It started when I spotted the packets of
aam papad stacked in the makeshift stalls. Those born in the pre-globalized
India will remember this tangy-sweet unique thing made out of sugared and
boiled raw mango. Sold by itinerant vendors of such folk goodies, calling out
to the children and adults about their tantalizing wares, walking down the
streets in the lazy, long afternoons of pre-smartphone youth, aam papad remains
for us a memorial pillar of the magical side of childhood. Globalized India has
lost quite a lot too.
It was the packaging actually. It was
done clumsily, using the standard transparent, yellow, plastic paper used by
corporate sweet companies like Haldiram, Bikanerwala, etc but done inexpertly,
perhaps by hand – using up too much paper. Haldiram types also now keep aam papad
in their in their shops occasionally but these are sleekly and uniformly
packaged in standardized and economical design. Even the aam papad taste has
been standardized. But here these were all different, packets varying from
stall to stall, handmade and amateurish. Even the rectangular slices of the aam
papad were of different thickness and shapes.
So much ineptitude, such neglect of
profitability, in this day and age when profiteering is considered the same as
profit-making! Who are these people? What is all this?
Then I saw that the entire winding lane
that connects Mumbai’s S V Road and V S Road and hosts a modest Prabhadevi
Temple was lined by scores of such temporary stalls selling much non corporate
merchandise. It was a full moon festival centered around the temple and the
stalls were part of the festival market. The temple was busy but not thronged
by devotees comfortably going inside with thalis of offerings and returning with
tilak on foreheads and reassurance in the hearts. Instead of the normal one cow
of the lane on other days there were several tethered cows today; tethered
around bundles of juicy green grass, and devotees bought some grass from the cows`
keepers to feed the happy, sleepy cows for gaining divine merit. There were the
usual balloonwallas, earthen utensils and lampwallas, a man with two show
monkeys, the usual brightly dressed children clutching anxious fingers, and I
looked for and eventually found that mysterious man of my own childhood with a
pole half-covered by a thick, sweet, sticky spiral running along its length.
You paid your money and the man took a small stick and unrolled from the huge
tantalizing pole a tiny sweet, spiral of the coloured, gummy paste for you to lick
at leisure. I waited to see children haltingly approach this smiling man and
buy their little magical stick to slobber over. It was another, bygone era
recreated. Or is it that it was always there and it was I who had wandered away
from it in order to live what I thought of as life?
All this on a full moon day, Purnima.
Then I remembered that such a modest mela came here every month on almost all
Purnima days. Only I had not noticed before. Here was a lifestyle governed by the lunar calendar. There were nearly a
hundred stalls. Most had the standard product mix of puffed grain (rice and
corn), gur in cute, retro-looking ingot shapes, aam papad as already described,
brightly hand painted earthen idols of Ganapati, Gauri and other current gods.
Other stalls had jewellery of beads, bindis and bangles looking like photos of
excavation-exhibits from Harappan archeological sites, and much similar things
which pass below the radar of corporate markets -- one or two stalls had calendars of Nehru,
Patel, Gandhi etc. Prayer booklets, dhoop sticks and agarbattis. All life.
And then one or two stalls that took my
breath away. Small heaps of dimpled, red, wild berries (picked from thorny
bushes) called ber, green, sweet and
sour jamphal, which have four fins
like torpedos, unevenly shaped, antique looking bel fruits – favourite of Lord Shiva and its sweet pulp supposedly
good for digestion, wild green jeera
bunched in neat bundles, and many small fruits and herbs whose names I did not
know but which were both unfamiliar and intimately familiar at the same time.
The whole table of the stall was like a visitation from a lifetime left behind,
evoking memories and dreams, ungraspable ancestral symbols and forebodings,
reminding me that like all of us I too was some sort of an exile.
