Why we are Pandits

Pandit Nehru on his Mekhal,
 carrying a Mulberry stick 

This is a ‘Did you know it was all thanks to Bhan Saheb!’ post.

[…] the circumstances under which the Brahman Bhattas of  Kashmir came to be called Pandits. Briefly, it would seem that, after the incorporation of Kashmir into the Mughal empire, quite a few of those Brahmans who migrated out of Kashmir attracted attention and even rose high at the imperial court, first in Agra and then in Delhi. In recognition of their sevices to the emperor or their scholarship, or both, suitable titles were conferred upon them. These were similar to those conferred upon distinguished Muslims. One such successful emigre, Jai Narain Bhan, was elevated to the status of a Raja. It was he who reportedly asked that Kashmiri Brahmans should be addressed as ‘Pandit’ and not by such honorifics as ‘Khuajah’. The request was granted by emperor Muhammad Shah (1719-49) (Sender 1988: 43 [Source: Henny Sender’s The Kashmiri Pandits: A Study of Cultural Choice in North India (Delhi, 1988), the name is given as Jai Ram Bhan]). Subsequently, ‘Pandit’ became established as the community name of Kashmiri Brahmans living outside Kashmir. In more recent times it has emerged as on of the ethonyms of the Bhatta of Kashmir.

~ from The T.N. Madan Omnibus

Tinsel Workers. Kashmir-Jammu.Then-Now.

“Photograph of tinsel workers in Jammu & Kashmir in India, taken by an unknown photographer in the 1890s. This image shows three seated workers with the tools of their trade. The tinsel wires are made of silver, or silver coated with gold leaf, and made into a bar in the shape of a candle, which is then forced through a series of holes on a steel plate to obtain increasingly fine-gauged lengths. Traditionally the wire was then wound onto a reel, as seen in the photograph, attached at the other end to a jantar, another steel plate, which allowed for futher refining of the gauge, and wires no thicker than a hair were obtained this way. A tola (180 grains of metal) usually produced 600 to 1,200 yards of wire.”
via: British Library

The frilly things seen dangling  in the above photographs are the Atahoor worn by Kashmiri pandit women in their ears (more often around the time of marriage festivities). These are not usually made of metal wires anymore, instead they are now made of synthetic (Sulma/Tillathreads. And since there aren’t many Atah wearing Pandit women left in valley anymore, the trade of these shiny things (along with some other shiny things like ‘shiny golden’ Kangri, employed for some ceremonies during marriage rites) has now moved to Jammu.

2012. Link Road. Jammu.

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Gold Diggers of Jammu

Not as famous as the giant gold digging ants of our state, these guys scavenge the drains of Jammu city’s Jain Bazaar for gold that inevitable finds its way into the drains while being processed in shops. The drains of Jain bazaar are leased out to various people for gold digging.

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Winter Neighbours from Kargil

I like the way Jammu looks in winter. Last year, the neighbours were a couple of college kids from Drass who played cricket on the roof-top all day long. This years it’s the family of a stone-crusher worker from Kargil.

With her grand-daughter, Subril. She was the one who started the conversation.
 ‘Aap ka Naam kya hai’.
That according to her grandfather is the best she can manage in urdu till now. 

Believes it is right that the girls should be married young.
‘If boys go ‘haywire’ no one asks anything, but the world stops in case of girls.’
I have no clue why he picked this subject to open talks with me but I believe he must have been talking to my father lately.

Working on a necklace of beads and a sweater for her grand-daughter

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The boy likes to enact chest beating of Muharram.
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The T.N. Madan Omnibus

