8; RAMAYANA AND MAHABHARATA; YOUNG LOVE BLOOMS

JEYPORE 

Jeypore, two hours further on, captivated us with its charm at very first glance. We found rooms at the Hotel Madhumati where the whole reception area was occupied by guests being shaved by a team of barbers, in readiness for a wedding taking place that night.

This town was the centre of the arts and entertainments of South Orissa; full of conjurers and fire-eaters, of strolling players, musicians, mind-readers and illusionists. It seemed impossible without retreat to a bedroom to shut out the nearby sound of someone tuning up a stringed instrument or producing desultory blasts on a horn. Near the entrance stood a cart drawn by two bullocks in which, under paper chains and sprays of artificial flowers, twenty-two musicians and a harmonium had been crammed. A notice said Our propaganda is travelling 10 kms anywhere for your pleasure. Say yes to life. A man pleaded into a microphone, 'This night we must sing and dance together. We must banish heaviness and care.' Across, on the far side of the road, the scene was strangely calm. Here at sunset, scrupulously avoided by the throngs of passers-by, the housewives were on their knees decorating the flagstones in front of their doors with the white powder design representing the footsteps of Lakshmi, drawn in the hope of inducing the goddess to enter the house and there spend the night.

(p. 243-244)

- NORMAN LEWIS: A GODDESS IN THE STONES - Travels in India (JONATHAN CAPE, LONDON)

RAMAYANA AND MAHABHARATA

Everyone in the theatrical business had to come to this town for their costumes: splendid, tawdry finery, star-spangled jackets, sherwanis, embroidered pantaloons, masks galore, and pleasantly ridiculous multiple crowns hung from the facades of the shops. 

Such was the local obsession with the theatre that every village in the area had a field set aside for the staging of performances of the RAMAYANA and the MAHABHARATA. Of these two epic Sanskrit poems, dating from about 500 BC, the longer, the MAHABHARATA, contains 100,000 stanzas - about fifteen times the Bible's length - and is presented in poetic form as the Great History of Mankind. Both the RAMAYANA and the similar MAHABHARATA have been dramatised in India and the countries of South-east Asia where they have been playing to audiences for at least 1,500 years. At Jeypore a short version of the Ramayana went on all night, but a full-scale production might last a week. The show usually started at ten and lasted until six in the morning, after which people went home and slept for the rest of the day. 

'What sort of an audience do they get?' I asked Ranjan.

'All kinds. Everyone is going who can.'

'Tribals, too?'

'Many of them. Most of the actors are tribal people. Their memory is very good for the long parts.'

Some people, Ranjan said, had to have medical treatment to cope with the exhaustion.

There had been a break in the sequence of such performances at about the time of our arrival due to an unsatisfactory confluence of the stars. It was one, however, that favoured marriages, and one or more took place each night, the more stylish of them based on our hotel. All the rooms apart from those we occupied had been taken over by the male members of a wedding party, with the bridegroom and his guests engaged in dressing themselves in archaic costumes which in most cases did not fit or were short of indispensable parts. The bedroom doors, left open as guests rushed in and out, showed half-clad men tripping over tin swords, or wrestling with enormously long turbans, and the endless buttons of achkans* made either for fat men or dwarfs. Barbers, cut-throat razors at the ready, groped their way from customer to customer in the half-light.

At 7 pm the town's lights went on, and as if to show the citizens' exultation and relief a great, crashing reverberation of drums was to be heard in all directions.

Lined up outside the hotel were the vehicles, both ancient and modern, which would convey the bridegroom's party to the bride's house, each of these being connected to a bicycle rickshaw carrying a small generator and an amplifying system. The band had arrived in something like an old-fashioned school brake*, with an ear-shattering uproar of drums, fifes**, flutes and horns of various descriptions, and rockets hissed up and exploded with stunning destinations immediately overhead. At this moment the hotel lights went out to an outburst of cheers. It seems to have been expected, something that had developed perhaps into a good-humoured convention for people who had acclimatised themselves to a situation in which nothing worked for long. This suspicion was strengthened by the sudden appearance of a number of beautiful girls who came scampering up the stairs with lighted candles to be placed in position all along the passages. With that, instantly, the lights came on again and the bellowing of the hotel's television, on full blast, was added to the street uproar outside.

