When I first went to Okhla to visit the slums and the mobile schools, it was heartening to see the children wanting to break free. They crowded near the yellow bus, the school on wheels. I wrote the story a month ago but it wasn't published until today.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on July 24, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, June 20, 2009
It’s only for a few hours when he is inside the mobile school run by the Delhi government that 13-year-old Kamruddin, son of a Bihari migrant, has the security of four walls and a roof. And that’s when, away from the flies and the stench, he can give his dreams a free run.
Before he joined the “School on wheels”, a non-formal education program that has gained momentum within India and abroad where such mobile schools are reaching out to migrant, and poor children who would have otherwise remained out of school, Kamruddin spent most of his waking hours washing plates at a nearby hotel for a paltry sum. Now, he attends school that comes to him, calling out to him and others with a song “School chale hum” in the morning, and goes for work in the afternoon. In the night, he sleeps in the open on a push cart his father pulls during the day. But all those limitations have only fueled the desire to move up and the bright yellow bus seems to the first step.
While Kamruddin is one of around 500 children that are part of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’s initiative in the city, more such marginalized kids from the hundreds of slums in Delhi that don’t have regular schools near them will be brought into the program this year. After learning the basics, the kids will then be mainstreamed in government schools.
Until now, the mobile schools were run as a pilot project in the city with only two Mobile Learning Centers touring the jhuggies. The government in now planning to launch 25 such centers. An MLC typically stops at four contact points fro two hours for a session. A maximum of 40 students can enroll per stop but the doors are open to other kids that may not be enrolled but want to join, according to officials.
The project, which is now expanded, will cover various traffic stops, construction sites, and among other slums, the JJ clusters, officials said.
“This is taking the school to the site of the children, closer to them,” SSA state project director VP Singh said. “Delhi is a metro and we have a situation where we have homeless, migrant people who cluster around construction sites. The situation is such that even 50 buses are not enough. And because of the Commonwealth Games, we have more construction and therefore more migrant children who travel with their parents from their native states to work.”
Incidentally, Delhi was the first state to introduce the Chalta Phirta School under the SSA program that was then followed by Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to extend primary education to deprived children, Singh said.
"We want to study"
When he enrolled last May into the MLC, parked on the side of the street across the railway tracks near the Okhla Mandi, along with other such children, Kamruddin knew he didn’t have to spend the rest of his life amid heaps of garbage, and in dingy one-room tenements, and there was hope for him, too. He didn't have to be poor all his life if he studied hard, he said.
“My father has tuberculosis. He said to me you go study and become a big man,” Kamruddin said. “I want to take care of my father. He still pulls a cart and spits blood. That’s why I attend school.”
The project is run by NGOs but is funded by the Delhi government. The buses, owned and refurbished by the Delhi government and UNICEF at a cost of Rs. 7.5 lakhs per bus, were given to the NGOs to operate last year when the Delhi government started the initiative.
Moushumi Barua, who teaches the children in the bus operated by NGO Butterflies, said it was a challenge educating them.
“They get no support from parents but they want to learn,” she said.
So when the bright yellow bus comes, the children flock to it, notebooks, slates in hand, and Barua laughs, scolds and tries to make school relevant to the children. Some of these children had never held a pencil in their hands before, she said.
Ten-year-old Girish Gautam is the only child in his family to attend a school. He also runs his house, spending hours amid heaps of garbage, picking up bottles that he later sells bringing home Rs. 40 on most days. On days that he is lucky, he earns Rs. 100. His father Munshilal lost his job at the vegetable and fruit market last month but he hasn't discouraged the son from attending school. The family of eight live in a windowless room smaller than a small-size car, squeezed in.
"How will we ever rise from the mess we are in," he said. "He needs the education."
Gautam wants to become doctor. Having spent months at the MLC, he is now enrolled into an NDMC school near Modi Mills in Class II.
“I like studying. One day when I was sick, the doctor gave me medicines and I became fine. That’s why I want to become a doctor. I want to save people,” he said.
His younger brother Vishal doesn't attend school yet. He doesn't see it as a viable alternative. He'd rather work and bring money home for an occassional treat of soft drink, he said.
The project
In November 2005, the former Secretary of Education Rina Ray had put across the idea to the government and three years later, the bright yellow buses hit the Delhi’s roads. In its second year, the project has proved to be a good solution to the issue educating the migrant, homeless children, Singh said.
“Before us, doorstep schools were there like in Mumbai where socialite and entrepreneur Bina Ramani ran such buses. We had gone see those,” Singh said.
Though the costing and mapping of areas the new buses will cover remains to be worked out, Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit has approved the proposal, officials said.
Next week, the Department of Education will advertise the project to invite proposals from different NGOs to run these schools. While Delhi State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation donated the two buses that were used in the pilot program, the government will provide the funding for the 25 buses and will also refurbish them, officials said.
“The whole process will take around two months. We will also have to screen the NGOs that are interested,” Singh said. “The focus is on the urban disadvantaged groups and buses will be deployed in red light areas, and those quarters of the city that house the poor.”
The pilot project started in February 2008, and more than 100 of the children have been admitted to government and corporation schools so far, Singh said.
The NGOs that are currently running the schools – the Salaam Balak Trust and Butterflies – get Rs. 1,535 per child per year for the lower primary classes and Rs. 2,960 per child per year for the upper primary classes.
Moulika, 13, had to drop out of a school because her shanty was demolished. When the family relocated to Okhla Mandi, she started coming to the MLC.
One day, she wants to walk into a college wearing jeans and shirt and looking every bit like the actresses she sees on television, on posters, everywhere.
“I want to study and own a house, a car. I want to be a doctor to serve my people, too,” she said.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
July 22 Solar Eclipse and Allah, and the faithful - While Muslims avoided Allah's wrath, Hindus prayed to oust the demon that cast its shadow on God
So the century's longest solar eclipse happened near Patna. I was first assigned to go to Taregna but then plans changed. So I was to report from Patna. On Monday, I was at the market when the mosque announced that special eclipse prayers would be held at 6 a.m. and congregation members are urged to come and participate. That was a story there. So I asked them and they said I could visit the Fakirbara Masjid in the morning. I went, and as I waited for them to finish their prayers, eclipse happened and darkness descended. Of course I didn't look at the sun. We went to the Darbhanga Ghat after the mosque prayers and saw women and men crouching in water, praying incessantly. The demons had threatened the God, and mankind could save it through prayers. Exploring the religious side of the eclipse was fun.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on July 23, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
Patna, July 22, 2009
At the 200-year-old Fakirbara Masjid in Dariyapur, Imam Mohd.
Atiqullah raised his pitch to tell the congregation that the solar
eclipse was a manifestation of God’s anger, and a reminder that the
creation will end. So they must pray to pacify him, and ask for his
forgiveness. And the gathering of nearly 60 men prostrated, and bowed
their head Wednesday morning at around 6 a.m. as the eclipse plunged
them into daylight darkness for a few moments. As the solar swept
through the northeast towards Mongolia where it would fade out with
the sunset, superstition trailed it.
“Allah, please forgive us. Remove your fear. Grace us with your love
again,” Atiqullah said, as part of the khutba, the sermon.
Such prayers weren’t unusual on the day the heavens and earth entered
into a rare alignment and even in Taregna, a subdivisional town that
NASA proclaimed as the best place to view total solar eclipse, the
lone mosque performed Kusoof or the eclipse prayer. When the moon came
in between the sun and the earth at 6:21 a.m., throwing a shadow on
the earth, the men rubbed their heads against the cold stone floor of
the mosque in the little village 30 kilometers off Patna. Outside,
thousands of tourists, the scientists, and others donned on the
protective eyeglasses and prepared to watch the century's longest
eclipse in the tiny subdivision. But the little village disappointed.
Cloudy skies obscured the view and thousands were left wanting more for their money.
***
In the distance, a light bulb flickered, and rain drops diluted the
rest of the sermon as the moon cast its shadow on earth, eclipsing the
sun, chewing away at the edges of the golden sphere. Suddenly, the
darkness descended. Such total eclipses are a rare phenomenon because
these require the tilted orbits of the sun, moon and earth to line up
in alignment so the sun can be covered by the moon. On the streets,
children wore cheap plastic sunglasses they sold for Rs. 20 a piece on
eve of the eclipse, and dared to look at the sun, warding off mothers’
concerns that the rays from the eclipse could turn them blind.
“It is like a snake trying to bite into the sun,” one child shouted.
But the faithful, bent in prayer, didn’t bother to look at the
nature’s spectacle outside the mosque doors.
“They have all turned it into a tamasha, a drama. This is a moment of
God’s anger. We should not look at him directly. That’s why Prophet
Mohamed said that during eclipse men must gather in congregations in a
mosque and turn to prayers,” Atiqullah said. “Taregna has turned into
a show. Eclipse is serious.”
At the sprawling ghats on the banks of the Ganges, women crouched in
water with folded hands, looking at the sun directly. They had come to
save their god, who the demons threatened.
So they would remain submerged in the brownish waters of the holy
river, chanting mantras till the catastrophe was over, till the ruler
of the night conceded defeat over the ruler of the day, they said.
Mithila Devi had travelled all the way from Darbhanga to perform the
pujas at the ghats during solar eclipse. She owed it to the gods.
At 5 a.m., when she walked down the steps at the ghats at Darbhanga
House, the site of the famous Kali temple, light filtered through the
clouds. Then there was rain. But all of that didn’t deter her. There
were other women too. They sat down on the steps, took out the diyas,
and prepared for the moment of darkness. In their innocence, they
believed their chanting would save the god from peril.
“We are not scared. Nothing will happen. If our god is in trouble, it
is to us to save him,” Devi, 50, said. “Can you see now that the
eclipse is slowly getting over? It’s because we prayed.”
In the morning, the ghats were full just like the mosques across the
city that announced there would be Kusoof, or the special prayers with
two rakats, cycles of prayer. Each rakat of the eclipse prayer has two
bowings and two prostrations.
During the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad, the day his son Ibrahim
died, there was a solar eclipse. People then said the sun eclipsed
because of the death. But the Prophet said it wasn’t so and that the
sun and moon were two signs of Allah and when they eclipse; the
followers must invoke God and pray till the eclipse is over.
It is also a reminder of the Day of Judgment, Atiqullah said.
On Feb. 6, 1980, he had summoned a similar congregation at a mosque in
the afternoon. It was his first Kusoof.
“At around 3 p.m., there was darkness similar to today. It was total
solar eclipse then,” Atiqullah said. “Bad things are spreading in the
world. God is angry.”
Across from him, Hosamudin nodded. When the Delhi High Court had
legalized homosexuality earlier this month, he was pretty sure the
eclipse was just a way of Allah showing he wasn’t happy with the
court’s decision.
“That’s one of the reasons. There’s others like corruption,” he said.
“I was there in 1980 too and had prayed my share. The eclipse is
Allah’s way of creating gear.”
***
At the ghats, the women and a few men would remain in water until the
dark shadow on the sun cleared away. On top of the steps, priest
performed yajnas during the grahan. Scented smoke, one mixed with ghee
and dried flowers, went up in the air.
Anita Pandey stood on the banks, her feet in water. She had walked to
the ghats in fear. If anything went wrong, she would be born into the
lowest caste in her next birth, she said.
“I threw away last night’s food. They say until the graham is over, we
are impure,” she said. “Only when the Sun God feels better, we can eat
a morsel. Every once in a while the demons scare the God who goes into
hiding. This was the longest in 135 years. But it will be over.”
Pandey had watched the shadows on the sun with her naked eyes.
While Muslims and Hindus did what the religious texts prescribed to
mitigate the effects of the eclipse, churches were quiet. Though the
Bible mentions a time, just before the return of Jesus, when something
that sounds like a much longer solar eclipse can descend upon earth.
Father Dominic Emmanuel, spokesman of the Delhi Catholic Archdiocese,
said since there was no mention of an eclipse in the Bible nor did
Jesus made any reference to it, most Christians didn't consider it as
a bad or a good omen.
"No, it doesn't mean much to us," he said.
But in the mosques across the cities that fell on the path of the
eclipe, the men huddled, listening to the sermons. The Muslim women
prayed inside their homes. And though the television sets broadcast
the whole spectacle, but they found no takers in the faithful.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on July 23, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
Patna, July 22, 2009
At the 200-year-old Fakirbara Masjid in Dariyapur, Imam Mohd.
Atiqullah raised his pitch to tell the congregation that the solar
eclipse was a manifestation of God’s anger, and a reminder that the
creation will end. So they must pray to pacify him, and ask for his
forgiveness. And the gathering of nearly 60 men prostrated, and bowed
their head Wednesday morning at around 6 a.m. as the eclipse plunged
them into daylight darkness for a few moments. As the solar swept
through the northeast towards Mongolia where it would fade out with
the sunset, superstition trailed it.
“Allah, please forgive us. Remove your fear. Grace us with your love
again,” Atiqullah said, as part of the khutba, the sermon.
Such prayers weren’t unusual on the day the heavens and earth entered
into a rare alignment and even in Taregna, a subdivisional town that
NASA proclaimed as the best place to view total solar eclipse, the
lone mosque performed Kusoof or the eclipse prayer. When the moon came
in between the sun and the earth at 6:21 a.m., throwing a shadow on
the earth, the men rubbed their heads against the cold stone floor of
the mosque in the little village 30 kilometers off Patna. Outside,
thousands of tourists, the scientists, and others donned on the
protective eyeglasses and prepared to watch the century's longest
eclipse in the tiny subdivision. But the little village disappointed.
Cloudy skies obscured the view and thousands were left wanting more for their money.
***
In the distance, a light bulb flickered, and rain drops diluted the
rest of the sermon as the moon cast its shadow on earth, eclipsing the
sun, chewing away at the edges of the golden sphere. Suddenly, the
darkness descended. Such total eclipses are a rare phenomenon because
these require the tilted orbits of the sun, moon and earth to line up
in alignment so the sun can be covered by the moon. On the streets,
children wore cheap plastic sunglasses they sold for Rs. 20 a piece on
eve of the eclipse, and dared to look at the sun, warding off mothers’
concerns that the rays from the eclipse could turn them blind.
“It is like a snake trying to bite into the sun,” one child shouted.
But the faithful, bent in prayer, didn’t bother to look at the
nature’s spectacle outside the mosque doors.
“They have all turned it into a tamasha, a drama. This is a moment of
God’s anger. We should not look at him directly. That’s why Prophet
Mohamed said that during eclipse men must gather in congregations in a
mosque and turn to prayers,” Atiqullah said. “Taregna has turned into
a show. Eclipse is serious.”
At the sprawling ghats on the banks of the Ganges, women crouched in
water with folded hands, looking at the sun directly. They had come to
save their god, who the demons threatened.