I read most of the essays in this book during my daily commute in Delhi Metro. On some days I did come across Pandits in transit while reading this book. Young men going to work, or returning from work, old women with their gold danglers, the dejhoors. going to relatives, or returning home. At various times while reading this book these thoughts did occur to me, these old thoughts, ‘I was born in a household where relations had names like Raja Papa, Aunty Mummy, Sahba Nanu, Bairaj Nanu, Nanu, Bhabhi, Didi, Babli Didi, Nishu kay Papa and so on and so forth. What strange ways to denote relationships! Notations that hardly give any clue about the true nature of kinship. Why this encapsulation? I now know that Pandits deemed it inappropriate to call people by their true names in terms of pure kinship terminlogy. I recalled a funny discussion between my Uncle and grandmother about ‘correct’ time for filing finger nails. It’s the Bhattil way, the Kashmiri Pandit way, as I now know. The Pandit ‘do and don’t’ prescribed and followed by Pandits. Their way of life. Our way of life explained in a complex set of dos and mostly don’t. I remember the frown of my nani occasioned by me jumping over some old ladies legs! The ye lagni karun frown. I remembered my questioning, my whys. I now realize that the self-doubt, the questioning, is also Bhattil. I  now understand the meaning of ‘Havelyat ti Dasdar‘, a term often deployed by my grandmother. I recalled that one of the most crucial events in my grandmother’s life was indeed the division of a Chulah. It happened sometime in 1970s, but an event she still recalls like it happened yesterday – how after death of her mother-in-law all the women of the clan set-up their own hearths. She would often talk how the division was done, how the corners were set. I recalled my own half-hearted attempts to draw a sketch of the house in which I was born. And then in this book, I found the floor plan of a typical Pandit household, and even-though the house I was born in was in the city and the plans laid bare in this book were based on Pandit houses in rural areas, I realized all the Pandit houses were essentially designed the same way. The kitchen, the stairs, the temple room, the Wooz, the brand, the Thokur Kuth...all had a fixed probable spot in the Pandit floor plan for a house. I read the reason for the intense love a Pandit has for his physical house, and not just the concept of it. I recalled my attempts to draw my family line (I could barely get past the 4th line). In one of the essays I read the author lament about the fact that barely any of his subjects could trace his family tree beyond 3rd or 4th genertion. Lamentations, there are quite a few in this book, old laments uttered like they were a judgement on the present state of Pandit affairs, laments one still hears, laments like, ‘They are an unorganized leaderless group, proud of their past, confused about their present, and uncertain of the future.’* And yet I couldn’t help but read this book like it was a grand celebration of life and a celebration of man’s heroic efforts to make sense of it, to make sense of his constructs and the ensuring environments.

 The essays in this book are based on a pioneering field study carried out by T.N. Madan in 1957-58 in twin village hamlets of Utrassu-Umanagri (still remembered as Votaros-Brariangan by Pandits), 12 miles east of Anantnag. The essays, catalogued in this book under ‘Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir’, were first published in 1967 and have since been re-published a number of times. Back when the writer started his studies, there were only a handful of anthropological studies of Indian communities available (most notably ‘Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India’ (1952) and ‘Changing Kinship Usages in the Setting of Political and Economic Change among the Nayars of Malabar’ (1952)) but with his writings and more so by his approach, Madan added new dimensions and opened new frontiers for further such studies. Given any other community, writings of this nature would have been treated as a Bible of sorts and yet Madan remains least quoted an authority on Kashmir. He remains a well known name (a cousin informed me that he is the father-in-law of Bhajan Sopori’s son*) but I suspect his work remains not so widely read within the community about which he wrote. His writings (and his life) ought to be the toast of the community. But, this sadly isn’t the case. Why should the student’s of his birth state not be encouraged to sample his writings and as an assignment try and write along similar lines on their own social set-up? I mean here is a man who in the aftermath of 1990 never dropped his objectivity, this even after witnessing his subject material dissolve at a pace perhaps never witnessed by any social scientist in the world. The Pandits of Votaros-Brariangan are now scattered in Udhampur, Jammu, Delhi and even US. The temple around which the villages were build was destroyed in 1992 in the aftermath of Babri Masjid. (The delicious irony, the village was set by a sanyasi, a renouncer). Even though his sadness at all this loss is quite visible in his later writings (in prefaces and introductions to various later editions of the book, and in his various later essays on Kashmir issue ), and even though he acknowledges the dagger of communalism digging deep into the hearts of even his own near and dear ones (his sister, who actually can claim to be the first person to have written an anthopological paper of Pandits of Kashmir, post 1990 became an ‘Anti-Muslim’ [read this interview from 2009]), even as he wrote about ‘no hope’, his own faith in hope, in people and more importantly in  ‘written word’ never Waivered. That is courage. Scholarship. Without doubt such as a man deserves respect and his writing ought to be not just respected but read and engaged with.

