Lamakaan : A Space with a Soul

Views from Lamakaan, Hyderabad

The black board that welcomes you is filled with information written in white chalk. As I am told there is a cafe inside, instinctively I search of the menu on it. Menu it is though,  of a different kind; if you are thirsty and hungry for some aesthetical spread, it is all here at Lamakaan, an oasis in the middle of the upmarket urban sprawl of the Banjara Hills in Hyderabad. Lamakaan, the emerging and thriving cultural hub of the city has not only the best productions of theatre, music , monologues, writers' interactions, book launches and exhibitions to offer but also moderately sweetened tea served in glasses and small samosas and also bondas, all for Rs 20/- (compare it with the minimum two dollar fares in the other cafes that dot the urban landscapes). The three level space is full by evening five o'clock, and surprisingly youngsters talk to each other! Some of them do have laptops opened before them, but they too are animatedly conversing with their friends. Lamakaan is a no-smoking zone but it definitely not a no-mobile phone zone, yet no one seems to look at their mobiles. A rarity indeed.

A music concert at Lamakaan

Coming from Delhi, I am reminded of the legendary Indian Coffee House at Connaught Place, where the writers, artists, intellectuals politicians, film-makers and so on met regularly to discus issues as if there was not tomorrow, over endless cups of coffee and the patent worthy cutlets, in those good old days. Having a lot to do with Kolkata, sculptor KS Radhakrishnan remembers those 'addas' in Park Street and Shakespeare Sarani. Brought up in Mumbai, theatre and film personality, Arundhati Nag cannot help gushing about the Samovar Cafe at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Kalaghoda and the Prithvi Theatre surroundings which had inspired her to realise her dream theatre Ranga Shankara in Bangalore. I am in good and famous company. We are suddenly engulfed by the auditory, olfactory and sonic ambience of Lamakaan. Small Aloo bondas dissolve on our palettes, washed down  by tea served in glasses which a Mumbaikar would spontaneously call as 'cutting chai'.

Multipurpose cafe space at Lamakaan

Lamakaan has been active in the city for the last six years. Even before that the place was already there and it was slowly being nurtured by veteran photographer, Hasan, who like Chandigarh's Nekchand, loved rocks.Hasan travelled all over Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka and to the place where his rock love would take him and kept taking photographs of rocks! Madness to the ordinary eyes, Hasan's passion has resulted into a huge repertoire of rock photographs and it could be easily the sociology and ecology of rocks in South India to the expert's and exalted eyes. A few of which are exhibited at the side walls along the stairs that lead to the second level where music, dance and other choreography are rehearsed. Itinerant artists are also accommodated in that modest room.

 KS Rashakrishnan and Arundhati Nag with Akshay from Lamakaan

Rocks are everywhere. The amphi-theatre where we sit and sip our tea and converse with Akshay, a young cultural enthusiast who grew weary of his job in event management and advertising companies, and has now taken up the position as a program manager Lamakaan, has a backdrop of two huge rocks that resemble a saucer over a cup. Lights and sound systems are in place. Arundhati Nag who knows the troubles, first hand, of running such a place wonders how Lamakaan is managed. " We generate funds by running the cafe" says Akshay.  "Seven young boys manage the cafe. The food is modest but in good quality. During the lunch hours one has to wait for ten minutes to find a place to sit and eat. They don't just come, eat and go. They slowly develop a soul relationship with the place. They get their friends. They develop interest in theatre, music, films and literature. With no persuasion per se, they all become our patrons."

Theatre workshop at Lamakaan

Run by a trust that resists corporate funding for ethical reasons are solely funded by canteen, contributions and the meagre rent yielded from programs. "We keep a left of the centre policy. So we have the support of most of the university educated youngsters" Akshay says "It is not that we don't make any profit, we do make profit but we reinvest it in the programs, and notably we are over-booked. It is a happy scenario overall but it has its own teething problems."

Open air theatre with rock backdrop

Banjara Hills in Hyderabad is the abode of the rich and powerful. Road No 1where Lamakaan is located however is surrounded by the middle class and upper middle class  who have a problem with sounds and people. Insulated by economics and discretion these rich people found a threat in Lamakaan as it started attracting more and more people. Citing the theatre sounds, the noises of rehearsals and so on as public nuisance, some people around filed a case against the establishment last year. With the city's intellectuals and artists rising up in rebellion against the move to close down Lamakaan, the government quashed its move to curb the activities of the blooming cultural centre and directed the organisation to be careful as the road congestion that its programs could create especially during the weekends.

Development and modernisation are the aspects that eat into the old cultural hubs and turn them into glass, steel and concrete edifices that emanate heat than cultural and spiritual energy. Politics and religion of late have started taking away the available spaces for setting up memorials and religious establishments or places of worship. The mental spaces for discussing cultural issues are also shrinking quite fast due to direct and indirect ideological threats. Seen against this grim backdrop, liberal, intellectual and artistic spaces like Lamakaan should be conserved, preserved and cherished.
" The next plot lying vacant is under litigation, Once it is lifted, we don't know what would come up there; a mall or perhaps a high rise. Then Lamakaan may have to develop new strategies of survival" Akshay looks into the darkening surrounding with hope.

About Monkeys and Us

Monkeys. They come uninvited into your homes through the windows that you have forgotten to latch and the air holes. They raid your refrigerators, ravage the wardrobes and topple the tastefully arranged statuettes in the drawing rooms. They defecate and urinate all over, even in the most unexpected places in your bedroom leaving the home reek in their stench for many days to come. You make complaints to the residence welfare association secretary who in turn would alert the municipality or corporation authorities who if kind enough would send the monkey catchers to the area later. When the monkey catchers come with their traps and crackers, they would find no monkeys around for they might have gone to other places to raid.

Why do monkeys come into the homes that we live? They do not come to attack us; nor do they have any interest in vandalising our homes. They do what is natural to them. They come into the homes when none is around in order to find some food. We often say that monkeys steal food. They don’t steal food, they look for it and when they find it they take it away for it is natural to them; seeking food and taking it. One may ask why then they get into the wardrobes and upset the setting of the interiors. They do it because it is natural to them; that’s what they do, a little bit of frolicking and merry making after food or in search of food. They eat food and go back and before going back they may defecate or urinate where they are. Don’t we do the same? We eat to our heart’s and stomach’s fill and they look for a loo to empty our bowels. We do it in the toilets and washrooms and monkeys do where they find themselves. They really do not intend to upset you with their piss and shit. Do we upset other people when we use washrooms in the places wherever we are?