So they would remain submerged in the brownish waters of the holy
river, chanting mantras till the catastrophe was over, till the ruler
of the night conceded defeat over the ruler of the day, they said.
Mithila Devi had travelled all the way from Darbhanga to perform the
pujas at the ghats during solar eclipse. She owed it to the gods.
At 5 a.m., when she walked down the steps at the ghats at Darbhanga
House, the site of the famous Kali temple, light filtered through the
clouds. Then there was rain. But all of that didn’t deter her. There
were other women too. They sat down on the steps, took out the diyas,
and prepared for the moment of darkness. In their innocence, they
believed their chanting would save the god from peril.
“We are not scared. Nothing will happen. If our god is in trouble, it
is to us to save him,” Devi, 50, said. “Can you see now that the
eclipse is slowly getting over? It’s because we prayed.”
In the morning, the ghats were full just like the mosques across the
city that announced there would be Kusoof, or the special prayers with
two rakats, cycles of prayer. Each rakat of the eclipse prayer has two
bowings and two prostrations.
During the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad, the day his son Ibrahim
died, there was a solar eclipse. People then said the sun eclipsed
because of the death. But the Prophet said it wasn’t so and that the
sun and moon were two signs of Allah and when they eclipse; the
followers must invoke God and pray till the eclipse is over.
It is also a reminder of the Day of Judgment, Atiqullah said.
On Feb. 6, 1980, he had summoned a similar congregation at a mosque in
the afternoon. It was his first Kusoof.
“At around 3 p.m., there was darkness similar to today. It was total
solar eclipse then,” Atiqullah said. “Bad things are spreading in the
world. God is angry.”
Across from him, Hosamudin nodded. When the Delhi High Court had
legalized homosexuality earlier this month, he was pretty sure the
eclipse was just a way of Allah showing he wasn’t happy with the
court’s decision.
“That’s one of the reasons. There’s others like corruption,” he said.
“I was there in 1980 too and had prayed my share. The eclipse is
Allah’s way of creating gear.”
***
At the ghats, the women and a few men would remain in water until the
dark shadow on the sun cleared away. On top of the steps, priest
performed yajnas during the grahan. Scented smoke, one mixed with ghee
and dried flowers, went up in the air.
Anita Pandey stood on the banks, her feet in water. She had walked to
the ghats in fear. If anything went wrong, she would be born into the
lowest caste in her next birth, she said.
“I threw away last night’s food. They say until the graham is over, we
are impure,” she said. “Only when the Sun God feels better, we can eat
a morsel. Every once in a while the demons scare the God who goes into
hiding. This was the longest in 135 years. But it will be over.”
Pandey had watched the shadows on the sun with her naked eyes.
While Muslims and Hindus did what the religious texts prescribed to
mitigate the effects of the eclipse, churches were quiet. Though the
Bible mentions a time, just before the return of Jesus, when something
that sounds like a much longer solar eclipse can descend upon earth.
Father Dominic Emmanuel, spokesman of the Delhi Catholic Archdiocese,
said since there was no mention of an eclipse in the Bible nor did
Jesus made any reference to it, most Christians didn't consider it as
a bad or a good omen.
"No, it doesn't mean much to us," he said.
But in the mosques across the cities that fell on the path of the
eclipe, the men huddled, listening to the sermons. The Muslim women
prayed inside their homes. And though the television sets broadcast
the whole spectacle, but they found no takers in the faithful.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
From Urdu medium and going to college
It was difficult finding Rushi Naaz's house in the cramped gullies of Jafrabad. But we made it somehow. Each time I went to their place, there would be happy chatter, and they'd show me new clothes. Rushi was going to college and it was a proud moment for the family. It was an act of courage on part of Nafeesa Begum, the mother, to defy conventions and send Rushi to college. With eight members in the family and a meagre income, it was an act that required guts. But Nafeesa is clear in her head. She couldn't go to college and was trapped in a marriage she didn't like. But she had no option.
It was emotional at times like when Nafeesa told me her story. But it was also fun looking at their clothes, and capturing their excitement.
An edited verison of the article appeared in the Indian Express on July 12, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 9, 2009
The rattle of the sewing machine on which her mother Nafeesa Begum is stitching clothes for her, is broken only by the quiet, hushed tones in which Rushi Naaz, talks about her hopes, and her nervousness of attending college far from the familiar surroundings.
The 17-year-old, who passed out of an Urdu medium school in Jafrabad and scored 76 percent, has enrolled into Zakir Hussain College under Delhi University where she will study political science. And that’s a big leap for the family.
“I am happy I am going to study but I feel lost. Everything is so different there,” Rushi said. “All is new. I don’t know if I will fit in. But I will give it all I have.”
So dreams are shaping, stretching beyond the mass of narrow streets, lackluster homes huddled together in the narrow gullies of the migrant neighborhood, and past the river, into the city.
Rushi was born in the Walled City, and then moved to the slum colonies in North East Delhi, in a 25 square yard house you reached after crisscrossing the numerous narrow streets off the main road, and in some regards is prey to the penetrating undercurrents of conformity and self-doubt. Thin and frail, she leaned against the lamppost, sweat running down her face, looking dejected after she didn’t make the cut for Ramjas College in the first list. Rooma Naaz, her sister, who also looked uncomfortable in her black synthetic churidar, tugged at her sleeves and told her she needn’t lose heart. With that kind of percentage, you’d get in anywhere, she said to her sister.
“This is just the start. You will be fine,” Rooma said.
For months now, the mother and daughters have been preparing for Rushi’s college. A pair of sandals with fake Chanel logo on them is neatly packed along with dozens of kurtas and salwars in a rusty steel box. It’s as if there’s a wedding and a trousseau is being put together.
But on the first day of college on July 16, Rushi will don a pair of jeans. Perhaps that would be an act of some daring in a locality that doesn’t take kindly to such acts but as her mother who defied traditions by stepping out of the house, and working to provide for the family, Rushi too will follow in the footsteps. A few days ago, she was little reluctant. But it is in defiance that her future lies, Rushi said.
“I used to care. But we have to get out and we have to catch up with the rest of the world,” she said.
***
Coming from an Urdu medium school, Rushi grappled with the typical problems – lack of textbooks, teachers and infrastructure. She had to translate notes from Hindi to Urdu to prepare for her Class 12 examinations. Books weren’t available. But teachers were forthcoming and helped, and Rooma, who studied from Hindi medium, also sat down with her sister helping her with words. She didn’t want to become yet another stereotype, and so she worked hard, Rushi said.
“They say that Urdu medium girls can’t make it. We are looked down upon,” she said. “I want to show we are no less. So what if we had problems.”
After years of poor performance, Urdu medium schools in the state have picked up, scoring an overall pass percentage of 88 percent in the CBSE Class XII board examinations despite all the odds – lack of trained teachers, textbooks and infrastructure. A few years ago, the pass percentage in Class X and XII board examinations fluctuated between 30 to 40 percent. But schools have fared better recently though school officials say it is also because there is no science or commerce stream in Class 12 for the girls.
"If they had maths and science, the results would have been bad. We don't have trained teachers in maths and science. Even in Class X, we have to teach those in English," Shabana Nazir, principal of Jama Masjid No. 2 school said.
The Zeenat Mahal Government Sarvodaya Girls Senior Secondary School is better known in the parts as the “tent-wallah” school because the school bursting at its seams with too many students and ramshackle infrastructure held classes in a tent. The roofs still leak and there aren't enough classrooms to fit in the 3,500 odd students in the school.
Jafrabad, where most settlers are poor migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, is a predominantly Muslim area where most girls give up on further studies after high school. According to a school official, who did not wish to be named, only about one percent of the girls attend college.
But Razia Begum, the principal of the school, can see a shift in the mindsets. As a community member, she has tried hard to convince parents that girls’ education should be a priority.
“Most of these girls are first-generation learners. If some parents are sending their girls to college, it is a big achievement. We are a community that has lagged behind. We are poor,” she said. “Here, we mostly have unskilled workers who are not exposed. Situation is changing but it is a slow process and need-based education should be imparted in schools to uplift the community's social and economic conditions."
Another school official said that the government wasn’t doing enough. There are no colleges nearby. Many parents, because of deep-rooted mindsets, are not willing to send their daughters to colleges that are far.
According to the Rajinder Sachar Committee, appointed by the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, that prepared a report on the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community of India, in the field of literacy, the rate among Muslims is below than the national average. Around 25 per cent of Muslim children in the 6-14 year age group have either never attended school or have dropped out, which also explains why so few women go on to college.
"They need vocational training and more girls' schools here. There should be more colleges here," the school official said.
Rubeena, a young teacher at the school and a Jafrabad resident, said she wasn't surprised. In 2003, when she passed out of the Zeenat Mahal school, she was among a handful of girls who went on to college.
"It happens. It is the mindset here. They fear if the girl is more educated then it will be difficult to find a match for her," she said. "I could study because my parents let me. But that's not the case with everyone."
***
Nafeesa had sold her earrings to put her first-born in school. Her husband no longer had his motor mechanic job. The garage he worked at closed down. Money was tight, but for Nafisa education was a priority. Married off at a young age, Nafisa’s own ambitions had been sidestepped. She recalled writing short stories in school at an Urdu medium school in old Delhi.
“My heart hurt easily. I was emotional and all that came out in my writing,” she said. “I thought I could become a writer. But a woman’s life is attached to a man’s life. If he is weak, then the woman breaks. I won’t let my daughters break. I will give them my life.”
Bent on the sewing machine, as the morning light flooded the small room, Nafeesa stitched her own dreams on the fabric of her daughter’s future. When she saw the slightly wrinkled hands of her husband on her wedding day 20 years ago, she hadn’t dared to look up. Her husband was 15 years elder to her. But she accepted her fate, working through the night, embroidering clothes, and saving money. When Rooma was born, and then a year later, Rushi followed, Nafisa said she didn’t want them to be crippled like her.
As she wipes the tears off her cheeks, Nafeesa draws her face close to the mirror for a minute, scanning the wrinkles, and the puffy eyes. She might have been summing up her life. She had spent it crouched in a corner, needle in hand, embroidering flowers. Or at the markets, bargaining for cheap deals.
“I still cry in the nights. My life is done. I didn’t look like this. I used to be beautiful once,” she said. “I just became another stereotype.”
In the papers, Nafeesa had read about the Sachar Committee report and wondered if things would improve. She had enrolled her daughters into a English medium school – Oracle Public School – in Jafrabad but she couldn’t afford to teach all four daughters in the elite English medium school. So the girls switched to the Zeenat Mahal School in Jafrabad.
But Nafeesa isn’t the kind to blame her community for the mindsets that got her life dead-ended. True that the Muslims were a community that lagged behind socially and economically. But the fault also lied in her own complicity, she said.
***
In the days leading up to college, while she waited for the results, Rushi enrolled in a private institute to learn English. It didn’t cost much. A mere Rs. 300. She stammered, and struggled through the first few days trying to introduce herself in the language. But cramming words didn’t help much. So, she quit after a month. In the evenings, leaning against the machine, she reads through “A Course in General English” by SJB Mathur in preparation for college.
Barring one or two occasions, where she ventured out of the ghetto in Jafrabad, Rushi has never been in the city. On the day she tagged along with her elder sister, dolled up in a garish, embroidered turquoise kurta, to look at the cut-off results for Delhi University, her face dropped after she saw the girls dressed in designer clothing, carrying branded bags, and walking in their stilettos. And she looked at her cheap sandals her mother got from Gandhinagar, and said she felt out of place.
Then she came back and told her mother the clothes she was making for her - the gaudy, embroidered kurtas – weren’t what they wore at the campus. She wanted more jeans. So Nafeesa went to Gandhinagar again and brought jeans and shirts. Her daughter should look splendid when she enters the college gates because she is a product of her mother’s dreams. She should shine, Nafisa said.
“I have kept our tradition,” Nafeesa said. “I don’t want a bad name, I have told them if they get boyfriends, I will stop their studies. But I know they won’t. They have seen me struggle.”
At Zakir Hussain College, where she made it in the first list, Rushi has chosen English as her medium of instruction. No doubt she will hit the roadblocks ever so often, and words will make her dizzy, but Rushi is determined to make it work.
“I want to become a lawyer. I want to do something for my mother,” she said. “I have problems with the language but I am working hard. Next month when we shift to a different house near the main road, I will join an English coaching institute.”
Rooma, the eldest daughter of the family, is pursuing her Bachelor’s through a distant learning program. The first in her family to study beyond Class 12, Rooma paved the way for her sister.
While the two sisters chat in excited tones about the latest fashion, and tell their mother to introduce an extra frill on the kurta, Annie, the youngest daughter sits next to her mother. In a few years, she too will be the center of attention, and it will be her turn to go to college.
And for Nafeesa, it will yet another victory.
It was emotional at times like when Nafeesa told me her story. But it was also fun looking at their clothes, and capturing their excitement.
An edited verison of the article appeared in the Indian Express on July 12, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 9, 2009
The rattle of the sewing machine on which her mother Nafeesa Begum is stitching clothes for her, is broken only by the quiet, hushed tones in which Rushi Naaz, talks about her hopes, and her nervousness of attending college far from the familiar surroundings.
The 17-year-old, who passed out of an Urdu medium school in Jafrabad and scored 76 percent, has enrolled into Zakir Hussain College under Delhi University where she will study political science. And that’s a big leap for the family.
“I am happy I am going to study but I feel lost. Everything is so different there,” Rushi said. “All is new. I don’t know if I will fit in. But I will give it all I have.”
So dreams are shaping, stretching beyond the mass of narrow streets, lackluster homes huddled together in the narrow gullies of the migrant neighborhood, and past the river, into the city.
Rushi was born in the Walled City, and then moved to the slum colonies in North East Delhi, in a 25 square yard house you reached after crisscrossing the numerous narrow streets off the main road, and in some regards is prey to the penetrating undercurrents of conformity and self-doubt. Thin and frail, she leaned against the lamppost, sweat running down her face, looking dejected after she didn’t make the cut for Ramjas College in the first list. Rooma Naaz, her sister, who also looked uncomfortable in her black synthetic churidar, tugged at her sleeves and told her she needn’t lose heart. With that kind of percentage, you’d get in anywhere, she said to her sister.
“This is just the start. You will be fine,” Rooma said.
For months now, the mother and daughters have been preparing for Rushi’s college. A pair of sandals with fake Chanel logo on them is neatly packed along with dozens of kurtas and salwars in a rusty steel box. It’s as if there’s a wedding and a trousseau is being put together.
But on the first day of college on July 16, Rushi will don a pair of jeans. Perhaps that would be an act of some daring in a locality that doesn’t take kindly to such acts but as her mother who defied traditions by stepping out of the house, and working to provide for the family, Rushi too will follow in the footsteps. A few days ago, she was little reluctant. But it is in defiance that her future lies, Rushi said.
