Book Talk at IIT Delhi
The title of my talk is taken from the text which appears on the dedication page of the book:
Like lovestruck, and for the land
1.
Many years ago, my mother
and I took a trip to Panchmarhi in Madhya Pradesh. The decision to visit
Panchmarhi was born out of my mother reading an issue of the monthly Hindi
magazine Sarita— in particular the Sarita Paryatan Visheshank.
The Paryatan Visheshank was, for us, a kind of passport and reading it
took us to different places. It took us to the ‘hill stations’ in the
Himalayas, the Deccan highlands of the southern and central India, and it took
us also to the beaches. These were places that were beautiful. When I say that
these places were ‘beautiful’, I mean to say that these places had a history of
being perceived and articulated as beautiful. It was this articulation which my
mother and I sought in the pages of the magazine. It made beauty credible.
In Panchmarhi, we went to
Bee Falls, Rajat Prapat, Dhupgarh, Pandav Caves, and in the end, we went to a
place called Apsara Vihar. Apsara Vihar was basically a river passing through a
wild stretch in the forest, flanked on both sides by hills. Our guide pointed at
a spot on the opposite hill and said, ‘Wahaan se Kareena Kapoor paani me
chhalang lagayi thi!’ I loved Panchmarhi. I have good memories of the place.
But here is the thing: if we were to turn proper nouns of all the places into
common nouns, into categories, then we find that we saw waterfalls, forest,
rock-cut caves and a river stretch. My mother, during our walk back from Apsara
Vihara, couldn’t help but utter, ‘We have plenty of these Apsara Vihars in
Hazaribagh!’
So you see. We had plenty
of Apsara Vihars in Hazaribagh. The issue was that our Apsara Vihars didn’t
have the credibility of the written word, at least in my time. Our Apsara
Vihars were earlier in the state of Bihar, and at the time of our travel to
Panchmarhi, in the newly formed Jharkhand. Neither of the two states were
particularly known for their beauty, though they were known for plenty other
things. Bihar was jungle raj, and Jharkhand was literally a piece of
jungle. But my mother’s observation had stuck with me, and I carry it even
today. There was a lesson encoded in her observation too: that beauty and verbalization
of beauty are two separate things.
2.
I left Hazaribagh for
Delhi in 2009. I call this chunk—Delhi 1.0. At the time, Jharkhand was nine
years old. The two-lane highway that connected Hazaribagh to Ranchi was in the
process of being widened into a four-lane expressway. A huge coalfield had been
surveyed in the south of Hazaribagh town, and NTPC had been engaged to operate
its thermal plant there.
Indian small towns are
often and rather simplistically called places where nothing happens. It is
something that I believed too, and in moments of frustration, still do. This
quality of things not happening points towards a certain timelessness where
time’s linearity is stalled and ‘things’— whatever ‘things’ may be— remain
fixed. In 2009, time had well entered Hazaribagh and time’s close cousin
‘development’ was sprinting everywhere across the terrain. The uprooted trees
of Hazaribagh Wildlife Sanctuary for the purpose of road widening, NTPC
signboards announcing some CSR activity or the other, the well-educated
us leaving the town, the opening of Vishal Mega Mart and hotels with elevators:
yes, time was in—and I was out.
Well, not really. I may
have been out of Hazaribagh physically, but the place exerted a strong pull on
me when I lived in the hostel of Ramjas College, about 20 kilometres from here.
It simply wouldn’t leave. It should have. The format was to leave the
smallness behind for the well-earned largesse of the metropolis. But Hazaribagh
spilled everywhere—during conversations with friends, teachers, and anyone who
asked, ‘So, where are you from?’ At that time, many students from Jharkhand,
and regardless of whether they came from Giridih or Gumla, or from Latehar or
Chatra, used to simply say ‘Ranchi’. Ranchi was sufficiently famous for being
MS Dhoni’s hometown, and that had given some visibility, if not to Jharkhand as
a whole, but at least to Ranchi the city. But I couldn’t say Ranchi because for
me Ranchi was different. Ranchi was a railway station and an airport. I said
Hazaribagh, and when I was prodded as to “where” and “how far from” and “in
which direction”, I explained the location patiently and repeatedly.
