with kohl, and with matted hair, chanting and dancing and encircle the shrine while the faithful stick Rs. 10 notes on to their swords, or daggers that they proudly brandish. And even though a certain disdain line their faces, many step aside to make way for them because they dread their curse.
Qalandar, whose name the vagrant fakirs invoke, was one of Pakistan’s Sufi saints who didn’t belong to any order. The fakirs say he performed miracles, brought the dead to life and such were his powers.
The fakirs are ascetics who are either born into the order like Barshad who says he was always a fakir, or are inducted like Islamuddin Khalifa who left his family in Delhi to become a wandering ascetic. When he was inducted in a ritual where his coffin was prepared symbolizing the death of his previous life, he was expected
to remain true to the fakirs, living a nomadic life, and sever all ties with the world.
As he sat in a corner watching the tricks of endurance performed by the fellow fakirs, he looked happy.
“I got peace here. I found God here,” he said.
While many doubt their beliefs and denounce their practices as being against Islam, the fakirs say they are too lost in their love for God to care. Justification isn’t the way of the true mystics, they said.
“Dervishes. Well, a lot of them might just be traditional and cultural. A true Sufi would call himself Fakir. But a lot of this is tradition and a way of earning. True qalandars are true Sufies lost to the world. I wouldn’t think they are true mystics,” Sadia Dehlvi, who authored a book on Sufism, said. “The true Qalandars are all gone.”
The Urs itself has transformed over the years. For the old-timers, the Urs has now become a tourist must-watch thing after the shrine was included in the Lonely Planet list, Dehlvi said.
Dehlvi has been going to the two Urs – of Nizamuddin Auliya and Khusro – for more than two decades and recalls the days when only the devoted came to the shrine. The qawallis too were different.
“Now it feels like a concert. The qawalls sit in a semi-circle but the middle path is supposed to be kept free so the djinns can come and listen to the music,” she said. “All that stands diluted now. So many things have changed.”
But even though many have dismissed them as petty mendicants who reduce to cheap magic tricks to beg for alms, the fakirs are as much part of the tradition of Urs as is the qawalli.
People made way for them as they came in. For at the shrine, nobody is shunned. All are welcome, Syed Kabiruddin Nizami, who claims to be a Sufi scholar and a descendant of Nizamuddin Auliya.
“The world comes here on Urs. The fakirs come, too,” he said. “But these days it is not the real Qalandars who were the high masters. They have the knowledge. The fakirs are a show. They resort to cheap tricks.”
They can’t ask the saint to cure ills, to mediate and fulfill wishes. That’s forbidden, he said.
Khwaja Hasan Saani Nizami, the hereditary keeper of the shrine, said the fakirs are not real Sufis. They are mad men because in Sufism, the boundaries are defined. Fakirs are deviant, he said.
But then, the fakirs scoff at these notions. Sufism, they say, is a
tradition. Saints are venerated and even sinners have a chance at redemption, the self-styled mystics said.
“Maybe we are sinners. But I have left all to be with God,” Islamuddin said. “At the Urs, we come to see our saint. He doesn’t despise us.”
As for the endurance tricks, he said they did it to show their devotion, to show the powers of the venerated saints, and to add to the Urs festivities.
“We go where the Urs is,” he said. “We have come from Kolkata, Mumbai, Uttar Pradesh, everywhere. The power of Urs brings us here.”
Such endurance tricks are not unique to the the Muslim fakirs. Many other sects practice such piercings. In the 1960s in the West, circuses started getting fakirs to perform piercing tricks in front of the crowds.
In Shia branch of Islam, on Muharram many followers mourn and commemorate the death of Imam Husayn ibn Ali , a grandson of Prophet Muhammad , and other family members in the Battle of Karbala. Flagellation is part of the mourning rituals.
However, the Fakirs don’t do it as mourning but as celebration of the supernatural powers of their saints and believe that by piercing and flagellation, they prove they are so lost to the faith that pain ceases to exist. They also claim it has been part of the Urs tradition for many centuries. While the Rifai fakirs indulge in piercing and other tricks, the Jalalis shackle themselves in heavy iron chains, which sometimes weigh as much as 70 kgs, Islamuddin, who claims to be a fakir in the Qadiri- Rifai Sufi order, said. At the shrine, nobody is shunned. All are welcome, Syed Kabiruddin Nizami, who claims to be a Sufi scholar and a descendant of Nizamuddin Auliya.
On Saturday, the fakirs walked to the Dargah with a shrowd of flowers, and offered to the Saint. And then, they smoked once again, sang qawallis and boarded the buses to return to where they came from.
I spoke to Barshad and kept asking him if the feats of endurance that he performed didn't hurt him and he said he didn't care. The faith carried him through.
We came back in the night for the Dhammal. One fakir pierced a sharp sword through his cheeks, the other lashed himself with a whip. An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on Oct. 12, 2009.
This one is for the fakirs.
"Come, come, whoever you are. Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter.Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come." Rumi
Saints and fakirs
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 10, 2009
Barshad Ali Khalifa Rifai emerged from a throng of fakirs chanting,and dancing on the third day of the Urs at the famous Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin Aulia, knelt down and put a dagger right through his shoulder.
His face twitched, his eyes rolled, but no blood colored the floors.
And no shouts of pain rose through the cacophony of drum beats and clanging cymbals.
Jaws dropped, cameras flashed, and nobody blinked through the Dhammal, a combination of magic tricks like walking on fire, endurance of physical torture like flagellating with chains dangling with knife-blades, and rhythmic skipping from foot to foot. The faith seemed infectious. It was as if they were all awed by the feat, yet they all knew he would be fine, and that he won’t die. Nobody cared to probe further, to question the antics, to get into a debate.
All this while, the fakirs who had gathered at the Rifai Chowk, the site of the scared fire or the dhuni at Nizamuddin Basti, from all over the country, traveling hundreds of miles to pay homage to Sufi poet Amir Khusro, the disciple of the 12th centrury saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, shouted “Mast Kalandar”, and whipped themselves as part of the performance.
The air was heavy with sweat, the scent of rose petals, the dying embers from the dhuni, and the waft of hashish from the chillums the fakirs smoked. It also throbbed with anticipation, dread, and disbelief.
Then Barshad stood up, and in a state of rapture pulled out the dagger, smiled, and walked back to his seat, swaying wildly.
No, he never felt any pain. It was a sweet trance, he said.
“I don’t think about the pain. It’s ecstasy. This is for Sarkar (Nizamuddin Auliya). Jis wali ke dar par fakir na gaya toh Urs kaisa. (No Urs is complete without the fakirs) So we come, we dance, we do dhammal, and we smoke,” he said. “He sees us through this. We keep the faith and he sees us through.”
The three-day Urs at the 705th death anniversary Khusro, culminated on Friday, a fortnight after Ramzan. The annual affair that celebrates the death because it signifies the ultimate union with God is an orgy of qawallis, mushairas, feasts and prayers and also intoxication, both literally and spiritually because the fakirs claim they are drunk on God’s love, and the tricks are to add to the enigma of the saint. Urs is also Arabic for marriage. For Sufis, it is time to celebrate, to
feast and pray. Thousands attended the Urs.
Rongila Bibi came from Bengal for the blessings of the saint.
"He is a special man of God. Khusro is his companion," the pregnant woman said. "I have come here to ask for his grace at the Urs. They say this is the best time."
For the wandering fakirs who converge at shrines, smoke, and do Dhammal, the Urs at Nizamuddin holds special significance, too. They claim they are sent invites to come and pay respects to the saint.
So they come, dressed in long robes, eyes lined with kohl, and with matted hair, chanting and dancing and encircle the shrine while the faithful stick Rs. 10 notes on to their swords, or daggers that they proudly brandish. And even though a certain disdain line their faces, many step aside to make way for them because they dread their curse.
Qalandar, whose name the vagrant fakirs invoke, was one of Pakistan’s Sufi saints who didn’t belong to any order. The fakirs say he performed miracles, brought the dead to life and such were his powers.
The fakirs are ascetics who are either born into the order like Barshad who says he was always a fakir, or are inducted like Islamuddin Khalifa who left his family in Delhi to become a wandering ascetic. When he was inducted in a ritual where his coffin was prepared symbolizing the death of his previous life, he was expected
to remain true to the fakirs, living a nomadic life, and sever all ties with the world.
As he sat in a corner watching the tricks of endurance performed by the fellow fakirs, he looked happy.
“I got peace here. I found God here,” he said.
While many doubt their beliefs and denounce their practices as being against Islam, the fakirs say they are too lost in their love for God to care. Justification isn’t the way of the true mystics, they said.
“Dervishes. Well, a lot of them might just be traditional and cultural. A true Sufi would call himself Fakir. But a lot of this is tradition and a way of earning. True qalandars are true Sufies lost to the world. I wouldn’t think they are true mystics,” Sadia Dehlvi, who authored a book on Sufism, said. “The true Qalandars are all gone.”
The Urs itself has transformed over the years. For the old-timers, the Urs has now become a tourist must-watch thing after the shrine was included in the Lonely Planet list, Dehlvi said.
Dehlvi has been going to the two Urs – of Nizamuddin Auliya and Khusro – for more than two decades and recalls the days when only the devoted came to the shrine. The qawallis too were different.
