A scattered tribe of anonymous artists

71-year-old Charan Singh’s freckles mirror the fine lines he draws to capture the elusive faces as he sits in the Tilak Marg police station. For more than 25 years, he has been drawing the sketches for the police, helping to retrieve them from the sea of anonymity through his deft craft.

Singh spent his early years painting hoardings that were transported to B-grade theatres in Allahabad, Gorakhpur and other areas of UP. With pride, he recalls making the posters of iconic films such as Bobby, Ram aur Shyam and many others. “I got many awards for my work from distributors and producers,” he says.

His services were first called upon after a robbery in Sadar Bazar, not far from his house in Jama Masjid, could not be solved. “The police came with the servant who had witnessed the robbery. I promptly drew a sketch based on what he told me,” he says.

This began what was to be a long association, as his services were frequently called upon to solve similar cases. Through word-of-mouth recommendations, more police stations began to seek his services. Soon, he was drawing sketches for police stations in Jama Masjid, Daryaganj and Civil Lines as well.

But slowly, work began to dwindle as the age of computerisation firmly set in. Today, most police stations employ the services of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) and the Crime Records Office at Delhi Police headquarters for drawing computer-enabled portraits of wanted persons.

Men like Singh, earlier an invaluable asset, have now become a scattered tribe of artists who are called upon rarely. It is not surprising, then, to hear Singh being dismissive about technology. “Computerised sketches are not the real thing,” he says.

This argument is not entirely without merit. In June, a toddler named Gungun was kidnapped outside India Gate, with computerised sketches proving inadequate. After Singh’s sketch of the kidnapper was published in newspapers, the girl was dropped outside Jhandewalan.

Singh still makes about 3-4 sketches a day. “Sometimes I copy something off the newspaper. If a friend or relative drops in, I make a sketch of him. It is important to stay in touch with one’s art,” he says. In fact, the striking thing is that they see themselves primarily as artists. “Writers, musicians, sportsmen – all need to practice their craft to remain sharp. It’s the same for me,” says Singh.

Yet, the public acclaim of artists forever eludes police sketchers like Singh. In fact, it is a necessary condition for their existence. Even today, he has lost none of the shrewd instincts of earlier years. He never lets an autorickshaw drop him outside his house, or divulge any personal details to strangers.

What gives him the most satisfaction is helping people. “Sketching is a passion, but I need to remain invisible. It is my sketches that must continue to speak.”

Today, he is one among a dying breed of anonymous artists, whose deft craft may not exist for much longer, replaced wholly by technology.

A version of this piece appeared in The Indian Express.

Closing of abattoir butchers many livelihoods

As Idgah closes, butchers and meat sellers fear an uncertain future

As the MCD sealed the buffalo section of Idgah, it meant curtains for the abattoir that has been the source of many livelihoods. By afternoon, Idgah resembled a small township, deserted and abandoned. In small corners, men sat idly, drinking tea and anxiously wondering what lay ahead. Mohd Jameel Qureshi, who has been working at Idgah for the last two decades, said, “I used to buy 2-3 goats every day and sell them in the market. With the new slaughterhouse in Ghazipur more than 15 kms away, whatever I earn will be lost in transportation.”

Small-time traders and butchers in the meat trade, like Qureshi, will bear the brunt of the move to Ghazipur. About 3000 people are expected to lose jobs as the result of this move. The question most of them ask – why has Idgah not been modernised? “For years, we’ve been asking for facilities. At the time of elections, they promise improvements but nothing has materialised for the last 10 years,” said Nadeem Qureshi, a butcher who slaughtered buffaloes at Idgah.

Most of these butchers live in Quresh Nagar, a cramped neighbourhood located a stone’s throw away from Idgah. Most of them are employed in the meat trade, and have been for generations. There is not a family here that doesn’t live under a cloud of anxiety, most of them stunned by this disruption to even begin thinking ahead.

65-year-old Sarvar Qureshi is almost on the verge of tears – she lives with her grandson Hashim, who was employed at Idgah. “We had a little bit – now even that is being snatched away from us,” she said. “We have nowhere to go, as my grandson is not skilled in any other profession. Our whole community’s bread and butter is tied to this profession.”