“I used to care. But we have to get out and we have to catch up with the rest of the world,” she said.
***
Coming from an Urdu medium school, Rushi grappled with the typical problems – lack of textbooks, teachers and infrastructure. She had to translate notes from Hindi to Urdu to prepare for her Class 12 examinations. Books weren’t available. But teachers were forthcoming and helped, and Rooma, who studied from Hindi medium, also sat down with her sister helping her with words. She didn’t want to become yet another stereotype, and so she worked hard, Rushi said.
“They say that Urdu medium girls can’t make it. We are looked down upon,” she said. “I want to show we are no less. So what if we had problems.”
After years of poor performance, Urdu medium schools in the state have picked up, scoring an overall pass percentage of 88 percent in the CBSE Class XII board examinations despite all the odds – lack of trained teachers, textbooks and infrastructure. A few years ago, the pass percentage in Class X and XII board examinations fluctuated between 30 to 40 percent. But schools have fared better recently though school officials say it is also because there is no science or commerce stream in Class 12 for the girls.
"If they had maths and science, the results would have been bad. We don't have trained teachers in maths and science. Even in Class X, we have to teach those in English," Shabana Nazir, principal of Jama Masjid No. 2 school said.
The Zeenat Mahal Government Sarvodaya Girls Senior Secondary School is better known in the parts as the “tent-wallah” school because the school bursting at its seams with too many students and ramshackle infrastructure held classes in a tent. The roofs still leak and there aren't enough classrooms to fit in the 3,500 odd students in the school.
Jafrabad, where most settlers are poor migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, is a predominantly Muslim area where most girls give up on further studies after high school. According to a school official, who did not wish to be named, only about one percent of the girls attend college.
But Razia Begum, the principal of the school, can see a shift in the mindsets. As a community member, she has tried hard to convince parents that girls’ education should be a priority.
“Most of these girls are first-generation learners. If some parents are sending their girls to college, it is a big achievement. We are a community that has lagged behind. We are poor,” she said. “Here, we mostly have unskilled workers who are not exposed. Situation is changing but it is a slow process and need-based education should be imparted in schools to uplift the community's social and economic conditions."
Another school official said that the government wasn’t doing enough. There are no colleges nearby. Many parents, because of deep-rooted mindsets, are not willing to send their daughters to colleges that are far.
According to the Rajinder Sachar Committee, appointed by the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, that prepared a report on the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community of India, in the field of literacy, the rate among Muslims is below than the national average. Around 25 per cent of Muslim children in the 6-14 year age group have either never attended school or have dropped out, which also explains why so few women go on to college.
"They need vocational training and more girls' schools here. There should be more colleges here," the school official said.
Rubeena, a young teacher at the school and a Jafrabad resident, said she wasn't surprised. In 2003, when she passed out of the Zeenat Mahal school, she was among a handful of girls who went on to college.
"It happens. It is the mindset here. They fear if the girl is more educated then it will be difficult to find a match for her," she said. "I could study because my parents let me. But that's not the case with everyone."
***
Nafeesa had sold her earrings to put her first-born in school. Her husband no longer had his motor mechanic job. The garage he worked at closed down. Money was tight, but for Nafisa education was a priority. Married off at a young age, Nafisa’s own ambitions had been sidestepped. She recalled writing short stories in school at an Urdu medium school in old Delhi.
“My heart hurt easily. I was emotional and all that came out in my writing,” she said. “I thought I could become a writer. But a woman’s life is attached to a man’s life. If he is weak, then the woman breaks. I won’t let my daughters break. I will give them my life.”
Bent on the sewing machine, as the morning light flooded the small room, Nafeesa stitched her own dreams on the fabric of her daughter’s future. When she saw the slightly wrinkled hands of her husband on her wedding day 20 years ago, she hadn’t dared to look up. Her husband was 15 years elder to her. But she accepted her fate, working through the night, embroidering clothes, and saving money. When Rooma was born, and then a year later, Rushi followed, Nafisa said she didn’t want them to be crippled like her.
As she wipes the tears off her cheeks, Nafeesa draws her face close to the mirror for a minute, scanning the wrinkles, and the puffy eyes. She might have been summing up her life. She had spent it crouched in a corner, needle in hand, embroidering flowers. Or at the markets, bargaining for cheap deals.
“I still cry in the nights. My life is done. I didn’t look like this. I used to be beautiful once,” she said. “I just became another stereotype.”
In the papers, Nafeesa had read about the Sachar Committee report and wondered if things would improve. She had enrolled her daughters into a English medium school – Oracle Public School – in Jafrabad but she couldn’t afford to teach all four daughters in the elite English medium school. So the girls switched to the Zeenat Mahal School in Jafrabad.
But Nafeesa isn’t the kind to blame her community for the mindsets that got her life dead-ended. True that the Muslims were a community that lagged behind socially and economically. But the fault also lied in her own complicity, she said.
***
In the days leading up to college, while she waited for the results, Rushi enrolled in a private institute to learn English. It didn’t cost much. A mere Rs. 300. She stammered, and struggled through the first few days trying to introduce herself in the language. But cramming words didn’t help much. So, she quit after a month. In the evenings, leaning against the machine, she reads through “A Course in General English” by SJB Mathur in preparation for college.
Barring one or two occasions, where she ventured out of the ghetto in Jafrabad, Rushi has never been in the city. On the day she tagged along with her elder sister, dolled up in a garish, embroidered turquoise kurta, to look at the cut-off results for Delhi University, her face dropped after she saw the girls dressed in designer clothing, carrying branded bags, and walking in their stilettos. And she looked at her cheap sandals her mother got from Gandhinagar, and said she felt out of place.
Then she came back and told her mother the clothes she was making for her - the gaudy, embroidered kurtas – weren’t what they wore at the campus. She wanted more jeans. So Nafeesa went to Gandhinagar again and brought jeans and shirts. Her daughter should look splendid when she enters the college gates because she is a product of her mother’s dreams. She should shine, Nafisa said.
“I have kept our tradition,” Nafeesa said. “I don’t want a bad name, I have told them if they get boyfriends, I will stop their studies. But I know they won’t. They have seen me struggle.”
At Zakir Hussain College, where she made it in the first list, Rushi has chosen English as her medium of instruction. No doubt she will hit the roadblocks ever so often, and words will make her dizzy, but Rushi is determined to make it work.
“I want to become a lawyer. I want to do something for my mother,” she said. “I have problems with the language but I am working hard. Next month when we shift to a different house near the main road, I will join an English coaching institute.”
Rooma, the eldest daughter of the family, is pursuing her Bachelor’s through a distant learning program. The first in her family to study beyond Class 12, Rooma paved the way for her sister.
While the two sisters chat in excited tones about the latest fashion, and tell their mother to introduce an extra frill on the kurta, Annie, the youngest daughter sits next to her mother. In a few years, she too will be the center of attention, and it will be her turn to go to college.
And for Nafeesa, it will yet another victory.
Tracking lives - dreams cut short
I have known Daniya Alvi for months now. I remember the first time I went to her place clutching a piece of paper where I had scribbled her address in Kalamahal that her teachers at the Jama Masjid No. 2 school gave me. She came downstairs to see who had come looking for her. She had been preparing for her Class 12 board examinations and I thought she'd get anywhere. She had been struggling to fund her studies then. And then I met her a second time when the results came. And her mother told me she was planning to get Daniya married. And then I kept going to their little quarter, spending time with the family, noting down the frustration in Daniya's life, and convincing them this wasn't the best decision. On the last day of our visit, when we were sitting in her grandmother's room, Asifa Alvi said in a flat tone that Daniya woldn't be studying further, that it wasn't the tradition in their family for girls to go for higher studies because eventually they had to look after their families.
And Daniya's face dropped. My photo editor kept the camera aside. The revelation was too much for me, too. I tried reasoning, keeping aside the principles of journalism that I had crammed at the university that you shouldn't get involved, and that you are an observer and you need to record things as they happened.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on July 12, 2009.
I hope Daniya can still make it. I hope she can study.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 9, 2009
There she stands, on the dark stairs, perched between the two dreams. Seventeen-year-old Daniya Alvi could choose to run down the broken steps, break free, and be a rebel. If she could have spoken out, brighter paths would have opened.
Alvi passed the Class XII examinations from the Jama masjid Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya No. 2, an Urdu medium school, in the Walled City, scoring 68 percent. She had hoped to go to college, and eventually become a teacher.
But she turned back, her small silhouette pronounced in the evening light that seeped in through the narrow opening, the one that took her home, to the confines of the one-room tenement she shared with her family, where she played the obedient daughter, the one who feigned happiness, and showed off her new clothes that are part of her trousseau with a hesitant smile, her hazel brown eyes restless. Here, she was living her family’s dreams.
But if you looked close enough, these were the eyes that conveyed a certain tenacity, even as they projected a sadness that perhaps captured her subdued dreams. She likes to think she’d still be able to study, that marriage isn’t an impediment, and that it is a necessary evil. She never mentions marriage, as if the plans they made about her and discuss so enthusiastically, doesn’t really involve her, or include her.
“What will be, will be. It’s okay. Maybe things will change and they will let me go to college,” she said.
In the stack of clothes, she pulls out from the almirah, there’s a blue sequinned kurta, a white lehenga, and a bright green silk kameez. Her father is stitching these for the daughter. When the results had come and he thougth Daniya would go to college, he had stitched a white kameez for her to wear to college. The purpose had changed now.
Alvi, who likes rock climbing and was a kabbadi champion at school, and participates in street theatre and mushairas, wrote her first poem on her mother Ruby Anwar, praising her for the hope she gave her daughters.
“She had to get married one day. The offer came and we said yes. I have faith in the boy,” Ruby said.
If Alvi had deviated from the destiny her family chose for her, she would be denounced, and tagged as the daughter who betrayed the family’s will, her grandmother’s wish that she be married off at an early age. Offers were pouring in, and life looked promising enough. Alvi didn’t protest. Not even a word. With her large brown, and translucent eyes, she just looked at her grandmother Asifa Alvi when she said that it wasn’t the family tradition for women to go for higher studies. Daniya had done her bit. It was now time for real responsibilities, Asifa said.
“Girls in our family don’t study beyond Class XII. She has learned her letters. The fate of a woman is to attend to her house. What is the point of collecting degrees when at the end, you have to cook and look after your children,” the 75-year-old grandmother said.
Alvi’s father Anwar Nafees just looked away. If he could, he would have sent her to college. But that afternoon, when the heat was oppressive, almost cruel, and there was stillness in the air, as he sat at the corner of the bed, his daughter by his side, he was helpless. His eldest daughter Arisha too had been married off after she passed her Class XII examinations.
“We obey our mother. My own limitations are such that I can’t do what I want,” he said.
The matriarch who lives downstairs, mostly sprawled on the bed on the side of the hall, draped in her white dupatta, not a strand of hair to be seen, is the one in command, and who decreed that the granddaughter be married to a young man, known to the family, and working as a travel agent. This was a seemingly good prospect for the family that fell on bad times after Alvi’s father lost his job, and then after a heart surgery had to give up on a food stall he ran near the family’s modest quarters in Daryaganj.
Now, the father, a poet at heart who can recite Urdu poetry penned down by the known and revered poets of the older times, as well as those written by his own uncles, while he stitches more new clothes for his daughter – a green satin churidar with sequins, a blue brocade kurta with frills, and a white salwar with pleats. After his ailment limited his options at earning a livelihood, he switched to tailoring and spends most of afternoons bent over a sewing machine, the fan whirring, and the television blaring news. He had wanted Alvi to become a news anchor. She is his chosen one, she is the one who completes the couplets as he recites them, and she is the one with a sweet voice, and an impeccable diction. Alvi is the one who can pronounce the Urdu words effortlessly, as if they came pouring out from her soul. And she is the one who has memorized all her father’s favorite poems.
Alvi hasn’t seen the prospective groom’s photographs. In front of her parents, under her mother’s stare, she doesn’t say much. Alvi, with her dark brown eyes, and long-flowing hair, isn’t curious either. It doesn’t become her to ask for it. That would be against the family traditions. When life throws surprises at you, you take it as you go, full of hope, and prayers.
“Inshallah, they will let me study,” she says.
They have told her the boy’s family would let her continue her studies. And the promise lingers in her imagination.
When they made the plans for her, they didn’t accommodate her own dreams. Alvi had battled the odds to pass the examinations through the results disappointed her. She had wanted more. But then, the circumstances had been such. Two of her family members died while the examinations were on and the family had too many visitors and too many obligations. She stayed up late in the nights, cramming from textbooks, translating notes from Hindi to Urdu, in the little kitchenette while the family slept in the adjoining room. Until the day her examinations began, she was taking tuitions. The Rs. 1,500 she brought home monthly was a relief. Because she was the eldest, and she was supplementing the family’s modest income, she had wanted to continue in the role. Her two siblings are still in school.
Alvi filled up the forms for admissions to the B. El. Ed. course in colleges. Her teachers had told her it was a safe bet and she would have no difficulty finding jobs after the course. A teaching job, with limited work hours, was something her family would let her take up, too.
These were human aspirations. College was the hope. She didn’t fill the admissions forms at Delhi University. At Jamia Millia Islamia, she didn’t get through.
“My name wasn’t there,” she said. “Other colleges I couldn’t check.”
Her mother said she wasn’t able to see the cut off lists while Alvi was out of town with her aunt. It just slipped off her mind.
And it didn’t matter now, she said.
Meanwhile Alvi stands between the dreams of two lives, awaiting the day these will unfold. She wasn’t happy then, while she sat next to her grandmother, listening to her as she charted her future. But she thought she might be someday. Who could tell?
"Destiny can surprise," she said. "It always does."
And Daniya's face dropped. My photo editor kept the camera aside. The revelation was too much for me, too. I tried reasoning, keeping aside the principles of journalism that I had crammed at the university that you shouldn't get involved, and that you are an observer and you need to record things as they happened.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on July 12, 2009.
I hope Daniya can still make it. I hope she can study.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 9, 2009
There she stands, on the dark stairs, perched between the two dreams. Seventeen-year-old Daniya Alvi could choose to run down the broken steps, break free, and be a rebel. If she could have spoken out, brighter paths would have opened.
Alvi passed the Class XII examinations from the Jama masjid Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya No. 2, an Urdu medium school, in the Walled City, scoring 68 percent. She had hoped to go to college, and eventually become a teacher.
But she turned back, her small silhouette pronounced in the evening light that seeped in through the narrow opening, the one that took her home, to the confines of the one-room tenement she shared with her family, where she played the obedient daughter, the one who feigned happiness, and showed off her new clothes that are part of her trousseau with a hesitant smile, her hazel brown eyes restless. Here, she was living her family’s dreams.