“Now it feels like a concert. The qawalls sit in a semi-circle but the middle path is supposed to be kept free so the djinns can come and listen to the music,” she said. “All that stands diluted now. So many things have changed.”
But even though many have dismissed them as petty mendicants who reduce to cheap magic tricks to beg for alms, the fakirs are as much part of the tradition of Urs as is the qawalli.
People made way for them as they came in. For at the shrine, nobody is shunned. All are welcome, Syed Kabiruddin Nizami, who claims to be a Sufi scholar and a descendant of Nizamuddin Auliya.
“The world comes here on Urs. The fakirs come, too,” he said. “But these days it is not the real Qalandars who were the high masters. They have the knowledge. The fakirs are a show. They resort to cheap tricks.”
They can’t ask the saint to cure ills, to mediate and fulfill wishes. That’s forbidden, he said.
Khwaja Hasan Saani Nizami, the hereditary keeper of the shrine, said the fakirs are not real Sufis. They are mad men because in Sufism, the boundaries are defined. Fakirs are deviant, he said.
But then, the fakirs scoff at these notions. Sufism, they say, is a
tradition. Saints are venerated and even sinners have a chance at redemption, the self-styled mystics said.
“Maybe we are sinners. But I have left all to be with God,” Islamuddin said. “At the Urs, we come to see our saint. He doesn’t despise us.”
As for the endurance tricks, he said they did it to show their devotion, to show the powers of the venerated saints, and to add to the Urs festivities.
“We go where the Urs is,” he said. “We have come from Kolkata, Mumbai, Uttar Pradesh, everywhere. The power of Urs brings us here.”
Such endurance tricks are not unique to the the Muslim fakirs. Many other sects practice such piercings. In the 1960s in the West, circuses started getting fakirs to perform piercing tricks in front of the crowds.
In Shia branch of Islam, on Muharram many followers mourn and commemorate the death of Imam Husayn ibn Ali , a grandson of Prophet Muhammad , and other family members in the Battle of Karbala. Flagellation is part of the mourning rituals.
However, the Fakirs don’t do it as mourning but as celebration of the supernatural powers of their saints and believe that by piercing and flagellation, they prove they are so lost to the faith that pain ceases to exist. They also claim it has been part of the Urs tradition for many centuries. While the Rifai fakirs indulge in piercing and other tricks, the Jalalis shackle themselves in heavy iron chains, which sometimes weigh as much as 70 kgs, Islamuddin, who claims to be a fakir in the Qadiri- Rifai Sufi order, said. At the shrine, nobody is shunned. All are welcome, Syed Kabiruddin Nizami, who claims to be a Sufi scholar and a descendant of Nizamuddin Auliya.
On Saturday, the fakirs walked to the Dargah with a shrowd of flowers, and offered to the Saint. And then, they smoked once again, sang qawallis and boarded the buses to return to where they came from.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
The invisible men behind Delhi's concrete and steel addiction
After the metro mishap happened in Zamrudpur in July killing at least six workers in Delhi, I walked through the lanes inside the urban villages, peeked inside the tiny hovels these contract workers were living in, and wrote about the horible conditions under which they worked and lived. Most of these workers weren't even paid minimum wages and were migrant labourers that had flocked to the megacity hoping to eke out a living somehow. Every room had stories of deprivation, of struggles, and of men who didn't complain, who perhaps had given up on hopes, and who had known no better. These were the people, the invisible men who were building the Delhi we envisioned.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 24, 2009
IF he hadn’t managed to loosen the safety belt and run that Sunday morning when the Metro tracks crashed killing six workers, Ravindar Kumar would have been yet another statistic, an addition to the body count that has emerged as Delhi lurches forward in its dreams of becoming a world class city.
Six workers died on Sunday, raising the death count in the mega project to nine in three accidents.
Kumar, 25, broke his hand on Sunday. As the dust rose in the skies amid shouts, for a brief moment Kumar, who is from Bihar, thought he would die, too. Perched on top of the slider, he saw the tracks fall.
There was a big jolt, and he would have been thrown in the air had it not been for the safety belt. And then the slider crashed too, bringing him down. He was trapped in the debris and finally managed to wriggle out of the safety belt that secured him to the machine and ran to safety.
Anil Yadav, a foreman, was on a slider too on that morning about 12 meters off the ground. When he saw the link break, he jumped off the slider.
“Safety belt was meaningless. I would have been trapped in the debris like others,” Yadav said.
Yadav was admitted to All India Institute of Medical Sciences Trauma Centre and remained there for five days undergoing treatment for head injuries. His family in Azamgarh called up a co-worker’s cell phone when they heard about the accident.
“They were crying. So I told Anil to go visit them,” Munna, another construction worker said.
Yadav was given Rs. 50,000 by the DMRC. That was in cash. He is still wondering if the government will give him any compensation at all.
Somewhere in the papers he read that Rs. 2 lakhs compensation had been earmarked for the injured but he doesn’t know if he will get any of that. While a petition was filed by an NGO in the court, the agencies have yet to revert to the court notices.
UNDER the shadows of the cranes trying to haul the debris, and the concrete mess on the ground, it is the hundreds of workers like Kumar, the invisible men, who are fuelling the city’s addiction to growth.
They are the poor migrant contract workers who flock to the city lured by the promise of construction jobs as Delhi gears for Commonwealth Games and a spate of construction projects mark its skyline. They work with little or no job security, get paid less than minimum wages and in some cases, don’t even have an identity proof.
These contract workers typically work under subcontractors who maintain the muster rolls and administer payments them. There are no unions, and no monitoring agency. There are too many layers, making it almost impossible to nail anyone. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, the principal employer in this project, has contracted the work to various contractors, who in turn have hired subcontractors or thekedars who bring the unskilled and semiskilled labourers.
Workers are not being paid the minimum wages. For an eight-hour shift, they get Rs. 100. If they do overtime, they get Rs. 150. Minimum wages in Delhi for unskilled labourers is Rs. 141. Semi-skilled workers make about Rs. 6,000 a month. The only benefit they get is free accommodation but the housing conditions are far from decent. The thekedar usually puts four people in a small room near the site where workers sleep in shifts because all of them wouldn't fit within its four walls at the same time. Room rents around Zamrudpur range from Rs. 1,200 to Rs. 1,600.
However, on paper, on muster rolls, everything looks fine. The files are maintained and nothing is amiss, DMRC spokesperson Anuj Dayal said.
“We haven’t heard any complaints. If the workers have any issues, they can come to us. Any discrepancies need to be highlighted,” he said. “All payments, all records are checked. We have proper procedures.”
And so the exploitation has continued.
“If we say something, we might lose our jobs,” he said. "What will we do then? Who will take care of our families? We have no land to till and even if there is, where's the money to buy seeds and irrigate the land?"
According to Dayal, engineers and DMRC officials visit the sites often to check for irregularities but so far they haven't reported anything.
BUT it only takes a trip through Zamrudpur village that lies just across the site where the Sunday accident happened, and through the maze of small rooms constructed in a haphazard way evidently for renting out, to see the conditions these contract workers are living in.
In a cramped room, Munna and three others sat against the wall talking. A fifth man, tired after his night shift at the site, slept in a corner in an embryonic position. Four people, if they all stretched, could barley fit in the room.
They all came from a village near Rae Bareilly to look for work. Munna who has been in Delhi for a few years now told them there were jobs at the DMRC construction sites.
Fourteen workers from Rae Bareilly are among the 70 odd workers that work under Upendar Yadav, a thekedar employed by Gammon India. Some of them have no identity cards and their only form of reassurance is an attendance card where the thekedar marks their hours. But then, neither their name nor the company’s name is on those cards. Their orange and yellow helmets are the only proof that they work at the Metro site and these plastic covers for their head are their only sheild, their only defense against a mishap. They know if a pillar were to fall, the helmets would crack, and their skulls would be smashed. But that's thinking too much, and if you thought of such things, you'd never work and you'd die of starvation anyways, they said.
“This is all we have. Now, after the accident we want to go back home but they haven’t paid us. We don’t know where to find Upendar and we don’t know if Gammon will entertain us,” Rajkumar, another worker said. “We feel trapped. We have no complaints but just give us some sort of identification."
Munna had been sleeping when the accident happened. At first he heard a thud, then the earth shook, and then there were shouts. He rushed outside, helped the injured, and then sat in his room thinking if it was worth it. If it wasn’t, where would the money come from, he said.
“There was water all over. The pipes had burst. Bodies were lying here and there. I stepped over a few too,” he said. “It was horrible.”
For Munna and others, this phase of construction was rushed, It was the pace, the obsession to finish so much and so soon that led to the accidents, Munna said.
"We all work overtime," he said.
In his black cheap plastic boots given to him by the officials, it hasn’t been easy working. They tear too soon because they are cheap quality, Munna said.
“There’s nothing for us. They are supposed to give us gloves but they always say the stocks are not there. If you see our hands, you’d be horrified. We pull the iron wires and rods with bare hands,” he said. “The palms harden. And there are no doctors at the site. The safety people keep some medicines. That’s all.”
Munna should have insurance but he doesn’t know about his rights.
There was no contract and the thekedar just made them sign on a paper and disbursed them their wages, he said.
“We were just hired and given the attendance cards,” he said.