An exhausted woman, who must have spent
weeks along with her village womenfolk picking these things from their forested
land (after bribing the forest guard) and who must have spent the small hours
of the morning arranging these offerings in neat piles of her stall. Now she
sat at the back watching with tired but proud eyes her husband negotiating
prices with the city stickers like me. I saw Marathi matrons with knowing eyes,
some accompanied by digital-generation schoolgoing daughters, making gentle
bargains for this exotica from the past with a touch of childhood memories and
deference for valuable things left behind unwillingly. Marketing chaps would
call this Minor Forest Produce. But this
market and the labour underlying it exists even today, and surfaces once every
month -- on full moon days – and finds customers to complete the product-cycle
with enough profit to finance a meagre existence in the hinterland. This
happens in Mumbai, in India, in the 21st century – of rampant
Washington Consensus. By the Lunar Calendar. I looked up to see the moon – it
was evening. I saw it as the familiar swollen, yellowed orb low in the sky! But
no. It was the glowing neon logo of some famous builder on top of a towering building
– one among scores of them clustering the horizon. The moon was still hidden
behind these buildings, but it was there.
I stood and looked at the whole scene
again, now with a historical eye. At one end of this winding impromtu market, on the S V Road, are the glittering
giant car showrooms of Ferrari, Bugatti, Porsche, Lamborghini and Tata Motors
and Hyundai – each showroom the size of a mini airport covering the ground
floors of the new, tall skyscrapers, some still under construction. At the other
end of the lane are the middle-class co-op. housing society flats resisting the
slow but sure approaching tsunami of the builder-driven future skyscrapers
bordering the Mahim bay – where the Portuguese had first set up their military
base. The lane was less than 100 yards from the old Century Mills area. The
co-op. 3-storey housing surrounding it were white-collar outgrowths of the old
labour tenements – “chawls” -- which had
served the now extinct textile mills, each factory site now the base of a rising
skyscraper. This was the one end of the old Girnigaum -- “a village of
factories” – now renamed Girgaum, the other end being the chowpatty on the
Marine Drive. Here was the March of History – of Bombay turning to Mumbai – the
global sow of Progress whose tits suckle modern politicians, tycoons, and
Schools of Business. The Solar Calendar zone of the ruling classes.
But in the interstices there struggles
and survives despite the terms of trade weighted against it the unbanishable
Purnima driven monthly market of the below–the–radar economy. The Lunar
Calendar zone, of the working classes. This is one face of the much-hyped Resilient
Spirit of the city – which is not the
televised Peace Runs by the chic after an atrocity -- the working class fighting
and resisting the post-Soviet Union capitalism; a new capitalism which wears
the government megadole-made masks of Orwellian Reforms. The other face is, of
course, the overladen local trains of Mumbai. I looked up along a canyon
between the skyscrapers and finally saw the moon, the real one, not a neon.
I walked back again through the unevenly
lined stalls marveling at their historical function, thinking about the ancient
Lunar Calendar. And I finally succumbed to the magical man with the coloured,
sweet python wrapped around his pole and bought a stick of that sweet. What is
wrong with lunar calendar? Why has it fallen into disrepute, if not disuse? What is a calendar? It is a chart to
record and plan the passage of time. Come to it, what is time? Time is nothing but the space to live
out our lives. There is nothing more visible to everybody and more
user-friendly than the moon to mark time. The sun looks the same all year
around and just marks the day and night – which is useful to mark daily labour
and sleep, sure -- but is a very short term measure.
The moon handles longer term
avtivities! Nearly all crops (except sugarcane) get sown and harvested – the
most important function of a calendar – within months, often two or more crops
a year. Babies get born within months. Most economic cycles of work – naturally
related to the produce of crops – get completed within months. Rural Money
lenders even today charge interest -- also related to crops – at monthly rates.
All lived life gets nicely handled by a lunar calendar. Most important of all,
the moon is much more pleasing to the eye and helpfully waxes and wanes to
provide analog reminder of the passage of time! So, what displaced the lunar calendar
which handled time in an easy, human-scale manner? Not surprisingly all
cultures since ancient times evolved their own lunar calendars. Even the Aristotlean
calendar of seven concentric rotating heavenly spheres had an annual calendar
of lunar months with an year-end correcting thingummy. And it is worth
remembering that the Aristotlean calendar – indeed, the whole Aristotlean physics, then called Natural
Philosphy, including astronomy, tides, eclipses, season, geometry, statics,
dynamics, mathematics, life, and all that -- lasted more than 1500 years. Upto
Galileo-Copernicus-Newton, when the Solar Calendar was born. Why was this born?