But if you looked close enough, these were the eyes that conveyed a certain tenacity, even as they projected a sadness that perhaps captured her subdued dreams. She likes to think she’d still be able to study, that marriage isn’t an impediment, and that it is a necessary evil. She never mentions marriage, as if the plans they made about her and discuss so enthusiastically, doesn’t really involve her, or include her.
“What will be, will be. It’s okay. Maybe things will change and they will let me go to college,” she said.
In the stack of clothes, she pulls out from the almirah, there’s a blue sequinned kurta, a white lehenga, and a bright green silk kameez. Her father is stitching these for the daughter. When the results had come and he thougth Daniya would go to college, he had stitched a white kameez for her to wear to college. The purpose had changed now.
Alvi, who likes rock climbing and was a kabbadi champion at school, and participates in street theatre and mushairas, wrote her first poem on her mother Ruby Anwar, praising her for the hope she gave her daughters.
“She had to get married one day. The offer came and we said yes. I have faith in the boy,” Ruby said.
If Alvi had deviated from the destiny her family chose for her, she would be denounced, and tagged as the daughter who betrayed the family’s will, her grandmother’s wish that she be married off at an early age. Offers were pouring in, and life looked promising enough. Alvi didn’t protest. Not even a word. With her large brown, and translucent eyes, she just looked at her grandmother Asifa Alvi when she said that it wasn’t the family tradition for women to go for higher studies. Daniya had done her bit. It was now time for real responsibilities, Asifa said.
“Girls in our family don’t study beyond Class XII. She has learned her letters. The fate of a woman is to attend to her house. What is the point of collecting degrees when at the end, you have to cook and look after your children,” the 75-year-old grandmother said.
Alvi’s father Anwar Nafees just looked away. If he could, he would have sent her to college. But that afternoon, when the heat was oppressive, almost cruel, and there was stillness in the air, as he sat at the corner of the bed, his daughter by his side, he was helpless. His eldest daughter Arisha too had been married off after she passed her Class XII examinations.
“We obey our mother. My own limitations are such that I can’t do what I want,” he said.
The matriarch who lives downstairs, mostly sprawled on the bed on the side of the hall, draped in her white dupatta, not a strand of hair to be seen, is the one in command, and who decreed that the granddaughter be married to a young man, known to the family, and working as a travel agent. This was a seemingly good prospect for the family that fell on bad times after Alvi’s father lost his job, and then after a heart surgery had to give up on a food stall he ran near the family’s modest quarters in Daryaganj.
Now, the father, a poet at heart who can recite Urdu poetry penned down by the known and revered poets of the older times, as well as those written by his own uncles, while he stitches more new clothes for his daughter – a green satin churidar with sequins, a blue brocade kurta with frills, and a white salwar with pleats. After his ailment limited his options at earning a livelihood, he switched to tailoring and spends most of afternoons bent over a sewing machine, the fan whirring, and the television blaring news. He had wanted Alvi to become a news anchor. She is his chosen one, she is the one who completes the couplets as he recites them, and she is the one with a sweet voice, and an impeccable diction. Alvi is the one who can pronounce the Urdu words effortlessly, as if they came pouring out from her soul. And she is the one who has memorized all her father’s favorite poems.
Alvi hasn’t seen the prospective groom’s photographs. In front of her parents, under her mother’s stare, she doesn’t say much. Alvi, with her dark brown eyes, and long-flowing hair, isn’t curious either. It doesn’t become her to ask for it. That would be against the family traditions. When life throws surprises at you, you take it as you go, full of hope, and prayers.
“Inshallah, they will let me study,” she says.
They have told her the boy’s family would let her continue her studies. And the promise lingers in her imagination.
When they made the plans for her, they didn’t accommodate her own dreams. Alvi had battled the odds to pass the examinations through the results disappointed her. She had wanted more. But then, the circumstances had been such. Two of her family members died while the examinations were on and the family had too many visitors and too many obligations. She stayed up late in the nights, cramming from textbooks, translating notes from Hindi to Urdu, in the little kitchenette while the family slept in the adjoining room. Until the day her examinations began, she was taking tuitions. The Rs. 1,500 she brought home monthly was a relief. Because she was the eldest, and she was supplementing the family’s modest income, she had wanted to continue in the role. Her two siblings are still in school.
Alvi filled up the forms for admissions to the B. El. Ed. course in colleges. Her teachers had told her it was a safe bet and she would have no difficulty finding jobs after the course. A teaching job, with limited work hours, was something her family would let her take up, too.
These were human aspirations. College was the hope. She didn’t fill the admissions forms at Delhi University. At Jamia Millia Islamia, she didn’t get through.
“My name wasn’t there,” she said. “Other colleges I couldn’t check.”
Her mother said she wasn’t able to see the cut off lists while Alvi was out of town with her aunt. It just slipped off her mind.
And it didn’t matter now, she said.
Meanwhile Alvi stands between the dreams of two lives, awaiting the day these will unfold. She wasn’t happy then, while she sat next to her grandmother, listening to her as she charted her future. But she thought she might be someday. Who could tell?
"Destiny can surprise," she said. "It always does."
Sunday, July 05, 2009
The man behind Mayawati's statues
I stumbled upon this man while researching for my article and called him. He wouldn't talk much but then he opened up after a while.
An edited verison appeared in the Indian Express on July 5, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 3, 2009
When he chips away at the marble or casts the molten bronze in a mould to make the many Dalit leaders’ statues that are slowly becoming part of Lucknow’s identity, Shraavan Parajapati has to be precise. He can’t deviate from the drawings handed over to him by the Chief Minister Mayawati. There’s no scope for liberties, and no room for an artist’s own vision.
That is frustrating at times. He isn’t a babu used to the orders. And at these moments, the artist in him takes over.
“It is odd at times. It hurts when I can’t introduce my creativity there,” he said. “But then, what can you do?”
Prajapati comes from a family of sculptors, his own claim to fame being a number of bronze statues he made for the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, including the one that was pulled down by the American troops in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. He had even met the slain leader in 1997, he said.
So when people say that statues of living leaders is an unknown phenomena, he simply dismisses those.
“In foreign countries, they do that. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also got her statue made. Saddam Hussein too,” he said. “The leaders like to be venerated. As long as you say yes to all they say, you are fine.”
Another grievance he has is the tight deadlines. If it weren’t for the rushed orders, he could have given the European statues that are now housed in the Lucknow Museum at the zoo a tough competition.
“Only if we had more time, we could have done the intricate work these statues have,” he said.
But Prajapati isn’t complaining. He has delivered 28 statues for the new projects, including nine of Mayawati herself. When Mayawati rode to power in 2007, clinching the majority of seats in the country’s most populous state, she engaged in an unchecked fantasy of constructing gargantuan new projects made of the pink dholpur stone, and marble statues, almost out of a vengeance. Before her arrival on the scene, BR Ambedkar’s statues were generally confined to Dalit bastis where they were made of the cheap clay and were painted in garish colors. The sophistication and splendor of marble was lacking. Most of the orders for these statues went to Prajapati, who said that he carves the statues himself, allocating two months on each of them on an average.
Now, Prajapati is on top of the list of the sculptors in the culture department of the Uttar Pradesh government bagging most of the orders for statues, one of which cost roughly Rs. 4.5 lakhs. The 18-feet high statues cost double the amount, he said.
When Mayawati wanted a 12-feet bronze statue of Ambedkar in 12 days, he was the one to take up the challenge and delivered on time. That’s why he has been the chosen one for the projects, he said.
In fact, he had already begun work on the 165-feet tall bronze statue of Ambedkar, an ambitious project that would have been taller than the Statue of Liberty and was expected to cost more than Rs. 200 crores. But when the Supreme Court orders came, the project was stalled.
“The elephants are the reason. There were too many of them and that caused the uproar. Otherwise the work would have gone on,” he said. “Haathi ne kaam bigad diya.”
In the work commissioned to him the BSP Supremo, he allegedly needs to make her statue look thin and also without double chin.
But a strange paradox is that Saddam Hussein's statue, one of the world's most famous for the fate that it met, is also Prajapati's most famous work. The artist claims he made six statues for Hussein and the one that became famous for its destruction was commissioned to him in 1995. But these are his claims only. Another sculptor who has laid the same claims is a Baghdad-based professor. Khalid Ezzat too has no paperwork to prove his claims, according to reports.
Also, since SP leader Mulayam Singh has indicated he would bulldoze some of the statues, this one too might get famous not for its artistic value but for the fate it meets.
An edited verison appeared in the Indian Express on July 5, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 3, 2009
When he chips away at the marble or casts the molten bronze in a mould to make the many Dalit leaders’ statues that are slowly becoming part of Lucknow’s identity, Shraavan Parajapati has to be precise. He can’t deviate from the drawings handed over to him by the Chief Minister Mayawati. There’s no scope for liberties, and no room for an artist’s own vision.
That is frustrating at times. He isn’t a babu used to the orders. And at these moments, the artist in him takes over.
“It is odd at times. It hurts when I can’t introduce my creativity there,” he said. “But then, what can you do?”
Prajapati comes from a family of sculptors, his own claim to fame being a number of bronze statues he made for the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, including the one that was pulled down by the American troops in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. He had even met the slain leader in 1997, he said.
So when people say that statues of living leaders is an unknown phenomena, he simply dismisses those.
“In foreign countries, they do that. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher also got her statue made. Saddam Hussein too,” he said. “The leaders like to be venerated. As long as you say yes to all they say, you are fine.”
Another grievance he has is the tight deadlines. If it weren’t for the rushed orders, he could have given the European statues that are now housed in the Lucknow Museum at the zoo a tough competition.
“Only if we had more time, we could have done the intricate work these statues have,” he said.
But Prajapati isn’t complaining. He has delivered 28 statues for the new projects, including nine of Mayawati herself. When Mayawati rode to power in 2007, clinching the majority of seats in the country’s most populous state, she engaged in an unchecked fantasy of constructing gargantuan new projects made of the pink dholpur stone, and marble statues, almost out of a vengeance. Before her arrival on the scene, BR Ambedkar’s statues were generally confined to Dalit bastis where they were made of the cheap clay and were painted in garish colors. The sophistication and splendor of marble was lacking. Most of the orders for these statues went to Prajapati, who said that he carves the statues himself, allocating two months on each of them on an average.
Now, Prajapati is on top of the list of the sculptors in the culture department of the Uttar Pradesh government bagging most of the orders for statues, one of which cost roughly Rs. 4.5 lakhs. The 18-feet high statues cost double the amount, he said.
When Mayawati wanted a 12-feet bronze statue of Ambedkar in 12 days, he was the one to take up the challenge and delivered on time. That’s why he has been the chosen one for the projects, he said.
In fact, he had already begun work on the 165-feet tall bronze statue of Ambedkar, an ambitious project that would have been taller than the Statue of Liberty and was expected to cost more than Rs. 200 crores. But when the Supreme Court orders came, the project was stalled.
“The elephants are the reason. There were too many of them and that caused the uproar. Otherwise the work would have gone on,” he said. “Haathi ne kaam bigad diya.”
In the work commissioned to him the BSP Supremo, he allegedly needs to make her statue look thin and also without double chin.
But a strange paradox is that Saddam Hussein's statue, one of the world's most famous for the fate that it met, is also Prajapati's most famous work. The artist claims he made six statues for Hussein and the one that became famous for its destruction was commissioned to him in 1995. But these are his claims only. Another sculptor who has laid the same claims is a Baghdad-based professor. Khalid Ezzat too has no paperwork to prove his claims, according to reports.
Also, since SP leader Mulayam Singh has indicated he would bulldoze some of the statues, this one too might get famous not for its artistic value but for the fate it meets.
Mayawati's Lucknow - A city in transition, and a city in defiance
We went to Lucknow after we were sort of thrown out of the Kanpur-Delhi train on Saturday night. So we took a bus and spent the Sunday cursing our stars for not being able to attend the Gay Pride March in Delhi. Since the flight was in the evening, we spent the day driving around the city, looking at Mayawati's structures. An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on July 5, 2009.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/lucknow-and-then/485100/
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-men-and-women-at-work/485098/1
Chipping away at Lucknow/A changing Lucknow
While Mayawati’s memorials and statues alter Lucknow’s landscape, The Sunday Express discovers a Lucknow that has been through such changes before but has held on. Will it do so this time around?
By Chinki Sinha
ON the banks of the Gomti, now Mayawati’s pink and peach sandstone and marble dreams define the skyline of Lucknow (and cower over everything else. The banks of Gomti is also the site of the multi-crore Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal), there used to be an open ground. Squeezed in between the river bank and the Dariya Wali Masjid and across from the King George's Medical College (now called Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Medical University), this was where kite fliers of repute would tug at their strings and fight fierce and colourful battles in the skies. Jafar Mir Abdullah would often stop by at the ground on his way home from La Martinere, where he studied at the time, to see the spectacle. Kan kauwe bazi or kite flying was a favourite sport in Lucknow. As a 10-year-old in 1952, he loved looking at the horizon that was painted in different hues in the twilight hour, the war cries resounding for miles. He loved watching the kite runners as they ran through the labyrinthine streets to grab fallen kites, raising dust as they sprinted.
The dust still fills the skies. Not because of the kite runners but because thousands of workers are busy carving memorials and statues that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati has decreed.
In a city that has pushed some of its past to the confines of the Lucknow Museum--where stone statues of Queen Victoria and members of her court languish--a new reality is emerging: the kind that’s cast in marble. These statues of Mayawati and her mentor Kanshi Ram--different in detail and intricacy from the ones the Europeans built--dot the landscape and occupy the spots that the British once claimed.
But though the statues belong to different eras, they serve a similar purpose--an assertion of power and of politics. In today’s times, as they stand tall at various intersections and inside memorials, the statues, all of them made under tight deadlines, symbolise Mayawati’s infatuation with her self and a statement of her Dalit politics.
While Lucknow still conjures images of the Bara Imambara, the Chhota Imambara and the famous Bhool Bhulaiya maze, Mayawati’s elephants and pink stupas have encroached upon that imagination.
***
The Buddha Park that stands on the ground Abdullah, now a businessman, remembers with much nostalgia was made in the early 1980s. This was before Mayawati started her mammoth construction and, as many old timers say, started altering the soul, the spirit and the character of the city that has always been referred to as a city of monuments and parks. But then, those parks aren’t the kind the BSP supremo is pushing for. The new ones are typically bereft of trees and celebrate Dalit leaders, including herself, by erecting huge statues of theirs. They intimidate as much as inspire awe.
