Gayatri, TNN
WHEN my mother was a child, the only girl’s school around was the local Marathi medium school down the road. So that’s where my grandfather, a true
blue Tamil Brahmin who wore a veshti beneath his CA pin-striped shirt and a Brahmin pigtail on his head till his dying day, sent her.
Till date, she does household accounts in Marathi, and takes Marathi tuitions, and has a domicile certificate to prove her Marathiness. But she draws a rice flour kolam every morning, eats rice, not rotis, and sings Carnatic classical, not Hindustani, music. My son is part Kannada, part Tamil and speaks neither, his rakhi sister (a festive tradition completely borrowed from the North) is part Punjabi, part Oriya, part Maharashtrian. They communicate in English and Hindi. My son once asked me after a discussion at school, “Mom, what state am I from?” It’s no longer a cliché to pat the kid on the head and say “We’re Indian”.
Obama is part Hawaiian, part African-American, part Caucasian, part Indonesian. And yet it has not stopped him from being the most definitive American this year. So how much does the region you belong to, really matter? And in this march towards being integrated Indians, how much of our regions do we carry with us? “People cling to tokens,” says Antara Dev Sen, daughter of Amartya Sen, and editor of the alternative The Little Magazine. “You see this in changing place names like Mumbai or Bengaluru. It’s political gesturing. It means nothing to people like us from Calcutta, if you call it Kolkata, because both identities exist maturely,” she says.
If RK Narayan’s Malgudi Days brings alive a fictional South Indian town to viewers across the country, irrespective of age and demographic, so does Arun Kolhatkar’s very Marathi Jejuri. And before Ram Gopal Varma’s Aag sank, it drew in viewers as much for Mohanlal, as it did for Bachchan.
How relevant is regionalism then today? When was the last time you flew a kite, thought dandiya was for Gujaratis only, or saw a street play in your mother tongue? It’s now about taking the best of all your worlds. Even everyday food has become pan-Indian. “I’m half Muslim and half Parsi,” says restaurateur and foodie Riyaaz Amlani. “I enjoy being both. But this growing regionality is the single largest threat to our nation. You are either 100 per cent Indian, or not!”
But rather than deny regionalism, mainstream India is gathering its regions in. The film industry is filled with those who came from near and far to find their fortune. Actor Dev Anand came from Lahore, “does that make me Pakistani? India made me what I am,” he says. Director Sriram Raghavan is a Tamilian from Pune, doling out slice-of-Mumbai-life thrillers like Johnny Gaddar.
“Regional cinema like Vaalu has done great business, budgets are increasing and you can catch a Malayalam movie in a multiplex,” he points out. Actor Nandita Das, who has spanned regional films, explains, “It is possible to be rooted as well as just Indian. With the growing global village, the individual feels small, so he clings to an ‘identity’ given to him.”
In literature, The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, edited by the US-born and educated Punjabi Rakesh Khanna, showcases crime writing — a genre absent in mainstream fiction — from small town writers. “Regional languages have cutting edge stuff,” says Khanna. And in couture, quiet revolutions are taking place. Designer Wendell Rodricks has returned to his roots in Goa.
He says, “Golawallahs and the weavers of Benares are kitschy tokens of India to the West, while true Indian craftsmen are being sourced by designers from Anna Sui to Chanel.” Designer Rohit Bal agrees that “regional craftsmen are the backbone of couture in India. But it does not work by couturiers regressing into villages. It is about bringing the regional up to the national and from there to the global.” The progression is towards a unified identity on all fronts.
And yet, it remains scratchy, as poet Gieve Patel puts it, “There are individual efforts, nothing I know of is giving regionalism momentum.” Tokenism is a clinging to turf by those who can’t make the transition.
Critic-poet-curator Ranjit Hoskote, says “I do not believe that anything like the ‘regional voice’ exists, except in the imagination of regionalists. The tragedy of India is culture turned into a mere pretext for the pursuit of a narrow, violent, and self-destructive politics of identity. Gujarati, Bengali, Urdu, Marathi, Malayalam and Kannada writers have been in the forefront of avant-garde tendencies, forming connections with ideological movements across the world. The idea of the regional voice is a chimera.”
Prahlad Kakkar, “quarter UP, quarter Maharashtrian, quarter Punjabi, quarter Dehra Ismail Khan” disagrees. “Political regionalism is valid because someone has to take responsibility for the turf. Respect the place you grow roots in. When the Iranians first landed on Gujarat shores, the king showed them a glass of milk and said, ‘It’s filled to the brim, where will you fit in?’ The Iranians took a spoonful of sugar, stirred it, and said ‘Like that’,” he says.
Politics views India as regions for votes. You are your constituency. Culture views an integrated Indian. Obama is proof the integrated man wins elections too. Is Raj Thackeray listening?
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