But Dayal said he had no knowledge of all this. Upendar Yadav, the thekedar, refused
to talk to us. For days after the mishap, he was missing. Munna and some others had gone looking for him to ask him for their dues but he was nowhere to be found. His cell hpone was switched off, they said.
Some workers said usually it takes a couple of months for the new hires to get an identity card but Munna said he has been working for more than four months and still hasn't got any proof.
The thekedar gives them Rs. 300 for food per week, which is deducted from their salaries paid to them in cash at the end of the month.
The colony itself is divided into camps. The workers stick to their own people. While Bengalis cluster in one part of the village, the Biharis populate the interiors.
“The Biharis, most of them, ran away after the accident,” Munna said.
Three of those who died in Sunday’s mishap belonged to Bihar.
Sunday’s accident, which was followed by yet another accident within hours of the first one at the same site when three cranes deployed to haul the debris crashed Monday morning, wasn’t the first time the DMRC’s reputation was at stake. In October 2008, a 400-tonne span at Laxmi Nagar in east Delhi fell down while being lifted and killed two people.
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) also published a report on the plight of the contract workers in the spate of construction activity in the capital for the Commonwealth Games.
Gautam Navlakha, a PUDR member, said while there are labour laws meant to protect the contract workers, the labour office has been negligent.
“It is understaffed and there is no premium for defending the plight of workers. It is the construction workers whose beggar is used to subsidize the mega project,” he said. “This is the saddest part. Nobody is talking about it. At every level there is a violation.”
Unions have been barred on the pretext of terrorism threat, he said.
“But who is asking for unhindered access. In a class society like we live in, the anti union feeling. Nobody gives a damn. Rest of us are living well. What about the miserable hovels in which the workers have to live,” he said.
Unions' golden age is over. Gone are the days when the unions fought for workers' rights and won. After corruption seeped through their ranks, and industry and others looking to gain political mileage blamed the unions for stalling development, of being communist, and of being in the way of gainful employment and industry investment, unions have been slowly dying, too feeble to protest, too marred in their own olitics to be of any help.
Responsibility too gets camouflaged in the layers of contractors and subcontractors. But according to the Contract Labour Act of 1970, the central government remains the principal employer and is thus responsible for adhering to the provisions of the act, Navlakha said.
A Delhi state labour ministry official said this was a central government project and hence out of their purview but generally if cases of exploitation are brought to them, they usually take circumstantial evidence into account.
“If it is a death case. There is an FIR. In injury cases, we in the labour jurisprudence, we would presume a lot of things in the favour of the labourers,” he said. “Bt they have to file a complaint.”
But then Munna and other are hardly aware of the fact that they can resort to law. For them, the life in labour camps such as these will never end. When the Metro project gets over, they will move to some other site, again risking their lives for a less than minimum wages.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 24, 2009
IF he hadn’t managed to loosen the safety belt and run that Sunday morning when the Metro tracks crashed killing six workers, Ravindar Kumar would have been yet another statistic, an addition to the body count that has emerged as Delhi lurches forward in its dreams of becoming a world class city.
Six workers died on Sunday, raising the death count in the mega project to nine in three accidents.
Kumar, 25, broke his hand on Sunday. As the dust rose in the skies amid shouts, for a brief moment Kumar, who is from Bihar, thought he would die, too. Perched on top of the slider, he saw the tracks fall.
There was a big jolt, and he would have been thrown in the air had it not been for the safety belt. And then the slider crashed too, bringing him down. He was trapped in the debris and finally managed to wriggle out of the safety belt that secured him to the machine and ran to safety.
Anil Yadav, a foreman, was on a slider too on that morning about 12 meters off the ground. When he saw the link break, he jumped off the slider.
“Safety belt was meaningless. I would have been trapped in the debris like others,” Yadav said.
Yadav was admitted to All India Institute of Medical Sciences Trauma Centre and remained there for five days undergoing treatment for head injuries. His family in Azamgarh called up a co-worker’s cell phone when they heard about the accident.
“They were crying. So I told Anil to go visit them,” Munna, another construction worker said.
Yadav was given Rs. 50,000 by the DMRC. That was in cash. He is still wondering if the government will give him any compensation at all.
Somewhere in the papers he read that Rs. 2 lakhs compensation had been earmarked for the injured but he doesn’t know if he will get any of that. While a petition was filed by an NGO in the court, the agencies have yet to revert to the court notices.
UNDER the shadows of the cranes trying to haul the debris, and the concrete mess on the ground, it is the hundreds of workers like Kumar, the invisible men, who are fuelling the city’s addiction to growth.
They are the poor migrant contract workers who flock to the city lured by the promise of construction jobs as Delhi gears for Commonwealth Games and a spate of construction projects mark its skyline. They work with little or no job security, get paid less than minimum wages and in some cases, don’t even have an identity proof.
These contract workers typically work under subcontractors who maintain the muster rolls and administer payments them. There are no unions, and no monitoring agency. There are too many layers, making it almost impossible to nail anyone. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, the principal employer in this project, has contracted the work to various contractors, who in turn have hired subcontractors or thekedars who bring the unskilled and semiskilled labourers.
Workers are not being paid the minimum wages. For an eight-hour shift, they get Rs. 100. If they do overtime, they get Rs. 150. Minimum wages in Delhi for unskilled labourers is Rs. 141. Semi-skilled workers make about Rs. 6,000 a month. The only benefit they get is free accommodation but the housing conditions are far from decent. The thekedar usually puts four people in a small room near the site where workers sleep in shifts because all of them wouldn't fit within its four walls at the same time. Room rents around Zamrudpur range from Rs. 1,200 to Rs. 1,600.
However, on paper, on muster rolls, everything looks fine. The files are maintained and nothing is amiss, DMRC spokesperson Anuj Dayal said.
“We haven’t heard any complaints. If the workers have any issues, they can come to us. Any discrepancies need to be highlighted,” he said. “All payments, all records are checked. We have proper procedures.”
And so the exploitation has continued.
“If we say something, we might lose our jobs,” he said. "What will we do then? Who will take care of our families? We have no land to till and even if there is, where's the money to buy seeds and irrigate the land?"
According to Dayal, engineers and DMRC officials visit the sites often to check for irregularities but so far they haven't reported anything.
BUT it only takes a trip through Zamrudpur village that lies just across the site where the Sunday accident happened, and through the maze of small rooms constructed in a haphazard way evidently for renting out, to see the conditions these contract workers are living in.
In a cramped room, Munna and three others sat against the wall talking. A fifth man, tired after his night shift at the site, slept in a corner in an embryonic position. Four people, if they all stretched, could barley fit in the room.
They all came from a village near Rae Bareilly to look for work. Munna who has been in Delhi for a few years now told them there were jobs at the DMRC construction sites.
Fourteen workers from Rae Bareilly are among the 70 odd workers that work under Upendar Yadav, a thekedar employed by Gammon India. Some of them have no identity cards and their only form of reassurance is an attendance card where the thekedar marks their hours. But then, neither their name nor the company’s name is on those cards. Their orange and yellow helmets are the only proof that they work at the Metro site and these plastic covers for their head are their only sheild, their only defense against a mishap. They know if a pillar were to fall, the helmets would crack, and their skulls would be smashed. But that's thinking too much, and if you thought of such things, you'd never work and you'd die of starvation anyways, they said.
“This is all we have. Now, after the accident we want to go back home but they haven’t paid us. We don’t know where to find Upendar and we don’t know if Gammon will entertain us,” Rajkumar, another worker said. “We feel trapped. We have no complaints but just give us some sort of identification."
Munna had been sleeping when the accident happened. At first he heard a thud, then the earth shook, and then there were shouts. He rushed outside, helped the injured, and then sat in his room thinking if it was worth it. If it wasn’t, where would the money come from, he said.
“There was water all over. The pipes had burst. Bodies were lying here and there. I stepped over a few too,” he said. “It was horrible.”
For Munna and others, this phase of construction was rushed, It was the pace, the obsession to finish so much and so soon that led to the accidents, Munna said.
"We all work overtime," he said.
In his black cheap plastic boots given to him by the officials, it hasn’t been easy working. They tear too soon because they are cheap quality, Munna said.
“There’s nothing for us. They are supposed to give us gloves but they always say the stocks are not there. If you see our hands, you’d be horrified. We pull the iron wires and rods with bare hands,” he said. “The palms harden. And there are no doctors at the site. The safety people keep some medicines. That’s all.”
Munna should have insurance but he doesn’t know about his rights.
There was no contract and the thekedar just made them sign on a paper and disbursed them their wages, he said.
“We were just hired and given the attendance cards,” he said.
But Dayal said he had no knowledge of all this. Upendar Yadav, the thekedar, refused
to talk to us. For days after the mishap, he was missing. Munna and some others had gone looking for him to ask him for their dues but he was nowhere to be found. His cell hpone was switched off, they said.
Some workers said usually it takes a couple of months for the new hires to get an identity card but Munna said he has been working for more than four months and still hasn't got any proof.
The thekedar gives them Rs. 300 for food per week, which is deducted from their salaries paid to them in cash at the end of the month.
The colony itself is divided into camps. The workers stick to their own people. While Bengalis cluster in one part of the village, the Biharis populate the interiors.
“The Biharis, most of them, ran away after the accident,” Munna said.
Three of those who died in Sunday’s mishap belonged to Bihar.