Monkeys come to our homes because the places where our homes stand today were their natural habitats years back. They were the rightful authorities of these places where we dwell today. There were full of trees laden with flowers and fruits; there were several herbs that they knew by instinct could heal many an illness. Their habitations were autonomous and mutually sustaining. Monkeys did not pluck more than they needed from the trees; they also did not destroy the tender shoots and flowers for the sake of it. They enjoyed doing a bit of revelry by hanging from the branches or jumping from one tree to the other. They respected other creatures in the forest and the co-habitation was more or less harmonious. Monkeys, like many other creatures helped the trees in pollination and seed distribution. The plot of life was going smooth till the developers came and destroyed the forests and made the clearings into huge apartment complexes. In the gated communities you created your own rules and regulations and gave the security guards all rights to scare away the monkeys.

                                          

When we talk about and against colonialism do we really think about the kind of colonialisms that we have been performing in our own habitats? We have colonised the natural lands of the monkeys and other creatures. Then we started talking about our rights as well as their rights. We never thought about those monkeys once they had evicted from their own forests that we had invaded to create high rise apartments. Once in a while, we become very conscious of the life in the nature and natural life; so we buy books about natural life and read them till we fall asleep. We grow a few trees and plants and someone out of pity and more selfishness rear pet creatures at home. This they believe would compensate all the wrongs that the human beings have done to the monkeys and other creatures of the forests. How many of us think about monkeys on a daily basis? We hardly think about them. We hardly think about the people who live in forests and in the peripheries. What difference do we make between monkeys and the forest dwellers?

 We might have forgotten about the monkeys. But they have not. They come back not with vengeance but ridden heavy with memories. Have you seen monkeys sitting on our water tanks and looking at the rising sun? Have you seen monkeys on the high ledges sitting precariously and seen like silhouettes of brooding philosophers at the cliffs and watching a beautiful sunset? What do you think? Do you think that they have come to raid your fridges? No, they have come to see the places where their ancestors had lived. They look at the sun the way their forefathers used to sit and watch the rising and the setting sun. Holding the babies close to their breasts monkey mothers tell them about the life they had once lived in these forests that have become concrete jungles now. They know that they have been an evicted lot and the land belongs to them naturally. But they do not have any paper documents to prove that it belongs to them. Their land is the land in their minds and souls. They do not come with an intention to steal the food items in your fridges. They creep into your homes because that’s how they used to do in the trees when they were living there. It is genetic. Monkeys do not forget. Even if some of them forget, the genetic inscription is so deep that they would remember at some point in their lives as the acidic memories melt down through the grooves of those inscriptions.

In the mud path of the park where I go for morning walk, I see a person standing awkwardly and turning his neck as if in a twitching and looking at me approaching. I look ahead of that man waiting and see a pack of monkeys sitting and eating some crumbs of biscuits that some religious morning walker had spilled there for the use of birds, stray dogs, ants and monkeys. I saw two right in the middle of the path and many other in the thickets along the walkway. I walk straight and the man joins me. He tells me that if we are two the monkeys don’t attack us. I tell him that even if you are alone they will not attack you for they are living their lives and you are living yours. So long as you do not pick up a stick or stone to throw at them they are not interested in you. You walk or not walk, you go for your job or not, they are least bothered. They are in their natural habitat in the forest like park. They pick up the crumbs because they see them there. Otherwise they eat the tender shoots of the plants and the unknown fruits hanging from the trees. Even the stray dogs do not bite you, I tell him because they are not really interested in you, I mean the human beings. It is us who are afraid of the natural creatures and we think that they will attack us. This fear, I believe has come from the understanding that we have encroached in to their natural territories. Colonizers always create forts and military structures to protect themselves from the people whom they rule over because they are afraid of dispossessing the people of their natural rights. Our politicians also do the same and they create a militaristic nation because they also know that they have dispossessed their own people. We are the monkey men and women but still we consider ourselves better than monkeys. 

Exclusive or Inclusive Performance Art Hardly Matches up with Performing Art

(Dancer Chandralekha)

Late dancer Chandralekha stopped doing Bharatanatyam at her prime age and at the peak of success and fame. Chandralekha says in a documentary directed by the television news veteran Sasikumar for the now defunct PTI Television that she did not find any connect between the dance form and theme that she did then and her own being. The shepherdesses were still churning milk and carrying the butter pots in their heads. Naughty Krishna was still teasing them and stealing the butter away with his truant friends. What did this enacting of a ‘performative event’ do either to the dancer or to the audience? Apart from displaying the virtuoso of the dancer what purpose did it serve? Why it was necessary for all the girls who danced to keep an unfading smile on their lips? What about those dancers who seldom smiled? Chandralekha felt that school of dancing quite oppressive and choking. She left the stage with a career well begun but not even a quarter done. Chandralekha went into hibernation for almost twenty four long years and re-emerged on stage with her experimental dance works that changed the history of contemporary Indian dance.

 (Dancer Leela Samson)

My intention here is not to write about Chandralekha for which I find myself ill equipped despite having the confidence of dealing with contemporary dance as yet another form of art. I was at the Ignite Festival of Contemporary Dance organised by the Gati Dance forum in an unusual venue in Chattarpur, South Delhi. While releasing a book on contemporary dance in India (Tilt Pause Shift- Dance Ecologies in India edited by Anita Cheriyan), noted danseuse and former chairperson of the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi, Leela Samson exclaimed about the categories that have come up in the dance scene of late. “Who decides what is contemporary and what is traditional or classical? Who are you dancing for? Who is your audience?” The questions sounded almost familiar as it is in art or music and the methodologies used for unpacking these loaded issues felt more or less the same for/in all the art genres. However, I feel that one has to wait for many more years so that there could be a strong culture of exchanges between/among various art genres for the simple reason that expertise brings in some sort of exclusivity to the art form and it resists the efforts of other genres to share the platform. Hence, even if the performance art practitioners try to share platform with the performing art practitioners including the contemporary theatre actors the former would look ridiculously naive in front of the highly trained performing artists. The same is applicable when the performing artists try to incorporate the finer values of contemporary visual art (fine art) into their works of art.