Sometime later in 2010,
my mother bought an Alto. She learned driving before me. She never went beyond
the second gear, by the way, but she went to a lot of places within Hazaribagh.
People would watch, and she would move. Later, when I learned driving, we
started moving together. Our immediate concern was to ‘see for ourselves’
places which we had heard about. We went to a place called Barso Pani. For the
longest time, we had heard that if you went there and shouted ‘Barso Pani’ or
clapped loudly, it would rain. Turned out, Barso Pani was a cave-like structure
with heavy water droplets condensed on the ceiling. It didn’t matter what you
said, the vibrations caused by sounds would make the saturated droplets fall to
the ground anyway. We returned from Barso Pani having debunked a myth which we
had kept with us for years. Then we went to the huge prehistoric cave at
another village and saw a long, rock art panel nearby. That was one common noun
done right. Caves.
Every vacation from
Ramjas was spent with me heading back to Hazaribagh, for newness and discovery, and soon
there emerged megalithic sites, Buddhist rock-cut caves, beautiful rivers and even
a waterfall. There emerged ruins of a palace, a couple of indigenous art forms,
and newer hills and escarpments. Through our wanderings in the present, we were
bringing history to our town, and a chronology began to emerge. 10000 BCE the rock
art, 1500 BCE the Megalithic Complex, 600-800 ACE the Buddhist caves, sometime
in 1600s the fort of Badam, 1764-65 East India Company in Bengal, 1776 the
appearance of Ocunhazary on the map of Major James Rennell, 1834 the
establishment of Hazaribagh district, the construction of the jails and the penitentiary,
emergence of the lake, plenty more events in the twentieth century which I
won’t mention here, my mother’s arrival in the town in 1985, and in 1991 my
birth. A lot many things had happened in my ‘timeless’ hometown.
Tales of Hazaribagh was,
first, a blog started in 2010 to document some of these places we saw.
Sometimes, we did it together. Sometimes, I travelled alone. I took photos from
my 3.2 megapixel camera phone and uploaded them on the blog. Tales of
Hazaribagh was also a Facebook group which I started along with the blog. The group thrived, it had over 10000 members, and the blog too turned into a
website (now closed after Tales' publication). Messages from people started pouring in. ‘Hi, we are planning a trip
to Hazaribagh and came across your site. Could you suggest a few places?’, or
‘Hi, we are interested in knowing more about the traditional art forms. Could
you suggest something in that regard?’, and sometimes the best kind of
messages, ‘Hi, we lived in Hazaribagh in the 1980s. Now we have moved abroad.
It was just so nice to see the photos. Thank you for the work you do.’ And so I
did. I met cultural anthropologists, heritage practitioners and local
historians, and in 2014, my work on Hazaribagh got me invited—digitally—for a
talk at Durham University. I continue to do one talk on Hazaribagh every year
with them.
After finishing my
Master’s, I received a writing fellowship at a UK university and took
Hazaribagh there. I delivered a talk on my hometown, much like this one, in a weekly
seminar; I tracked down a descendant of an 1857 army caption after whose
battalion was named a building in Hazaribagh. I visited his home and tried
putting on the Scottish kilt, after he had shown me the sketches and notes of
his great grandfather Captain Thomas Rattray. I went also to the British
Library where I found a wonderful little book of verse called Garden at
Hazaribagh, written and published by a former Deputy Commissioner in 1946. I
returned after the three-month period, still not wanting to enter academia, and
joined advertising. For a year, I led the energetic life of a copywriter and
wrote ads for restaurants, real estate companies, tourism websites and luxury
hotels, and on bad days, for sanitary wares. But you see, there was a
disconnect. As much as I loved my work, I gradually stopped loving myself. It
happened because in my mind I was supposed to use all the material that I had
collected on Hazaribagh towards something. Career wise, life was good, but when
it came to satisfaction, I found myself haunted… by Hazaribagh. And just like
all hauntings begin, I too lost sleep, the will to eat, and the motivation to
live. I was diagnosed with a case of severe clinical depression and was advised
to leave Delhi. And that’s how Delhi 1.0 ended— in a quarter-life crisis.