At another Buddha Park near the Kanshi Ram memorial, the one the Dalit icon is building, a statue of Buddha is flanked on either side by a statue of Mayawati holding her famous bag and a statue of a safari-suit clad Kanshi Ram. A guesthouse and a public library are also being built at the site. A guard, who doesn’t want to be named, says labourers are working overtime to finish the project. But like many in the city, he can’t see the point of it all. “If she is building parks, then there has to be some grass for us to walk on. This is all stone and the feet burn when you step on it. This is such a waste,” he says.
Across the road, clouds of dust part to reveal another memorial. Being built on a war footing on a 30-acre piece of land, this one is dedicated to Kanshi Ram, who discovered Mayawati in a nondescript colony in Noida and installed her in the corridors of power. The dome resembles that of the US Capitol Hill and two giant elephants guard the entrance. But as with her all other structures, awe-inspiring and intimidating, this one looks misplaced too.
“Whatever she is making, it doesn’t match Lucknow’s character,” says Abdullah. “What is the point of 100 elephants and seven-foot statues? It has no relevance. Haathi was a vehicle of the nawabs. What does she want to show?”
The cost of the entire exercise in pink sandstone isn’t known. Some peg it at Rs 2,000 crore, others say it is much more, close to Rs. 6,000 crores in Lucknow alone. The scale is huge too--there are at least nine memorials being built in Lucknow, including the Kanshi Ram Memorial, and the Buddha Stahl in Alambagh. Elephants are omnipresent but in the Kanshi Ram Memorial, across the road from the Buddha Sthal, the dome is built on the lines of the Capitol Hill dome in Washington. When she would have finished, Mayawati’s structures in Lucknow would have left behind the ones in United States, including the 46.5 meters Statue of Liberty in New York designed by the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi . She had already commissioned a 165-feet tall Ambedkar statue that would have cost more than Rs. 200 crores to Shraavan Parajapati, the artist who has made most of the statues lining the streets of Lucknow. This one was to be installed at the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal, which is under construction after the BSP leader razed Ambedkar Sahitya Sansthan and Museum, Satkar Bhawan and the adjacent Ambedkar Stadium, which was previously called the Gomti Nagar Stadium, to accommodate the ambitious project estimated to cost around Rs. 560 crores.
Public Interest Litigations have been filed, the Supreme Court recently issued notices to Mayawati and the state government, and politicians have criticised the way money meant for development had been wasted, but an unabashed Mayawati pushed for her agenda. She set tight deadlines for the sculptors, luring them, even daring them. Shraavan Parajapati, one of the two sculptors the BSP leader has sourced the work to, finished a 17-ft bronze statue of Ambedkar in XXX in 15 days flat. Even the Gomti looks subdued, its course thinning as it passes by Mayawati’s ambitious 130-acre BR Ambedkar Park that is being built to honour the man who she calls the “true leader of the Dalits”.
Architect and author Gautam Bhatia absolves Mayawati of any blame for celebrating, through architecture, her community’s rise in the Indian political system. But, he feels, the construction is designed to glorify her and is an exercise in megalomania. And the uniqueness and the scale of it all indicate how she is trying to create an architecture that is new and has no connection to the past. Through this, she is breaking conventions. “This is what Hitler did and Mussolini did. You make such grand gestures that people would remember,” says Bhatia.
By installing her own statues and placing them with Ambedkar’s and Kanshi Ram’s, she is also deviating from tradition that memorial parks are built to honour the dead. But then, Mayawati is a non-conformist. Unfettered by criticisms, she has gone on, inaugurating statues, pumping even more money into the parks, razing them and redoing them, trying out her grand experiment of might in Lucknow.
In 2007, when she once again became chief minister of Lucknow and this time with an overwhelming majority, Mayawati seized the opportunity to etch her name in history--and change the city once again.
****
Perhaps there was a never a point in the city’s life when it was complete. It was always changing, incorporating bits of history in its houses, its gardens, and its streets. The nawabs built their Imambaras and their masjids. Then the Europeans came and razed at least two-thirds of the city’s fine, old buildings and erected their structures. And then, successive governments chipped away at Lucknow’s legacy. But a fundamental core stayed, a part that hasn’t been breached. Here, in the city’s old colonies like Kaiser Bagh and Aminabad, where the latticework on the balconies is still intact and where a mellifluous, old language is spoken, Mayawati’s elephants haven’t yet marched in. And that’s where the heart of Lucknow still beats.
At least that’s what Abdullah feels. An old timer, he has seen the city change. Much of the change was inevitable—the malls in their glass and steel opulence, the apartment buildings where the migrants lived and the new colonies that the housing department built on land that was once part of villages bordering Lucknow. Much of Mayawati’s grand plan is being played out in these parts where there is the space to accommodate her mammoth structures. The rest of the city remains cramped, squeezed in, and only a faint reflection of its former self.
One architect who is defying the winds of change is S.M. Zafar. Zafar grew up in Lucknow and worked abroad but is now trying to bring back the old glory of Lucknow in his buildings. He has some contracts to build residential units and is trying to style those to resemble some of the fast-fading nawabi architectural style. It’s with nostalgia and disgust that Zafar refers to the newer parts of the city, including Gomti Nagar, that came up 25 years ago on a landfill.
“Where they have placed the elephants, there used to be a dhobi ghat and people used to fly kites. There also used to a swimming institute that was free for all,” he says. “I don’t know what her intention is. At one point, Rumi Darwaza was the entrance to the city. I am trying to keep the old architecture, at least the physical aspect of it in my buildings.”
Disgusted he is, but Zafar can understand why Mayawati is doing what she is doing. “She is sentimental. I agree she was oppressed, her community was oppressed. But by building elephants, their problems will not go away,” he says.
Like many in the old city, Zafar zealously guards the older parts of the city. “Our culture will not go away. The people who are the bearers of this culture live in the old city. Those in the new parts are the migrants, the industrialists, the powerful,” Zafar says.
As more elephants and statues come up in Lucknow, life goes on in the old city. The residents only stop to sigh at the sight, and then return to the familiar parts, away from the grand stupas, away from the colossal elephants and away from the noise. And they hope Lucknow will yet again defy the change.
In case you want
A photographer who has documented Lucknow in his works said what Mayawati was doing was incomparable. But the credit goes to her for the development of the city, for building roads and keeping the city clean.
“I am no advocate of hers. But she has developed the city,” he said.
But Abdullah, who lives in the older parts near Kaiser Bagh, said the development was only in the stupas. As with Mayawati’s memorials that need space and can’t penetrate the narrow streets of old Lucknow, development too has been kept out of it.
“Has anyone ever asked us what are our problems,” he said. “She is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Not just of her clan.”
Some of the projects
Manyawar Kanshi Ram Memorial
Rs 110 crore spent on project, another Rs 125 crore needed
This memorial is coming up on 42 acres on Jail Road, Alambagh.
Kanshi Ram Museum
The 140-foot-high structure built on 11 acres will cost over Rs 100 crore
It is a 140-foot-high structure, being built inside the Kanshi Ram Memorial.
Kanshi Ram Bahujan Nayak Park
Bungalow, which housed BSP headquarters, demolished for park
This park is being developed in the memory of the late Kanshi Ram on South Avenue.
Ramabai Ambedkar Rally Maidan
Developed on 51 acres of land acquired from villagers
Kanshi Ram Sanskritik Sthal
Over 100 acres carved out of a memorial for Kargil martyrs
Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Prateek Sthal
The Lucknow Development Authority has developed this on a two-acre area on the Gomti embankment, adjacent to the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal.
Manyawar Kanshi Ram Yaadgar Vishram Sthal
The government is developing a guest house named after Kanshi Ram on Mall Avenue, which was initially allotted to Mayawati as a former chief minister.
Buddha Sthal and Sharda Canal Front Development
This monument is coming up on 6,000 sq metres of land on VIP Road in Alambagh, at a cost of Rs 90 crore.
Samtamulak Chauraha and Ambedkar Chauraha
The Public Works Department is developing two roundabouts and two triangular crossings at Samtamulak Chauraha, earlier known as Uptron crossing.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/lucknow-and-then/485100/
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-men-and-women-at-work/485098/1
Chipping away at Lucknow/A changing Lucknow
While Mayawati’s memorials and statues alter Lucknow’s landscape, The Sunday Express discovers a Lucknow that has been through such changes before but has held on. Will it do so this time around?
By Chinki Sinha
ON the banks of the Gomti, now Mayawati’s pink and peach sandstone and marble dreams define the skyline of Lucknow (and cower over everything else. The banks of Gomti is also the site of the multi-crore Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal), there used to be an open ground. Squeezed in between the river bank and the Dariya Wali Masjid and across from the King George's Medical College (now called Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Medical University), this was where kite fliers of repute would tug at their strings and fight fierce and colourful battles in the skies. Jafar Mir Abdullah would often stop by at the ground on his way home from La Martinere, where he studied at the time, to see the spectacle. Kan kauwe bazi or kite flying was a favourite sport in Lucknow. As a 10-year-old in 1952, he loved looking at the horizon that was painted in different hues in the twilight hour, the war cries resounding for miles. He loved watching the kite runners as they ran through the labyrinthine streets to grab fallen kites, raising dust as they sprinted.
The dust still fills the skies. Not because of the kite runners but because thousands of workers are busy carving memorials and statues that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati has decreed.
In a city that has pushed some of its past to the confines of the Lucknow Museum--where stone statues of Queen Victoria and members of her court languish--a new reality is emerging: the kind that’s cast in marble. These statues of Mayawati and her mentor Kanshi Ram--different in detail and intricacy from the ones the Europeans built--dot the landscape and occupy the spots that the British once claimed.
But though the statues belong to different eras, they serve a similar purpose--an assertion of power and of politics. In today’s times, as they stand tall at various intersections and inside memorials, the statues, all of them made under tight deadlines, symbolise Mayawati’s infatuation with her self and a statement of her Dalit politics.
While Lucknow still conjures images of the Bara Imambara, the Chhota Imambara and the famous Bhool Bhulaiya maze, Mayawati’s elephants and pink stupas have encroached upon that imagination.
***
The Buddha Park that stands on the ground Abdullah, now a businessman, remembers with much nostalgia was made in the early 1980s. This was before Mayawati started her mammoth construction and, as many old timers say, started altering the soul, the spirit and the character of the city that has always been referred to as a city of monuments and parks. But then, those parks aren’t the kind the BSP supremo is pushing for. The new ones are typically bereft of trees and celebrate Dalit leaders, including herself, by erecting huge statues of theirs. They intimidate as much as inspire awe.
At another Buddha Park near the Kanshi Ram memorial, the one the Dalit icon is building, a statue of Buddha is flanked on either side by a statue of Mayawati holding her famous bag and a statue of a safari-suit clad Kanshi Ram. A guesthouse and a public library are also being built at the site. A guard, who doesn’t want to be named, says labourers are working overtime to finish the project. But like many in the city, he can’t see the point of it all. “If she is building parks, then there has to be some grass for us to walk on. This is all stone and the feet burn when you step on it. This is such a waste,” he says.
Across the road, clouds of dust part to reveal another memorial. Being built on a war footing on a 30-acre piece of land, this one is dedicated to Kanshi Ram, who discovered Mayawati in a nondescript colony in Noida and installed her in the corridors of power. The dome resembles that of the US Capitol Hill and two giant elephants guard the entrance. But as with her all other structures, awe-inspiring and intimidating, this one looks misplaced too.
“Whatever she is making, it doesn’t match Lucknow’s character,” says Abdullah. “What is the point of 100 elephants and seven-foot statues? It has no relevance. Haathi was a vehicle of the nawabs. What does she want to show?”
The cost of the entire exercise in pink sandstone isn’t known. Some peg it at Rs 2,000 crore, others say it is much more, close to Rs. 6,000 crores in Lucknow alone. The scale is huge too--there are at least nine memorials being built in Lucknow, including the Kanshi Ram Memorial, and the Buddha Stahl in Alambagh. Elephants are omnipresent but in the Kanshi Ram Memorial, across the road from the Buddha Sthal, the dome is built on the lines of the Capitol Hill dome in Washington. When she would have finished, Mayawati’s structures in Lucknow would have left behind the ones in United States, including the 46.5 meters Statue of Liberty in New York designed by the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi . She had already commissioned a 165-feet tall Ambedkar statue that would have cost more than Rs. 200 crores to Shraavan Parajapati, the artist who has made most of the statues lining the streets of Lucknow. This one was to be installed at the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal, which is under construction after the BSP leader razed Ambedkar Sahitya Sansthan and Museum, Satkar Bhawan and the adjacent Ambedkar Stadium, which was previously called the Gomti Nagar Stadium, to accommodate the ambitious project estimated to cost around Rs. 560 crores.
Public Interest Litigations have been filed, the Supreme Court recently issued notices to Mayawati and the state government, and politicians have criticised the way money meant for development had been wasted, but an unabashed Mayawati pushed for her agenda. She set tight deadlines for the sculptors, luring them, even daring them. Shraavan Parajapati, one of the two sculptors the BSP leader has sourced the work to, finished a 17-ft bronze statue of Ambedkar in XXX in 15 days flat. Even the Gomti looks subdued, its course thinning as it passes by Mayawati’s ambitious 130-acre BR Ambedkar Park that is being built to honour the man who she calls the “true leader of the Dalits”.
Architect and author Gautam Bhatia absolves Mayawati of any blame for celebrating, through architecture, her community’s rise in the Indian political system. But, he feels, the construction is designed to glorify her and is an exercise in megalomania. And the uniqueness and the scale of it all indicate how she is trying to create an architecture that is new and has no connection to the past. Through this, she is breaking conventions. “This is what Hitler did and Mussolini did. You make such grand gestures that people would remember,” says Bhatia.
By installing her own statues and placing them with Ambedkar’s and Kanshi Ram’s, she is also deviating from tradition that memorial parks are built to honour the dead. But then, Mayawati is a non-conformist. Unfettered by criticisms, she has gone on, inaugurating statues, pumping even more money into the parks, razing them and redoing them, trying out her grand experiment of might in Lucknow.
In 2007, when she once again became chief minister of Lucknow and this time with an overwhelming majority, Mayawati seized the opportunity to etch her name in history--and change the city once again.
****
Perhaps there was a never a point in the city’s life when it was complete. It was always changing, incorporating bits of history in its houses, its gardens, and its streets. The nawabs built their Imambaras and their masjids. Then the Europeans came and razed at least two-thirds of the city’s fine, old buildings and erected their structures. And then, successive governments chipped away at Lucknow’s legacy. But a fundamental core stayed, a part that hasn’t been breached. Here, in the city’s old colonies like Kaiser Bagh and Aminabad, where the latticework on the balconies is still intact and where a mellifluous, old language is spoken, Mayawati’s elephants haven’t yet marched in. And that’s where the heart of Lucknow still beats.