On a weekday such as this, Quresh Nagar would usually be absorbed in the business of buying and selling meat, and other activities that revolve around the trade. But this is not an ordinary day, and at every small corner, newly unemployed men sit. Most of them agree that crime is likely to increase in the area. 72-year-old Ziauddin Qureshi, one of the ‘elders’ in the area, said, “Our children have been rendered useless. How should we go on – should we burgle and steal?”

A version of this piece appeared in The Indian Express.

In Old Delhi, 1984 was a narrow escape

Every day at 5 am, 56-year-old Karnal Singh begins his day’s work at Sisganj gurdwara. For 15 years now, he has been selling devotional CD’s of all hues and colours, including one that narrates the 1984 massacre. But he doesn’t need it to remember the evening of November 1, 1984, when hordes of hooligans attacked this very gurdwara. “Acid bottles were thrown, stones were thrown. I don’t know how we survived,” he says.

Lakhbir Singh was at the frontline as Sisganj was in a state of siege. He lifts his shirt to show me a stab wound mark that he bore during that time, as a 30-year-old man. “We stopped them from entering the gurdwara. I sustained this wound as I was trying to push them back towards that fountain,” he says, pointing towards the white marble structure facing Sisganj.

The pain may have receded with the passing of time, but the resentment still lingers. Even today, he goes every time when Tytler is produced in court. “Why don’t they arrest and punish him?” he says, trying to contain the anger in his voice.

What do they think of Manmohan Singh as PM today? Words of praise flow out at the honesty and the integrity of the man. In some ways, does it assuage some of the anger and the pain of 1984? “Ek mahaul tha, khatam ho gaya (It was an atmosphere which has got over now),” says Lakhbir Singh. Karnal Singh can’t forget the feast prepared in anticipation of 1 lakh devotees (as Guru Tegh Bahadur shahid divas was approaching) that was later dumped into the Yamuna. But both thank providence and believe good fortune saved them during that tumultuous time.

But the question remains – why did a communally sensitive flashpoint such as Chandni Chowk managed to stay more or less clear of the violence? There are many theories. Karnal Singh says he firmly remembers Kiran Bedi arriving and securing the area. Others say there were few policemen and the resistance from the gurdwara repelled the aggressors.

What is likely to have happened is that, following the first tidal wave of resistance, the aggressors simply realised it wasn’t necessary to win this battle when there were far easier targets elsewhere. Instead of trying to locate the odd Sikh family huddled somewhere within the labyrinthine maze of Old Delhi, mostly in Dariba Kalan and Sitaram Bazar, most of them left for east Delhi where a free-for-all massacre was taking place.

An atrociously edited version of this piece appeared in The Indian Express on November 2.

Resting easy with the Booker

The lack of ‘Indians’ in this year’s prize race should provide cause for introspection

In late July, one news item largely escaped attention, making a fleeting appearance in the inside pages of our newspapers. The Booker longlist was out, and not a single Indian author had featured in it. The national media just as easily ignored it, moving on to other things. For someone not particularly clued in to the literary scene, it would seem that the Booker Prize is not taking place this year at all.

For long, our engagement with the Booker Prize has been defined by this sort of inconsistency. Our frenzied reactions to a Booker win, making no qualms about appropriating the success of an immigrant elite as unmistakably Indian, only make the task of a critical engagement more difficult. In the event of an Indian winning the prize, as Adiga last year did, the otherwise indifferent attitude to the prize transforms into another opportunity to beat up our chests with proud nationalist fervour.

This is particularly silly, because every artistic achievement is, first and foremost, an individual one. Writing is even more so – it is an act of solitary cultural production, the fruit of the labour of hours spent alone. At times, this alliance with nationalism can also backfire spectacularly, when writers are unwillingly bound to the metanarrative of a rising nation. The most obvious example is Arundhati Roy, whose oppositional politics surprised those who were quick to anoint her the darling of a resurgent India.