(a relevant image used here got me into a copyright issue with a relative of the artist in question here suggesting to pay me for the image. Hence I am using a proxy image from the net)

However liberal the disciplines are, interdisciplinarity has some weak areas in it mainly because of the linguistic and formal limitations as well as possibilities. What a painterly language capable of may not find similar resonances in music or theatre, even if we insist there are such areas of overlapping. The exposed areas in such overlapping makes interdisciplinarity always an awkward attempt in generating inclusive art forms rather than creating harmoniously fused works of art through absolute juxtapositions. One of the art forms involved in the interdisciplinary act has to take a backseat or a secondary position either by becoming a backdrop of the other art form involved or a prop for it to use conveniently. Attempt to fuse various art forms in a single production is not a new thing. I remember Alakananda Samarth performing the Myth of Medea with Nalini Malani’s specially designed works of art for the performance. When Samarth did her act, Malani’s works became just props and backdrop for her performance; without that performance, seen as autonomous works of art, Malani’s works looked out of context and less aesthetical. Many artists have done stage props and designs for theatre productions but they were never called interdisciplinary works. But today there is an insistence on this term. I happen to watch the performance of a performing theatre artist, Nimmy Raphael in her production titled ‘Nidravathwa’. Though thematically twisted beyond recognition and cognition, the performance was convincing as the actor could make use of her body and the theatre space with minimum props. Now, if I am asked to compare Rapheal’s performance with that of any contemporary artist today doing performances elsewhere in the country, I would say, they should better stick to their primary training than foraying into the realm of performance for the performers need (or have) a deep and thorough physical and mental culture which the itinerant performance artists lack not only in India but also elsewhere in the world.

(Nimmy Raphael performing Nidrawata)

This perfection that we see on stage of contemporary theatre and dance automatically attributes autonomy to those works of art which in turn resist any kind of intrusion by other works of art. True, a performance piece makes use of sonic ambience, supporting actors in their physical absence or presence, light and sound engineering, music and so on. One should contemplate on this; could a music piece involved in a theatre production and its creator be called an interdisciplinary interventionist rather than a supporter or a creative collaborator or simply a part of the production team? An interdisciplinary work is possible only when one work of art supplements and complements the other work of art involved in it and vice versa. I would say the music or light used in Rapheal’s work or in that case even Leela Samson’s or Chandralekha’s work is never an absolute necessity provided if the dancer or the actor decides the work to be performed in full day light with natural sonic ambience to the effect of the original production. If the effect of the work of art is hampered by the lack or removal of the original production components then we could say that they are interdisciplinary and collaborative; otherwise they would remain as creative components than creative interventions. A painting remains a painting even if is removed from the frame or the gallery lights; just think of it.

(from Chandralekha's production)

This autonomy of a work of art resists, as I said before, interdisciplinary interventions. When a work of art becomes too autonomous and a number of such autonomous works come together in a particular zone, so many exclusivities start finding the areas of sharing. Even without such communion, too much of autonomy could also create individualistic exclusivities. Such exclusivities cause the formation of schools and establishments. This is an inevitability that one cannot escape. The moment one forms a school or causes an establishment, however he or she tries the possibilities of interdisciplinarity cease to exist. To create interdisciplinarity, one has to do away with establishments. Late Chandralekha was a proponent of anti-establishmentarianism. She made her own establishment but at the same time she did not want the characters of an establishment eat away her grand projects. She never considered her disciples as her students; instead she said they were her co-dancers. Chandralekaha was an establishment in herself. She however hated establishments, conventions and traditions. She said that breaking of establishments is a necessity to further the causes of art and to develop individuality in creative act. She said that she danced because she wanted to tell the establishments that despite of them she existed. How many of us are ready to move beyond establishment in the days when everyone is drawn to the allurement or terror caused by the establishment, in the name of nationalism or religion?    

The Secret Garden in Kastur Ba’s Life

(a wonderful fictional take on Kastur Ba's life based on historical facts)

In 2014, I thought of doing an exhibition project in Pune based on the life and times of Kastur Ba Gandhi, as the organization that I was involved with then had told me that the Aga Khan Palace where Kastur Ba breathed her last would be made available to me to do a commemorative show. The exhibition which was to take place a year after however was not meant to commemorate any particular landmark in Kastur Ba’s life; the year 2015 was not her 100^th or 150^th birth anniversary. The rationale of the show was simple; the place where she spent her last days was there in Pune. I thought of a woman who had suffered a lot by standing devotedly with her husband’s experiments with his own life, her journeys across continents, dignified bearing of the leadership that was forced on to her shoulders at times and her natural growth as a social reformer and political activist. My project was to be an all woman exhibition. Sooner than later I came to know that the Aga Khan Palace was not ready to give its premises for its own reasons unknown to me. To sum it up, the project did not take place.

Kastur Ba Gandhi was a phenomenal example of personal evolution. Born in 1869 in Porbandar, Gujarat, in a Modh-Banya family, Kastur was not destined to become a saint or a warrior. She was brought up like any other young girl of that time, kept in disadvantage by giving no formal education which was the norm of the times, was fed by myths and folk stories that extolled the virtues of a devoted wife, and was married off to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, an unsure and awkward thirteen year old boy. That boy since his childhood was an experimenter; he was sceptical about everything including his own sexual prowess and other physical abilities hence he did a series of experiments with sex and male chauvinism, of course on his legally wedded wife, thirteen year old Kastur. Sexual abuse within marriage, that too within child marriage might not have been seen as a crime or even an aberration on the contrary it was believed that the girls were supposed suffer the indignity, mistreatment and the physical abuse pertaining sex silently. Kastur did that because she thought it was a part of her wifely duties.