Sunday’s accident, which was followed by yet another accident within hours of the first one at the same site when three cranes deployed to haul the debris crashed Monday morning, wasn’t the first time the DMRC’s reputation was at stake. In October 2008, a 400-tonne span at Laxmi Nagar in east Delhi fell down while being lifted and killed two people.
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) also published a report on the plight of the contract workers in the spate of construction activity in the capital for the Commonwealth Games.
Gautam Navlakha, a PUDR member, said while there are labour laws meant to protect the contract workers, the labour office has been negligent.
“It is understaffed and there is no premium for defending the plight of workers. It is the construction workers whose beggar is used to subsidize the mega project,” he said. “This is the saddest part. Nobody is talking about it. At every level there is a violation.”
Unions have been barred on the pretext of terrorism threat, he said.
“But who is asking for unhindered access. In a class society like we live in, the anti union feeling. Nobody gives a damn. Rest of us are living well. What about the miserable hovels in which the workers have to live,” he said.
Unions' golden age is over. Gone are the days when the unions fought for workers' rights and won. After corruption seeped through their ranks, and industry and others looking to gain political mileage blamed the unions for stalling development, of being communist, and of being in the way of gainful employment and industry investment, unions have been slowly dying, too feeble to protest, too marred in their own olitics to be of any help.
Responsibility too gets camouflaged in the layers of contractors and subcontractors. But according to the Contract Labour Act of 1970, the central government remains the principal employer and is thus responsible for adhering to the provisions of the act, Navlakha said.
A Delhi state labour ministry official said this was a central government project and hence out of their purview but generally if cases of exploitation are brought to them, they usually take circumstantial evidence into account.
“If it is a death case. There is an FIR. In injury cases, we in the labour jurisprudence, we would presume a lot of things in the favour of the labourers,” he said. “Bt they have to file a complaint.”
But then Munna and other are hardly aware of the fact that they can resort to law. For them, the life in labour camps such as these will never end. When the Metro project gets over, they will move to some other site, again risking their lives for a less than minimum wages.
Monday, September 28, 2009
The little boy's walk to the grave
The little boy walked
past the unswept stiarcases, the sleepy houses
past the smells of the night, the cigarette butts,
and the heap of leftover food collected on the sides of the streets, rotting and unclaimed by the street dogs
the slum was begining to wake up to the sounds of the megacity
the buses honked, the cars screeched
and the muezzin called from five different mosques
then the doors creaked, someone looked out of a window
but Wasim continued walking
outside the boundary of the graveyard
Wasim stopped, looked over his shoulder
nobody was around
he gently pushed open the gate
then he tiptoed to Aesha's grave
and sat down
For two weeks he had been coming here
after his sister died in a school stampede
for her, he carried incense sticks, and even brought roses
every morning he decked up the grave, sticking flowers around it
gently touching it, and lighting the incense
He always got up when Aesha prepared to leave for school
and he would turn his back and try to sleep again
because his school didn't start until noon
in the evenings they played together
his sister with her reddish hair and light eyes, a beauty
and he, dark, with a large nose envied her
she had delicate features and she stood first
Aesha had everything going for her
On the fateful day
when the stampede killed the girls
Aesha had crawled out
she was to live, and play with him, and marry into a nice house
but a voice called out to her, a friend who needed help
and Wasim had watched helplessly from the other side of the gate
he had gesticulated wildly, and screamed till the police shooed him away
On the other side of the gate, Aesha turned back
and disappeared into the dark staircase
Wasim ran home, and then saw his sister's body when they brought her home
So every morning he walks to her little grave
and talks to her
tells her about homework, about their mother, the news and everything else
for hours he sits there
sometimes, he carries a little of Aesha with him
and sprinkles the mud on the side of the bed where he sleeps
past the unswept stiarcases, the sleepy houses
past the smells of the night, the cigarette butts,
and the heap of leftover food collected on the sides of the streets, rotting and unclaimed by the street dogs
the slum was begining to wake up to the sounds of the megacity
the buses honked, the cars screeched
and the muezzin called from five different mosques
then the doors creaked, someone looked out of a window
but Wasim continued walking
outside the boundary of the graveyard
Wasim stopped, looked over his shoulder
nobody was around
he gently pushed open the gate
then he tiptoed to Aesha's grave
and sat down
For two weeks he had been coming here
after his sister died in a school stampede
for her, he carried incense sticks, and even brought roses
every morning he decked up the grave, sticking flowers around it
gently touching it, and lighting the incense
He always got up when Aesha prepared to leave for school
and he would turn his back and try to sleep again
because his school didn't start until noon
in the evenings they played together
his sister with her reddish hair and light eyes, a beauty
and he, dark, with a large nose envied her
she had delicate features and she stood first
Aesha had everything going for her
On the fateful day
when the stampede killed the girls
Aesha had crawled out
she was to live, and play with him, and marry into a nice house
but a voice called out to her, a friend who needed help
and Wasim had watched helplessly from the other side of the gate
he had gesticulated wildly, and screamed till the police shooed him away
On the other side of the gate, Aesha turned back
and disappeared into the dark staircase
Wasim ran home, and then saw his sister's body when they brought her home
So every morning he walks to her little grave
and talks to her
tells her about homework, about their mother, the news and everything else
for hours he sits there
sometimes, he carries a little of Aesha with him
and sprinkles the mud on the side of the bed where he sleeps
Revisiting Khajuri Khas
I went back to the slums across the road from Khajuri Khas school two weeks after of the incident that killed five girls and injured 34 others.
An edited version of this appeared in the Indian Express on September 28, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, September 27, 2009
Shamsiran quietly put the green sequinned dress material that her daughter Afroz bought in the coffin. Afroz had bought it for Eid on the Sunday before she died in the stampede at a Khajuri Khas school. Then, she stood in the doorway, wailing, and bid farewell to Afroz.
from the next alley, another coffin emerged, of Aesha’s and one mother’s cries mingled with the wail of the other.
On September 11, through the numerous alleys in the cramped Shri Ram Colony, people poured out, hundreds of them, solemn and angry, crowding around the graveyard where three of the area’s girls werelaid to rest a day after they died.
More than two weeks have passed since the tragedy. Some of the anger has died, giving way to dejection and hopelessness. Tears still flow, but voices are hushed and subdued. But grief, fear and anger that the culprits are still at large and not one government official ever knocked on their doors to ask how they were coping has united the many families in the colony that now say their daughters will never go back to the school.
Parveen said her daughter sits up through the nights and cries. The road to recovery is long, the process painful.
“She says she can still hear the screams of the girls,” she said. “I will not send her to the school. She is my only daughter. What if I had lost her on the day? I’d be lost, too.”
As she spoke, the women who had gathered around her on Sunday afternoon, taking a break from their housework, said the government should set up a school in Shri Ram Colony.
“No girls from this area will ever attend the school. We wanted to educate them so they could have better lives, not be like us, but not at this cost,” Asraf Jahan said. “What is the government doing for us?
What is it doing about the incident? Only announcements. That doesn’t help.”
Sajida, a student of Class 7 at the school where the tragedy struck, breaks down often. On the day when rains had filled the school compound and they were going up the stairs, the boys came, and they were trapped. Someone pushed her, too. Sajida somehow managed to get out but she saw other girls clambering out of the narrow staircase, their kurtas torn, blood on their faces and arms and the screams and
the sights have stayed with her, she said.
“They pushed me, they pushed the other girls,” Sajida said. “I will not go back. They died there. The walls must be resounding with their cries. I hear them, too.”
In another section of the colony, Nazreen, another student, is recuperating from her injuries. For days after the tragedy, Nazreen remained in the house, and talked only about the deaths. Her classmate Aesha was among the dead.
Jakri Begum, the mother, said much remains shrouded in mystery.
Stories of harassment were not unusual and girls often said the boys stood outside the gates and teased them. But nobody knew it would come to this, she said.
“For us, our honour is the only thing we have. If it means we have to keep them home, we will. We have no other choice,” she said. “The government, if it wants to do something for us, they should build a school here and then our daughters won’t sit home.”
The school was slated to open September 15 but the reopening was deferred until September 29 because the situation was not “normal”, according to officials.
On the day the tragedy struck, no meals were cooked in the neighborhood. On Eid, families stayed inside shunning new clothes, and didn’t prepare sewai. They were in mourning, they said.
“It was a black day for us,” Jakri Begum said.
The stampede at the school had occurred at around 9 am on September 10 when students were trying to make their way up and down a narrow staircase when school officials asked them to shift classrooms. While there were conflicting reports about the reasons that led to the tragedy, ranging from rumours about a short circuit and current subsequently passing through the flooded classrooms on the ground floor, and boys misbehaving with girls, the locals say the latter led to the stampede and then the deaths.
Post mortem reports suggested there were no electrocution injuries and most girls had injuries in chest and hands, and the abdomen region.
But Zaeeda who washed the dead body of her niece Afroz as part of the ritualistic burial, said she saw the marks all over, on the arms, on the chest as if someone had bit her.
The Delhi government had announced an ex gratia of Rs.1 lakh to the families of each of the deceased and Rs.50,000 to each injured, but the families are yet to receive the money or any notification from the government. Five girls were killed and 34 other students injured in the stampede.
“It was sad. I lost two nieces – Aesha and Afroz. The chief minister says the government will give compensation but we don’t want the money. Money won’t bring them back. We want justice,” she said.
