On chronicling our dying professions

There are cities which still retain their old world charm, holding onto a frozen time and space, and then there are cities which leave behind the signs of their long lost glory, legacy, rich heritage, cultural icons, social customs and even trade and occupation. Young insightful writer Nidhi Dugar Kundalia’s debut offering — The Lost Generation: Chronicling India’s Dying Professions — to the book lovers at large is like turning over the pages of past quarters that would otherwise remain buried under thick layers of dust for want of rediscovery. It’s a total revelation to today’s generation and the reading public and as eminent writer, politician and Parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor befittingly puts in his words to describe the paperback edition from Random House India that “it is an unforgettable portrait of a disappearing India”.

A Haridwar pandit who maintains genealogical records of families for centuries; a professional mourner who has mastered the art of fake tears over dead bodies; a letter writer who overlooks the lies that a sex worker makes him write to her family back home — the book thus identifies and accumulates snippets of unsung heroes without whom the indigenous India would be incomplete. According to the book’s blurb on its overleaf, these are remnants of an India that still exist in its old streets and neighbourhoods, an unshakeable sense of belonging to a time that was the everyday life of our ancestors. The author profoundly excavates some extraordinary stories of eleven professionals from the deep mines of India’s history and traditions. For instance, from the hauntingly beautiful rudaalis to the bizarre tasks of a street dentist, thereby uncovering the romance and tragedy of India’s ageing bylanes and its incredible living ethnicity.

Having taken two and half years’ time (dividing between travelling for year and a half and a yearlong writing) to compile this book, Kundalia had to choose her essaying piece over journalism. Recalls the 28-year-old journalist from Kolkata’s Starmark Bookstore at Quest Mall where the book was launched: “I was the assistant editor of the reputed Kindle magazine till a year ago and my tenure saw me contributing to several columns and subbing articles. However, opting to research for this book made it amply difficult for me to straddle with my job on the other end. So I gave up my desk duties and quit a full-fledged job that I was unable to continue with wholeheartedly.” An MA from City University, London, Kundalia has hitherto penned extensively on society, subcultures and cultural oddities in newspapers and magazines like The Hindu, The Times of India, Open magazine besides Kindle of course.

“The subject was always on my mind, especially when I used to write for magazines and journal columns. But initially, its ambit was confined to Bengal and its surrounding areas alone. However, the focus later got shifted to a pan-Indian twist from a region-specific topography. I essentially clubbed those subcultures which are relegated to obscurity and extinction,” shares the scribe-turned-author.

The book amazingly draws stories in vivid detail from the erstwhile India about occupations that stand marginalised in today’s context. It depicts lives and captures emotions of those who still dabble in the bygone-era crafts and trades. The godna artists of Jharkhand, the rudaalis of Rajasthan, the genealogists of Haridwar, the kabootarbaaz of old Delhi, the storytellers of Andhra Pradesh, the street dentists of Baroda, the Urdu scribes of Delhi, the boat makers of Balagarh, the ittar wallahs of Hyderabad, the bhisti wallahs of Calcutta, the letter writers of Bombay — all find a special place in her book, constituting significant chapters on each of the category. While unveiling the book, ace National Award-winning filmmaker Goutam Ghose had lauded Kundalia’s tall task of assembling such expansive material relevant to India’s historical legacy into an engrossing story format and mentioned “past is perhaps the concrete symbol of our civilization. We live in a strange country of incredible heterogeneity and living traditions that are but sadly pushed to the brink of neglect. I still miss the smell of celluloid as a cinema maker. Where have the negative cutters and poster painters gone in a world greatly attacked by digital technology It’s now part of our human history and need to be well-nurtured in our garden of memory.”

“The entire journey was of an eye-opening revelation to me,” she stresses. “I remember communicating with the Rajvanshi community of Balagarh, situated 100 kilometres away from Kolkata. The wonderful cluster consists of craftsmen who are but wooden boatmakers for centuries since the Mughal period of Emperor Akbar’s reign. I not only documented their complete creative idea of boatmaking but also made a brief note of their family history. Once when the rivers changed tracks, they wished to steam down to Kolkata and settle along the course of Hooghly banks. But as man proposes God disposes. Before they could finally shift their base, the boat rocked and capsized amidst their sail, incurring heavy losses of property and belongings. They were rendered absolute penniless to even purchase a boat for themselves,” she elaborates.

Traversing countrywide across a number of towns and cities, Kundalia bumped into people toying and dealing with vanishing, offbeat professions. “My objective was to uncover and peel off various layers of the real forgotten India of yesteryears, right from its rural fringes to the urban pith. Digging up these professions and learning about their source of origin and functionality, I could fathom that many of them are predominantly ordained by caste, religion, social constructs and patriarchy,” she asserts.

“I could feel a sense of empathy from a human-interest angle while listening to their narrations in rapt attention. There was nostalgia in their tone and when I had outlined the synopsis of their verbal accounts, I produced a cast of mysterious characters to pepper their tales with interesting nuggets, a touch of poignancy, slices of history and social conventions,” discloses the writer. In a way, Kundalia’s stories represent the diversities of Indian society and as she confirmed earlier, the very basis of these professions lying in neglect is the organized class, caste, creed, religion etc.

Taking trips to Rajasthan’s sand dunes and humble hamlets, she encountered a unique experience. “I saw boys playing gilli danda in the streets, women walking miles of distances to fetch water in pots and pitchers plus men doing all kinds of odd chores. But there was no indication of little girls in the village. Afterwards I heard that no single marriage has taken place there in the last 80 years. That is the deplorable status of girl versus boy ratio owing to female foeticide offence. Seems, there was no law, police or governance to check this heinous crime in the area,” she rues. “Then there were rudaalis who would be hired to cry over corpses. The more they cried, higher the deceased was held in regard, because the upper caste women were not allowed to express grief openly in front of the commoners. So the former stepped in as substitutes. Also, there were Godna artists who traipsed from place to place like nomadic herds, inscribing the skins of girl infants at the time of their tattooing ceremony. The genealogist in Haridwar was proud of his vocation of recording deaths in families and the pandas (priests) present at the ghats would ritualistically float away the ash into the holy Ganges. The Brahmin was also very possessive of the tail on his head as he fondled it from time to time as well as the ink he used in his pen to maintain the records,” she summarises. True, that an urbanite would rarely realise the true meaning of an everyday life in a village. For them, these practices and incidents would merely exist in low undertones.

When probed further, if she thinks that her book can help reinstate the perfect practitioners of these odd professions, to that, the author says, “Certain books of history are only meant to chronicle the past existence and belong to the said genre. They don’t aim to bring about a change in the current prevalent order. My personal experiences as a first-hand witness told me to highlight the social inequalities, the gradual passage of time, the darker interiors of ignorance and also to sensitise the readers to such human conditions which are commonly unheard of.”