 (Memorial sculptures of Kastur Ba and Gandhiji at Aga Khan Palace, Pune)

When someone experiments with his or her life, so many things happen to the people around them for the simple reason that none could exist in isolation. Only the degree of affection varies; those who are closer to the person suffer more and those who are away, perhaps suffer less. The word ‘suffer’, I believe is a wrong thing in the context of someone making an experiment with his/her own life, they take the agency of their own lives without really considering the people around. In fact, if someone considers the outcome of his experiments and their effects on the people around, which often would be disturbing as the experiments have a streak of non-conformism, he/she would not be able to do any kind of experimentation. All the personal experiments start with a direct addressing of one’s own personal self that involves both body and mind. Often its social effects are least considered or at times they are not even thought about. However, a person growing up with a keen sense of personal experimentation would slowly realize how his/her experiments could have social implications beyond his control. Once this realization happens, perhaps one could channelize the results of the experimentations for larger social causes; it is a sort of inevitability that anyone experiments with his/her own self, if he or she is not a recluse and does not shun the society totally cannot but channelize the experimental findings towards the society to which he is a part of. Gandhiji was doing it, initially for very selfish purpose of sexual and other bodily gratifications and later for his ‘soul’ purpose.

We have heard a lot of Gandhiji’s experiments with ‘truth’. Gandhiji’s truth was never the truth of Katur Ba. How, one may ask. The histories that have been written about Gandhiji and the writings all himself have cursorily spoken of Kastur Ba’s views on Gandhi ji’s experimentations. Even her reluctance to clean the toilets in Durban during their South African life, later her objections to various relationships maintained by Gandhiji, his faith in natural treatment that amounts to quackery, his forceful denial of beef broth and penicillin injection to Kastur Ba and so on are either recorded by Gandhiji himself or by other male chroniclers and historians. Kastur Ba did not maintain a log book or diary; you know why, yes, she was illiterate. When you are illiterate and is sucked up into the life of your husband whom you adore and follow, it is not necessary to maintain a private diary even if you are literate. Such was the faithfulness of Kastur Ba; when celibacy was imposed on Kastur Ba in her thirties, she did not revolt or transgress. Gandhiji had tried his best to teach her during the early days of their marriage. In their nuptial chamber, education had an erotic edge and each learning session ended in a violently pleasurable sexual intercourse. The young couple, the master and the disciple waited for the night to come and the class to start and the class was a pretext for all consuming sex. Kastur Ba did not learn to write. Gandhiji took up the mission to teach her when she was already in her seventies and frail in health. Harilal, the eldest son of the couple who had gone astray due to the patriarchal mishandling of his childhood by Gandhiji himself, refuse to believe that Kastur Ba wrote a public letter to him (it was dictated to Manilal) and accused Gandhiji of ‘dictating’ her for writing such a letter.

(Gandhiji and Kastur Ba at the forefront of Independence Struggle)

We did not know the truth of Kasturba till recently. Gandhiji’s prolific views on women and their social, moral, spiritual and political roles in the society have been discussed and critiqued at several points in due course of history. Kastur Ba’s silence is finally broken. ‘The Secret Diary of Kasturba’ written by Neelima Dalmia Adhar is an exquisite account of Kastur Ba’s life from her own point of view. Fictional though heavily based on history, the author has achieved the rare accomplishment of recreating an autobiography for/of Kastur Ba. The most fascinating thing about this book is its own realization that Kastur Ba cannot exist without her Mohandas (Gandhi- ji). They are entwined like word and its meaning or they are like Shiva and Parvati. It is interesting to think that could Gandhiji be possible without Kastur Ba and vice versa. Though, the dominant has made us believe that Gandhiji was single minded on social reformation and political activism therefore a wife’s presence or absence would not have made much a difference to him or his experimental life. It is also said that Gandhiji had platonic relationships with many women. Kastur Ba was seen as a casualty than an event in herself. But the book deconstructs the whole narrative of Gandhiji by being faithful Gandhiji’s life without being judgmental and as readers we come to feel that the book is more about Gandhiji than about Kastur Ba, perhaps rightfully so.

Yes, the book is mostly about Gandhiji; but seen from a different perspective which was unknown to us till the publication of the book. Kastur ba is not on an avenging path, she is not a clarion calling feminist either. The tone of the narrative voice (Kastur Ba’s voice) is dispassionate yet intense. She is emotional yet restrained. She is devoted to her husband but mince no words in criticism him.  The book is a dressing down of Gandhiji who is already half clad. But in the dressing down, the benevolent woman in Kastur Ba is not vengeful. She writes like a wife who knows her husband, his fears, anxieties, weakness and hypocrisy. She does not attempt to lionize these shortcomings of a global personality. She does not discount the virtues of her husband who in the eyes of the world remains a Mahatma, devoid of all human flaws. But she cannot remain a hagiographer like other personal historian of Gandhiji. She looks at Gandhiji’s moral preaching on sexuality in later life and his platonic relationship with many women with a cold sense of irony. She does not fall into sarcasm but as a person who had been the object of his carnal experiments, Kastur Ba cannot see the transformation of the man into a saint whose sexuality has been transcended without feeling a bad taste in her mouth. She writes her secret diary through the author. In fact the author has given Kastur Ba her tongue back even posthumously.

(Ahalya Moksham, stories that need retelling from Ramayana)

You cannot keep the book down until you finish reading it. This is not an exaggeration. What touches one is Kastur Ba’s constant pining for Harilal Gandhi, the eldest of the four sons of the Gandhi couple. Harilal was the first ‘victim’ of Gandhiji’s experiments with truth. A moral tyrant, Gandhiji imposed his world views on Harilal, who had fallen in the line yet wanted his own life through formal education and entry into business. Kastur Ba constantly craved for the well being of a son who had determined to ruin himself in the attempt to redeem himself! But as a faithful wife Kastur Ba stood with Gandhiji and denounced Harilal at one point. Kastur Ba’s transformation from a docile housewife to a national leader and doting companion of Mahatma Gandhi was not an easy one. But she has the last laugh in the book; and I believe in her life too. Gandhiji thought that Kastur Ba’s involvement in the political and social work was a result of his influence on her. But at one point, Kasturba smiles at herself and thinks that how does he know it was not his influence but she herself wanted to do that. When I read this I remembered the retelling of Sita’s story by the Telegu writer Volga in her book ‘Liberation of Sita’. Ahalya who had been turned into a stone for ‘accidentally’ sleeping with Indra who had lusted after her and had slept with her in her husband, Maharshi Gautama’s guise, meets Sita later in the forest. Ram’s touch was supposed to release Ahalya from the stone. In Volga’s retelling, Ahalya is not a stone (we could understand that by turning her into a stone, her sexuality had been put into a morbid state either by herself or by mutilation which is somehow left to our own conclusion). Sita asks Ahalya when they meet, “But wasn’t it outrageous in your case? After all, you did not know that he was not your husband...” Ahalya replies: “Do you know whether I knew this or not? Does anyone know?”