Rukhsana, Aesha’s mother, wiped her tears. Her elder daughter Nisha stood beside her, and her son Wasim sat brooding in a corner.
Nisha had been getting ready for school when the news came. She attended the same school as Aesha but that fateful day, her exam was in the second shift.
Each morning at 6 a.m., Wasim walks to the graveyard, and lights incense sticks at his sister’s grave. Sometimes, he sticks a few incense sticks in the fresh mud of the other two graves, too.
“When she got angry she sat in a corner. It still feels she is sitting there,” he said, standing near the boundary of the graveyard. “I miss her. That’s why I come to her grave every morning.”
Across the road, past the school building that’s locked, in one of the gullis, up a flight of stairs, in yet another house, another family is grieving.
Monika, a Class 11 student, died in the stampede, and now her mother Jagesh Choudhary said she is unwilling to send her youngest daughter Sonika back to school.
“What’s the point? If they couldn’t manage this time with the police station just a stone throw away, what is the guarantee such incidents won’t happen again,” she said, her voice ringing, the anger unnoticeable. “Two weeks have passed. None of the boys have been booked. No government official ever came to us. When a poor man’s
child dies, it is just another number. The poor have nothing but their anger and hurt.”
After the Deputy Commissioner of North-East Delhi T C Nakh was asked by the government to submit a magisterial report on the incident, process to terminate the principal and suspend the other three, including the two vice-principals and RP Yadav, the zonal deputy director of education as recommended by the magisterial probe has already begun.
But while the families mourn their dead, and stay away from festivities, the tragedy has been hijacked, and being made into a political issue already.
Across the school, a dharna had been organized Sunday. Gurvindar Singh, the national president of Suryavanshi Khatik Samaj, who led the dharna said they would pitch their own candidate in the municipal elections and cut into the Congress votes because a lot of voters belonged to the Khatik Samaj if the government didn’t build a memorial for the deceased girls and double the compensation amount.
The group has submitted a memo to the Chief Minister, too.
“We will boycott the elections,” Singh said.
But inside a room, Afroz’s father Mohd. Ishaq was once again looking at his daughter’s pictures before he left for the graveyard to spend a few minutes with the departed.
An edited version of this appeared in the Indian Express on September 28, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, September 27, 2009
Shamsiran quietly put the green sequinned dress material that her daughter Afroz bought in the coffin. Afroz had bought it for Eid on the Sunday before she died in the stampede at a Khajuri Khas school. Then, she stood in the doorway, wailing, and bid farewell to Afroz.
from the next alley, another coffin emerged, of Aesha’s and one mother’s cries mingled with the wail of the other.
On September 11, through the numerous alleys in the cramped Shri Ram Colony, people poured out, hundreds of them, solemn and angry, crowding around the graveyard where three of the area’s girls werelaid to rest a day after they died.
More than two weeks have passed since the tragedy. Some of the anger has died, giving way to dejection and hopelessness. Tears still flow, but voices are hushed and subdued. But grief, fear and anger that the culprits are still at large and not one government official ever knocked on their doors to ask how they were coping has united the many families in the colony that now say their daughters will never go back to the school.
Parveen said her daughter sits up through the nights and cries. The road to recovery is long, the process painful.
“She says she can still hear the screams of the girls,” she said. “I will not send her to the school. She is my only daughter. What if I had lost her on the day? I’d be lost, too.”
As she spoke, the women who had gathered around her on Sunday afternoon, taking a break from their housework, said the government should set up a school in Shri Ram Colony.
“No girls from this area will ever attend the school. We wanted to educate them so they could have better lives, not be like us, but not at this cost,” Asraf Jahan said. “What is the government doing for us?
What is it doing about the incident? Only announcements. That doesn’t help.”
Sajida, a student of Class 7 at the school where the tragedy struck, breaks down often. On the day when rains had filled the school compound and they were going up the stairs, the boys came, and they were trapped. Someone pushed her, too. Sajida somehow managed to get out but she saw other girls clambering out of the narrow staircase, their kurtas torn, blood on their faces and arms and the screams and
the sights have stayed with her, she said.
“They pushed me, they pushed the other girls,” Sajida said. “I will not go back. They died there. The walls must be resounding with their cries. I hear them, too.”
In another section of the colony, Nazreen, another student, is recuperating from her injuries. For days after the tragedy, Nazreen remained in the house, and talked only about the deaths. Her classmate Aesha was among the dead.
Jakri Begum, the mother, said much remains shrouded in mystery.
Stories of harassment were not unusual and girls often said the boys stood outside the gates and teased them. But nobody knew it would come to this, she said.
“For us, our honour is the only thing we have. If it means we have to keep them home, we will. We have no other choice,” she said. “The government, if it wants to do something for us, they should build a school here and then our daughters won’t sit home.”
The school was slated to open September 15 but the reopening was deferred until September 29 because the situation was not “normal”, according to officials.
On the day the tragedy struck, no meals were cooked in the neighborhood. On Eid, families stayed inside shunning new clothes, and didn’t prepare sewai. They were in mourning, they said.
“It was a black day for us,” Jakri Begum said.
The stampede at the school had occurred at around 9 am on September 10 when students were trying to make their way up and down a narrow staircase when school officials asked them to shift classrooms. While there were conflicting reports about the reasons that led to the tragedy, ranging from rumours about a short circuit and current subsequently passing through the flooded classrooms on the ground floor, and boys misbehaving with girls, the locals say the latter led to the stampede and then the deaths.
Post mortem reports suggested there were no electrocution injuries and most girls had injuries in chest and hands, and the abdomen region.
But Zaeeda who washed the dead body of her niece Afroz as part of the ritualistic burial, said she saw the marks all over, on the arms, on the chest as if someone had bit her.
The Delhi government had announced an ex gratia of Rs.1 lakh to the families of each of the deceased and Rs.50,000 to each injured, but the families are yet to receive the money or any notification from the government. Five girls were killed and 34 other students injured in the stampede.
“It was sad. I lost two nieces – Aesha and Afroz. The chief minister says the government will give compensation but we don’t want the money. Money won’t bring them back. We want justice,” she said.
Rukhsana, Aesha’s mother, wiped her tears. Her elder daughter Nisha stood beside her, and her son Wasim sat brooding in a corner.
Nisha had been getting ready for school when the news came. She attended the same school as Aesha but that fateful day, her exam was in the second shift.
Each morning at 6 a.m., Wasim walks to the graveyard, and lights incense sticks at his sister’s grave. Sometimes, he sticks a few incense sticks in the fresh mud of the other two graves, too.
“When she got angry she sat in a corner. It still feels she is sitting there,” he said, standing near the boundary of the graveyard. “I miss her. That’s why I come to her grave every morning.”
Across the road, past the school building that’s locked, in one of the gullis, up a flight of stairs, in yet another house, another family is grieving.
Monika, a Class 11 student, died in the stampede, and now her mother Jagesh Choudhary said she is unwilling to send her youngest daughter Sonika back to school.
“What’s the point? If they couldn’t manage this time with the police station just a stone throw away, what is the guarantee such incidents won’t happen again,” she said, her voice ringing, the anger unnoticeable. “Two weeks have passed. None of the boys have been booked. No government official ever came to us. When a poor man’s
child dies, it is just another number. The poor have nothing but their anger and hurt.”
After the Deputy Commissioner of North-East Delhi T C Nakh was asked by the government to submit a magisterial report on the incident, process to terminate the principal and suspend the other three, including the two vice-principals and RP Yadav, the zonal deputy director of education as recommended by the magisterial probe has already begun.
But while the families mourn their dead, and stay away from festivities, the tragedy has been hijacked, and being made into a political issue already.
Across the school, a dharna had been organized Sunday. Gurvindar Singh, the national president of Suryavanshi Khatik Samaj, who led the dharna said they would pitch their own candidate in the municipal elections and cut into the Congress votes because a lot of voters belonged to the Khatik Samaj if the government didn’t build a memorial for the deceased girls and double the compensation amount.
The group has submitted a memo to the Chief Minister, too.
“We will boycott the elections,” Singh said.
