Here's the dual face of the Guwahati mentality that I tried to explore:

Full text available at: http://www.xcp.bfn.org/goswami.html

TAKING THE OTHER ROUTE

Adda: rendezvous; meeting place

I stood where the Rajgarh Road ended, just beyond the railway crossing and watched Moni Bhattacharjee stripping down to his skin. The occasion: a 3 hour-long film festival being held there in a makeshift open-air theatre. It was organised by a group of young people wanting an audience to showcase their work. The setting: incongruous in the extreme. There was the railway track at the back, noisy cycle and auto rickshaws in front and in between, an audience thousand or more in number. Over it all, was the larger than life image of Moni suffering the ennui of life in silence. The film: Wind of Change by Rajiv Borthakur. It is a depiction of life fragmented in today’s topsy-turvy times, and of the mundane activities of life: waking, sleeping, walking, waiting, dressing, undressing…

To my surprise, I noticed that none among the audience shuffled uncomfortably in their seats or coughed discreetly or made catcalls either as they watched Moni undress. I felt then that it had been wrong of me to attribute puritanism as endemic to the Guwahati psyche. But then, I had drawn my inference from events like vandalisation of fashion shows in the name of cultural preservation, and from the lived experience of my neighbour Mrs. K complaining to my mother that I, as a girl, should not return home very late every day. I just had to thank the young people from one of the various addas of Guwahati for acquainting me with this other face of the city.
***

Guwahati is where the capital of Assam, one of the seven states (federating units) of the Northeast frontier of India, is located. It used to be a sleepy town till the acceleration of commercial development reached such a pitch in the last decade or less that it lost its balance – it remains, as in the peoples’ attitudes, a small town; outwardly however, it can compete with any third world metropolis today.

And like any growing city, it attracts a large number of people who come here looking for livelihood avenues.

***

Most of the members of the adda Moni frequents are not from Guwahati. They came to the city from different parts of Assam to pursue their respective professions – mostly connected to the film industry. While some of them have been in the industry close to ten years, some are relatively newcomers. But everybody shares a common passion – cinema. It was this passion that dominated most of their daily conversations and culminated in the film festival where the Wind of Change had been screened. The adda members called it the Addabazor Suti Sobi Prodorxon: Screening of Short Films by the Addabaz (adda lovers).
***

The adda culture is nothing new to the Guwahati scene. An informal get together of like-minded individuals, addas have a dichotomous nature and are viewed with wide ambivalence. On the one hand are some addas outside pan shops, under roadside trees and in hip and happening food joints, where the members meet regularly to play cards or carom and to gossip. These regular hangouts are mostly identified with loafers and the general inclination is to equate adda with decadence. On the other hand are the addas of poets and writers, or professionals and workers, also maybe on roadsides, or in coffee shops, tea stalls and other eating joints or perhaps at a member’s house. These addas are looked at with much awe as the spawning ground of brilliant ideas and intellectual innovations.

The older generation of Guwahatians met at Panbazar, the book land of Guwahati – also considered the intellectual hub of the city. Addas still happen here, some of them having survived decades. But today’s young and happening destination is Rajgarh, opposite the Guwahati Commerce College, where one can see different kinds of addabaz. One of these kinds represents the flashy and consumerist pop-culture of Guwahati, which has placed the city among the topmost in the purchasing power index of the country. Rich kids with big cars and ‘modified’ bikes may be seen parked outside fashionable eating joints, enjoying their money power. Close to them however, might be another adda where a group of people would be equally enjoying themselves talking about art, literature, world affairs, family gossip, and what have you.

The adda which Moni and Rajiv and a number of their friends frequent also meets at the Rajgarh Link Road. This particular adda had its genesis with its members meeting between long working hours in the nearby editing studios. They would get together to smoke or chew tamul (betel nut) or sip tea and to have some conversation. Gradually a fraternity developed with the realisation of their common passion. Numbers swelled. The adda became their permanent address. So much so that anybody looking for young people associated with the industry would either meet them at the adda or in the event of their absence, leave a message, delivery ensured.
***

The idea of organising a short film festival came up in the course of regular adda discussions. Notwithstanding what was portrayed in the introductory film of the festival, Moments (of Adda), these young people met not merely to talk into their cell phones and drink tea with cigarettes dangling from their fingers. That was part of it. But they also had moments of intellectual introspection and times when they constructively contemplated on their shared desire to ‘do something different’. The idea took a few months to grow roots. Then, Amar Gogoi, one of the earliest adda members, took it upon himself to push the project through. Owing mainly to his enterprise, the adda members and their friends put together their films, publicised the event, pooled the required funds and set up the modest infrastructure for the screening within just a month.