A Forgotten Danish Cartoon Strip and the Way We Eat Chicken

(Moco, a forgotten Danish Cartoon strip)

People in north Kerala read Mathrubhoomi weekly, in central Kerala it was the rule of Malayala Manorama weekly. In south, we proudly read Kalakaumudi, which was a recent launch in 1970s. While both Mathrubhoomi and Manorama could cut across the invisible north south boundaries made distinct by curious differences in language, culture and eating habits, Kalakaumudi most remained as a South side weekly and took its own time to become a pan Kerala magazine. People read each magazine for different reason; Mathrubhoomi exuded both literary verve and a sense of conservatism, Malayala Manorama treaded along a middle path entertaining mostly the semi-literate and low brow-ist readers. Kalakaumudi, in a way set the editorial pattern for many other magazines which would start in 1990s; the first half of it had daring investigative political reports and the second half was a treasure trove of modern literature. M.S.Mani and S.Jayachandran Nair, an editor-duo worked hard to make Kalakaumudi a pride of the reader.

( a recent cover page of Kalakaumudi)

It was mid 1970s. India was reeling under the Emergency and its aftermath. I was hardly seven or eight at that time. My father being a political activist and a reformist subscribed most of the journals then published in Kerala and my mother was an avid reader of literature, eking out time for reading from her domestic as well as professional responsibilities and saving up money to build a home library slowly but steadily, which satisfied my quest for reading as a young boy. I eagerly waited for the latest issue of Kalakaumudi, brought by the newspaper boy every week on the stipulated day. What attracted me most in this journal at that time was a small strip cartoon which did not have any name. Each issue carried two or three cartoon strips, spread out in different pages almost giving a pleasant surprise to the reader. The cartoon had no title and no dialogues. Each cartoon had three columns and invariably in one of them there would be a vertical inscription along the dividing line, which read MOCO. As we did not have any search engines in those days, we called it Moco and almost had decided that the name of the protagonist was Moco. Hence, my mother called his wife (a spoiler of Moco’s adventures) Mocochi. Looking at this cartoon strip just before sleeping, lying down on one side of my mother brought smile to our lips.

 (Indira Gandhi and Leonid Breshnev, the then Soviet Union president)

Those were the days of India’s or rather Indira Gandhi’s tilt towards the Soviet Union for cultural and militaristic support. So more than the American popular culture we had Russian popular culture to grow up with. Stories of Leo Tolstoy, translated and illustrated folk tales distributed in Kerala by the Prabhat Book House, Russian calendars that extolled their achievements in the fields of astronomy and agriculture and the grand literature of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Pushkin, Mayakovsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and so on were the cultural backdrop against which we grew up. An occasional documentary or cartoon films that we could see in Trivandrum museum were from Russia. Before we knew any name of the western publication houses, we were fully aware of the publication brand, Raduga, which was a major Russian publishing house. Hence, naturally we thought MOCO was a Russian cartoon. And without any speech bubbles and specific cultural suggestions we thought it could be from anywhere in the world but it was satisfying to believe that it came from Russia. For us then all good things came from Russia.

 (one of the Moco strips currently available online)

To tell the truth, I have always been very curious to know about MOCO. The reason is slightly un-academic though. If I say cooked or fried chicken was the reason that inspired me to know more about MOCO, one would feel that I am exaggerating. But that is the truth. In our childhood, with India holding up its protected nationalist economic policies, the markets were starved of modern products. Our food staples were always the usual fares; preferred meat was that of buffaloes or cows (we called it then beef generally. Though India is inching towards a total ban on beef for the coercive political reasons, Kerala is still one of the high beef consuming states in India and you would surprised to know that Maharastra where a strict beef ban is in place tops the chart). Vegetables were stereotypical and thankfully more organically produced. Eating chicken was a luxury as there were no organized poultry farms or chicken import from the neighbouring states as we see today. Hens and cocks were reared at most of the homes mainly for eggs rather than for their meet. Therefore people in Kerala ate chicken only on very special occasions like Christmas or special dinners. Killing a chicken from the backyard was an emotional as well as ethical affair in those days therefore the life expectancy of these fowls was more than what is today.

The cartoon strip MOCO had at times a dinner scene in which we found a ‘dressed’ fowl on a plate with its two legs raised up towards heaven; two wavy lines that went up showed that the cooked bird was just taken out of the oven. It looked so tasty then. Our mouths used to water when we saw that particular frame. As there was nothing to tell us that it was a chicken (it could have been a duck, a turkey or any bird), we assumed that it was one. We craved for eating chicken but in vain. I remember when the poet Kumaran Asan’s birthday was celebrated in our neighbouring village on the month of April every year, one benevolent uncle used to feed us chicken curry and appam. Kumaran Asan who in his poems propagated the ideas of non-violence was somehow remembered wistfully by me in the beginning because of this chicken association. People refrained from eating chicken because of economic reasons as well as emotional reasons. Killing a home grown chicken was a crime, felt by many. To neutralize the guilt of killing a poor bird in Kerala we had developed a maxim that went like, ‘the sin of killing would be erased with the eating of it’. However, I remember most of the women resisted killing a chicken and the abattoir in back yard was often handled by men who had been dreaming of eating chicken on a Sunday afternoon and obscenely eying the proud hens and cocks loitering around the courtyard minding their own business.

MOCO disappeared from the pages of Kalakaumudi after a few years. The magazine also took many avatars by changing its looks, content and even changing the editor. S.Jayachandran Nair went on to start Malayalam Vaarika but he did not carry over MOCO to the new publication though he could wean away the start writers and artists to his fresh editorial venture with the New Indian Express. My curiosity about MOCO simmered down as time went by. At times I used to think wistfully about this character. Perhaps, he was indirectly responsible for many glad eyed cartoon characters in the world. MOCO was married man and a declared skirt chaser. But each time his attempts to get a young woman in his bed were spoiled by his obese wife ‘Mocochi’.  In this way this cartoon based itself on a cheating husband and an unrelenting spoiler of a wife. They too have their nice moments and mind it, those moments are propped up by Moco only to hide the nubile one behind the curtain or under the bed. Moco and Mocochi had a son, a small version of Moco and the expression on the Moco Jr’s face was that of a child crook; really the father’s son. As none spoke anything in this cartoon strip, we did not know what they were talking to each other. The actions were enough to conjure up mischievous conversations all by ourselves.

