Phoolsunghi Read online

  The Tawaif

  The musical world of Phoolsunghi is sustained by a culture of candid interactions among patrons, tawaifs and maestros, each having a well-defined role. Although gurus like Najju Khan, Ramnarayan Misir and Mahendar function as grand patriarchs, the novel is effusive in its praise for the musical abilities of tawaifs such as Dhelabai and Vidyadharibai.

  From the mid-sixteenth to the early twentieth century, tawaifs embodied the refinement and sophistication of India’s courtly culture. They thrived on the largess of the nobility, and catered to their leisure, excelling in music, dance and literature. As custodians of culture, they commanded both admiration and affection, albeit with the label of ‘fallen women.’ Stories abound of lovesick admirers raining generosity on their favorite tawaifs, often to the point of self-ruin. Phoolsunghi itself begins with a reference to a patron of Janki Bai (1880–1934), who had squandered all his fortune on her mujras.

  Unsurprisingly, they were seen as a threat to the idea of family. With the decline of nobility, they were left to fend for themselves, many falling to prostitution. This was also the time when the tawaifs started clearing out of Lucknow and Patna, crowding places like Muzaffarpur’s Chaturbhuj Sthan. The story of Dhelabai’s mother, Meenabai, narrated towards the end of Phoolsunghi, mirrors this trajectory. The migrant tawaifs brought along art forms popular in the Durbars of Delhi and Lucknow. According to some accounts, a troupe of Iranian-origin courtesans that travelled from Delhi to Lucknow, arriving finally at the court of Hathwa Maharaj in Goplagunj (Saran Division), were the pioneers of Bhojpuri folk theatre. Two of the tawaifs from the troupe, Sudari Bai and Duniya Bai, earned tremendous fame as ‘nautanki’ artists around 1850s, inspiring others to undertake playwriting in Bhojpuri.6

  With the rise of scholarly classical singers like Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860–1936) and Vishnu Digambar Pauluskar (1872–1931), who undertook the monumental exercise of defining, documenting and ordering styles in Indian classical music, the contributions of tawaifs was mostly overlooked. Bhatkhande and Pauluskar established public-funded music schools, taking it outside the system of feudal patronage, and imbued it with a distinct religio-nationalist tone. Naturally, these maneuvers were detrimental to styles like thumri which the tawaifs had invented and perfected.7

  Throughout the nationalist movement, whenever the question of the tawaif was broached by writers and reformers alike, they were discussed as a corrupting surplus, their tremendous contribution to the progress of Indian music and dance elided. The idea of reform demanded a ‘post-rescue’ life dedicated to renunciation and social service. However, even a cursory glance at the paradigms of reform reveals a distinct pattern that aims to dislocate tawaifs from the centre to the periphery, both spatially and culturally. At the turn of the century, when the principals of Patna College and B.N. College urged the authorities to remove nautch-houses from the vicinity of educational institutions in Patna, it soon snowballed into a statewide demand. In Premchand’s Sevasadan (1919), a drive by the Varanasi municipality to banish tawaifs from the city triggers the central crisis of the plot. The beleaguered protagonist eventually finds refuge as the head of a care home for children of former courtesans.

  Chhapra itself was home to a sizeable tawaif community who inhabited a block named Shiv Bazaar, adjacent to the Bhagwan Bazaar. However, a few decades after Independence, they were driven out of the city. The temple built by Dhelabai, where Mahendar Misir spent the final years of his life after serving a seven-year sentence, is no longer remembered as Dhelabai’s temple; it now has a generic name—shivalay or the home of Shiva. However, the story of Dhelabai, particularly the way Pandey Kapil narrates it, offers a different paradigm of rescue: the tawaif becomes an heiress, moving from the periphery to the centre. She isn’t required to repent, but is bestowed with wifehood and awarded a final reunion with her lover.