Because European feudal economies, saturated and stagnating within their old
mode, were wanting to do long-term oceanic shipping (now helped by compass
navigation) looking for products and labour globally
to plunder and exploit better. In short,
the Solar Calendar came with the onset of capitalism. Globalization began
with capitalism.
Happily walking through my local,
pre-capitalist market I was about to pop my magical stick of sweet gum into my
mouth when my diabetic calorie- consciousness –
as constant as class- consciousness – kicked in and stopped me. Okay, the
lunar calendar needs a year-end correction to align with the current solar
calendar but what is so terribly wrong with that? I walked up to the magic man
with the sweet python-pole, with the children thronging him mesmerized and gave
away my stick to a baffled boy. The magic man smiled. Little paper flags stuck
into his sweet python fluttered cheerfully in the breeze.
I had reached the end of the lane where
there was a triangular, corner shop so cute and so common in the old parts of
Bombay. It still had name City Light Café in faded letters of masonry. But now one
half, along one arm of the triangle, was a pharmacy shop and the other arm had
a mobile phone outlet. I looked at the city entering into the night, its tall
towers glittering sharply in the dark sky, and wondered at the heart-breaking
inequity of it. This is what gross inequity, enacted on a vast economic scale,
looks like! The very textile mills with their workers, their chawls, which had
given economic value to this land were coldly closed down and scattered to the
winds of history by patient, back-room political machinations of cold blooded
builders so as to encash that very value as capital
gains – in these glittering high` rise towers of a global template. This
city is built upon the graves of cruel, iniquitous displacements and usurpations.
Perhaps all cities of the world are like
that.
I could not ponder on this enigma
because my senses were assailed by the peak evening traffic of speeding,
blaring, honking vehicles. The ground beneath my feet shook as behemoth buses
of BEST hurtled past. These were the streets in which small forays in my little
Hyundai brought my heart to my mouth, and in the same streets these monsters
were being driven by superhuman drivers at unbelievable speeds between the red
lights. I looked at one bus. Its destination was Kurla Depot, and it had
started from the govt. secretariat in Nariman Point. Those who know the city
would understand how arduous this route can be. That these drivers can reach
their destinations, through this apocalyptic traffic, every day, and keep their
schedules and nerves is an astounding, unsung feat. Kurla!
Ah, I realized with a strange uplifting
tugging at my heart, that lo and hehold, Kurla too has its own lunar calendar.
There too on full moon days and nights there gathers, centered around the
convenient temple or a dargah, a similar congregation of people and produce
from the hinterland who live and persevere below the radar of the official
economy. And Kurla too was and still is a major residential area of industrial
and white-collar labour. The old social and economic networks of the city have
not been fully uprooted by the Development parade. I watched the massed traffic.
A new model of Mercedes was impatiently trying to find its way through the slow
moving jam.
Why only Kurla? The whole of old Bombay,
except the narrow strip of British and Parsi thugs from Malabar Hill to the
Fort profiting from the opium trade with China -- the entire city really -- was
nothing but factories and the surrounding labour tenements -- chawls. From
Girgaum Chowpatty, via the mid-section of Parel, Dadar, Sion, Kurla, etc to far
areas like Ghatkopar, Malad, Mulund and Vikhroli. Now the factories are all
dead or gone. Malls and Multiplexes have come. Chawls had sensed the winds of
change early and had slowly converted,
using instincts of organized labour, to 3-storey Co-op. housing societies, as
their workers too had changed in the next generation from the underclass,
collarless and blue-collar to middle-class white-collar who now move around on
motorbikes, with laptops inside appropriately designed backpacks. On full moon
days or even without full moon the working class of the city has built, using
the lunar calendar and melas and temples and dargahs, its economic trenches and
ramparts for a protracted defensive warfare against the Animal Spirits of the
corporate oligarchies of India ceremonially unleashed by Manmohan Singh in
1991. Hm, come to it, this is not only about Mumbai either.
The single, most powerful word today, in
media and government spheres is: Market. It is the Name of the Dominant God
today, in India and the world, and all older “national” gods have become its
subservient vaahans –vehicles, very
much like the earlier tribal totemic gods had done with the “national” gods. It
reigns globally, imperially, realtime, and 24x7; and it uses the Solar Calendar.
