Goodbye small towns

LIKE tigers and star-backed turtles, small towns in India seem to be well on their way to extinction. The only difference is that their demise is not mourned or commented upon. Lately this columnist has been travelling throughout the small towns of India and discovered, to her dismay, that town after town is shedding its unique local character in favour of a globalised sameness. As you travel, all of them now seem to be uniformly composed of large hoardings advertising globally produced consumer goods, congested roads overtaken by shiny new cars and fast food joints that serve globally favoured fizzy drinks, pizzas, hamburgers and noodles.

The unique temper and sensibilities, that once brought families together to share and combine their dreams, desires and hopes and shaped the special ethos of places like Chengalpattu, Saharanpur, Patiala or Pune, are now fast melting into common patterns of life and consumption decided by faceless international market forces.

It hits you especially hard when, in this debris, you suddenly chance upon some relic of days gone by like a beautifully crafted bell-metal pot or an exquisite wooden almirah polished and finished with a certain pride in one's chosen craft and an aesthetically refined response to the daily rhythms of life. Even in our bigger towns, where the supposedly more aesthetically aware live, things of daily use such as betel nut crackers, combs or articles used for puja rituals are more likely than not to be found displayed in the living rooms as curios or ornamental pieces for decoration.

In wedding songs of yore in the North, this uniqueness of towns, their crafts and historic importance was celebrated with aplomb. At a wedding even now, one may hear old women urge the bride's brother to bring water from Janakpuri (Mithila) to bathe his sister (Ke Janakpuri ko jal le aiyo...) as it was marked and made memorable by Sita's nobility of soul. Or ask a boy's grandfather to send him to Kashi or Kanchi to learn the Vedas at the feet of the gurus.

Similarly in songs sung at weddings and other happy occasions the pampered young wives, daughters, sisters would ask for chappals from Kanpur, silk from Benares, gold bangles from Patna and sweets from Calcutta. The intimacy and interdependence of such desires gave both intelligibility and a human face to the immense machines that ran the states. They also taught people about their place (in every sense) within it and marked recognisable characteristics on old families that cut both ways.

Thus people from Lucknow were said to be stamped with a certain courtliness of manner often verging on the namby-pamby; those from Kashi with a certain Durvasa-like brilliance; while people from Patiala were synonymous with warmth and hospitality and, of course, their penchant for the famous Patiala peg. Even the hinterland occupied by widows, destitutes, prostitutes and orphans growing up in the houses of distant relatives remained fiercely loyal to the recognised ethos of their town.

For women, life (mostly lived in joint families) was predictable and often rather stultifying but it blended into a single comprehensible entity. If the wisdom it taught them was narrow, it was also deep. In time, these women became a huge fund of local lore and cultural norms and patterns for those who wanted to learn about them. The life in women's quarters also gained richness as young daughters-in-law from other towns joined the family and each brought with her a rich dowry of dialects, cuisine and crafts of her native place. True, the languor and eventlessness of small towns feel oppressive to the culture vultures of the dot.com generation who have declared these towns as creatively kaput. But they have not spent enough time gauging the depths of local centres of communal exchange (even the word communal has become a pejorative, has it not?) such as the shops that are so well known that they close early and consider it beneath their dignity to advertise or display their wares. The large and airy front rooms of old houses where political opinions of the entire town are forged and where local elections are lost and won. The dark lanes and back alleys that keep a close watch on all the young unmarried people in town, the kingdom of feisty servants and mongrels. Those musty rooms within old homes containing gas lanterns, mounds of rusting utensils, rolls upon rolls of old bedding that are only brought out during weddings or bereavement when the old clans gather together.

The ones who thrived in these towns as none else were the children. There are scores of us who remember living out of doors most of the year, with scrumptious guavas or half ripe mangoes or tamarinds and sharing information with each other about the birds and the bees behind shrubs and water tanks. We were never consulted about anything - whether we wanted to eat and if so what we would like nor where we wished to be schooled nor whom we wished to marry. Most of us have grown up fairly unscarred by such upbringing.

But for the children of our children, those small towns will no longer exist. Families are fast turning nuclear now and are much more conscious of the individuality of the child. But I do suspect that, given a fair and honest choice between a life cramped with high pressure schooling and tuitions and the idyllic free roaming that small town life once made possible where education was but one part of growing up, most children would perhaps opt for the latter. Sadly, that may no longer be possible.

Children seem to be growing up faster and cleverer now, but the global life in which the present times and their own parents so keen on are catapulting them into is, I suspect, still a strange little growth with its anonymous freedoms, its striving for a new identity and its restless and aggressive ambitions. Often, therefore, one finds in the functioning of today's so-called civil society the same old taboos and repressions being reheated and served especially to the daughters and daughters-in-law. The tyrannical snobbishness of caste and class based sense of superiority was much in evidence when the PM visited the Staten Island in the United States recently and made those cryptic comments about the "India of Our Dreams" to thunderous applause from the NRI community that had gathered there to listen to him. Having first safely abandoned the shores of India with their nuclear families, the NRI community has acquired a strange penchant to assert a Hindu identity abroad. A look at their popular publications shows the conservative values represented by the Sangh Parivar are enjoying a revival not only among the trendy young models and film stars in India but also in the U.S. where most want to intermarry, go to temples and teach their children a capsulated and sanitised version of the Hindu religion through the internet and Amar Chitra Katha.

But there is one issue above all others at the centre of this neo-conservatism that the death of small towns is encouraging in no mean degree. That issue is not adultery, homosexuality nor women's emancipation. It is the concept of true Indian secularism as our small towns forged it. Its importance to the intellectual life in small towns of today is increasingly being undermined by political forces that thrive on confusion and lack of roots in a society. It is no coincidence that the functionaries of the Sangh should raise the issues of an Indian identity for non-Hindus and cow protection and link them to the issue of nation and character building. Secularism or a freedom to practise their religion without fear or fervour is at the heart of our identity as a nation where the interests of women. the minorities and aborigines coalesce. The distinction between organised religion and the State must remain clear if all these are to survive. The small towns with their cultural mazes and long and healthy intertwining of the lives of various communities guaranteed that you could not hurt or reward one group without hurting or rewarding the whole community. The nihilism, the self-indulgence and the rampant individualism of the globalised small towns is isolating and exposing small groups of dissenters and minorities who practise a different faith, as never before. It is not surprising that the group of neo-traditionalists has reserved its deepest animosity against all those who oppose totalitarianism of all kinds, cultural as well as political and economical. There is a palpable fragility about the concept of a civilised state which grants an honest freedom of choice to all its citizens.

Of course, as globalisation is rolling ahead generating unthought of benefits and disasters, people are turning to their roots that would give them some sort of grip over reality. It is for this reason that conservatism and family values seem to be enjoying an ascendancy in the world of today especially among those who have broken away from older patterns of living and earning a living. That makes the danger of hubris all the greater and the need for self introspection and self restraint all the more pressing for a society and polity such as ours.

MRINAL PANDE

The author writes in Hindi and English and is a freelance journalist.

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