At least that’s what Abdullah feels. An old timer, he has seen the city change. Much of the change was inevitable—the malls in their glass and steel opulence, the apartment buildings where the migrants lived and the new colonies that the housing department built on land that was once part of villages bordering Lucknow. Much of Mayawati’s grand plan is being played out in these parts where there is the space to accommodate her mammoth structures. The rest of the city remains cramped, squeezed in, and only a faint reflection of its former self.
One architect who is defying the winds of change is S.M. Zafar. Zafar grew up in Lucknow and worked abroad but is now trying to bring back the old glory of Lucknow in his buildings. He has some contracts to build residential units and is trying to style those to resemble some of the fast-fading nawabi architectural style. It’s with nostalgia and disgust that Zafar refers to the newer parts of the city, including Gomti Nagar, that came up 25 years ago on a landfill.
“Where they have placed the elephants, there used to be a dhobi ghat and people used to fly kites. There also used to a swimming institute that was free for all,” he says. “I don’t know what her intention is. At one point, Rumi Darwaza was the entrance to the city. I am trying to keep the old architecture, at least the physical aspect of it in my buildings.”
Disgusted he is, but Zafar can understand why Mayawati is doing what she is doing. “She is sentimental. I agree she was oppressed, her community was oppressed. But by building elephants, their problems will not go away,” he says.
Like many in the old city, Zafar zealously guards the older parts of the city. “Our culture will not go away. The people who are the bearers of this culture live in the old city. Those in the new parts are the migrants, the industrialists, the powerful,” Zafar says.
As more elephants and statues come up in Lucknow, life goes on in the old city. The residents only stop to sigh at the sight, and then return to the familiar parts, away from the grand stupas, away from the colossal elephants and away from the noise. And they hope Lucknow will yet again defy the change.
In case you want
A photographer who has documented Lucknow in his works said what Mayawati was doing was incomparable. But the credit goes to her for the development of the city, for building roads and keeping the city clean.
“I am no advocate of hers. But she has developed the city,” he said.
But Abdullah, who lives in the older parts near Kaiser Bagh, said the development was only in the stupas. As with Mayawati’s memorials that need space and can’t penetrate the narrow streets of old Lucknow, development too has been kept out of it.
“Has anyone ever asked us what are our problems,” he said. “She is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Not just of her clan.”
Some of the projects
Manyawar Kanshi Ram Memorial
Rs 110 crore spent on project, another Rs 125 crore needed
This memorial is coming up on 42 acres on Jail Road, Alambagh.
Kanshi Ram Museum
The 140-foot-high structure built on 11 acres will cost over Rs 100 crore
It is a 140-foot-high structure, being built inside the Kanshi Ram Memorial.
Kanshi Ram Bahujan Nayak Park
Bungalow, which housed BSP headquarters, demolished for park
This park is being developed in the memory of the late Kanshi Ram on South Avenue.
Ramabai Ambedkar Rally Maidan
Developed on 51 acres of land acquired from villagers
Kanshi Ram Sanskritik Sthal
Over 100 acres carved out of a memorial for Kargil martyrs
Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Prateek Sthal
The Lucknow Development Authority has developed this on a two-acre area on the Gomti embankment, adjacent to the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal.
Manyawar Kanshi Ram Yaadgar Vishram Sthal
The government is developing a guest house named after Kanshi Ram on Mall Avenue, which was initially allotted to Mayawati as a former chief minister.
Buddha Sthal and Sharda Canal Front Development
This monument is coming up on 6,000 sq metres of land on VIP Road in Alambagh, at a cost of Rs 90 crore.
Samtamulak Chauraha and Ambedkar Chauraha
The Public Works Department is developing two roundabouts and two triangular crossings at Samtamulak Chauraha, earlier known as Uptron crossing.
Dissecting jeans after colleges in Kanpur banned the dreaded apparel - The arrival of jeans in small-town India
So I was sent to Kanpur to do a story on the nuances of jeans ...
An edited version http://www.indianexpress.com/news/a-fitting-reply/484625/ appeared in the Indian Express on July 5.
Chinki Sinha
Kanpur, July 1, 2009
“Blue, blue jeans I wear them every day
There’s no particular reason to change.” Blur
Nancy Parihar’s rebellion starts from her head. The 20-year-old ‘s curls are streaked a bold blonde, and then are tight-fitting jeans are the perfect badge of nonconformity in a Kanpur, a late-starter when it comes to adopting jeans. Only recently, some colleges banned jeans on campus though when women protested, the ban was lifted.
Her streaked hair, with golden specks scattered through the mass of curly hair, flying, and the world looking less menacing through the tinted sunglasses that she wore, Nancy Parihar rides through the shanty towns where men turn to stare at her, through upscale neighborhoods where she perfectly fits in, by the glittering mall at the intersection of the modern and the old parts of the city where the mannequins reflect her aspirations, and through the mean, narrow streets, into an alley. And the world changes drastically.
Certainly, this isn’t the neighborhood where cigarette jeans or the knee-length denim capris would go unnoticed. But Nancy is unfazed. She is the small town girl getting ready to take on the world like millions of others in thousands of smaller cities and towns and even villages in India where denim has come to them through the television screens, globalization working its way through the layers, tempting them to break free.
Denim’s association with a “sexy rebelliousness” started almost half a century ago when the hippies took to denim and made it a symbol of protest, of anti-establishment. Then, through the years, jeans became mainstream alternating between comfort wear to fashion wear, pushing through the mindsets with a vengeance.
In fact, in the last couple of years, the sale of western clothes in Grade B and C cities like Kanpur has been phenomenal, according to industry experts.
“It is under 20 percent but that’s huge. Western wear is the fastest-growing segement in the garment industry. Most of the demand is coming from smaller cities. Kanpur is one of the fastest-growing cities in terms of western clothing, including jeans,” Rakesh Vaid, Chairman of the Apparel Export Promotion Council, said.
“The world is changing. Who wants the behenji look? We didn’t wear jeans until Class 10th here. But in 2006 when Kareena Kapoor wore those bell bottoms in Mujhse Dosti Karoge, I had to get those,” Nancy said. “We have evolved. We are getting there.”
And the tight-fighting midnight blue jeans Nancy sported was playing its due role in the young rebel’s life.
Nancy is fashion-forward and checks out the latest trends online. Her jeans must convey a carefully crafted image. She is someone with some disposable income, a modern, liberated young woman, and one who knows that other women will be checking out her butt.
But then, as with any change, denim’s entry in small-town India hasn’t been without its hitches. It was frowned upon, it was dismissed as a symbol of warped mentality, and it was denounced as being against the Indian culture. And the women, dreamy-eyed and totally in love with what denim promised were pitched in a battle with those that guarded the culture so fiercely.
Nancy doesn't want to closeted into roles. When she wore jeans and looked at the reflection of herself into the mirror, she saw a woman who was strong, and who dared to dream. Her mother Mandeep Kaur never wore jeans in her life but she did buy jeans for her daughters, dressing them up in the garb that she had been beyond what she could have even dreamed of in a small village in Jalandhar.
“Everyone wears them. Let them go with the flow,” she said.
Once a neighbor had come to Kaur, demanding she ask her daughters to be “decent” and give up on jeans. Those things don’t like nice in this area, they had said.
“But we didn’t bother. Mother told us to wear long kurtas with capris. We did. But that became a trend, too,” Nancy said.
In Shastri Nagar, Nancy was the first to wear the dreaded apparel that sort of jolted the conservative quarters and pushed it in times much ahead of what the residents would have been comfortable with.
Kanpur, city that’s catching up
Navin Market has all the trappings of modernity. A group of teenagers in embroidered jeans gather in front of the mall, scanning the jeans on display in store windows. Levis, and Lee, and all others have made it to Kanpur.
In a city hit by the jeans wave, where billboards with women sporting knee-length denim capris, or tapered, and low-waist jeans dominate the landscape and tailors are busy flipping pages of latest style books, deciphering how to make those cool jeans, denim is more than just a stylish, comfortable piece of clothing. Inherent in it is an attitude, a struggle, an aspiration, and even a tinge of rebellion.
A lone cow walked by Nancy’s gate. An old woman looked up from where she was sitting, her nose wrinkling, a disapproving look on her face, but Nancy didn’t care. Stares, smirks, taunts, and plenty of them came her way, was part of the deal.
In the family’s modest quarters, in a little space, squeezed in between the living room, and the kitchen, is where Nancy’s denim treasure lies. This is the sum total of her aspirations, and her investments. And when she pulls them out, you can’t miss the glint in her eyes.
She pulled out the first pair, a flared bell bottoms with trappings and buckles. She was in Class 6 when she bought those. Those were in vogue then –high waist and sung fit and elephant flares. Then she gently tossed the grayish, slim fit jeans on to the chair. And then, it was the turn of the hippie-style ones with embroidery and torn finish, inducted into the collection three years ago. And they got bolder with years. When Nancy entered college, she bought a pair of black low-waist jeans from Fade Out, a shop known in those days as the most up-to-date when it came to stocking the latest denim wear. It cost her much of her savings. Nancy had been saving pocket cash for months.
Even now, Nancy, who earns Rs. 7,000 per month, invests much of what is left over from contributing to the household expenses, in her denim dreams.
But now she frequents Chandu’s Western Wear for Women near Swaroop Nagar where she can get what she wants for a small sum. She stumbled upon the little tailor shop and wanted everything they made.
But denim dreams aren’t just for Nancy.
Chand Alam keeps away from sermonizing to his customers about modesty. When the women push the fashion magazines in front of him, asking him to stitch the ultra low-waist jeans that barely have an inch-long zip, he tries keeping a straight face. But he can’t always help smirking. No point converting the dreamy-eyed girls who want to look like poster girls, he said.
“If you try to impose length, then customers won’t like it. They want to look like film stars. It is the start of a revolution here. Now girls here can’t do without jeans. Everything is fine when it comes to fashion,” he said. “Ban or no ban, jeans will still sell.”
A year ago, Alam didn’t have such dilemmas. He used to stitch men’s trousers then. But a year ago, when everywhere he looked, he saw women wearing jeans, he decided to switch from tailoring men’s pants to exclusively cutting out denim for women. And his little store became an instant hit.
That was the decisive moment. Alam the future was in jeans. A year ago, he took the plunge and switched over from stitching men’s clothes to exclusively cutting out denim for women.
But even in a year’s time, the jeans have themselves have undergone transformation. Here women set new bars for waist every day, he said.
“Those just get lower,” Alam said.
When Alam betrayed his kind to tailor jeans for the fairer sex, he was the first tailor in Kanpur to take the plunge. And it was worth taking the risk. He and Abdul Rauf, the other tailor in the shop, have a deluge of orders. When Nancy walked into the shop that evening, Rauf was trying to beat the heat off, fanning himself.
“We get at least five orders a day,” Rauf said, as Nancy walked into the store, magazine in hand.. “There’s no time to even relax.”
And in that intersecting point in their lives, it was jeans that became the focal point of aspiration. For one, it was a symbol of liberation from the stereotype of a small town girl, and for the other, a means to get a better life, a better future, a livelihood that paid better.
Jeans is everywhere
When four colleges banned jeans on campus in the city recently, women were out on the streets, protesting the move, demanding the authorities to scrap the “unreasonable” order that only victimized them and justified men’s eve-teasing. College principals, sitting in their office, had drafted the guidelines because it was the need of the hour. When girls wore the tight-fitting jeans, showing off the curves, so tight that it could rip in the middle if you had to bend, principals said, the men taunted them, and eve-teased them. Women had to be modest, and wear clothes that didn’t get them in trouble was the classic argument that the principals offered.
After all Kanpur isn’t Mumbai or Delhi. It is slowly awakening as most of the Tier B and C cities, and will take its time. Mindsets didn’t change overnight, they said.
But they underestimated the power or the penetration of denim. In their heydays, the hippie era that the Vietnam War had galvanized, they too had rebelled. Or at least they sported the era’s clothing – the granny sunglasses, the bell bottoms, and the frayed denim pants.
In the old parts of the city, where the muezzin calls are duly heard five times a day and where mosque ramparts are visible from a distance, and veiled women hurry past the shops, and disappear into the narrow gullies, the dreaded jeans, a symbol of western decadence for most of the old timers, has made an appearance. In Colonelganj, in tucked-away lanes, little manufacturing units, the sweatshops where thin, emaciated men are bent over the machines stitching jeans, stand neck to neck.
In these cramped quarters, signs of change aren’t hard to find. A tailor shop advertises its skills in making the most trendy, western wear for women, including jeans. It is called “Naughty Girl”. Yet another shop is named “A touch of New Feeling.”
Across the street, on a clothesline, a woman’s jeans are drying. In another quarter of the city called Chamanganj, where women drift in and out of henna and bangle shops, their burquas swishing as they move about, a shopkeeper claimed he had seen denim and not salwars underneath some of those long-flowing veils.
In Shukla Ganj, on the other side of the river, Shiraz Ahmed looked up at a woman who was wearing jeans and a short top on a rickshaw and looked away.
“It doesn’t look good at all,” he said. “It is a bubble, a myth. It will burst. It is fashion mania. Why take it seriously? It will go. They will come back to senses.”
Ijaz Ahmed can go on and on about the side effects of jeans. A resident of Bacpn Ganj in Kanpur and driver by profession, Ahmed feels the jeans is the biggest vice to have befallen the city of his ancestors.
“This is destroying our society. When they see women in jeans, men can be tempted to imagine their bodies. But what can you do. Even in Muslim areas, women are wearing jeans. They wear in under the burquas or carry it to their friend’s house in the city and change into them,” he said. “Recently, some women eloped with men. The women were the jeans-wearing type.”
Class Act
Ajanta Chadha, principal of SN Sen Balika PG College where jeans have been banned for the last six years, said it wasn’t as if Kanpur suddenly woke up to jeans. They wore it in their time, too, but then not in college where the focus should be on studies and not on fashion, she said.
Also, denim used to be an elite wear. Only women from the posh areas wore them. But now denim has transcended class barriers in the city with too many shops selling denim. But then, these women travel in rickshaws and not in cars, and live in conservative neighborhoods.
“Even the servant class is wearing jeans now. But Kanpur is an industrial city. The working class mentality is different,” she said. “The spirit nowadays is all about asserting identity. Hum barabar hai. But jeans don’t liberate you. The change has to be slowed down.”
While the ban was lifted in the colleges after Mayawati government issued a statement saying she would take action if the colleges didn’t turn around, principals are now considering an alternative.
“We are thinking about introducing uniform in colleges,” another principal said. “Let’s just root out the problem. I have seen men leching at women wearing jeans outside college. On television they said we have issued a Taliban like diktat. But we are moral guardians. It is for their good.”
The day the ban was lifted, defiance was evident in students’ attitude. Most came to the colleges to see the admissions list wearing jeans, and teachers frowned. But stayed mum.