  The Patriots, Sahibs and Migrants

  Saran Division is an administrative unit comprising three districts of Bihar: Chhapra, Sivan and Gopalganj. The district of Chhapra, also known as Saran, has its headquarters in the Chhapra City.8 Saran Division has long been the center of Bhojpuri language movement. It has produced several Bhojpuri authors, including the celebrated trio of Mahendar Misir, Raghuveer Narayan (1884–1955) and Bhikhari Thakur (1887–1971).9 It is also the birthplace of two of India’s greatest political icons—Rajendra Prasad (1884–1963) and Jay Prakash Narayan (or JP, 1902–1979)—something the local populace is extremely proud of. Moreover, during India’s freedom struggle, it was a hotbed of armed revolutionaries. If one visits the place, it is easy to see how the air in Saran is laden with tales extolling the exploits of its revolutionary sons; stories about Baikunth Shukla (1910–1934), who avenged Bhagat Singh’s hanging by shooting the informant dead; the escapades of Saryoo Prasad (1882–1964), who wrote perhaps the earliest manifestos of revolutionary movement in Bihar. Given the charged political climate of Chhapra during the days of freedom struggle, Mahendar Misir’s interaction with revolutionaries seems quite probable, even in the absence of hard evidences; a man so popular among youth must have known, at least, a few revolutionaries, maybe helped them too, as some suggest. Besides, using counterfeited money wasn’t uncommon among the underground activists. In 1930, when Yogendra Shukla was arrested from Chhapra, the list of items confiscated during the raid mentions counterfeit coins.10 Even though the find cannot be attributed to Misir, since he forged only banknotes, the pull of Chhapra’s anti-colonial ethos must have been hard to avoid, especially for a folk poet like Misir.

  It needs to be emphasized that the land of revolutionaries is the land of Henry Revel or Revel Sahib too. Revel was the custom collector of Chhapra and a much-admired public figure across Saran. Even though he lingers through the novel mostly as a memory, his mystical presence is quite forceful; we see his portrait hung in the prayer room of a Hindu household, and his grave functions as a shrine, which characters frequent for spiritual succor. It is said that during the final years of his life, he shed his Englishness and roamed the area, helping the locals with money and medicines. Instances of a sahib turning native weren’t too uncommon, each transformation having its own peculiar story.11 According to the eulogy inscribed on his tomb, installed in 1883 at the instructions of the then governor-general of Bengal, the market was named after him in 1788. In the words of Thomas Frank Bignold (1838–1887), the British civil servant who was posted in Patna during the 1860s, Revel was unlike the despotic ‘Magistrates of Yore’ who ruled with an iron fist:

  Friend to the people, in their midst he moved,

  To all familiar and by all beloved,

  And those who gathered prattling where he came,

  Grey-headed now, still gossip of his name.12

  Unlike other Bhojpuri-speaking parts of Bihar, Chhapra displayed an attitude of openness towards western influences. The following example is a telling one. Throughout the Bhojpuri belt, English was seen as a threat; there were rumors that education in English was a sinister ploy to Christianize unsuspecting Biharis, and get them deported to Mauritius.13 However, the general opinion in Chhapra was significantly different. In 1870, when the colonial government decided to withdraw its support to the English medium schools, a meeting was convened in the mofussil to protest the decision.14 It is highly unlikely that Revel Sahib was alive at the time, yet it is certain that he hadn’t faded out of public memory. The eulogy on his tomb is dated 1883, thirteen years after the public gathering in question. One wonders if his bonhomie with the locals was a result of Chhapra’s assimilative spirit, or whether he was the force behind the memorandum. It must be highlighted that Saran’s cultural syncretism has a long history. With Ghaghara, Ganga and Saryu providing a convenient river-transport network, the area emerged as a major trading center in eighteenth century India, bringing both money and western influences in abundance.15 Characters in Phoolsunghi inherit more than the material assets he has left behind; they live in a world whose moral framework has been set in place by R
evel Sahib.

  But there were other moral forces at play, too, trying to bring modernity and reform into the region. However, prior to Gandhi’s (1865–1948) arrival in 1915, the fate of reform was linked to the fate of reformist organizations active at the place. The same was true of Bihar. In spite of several proselytizing visits by stalwarts such as Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905) and Keshab Chandra Sen (1838–1884), Brahmo Samaj was a failure. Consequently, the cause it championed the most—female literacy—remained a neglected issue for very long. Arya Samaj, by contrast, made a steady progress, galvanizing members of the lower caste. Between 1872–1873, Dayanand (1824–1883) toured the Bhojpuri belt, lecturing in towns like Arrah, Dumraon and Chhapra. His visit to Chhapra in May 1873 left a lasting impact on the locals. Upon his arrival in the town, he was challenged to a public debate by a certain Pandit Jagannath, a representative of the orthodox Brahmans; as expected, Dayanand prevailed in the debate, boosting the anti-caste voices in the district.16 Perhaps it is this spirit of Arya Samaj which animates the anti-caste and reformist sentiments in the folk theatres of Rasool Mian and Bhikhari Thakur. Although Haliwant Sahay is no crusader, yet we see a complete disregard of caste and religion-based discriminations in his household; it employs a Muslim cook, a Dom sentry and a butler of indeterminate caste.

