Life Among the Scorpions Read online

  ‘The world opened up for us.’

  ‘We learned a lot by going outside the state.’

  ‘Did you know that over 30,000 Kashmiri girls are studying in educational institutions in the rest of India?’

  ‘My daughter could go to college and is now doing her PhD here, thanks to opportunities I got to sell my crafts outside the state through your crafts bazaars.’

  ‘We discovered that neither was Kashmir so badly off, nor was the rest of India a bad place.’

  ‘We have also seen for ourselves that conditions in India are far better than in Pakistan. Look at what has been happening there.’

  We drove to congested parts of old Srinagar, walked along many narrow lanes and visited homes and workplaces of artisans practising copper engraving, waggu mat-weaving, papier mâché art, walnut woodcarving, the finest embroideries, and tilla (metallic thread) work. Their shops were full to the roof with pherans embroidered and ready to be worn at weddings. These were like defiant symbols of women who were determined to adorn themselves and celebrate the good times. The areas in which I spent the most time were Wantpora, Rajwari Kadal, Nowhatta, Mashadi Mohalla, Rangar Stop at Khanyar, Fateh Kadal, Haba Kadal, Kamarwari, Safa Kadal and Rainawari. My crafts-friends remarked that if I gave this list to the security forces they would not believe it. These had all been militant hotspots. The only anachronism to this amiable atmosphere I could find were the ugly rolls of barbed wire and security men inside bunkers. Outside the bunkers, there was utter calm. The men were largely ignored and looked as if they had overstayed their welcome. While it is true that they were the unwanted face of the Indian security forces, and human rights violations had been committed, my friends agreed that without firm action, militancy would have bled and ruined Kashmir forever. Word from the simple inhabitants of Kashmir demonstrated how Kashmir had progressed and prospered both despite and because of militancy. Others, of course, have chosen to draw a picture that may oppose this perception. Areas such as Mandibal, Zadibal, Kathi Maidan, Gulshan Bagh, Badamwari, Kathi Darwaza, supposedly less affected by militancy in its heydays, were no different from the ‘heavy militancy’ areas mentioned earlier at the time. Money flowed in from right and wrong sources, work went on, what people lost in earnings from the absence of tourists was made up from the security forces and their expenditures. In spite of how much Pakistan and others tried, the ordinary people of Kashmir had shown that they could not be crippled.

  The 2008 visit to Kashmir was a lesson in microcosm for me. And it is what must be learned in the macrocosm by our politicians, both in the state and at the Centre. Unfortunately, things turned abnormal again in 2015. Indecision, lack of vision, vested interests in issues of daily governance, a heavy influx of Pakistani-funded militancy and cheap electoral politics was to take over this beautiful region again in 2015. With political parties cultivating election fodder, the wedding feasts were to be overshadowed by electoral machinations before the innocent public could see it coming. Artisans could not leave their homes because of curfews, stone throwing and firing. Security personnel stiffened up in their bunkers. Sentiments were being stirred from across the border and misinformation and violence were back in the vocabulary of troublemakers. In 2017, the mischievous involvement of India’s western neighbour has become more than evident. The atmosphere in Kashmir is festive and normal in most parts except for areas where militancy still prevails. The people, luckily, are longing for peace.

  Kashmir is India, but Kashmir is also Kashmir: When will ‘India’ learn to feel its pulse and truly engage with it?

  *Crafts of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, Ahmedabad: India Mapin Publishing, 1990.

  10

  A TRYST WITH CRAFTS AND THE ‘CRAFTY’

  Gurjari and Dilli Haat

  FROM MID-1977, SETTLING INTO A faster paced life in Delhi, did not mean much to me beyond getting the children into schools and arranging our minimal baggage into our government home in Bharati Nagar. The whirlwind was around Ashok who had the time of his life keeping pace with George Fernandes who wanted to be everywhere and do everything all at once. Like George Sahib, his staff never had enough sleep, between staying up till 2 am to deal with files, or landing somewhere at 6 am to catch a flight at 8 am. Work for them consisted of creating a new industrial policy, setting up the District Industries Centres, laying down the nation’s laws for IBM and Coca Cola to follow, and reserving goods for production by hand. George Sahib was disgusted that there were quotas for gas connections, cement, telephones and even the Bajaj two-wheelers. They worked to increase cement production, gave electricity supply contracts to the private sector, allowed private hotels to come up, and yet were accused of being illiberal socialists. Life for the minister and his Special Assistant was a series of jet lags, time lags and an over-frantic work pace. Ashok related to us how for a few moments George Sahib could not recall his own name when he looked in the mirror at a hotel abroad when they had gone for a conference.