Far more alarming, though, is the reluctance of the literary intelligentsia to contest the politics of the Booker Prize. The prize now has been awarded to diverse writers from many parts of the world (within that relic called the Commonwealth), imbuing the Booker with the appearance of radical qualities. Yet despite 40 years of the prize, the category of the so-called ‘universal’ writer is still occupied by the white Christian male. The rest can all be slotted in a ghetto of their own – women writers, Asian writers and so on.

Especially in the case of Asia and Africa, the writers function as imperial ethnologists, representing their ‘native’ lands in forms that must both entertain and elucidate. It is not surprising, then, that while the prize-winning citation of predominantly white writers is framed in generally vague liberal humanist terms, the Indian and African writer usually finds his work slotted in particular terms, representing a country or continent.

Another aspect that makes the evaluation of the Booker problematic is the debate within Britain as to what purpose the prize must serve. A substantial section of the literary establishment believes that the Booker is essentially a ‘British’ prize, reflecting the country’s values and ideas of literature. Not surprisingly then, in the year after the prize has gone to an ‘outsider’, the Booker finds itself responding to a backlash that exhorts it to return to its origins as an upholder of British literature.

This is as true of 2009, as it has been of previous years. Let us consider the books that won the prize in 1982, 1998 and 2007 – years after Rushdie, Roy and Desai won respectively. Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark (1982), Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) and Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) are books that share a convention of form, theme and narrative. All are defined by a sedate, conservative way of storytelling, centred on events distinctly European. This is offset against the tumultuous narrative energy and radical formalism of at least two books that preceded them – Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.

A look at the 2009 shortlist is revealing, yet entirely predictable, with its abundance of quintessentially British novels. The Booker favourite, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, is a tale about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s trusted adviser, as he tries to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Booker website calls it ‘that rare thing: a truly great English novel’. Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze is a historical reconstruction of the meeting of the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson at a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest, while Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger is a ghost story set in post-war Warwickshire. Add to this, AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book, a ‘vivid, rich and moving saga taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme’.

It is during years such as this that the Booker’s relevance as a global literary prize comes severely under question. Therefore, this is a time good as any to examine the Booker Prize in its historical context and redefine the terms of our engagement. One of the most heartening aspects of The White Tiger win last year was the vibrant cultural dialogue and spirited debate that followed. It is a dialogue that, in a mature literary milieu, we must now seek to begin on our own. The Booker may then become an event to which we pay attention, but it does not define our sense of literary worth.

Discourse on freedom

I can’t remember the last time I read something so singularly infuriating and astonishingly puerile. Here Aakar Patel in Mint -

The British left in 1947, and they left too soon. We celebrate Independence Day, but another six decades of dependence as Great Britain’s colony would have been good for us. We could have learnt how to run cities. No harm in admitting what is obvious for all to see: We cannot even manage traffic.

I don’t mind satire, in fact, I relish it, but this is such mindless expression. There are so many things wrong with this post – the equation of the long, painful history of colonisation with the concerns peculiar to a merely vehicle-owning class. There’s more to follow -

Delhi would have more bits like the ones the British built, the only elegant parts of the city, just as British South Bombay is the only elegant part. Cities such as Surat and Ahmedabad and Hyderabad and Indore would have become civilized.

I can understand that Patel never read Fanon, by the above extract. But here’s another gem – the colonial economy destroyed indigenous scholarship, but Patel clearly thinks we could done with a bit more of Macaulay.

The great German tradition of Indology continues through men such as Heinrich von Stietencron, but a sustained engagement through colonial government would have resulted in more attention to Indian studies…What else would be better? Education, through the Macaulay plan.

This is irresponsible journalism at its worst. I agree that being politically engaging isn’t a priority for Mint Lounge, yet we could do without this tripe.

Hungry, and without a vote

It is early morning in Chandni Chowk, and the poll booths do not show encouraging signs of activity. The only people at work are the pavement barbers, trimming with mechanical ease. In a small alley off Nai Sarak, kids have never found playing cricket on the street so smooth and uninterrupted as all the shops are closed. This scenario of deserted streets and uncharacteristic calm replicates itself everywhere else in the walled city on this sluggish morning. The enthusiastic voting that will eventually push up the turnout to 50 percent is a story for the latter part of the day.