Dr. Kshama Tripathy, of the Dayanand Girls College that was the first among the four colleges to ban the jeans, sat in the administrative office looking at the women who queued up to submit the forms.
“These days, they wear vulgar tops. The tops are going up and up, and the jeans is getting lower and lower,” she said. “What can we do? We can’t be America. They all want to show they are modern but then the jeans are so low, you can almost see the divider. We thought if we stop them from wearing jeans, then automatically the vulgar tops will go away.”
Outside the hall, on the notice board, the order that asked girls to keep off from wearing jeans on campus hadn’t been taken off. But that didn’t scare the girls. They had read about the lifting of the ban in the papers.
Ria Tiwari, a master’s student at the college, said she was angry that the college had even thought of such a thing.
“Jeans are so comfortable. We are happy the government sided with us,” she said.
At the gate, gatekeeper Shekhar Saini almost stopped a woman in short cropped hair and snug jeans from entering the premises.
“I thought he was a man. We couldn’t recognize. These days, you can’t even make out,” he said.
Sonika, 21, who hails from Fatehpur in Uttar Pradesh, started wearing jeans when she came to Kanpur around four years ago. As with her transition from a village to a city, her new attire symbolized freedom from the past.
“I don’t wear it in when I am in my village. We have to follow rules there. But here I am free,” she said.
In her grey, embroidered jeans, and black top, Sonika, who kept pulling the top, embodied the city’s dilemma. She couldn’t let go of the traditions. She was too grounded in those, shackled almost. But modernity beckoned, too. She was tempted.
The year was 1972, the year when jeans first hit Kanpur. Keshav Jashnani, a businessman, could predict the potential of jeans in his native city and he traveled to Mumbai and stocked Kalpana, a known store, with denim.
“Back in those days, only fashion-conscious women used to come to the store. And they were the ones who wore it everywhere. Slowly, the jeans started catching up in Kanpur,” he said. “Girls came to us from Etawa, Kalpi, even far-flung villages to buy jeans. Jeans is localized now. There’s no stopping it.”
The legendary store, which is shutting in a few days, was among the first few stores to sell jeans in Uttar Pradesh, where jeans became popular in the last decade, blurring class barriers, and infusing women with dreams that they too could dress like the big-city women, be modern, and challenge the norms.
Outside PPN College in Kanpur, a bunch of young men stood, helping out newcomers with forms. Satish Kumar Gupta, 22, and a student, banning jeans in colleges was no solution to social ills like rape and molestation. Women can’t be reined in just because men could be provoked by their dress, he said.
“What if someone asked us to wear dhotis? This is outrageous,” he said. “We don’t agree.”
Nancy couldn't care less. Often her mother tells her to wear salwar kurtas and give up on jeans. She is growing up and the neighbors are talking.
"So what? I will wear jeans. They make me feel confident. It's me when I am in jeans," she said. "Let them talk. Let them ban jeans. I will still wear it."
BOX on jeans
But jeans wasn’t always the coveted wear, at least not for women. When it first arrived more than a century and a half ago, it was as workmen’s clothing, its rough fabric perfect for wear and tear.
Then it was exported around the world. It became a symbol of civilization and then slowly, fashion houses picked up the fabric and burned the runway with super models sashaying down the ramp in denim pants, shirts, and even skirts.
From its humble origins as work pants, jeans have come a long way, penetrating societies that have adopted it as its own.
For women, too, the jeans stood for a sort of liberation. The feminist movement demanded a change from the cumbersome Victorian era dresses like the corsets to clothing women could wear to work, and break from the society had then earmarked for them.
Jeans Market in India
It was in the sixties that jeans came to India. At first, imported jeans were in demand but then after the 1970s the jeans market has expanded substantially. With globalization and satellite media penetrating the nooks and corners of the country, jeans are everywhere.
While until about 17 years ago, the jean market in India was dominated by unbranded jeans, customers have now become brand conscious and from a casual, comfortable clothing, it has now become a revolution where the apparel itself symbolizes the aspirations of small-town India, waking up, and trying to catch up with the cosmopolitan, urban and fashionable cities.
Because jeans are not classifed seperately and are merged with trousers, statistics are not available on the number of jeans sold in India.
But industry insiders say that denim have also spread to rural areas. The proportion of jeans in urban and rural areas is expected to be about equal.
In 2007 -08, the number of trousers in the domestic market were estimated to be around 308 million pieces for men and 324 million pieces for women, according to M K Panthaki, director of the Clothing Manufacturers Association of India.
An edited version http://www.indianexpress.com/news/a-fitting-reply/484625/ appeared in the Indian Express on July 5.
Chinki Sinha
Kanpur, July 1, 2009
“Blue, blue jeans I wear them every day
There’s no particular reason to change.” Blur
Nancy Parihar’s rebellion starts from her head. The 20-year-old ‘s curls are streaked a bold blonde, and then are tight-fitting jeans are the perfect badge of nonconformity in a Kanpur, a late-starter when it comes to adopting jeans. Only recently, some colleges banned jeans on campus though when women protested, the ban was lifted.
Her streaked hair, with golden specks scattered through the mass of curly hair, flying, and the world looking less menacing through the tinted sunglasses that she wore, Nancy Parihar rides through the shanty towns where men turn to stare at her, through upscale neighborhoods where she perfectly fits in, by the glittering mall at the intersection of the modern and the old parts of the city where the mannequins reflect her aspirations, and through the mean, narrow streets, into an alley. And the world changes drastically.
Certainly, this isn’t the neighborhood where cigarette jeans or the knee-length denim capris would go unnoticed. But Nancy is unfazed. She is the small town girl getting ready to take on the world like millions of others in thousands of smaller cities and towns and even villages in India where denim has come to them through the television screens, globalization working its way through the layers, tempting them to break free.
Denim’s association with a “sexy rebelliousness” started almost half a century ago when the hippies took to denim and made it a symbol of protest, of anti-establishment. Then, through the years, jeans became mainstream alternating between comfort wear to fashion wear, pushing through the mindsets with a vengeance.
In fact, in the last couple of years, the sale of western clothes in Grade B and C cities like Kanpur has been phenomenal, according to industry experts.
“It is under 20 percent but that’s huge. Western wear is the fastest-growing segement in the garment industry. Most of the demand is coming from smaller cities. Kanpur is one of the fastest-growing cities in terms of western clothing, including jeans,” Rakesh Vaid, Chairman of the Apparel Export Promotion Council, said.
“The world is changing. Who wants the behenji look? We didn’t wear jeans until Class 10th here. But in 2006 when Kareena Kapoor wore those bell bottoms in Mujhse Dosti Karoge, I had to get those,” Nancy said. “We have evolved. We are getting there.”
And the tight-fighting midnight blue jeans Nancy sported was playing its due role in the young rebel’s life.
Nancy is fashion-forward and checks out the latest trends online. Her jeans must convey a carefully crafted image. She is someone with some disposable income, a modern, liberated young woman, and one who knows that other women will be checking out her butt.
But then, as with any change, denim’s entry in small-town India hasn’t been without its hitches. It was frowned upon, it was dismissed as a symbol of warped mentality, and it was denounced as being against the Indian culture. And the women, dreamy-eyed and totally in love with what denim promised were pitched in a battle with those that guarded the culture so fiercely.
Nancy doesn't want to closeted into roles. When she wore jeans and looked at the reflection of herself into the mirror, she saw a woman who was strong, and who dared to dream. Her mother Mandeep Kaur never wore jeans in her life but she did buy jeans for her daughters, dressing them up in the garb that she had been beyond what she could have even dreamed of in a small village in Jalandhar.
“Everyone wears them. Let them go with the flow,” she said.
Once a neighbor had come to Kaur, demanding she ask her daughters to be “decent” and give up on jeans. Those things don’t like nice in this area, they had said.
“But we didn’t bother. Mother told us to wear long kurtas with capris. We did. But that became a trend, too,” Nancy said.
In Shastri Nagar, Nancy was the first to wear the dreaded apparel that sort of jolted the conservative quarters and pushed it in times much ahead of what the residents would have been comfortable with.
Kanpur, city that’s catching up
Navin Market has all the trappings of modernity. A group of teenagers in embroidered jeans gather in front of the mall, scanning the jeans on display in store windows. Levis, and Lee, and all others have made it to Kanpur.
In a city hit by the jeans wave, where billboards with women sporting knee-length denim capris, or tapered, and low-waist jeans dominate the landscape and tailors are busy flipping pages of latest style books, deciphering how to make those cool jeans, denim is more than just a stylish, comfortable piece of clothing. Inherent in it is an attitude, a struggle, an aspiration, and even a tinge of rebellion.
A lone cow walked by Nancy’s gate. An old woman looked up from where she was sitting, her nose wrinkling, a disapproving look on her face, but Nancy didn’t care. Stares, smirks, taunts, and plenty of them came her way, was part of the deal.
In the family’s modest quarters, in a little space, squeezed in between the living room, and the kitchen, is where Nancy’s denim treasure lies. This is the sum total of her aspirations, and her investments. And when she pulls them out, you can’t miss the glint in her eyes.
She pulled out the first pair, a flared bell bottoms with trappings and buckles. She was in Class 6 when she bought those. Those were in vogue then –high waist and sung fit and elephant flares. Then she gently tossed the grayish, slim fit jeans on to the chair. And then, it was the turn of the hippie-style ones with embroidery and torn finish, inducted into the collection three years ago. And they got bolder with years. When Nancy entered college, she bought a pair of black low-waist jeans from Fade Out, a shop known in those days as the most up-to-date when it came to stocking the latest denim wear. It cost her much of her savings. Nancy had been saving pocket cash for months.
Even now, Nancy, who earns Rs. 7,000 per month, invests much of what is left over from contributing to the household expenses, in her denim dreams.
But now she frequents Chandu’s Western Wear for Women near Swaroop Nagar where she can get what she wants for a small sum. She stumbled upon the little tailor shop and wanted everything they made.
But denim dreams aren’t just for Nancy.
Chand Alam keeps away from sermonizing to his customers about modesty. When the women push the fashion magazines in front of him, asking him to stitch the ultra low-waist jeans that barely have an inch-long zip, he tries keeping a straight face. But he can’t always help smirking. No point converting the dreamy-eyed girls who want to look like poster girls, he said.
“If you try to impose length, then customers won’t like it. They want to look like film stars. It is the start of a revolution here. Now girls here can’t do without jeans. Everything is fine when it comes to fashion,” he said. “Ban or no ban, jeans will still sell.”
A year ago, Alam didn’t have such dilemmas. He used to stitch men’s trousers then. But a year ago, when everywhere he looked, he saw women wearing jeans, he decided to switch from tailoring men’s pants to exclusively cutting out denim for women. And his little store became an instant hit.
That was the decisive moment. Alam the future was in jeans. A year ago, he took the plunge and switched over from stitching men’s clothes to exclusively cutting out denim for women.
But even in a year’s time, the jeans have themselves have undergone transformation. Here women set new bars for waist every day, he said.
“Those just get lower,” Alam said.
When Alam betrayed his kind to tailor jeans for the fairer sex, he was the first tailor in Kanpur to take the plunge. And it was worth taking the risk. He and Abdul Rauf, the other tailor in the shop, have a deluge of orders. When Nancy walked into the shop that evening, Rauf was trying to beat the heat off, fanning himself.
“We get at least five orders a day,” Rauf said, as Nancy walked into the store, magazine in hand.. “There’s no time to even relax.”
And in that intersecting point in their lives, it was jeans that became the focal point of aspiration. For one, it was a symbol of liberation from the stereotype of a small town girl, and for the other, a means to get a better life, a better future, a livelihood that paid better.
Jeans is everywhere
When four colleges banned jeans on campus in the city recently, women were out on the streets, protesting the move, demanding the authorities to scrap the “unreasonable” order that only victimized them and justified men’s eve-teasing. College principals, sitting in their office, had drafted the guidelines because it was the need of the hour. When girls wore the tight-fitting jeans, showing off the curves, so tight that it could rip in the middle if you had to bend, principals said, the men taunted them, and eve-teased them. Women had to be modest, and wear clothes that didn’t get them in trouble was the classic argument that the principals offered.
After all Kanpur isn’t Mumbai or Delhi. It is slowly awakening as most of the Tier B and C cities, and will take its time. Mindsets didn’t change overnight, they said.
But they underestimated the power or the penetration of denim. In their heydays, the hippie era that the Vietnam War had galvanized, they too had rebelled. Or at least they sported the era’s clothing – the granny sunglasses, the bell bottoms, and the frayed denim pants.
In the old parts of the city, where the muezzin calls are duly heard five times a day and where mosque ramparts are visible from a distance, and veiled women hurry past the shops, and disappear into the narrow gullies, the dreaded jeans, a symbol of western decadence for most of the old timers, has made an appearance. In Colonelganj, in tucked-away lanes, little manufacturing units, the sweatshops where thin, emaciated men are bent over the machines stitching jeans, stand neck to neck.
In these cramped quarters, signs of change aren’t hard to find. A tailor shop advertises its skills in making the most trendy, western wear for women, including jeans. It is called “Naughty Girl”. Yet another shop is named “A touch of New Feeling.”
Across the street, on a clothesline, a woman’s jeans are drying. In another quarter of the city called Chamanganj, where women drift in and out of henna and bangle shops, their burquas swishing as they move about, a shopkeeper claimed he had seen denim and not salwars underneath some of those long-flowing veils.
In Shukla Ganj, on the other side of the river, Shiraz Ahmed looked up at a woman who was wearing jeans and a short top on a rickshaw and looked away.
“It doesn’t look good at all,” he said. “It is a bubble, a myth. It will burst. It is fashion mania. Why take it seriously? It will go. They will come back to senses.”
Ijaz Ahmed can go on and on about the side effects of jeans. A resident of Bacpn Ganj in Kanpur and driver by profession, Ahmed feels the jeans is the biggest vice to have befallen the city of his ancestors.
“This is destroying our society. When they see women in jeans, men can be tempted to imagine their bodies. But what can you do. Even in Muslim areas, women are wearing jeans. They wear in under the burquas or carry it to their friend’s house in the city and change into them,” he said. “Recently, some women eloped with men. The women were the jeans-wearing type.”
Class Act
Ajanta Chadha, principal of SN Sen Balika PG College where jeans have been banned for the last six years, said it wasn’t as if Kanpur suddenly woke up to jeans. They wore it in their time, too, but then not in college where the focus should be on studies and not on fashion, she said.
Also, denim used to be an elite wear. Only women from the posh areas wore them. But now denim has transcended class barriers in the city with too many shops selling denim. But then, these women travel in rickshaws and not in cars, and live in conservative neighborhoods.