  In contrast, I was quite bored. One half-hearted attempt to participate in an IAS officers wives’ meeting was short-lived. I found them discussing how little work their government malis or gardeners did (this was forty years ago) and how some were trying to move to better housing. Better look for some work, I thought, and wrote to Brij Bhasin, an unusual police officer who loved Kathak dancing, and opted to revive the sinking handicrafts corporation of the state of Gujarat. I had only met him once briefly but he called back and said if I would work for them, he would create a job for me. I was to be a consultant in design and marketing. In those days, degrees didn’t matter and I hadn’t used ‘pull’, so I was thrilled at the 750 rupees I was offered monthly for the part-time work.

  Continuing in my ordinary Kashmiri style of living and not expecting government cars to ferry me anywhere, I took a bus every day from the Dayal Singh College bus stop and walked from Jantar Mantar to Gurjari, the Gujarat State Handicrafts and Handloom Corporation showroom. Most times, the cheeky DTC (Delhi Transport Corporation) bus drivers would rev up the engine and speed away on seeing a young woman waiting at the stop. It was a game for them. I was so angry one day that I took an auto to Udyog Bhavan, marched into my husband’s office and let forth a tirade about the rotten Delhi transport system and how bureaucrats and ministers did not care for the common people since they never used it.

  ‘Calm down, yaar*, have a cup of coffee,’ Ashok offered, and laughed.

  But he still did not offer me our old personal Premier Padmini car which he needed to drive to work every day. We never used government cars for our own work. Today, the opposite is the norm.

  Soon, I had gathered a bunch of sympathizers at the bus stop across the road where the Dayal Singh College boys also waited every day. They had been watching my frustration and should have enjoyed it as they were considered the ‘goonda** college’ of town, but when I grumbled loudly since yet another bus had zoomed past with the driver grinning at me in evil pleasure, this gang stood in the middle of the road when the next bus came along and blocked its passage till the driver allowed me in. I was more thrilled with my first brush with a successful agitation and people’s power, than I was at being the wife of a supposedly important IAS officer who was very close to a minister and could thus avail of any undeserved comfort. When his anti-establishment minister—with silly tag names like agitationist, stormy petrel and rabble-rouser—heard this story a few days later, Ashok told me he was mighty pleased.

  ~

  Gaining acceptance at Gurjari was a funny process. The manager at the time thought I had come to displace him. To put me off, he gave me several large sheets with multiple columns listing code numbers of items, stock positions, prices and totals to fill in by hand from bill books; I took these home and worked on them till midnight for many days. He had hoped I would get fed up and run away. I was not given a chair or desk to sit for the first year and a half of my job, and so I sat at the end of the sales counters. It was only when I hesitantly raised it before the managing director
at the quarterly meeting at the head office in Ahmedabad that a small space was cleared for me in the Delhi showroom in a corner behind a pillar.

  The manager had his own unique expressions when speaking. For instance, fabric that wasn’t stiff was ‘limping’, according to him. When the highly popular film Satyam Shivam Sundaram came to town and Zeenat Aman was sizzling on the screen, everyone including our manager went to see it.

  ‘Picture kaisi thi?’ (How was the film?) I asked the following day.

  ‘Bas, sirf tie and dye, tie and dye, aur kuchh nahin, Jayaji.’ (It was just tie and dye, tie and dye, and nothing else, Jaya ji.)

  Since Zeenat’s sexy outfits in the film were mostly in Gujarati bandhni fabric which is tied and dyed, he thought it was the most suitable film review he could give me!