But inside a room, Afroz’s father Mohd. Ishaq was once again looking at his daughter’s pictures before he left for the graveyard to spend a few minutes with the departed.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
The loss of words
You want me to cut short a mother's wail,
stop her while she tells me how she buried her daughter
how she put the green kurta in the coffin
and the clips, and the purse and her hopes and her despair
and her loss too
You want for your inches' sake, for the column width
to cut her tale in half
of how she saw Afroz skip the poodles of water, the muddy corners of the alley
of how she never looked back, and how she tightly held her umbrella
and then she had disappeared at the corner of the alley
and never turned back
and then an hour later, people came rushing to her house
shouting, and screaming
there was a stampede and girls had died at the school
Afroz, the robust, tall and beautiful girl was one of them
You want me to shrink it, edit it, cut it, delete the emotion, erase the pain, take everything out, tighten the graphs, strangle everything, mutilate it all, because there's no space tonight
but it is emptiness in her eyes that makes me write
and her voice is heavy with the narration of a lifetime
On that day, Afroz woke up early for the Sehri, said her prayers
Then sat and crammed her notes
And then she left for school
And you want to keep it tight, keep it short
And I don't know how to
I can't not let her cry, and I can't not write about how beautifully she cried
She had waited outside the hospital for hours
and they would not let her see her
those hours, the wait, the lag, the despair, the helplessness
and you want me to condense it in one line
because there are the inches, the column width, the advertisments, and crime spots
So the tale of the poor mother's dead daughter needs to be cut
No I can't contain the agony in 500 words
I can't betray the mother, and her daughter
Because the poor have nothing but their anger and hurt
and their loss
they let her in and there Afroz lay there in the corner
after the other four who had died
when the boys chased them up and down the narow staircase at school
and they had shouted, screamed, tried to run
but they gave up
They didn't let her near the body
she saw the hand upturned
she asked the policeman to place it at her side
she had lurched forward
but they held her back
she saw the marks, too
then they gave them the body
and they brought it home
I know the space is tight tonight, but the story hangs heavy on me
I can't rid of it except here
Because the pain of the poor, the tales of loss must be written
I can't justify why you should run it
I can't pitch it
except that when a young boy walks to the grave of his sister,
and kneels down near the freshly-dug grave and lights incense sticks
the image sticks to me, and I can't shake it off
So I need to write
And you tell me it is getting too long
But Wasim walked everyday to the grave at 6 a.m.
and each day he carried the incense sticks
and he spends hours at the grave still
because back at home, Aesha is not there to play carrom with him
And all this, you want me to fit in a sentence
It is hard
It is like cutting his walk short, like asking him to stop because I have a quote
and I am done
And so I linger, I let him talk
And then I am back on the page
chopping a bit off here and there
mostly the conjunctions, the extra ones
But I can't lose more of this loss
because it makes me angry, sad, and whole lot of other things
So, I didn't chop much tonight
Because I couldn't
And the loss was too much for me to press it in a mere 500-word piece
Because the poor have nothing but their loss
and I have nothing but the words
So I let the tale flow
Maybe you can cut it
I went into the homes, and sat beside the wailing mothers
who felt alone because nobody ever came to ask them about the loss
the ministers made announcements, they expressed shock and regret and ordered probes
but nobody came knocking to ask them how they were coping
because loss is a heavy burden to carry and it spreads
Its emptiness fills you, and it overflows and spreads again
So the loss needs to be cut, the tales need to be edited
So you do it.
How can I?
I had looked at the pictures, and I became part of the loss
I carried those with me, in my head, and my notes
And you want me to lose it all
because nobody writes that long
But I refuse
Because loss is all that they have
stop her while she tells me how she buried her daughter
how she put the green kurta in the coffin
and the clips, and the purse and her hopes and her despair
and her loss too
You want for your inches' sake, for the column width
to cut her tale in half
of how she saw Afroz skip the poodles of water, the muddy corners of the alley
of how she never looked back, and how she tightly held her umbrella
and then she had disappeared at the corner of the alley
and never turned back
and then an hour later, people came rushing to her house
shouting, and screaming
there was a stampede and girls had died at the school
Afroz, the robust, tall and beautiful girl was one of them
You want me to shrink it, edit it, cut it, delete the emotion, erase the pain, take everything out, tighten the graphs, strangle everything, mutilate it all, because there's no space tonight
but it is emptiness in her eyes that makes me write
and her voice is heavy with the narration of a lifetime
On that day, Afroz woke up early for the Sehri, said her prayers
Then sat and crammed her notes
And then she left for school
And you want to keep it tight, keep it short
And I don't know how to
I can't not let her cry, and I can't not write about how beautifully she cried
She had waited outside the hospital for hours
and they would not let her see her
those hours, the wait, the lag, the despair, the helplessness
and you want me to condense it in one line
because there are the inches, the column width, the advertisments, and crime spots
So the tale of the poor mother's dead daughter needs to be cut
No I can't contain the agony in 500 words
I can't betray the mother, and her daughter
Because the poor have nothing but their anger and hurt
and their loss
they let her in and there Afroz lay there in the corner
after the other four who had died
when the boys chased them up and down the narow staircase at school
and they had shouted, screamed, tried to run
but they gave up
They didn't let her near the body
she saw the hand upturned
she asked the policeman to place it at her side
she had lurched forward
but they held her back
she saw the marks, too
then they gave them the body
and they brought it home
I know the space is tight tonight, but the story hangs heavy on me
I can't rid of it except here
Because the pain of the poor, the tales of loss must be written
I can't justify why you should run it
I can't pitch it
except that when a young boy walks to the grave of his sister,
and kneels down near the freshly-dug grave and lights incense sticks
the image sticks to me, and I can't shake it off
So I need to write
And you tell me it is getting too long
But Wasim walked everyday to the grave at 6 a.m.
and each day he carried the incense sticks
and he spends hours at the grave still
because back at home, Aesha is not there to play carrom with him
And all this, you want me to fit in a sentence
It is hard
It is like cutting his walk short, like asking him to stop because I have a quote
and I am done
And so I linger, I let him talk
And then I am back on the page
chopping a bit off here and there
mostly the conjunctions, the extra ones
But I can't lose more of this loss
because it makes me angry, sad, and whole lot of other things
So, I didn't chop much tonight
Because I couldn't
And the loss was too much for me to press it in a mere 500-word piece
Because the poor have nothing but their loss
and I have nothing but the words
So I let the tale flow
Maybe you can cut it
I went into the homes, and sat beside the wailing mothers
who felt alone because nobody ever came to ask them about the loss
the ministers made announcements, they expressed shock and regret and ordered probes
but nobody came knocking to ask them how they were coping
because loss is a heavy burden to carry and it spreads
Its emptiness fills you, and it overflows and spreads again
So the loss needs to be cut, the tales need to be edited
So you do it.
How can I?
I had looked at the pictures, and I became part of the loss
I carried those with me, in my head, and my notes
And you want me to lose it all
because nobody writes that long
But I refuse
Because loss is all that they have
Friday, September 25, 2009
NRI Cell formed under NCW to provide legal help to abandoned wives in case of overseas marriage
An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on September 25, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, September 24, 2009
She doesn’t watch travel channels anymore. And if she stumbles upon those, she switches off the television, shuts her mind to the memories of a life that Hardeep Kaur (name changed because the case is sub judice) lived for a mere 14 months.
Two-and-a-half years ago when Kaur created a profile on the matrimonial website www.shaadi.com, she was 35 years old, a professional, who wanted to settle down with a man who was equally qualified and preferably living abroad.
She found her man, and then started a chain of long telephone conversations stretching into the nights. He was a corporate honcho, shuttling between countries, and living a life she always wanted. They decided to meet. Two months later he flew down from United Kingdom, and the couple decided to get married.
And then the nightmares began. Kaur flew to United Kingdom, and was abused and harassed and later abandoned, she said. She left for India 14 months later, and had to start from scratch again.
“It is a double blow. All of a sudden you pack your bags and leave for a life that you have dreamt of, with a man you trust. Then you come back and you resurrect your life yet again,” she said. “Everything has traces of memory of a different life, things that you did together, places that you travelled together.”
A few months ago she stumbled upon the NRI Cell under the National Commission of Women that has been nominated as the coordinating agency at the national level for dealing with issues that relate to NRI marriages by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs. While the cell was launched in August, it was formally inaugurated Thursday by Girija Vyas, the chairperson of NCW, who said the newly-formed cell is already working on 6-7 cases where women have approached them with their complaints.
Now, Kaur is hopeful. The anger, the bitterness and the sense of loss can be now be channelized to bring the man to books.
Kaur’s case in one of the thousands of cases of such marriages gone wrong and tales of harassment and abandonment are not unusual. As a NCW member, she will not fight her case and also offer counselling to others who went through the same trauma.
In Punjab alone, the number of active cases is more than 30,000, according to NCW officials.
Various state governments, including Gujarat, where incidence of such cases is high have begun public awareness campaigns to educate families and women on Supreme Court judgments on matrimonial laws and their rights. In Gujarat, in 2008 out of the 20,000 matrimonial cases registered across 57 wards, almost five percent of those are of overseas marriage where the NRI grooms have duped the women.
Other than Gujarat and Punjab, where locals say many houses that have a family member abroad display miniature ships or aeroplanes on the roof as a show of status and even offer toy aircrafts at the Talhan G urudwara near Jalandhar because it is widely believed that chances of going abroad increase with it, Kerela and Andhra Pradesh are the other two states that have seen an upsurge in the number of such cases.
Ajay Kumar, a coordinator for the NRI Cell and a lawyer, said in such communities, the aspirations run high.
“They feel if the girl goes abroad, then the brother will follow, and the family too can migrate. It is the social-economic climate there. For the NRIs it is like honeymoon tourism, they know the law can’t do anything to them,” he said. “As a Cell, we are still in the formative stages. We have to work out the modalities. The legal options we can tell them are domestic violence and dowry, both criminal offences. Education will be the way. Maybe we are helpless now but we have made a humble start.”
As a recommending body, the NCW can only function in an advisory capacity, she said. However, the NRI Cell will render assistance to women, provide legal counselling to them, try for reconciliation and network with NGOs and is even trying to form bilateral and multilateral consensus with the four countries – United States, which has the highest incidence of such cases, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia - so that foreign courts do not issue a divorce decree without the presence of the wife as happened with Amarjit, who was married last year to man who said he had a Belgian passport through a Punjabi matrimonial website.
Everything had seemed perfect last year in February when she found the match on the website. He was Sikh and lived in Europe. She couldn’t have asked fro more, she said.