Finally, my interest in the topic of chicken consumption in India and particularly in Kerala took me to MOCO again. And with the help of Google, I found out that MOCO was a Danish cartoon. Created by Jorgen Mogensen and Casper Cornelius, this cartoon strip was started as a Pantomime cartoon in 1940s. The name of the protagonist, which I thought was Moco all this while is Mr.Alfred and his wife is Mrs.Alfred and the son is Alfred Jr. A Pantomime cartoon is something that does not have a dialogue and initially it was created for scuttling the problems of translations when it was syndicated to various publications in different countries. Though it was a Danish cartoon, it appeared first time in Le Figaro, the French magazine, where the character was identified as Presto. Later on the syndicating agency P.I.B took it and rebranded it as MOCO by taking two letters each from the names of the creators. Moco became a household name in Australia and the USA, from where it got syndicated to many other countries. Moco was a bold experiment in cartooning because Alfred the protagonist could transcend time and become a character anywhere in the world any time of history. He could be a Roman, an Arab or even an Indian in certain strips. However, considering the thematic orientation of the cartoon strip (skirt chasing which was detrimental to the family concept of the conservative America), in the US, this cartoon was seen as a low browistic one catering to the semi-literate class. Whatever it was, the appeal of the cartoon was global to certain extent.

Today, perhaps very few people remember MOCO in Kerala. My experiment proved it beyond doubt. I sent the picture to my mother and sister via Whatsapp and asked them to identify the character; unfortunately those two people who had laughed a lot looking at this cartoon years back, have absolutely forgotten him. I just wondered whether this oblivion came from the consumption of chicken, a blow of fate. MOCO had allured with his cooked chicken. Today we eat a lot of chicken. The change in global economy has changed our eating habits and chicken tops the non-vegetarian menu in India today. Market studies show that there is a 12% growth in chicken consumption in every year in India. Kerala is a very special case. The data of chicken consumption make sweep you off the feet. Kerala has a total population of 33 million of which 80% eat chicken on a regular basis. Kerala’s monthly consumption of chicken is 5000 tonnes of which only 264.3 tonnes are produced in Kerala itself. Rest is imported. In a year Kerala spends an average of Rs.2844 crore for eating chicken and each year Rs.1752 crore goes out of Kerala in chicken business. And rightfully, out of the five obese states in India Kerala stands second, a real gain indeed! When I think of those days when we had to look at a cartoon strip and imagine the taste of chicken, the change that has taken place within forty years is enormous. Moco has been forgotten by most of the Keralites but they have carried forward one thing from the cartoon strip: the chicken.  

A Dramatic Monologue of an Ageing Body

This is about old age. When I was in my teens I was impatient to grow up. The very idea of growing up intoxicated me like everyone else in my friends’ circle. Like many of them I too did not know that there was an economy of growing up. It was not just a Complan thing. What I meant by growing up was all about setting myself free, free of all hurdles and shackles that the grownups had imposed on me.

I dreamt that once I became a grown up person I would do all what the grownups did, including smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, sporting a beard and moustache, wearing a lungi, folding it up to the knees, doing a job, getting married, setting up a home, making kids, sending them to school, seeing them growing up, getting them married, becoming a conformist citizen of the country and so on. I never thought then that those were in fact leading me to a larger and wider trap quite challenging and enticing at once.

In retrospect I understand that most of the people realize their dreams, if those dreams are the dreams that I have just recounted. To realize those dreams one does not do too many things. Just go by the flow you would reach your grave, passing through those milestones in life, experiencing them to the hilt, smiling and shedding tears, if your journey is not abruptly curtailed by an accident or illness. Life is fascinatingly ordinary for many of us and most of us do not think about treading a different path. Ordinariness and the quotidian is so alluring that the exceptional things look blasphemous if not dangerous.

At some point I decided not to be ordinary. I think that was when I really started growing up. When I dreamt of the grown up days, it was peculiar that the age group was not set. Had I wanted to become a twenty five year old man? Or it was an effort to become a thirty year old person? Was it the maturity of the people in their forties that had allured me? But one thing was sure that in my dream of becoming a grown up man there were no grey hairs, weakened muscles and wrinkled skin. That means I wanted to be grown up but eternally young. Growing up did not mean getting older or aged then. Youthfulness was the basis of all enjoyments and happiness in life.

(Literary critic, late Dr.Sukumar Azhikode)

Now standing at the threshold of forty eighth year of my life I no longer think about growing up but I do think about ageing. And it is nothing related to the fear of being discriminated, nor is it about becoming weak.  But it is all about seeing life in a new perspective. It is about slowing down. It is about really understanding one’s own body and mind without attributing any spiritual dimensions to it. One could approach one’s mind and body in a strictly rational and scientific way. What does the body want and what does the mind crave? Do they want the same thing or different things? Do the former respond to the demands of the latter and vice versa? And if they are growing incompatible how are you going to hold them together? Will you leave one for the other jeopardising your very existence? Questions are abundant in this case.

There are chronic bachelors and spinsters who live their lives as they want and beautifully age and pass out of the academy of life. Married people also do the same. However, the loners get more time to contemplate on the mind body relationship after a certain age. If the partners are compatible they could grow harmoniously together and walk into the night of a life holding hands and disappear into the horizon of memories lashing in the minds of their progenies and successors. Such cases are increasingly becoming rare though these days. A great literary critic in Kerala, Late Dr.Sukumar Azhikode was a chronic bachelor and he had written in one of his autobiographical pieces that he used to caress his own body and tried to know what it wanted. Mind would respond in such moments and one could feel one’s mind in the finger tips.