However, this day is no different from any other for Mohammad Ali, a 45-year-old daily labourer from Murshidabad in West Bengal. He is one among hundreds of men that squat outside the numerous food stalls in Matia Mahal waiting for his first morsel of bread. “Some wealthy man usually comes from Jama Masjid after the morning prayers to feed us, especially after some wish has been fulfilled. On a few lucky days, we are able to eat. Otherwise, we have no option but to go hungry.” On being asked whether he had voted, he replied, “I am homeless, therefore I cannot vote. I have no passport, no ration card to prove my existence.”

Sonu, who migrated to Delhi a decade ago still hadn’t got his vote. He said, “I tried to contact the authorities but they say that you have no residential address. Does it mean that I cannot vote?”

This was a problem in the slums opposite Meena Bazaar as well, where most people had no voter ID cards. Residents of the colony told The Indian Express that no one from the Election Commission had contacted them and helped them register as voters. Surprisingly, most people who had not been able to register seemed eager and enthusiastic to vote.

Ashok Kumar Rawat, 43, had been able to secure breakfast but was still looking for work near the Dojana House polling booth in Matia Mahal. He said, “Of course, I would love to vote if I get the chance. Maybe it can make some difference.”

I wrote this story while covering the 2009 general elections for The Indian Express.

Facing extinction

Despite the odds, DU’s vendors have stayed on. Now they fear an uncertain future

Rajkumar at his stall outside DU's Faculty of Law

Every day at 7 am, 42-year-old Rajkumar Suri sets off from East Delhi’s Vivek Vihar for the hour-long journey to North Campus. For four years now, his stall has been a fixture outside DU’s Faculty of Law. For a decade before that, he sold vegetables at the Azadpur Mandi. “The money wasn’t steady, so I left,” he says.

Selling banta in the summer and making hot tea for students during the chilly months of winter, Rajkumar feels content. “There is at least some form of regular income. My children are able to study well,” he says.

However, every month he has to give a thousand rupees to the extortionist institutions of state – the police, the MCD and anybody else who can claim to be from the government. Most vendors, like Rajkumar, are resigned to their fate. “Kya karein? (What to do?),” they say.

Lal Singh, 35, has been working outside Ramjas College for the last 17 years. This native of Faizabad says, “I have no choice but to pay the money. I have a wife and three children, and it is hard to survive on the Rs 2500 I’m left with.” However, he is more worried about a change of guard. “Every time a new officer comes, there is trouble.”

Early last year, the police ordered all the stalls shut. “I didn’t know what to do, many times I was close to tears,” says Rajkumar. After repeated requests from vendors, the authorities relented. But after things became normal, the monthly rates were raised. Many vendors would be happy to pay a similar amount to the government, in return for accreditation. “They can give us a private lease, or a contract. At least, we won’t be harassed,” he says.

The government, though, has other plans in store. A large number of venues for the Commonwealth Games in 2010 are in the campus, which means that the vendors will be kicked out. “I may have to move to some other area, or find another job,” admits Lal Singh. “Nobody can stay hungry.”

Rajkumar has some suggestions. “They can make nice stalls for us, give us proper facilities,” he says. “Koi bahar se aa raha hai, to apne ghar ke aadmi ko bahar nikal do? (If a guest comes from outside, do you kick your own people out?)”

This story appeared in Real Page 3 in The Sunday Express on July 26.

Festival of love marked by spirit of reconciliation

A version of this piece on the Delhi Gay Pride 2009 will appear tomorrow in The Indian Express.

As the Gay Pride March took a brief halt near K G Marg, a middle-aged woman was standing alone at a distance carrying the placard – Proud to be a Mother. She was one of many parents who had come here in support of their children. Did she feel apprehensive? “Not at all,” she said. “Awareness creates an understanding that being gay is not unnatural.”

The 2009 Annual Gay Pride March was marked by this spirit of reconciliation. Bisexuals and transgenders had, in earlier years, felt marginalised by this movement. But this year, they were out in full strength. Kiran, 30, a person from the transgender community, was delighted by this show of unity. “We are one soul, one thought,” she said. “Together, we are stronger.”