  For a few chapters in the narrative, the action shifts from Chhapra to Banaras, and then to Calcutta, offering a peek into the world of a Bihari migrant in early twentieth century India. Banaras is part of the extended Bhojpuri belt and therefore not so alien a city. Its vestigial courtly culture comes to Mahendar’s rescue, providing him both sustenance and fame. But Calcutta of 1915–1920s, roughly the time when Mahendar lived there, was quite different. The bhadralok had mostly outgrown its nineteenth century fascination for courtesans and mujras, glimpses of which can be seen in Bimal Mitra’s Sahib Biwi Golam (1953) and Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Shei Samay (1981). In a city that binged on gramophone recordings of Gauhar Jaan (1873–1930)—the diva who reigned the music scene in Calcutta during the period—there must have been no patrician takers for his Bhojpuri lyrics. Naturally, Mahendar is terribly lonesome; the community of fellow migrants is no match for the vibrant social life of Chhapra and Banaras. It is liberating in the sense that it destroys hierarchies of caste, allows characters to escape their past and is capable of some charity, too. However, it is motivated largely by material considerations, leaving a waylaid artist no choice but to return to his village.

  To a great extent, the plot is shaped by new ‘objects’ of modernity, railways being the principal among them. The following lines in Bhojpuri, composed by Ambika Dutt Vyas (around 1858), a Sanskrit teacher at a government school in Chhapra, attest to the wonders of this new world:

  Mighty is the reign of queen Vitoria, O Ram,

  Throughout the world it stretches, O Hari

  Dhuwankas chug away, wherever you see, O Ram,

  Telegraph wires are spread everywhere, O Hari.

  Dhuwankas or trains play an important role in the narrative. They facilitate Mahendar’s escapades, rescue Ramprakash and provide a sense of time, conjuring images of two different historical junctures—before the railroads, and after their development. But the sense of wonder, expressed in Vyas’s poem, is not too overwhelming. Characters manipulate these new objects to their advantage; they know their way around the surveillance on a railway platform, print banknotes and use gas lamps in note-forgery.

  A note on Bhojpuri

  Drawing upon his experience as the series editor for People’s Linguistic Survey of India (2012), G.N. Devy concluded that ‘Bhojpuri has not only stayed alive . . . in the whole world, Bhojpuri is the most rapidly developing language.’17 According to various estimates, there are close to 200 million Bhojpuri speakers living in India and overseas. While the majority of them live in Poorvanchal—a geographical unit comprising parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh—a sizeable Bhojpuri-speaking population lives in Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Nepal. Further, as a result of ‘girmitiya’ or indentured migration during the colonial period (1832–1914), the language is also spoken extensively in Fiji, Mauritius, Suriname, South Africa and parts of the Caribbean. The word Bhojpuri derives its name from Bhojpur, an ancient feudatory located near Arrah in Bihar. The feudatory, in turn, derives its name from Bhoj, the ancient king from Ujjain (Malwa) whose descendants ruled the province.18

  Literary Bhojpuri claims a fairly old ancestry. It has been suggested that the earliest literary specimen with Bhojpuri expressions date back to the medieval devotional compositions of the Nath sect. The tradition of writing in Bhojpuri begins with Kabir (fifteenth century)—often considered the ‘Adi Kavi’ or the first poet of Bhojpuri—and includes the devotional compositions of saint-poets such as Dharamdas (sixteenth century), Dharni Das (seventeenth century), Shiv Narayan (eighteenth century), Dariya Sahib (eighteenth century), Lakshmi Sakhi (eighteenth century) and Bulakidas (eighteenth century). By late nineteenth century, Bhojpuri had produced its first literary prose. According to George Abraham Grierson, Ravidutt Shukla’s play ‘Devakshar Charitra’ (1884) is the earliest recorded specimens of literary prose in Bhojpuri. A year later, in 1885, a Banaras based wrestler, Teg Ali, published Badmash Darpan, Bhojpuri’s first published work. Yet, a literary culture, so long and diverse, remains largely neglected.19 If one was to draw a list of factors that may have led to this neglect, two causes stand out: the perception that Bhojpuri is a folk language, spoken by illiterate villagers, and the near absence of its interaction with the other literary cultures, through translations or otherwise. Hopefully, the present translation will change some of that.