(Chikungunya scare in Delhi)

Ageing is a beautiful thing. Recently I was downed by the Chikungunya virus as it reached epidemic proportions in Delhi. While recuperating I went to the doctor in order to find solutions for the resultant joint pains and muscle cramps. I told the doctor that I felt suddenly I became old or rather I felt the waves of ageing in my being. The illness has made me weak; my bones and muscles ache as I sit, get up, sleep or walk. Over a period I started understanding slowly my body which I thought was like a stallion held in control by an expert rider, had fallen prey to the virus. Today I have to respond to the movement of my body; how my wrists move, my knees bend or straighten up, how my ankles react when I climb flight of stairs or climb down.

It was then I turned my attention to the old or aged or ageing people around me. Now I understand how they exactly feel and cope with the surroundings. Dyeing one’s hairs is not always a way to look young and healthy. But ageing is something that could be healthy (despite many physical ailments) and beautiful. I have started seeing beauty in aged and ageing people. I feel, I am an ageing person now. People say that age is just a number and it is all in mind. Yes, it is all in mind. Most of us do not grow up at all after certain age. The same people who used to crave for growing up now wish to go back to their younger days when they were absolute carefree. If you are in a whatsapp group where you have your college or school friends you would know how you desperately want to go back in time and to be again young.

That’s the mind. If the mind accepts the age and be alert for the age that your body feels then everything is fine. That does not mean that an ageing person’s mind should be showing symptoms of ageing therefore ceasing to be productive, imaginative and creative. But the difference is that in order to be productive, imaginative and creative one need not necessarily be young in body and mind. One could create wonderful works of art or anything of that sort even at the age of eighty. Suddenly someone will pitch in and say that it is what exactly about a young mind in an ageing body. I say, a young mind inside an ageing body is an anachronism. An ageing body learns things from the surroundings by testing and also by imbibing. Similarly, a mind within the ageing body should also learn the lessons of the ageing body by testing and imbibing (here I avoid a further complicated notion of mind being inside and outside the body at once and for the sake of argument, I maintain that the mind is inside the body). Once that is done the mind will not behave like a young person who has a young body.

                         

The difference between the young mind and the older mind, in an ideal situation is that the younger one while showing its tendencies to be vigorous and fast therefore prone to make mistakes due to lack of empirical experiences before, the aged or the ageing mind always knows how to slow down and avoid mistakes. I cannot help the people who keep committing mistakes after certain age; that means they have not learned the lessons of ageing in the right sense. Working out in gym, maintaining a comparatively healthy body and having enough medical attention around do not assure the ageing body’s abilities to perform like a young body. As that is the case a mind that resides in a well maintained old body would automatically correspond to the apparent youthfulness of the body and could commit a few mistakes (given that there are no warning signals sent out on the right time) and make the person ridiculous in public, if not unto himself.

Nature is a wonderful engineering system. We have been created by nature through natural selection, adaptation and improvisation over a period of time. Whatever deficiencies we had in the beginning, at the points of evolutionary junctures, have been corrected by the nature and it continues even today. This correctional process also includes slowing down. When a person becomes old he learns how to slow down. When we age we start seeing things around us as if they were absolutely new. They have been there but we were not seeing them because of the speed. Everything would look strange and unfamiliar in the beginning as you age. It is exactly like you drive down to your work place and one day decided to take a public transportation system. Sitting at the window seat you start seeing sceneries that you have been missing for many years. The same landscape, the same urbanscape, the same roads, the same streets, the same buildings, the same wayfarers all would look new to you because now you have unshackled yourself from the view that is given by the driver’s seat. Ageing is a shifting for good; you start seeing things in a different light.

When you slow down you start feeling one with the nature because nature is not in a hurry. The things that you want to do it in eight hours are perhaps done by nature in eighty years. That’s how the trees grow in nature. They are more enduring because they do everything slowly. That does not meant that one should assume the snail’s pace. No, I am not making any unearthly demands or suggestions. It is about the body slowing down, letting the mind to register everything and becoming harmoniously blended with the pace of the nature. Old age they say is the second infancy. Shakespeare also had said the same in his poem, All the World is a Stage, where he qualifies the last stage of life as: “Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history/Is second childishness and mere oblivion/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” If we could avoid the cynicism of the great bard, we can say that the slowing down in fact helps us to be children for the second time in life. Yes, there would be a stage where the sensory faculties deprive us of their service; but there is a stage till before that when we could see everything afresh, without committing many mistakes that we have done during the struggles to really grow up. 

The Curator is Dead and Long Live the Curator: Search for a New Word Instead

( a conservator at work)

Recently I had an opportunity to attend an international conservators’ forum which was held in Delhi’s IGNCA. Conservators from Mexico, Spain, the United States and so on presented the problems that they face while going around and ahead with their works. For me, as an Indian it was quite heartening to listen that they face bureaucratic hurdles and they too have brainless councillors and politicians who give conservation works to contractors who in the name of beautifying and conserving either wash down the patina-ted bronze sculptures with acid or over paint them with black paint. It is not just an Indian problem. Suddenly came another issue that the conservators in the public museums face there; the ego of the curators. In the hierarchy of museum administration, it is generally viewed that curator wields more power than the conservator. Or at times, the curator him/herself doubles up as a conservator often challenging the specialization of the conservators. Luckily in India the competition and the hierarchic disputes within the museums (and the museum discourse as well) remain as ego issues between ‘officials’ who carry these designations around, without never flowering into a full-fledged discourse that would make the museum practices more sophisticated than as they are today in our country.

(a conservator at work)

What caught my attention was the curator-conservator tussle that had been irritating the conservators from the foreign countries. It put me into thinking. In India we do not have so many celebrity conservators as we treat them as mechanics who mend cars and motorbikes. The kind of reputation and regard that the vintage car restorers get these days still evades the Indian conservators who toil with the paintings and sculptures in the dusty store rooms and workshops of the museums. We do have organizations like INTACH that does large scale conservations in India and elsewhere. Interestingly, the name INTACH also reminds one of the institutions like the Archaeological Survey of India that does very interesting and important excavations in different parts of India, at times helping in changing our historical views and at other times paving way for ideological disputes that involves not only scholars but also ill informed politicians. Unfortunately, like any other excavation agency in the world, due to the fear of changing the historical discourse which is conducive for maintaining the history as a given, the ASI is also forced to suppress many of its findings and interventions in the historical narrative. I am not scholar to comment on either the practice of conservation in India or the excavations that have been happening under the aegis of the ASI. However, I would say, the specialisation that several of our conservators and the excavators has been underused in our country. When conservation and restoration together slips over to the practice of authentication of a work of art, it suddenly enters into a different economic discourse, which takes away the technical as well as historical nature of the work. This issue has to be discussed further by the experts in the respective fields.