The leitmotif of the festival was freedom – of expression, of participation, of appreciation. The idea of freedom was inherent in the choice of setting: the open-air theatre in the street. The entire process by which the festival was put together also spoke of the same idea of unrestraint. None of the 32 films submitted for screening were rejected. Any subject matter was allowed – the painfully moralising Values and Vision was screened as was the intensely erudite Las Vegasot. No limit was set on the length of the film or the age of the maker. Thirteen year old Raeesha Tanvir Altaf, for instance, showcased her film Khakuar Paro Sorai. Neither was experience a precondition: from a veteran like Altaf Majid to an amateur like Abinash Lahkar, everybody was provided a platform. And finally, nobody was barred from viewing the films or from airing their views about the films.

Those who did air their views though, chose to talk not so much about the individual films as about the entire event. For them the remarkable fact was the ‘something different’ that the festival signified, and the intellectual labour and out-of-the-box thinking that went into making it a reality. The genre of the short film also provided novelty. Larger significance to the phenomenon came from the realisation that it was all done by a group of talented but cash strapped young people without any institutional support. It was the sole urge to ‘do something’ that had made them put together an innovative film festival in such a short time and with funds less than INR 10,000 (USD 217 approx) – most of it contributed by the members of the group.

As it happened though, the films showed a poor understanding of the short film genre. In fact, technical, grammatical and dramatical shortcomings in most of the films were quite conspicuous. Most of the filmmakers suffered from poor execution of ideas and inability to translate individual visions into moving communicating pictures. Language barriers also often proved insurmountable. Where amateurs were making the films this is perhaps understandable, but quite a few of the adda members are professionals. Paucity of time has been cited as one cause of all shortcomings. But one of the possible reasons could have been that everybody tried to do everything. An editor trying his hand at direction or an actor or a director turning scriptwriter may not have been the best use of their respective specialisations. What if they had pooled their expertise and come up with one extraordinary flim? A different experience would then have awaited the Guwahatians.
***

The adda film festival was one burst of enthusiasm, a sustained effort of a month, and a temporary shedding of the characteristic Assamese attitude of lahe lahe (sloth in equivalent terms) by a group of young people and it exposed an entire city to the possibility of alternatives to established institutions, avenues and perspectives. It also made people realise they had an aptitude for such alternatives. There’s hope for the city yet. But what about Mrs. K?
***

GUWAHATIS OF THE MIND

We had to break up Guwahati as guwa jug hati guwahati, ie., guwa+hati=guwahati; guwa mane tamol, hati mane bazaar. If guwa means areca and hati means haat or market and the two together make Guwahati – as we were taught in Axamiya grammar classes—I could not understand why the city-streets weren’t lined with tamol haats, why we had to get our periodic supply of tamol—that endemic Axamiya addiction—from the village every time we went there.

“The tamol haats gave the city its name. There must have been such haats in the days of the Ahoms”, my mother explained. Names, it seemed to me, do not rue the loss of roots. Well, I’m not just a name and I do rue the loss of my roots. And my roots lie in Guwahati.

Now that I’m away from Guwahati, and so far away, I feel I never knew enough about my city, not as much as I should have anyway. I do know the origin of its name— and I have already flaunted the fact; I do know about the most beautiful places in the city—I happened to live in one of them; I also know the people — there everybody knows everybody else. But all of this was not due to any extra effort on my part. It all just came to me; it was part of my life there.

As opposed to the list of things I know, the inventory of all that I don’t know is colossal: it will probably run the length and breadth of the Xaraighat bridge. Lachit Borphukan who still stands guard near the bridge at the city entrance hadn’t saved the city from the invading Mughals to pass it on to ignoramuses like me.
***

Our house was on a hill. We could see the whole of Guwahati from the terrace—the Narakaxur and Kalapahar hills in front and the Nilachal hills with the Kamakhya temple towards the left. And behind flowed the Brahmaputra.

