In memoriam

Komal Kothari – more than a treasure

I MET Komal Kothari in 1973 when I was 21 and on my way to the desert land of Jaisalmer to make my first film on the cultural heritage of the area. Before I left, my father, then deeply engrossed in the dream of a new India, said, ‘You can’t go to the desert without meeting Komalji in Jodhpur.’ So I ended up as thousands have at B-II Paota Road in Jodhpur. 31 years have gone by but I remember my first meeting vividly. I was face to face with much more than an encyclopaedia about the fabric of life in these arid areas of Rajasthan. Sharp, finely tuned with an amazing grasp of the nuances that make up India he, in a way, was my first ‘guru’ to understanding the amazing richness and quality that makes India.

In that first film I made, he networked many connections including the most powerful part of the film – the music of the desert. He came to the locations and every evening we sat under an amazing desert sky listening to an array of folk musicians that mesmerised and captivated like little else can. I worked with Komalji on several films from the 1970s till the early ’80s. He had an amazing ability to give everything of himself to any effort – films, books, music or the wilderness, with expertise and humility. In myriad ways he remained a constant presence and though I saw little of him from the early ’80s to the late ’90s, I knew he was always around. I was deeply engrossed with tigers and meanwhile Komalji had turned into one of the greatest legends this country has known.

I went back to see him in the late ’90s and we talked of old times and the cultural horrors that confront today’s world. When one was with Komalji the delight of cross-fertilisation of ideas, connections and interdisciplinary fields – all this cooked together in ways that were masterful. Komalji was the master of articulating the concoction that makes the reality of India. He could take your breath away with his words and silence you with his depth of vision. It was a treat to just be with him.

I was with him for a few days before he died on 20th April. Something had pushed me to travel to Jodhpur with my family. He had already interacted with my wife and I wanted him to meet my son Hamir. He had been very ill for a few months. Komalji had battled heart problems and cancer but now his kidneys were failing. I sat at his bedside – he was half his physical self but his mind darted effortlessly from field to field as we talked of ‘Madhu-Malati’, the great folk tale emblematic of the story of the tiger and the blackbuck. In those few days we decided to do a book on this amazing tale – my commitment to a greater understanding of the tiger combined with Komalji’s wisdom of the finer details of folklore. We formulated the schedule – I returned to Delhi with several hundred pictures from the old texts and illustrations of Madhu-Malati. After Jodhpur I felt elevated – our trip had been so special that it was beyond definition.

When just days later I heard that he had passed away I was devastated for a while. People like Komalji are more than a national treasure. They are the reason why India is India or why we love it. They are now in such tiny minority that when they depart India shakes just like the tremors of an earthquake – it loses something of its essence because such people are able to touch the roots of this nation. They have the wisdom, depth and ability to interpret the roots – but they also have their great sorrow. For Komalji it was not being able to share this experience with a growing younger generation because most of them don’t care.

Komalji was for me a great conduit to the understanding of this country; I could feel it through him. His demise froze me but because of the richness and depth of his presence, his wisdom, his ability to cross-fertilize, he also unfroze me and is a part of my very being. Yes, I have embarked on the Madhu-Malati book – I will do it. Of course, I will hugely miss Komalji because he was not only someone I treasured through my life but equally because his vision of the Indian reality is a great inspiration for the future of any generation.

Before leaving Jodhpur I drove out to see a tiny bit of wilderness where Komalji was building a folk museum – he insisted that I go at dawn to see the birds, the peacocks, the antelope. I drove there amidst the horrors of modern India and the mining of our precious land – bomb-scarred land, craters, the crimes committed against the earth to make a quick buck, and then came Komalji’s oasis. His final words to me were, ‘Help me save it – I want to protect this fragment of desert wilderness even an area of 200-300 hectares around my land. I want all the wildlife here to prosper.’ It is a never-ending mission to protect, preserve and keep alive the roots that anchor a people and a nation, be it in the cultural context or the natural world. I know that I have been able to feel some of the roots through my link with Komalji. What more can one hope for in life?