(Curator Scot Schaffer- all pics for representational purpose only)

My interest here is to discuss the role of the curator in today’s art discourse. It has become a child’s knowledge that the world curator comes from the Latin ‘curare’ which means ‘to take care’ or manage. There is also a saying that the word curator comes from the root ‘cure’ which means ‘helping something out of a bad physical condition’. That’s why Carold Duncan once observed that a work of art is ‘sick’ in a museum that needs a ‘curator’ to nurse it out of a sick condition. The world curator also has references to the medical practice of preserving dead bodies. That means whatever art objects that we see today in a museum are dead bodies because the word museum comes from the world ‘mausoleum’ which means a place where the dead are preserved. That means both literally and metaphorically a museum means a house of the dead. Interestingly, we have contemporary museums where living artists’ works are also preserved and exhibited. That means, those works that are capable of reaching to a museum, whether they are the works of a dead master or a modern contemporary living artist, we could say they are dead bodies. In the economic circuit of art, which is the auction circuit, it is said that a work of art becomes economically dead when it reaches a museum. That means museum is the ultimate space where the dead objects are brought to rest. When a work of art plays out all its economic values and is transacted in the market, it is a body in action which needs rest. The death of a work of art is celebrated in the museum and the curator is the presiding official of that death ritual.

 (Inside a mausoleum)

Today, however, both these words, Museum and Curator, have been taken out of the old discourse and are used for the contemporary purposes. Museums, moving away from the conventional sense, have become to play the role of expansive galleries that could afford to showcase high value art objects for longer durations and in the meanwhile, curators have come out of the old museum practice and have become itinerant professionals who do not really need specialization in any particular area of art. Pushing further for contemporary purposes, the word and designation ‘curator’ has migrated to various areas of commercial market where utility objects are sold not just for their functionality but for their aesthetical value. That means today’s curator is not simply a specialist who ‘takes care of the works of art’ or one who arranges the works of art. Within the museum as well as gallery parlance, the word curator till recently had some umbilical relationship with the original word but that too seems to have severed by the market forces. When the discretionary status of the word curator is collapsed for accommodating various practices within its blanket coverage, it has become a word that connotes someone who arranges a few examples from certain disciplines tastefully, intelligently and convincingly. This fluidity of position that the word curator has acquired by now helped not only the gallerists and freelancers to call themselves curators but also it has helped those people who delves in the business of life style products and home interiors. (To cite a stray example, recently I came across a news item in the reputed Hindustan Times newspaper, in which Gauri Khan, wife of the super star, Shah Rukh Khan has been qualified as the curator of her life style shop in Mumbai. Interestingly, Sakshi Gallery of Mumbai had collaborated with Mrs.Khan in showcasing some works of art in her shop as ‘curatorial efforts’ befitting for the new market realities. I am yet to know whether such a collaboration has given Mrs.Khan the confidence to use the term liberally in her business activities or it was just an attribution of an over enthusiastic journalist).

 (Gauri Khan, life style curator)

I am a curator (with a post graduate degree in curatorial practice from the Goldsmiths College, University of London) who curates very less number of shows and of late I have been feeling a strong urge to call myself something else other than a curator in the professional context. The reason is simple: when everyone in every field is a curator, within the art sphere it does not make much a difference. We have curated talks, curated seminars, curated film shows, curated food festivals, curated furniture expos and so on. (It is just a question of time we have curated medical attendance. I think the medical packages offered by the high end private medical facilities in our country are nothing but curated medical packages which for some reason the doctors are not yet calling them, and themselves curators). We need to find a different word for this. In the case of music, sampling and arranging were started long back with the advent of the music and sound softwares. In India, A.R.Rahman is set to have pioneered this way of music production in mid 1990s itself. Luckily we have not yet started calling him a music curator but we have music curators and I have been hearing the name of TM Krishna, the rebellious Carnatic musician for quite some time and many other previously unheard of names. In a forth coming art festival Goa, I am told that there are fourteen curators from different creative disciplines that include the noted singer Shubha Mudgal.

 (A.R.Rahman)

If sampling and arranging could make good audible music, why the same couldn’t create good art, food, textile, theatre, dance, literature and so on? If that is true, then curator is a word that has lost its meaning and purpose. The word curator has become an obsolete word in the contemporary art practices and expose. This word should be replaced by something like ‘sampler’ or ‘arranger’. There will be many questions raised at this juncture, of which the main would be, if museums are still called museums then why can’t the word curator remain in parlance. This is where the old habits of the market come to take an upper hand. Market always plays with the familiar and the comfortable. Even if the product is radically different and new, the advertisements use the age old belief systems to sell the products. If at all there are locations and events depicted in the advertisements that are unfamiliar for the consumers for the time being, the underlying message would be the same as in any conventional belief system; trust in the family unit, live and die for it. There are several advertisements that ask women to be bold and more forthcoming in the social life. However, the point of reference for them would be eventually to confirm with the familial values.

 (DJ)

Hence, even if museums are dead and the curators also have become an extinct category, the parlance has to remain the same for some more time and in due course it will migrate to other practices in order to confirm the patterns of the market, the desire that it creates and its ultimate target, the family unit. Immediately after the Abstract Expressionist period in 1940s and 50s in the US there was a short lived movement of photo-realism (not the same photo realism that resurfaced in 1990s). The critics and writers found it difficult to find a suitable jargon to qualify the new style of art and due to this lack they resorted to the previous parlance that was used for writing about the abstract expressionist works. In this curious mixture we got Zen Buddhist and oriental spiritual jargons desperately trying to highlight the concentration and meditation of the artist to make the verisimilitude of an image. This has just happened in India, in the case of curatorial practice. I would say, it is time that we rethink on it and call it Art Arranging or Art Sampling or Art Jokey, Visual Art Jokey or something that would find place in the art historical and critical discourse of our times.