Which people in India have come under
its way? Recently some think tank in Singapore or Sweden, or Sarajevo had
estimated India’s middle class as 30 million – 3 crore people – and there was
widespread outrage and consternation; even the FM had to issue a Statement. But
that is nothing. We have always known the figure more or less. Total central
govt employees, both civil and military, including retired pensioners are
around 1.5 crore. Add the police and paramilitary forces and state government
employees of about the same number, it becomes 3 crores. Add all private sector
employees of about 2 crore and the total kitty is 5 crore people. These are the
catchment of Market. That is all. If we then add the odd rural people employed
in organized kulak agriculture/horticulture and all transportation and all
shops, and workshops, another 5 crore can be added at best. So 10 crore – less
than 10% of India’s population -- is the catchment of Market Forces, and use
Solar Calendar to live lives that are poor imitations of the American Idol
template. This narrow segment of the population is the India seen by the World Bank,
G-8, Boeing, General Motors, Monsanto, Shell, Burger King, Cola Cola, Star TV,
Nike – that lot. This is the India that dominates the Idea of India and
foreshortens it. This thin crust is the bankable of India, the Visible India –
credible or incredible – ruled by 24x7 solar calendar.
The Purnima markets at Prabhadevi Lane represent
the Invisible India, 90% of the people of this Jambudwipa – from Phagwara, through Pilibhit, Purnea and Parbhani
to Perambudur. Mercifully left out of most of the wordy privileges of the
Constitution, the pompous Institutions of governance of democracy, the deep
calculations of the global think tanks and the bloodsucking machinations of the
Markets, this Invisible India hangs on to its ancient lunar calendar, labours
on month by month with the waxing and waning of the moon and of their fickle
fortunes, fights and survives in the gaps, penumbras and interstices of the Orwellian
juggernaut called the Economy. Births, marriages, deaths take place along old
patterns. Even the local money lenders, using monthly interest rates, do not
really ever get rich and buy a Mercedes or more away to Mumbai – they stay on
in the same old villages; at best make a 2-storey house there. Is this a small
space? Is this a small and trivial phenomenon? No. Quite the opposite. This 90%
Invisible India is the real dark matter of this land surviving for centuries
despite all odds under a lunar calendar.
We knew this all along, of course, at
the back of our minds – luckily still
out of reach of the media overkill, the stultifying 360 degree badgering of
Market Forces which makes up more Orwellian things like Discourse or ,lately,
Narrative. Not only we, but 90% of the world – from Bagota, through Botswana,
Bosnia, Burdwan to Borneo – get to know
it afresh every day simply from our working life. That the 24x7, global,
Markets That Never Sleep, or Where The Sun Does Not Set, where the Solar Calendar
rules,digitally exact, all these are only skin deep and work only for 10% of this planet’s people.
What we don’t quite realize is that this
10% world of the Solar Calendar is not
a big deal. It has a shallow hold on the world. Its frontages and masquerades
and parades are overwhelming and mind numbing, yes, but if we avert our eyes
from the wide angled glare of its narratives and disourses, we find that most
of world – 90% actually -- has slipped through its grasp, even in today’s Late
Capitalism stage. The full moon bazaar in
Prabhadevi Lane is the living proof -- for those who need this proof.
Things are not so bad! The demise of the Soviet Union is not the end of the
world. May be it is a blessing actually. History has not ended at all. Far from
it. It is yet to begin really. Long live lunar calendars.
I see a woman running a vada-paav
roadside stall, finally sitting down tired at the end of a hard day of making
and selling the stuff, chatting with another woman, may be her last customer
and friend. They are smiling, spent, content. The moon has risen up clear in
the sky, beyond and above the tall skyscrapers under construction all around.
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