I completed reading this book in Jammu, just a few days away from my Mekhal ceremony and my sister’s wedding. After I finished reading the book, I read out the proverbs (collected by him during his field study) given in this book, in my broken tongue, to my grand-mother, her daughter-in-laws and sons. Between them, they managed to complete almost all the proverbs before I could even get to the second word. There was much wonder and laughter. My wonder and their laughter. The reading session even drew the interest of my grandfather who is slowly loosing his memory. Later, a grand-aunt (FaFaBroWi) burnt some Izband in a Kangri while singing. ‘Izband Kangiray Tiss Tiss Droy, Sharika Aayay Lol Barnay’ and then they all went back to singing leelas of Parmanand and Krishna Razdan, digging into their lyrics books and memories.

I write all this while warming my feet over a Kangri, wrapped in a laif, even as the afternoon winter sun in Jammu is at its magnificent best.

Tok and Bricks. Jammu. 2012.

Photographs from the book -“Utrassu-Umanagri”(1957-58)

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The T.N. Madan Omnibus
The Hindu Householder
Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir

Non-Renunciation: Themes and Interpretation of Hindu Culture
(2010, Oxford University Press. Rs. 750.)
For those in India:
Buy The T.N. Madan Omnibus: The Hindu Householder from Flipkart.com

* correction [14 June, 2017]: Prof. Madan’s daughter Vandana Madan wrote in to say:

“His older brother Prof.D.N. Madan is Bhajan Sopori’s father in law”

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Initially Madan wanted to do a study of ‘values’ among the pundits of Kashmir but was advised against it by his mentors. But after proving a typical Kashmiri Pandit to be a householder who has little time for thoughts of renunciation, in the next set of essays cataloged under ‘Non-Renunciation: Themes and Interpretation of Hindu Culture’, Madan moves to values and goes on to explore the associated themes at length. The most interesting of these is the essay on ‘Asceticism and Eroticism’. Here he innovatively chooses to study works of fiction to present his thesis – three works specifically: Bhagvaticharan Varma’s Hindi novel Chitraleka (1933), U.R. Anantha Murthy’s Kannada novel Samskara (1965), translated into English by A.K. Ramanujan, and Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar’s Marathi novel Yayati (1959), rendered into Hindi by Moreshvar Tapasvi.

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Epilogue to the book offers Madan’s memories of ‘Growing up in a Kashmiri Hindu Household’. It was a shock to know that he too grew up on the story of ‘Gagri Gagri‘, a sad tale of a lady mouse who lost her ear in a domestic fight over missing khichdi. It’s a story I too grew up on. My grandmother still remembers it, in parts. As I asked her to sing me a line, my favorite line, in which the lady mouse has her ear blown by a Kajwot thrown by her husband, one of my aunts (Anita Didi, FaBroWi) filled in with her favorite part, where the husband tries to convince her to return back to her. The ending of the story (death of the lady mouse, as recounted by Madan) came as a surprise to Anita Didi. But then she agreed that the ending was appropriate as the heavy pleading by the husband made more sense in such a scenario. [This story is going on my ‘to do someday’ list. Inputs are welcome.]

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 *Madan was in fact describing the impact of land re-distribution on the Pandits of rural Kashmir in 1950s: “An instance of the lack of solidarity among Kashmiri Pandits may be seen in their attitude to the recent political and economic changes in the State. These changes have had, among other consequences, the effect of endangering the economic solvency of the Pandits. All households that owned more than 23 acres have lost the land exceeding that limit to their tenants; the tenant’s share on agriculture produce has been raised, benefitting the Muslims more than the pandits, because not many Pandits have been tenants; and government jobs have been thrown open to the Muslims on a favoured treatment basis. In the face of the rising economic and political power of the Muslims, it might have been expected that the Pandits would evolve a common approach to their relations with the Muslims; but they have not. They are divided into two opinion groups; those who want to co-operate with the Muslims and work for a united village community, and those who want to seek protection from the government as a religious minority. They are an unorganised leaderless group, proud of their past, confused about their present, and uncertain of the future.”