The family agreed. Delhi’s Tilak Nagar resident Amarjit would marry, they would apply for her visa, and she would fly to a country she only saw on television, or read about it in magazines, and upgrade her life. She was 25 when she married. When her husband prepared to leave India after three months, she asked him about her visa. He dodged the questions, she said.
When she filed an FIR in Ludhiana where she was living with her aunt after she got suspicious, her husband left the country. She called his home in England, and he hung up on her, she said.
Months later, she found him on the matrimonial website courting women. His status said “separated”, Amarjit said.
“I don’t know why he left me. I will never know,” she said. “Perhaps he wanted me to serve his parents in Chandigarh, be like a maid. Everything came crashing.”
Amarjit’s case is among the several cases that are now with the NCW.
The NCW is also partnering with United Nations Development Fund for Women that will help by providing technical support and help the cell raise funds. Through its huge network with NGOs worldwide, it can help the cell coordinate and build data banks, Anne Stenhammer, its representative said.
“The cell can support the government in its efforts. These women, particularly if they are in a different country, are vulnerable. This can be the safety net,” she said.
According to the NCW officials, the NRI units will be formed at embassies in foreign countries as the first point of contact for such women. The NRI cell at the ICCW in Delhi will then look into the complaints and take suo moto notice in accordance with Section 10 (1) (f) of the NCW Act of 1990.
It has already started the first overseas office at Indian embassy in Britain.
The cell will also use the media extensively to dissipate information about the NRI Cell in rural areas too, officials said.
For Amarjit, it offers some hope.
"I have gone to the police. Nothing was done. Maybe I will find help here," she said. "I want him to be punished. He says he is in UK, and not under Indian law. I want him to suffer for what he has done."
How to register complaints
The concept of the NRI Cell is based on the recommendation of the Parliamentary Committee on Empowerment of Woman (14th Lok Sabha) on the subject “ Plight of Indian Woman deserted by NRI husbands”.
Women can register their complaints on the NCW website http://ncw.nic.in/frmNRICell.aspx.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, September 24, 2009
She doesn’t watch travel channels anymore. And if she stumbles upon those, she switches off the television, shuts her mind to the memories of a life that Hardeep Kaur (name changed because the case is sub judice) lived for a mere 14 months.
Two-and-a-half years ago when Kaur created a profile on the matrimonial website www.shaadi.com, she was 35 years old, a professional, who wanted to settle down with a man who was equally qualified and preferably living abroad.
She found her man, and then started a chain of long telephone conversations stretching into the nights. He was a corporate honcho, shuttling between countries, and living a life she always wanted. They decided to meet. Two months later he flew down from United Kingdom, and the couple decided to get married.
And then the nightmares began. Kaur flew to United Kingdom, and was abused and harassed and later abandoned, she said. She left for India 14 months later, and had to start from scratch again.
“It is a double blow. All of a sudden you pack your bags and leave for a life that you have dreamt of, with a man you trust. Then you come back and you resurrect your life yet again,” she said. “Everything has traces of memory of a different life, things that you did together, places that you travelled together.”
A few months ago she stumbled upon the NRI Cell under the National Commission of Women that has been nominated as the coordinating agency at the national level for dealing with issues that relate to NRI marriages by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs. While the cell was launched in August, it was formally inaugurated Thursday by Girija Vyas, the chairperson of NCW, who said the newly-formed cell is already working on 6-7 cases where women have approached them with their complaints.
Now, Kaur is hopeful. The anger, the bitterness and the sense of loss can be now be channelized to bring the man to books.
Kaur’s case in one of the thousands of cases of such marriages gone wrong and tales of harassment and abandonment are not unusual. As a NCW member, she will not fight her case and also offer counselling to others who went through the same trauma.
In Punjab alone, the number of active cases is more than 30,000, according to NCW officials.
Various state governments, including Gujarat, where incidence of such cases is high have begun public awareness campaigns to educate families and women on Supreme Court judgments on matrimonial laws and their rights. In Gujarat, in 2008 out of the 20,000 matrimonial cases registered across 57 wards, almost five percent of those are of overseas marriage where the NRI grooms have duped the women.
Other than Gujarat and Punjab, where locals say many houses that have a family member abroad display miniature ships or aeroplanes on the roof as a show of status and even offer toy aircrafts at the Talhan G urudwara near Jalandhar because it is widely believed that chances of going abroad increase with it, Kerela and Andhra Pradesh are the other two states that have seen an upsurge in the number of such cases.
Ajay Kumar, a coordinator for the NRI Cell and a lawyer, said in such communities, the aspirations run high.
“They feel if the girl goes abroad, then the brother will follow, and the family too can migrate. It is the social-economic climate there. For the NRIs it is like honeymoon tourism, they know the law can’t do anything to them,” he said. “As a Cell, we are still in the formative stages. We have to work out the modalities. The legal options we can tell them are domestic violence and dowry, both criminal offences. Education will be the way. Maybe we are helpless now but we have made a humble start.”
As a recommending body, the NCW can only function in an advisory capacity, she said. However, the NRI Cell will render assistance to women, provide legal counselling to them, try for reconciliation and network with NGOs and is even trying to form bilateral and multilateral consensus with the four countries – United States, which has the highest incidence of such cases, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia - so that foreign courts do not issue a divorce decree without the presence of the wife as happened with Amarjit, who was married last year to man who said he had a Belgian passport through a Punjabi matrimonial website.
Everything had seemed perfect last year in February when she found the match on the website. He was Sikh and lived in Europe. She couldn’t have asked fro more, she said.
The family agreed. Delhi’s Tilak Nagar resident Amarjit would marry, they would apply for her visa, and she would fly to a country she only saw on television, or read about it in magazines, and upgrade her life. She was 25 when she married. When her husband prepared to leave India after three months, she asked him about her visa. He dodged the questions, she said.
When she filed an FIR in Ludhiana where she was living with her aunt after she got suspicious, her husband left the country. She called his home in England, and he hung up on her, she said.
Months later, she found him on the matrimonial website courting women. His status said “separated”, Amarjit said.
“I don’t know why he left me. I will never know,” she said. “Perhaps he wanted me to serve his parents in Chandigarh, be like a maid. Everything came crashing.”
Amarjit’s case is among the several cases that are now with the NCW.
The NCW is also partnering with United Nations Development Fund for Women that will help by providing technical support and help the cell raise funds. Through its huge network with NGOs worldwide, it can help the cell coordinate and build data banks, Anne Stenhammer, its representative said.
“The cell can support the government in its efforts. These women, particularly if they are in a different country, are vulnerable. This can be the safety net,” she said.
According to the NCW officials, the NRI units will be formed at embassies in foreign countries as the first point of contact for such women. The NRI cell at the ICCW in Delhi will then look into the complaints and take suo moto notice in accordance with Section 10 (1) (f) of the NCW Act of 1990.
It has already started the first overseas office at Indian embassy in Britain.
The cell will also use the media extensively to dissipate information about the NRI Cell in rural areas too, officials said.
For Amarjit, it offers some hope.
"I have gone to the police. Nothing was done. Maybe I will find help here," she said. "I want him to be punished. He says he is in UK, and not under Indian law. I want him to suffer for what he has done."
How to register complaints
The concept of the NRI Cell is based on the recommendation of the Parliamentary Committee on Empowerment of Woman (14th Lok Sabha) on the subject “ Plight of Indian Woman deserted by NRI husbands”.
Women can register their complaints on the NCW website http://ncw.nic.in/frmNRICell.aspx.
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Journeys of faith ...
The Markaz is just down the road from where I live in Nizamuddin. It always intrigued me because the area remained festive at all times. It is also perhaps the most cosmopolitan in nature with men and women of different nationalities sipping tea at the chai stalls or bargaining for cheap deals for their preparation for chillah.
Access was never easy and being a woman, I could not enter the men's section. So I kept asking around, trying to find someone who could get me inside the women's section. And finally I found Nida who took me there one morning and I managed to talk to some women before I was asked to leave by a woman who told me Tablighis are not allowed to talk to anyone during the jamaat period. We left.
The photographer, a young intern called mikma Lpcha, wasn't so lucky. While shooting the pictures of the Markaz from outside, he was called inside and they asked him to destroy all the pictures.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on August 23, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, August 21, 2009
For 40 days of the Chillah, the four Sri Lankan women will travel in the interiors of India, crisscrossing villages, staying for a couple of days each at a Tablighi’s house and preaching to the rural Muslim women the correct ways of Islam. They will hold sessions, recite the Suras and bring back the women to faithful adherence to Islamic teachings. And if language becomes a barrier, they will have a translator travel with them, too.
“This is for Allah, for our religious improvement,” Mohd. Refai, who hails from a tiny hamlet in Sri Lanka, said. “We will spread his message. We will tell them about the virtues, discuss how to rear children in an Islamic way and tell them why they should wear the purdah.”
Refai, who came Friday morning, tugged at the scarf on her head frequently, trying to hide any loose strands of hair that might just show, as she nervously glanced around the large hall that was bare except for a bed. Women walked in and out of the hall, nodding, smiling and inquiring about the prayer sessions throughout the day.