3.
We are aware that a place
has the capacity to generate multiple experiential spaces. This committee room
today holds a different value for me than the time when I was here as a
timekeeper a few months ago, and this same room will turn into a different
space when I’ll present my research here in the future. So when I returned to
Hazaribagh in 2017, I returned to a specific kind of space, and that was the
one of a sanatorium. Before that, as you have seen, I was trying to turn my
hometown into a long chronology. I was making it temporal. But in 2017, I was
put at the beginning of Hazaribagh’s modern history, the very genesis of the
town which lay in its utility as a resting place for travelling soldiers.
Perhaps the word ‘town’ is not fully correct here, because ‘town’ happened
later; what offered the environment conducive to recuperation was the land
itself, the geography. It was at this point in my life that Hazaribagh
transformed from a small hometown into a larger homeland, and when the homeland
opened up, it ushered in something which I needed the most—excitement, if not
yet the purpose. There was some romance to it too. It was like something that
happens in the movies. One shared gaze, and the world disappears, leaving only
the infatuated lovers in the rain.
This excitement fuelled
me during the first year of my recovery. It took me outside the town and
outwards into the plateau. To be honest, I couldn’t care less about describing
the ‘provinciality’ of Hazaribagh town, so if you are looking for nostalgic
tales about small town life in India, then you will be disappointed. My
tales are different. Chapter 1 outlines the scope of the book thus:
This
book, therefore, is about me and the Hazaribagh Plateau. It is also about me in
the Hazaribagh Plateau. It is not about the town, but the land. And though it
does delve into history, it is not a history book.
We will come to more
extracts a little later, but for now, let’s quickly return to those infatuated
lovers in the rain, and the excitement such love brings. Between 2017-19, I
couldn’t have rationally told you what I was doing. I was taking the poor Alto
on to forest roads, up the hills and into the valleys. I was stepping down from
the bridges on the roads to walk with the water flowing below. In the wildlife
sanctuary, I was walking the entire circuit on foot till dusk transformed into
night and excitement gave way to fear. I was marking my rocks, certain
stretches of rivers, and I was sweating. I grew fond especially of Google Earth
and through its satellite view, I began scanning the rivers for waterfalls. And
then something clicked. Something that was there all along, but not told, and
it was the logic of waterfalls. You see, a plateau must fall somewhere. Ideally
the table-top should drop in all directions. These drops, which are called
escarpments, I realised were where waterfalls had to be found. A river starts
from the table-top and flows downwards. When it reaches the escarpment, it can
either create a valley or simply fall down. So if I were to scan the
escarpments of the plateau, then I would definitely find waterfalls. And I did.
About a dozen of them, in a year. Paryatan Visheshank didn’t lead me to
them. It was, instead, done by collaborating with the land. You bring
something, I bring something. This word ‘collaboration’ here is important; it
is different from ‘consumption’. Between anonymity and tourism, this
collaboration created a different space out of Hazaribagh, and I made this
space mine. In this space, rivers became my roads, and they led me from one
village to the other. At confluences, I simply walked from one river to the
next and then followed it either up to the table-top or down to its eventual
fall into the lower reaches below. Similarly, forest trails were preferred.
Waterbodies like lakes and reservoirs, valley roads, hills and forests started appearing
more. Gone were the temples, the narrow small-town streets, the token nukkad ki
chai, and the issues of humanity like the riots which a senior had pointed out in college. I revolved
around my homeland. I looked at one mountain and it offered its story, I walked
around the lake and it returned a link between beauty and punishment, I went to
a zombie waterfall and it told me how its life was bartered away for mines. To
quote from Chapter 4 “Forest”:
I
had thought of landscape as a stationary, geographical feature, defined by the
physical appearance of things. Now it was a subject to economy, politics and
public policy. No longer enduring, nor innocent.