A string of hills one after the other stretched from our own Chintachal — Nabagraha (where the ancient temple dedicated to the nine planets still stands), Kharghuli (where the Raj Bhavan stands on the river-front) …

I saw the entire city from where I stood. I saw the Nehru Stadium and heard the cries of a wild audience at the India-South Africa cricket match. I saw the Guwahati Club flyover and heard the trains passing under it. Further right, I saw the TV tower on the Narakaxur hill with the Guwahati Medical College right next to it. The last time I was there, I’d clicked pictures of a lustreless sunset from the balcony of my sister’s hostel room.

From here, the sun looked different—against the backdrop of the Brahmaputra, it looked like Kamakhya’s xendurar phut—vermilion mark on her forehead. It is as red as the Devi’s menstrual blood that the pandas at the temple wash their hands with every ambubaxi.

At night, one couldn’t make out where the stars ended and the city lights began. The blue hills turn black, the Brahmaputra becomes a grey sky, and stars twinkle everywhere.
***

It was poetry of a different kind on our house on the hill and it was lost once we shifted to ‘the plains’. I became really and truly a part of the city for the first time. And once face to face with the real Guwahati, poetry failed to find metaphors.

What was Guwahati? It used to be Pragjyotishpur once upon a time and I could imagine my city as the light of the east when I saw it from our house on the hill. I couldn’t relate that Guwahati with the Guwahati I found myself in now.

The city I saw now was like any other city—dirty, unplanned, congested, polluted, ever-expanding. The beauty that I had so far seen in everything turned out to be merely the construct of my naïve, poetic (if you could call it that) escapism—because I didn’t want to see what lay beyond the bright lights, starry or otherwise, I hadn’t realised there were dark, unlit streets in my city as in others. Because I had not wanted to know what happened to people when there were the rains I revelled in, I hadn’t seen the water-logged streets of Guwahati: on a rainy day, I was safe on my perch; any commerce with the world below could be postponed to a sunny day. The black-out calls by this or that organization in protest against this or that atrocity, imagined or otherwise, gave me a chance to view a dark and mysterious Guwahati whose secrets—I fancied—only I knew. It was only in the next day’s papers that I would read what violence the same darkness had veiled from me and wreaked on others in its midst.

Thus, I was an insider-outsider. A part and apart. I was in Guwahati but in a Guwahati that did not exist outside my imagination. I had created a new Guwahati, a Guwahati nobody else knew. Conversely, I knew very little about the real Guwahati, or other people’s Guwahatis.

It was in Delhi, a place I’d hate to call home, that I realized the need to know about my real home. After all, if you need to explain your hatred for a certain place, you have also to have enough knowledge about the place you love in order to defend your love for it and contrast it with what you hate. And my knowledge of Guwahati, as I’ve unabashedly admitted, is pathetic. I’ve set out to learn now. And once I do, perhaps I shall be able to write about other Guwahatis—more real Guwahatis possibly—other constructs of Guwahati, bridges with the Guwahati which is my mind’s own place.
***

CITY AS SETTING: REFLECTIONS OF THE CHANGING FACES OF GUWAHATI IN AXAMIYA LITERATURE

In a way, this project of mine had begun way back in 2000 when I was working with tehelka.com as a trainee journalist and the editor of the lifestyle channel on the site, had asked me to write a piece for her on Guwahati which I always touted as a better place to live in than Delhi.

The editor loved the piece I wrote but I couldn’t figure out why because to me it only revealed my ignorance. I had been thinking of sitting down somebody and taking myself to task over it and learning more about the city I loved to call home.

If it hadn’t been for this fellowship, I don’t know when I would have found the required time, motivation and money to do it. For starters therefore, I think I should post a copy of the piece on Guwahati that I had written in 2000. It is from here my journey of rediscovery begins.

Taking an ecumenical approach, my subsequent postings shall traverse genres of creative writing, autobiography, literary criticism, sociological research, oral history and journalism, all aimed at studying Guwahati as reflected in literature, and linking such literary reflections with contemporaneous socio-politics. But to begin with, a monologue…

***