(p. 244-246)

*Difference between ACHKAN and SHERWANI: The SHERWANI is a longer coat extending below the knees, while the ACHKAN is shorter and ends around the thighs or above. SHERWANIS feature buttoned closures in the front. (Google). Never having worn an ACHKAN or a SHERWANI, I had to search Google to find out their meaning. ACHKAN and SHERWANI remind Me of male models on TV.

*A break or brake (carriage) is an open four-wheeled vehicle with a high seat for the driver, pulled by two or four horses. - Wikipedia

*A fife [বাঁশি / বাঁহী/ बांसुरी] is a kind of small shrill flute used with the drum in military bands. - Google [Cf. "ও বাঁশি হায় বাঁশি কেন গায় আমারে কাঁদায় কে গেছে হারায় স্মরণের বেদনায় কেন মনে এনে দেয় আ আ বাঁশি কেন গায় আমারে কাঁদায়" song lyrics]

*scamper: (especially of a small animal or child) run with quick light steps, especially through fear [a small animal] or excitement [a child]. - Google

- NORMAN LEWIS: A GODDESS IN THE STONES - Travels in India (JONATHAN CAPE, LONDON)

YOUNG LOVE BLOOMS 

The peace and the apparent prosperity of Jeypore seemed remarkable. In Jeypore there were no policemen in the streets and queues of its citizens waited outside the principal cinema to be subjected to the anodyne of the Indian masses. The cinema was showing YOUNG LOVE BLOOMS with Monisha Koirala and Salman Khan - both given fashionable mousy hair - and dealt with teenage lovers who keep their innocence.

Another sign of affluence was the presence of many pharmacies, and their blown-up versions known as medical halls. India manufactures and exports a huge range of pharmaceuticals, and these, flooding the home market and advertised with persistence and cunning, are on sale even in the smallest towns, mopping up a high proportion of any spare cash that happens to be about. 

Jeypore appeared to be full of people well-off enough to worry about their health, and medical halls sowed the seeds of fear by window displays showing what could happen to those who tried to bypass the medicinal road to well-being. The evidence provided was startling, but since it was accepted that some citizens with spending power might be illiterate, and that most tribals were, the facts and figures were supported by photographs that spoke for themselves of the ravages of disfiguring diseases. The most popular display included a wonderfully convincing working model of a defective digestive tract, with arrows pointing to the zones of malfunction. This was garnished with large colour photographs of abscesses, tumours and cysts. The exhibit drew a constant crowd, and people stopping to inspect it on their way home from the cinema may well have found it an antidote to the sugary images of YOUNG LOVE BLOOMS.

(p. 247-249)

- NORMAN LEWIS: A GODDESS IN THE STONES - Travels in India (JONATHAN CAPE, LONDON)

WEDDING GUESTS

The day was passed in pleasant exploration of the oddities of Jeypore. Back at the Madhumati for dinner we found the scene hardly changed from the previous evening. The advanced guards of another wedding party had arrived to invest the hotel with its daily quota of confusion, charging up and down the stairs, pressing every bell in sight, and bursting into already tenanted rooms. 

Rickshaws bringing the evening contingent of wedding guests waited to discharge their fares at the moment when a sudden and probably brief splurge of urban illumination would do justice to their glittering attire. At street corners musicians carrying ancient instruments stood in silent anticipation, like a bullring band waiting for the procession of the toreros [bullfighters]. Indifferent to the growing tension and excitement, the women across the road got on with the evening decoration of their thresholds.

(p. 249)

- NORMAN LEWIS: A GODDESS IN THE STONES - Travels in India (JONATHAN CAPE, LONDON)

NORMAN LEWIS 

George Eliot is said to be the male pen name of a top female novelist. I wonder if "Norman Lewis" is similarly the MALE pen name used by a great FEMALE writer, one of the world's greatest writers, who has been reincarnating for billions of years, in both female and male forms, and may be in C.B. under house arrest (which sounds extremely ridiculous & funny).

Ms. X = Norman Lewis?

Ms. Z could be Norman Lewis.

Kishalay Sinha কিশলয় সিনহা किशलय सिन्हा जी [G] April 26/27, 2024