So you see, after the
infatuation was over, there was ugliness too. I wished for uninterrupted
greenery, but its sequence was broken by the coal dust winding up airily behind
hyva trucks. I wanted my river, but villagers came and told me about the
promised bridge. I wanted my forest, but its quiet would often conjure inside
me the images of Naxalis. This was the second phase of love, the testing kind.
The one in which we show each other our baggage. I had my own baggage to dump,
and Hazaribagh had its too.
Sharing grief in love is
a process; it is also a performance. There are rituals involved, some unsaid
ones too. With humans we know such rituals, but when a human meets a non-human,
he can only improvise and hope that whatever he is doing is right. To explain
this predicament, I offer here an extract from Chapter 2, “Hill”. [A quick
context first: to create the bypass road for the expressway, a portion of
Canary Hill’s forest in Hazaribagh town had to be taken out. The trees were
assigned numbers for felling. One such tree was 1362.]
I
went to see 1362 often.
I would rise early and make sure to
be inside the forest before the hill swarmed with joggers and morning walkers.
Before
dawn broke, I would be in, making my way to the clearing. Paths in the forest
hardly run parallel, I came to learn soon, after getting lost a couple of
times. Once I saw a dead hare, its pelt decaying and stuck to the ground. Then,
on the same day, I saw another hare, alive and leaping across the trail.
Sighting wildlife at Canary now? I was amused.
To
say that I was growing fond of the forest would be an example of language
trivializing an emotion. I remember the day when Sumana Roy’s book How I Became
a Tree arrived at home. I had taken it to Canary, to 1362, and leaning against
the trunk, I read a chapter aloud. There was love blossoming in the Arden,
between me and the doomed tree. It was tragic from the beginning. The forest
would soon be a stretch of tar.
I
had begun to love the tree at the wrong time. I, a fucking performative
millennial.
But just as there are
rituals to grief, there are rituals to hope too. And love requires one to be
hopeful and to find it in unconventional places. To illustrate this, I offer an
extract from Chapter 7, “Territorial Trespassing”:
The
road to Beram passes through Murki, where an interesting hillock stands outside
the village. Sal trees rise from this mound. A tidy alley, wide enough to
accommodate the Alto, runs through the mousy hill. The path’s impeccable
integrity restrains me from driving on it. When I come to this place, I come
harbouring awe. I park the car on the tarmac and walk up to the mound. A loose
magic floats in the air. When I look closely at the laterite track, I notice
stones placed neatly in straight lines along either side of the path. I notice
they are fixed to give the path its borders. A rushing traveller will miss it.
A disinterested driver will miss it too.
This
stone-bordered path is a human intervention to landscape. With no construction
tenders and without resorting to concrete, the path is a work of the villagers’
labour. No boisterous signboard takes credit for the ‘sundarikaran’ here. No
corporation passes it off as their CSR activity. The villagers merely declared
their love for the land.
‘I
love you,’ the lover says, and offers gifts. The lover sings. The lover dances.
The lover writes of his love on the sky. The villagers used the stones from the
land to gift the place a new charm. They did not give up on it, they used no
words to codify their affection.
When
I drive on the NH 100 and cross the turn to Murki, my head turns towards the
river, the bridge, the hillock. ‘Oi, what you looking at?’ someone asks, and I
say nothing, unsure if my sentiments warrant articulation, unsure if any
articulation will resonate.