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Dal Diving, 1954

Female, Swimsuits and Swimmers. Another thing missing in contemporary images of Kashmir. 
I came across this photograph in ‘Guide to Kashmir’, a tourist brochure published by The Tourist Traffic Branch, Ministry of Transport New Delhi, 1954.
 [Complete Booklet To Be Posted, soon. Update: Posted Guide to Kashmir, 1954]
From ‘Honolulu’ to ‘Heena’. 
I believe I spotted a ‘bathing boat’ named Heena at the same spot, in 2008. 
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Kashmir by Charles W. Bartlett

English painter Charles W. Bartlett (1860-1940) visited Kashmir in 1913 as part of his 18-month world tour. Later, based on his travel sketchbooks and journals, he went on to paint some really pieces of art in Hawai. 
Here is Kashmir by Charles W. Bartlett.  

Dal Lake, Kashmirby Charles W. Bartlett, 1916 

Village Temple, Kashmir by Charles W. Bartlett, 1919
(Above two via: hanga.com)

Kashmir Family, 1935
(via:frazerfineart.com)
Mother and Child, 1916. Perhaps the best of his work. Or perhaps one of the finest paintings on Kashmir. Or just an image of Madonna. Or an image of Kashmir. Proverbial Maej Kasheer.
(via: robynbuntin.com, do check it out for more details on this paiting)

Kashmiri men often speak of Kashmiri women as bacha parast, devotees of child. Almost a response by women, a Kashmiri proverb goes,’Halaluk ya haramuk, panani dambik nav reth‘, Legitimate or illegitimage, nine months of one’s own womb.’ 




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Vintage Ladakh

Photographs of Ladakh region from ‘Beyond the Pir Panjal life and missionary enterprise in Kashmir’ by Ernest F. Neve (1914, first published in 1912).


Zoji La Pass

Moulbe Buddha

Lamoyora Monastery

Rock art Khalatze dated 200-300 B.C.

Alchi Temple

Leh Palace view

Town view of Leh

The Dance



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A paintings of Leh from ‘Travels in Ladâk, Tartary, and Kashmir’ (1862) by Henry D’Oyley

Panorama Leh
Village of Hensko near Photo La Pass (thirteen thousand feet)
Village of Kardong, Lakoul 
Moravion Mission House, Kardong

Buddhist Monastery Near Leh

j

Busqo village Ladakh

Bridge over Indus

Kerboo-Surgol
Gyam Ladakh
Pass of Bara Lacha
Suru River

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Kashmir, 1912

Photographs from ‘Beyond the Pir Panjal life and missionary enterprise in Kashmir’ by Ernest F. Neve (1914, first published in 1912). Photographs are by Dr. Neve himself unless mentioned otherwise. The rest of the photographs are by popular photographer from Sialkot R.E. Shorter (check out his kashmir work here and here). Besides Shorter, we have G. W. Millais (Geoffrey W. Millais, son of Sir John Millais, his previously featured here and here), we have famous Biscoe, and we have new names like G.W. Possnet and two very Indian, B.D. Chadda and Shiv Nath (Vishwanath?).

Crossing the Indus on a Raft of inflated Sheepskins. [More on crossing rivers on dead skin, later]
Konsa Nag, a the foot of Brahma Peaks

Mount Tatticooti, highest peak in Pir Panjal range

Saussurea, last flower found on Pir Panjal heights

Street view Anantnag/Islamabad

Kashmiri Villagers

Peasant holding Kangri

Fair at Hazrat Bal

Mar Canal.
Many old travelogues call this bridge ‘Merchant’s Bridge’.
This should be ‘Bohri Kadal’, Bohris being the Punjabi merchant class of Kashmir

(I think is should be Tsont-i-kul or Apple tree Canal?)

Shah-Hamadan

Previously posted here from a year 1904 book but now identified to have been shot by  R.E. Shorter (which also means that the photographs posted here are actually probably a decade or so older that the stated 1912)

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Leave and Arrive

Habba Kadal, 2008

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked 
I cried to dream again.

This blog is now definitely floating in some strange waters. A couple of weeks ago my sister went to Jim Corbett National Park with her colleagues for an ‘Office Picnic. The place she works for, an IT firm based around Noida, has quite a lot Kashmiri Muslims on its payroll. In fact, the firm has a mini-branch of a sort operating from Srinagar.  It was simple, they hired a Kashmiri in Delhi who good at what he did and they got him to hire some more. Because the work involves technology, the firm was just as happy having them work from Srinagar. For the Picnic these outstation employees were also invited. So at Jim Corbett my sister got to interact with some Kashimiri Muslims. Her impression of them was of the usual type: one a bright beautiful girl but head ever covered and other a decent, honest, zealous boy who asks questions like, ‘So, why did you leave?’

