By Deepa Majumdar
Many years ago, when I once visited the holy city of Varanasi, I noticed in one of the famed cremation ghats, a family from the Dom caste. Many pious Hindus seek to pass away in Varanasi, for a certain degree of salvation is guaranteed if one dies in this holy city of the great God Shiva. In one of his vivid visions, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa saw Shiva liberating souls in Varanasi. But I was too young to understand any of this profundity. All I noticed was the Dom family busy cremating the body that had just arrived. And like many who share their place in society, there was, in this “lower caste” family, no apparent resentment, no seething anger at the social injustices they have suffered for centuries … and yet, no meekness either. If I recall correctly, all they seemed to have had was this simple acceptance of their lot. Indeed, it was I who seethed at their lot … not they.
Today I understand their attitude a little better. For theirs was neither the false consciousness of the oppressed, nor the result of religion being an opium of the masses, as Karl Marx opined rather cynically. Theirs was rather, the kind of detachment that comes from wisdom … perhaps the kind of wisdom that makes people see the world as a stage, wherein we play different roles. As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus said long ago, our job is to play the role well … not to choose the role. Nevertheless, I could not help but seethe on behalf of this Dom family. For the little Dom children, I realized, this ghat was their home, their playground, their school, their all. This is where they had grown up, accustomed to seeing body after body arrive to be cremated. They were accustomed to being shunned by the very society where they performed so essential a task as cremating the dead. In the context of this article, my basic question is this … for the little Dom children, was the cremation ghat their root on earth? Was this the root they would remember ever after, in times of trouble and tribulations, when they grew into adults? Would memories of the cremation ghat arrive in their minds, like illumined candles, to comfort them, purify them, and bring them peace … as do the good memories from childhood? Or does this purported power of memory-as-healer depend on the objective quality of the place where one spends one’s childhood? Would the holiness of Varanasi impress itself through memory in the minds of these Dom children, once they grew up? Or would it be merely their personal experiences in the cremation ghat?
I do not know the answers to these questions. But my guess is that only some places qualify as being objectively powerful enough to influence visitors long after they have left. The fact that memory heals depends not on the power of memory as such, nor on the individual in question, but on the power of the place remembered. For when we recall a holy place from childhood, what we recall is not the place as such, but our karmic responses to the place, which remain tucked away in consciousness like healing treasures.
For many years my memories of a happy childhood spent in Shillong remained tucked away in the deep recesses of my consciousness. Despite the alarming communalism aimed particularly at Bengalis, and despite the constant feeling that we were foreigners in our own post-independent nation, we felt in Shillong an unusual air of auspiciousness, usually associated with places of mystical significance. Many were our miseries in school, where the darker skinned among us and those with well oiled hair and Indian features, were treated as pariah. At least some of us were deeply aware of the racism and trenchant injustices. Many conformed passively to the pecking order that children will inevitably construct among themselves in an unholy imitation of adults. If anything, we were perhaps more fettered than were our parents. For ours was a world divided, despite the fact that the independence of India from British rule had finally arrived, like manna from heaven. If school was the world of Europe, with piano lessons, western music, and history books where the British looked elegant and handsome and the Indians shifty eyed and cartoon like … then home was India, where we studied Indian classical music, the mystical world of Tagore, and the lofty traditions of enlightened Hinduism. If school was materialistic and ornate, then home was where we practiced the staple creed of “simple living, high thinking.” If school was where we genuflected, then home was where we folded our hands in a “namaste.”
Yet none of this was as much tucked away in my consciousness as was this feeling … a most impractical feeling of poetry … a data-free feeling that consisted of snatches of memory … a scene here and a scene there, a smell here and a scent there. I had, in short, commemorated in my consciousness, a poetic memory of Shillong, and yet, I believe firmly that none of this had much to do with me. It had to do rather with the deep and ancient quality of Shillong itself that impressed itself so wonderfully upon my young mind. This great poetic memory, I believe is the total antipode of a communal clutching of a land, or an attachment to a land carved by centuries of ancestors, or even by blood shed for the sake of a land. For the poet’s link with a land is profoundly mystical. It is detached, for it has to do with the subtle air of auspiciousness hidden in the land … a quality that no man can own.
How well I recall the Shillong sky and indeed, who could possibly own that special flawless blue, or those vivid clouds? How well I remember the scent of the soil when the first gigantic rain drops struck a waiting earth, at the onset of the rainy season. How well I remember the sound of rain hammering the corrugated red roof of our cottage. How well I remember the feeling of absolute security in the poetic cocoon bequeathed to us by the Bengali culture … that cocoon from within which we watched nature in a state of moist tumult … with neither anxiety nor dismay, but rather with song, poetry and cuisine. How well I remember those large vats of khichuri my mother would make for the occasion of the rainy weather. And how well I remember those magical winter afternoons, when the sun shone with a memorable light, setting early, as we trudged home from the State Central Library, after a euphoric afternoon spent in the Children’s Corner. How well I remember the coal stoves that kept us warm, as we sat all afternoon snugly curled by a window, eagerly rotating the revolving bookshelves to find that book by Enid Blyton or Richmal Crompton. And who could forget the orange flames that leapt in the fireplace to keep us warm in winter, as we sat by the fireside with the adults feeding us dinner. Truly, our was a most privileged and happy childhood. How I wish children today could know the same security and easy poetic contentment that we took for granted. How well I remember the single electronic gadget that graced our home … a small Murphy radio, which my father would tune. What did we depend on for music and entertainment in those pre-television days? We played with one another and with neighbors. We sang songs. We invented games and toys. We grew small gardens, living close to nature. We ate gooseberries right off the plant in the garden. We lived in a western and westernized world that clashed with our Indian world … and yet somehow did not clash. For India had her usual perennial capacity to swallow all differences, harmonizing them, sublimating all friction in her timeless aura of auspiciousness.
I put it all down to the innate magic of Shillong … a magic that arises, not from human hands, but from an auspicious quality bequeathed upon this blessed land of the gods from time immemorial. And even though everyone warns me that Shillong has truly changed for the worse, I expect this abstract and ethereal quality to remain … I expect to find in myself again that special feeling of security that one finds only in the poet’s paradise, which is what Shillong was to those of us who grew up there. (The author is Associate Professor, Purdue University, USA)