I started this talk by
dwelling on beauty and its articulation. Between these two things, there exists
a space too. It is the same kind of intermediary space which exists between a
place’s anonymity and fame. This is the space of poetry. And poetry not in the
sense of the picturesque or the reductive-romantic, but in the sense that it
leads to something that is new— the Greek ‘poesis’. But to create something
new, there has to be enough familiarity with the old, and though we think of
new and old as qualities that come before or after each other, it is
nonetheless possible that both exist on the same temporal plane. The journeys
in Tales of Hazaribagh are repetitive in nature. It is often the same
hill, the same lake, the same forest, the same waterfalls and the same rivers
that are visited over and over again. On one hand, there is familiarization
happening with each visit, and yet every visit also offers something different.
Something getting old as it simultaneously becomes new. And it is through this
duality that one may find their place, because embedded in this dynamism is the
notion of investment. Investing empathetically in both the good and the bad.
Going to meet a waterfall when it is both dry and thundering. Watching how the
landscape changes over time, over seasons. My own river in Hazaribagh is Konar.
There are four more, but it is in Konar that I have invested the most. After
the thrill of exploration was over, I visited Konar still. Often, I went to see
the river all dressed up, as if I were going on a date, and often I just went
to sit next to it. In the current time, the anxiety of placelessness, of not
belonging anywhere, not being rooted, whether in language, on the internet, or
even in a place, gnaws at us. The plateau, by becoming my sanatorium, offered
me that grounding. I would like to read an extract from the book’s epilogue
here:
I
left Delhi not because I hated the city, but because, at that time, I hated
myself in it. I came to Hazaribagh because I thought I could love myself in it.
But how does one grow self-love out of
self-hatred?
It is precisely here that the plateau intervened.
I
loved it first. I loved its unrelenting flatness and I loved its swift rivers,
its ruins and its forest. I loved its lakes and its reservoirs, and though the
heat annoyed me, I loved its summers too. When this love spilled over, it
became easier to gift some of it to myself.
I loved myself through the plateau.
If,
in Delhi, the depression felt larger than me, in Hazaribagh, the plateau was
greater than me. Against this greatness, the mind had to behave. […] Between
what I was and what I am, between hatred and love, and cynicism and hope, is
the plateau.
It contains me and my mind.
4.
In the end, I want to say
something about the author of the book. Not me, exactly, but the Mihir you find
inside it. On the back cover, you will see three genres listed: travel, memoir
and non-fiction. After reading it, you can add yours too. It has been a year
since Tales was published, and it surprises me how differently readers
have approached this book. Some have read it for certain geographical
explications, some have read it for local history (especially the “Lake”
chapter), some have read it as a critique of ‘helter-skelter modernity’, some
because it is now in their UG syllabus, and some have read it for my own story.
Reception aside— that the book struggles with narrative is not something I
didn’t know before. A few days ago, my friend and a fellow author who writes
fiction, told me, ‘Mihir, you will someday have to make your peace with
narrative.’ Perhaps in the next one, who knows? But here is something I would
like to say.
Tales is
not a book which is written by simply ‘a poet and a writer’, although I am a
poet and a writer. Instead, it is a riverwalker’s book. The riverwalker doesn’t
care about narrative, he cares about the experience. It doesn’t matter whether
a trip ends in success or failure, or whether an anticipated climax turns out
to be a fluke. There are plenty of flukes in the book too. This riverwalker is
concerned with creating a different kind of exploratory map for Hazaribagh, one
that has emerged through an engagement with— you guess it— rivers, and so he records
both successes and the flukes, because he is only slightly more experienced
than you. He knows the path, alright, but he does not know what awaits him, so
when you follow the author, you follow not an authority but a vulnerable friend
who is as excited to see what lies ahead as you are. In moments of failure, he
shares your disappointment and puts that disappointment into words.
This riverwalker can
often be frustrating with proper nouns, but hey, you may want to cut him some
slack. Why? Because he doesn’t want you to get lost the way he did multiple
times. In his mind, Tales was that unwritten book which he wanted
to read, a book that would have told him where to look and for what, and so he
wrote it. He knows that he is now in Delhi— Delhi 2.0.— so if you were to visit
Hazaribagh tomorrow or the day after, he cannot take you to these places in the
Alto.
That is why he also made a hand-drawn map for you, included in the book.