A couple of months ago, as I discussed Benaras with a friend, she referred to its famed Ganga-Jamni tehzeeb. The violence and acrimony that we come across today is not what the place stood for, she added. Hatred, I agreed with her, was not what the town represented. However, I argued that the town was also not only about love and harmony, and that people existed between the two extremes. Hatred, among other things, is seldom discussed openly, attesting to society's penchant for dodging talks on difficult issues.
During my school years, I used to accompany my mother to her parents’ place in Benaras each summer. There, at the heart of the town, it seemed like all the reverence was reserved for the sounds emerging from the temple. The calls from the masjid were frowned upon, and decidedly so. While the temple priest, or pandit, was suffixed with a 'ji', the mullah was prefixed with a Hindi slur. The other day, I asked my mother if anyone in her family had Muslim friends. She was uncharacteristically quick in responding with a "no".
Today, I live in an old, large campus in Benaras, which also houses a mazar. The language used by some of my colleagues to refer to Muslims on a regular basis, will not find place on this platform. It was only the other day that a colleague mentioned how the demolition of buildings near the Kashi Vishwanath temple had led to a sad situation. As I wondered why, he added that it had enhanced the visibility of the Gyanvapi mosque abutting the temple. The mosque was better hidden, he said.
While the young and privileged in Gujarat deny the existence of caste in India, the ones in Benaras are proud and vocal about it.
Bishwanath Ghosh, to his credit, does not shy away from talking about this side of the city in his book Aimless in Banaras: Wanderings in India's Holiest City. He mentions how the Babri Masjid demolition, and the period that followed, changed the fabric of the town. He takes note of the razing of homes for a corridor that will connect the Kashi Vishwanath temple to the river. He also touches upon pujaris flying across the globe to conduct rituals, and looking down upon other pujaris, before discussing the subject of caste. And he does all of it forthrightly.
Ghosh isn't afraid of referring to the much-hyped and celebrated evening arati on the river as “a sham”. The arati – as it is currently performed on selected ghats — is an act Benaras can do without.
The writer, quoting someone who stayed in the town for a few years, says, “Banaras taught me lessons which no book could ever have taught”. This line holds true for me as well, as it perhaps does for many others. The city is special, and depending on how one experiences it, it is a place for music, religion, faith, history, mythology, exotica, Sanskrit, spirituality, and much else. Few remain untouched by it; most are deeply influenced by it in myriad ways.
Unsurprisingly, much has been written about Benaras. Diana L Eck’s Banaras: City of Light remains a seminal book on the city, besides Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics. There is, of course, Kashinath Singh’s Kashi Ka Assi, considered a bona fide modern-day classic on the subject. Among those published in recent years, Saba Dewan's Tawaifnama has received favourable reviews, while Aatish Taseer’s The Twice Born failed to make the cut somehow. The children's book, Varsha’s Varanasi, by Chitra Soundar proved to be a disappointment as well. Evidently, reading a good book on Benaras is fascinating, but writing one is anything but easy.
In case of Aimless in Banaras, the book not only seems to suffer from a lack of attention to detail, but also from Ghosh’s affinity for the clichéd. When Bishwanath Ghosh writes about the Ramleela, he generalises by saying that it “typically takes place over nine nights . . . but in Banaras performances are spread over a month”. Generalisation seldom works. Similarly, when he writes about sarees, he appears to not have taken the pain to delve deeper into the subject. He also generously uses superlatives about a place which, to put mildly, is not easy to comprehend, a few instances of which are “the oldest”, “the newest”, “the most popular”, and “the best-known”.
As I looked up the book at a bookstore that I frequent in town, two people there mentioned an error it carried. Benarasis, from the little I know, take themselves and their town seriously. They pointed out that Ghosh has mistakenly mentioned that Gaya Singh was the only character in Kashi Ka Assi whose original name was retained. They dispute this claim made by Ghosh by adding that the original names of most characters have been retained in Singh's book. I corroborated this claim by looking up online reviews, a couple of which cited the same error.
Talking of ghats, he writes, “There is something depressing about the ghats that lie north of Dashashwamedh. . . They are poorly maintained . . .This segment is also Benaras, but this is not where all the actions take place”. Through my regular walks along the ghats, I've discovered that this is the less touristy stretch. Friends from the town who I walk with add that this stretch is what remains of the "asli" Benaras. To me, some of the lines appeared outright strange. Sample this: “I have never come across a human swimming across its entire breadth, at least in Banaras”, or, “In Banaras no one preaches to you”. And one wonders why he could not stay away from the too oft-repeated quote by Mark Twain: "Varanasi is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together."
In a recent interview, comic and writer Varun Grover mentioned that Benaras has always been viewed through the eyes of the white man. You need time to break through the clichés that we have been fed through this gaze. Ghosh appears to have fallen in the same trap.
The other day, a friend and I were walking down the lanes of Benaras to the Chowk locality for some malaiyo. He asked me how I manage to find my way through these labyrinthine lanes of the city. Was it Google maps, or had I learned to identify landmarks in this web of roads and alleys, or was it something else? None, I responded; Benaras seeps into one’s system. Learning to find one’s way through its lanes is akin to learning to cycle or swim. Once you know these lanes, they take you around. Perhaps, in case of Bishwanath Ghosh, Benaras hasn't gotten into his system.
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