  I travelled all over Gujarat in an exhilarating decade of artistic discovery: Bhuj, Dhamadka, Morvi, Mandvi, Hodka, Deesa, Rajkot, Wadhwan, Surendranagar, Jamkhambaliya, Dang and Bharuch. In fact, there was no place the designers and I did not travel to, often in searing heat in a matador van without any thought of air conditioning. There was more often no electricity or running water in villages where we stopped for the night. We bathed behind scrub bushes with a small lota (a pot made of brass) of water and a gaggle of curious dusty children watching. In Dhamadka, from where the now-famous ajrakh-printed fabric emanated, was a regular working stop where we arranged sari layouts in dim lantern light and slept on bales of unbleached fresh cloth in the printer’s home while work was done. I noticed the adjoining farm had an electric line for its water pump to work. Mohammad bhai Siddiq bhai Khatri, an ajrakh-block printer, explained that farmers were given a line to run their electrical equipment. Around that time, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had asked industrialists in the country what they required to double production. I asked him the same question.

  ‘If we had electricity, we could work from 6 pm till midnight. If there is a storm, we can shut our windows and continue to work under light bulbs. With one power line we could double our work time and double our production,’ he explained. I wrote an article about this simple logic and sent it to The Indian Express. Many months later, when I visited Dhamadka again, Mohammad-bhai greeted me with an even bigger smile than usual.

  ‘See, Jaya-ben, we have lights now! I have a bigger workshed. We earned more so I built a comfortable sandaas (toilet) which you can use.’

  Apparently some sensible soul in the Gujarat State Electricity Board had seen my article, and encouraged by my inquiry about why an artisan couldn’t have an electric line like a farmer, had brought another line to the Khatri printers of the village!

  Mohammad bhai’s three sons, their wives and countless grandchildren are now all prosperous block printers in natural dyes, winning recognition and awards from all over the world. When I visited the village after the Kutch earthquake in January 2001, despite the death of his wife and granddaughter in the quake, the sense of enterprise of the family had not diminished. They had balanced their computer precariously on the debris and were sending scanned swatch samples to a client in Canada. Ismail, the second son headed a remarkable exercise in relocating ajrakh printers to a new village they proudly named Ajrakhpur. We should learn from them not to paste the names of political leaders everywhere. Even today, Ismail bhai telephones when he needs me to speak to someone in officialdom to expedite a file applying for a road, street lights and facilities for which he mobilizes funds from donors and the community itself. Their pride and self-reliance are great lessons that need to be learned by those who love to focus only on the woes of minority communities. The elder brother, Razzak bhai, voted for the Congress and had been Panchayat chief, while the younger brother campaigned successfully for a local BJP candidate, saying they give their vote to those who respond and deliver.

  After the Gujarat earthquake, Narendra Modi was made the chief minister of the state. I often requested his office to expedite files to help them in the relocation of their village. This support was readily given. I was keen that the chief minister provide a date for meeting the craftspersons of Kutch so that he could honour their achievements across the region after the earthquake, and extend his support to families like those in Ajrakhpur who have achieved so much for the good name and identity of Kutch. Unfortunately, I never got a positive response from his office. A good opportunity to highlight the excellent skills of this region and emphasize communal amity slipped away.

  ~

  Women in rural areas started many quiet revolutions. For me, the advantage of being a woman was the ability to enter their innermost living spaces and see their embroideries and skills to guide them directly instead of having to work through an intermediary. When women were encouraged to have bank accounts to save earnings from their work, the men began to respect them. Roles were often reversed. We hid our smiles when we saw husbands carrying the children and parcels while the woman walked ahead to meet us at the camp office in Bhuj.

  The Girasia jat community makes the finest embroidery pieces with pin-head sized mirrors embedded in the threads for their own garments. Once, they refused to undertake an order from one Mr Suri, an Indian businessman who supplied to Au Printemps, a well-known departmental store in Paris. He was desperate and telephoned me from Paris every morning to urge me to help him get the work done. I held a meeting in the village where women discussed how commercializing their work would offend their Mata, their female deity, and invite destruction upon their livestock or their village, and were therefore against their sacred beliefs. Though they were envious of the women in other villages earning from their embroidery work, the young women of this community were apprehensive. I left it to them to decide. Finally an old, wrinkled woman spoke up. She said, ‘Our Mata will not bring harm to us if our hearts are pure.’ She went into a long lecture, the gist of which turned out to be: ‘Give it a go, let’s do it!’ This old woman had had the most progressive voice. They began work and the yoke pieces for Paris were dispatched. Unfortunately, a short while later, Mr Suri suddenly died of a heart attack in Paris. The women, however, continued to supply their fine work for sale. Did bad fortune visit Mr Suri instead? I wonder.