On that infamous January night in 1990, my mother and sister were at my Massi’s place in Chanpora while I was at home with my Grandmother in Chattabal.

‘Your sister, who must have been 6 at the time, was quite a screamer as a kid ( in fact still is), master in the art of Baakh. When the loudspeakers from the mosques started their death songs about creating a new paradise on earth, your devil little sister, probably disapproving, or perhaps afraid or just hungry, or just for the fun of it, started crying at the top of her lungs. Your mother and I tried to console her as we were terrified that the sounds emanating  from her loudspeaker were going to attract the attention of whoever was singing the hit number  ‘Death to Kafirs’ from the mosque. After all our attempts to reason with her failed, we did the only thing we could think of: we stuffed her mouth with Parle-G biscuits, chunks and chunks of it. Megha chup ho Ja! Megha Dam Kar! Please shut up! That shut her up good and we again focused back our attention to the long-winding sermon from the mosque.The sermon stopped a few hours before dawn, it stopped just as suddenly as it had started. It was only next morning that we realized that it was all probably audio-taped sermons imported from Pakistan. No one could have stayed up that late into the night just to sit in front of a microphone and talk about killing. Most of it was in Urdu, in any case. Next morning, I asked a neighbour about happenings of the last night, but only to be greeted by silence. Not a word was spoken. As if he didn’t hear anything.’

At this point my Massi’s narrative as broken by her Bahu who added:

‘Yes, I too remember the night. When the sermon started, my mother shut me and my younger sister in a storeroom under a staircase.’

‘Where did you used to live?’

‘Jawahar Nagar. The night was same all over the city.’

I don’t remember what happened that night in Chattabal. I have no recollection of it. All those nights are the same to me now. All I remember is that just around that time we stopped sleeping in Naya Kambra, the room closer to the outer wall and started spending nights in the Thokur Kuth, the main God Room, all eight of us. Those days, there were stories of people getting killed in sleep, in their beds. We stopped sleeping. I slept.

Given the nature of this blog, one would expect that I have a lot of Kashmiri Muslim friends or that at least I interact a lot with them or that I interact a lot with Muslims. That  definitely is not the case. As a Kid, growing up in Jammu, I did have a lot of Kashmiri Muslim ‘Cricket’ friends who taught me reverse swing. I had a Muslim friend in college who regaled me with stories like the one about Muslim men planning to melt all of American Gold at Fort Knox by crashing mercury filled plane into it. Given my ‘Muslim Parast‘ concerns, one would think I must be hanging out with Muslims all the time. That  definitely is not the case. In fact, I became conscious of this fact only last year when hoping to join my family for a holiday on 2nd October, I reached my mother’s place only to realize that she along with my sister had gone to the wedding of a U.P. Muslim friend of my sister somewhere deep in Ghaziabad. It occurred to me that even though I have read a bunch of books on Islam and Muslims, and even though my sister has read none, it was she who can now say that she has been to a Muslim wedding and not I. In fact, I am sure she doesn’t even think of it as a big deal. ‘You live there, We live here.’ is how she simply answered the question, ‘Why did you leave?’

I am writing all this after running into a Kashmiri Muslim from Baramulla last night at a Lohri ‘Party’ thrown by a bunch of couples from Ranchi and Kota living in Dwarka. It was a ‘beganay ki shaadi may Abdullah deewana‘ kind of scene for me as I just knew onlt one of the guys and that too only because we briefly worked together. On realizing that I am a Kashmiri, one of the hosts pointed to a guy in the room, a college buddy of his, and said, ‘He too is a Kashmiri.’ Indians are generally ignorant about complexities of ‘Masla-e-Kashmir’, this ignorance is often a cause of heartburn for Kashmiris but in this particular case, it somehow gave me pleasure that these simple working guys knew nothing about our history and didn’t care about its complexities. To them, we both were just Kashmirirs. Just when you put people in cozy, comfortable definitions, people break out of them. And so I met a fellow Kashmiri and we started a brief conversation with the usual questions, ‘So, where do you live?’ ‘Where I used to live! Well, you know Chatchbal.’

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