They came from different countries – Africa, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. The Tablighi Jamaat, a missionary revivalist Islamic movement founded in 1926 in India, and originally centred at men, has now spread to more than 80 countries. The movement has also recruited women who travel with their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers, and stay at a follower’s house while the men stay at the local mosque and
visit people’s homes helping them to interpret the meaning of Islam.
The women’s jamaat is called Masturat.
It was in the 1920s that Maulana Mohammad Ilyas Kandhalawi founded the Tablighi Jamaat in the Mewat province of India with the slogan ‘Aye Musalmano! Musalman bano’ (Come O Muslims! Become Muslims). Tabligh means “to convey” in Arabic and followers try to imitate the companions of the Prophet by going out and spreading the teachings of Islam as they did in the past.
Over the years, the movement spread, crossing over to other continents and bringing within its fold men and women from far-flung countries like the UK and the USA. From the Markaz in Nizamuddin, jamaats travel to different parts of India and abroad. Besides 40-day chillahs, there are four-month-long tours too. Recently, the thrust has been on rural India and jamaats have been assigned remote villages, a participant
said.
In Nizamuddin West, where the famous Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin Aulia exists, the people that crowd its narrow lanes, filtering in and out of cyber cafes tucked away in alleys behind the Markaz that towers over everything else, are as cosmopolitan as it can get. They step out of the Markaz gates, and chat in loud, animated tones with each other, as they flock to the biryani vendor in the mornings or in the evenings
after the Maghrib prayers, they crowd at Nasir Iqbal’s little store for firni and kheer.
But women never come out. They stay indoors. Often local women come to meet them. Before they leave for their destinations that are decided by the maulanas, they stay at the Markaz for three days preparing for the journey.
Maulana Ilyas is said to have been keen on women’s participation in the movement. The first women’s jamaat went to Mewat where the movement was born. At first women would confine themselves to meetings locally but then it spread. Ilyas had sought ulema’s opinion at involving women because he thought that the movement needed to enlist women. But ulemas recoiled at the idea and Ilyas kept at it.
The Biswa Ijtema, the annual Tablighi congregation in Bangladesh, attracts over three million devotees from around the world.
At least 500 people leave for various destinations in India as part of jamaats every day, according to a vendor.
“I see them coming and going. So many of them come, and so many leave,” he said.
In 40 days, the jamaat consisting of 8-12 people will visit 20 villages.
“No, it is not tough. It will be a pleasure. The worldly life is short and the afterlife is eternal. Our aim is to get to paradise. Through this, we will. Allah has chosen us for this. It is through his grace that we will go and tell people about him.”
Inside the women’s section, the floors were covered with mats, and the curtains kept out most of the outside light. This is where the women would gather and read out from the Koran, and wait for the Markaz to issue them instructions on where they would go. But Refai, 53, isn’t bothered. As long it is for the faith, she is prepared to bear any inconvenience. When she returns, she will write a report on her work like all other women and submit it at the Markaz, and go back to Puttalam, her village that is 80 miles north of Colombo, and tell others what she learned here.
“This is where they can learn the correct things,” Ahmed said.
Refai was 40 when she first went for a jamaat in Sri Lanka. That was for three days, she recalled.
“At the time, I didn’t know much. I saw others and imitated what they did,” she said.
Coming to India was a big decision. This is her first 40-day Chillah in a country that’s unfamiliar.
She applied to the markaz in Colombo and when her turn came, she packed her bags and accompanied her husband here. Only married women are allowed to participate in jamaats.
In Sri Lanka, women only started going for jamaats in the 1970s when a jamaat from India visited the island nation, she said.
Men and women of the Tablighi Jamaat remain aloof from discussions on political life and devote time to discussing the Koran and the teachings. Tours that are self-funded are the central feature of the movement and during the tour the participants break away from all familial and work hierarchies and that allows them to focus.
It is the journey that’s most important, Nida Ahmed, who is an alima or a Muslim woman scholar, said.
“Women were always part of the movement but in the last ten years more and more women have joined it. Recently, we see women from other countries coming often. I guess they want to learn more about Islam, their faith,” she said.
Access was never easy and being a woman, I could not enter the men's section. So I kept asking around, trying to find someone who could get me inside the women's section. And finally I found Nida who took me there one morning and I managed to talk to some women before I was asked to leave by a woman who told me Tablighis are not allowed to talk to anyone during the jamaat period. We left.
The photographer, a young intern called mikma Lpcha, wasn't so lucky. While shooting the pictures of the Markaz from outside, he was called inside and they asked him to destroy all the pictures.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on August 23, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, August 21, 2009
For 40 days of the Chillah, the four Sri Lankan women will travel in the interiors of India, crisscrossing villages, staying for a couple of days each at a Tablighi’s house and preaching to the rural Muslim women the correct ways of Islam. They will hold sessions, recite the Suras and bring back the women to faithful adherence to Islamic teachings. And if language becomes a barrier, they will have a translator travel with them, too.
“This is for Allah, for our religious improvement,” Mohd. Refai, who hails from a tiny hamlet in Sri Lanka, said. “We will spread his message. We will tell them about the virtues, discuss how to rear children in an Islamic way and tell them why they should wear the purdah.”
Refai, who came Friday morning, tugged at the scarf on her head frequently, trying to hide any loose strands of hair that might just show, as she nervously glanced around the large hall that was bare except for a bed. Women walked in and out of the hall, nodding, smiling and inquiring about the prayer sessions throughout the day.
They came from different countries – Africa, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. The Tablighi Jamaat, a missionary revivalist Islamic movement founded in 1926 in India, and originally centred at men, has now spread to more than 80 countries. The movement has also recruited women who travel with their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers, and stay at a follower’s house while the men stay at the local mosque and
visit people’s homes helping them to interpret the meaning of Islam.
The women’s jamaat is called Masturat.
It was in the 1920s that Maulana Mohammad Ilyas Kandhalawi founded the Tablighi Jamaat in the Mewat province of India with the slogan ‘Aye Musalmano! Musalman bano’ (Come O Muslims! Become Muslims). Tabligh means “to convey” in Arabic and followers try to imitate the companions of the Prophet by going out and spreading the teachings of Islam as they did in the past.
Over the years, the movement spread, crossing over to other continents and bringing within its fold men and women from far-flung countries like the UK and the USA. From the Markaz in Nizamuddin, jamaats travel to different parts of India and abroad. Besides 40-day chillahs, there are four-month-long tours too. Recently, the thrust has been on rural India and jamaats have been assigned remote villages, a participant
said.
In Nizamuddin West, where the famous Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin Aulia exists, the people that crowd its narrow lanes, filtering in and out of cyber cafes tucked away in alleys behind the Markaz that towers over everything else, are as cosmopolitan as it can get. They step out of the Markaz gates, and chat in loud, animated tones with each other, as they flock to the biryani vendor in the mornings or in the evenings
after the Maghrib prayers, they crowd at Nasir Iqbal’s little store for firni and kheer.
But women never come out. They stay indoors. Often local women come to meet them. Before they leave for their destinations that are decided by the maulanas, they stay at the Markaz for three days preparing for the journey.
Maulana Ilyas is said to have been keen on women’s participation in the movement. The first women’s jamaat went to Mewat where the movement was born. At first women would confine themselves to meetings locally but then it spread. Ilyas had sought ulema’s opinion at involving women because he thought that the movement needed to enlist women. But ulemas recoiled at the idea and Ilyas kept at it.
The Biswa Ijtema, the annual Tablighi congregation in Bangladesh, attracts over three million devotees from around the world.
At least 500 people leave for various destinations in India as part of jamaats every day, according to a vendor.
“I see them coming and going. So many of them come, and so many leave,” he said.
In 40 days, the jamaat consisting of 8-12 people will visit 20 villages.
“No, it is not tough. It will be a pleasure. The worldly life is short and the afterlife is eternal. Our aim is to get to paradise. Through this, we will. Allah has chosen us for this. It is through his grace that we will go and tell people about him.”
Inside the women’s section, the floors were covered with mats, and the curtains kept out most of the outside light. This is where the women would gather and read out from the Koran, and wait for the Markaz to issue them instructions on where they would go. But Refai, 53, isn’t bothered. As long it is for the faith, she is prepared to bear any inconvenience. When she returns, she will write a report on her work like all other women and submit it at the Markaz, and go back to Puttalam, her village that is 80 miles north of Colombo, and tell others what she learned here.
“This is where they can learn the correct things,” Ahmed said.
Refai was 40 when she first went for a jamaat in Sri Lanka. That was for three days, she recalled.
“At the time, I didn’t know much. I saw others and imitated what they did,” she said.
Coming to India was a big decision. This is her first 40-day Chillah in a country that’s unfamiliar.
She applied to the markaz in Colombo and when her turn came, she packed her bags and accompanied her husband here. Only married women are allowed to participate in jamaats.
In Sri Lanka, women only started going for jamaats in the 1970s when a jamaat from India visited the island nation, she said.
Men and women of the Tablighi Jamaat remain aloof from discussions on political life and devote time to discussing the Koran and the teachings. Tours that are self-funded are the central feature of the movement and during the tour the participants break away from all familial and work hierarchies and that allows them to focus.
It is the journey that’s most important, Nida Ahmed, who is an alima or a Muslim woman scholar, said.
“Women were always part of the movement but in the last ten years more and more women have joined it. Recently, we see women from other countries coming often. I guess they want to learn more about Islam, their faith,” she said.
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