  In hundreds of villages, we would explain patterns and new design layouts to make contemporary items for city use. From a drought-ridden economy to one held together by women’s earnings, Kutch turned itself around and has now become a must-visit spot for tour operators, designers, craft lovers and even the city elite who go to these ‘must-see’ places not to be outdone by their friends. I patiently listen to tales about the crafts of Kutch and the wonderful skills these new enthusiasts have discovered. I keep wondering how many times a tale has to be reinvented, a place rediscovered, a path further trodden before people learn to create their own fresh stories.

  ~

  Gurjari became famous. Its sales rose every month. It was a rage in branches that opened in Bombay, Calcutta and Bangalore (now Bengaluru) where I also helped with the renovation and interior decor to save the corporation money. Actors such as Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak, Teji Bachchan, social activist and mother of Amitabh Bachchan, even Sonia Gandhi in skirts and boots accompanying antique textile buyers from abroad, and budding actors from the National School of Drama like Neena Gupta—all made regular visits to Gurjari to grab the latest textiles. Teji Bacchhan, who loved to chat every time she came, told me that cultural activist and writer Pupul Jayakar had always got only three saris woven together on a loom; one for Teji Bacchhan, one for Indira Gandhi, and one for herself, after which the weaver was told not to replicate them for anyone else. But some of my experiences made me wish that the benefit of the craftspersons was uppermost in people’s minds which was not always the case. For instance, I had once asked a well-known film actress who often shopped at Gurjari to consider wearing a collection of saris designed by us in any of her forthcoming films and had requested that a line in the credits at the end of the film be carried: ‘Saris designed by the Gujarat State Handi
crafts Development Corporation’. She refused, saying she would not like to have everyone else wearing the same things she wore.

  I developed campaigns like ‘What’s new at Gurjari’ and bags printed with ‘See you at Gurjari’, which were phrases often uttered by customers. Bank employees, school teachers and students all started wearing Gurjari-style clothes and shawls. Young Indian fashion took birth, and the silly word ‘ethnic’ which Britishers originally used for natives became a description for Indian handcrafted clothes. Not bad for a place I had discovered in a condition where 75 per cent of the merchandise was junk and the accounts were in the red. We were one of the very few public sector undertakings that fulfilled a social purpose and made profits as well. It also set the lead for other emporia to follow. Ultimately, India Today did a multi-page story on 30 April 1988 on the success of Gurjari, a government emporium no less. There was a small picture of me captioned ‘the brainchild’. There I was at a danger signal which I did not recognize, as I was still in an innocent phase of public life.

  A steady procession of managing directors at Gurjari were open-minded, courteous and positive. The organization progressed with better outcomes. In 1987, the Uttar Pradesh Export Corporation asked if I would be a consultant for their handicrafts division as well. Travelling to remote villages and discovering so much talent in miserable surroundings made it even more challenging and exciting to create new ways of improving skills and lives.

  In my experience, Uttar Pradesh was more rigid in its attitude towards progress. Craftspersons were more apathetic towards any hope for betterment there. Feudal attitudes of the mai-baap sarkar were still dominant despite officers being well-intentioned. This showed in the patronizing and condescending manner in which they spoke to artisans. They made it clear that they did not want any physical discomfort while travelling. Officers who travelled with me carried briefcases and couldn’t squat on floors because of their tight three-piece suits. When I took Laila Tyabji, a friend who had decided to work in crafts, on a tour, we walked through the dirty lanes of Ferozabad where the gutters overflowed with all manner of filth in a sudden downpour. Arriving at the Tundla station at 2 am to wait for a train at 6 am we found one waiting room full. We went to another one and lay down to sleep on a large dining table for want of any other space. A posse of policemen arrived and woke us up, shouting for us to leave and make way for the Director General of Police or DG Sahib. I could see the DG Sahib waiting behind the screen so I loudly remarked that his Sahib would not like to be found turning two women out onto the platform in the middle of the night for his convenience. The senior officer got the message and hurriedly asked his men to leave us alone. Unlike Gujarat, UP was full of this sort of officiousness.