“Even the servant class is wearing jeans now. But Kanpur is an industrial city. The working class mentality is different,” she said. “The spirit nowadays is all about asserting identity. Hum barabar hai. But jeans don’t liberate you. The change has to be slowed down.”
While the ban was lifted in the colleges after Mayawati government issued a statement saying she would take action if the colleges didn’t turn around, principals are now considering an alternative.
“We are thinking about introducing uniform in colleges,” another principal said. “Let’s just root out the problem. I have seen men leching at women wearing jeans outside college. On television they said we have issued a Taliban like diktat. But we are moral guardians. It is for their good.”
The day the ban was lifted, defiance was evident in students’ attitude. Most came to the colleges to see the admissions list wearing jeans, and teachers frowned. But stayed mum.
Dr. Kshama Tripathy, of the Dayanand Girls College that was the first among the four colleges to ban the jeans, sat in the administrative office looking at the women who queued up to submit the forms.
“These days, they wear vulgar tops. The tops are going up and up, and the jeans is getting lower and lower,” she said. “What can we do? We can’t be America. They all want to show they are modern but then the jeans are so low, you can almost see the divider. We thought if we stop them from wearing jeans, then automatically the vulgar tops will go away.”
Outside the hall, on the notice board, the order that asked girls to keep off from wearing jeans on campus hadn’t been taken off. But that didn’t scare the girls. They had read about the lifting of the ban in the papers.
Ria Tiwari, a master’s student at the college, said she was angry that the college had even thought of such a thing.
“Jeans are so comfortable. We are happy the government sided with us,” she said.
At the gate, gatekeeper Shekhar Saini almost stopped a woman in short cropped hair and snug jeans from entering the premises.
“I thought he was a man. We couldn’t recognize. These days, you can’t even make out,” he said.
Sonika, 21, who hails from Fatehpur in Uttar Pradesh, started wearing jeans when she came to Kanpur around four years ago. As with her transition from a village to a city, her new attire symbolized freedom from the past.
“I don’t wear it in when I am in my village. We have to follow rules there. But here I am free,” she said.
In her grey, embroidered jeans, and black top, Sonika, who kept pulling the top, embodied the city’s dilemma. She couldn’t let go of the traditions. She was too grounded in those, shackled almost. But modernity beckoned, too. She was tempted.
The year was 1972, the year when jeans first hit Kanpur. Keshav Jashnani, a businessman, could predict the potential of jeans in his native city and he traveled to Mumbai and stocked Kalpana, a known store, with denim.
“Back in those days, only fashion-conscious women used to come to the store. And they were the ones who wore it everywhere. Slowly, the jeans started catching up in Kanpur,” he said. “Girls came to us from Etawa, Kalpi, even far-flung villages to buy jeans. Jeans is localized now. There’s no stopping it.”
The legendary store, which is shutting in a few days, was among the first few stores to sell jeans in Uttar Pradesh, where jeans became popular in the last decade, blurring class barriers, and infusing women with dreams that they too could dress like the big-city women, be modern, and challenge the norms.
Outside PPN College in Kanpur, a bunch of young men stood, helping out newcomers with forms. Satish Kumar Gupta, 22, and a student, banning jeans in colleges was no solution to social ills like rape and molestation. Women can’t be reined in just because men could be provoked by their dress, he said.
“What if someone asked us to wear dhotis? This is outrageous,” he said. “We don’t agree.”
Nancy couldn't care less. Often her mother tells her to wear salwar kurtas and give up on jeans. She is growing up and the neighbors are talking.
"So what? I will wear jeans. They make me feel confident. It's me when I am in jeans," she said. "Let them talk. Let them ban jeans. I will still wear it."
BOX on jeans
But jeans wasn’t always the coveted wear, at least not for women. When it first arrived more than a century and a half ago, it was as workmen’s clothing, its rough fabric perfect for wear and tear.
Then it was exported around the world. It became a symbol of civilization and then slowly, fashion houses picked up the fabric and burned the runway with super models sashaying down the ramp in denim pants, shirts, and even skirts.
From its humble origins as work pants, jeans have come a long way, penetrating societies that have adopted it as its own.
For women, too, the jeans stood for a sort of liberation. The feminist movement demanded a change from the cumbersome Victorian era dresses like the corsets to clothing women could wear to work, and break from the society had then earmarked for them.
Jeans Market in India
It was in the sixties that jeans came to India. At first, imported jeans were in demand but then after the 1970s the jeans market has expanded substantially. With globalization and satellite media penetrating the nooks and corners of the country, jeans are everywhere.
While until about 17 years ago, the jean market in India was dominated by unbranded jeans, customers have now become brand conscious and from a casual, comfortable clothing, it has now become a revolution where the apparel itself symbolizes the aspirations of small-town India, waking up, and trying to catch up with the cosmopolitan, urban and fashionable cities.
Because jeans are not classifed seperately and are merged with trousers, statistics are not available on the number of jeans sold in India.
But industry insiders say that denim have also spread to rural areas. The proportion of jeans in urban and rural areas is expected to be about equal.
In 2007 -08, the number of trousers in the domestic market were estimated to be around 308 million pieces for men and 324 million pieces for women, according to M K Panthaki, director of the Clothing Manufacturers Association of India.
Friday, July 03, 2009
Delhi High Court legalizes homosexuality - Gay couple decides to meet the parents
I missed the Gay Pride Parade in the city because I was stuck in Lucknow. But then when the High Court upheld gay rights, I went along with our photo editor to Jantar Mantar looking for a story to tell, a personal tale. It was fun seeing the supporters and the LGBT community members congratulate each other, tears streaming down their cheeks. It was emotional. It was a moment of defiance.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on July 3, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 2, 2009
There was never much of a plan. There couldn’t be. They lived in the shadow of Section 377, always careful, watchful, and only danced with abandon at a couple of “gay-friendly” nightclubs that would let two men enter as a couple on some nights. On other days, and in public places, they'd be reserved, and mum about their relationship.
But after the Delhi High Court legalized homosexuality, Rahul Singh, a gay rights activist, is planning and plotting a surprise visit to his parents in Lucknow. And he is taking his partner of three years along.
Not that the landmark judgment would change mindsets overnight. Miracles don’t happen that easily but at least some sanction came with the ruling. Anything more than that at the moment would be asking for too much, he said.
“This means a lot to me,” he said. “This is the first step. The sanction has come from the law. Now we can be together. But it is a long battle, and we have just won the first in the series.”
At Jantar Mantar, the designated protest spot in the capital, four days ago, supporters and members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community had rallied at the Gay Pride march, denouncing the draconian Section 377.
On Thursday, they came to the protest street again. But this time, they came to celebrate their rainbow identity. “Make a Wish” etched on Gunjan Sharma’s hand bag symbolized the optimism, and the gratitude. For months, the case had been pending in the court. But the activists never let their hopes down. On July 2, when the Delhi High Court decriminalized homosexuality, that long-standing wish had been granted.
Sharma is a queer rights activist at TARSHI (Talking about Reproductive and Sexual Health Issues).
“Of course we are happy,” she said, embracing a fellow activist.
On the wall in the background, a slogan “Love is not about gender” shouted out loud.
Standing on the sidelines, Arpit Goel stood, smoking, and smiling profusely.
“This is a big day for us,” he said.
Nienke Boer, a South African volunteer, was taking in all the excitement. She had witnessed history and she was brimming with excitement.
"It is historical. South Africa has legalized gay marriage but then we are a conservative society, too. This is just a begining," she said.
Singh came too, television crews zeroing upon him. While the court’s order will not change the daily life of the many queer Indians, it will certainly give them the dignity they had long been asking for. Of course, the battle is long. Civil unions and gay marriages are on the radar, too, he said.
But the first challenge is the government reaction, he said.
When he had introduced his boyfriend to his parents, Singh told them he is a “good friend.”
For the 32-year-old the “illegal” tag attached to his relationship with his partner stripped it of its dignity, and he never felt comfortable talking about his relationship with his family. But Thursday was a proud moment for him. It was like coming out of the closet the second time and the feeling was liberating.
“My dignity as a gay man has been reaffirmed,” Singh said. “I will be in a position to talk to my family. We have a stable relationship and I want them to know that.”
Years ago, when he came out to his parents, it had been under pressure. They didn’t know about his sexual orientation and like so many other parents wanted him to get married. So Singh had to tell them he liked men instead. Parents reacted, and there were tears, and emotional dialogues. But then the doors had swung open.
It hadn’t been easy for Singh, who earlier worked with the Naz Foundation and in January started the Pahal Foundation. He is also a counselor at the Pahal Beauty Parlour in Faridabad, which is also India’s first gay beauty clinic.
He felt isolated when other boys discussed women at school. He jut wasn’t interested. At the time, the thought that he could be gay crossed his mind but he dismissed it. Maybe with time, he would eventually marry a woman and have children and live a normal life like most men did, he said.
“I kept all of it to myself. I thought with time, it will go away,” Singh said.
But flipping through a magazine once, he stumbled upon an article on homosexuality and that was when he realized he could be gay. He visited psychiatrists, hoping they would not confirm it.
“It was a struggle. I realized it was orientation and if I didn’t accept it, I’d be betraying myself,” he said. “But for a long time, I wasn’t able to talk about it.”
Singh met Yash, who works in the private sector, at one of the discotheques in the city. They danced, talked and exchanged numbers. Singh wasn’t expecting too much out of it. But then, Yash, 30, called. And then over coffee and dates, the couple committed. They live together now.
Singh will take Yash to meet his parents at the end of this month. He has booked the tickets, he said.
Yash is nervous about meeting Singh's parents. Legal sanction doesn't always translate into social or cultural sanction. But yes, he will take the plunge.
"I am a little jittery but I am looking forward to the meeting," he said. "Today, we overcame one hurdle. That's a good thing."
But in all this celebration, Upendar Mahto, a papad seller, looked misplaced. He came to the protest street after he saw the crowd, hoping to do good business.
“I think this is a rally. But these are high-class people. They won’t buy my stuff,” he said. “I don’t know what has happened. I just see too many colors.”
Across the street, some policemen stood watching the activists and the LGBT members break into a dance.
They were amused.
“At least one good thing comes out of it. The population will not go up,” one home guard joked.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on July 3, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 2, 2009
There was never much of a plan. There couldn’t be. They lived in the shadow of Section 377, always careful, watchful, and only danced with abandon at a couple of “gay-friendly” nightclubs that would let two men enter as a couple on some nights. On other days, and in public places, they'd be reserved, and mum about their relationship.
But after the Delhi High Court legalized homosexuality, Rahul Singh, a gay rights activist, is planning and plotting a surprise visit to his parents in Lucknow. And he is taking his partner of three years along.
Not that the landmark judgment would change mindsets overnight. Miracles don’t happen that easily but at least some sanction came with the ruling. Anything more than that at the moment would be asking for too much, he said.
“This means a lot to me,” he said. “This is the first step. The sanction has come from the law. Now we can be together. But it is a long battle, and we have just won the first in the series.”
At Jantar Mantar, the designated protest spot in the capital, four days ago, supporters and members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community had rallied at the Gay Pride march, denouncing the draconian Section 377.
On Thursday, they came to the protest street again. But this time, they came to celebrate their rainbow identity. “Make a Wish” etched on Gunjan Sharma’s hand bag symbolized the optimism, and the gratitude. For months, the case had been pending in the court. But the activists never let their hopes down. On July 2, when the Delhi High Court decriminalized homosexuality, that long-standing wish had been granted.
Sharma is a queer rights activist at TARSHI (Talking about Reproductive and Sexual Health Issues).
“Of course we are happy,” she said, embracing a fellow activist.
On the wall in the background, a slogan “Love is not about gender” shouted out loud.
Standing on the sidelines, Arpit Goel stood, smoking, and smiling profusely.
“This is a big day for us,” he said.
Nienke Boer, a South African volunteer, was taking in all the excitement. She had witnessed history and she was brimming with excitement.
"It is historical. South Africa has legalized gay marriage but then we are a conservative society, too. This is just a begining," she said.
Singh came too, television crews zeroing upon him. While the court’s order will not change the daily life of the many queer Indians, it will certainly give them the dignity they had long been asking for. Of course, the battle is long. Civil unions and gay marriages are on the radar, too, he said.
But the first challenge is the government reaction, he said.
When he had introduced his boyfriend to his parents, Singh told them he is a “good friend.”
For the 32-year-old the “illegal” tag attached to his relationship with his partner stripped it of its dignity, and he never felt comfortable talking about his relationship with his family. But Thursday was a proud moment for him. It was like coming out of the closet the second time and the feeling was liberating.
“My dignity as a gay man has been reaffirmed,” Singh said. “I will be in a position to talk to my family. We have a stable relationship and I want them to know that.”
Years ago, when he came out to his parents, it had been under pressure. They didn’t know about his sexual orientation and like so many other parents wanted him to get married. So Singh had to tell them he liked men instead. Parents reacted, and there were tears, and emotional dialogues. But then the doors had swung open.
It hadn’t been easy for Singh, who earlier worked with the Naz Foundation and in January started the Pahal Foundation. He is also a counselor at the Pahal Beauty Parlour in Faridabad, which is also India’s first gay beauty clinic.
He felt isolated when other boys discussed women at school. He jut wasn’t interested. At the time, the thought that he could be gay crossed his mind but he dismissed it. Maybe with time, he would eventually marry a woman and have children and live a normal life like most men did, he said.
“I kept all of it to myself. I thought with time, it will go away,” Singh said.
But flipping through a magazine once, he stumbled upon an article on homosexuality and that was when he realized he could be gay. He visited psychiatrists, hoping they would not confirm it.
“It was a struggle. I realized it was orientation and if I didn’t accept it, I’d be betraying myself,” he said. “But for a long time, I wasn’t able to talk about it.”
Singh met Yash, who works in the private sector, at one of the discotheques in the city. They danced, talked and exchanged numbers. Singh wasn’t expecting too much out of it. But then, Yash, 30, called. And then over coffee and dates, the couple committed. They live together now.
Singh will take Yash to meet his parents at the end of this month. He has booked the tickets, he said.
Yash is nervous about meeting Singh's parents. Legal sanction doesn't always translate into social or cultural sanction. But yes, he will take the plunge.
"I am a little jittery but I am looking forward to the meeting," he said. "Today, we overcame one hurdle. That's a good thing."
But in all this celebration, Upendar Mahto, a papad seller, looked misplaced. He came to the protest street after he saw the crowd, hoping to do good business.
“I think this is a rally. But these are high-class people. They won’t buy my stuff,” he said. “I don’t know what has happened. I just see too many colors.”
Across the street, some policemen stood watching the activists and the LGBT members break into a dance.
They were amused.
“At least one good thing comes out of it. The population will not go up,” one home guard joked.
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