Veena frowned and nodded, not sure if the irresponsible Maan was being sarcastic at her expense.
‘I remember our days in Lahore – none of this could ever have happened,’ said old Mrs Tandon with tender nostalgia and a look of shining faith in her eyes. ‘The people contributed without being asked, even the Municipal Council provided free lighting, and the effigies we made for Ravana were so frightening that children would hide their faces in their mothers’ laps. Our neighbourhood had the best Ramlila in the city. And all the swaroops were brahmin boys,’ she added approvingly.
‘But that would never do,’ said Maan. ‘Bhaskar would never have been eligible then.’
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ said old Mrs Tandon thoughtfully. This was the first time she had considered the matter from this angle. ‘That would not have been good. Just because we aren’t brahmins! But people were old-fashioned then. Some things are changing for the better. Bhaskar must certainly get a part next year. He knows half of them by heart already.’
15.5
KEDARNATH had, in this matter of the actor-deities or swaroops, been surprised to find that one of the leaders of the untouchables was the jatav Jagat Ram from Ravidaspur. It was difficult for him to think of Jagat Ram as having anything to do with local agitation, for he was a fairly sober man who had concentrated, by and large, on his work and his large family; and had played no active role in the strike in Misri Mandi. But Jagat Ram had, by virtue of his relative prosperity – if it could be called that – and the fact that he was at least minimally literate, been pressured by his neighbours and fellow-workers into representing them. He did not want to accept; having accepted, though, he did what he could. However, he felt at a disadvantage in two respects. First, it was only by stretching a point that he could claim to have a stake in what went on in Misri Mandi. Secondly, since his livelihood depended on Kedarnath and other local figures, he knew that for the sake of his family he had to tread carefully.
Kedarnath for his part was not unsympathetic in a theoretical sense to the general question of opening up the field of actors. But the Ramlila in his eyes was not a competition or a political act but an enactment of faith by the community. Most of the boys who acted in it had known each other from childhood, and the scenes that were represented had the sanction of hundreds of years of tradition. The Ramlila of Misri Mandi was famous throughout the city. To tack on scenes after the coronation of Rama struck him as being pointlessly offensive – a political invasion of religion, a moralistic invasion of morality. As for some sort of quota system among the swaroops, that would only lead to political conflict and artistic disaster.
Jagat Ram argued that since the brahmin stranglehold over the parts of the heroes had been broken in favour of the other upper castes, it was a logical next step to allow the so-called lower castes and scheduled castes to participate. They contributed to the success of the Ramlila as spectators and even to a small extent as contributors; why not then as actors? Kedarnath responded that it was obviously too late to do anything this year. He would bring up the matter with the Ramlila Committee the following year. But he suggested that the people of Ravidaspur, which was largely a scheduled caste community – and from which the claim largely emanated – should perform a Ramlila of their own as well, so that the demand would not be seen as invasive and mischievous, merely a way of prolonging by other weapons the conflict that had had its first culmination in the disastrous strike earlier in the year.
Nothing was really resolved. Everything was left in uncertainty. And Jagat Ram was not really surprised. This was his first venture into politics, and he had not enjoyed it. His childhood hell in a village, his brutal adolescence in a factory, and the vicious world of competitors and middlemen, poverty and dirt in which he now found himself, had served to turn him into something of a philosopher. One did not argue with elephants in a jungle when they were on the rampage, one did not argue with the traffic in Chowk as it hurtled past in murderous confusion. One got out of the way and got one’s family out of the way. If possible, one retained what dignity one could. The world was a place of brutality and cruelty and the exclusion of people like him from the rites of religion was almost the least of its barbarities.
The previous year one of the jatavs of his own village, who had spent a couple of years in Brahmpur, had gone back home during the harvest season. After the comparative freedom of the city, he had made the mistake of imagining that he had gained exemption from the generalized loathing of the upper-caste villagers. Perhaps also, being eighteen years old, he had the rashness of youth; at any rate, he cycled around the village singing film songs on a bicycle he had bought from his earnings. One day, feeling thirsty, he had had the brazenness to ask an upper-caste woman who was cooking outside her house for some water to drink. That night he had been set upon by a gang of men, tied to his bicycle, and forced to eat human excreta. His brain and his bicycle had then been smashed to bits. Everyone knew the men who were responsible, yet no one had dared to testify; and the details had been too horrendous for even the newspapers to print.