Nor could this be dismissed as detached upper-class activism. They came from the villages of Khanpur, Kapashera and Ashram, as they did from the elite neighbourhoods of Defence Colony and Jangpura. Mohammad Akhtar, who works as a tailor, had come all the way from Mumbai. He had been to gay pride rallies in all parts of the country, but he had never seen anything of such fervour and magnitude. Delirious and lost for words, all he could say was, “Bahut accha lag raha hai.”

The gathering had also been enthused by reports that came in yesterday that the government was considering repealing Section 377 and de-criminalise homosexuality. There were an air of optimism and the sense that, after years of hard work, victory was near. Pulapre Balakrishnan, who insisted I use his full name, and has been part of the movement for 15 years said, “The government’s reaction has been very positive. This has been long overdue.” Fashion designer Suneet Verma was ebullient. “Bravo to the new government and the sensitivity they have shown,” he said.

The most heartening aspect was the solidarity shown by people outside the gay community, as placards with Homo Hetero Bhai Bhai could be seen in abundance. Though accurate numbers cannot be known, it would not be far off the mark to say that almost 50% of the gathering comprised of heterosexual people. Kanta Advani, in her mid-60’s, walked carefully through the raucous crowd while holding her husband’s hand. “I’m here in support of freedom,” she said.

The march began at 5.30 p.m. from Barakhamba Road and continued for more than two hours until its culmination at Jantar Mantar. Sulekha, a gay activist, took the stage and announced, “I have nothing to be ashamed of. I’m proud to be gay.” Balloons soared over the crowd, whistles rent the air and people of all hues and colours danced to the beat of Asha Band. Once the band stopped briefly, the crowd chanted, “Hum Dilli lene aaye hain, hum Dilli lekar jayenge.(We’ve come to conquer Delhi, we will leave after we conquer it).”

By the time the march dispersed, nobody was left to argue that it wasn’t the case.

Through an astute lens

For almost three decades, cinema has been a perceptive mirror to the forces shaping modern Iran

Mania Akbari in Abbas Kiarostami's Ten

As the crisis in Iran escalates, the pictures of protests and unrest would not have surprised those who follow Iranian cinema closely. Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian cinema has developed a subtle language of dissent, circumnavigating the dreaded censors of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture and holding a mirror to the country’s fissures. Film critic Godfrey Cheshire wrote in Newsweek, “Iranian films show us a society struggling with itself, trying to reconcile cultural traditions with political choices, vaunted ideals with thorny realities.”

The most visible struggle, for those of us who view Iran from the outside, is the issue of women’s rights. Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple, a film about the forced confinement of two women, and Jafar Panahi’s Offside, which trained its lens on the exclusion of women from football stadiums, are among several such acclaimed films.

But to understand how Iranian cinema articulates its political protest, Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten is particularly revealing. In the film, a dashboard cam eavesdrops on a divorcee’s impromptu conversations with fellow passengers in car journeys across Tehran which bring Iran’s sexual and social policies into sharp focus. In one scene, a camera focusses on a character as she scratches wildly around her hijab in the summer heat. In another, the veil drops in a moment of catharsis but is quickly put back on — Kiarostami has made his point by showing us the exhilaration of the unlocked genie. In an environment where dialogue can swiftly be clamped down upon, Iranian cinema has mastered the art of subversive suggestion, without leaving any footprints.

The picture of Tehran that has emerged in recent days has been that of a city divided — the pro-Moussavi supporters who have crowded the elite, affluent neighbourhoods in the capital’s north distinctly separate from the poorer neighbourhoods in the city’s south where support for incumbent president Ahmadinejad is strong.

In a country where one-fifth of the population accounts for 45 per cent of the household income, the class divisions point to irreconcilable narratives. Iran’s cinema has observed the chasms that separate the westernised elite and the middle classes, who long for greater freedoms and a secular state, and their poorer fellow citizens, who support religion’s primal defining role.

Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold is the tale of an overweight pizza delivery boy who, in encounters with Tehran’s wealthy classes, realises his inability to transcend his social class. Majid Majidi’s The Song of Sparrows takes this even further — portraying the working classes as powerless and inconsequential, he shows the primal role of religion as a form of social glue that gives them a sense of community and belonging.

What gives Iranian cinema its significant political weight is how often its films blur the distinctions between fiction and documentary. Solely relying on dialogue and minimal use of supporting narrative devices like background music, Iranian cinema regularly comes up with genre-defying films —Ten and The Apple being two examples — impossible to determine whether their realm is fiction or non-fiction.

At other times, they can be remarkably prescient. In 1997, Kiarostami’s most celebrated film, Taste of Cherry, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in the same week that an assertive electorate chose reformist intellectual Mohammad Khatami as president. Taste of Cherry, the tale of a nihilist who drives on the outskirts of Tehran looking for an accomplice to complete a task after he commits suicide, was distinctly at odds with the euphoric mood in Iran at the time. However, reformist hopes withered away as hardliners prevailed, leading to an environment of frustration and failure similar to the predicament of the protagonist.

But its role as an instrument against authoritarianism retains primacy. In his book, Close Up Iranian Cinema: Past, Present and Future, Hamid Dabashi has written, “In the cinema, we were re-born as global citizens in defiance of the tyranny of the time and the isolation of the space that sought to confine us. In cinema, everything was possible, and in that possibility we defied our paralysing limitations. The cinema revealed our hidden hopes as nation.”

Armed with the radical fervour of artists under siege, Iran’s filmmakers have created a searing chronicle of a fascinating and complex society — its tenuous social fabric, the weight of history, the arduous battle between tradition and modernity — as it charts its way forward in the modern world.

This piece appeared in the op-ed pages of The Indian Express on June 20.

Pakistan’s deepening political crisis

The Supreme Court ruling to bar the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz Sharif from elected office has plunged Pakistan into political turmoil once again. It is the last thing the country needed as it reels from the Taliban’s offensive in Swat on one hand and India’s aggressive diplomacy and US pressure over the Mumbai attacks on the other.

The optimism that enveloped the country following the elections last year and the return of genuine democratic rule is nowhere to be seen. The task of restoring autonomy to institutions such as the judiciary should have begun with the reinstatement of Iftikhar Mohammed Choudhury as Chief Justice. Instead, the failure to honour the Murree declaration severely harmed the spirit of political unity. The verdict of a Musharraf-appointed Supreme Court, whose legitimacy is constantly under question, has set the discord that began over differences on restoring the judiciary along an irrevocable path. Mr Nawaz Sharif has already denounced the court ruling as politically motivated by saying, “It’s an edict, not a verdict.”

Allegations by the PML-N of PPP’s offer of a business deal to Mr Shahbaz Sharif granting amnesty in return for legitimising the Supreme Court and dropping the demand for the restoration of the judiciary has further damaged the PPP’s credibility and commitment to empowering democratic institutions. The deployment of police to disallow the convening of the Punjab provincial assembly, where Mr Shahbaz Sharif is chief minister, has only highlighted the PPP’s unwillingness to uphold democratic norms. Lawyers throughout Pakistan have condemned the decision, calling it a ‘presidential’ verdict and protesting in large numbers at the Mall in Lahore and outside the locked Pakistani parliament in Islamabad.

Pakistan is unfortunately heading for the divisive politics of the 1990’s that created the justification for military rule. Mr Zardari’s contentious decision to assume the post of president has only deepened the mistrust between the two major parties, especially since he has not shown any inclination to curtail the extra-constitutional powers invested in the post during Musharraf’s reign. At a time when the political establishment needs to stand united to root out the menace of rising religious fundamentalism and other challenges facing the country, the recent events do not bode well for democracy’s future. Mr Zardari has repeatedly raised a call to the spirit of ‘reconciliation’, but he has increasingly taken steps to isolate and vanquish the PML-N in the political arena. A year later, democracy’s early promise once again lies battered.

This appeared as an editorial in The Daily Word, the paper at the Asian College of Journalism.