  Gautam Choubey

  1

  One Life, Two Chance Encounters

  Dhela!

  Dhela or ‘stone’ was what she had come to be called. Once, her nautch triggered a violent street fight amongst her fanatic admirers, and in the ensuing mayhem, stones were hurled. That same day, she ceased to be known by her real name and became famous as Dhela.

  She was a queen among beauties and an unchallenged sovereign in the realm of music and dance. When the fingers of the accompanist moved briskly over the taut head of the tabla, her skirt swirled like a whirlpool in an ocean. And when mellifluous songs flowed from her lips, it seemed as if her throat was a flute upon which the wind was playing resonant tunes. One could liken her to Menaka, or perhaps to Urvashi, the celestial nymphs. This tawaif from Muzaffarpur, once the foremost city in the ancient republic of Vaishali, was as majestic as Amrapali—the fabled royal courtesan of that province.

  Once upon a time, a famous tawaif called Janakibai lived in Prayagraj. It is said that a devoted admirer of Janakibai was so completely besotted with her songs that he lavished all his wealth on her. However, he had never seen her face, not even a fleeting glimpse, for she always wore a veil. One day, as she absentmindedly lifted her veil and he caught sight of her dark and pockmarked face, he was shocked beyond belief. Could a sound so sweet emerge from a source so repulsive? As his world came crashing down, he exploded with rage and in a fit of uncontrolled fury, stabbed her over and over again. Janakibai miraculously survived the fifty-six stabs and got a colourful new moniker—Chappan Churi or fifty-six knives.

  Like Chappan Churi, Dhela, too, once had a real name. She was Gulzaribai. True to her name, she was a gulzar, a blooming garden of flowers. She was blessed with moonlike radiance and the beauty of a heavenly nymph. But, the deeds of a few fanatics, who clashed over her and engaged in a vicious stone-fight, got her forever renamed to Dhela, alias Dhelabai.

  Dhelabai’s fame spread-out in all directions just like the rays of the rising sun. When it reached Babu Haliwant Sahay, a powerful zamindar from Chhapra, he rushed to Muzaffarpur to marvel at her splendour. However, when he returned home after meeting her, he was lovelorn and crestfallen. Haliwant Sahay’s middle-aged body was home to the soul of a young rasik—a devourer of pleasure. Dhelabai’s luscious body and her seductive fragrance had filled his hear
t with unbearable longings and weakened his scruples. Yet, for him, she remained painfully unattainable.

  The words that Dhelabai uttered to repulse his advances were steadfast and sacred, like a church bell. But he felt as if they were a dagger plunged into his heart; they had inflicted a wound whose pain pulsated through his veins. She had said, ‘Babu Sahib! You must have heard of a phoolsunghi—the flowerpecker—yes? It can never be held captive in a cage. It sucks nectar from a flower and then flies on to the next. I come from the community of tawaifs. Members of my community are like a phoolsunghi. Having After sucking money from one pocket, we quickly set out looking for another. Go back home. Spare a thought for your advanced age and spend the remainder of your days saying prayers and chanting the holy name of Lord Ram.’

  However, as he descended the steps of her nautch-house, Sahay did not forget to warn her, ‘Dhela, my pocket is a limitless fountain of riches. I have no doubt that any phoolsunghi will gladly agree to a life as a captive in my golden cage. Her beak isn’t big enough to suck all the nectar from my pocket. And, as to my age, let it be heard that Haliwant Sahay earns his money believing he’ll never die. And he lives his life as if he were forever young, like the Ashwinis, the ever-youthful twins of the sun god. It’s all right for now. When the time comes, you’ll know the hollowness of your own sermon. I am returning home to build a palace for you; a golden-cage for a phoolsunghi. Trapped inside that cage, the flowerpecker will remain perfectly satisfied with a single flower and chirp merrily around it.’