Divine intervention

I was peering into the makeshift workshop, fascinated by a cluster of veins crawling up like worms along the arms of the asur. Then, unavoidably, my eyes strayed on to the newspaper page wrapped around his face. And there, from the front page of a Bengali daily, Rizwanur Rahman smiled back. Next to him was a mugshot of his mother weeping pitifully. And looming over them was the divine mother, grim and unconsoling — ten outstretched arms clutching at imaginary weapons, and her face still hidden from the world.

Behind this startling collage, the colossal structure of the Uluberia Panpur Tarun Sangha puja pandal stood awkwardly: hastily draped and trailing bits of colourful cloth. In this part of Uluberia, there is little activity to suggest the forthcoming festivities, apart from the desolate pandals and a few shops doing brisk business. No loudspeakers, not even the excited din of the people. Only the voices of the muezzins, crying out the azaan, pierce the autumn air.

To visit Uluberia, particularly during the intersection of Eid and Durga Puja, is to confront strange sights, and even stranger realities. A night train had brought me (and a friend) here from Calcutta. In less than an hour, we had left behind the luminous splendour of the city, hurtling through miles of darkness into a region where electricity happens to be an intermittent luxury.

But special occasions have special ways of dealing with such practical crises. On the way to the town, we crossed alternate patches of light and darkness — glittering letters wishing “Eid Mubarak” on brightly lit gateways, followed by the total absence of streetlights, with only hurricanes and bulbs burning weakly in the houses showing the way. Where there was light, there was also the drone of a generator, drowned by film songs blaring on loudspeakers. Groups of daintily-dressed men lolled on chairs, charmed by their little islands of mirth. Such exclusive access to uninterrupted light and song in a sea of surrounding darkness perhaps creates the sense of an achievement. This achievement could be perceived as a unique index of development — an intensely subjective index that refuses to be identified with welfare and justice and bypasses any familiar rhetoric of progress.

Such an index of success was also perceptible in the ‘other part’ of the town. One reaches this part by crossing Bombay Road, and is greeted by the skeletal frames of puja pandals. It is just the day after Eid, and the preparations, here, are far from finished. But another kind of work, away from the public eye, has also already begun in this area.

At the Jodurberia Koltala Committee pandal, a couple of local men, who double up as ‘decorators’ during these months, seemed to find my eager curiosity flattering. “This is the 20th year of our Durga Puja,” one of them volunteered. “Of course, we have been doing the Kali Puja for longer — last year we had our 50th anniversary — but Durga Puja is more special.” While the golden jubilee celebrations involved elaborate and expensive “lighting” (on a grand budget of Rs 50,000), the success of the Durga Puja is judged on a different scale. Every year the Committee distributes clothes to handicapped people, a scheme that is partially run on local donations, besides using the Committee fund itself. This project involves prior enlisting of potential recipients, then drawing up lists of individual needs. “We buy lungis for the Mohammedans and thaans for widows,” I was politely informed. About 200 destitutes are fed, clothed and given a token five-rupee coin on the evening of ashtami.

The pride with which the man recounted all this made him slightly hysterical. He gestured wildly, raised his voice, suspended work and ignored the dismayed looks of his assistant. A few urchins mocked him freely. For him, this ritual annual charity has a more enduring significance than solving other, more pressing, social problems — the appallingly irregular supply of electricity or the sordid condition of healthcare, for instance. (Incidentally, the local ESI Hospital looked squalid, while a handwritten notice declared that the Charushila Manmathnath De Cancer Rognirnay Kendra would be closed for the days of the Puja.)

In Uluberia, local customs, religious festivals and their associated ritual observations seemed to articulate and clarify the whole unwieldy question of development in terms of a peculiar human economy: if development is to succeed as a principle of progress, it has to take itself beyond the realm of market economics into a more personalized space. It has to reach an area of social care and accountability that depends as much on people’s natural conscientiousness as also on the goodwill that religious occasions foster among them. Thus, nearly the same set of activities — different kinds of ‘social work’ — accrue around religious festivals. As with Durga Puja, the list of such activities organized by the Bajar Para Young Sporting Club for its Eid celebrations included sit-and-draw competitions, cultural programmes, clothes distribution and so on.

We got a glimpse of more amusing inter-cultural exchanges too. At an artisan’s workshop, a group of little boys and girls gathered around us, preening themselves expectantly for a photograph, as my friend went hunting for stills. One of them, presumably a Muslim boy, no more than eight or ten, suddenly exclaimed, pointing to a Ganesh, “Ema, ei haathitake dhuti poriyechhe keno re?” (Why on earth is this elephant dressed up in a dhoti?), to which the company responded with a hearty laugh.

Since ritual celebration and social welfare are not divorced from each other, and since one form of social activity (charity) often feeds on another kind of social practice (worship), we found a strange assortment of names on the marble tablets of the Uluberia Kali Temple as well. One Bechimoyi Khan (who had donated Rs 51) shares the same tablet with sisters, Happy and Jolly Mahalanobis. And speaking of names, there are plenty of imaginatively named autorickshaws around (we were ferried into the town by one called “Jhilik Sona”). There were the usual apostrophes to Ma Kali and Shri Krishna on the headboards. Although many of the drivers are Muslim, I failed to notice a single autorickshaw carrying the message of Allah.

The road from the kalibari took us into the Sheikh Abu Bakr bazaar, full of people shopping feverishly, and from there on to the pandal where I had found the faces of Rizwanur and his mother wrapped around the asur’s face. Perhaps this disturbing jumble of events and faces prompted my friend to ask our rickshawwallah, Jigri, if he knew about Rizwanur and Priyanka. “Yes, indeed,” he replied, “here, too, two couples were hounded by their families, police and the panchayat recently.” A Muslim girl had run away with a vegetable-seller, a santhal from Jhargram, while another girl, a Hindu, had married out of her community, provoking outrage. Things were pretty bad for a while until shalishi sabhas intervened and settled the disputes peacefully. “And that’s because there was no great economic disparity between the families,” he concluded wisely. It was all among vegetable-sellers.

So, is Uluberia communally sensitive? Not really, Jigri believes, although it is a society fast morphing beyond traditional proprieties. Even a few years back, Eid would not merit elaborate celebrations, especially the playing of music and the making of pandals and lit-up gateways, which are scorned by the maulanas. But as ways of seeing change, so do the ways of being. Rituals are not just about preserving values but also about initiating a change of perspective. Apart from influencing the modes of social welfare, the fluidity of rituals inspires other kinds of transformation.

We sampled a bit of the latter, more ineffable sort of change one evening, near the footbridge that symbolically separates the Muslim part from the more heterogeneous ‘other’ section of the town. A woman, probably in her forties, stood there yelling at three young men, one of them possibly her son, “Okhane tora kon Hindu meyeder dekhte jabi shuni?” (Which Hindu girls exactly are you going to ogle at there?) Okhane, there, referred to the dazzling lights and flowing melodies by which the men had been lured. As they listened to the diatribe, there was no fear or humiliation in the heavy silence that built up around them. Instead, there remained the hint of a menace, a sliver of contrariness on the faces of the youths that betrayed signs of a subtle but significant shift of attitudes.