Valmik Thapar

 

Remembering Komalda

I REMEMBER Komalda talking to me with matter-of-fact calm about his father’s death rites and ceremonies, which he had observed with meticulous rigour. Acknowledging the family as a vital site for his research, he punctuated his observations with intimate details – for instance, if three people travelling by train are taking the ashes of a dead person to Hardwar, then they will always buy four cups of tea. One cup of tea for the dead person. However, when the relatives of the dead return back home, they will buy only three cups of tea. Measuring his words, Komalda said, ‘If you are capable of treating a dead person as a living being immediately after his or her death, then he or she can live for eternity. The dead can be with you forever.’

These words resonate for me as I begin, with difficulty, to reflect on Komalda’s death – a death that, on the one hand, was anticipated, but which has yet to sink in. The loss is immeasurable. In this context, how can one commemorate him today? No shubraj or panegyric verses, I can hear him mutter. Just get on with the work.

On my last trip to Jodhpur, Komalda took me to the site of his newly imagined ethnographic museum on the edge of the desert. ‘Why a museum, Komalda?’, I asked, thinking of all those redundant edifices in India which attempt to preserve the past, even as the past lives and mutates on our streets and in the chaos of our everyday lives. ‘This museum,’ Komalda emphasized, ‘will not have any permanent structure. No walls, no collection. It will simply provide a space for traditional modes of production and processes of work.’ At the heart of his imaginary of the museum was an object that would inaugurate its existence: the jharu or household broom.

Till the end, Komalda’s homage to ordinariness was profoundly real. As any of his friends can testify, he had a vast knowledge of the material bases of culture relating to land, water, agriculture, irrigation and livestock. He could name the different kinds of animal dung used as preservatives in the construction of clay pots, and if he talked about Heer Ranjha, it was not to relish its poetry but to point out its use as an indigenous quarantine practice during epidemics of foot- and-mouth disease.

Similarly, the jharu, for Komalda, opened up a wealth of knowledge relating to its different materials, working communities, techniques of construction and myths. In certain households, as I learned from him, the jharu is actually worshipped as the goddess Lakshmi. And, in some communities – this detail is particularly human – when the broom becomes old, it is not simply thrown away as garbage. Rather, it is set aside gently, unobtrusively, with muted respect.

While listening to Komalda narrate the cultural history of the jharu on that last trip to the museum site outside of Jodhpur, I remember us passing a dumping site for animal carcasses. It was a grim and surreal sight – miles and miles of bones, bleached under the sun, with vultures hovering in the sky. Within the skeletal remains of the animals, we saw bright-blue and bright-pink plastic packets wedged between the bones. A ghastly reminder of the ubiquity of plastic in India, which has proliferated almost as virulently as the vilayati bambul shrub, appropriately branded as angreji or foreign by rural people.

Tellingly, Komalda did not use the example of plastic – eaten, but undigested, by the animals – to launch into an anti-modernity diatribe with which we are so familiar today in contemporary Indian debates around secularism and community. Steeped as he was in the minutiae of rural cultures, and critically aware of the hazardous destruction of traditional water-harvesting systems, among other manifestations of people’s science and technology, Komalda was neither an anti-developmentalist nor an anti-modernist.

In many ways, he was a down-to-earth realist who recognized the extraordinary courage and tenacity embodied in the cultures of survival. With this in mind, I remember him peering into the field of bones and asking, ‘Look carefully, are the horns and hooves of the animals intact?’ He then turned to me and rattled off figures relating to the market price of these bones sold to the glue and pharmaceutical industries. If bone-collecting is a viable business, it is not surprising that there should be communities of bone-collectors from the most downtrodden sections of society. Komalda was the kind of grassroots researcher who did not merely document or commiserate with such communities; rather, he recognized their skills and contribution to society at large.

Scavengers, as he often reminded us, prevent our cities from being buried in garbage; nomadic communities like the Kalbelia contribute to the removal of locusts; the Ghattiwal repair and maintain the chakki or grinding stone. This fundamental respect for the technical skills of the downtrodden extended to their music and genealogies, their narratives, performances and epics. Far from instrumentalizing people’s knowledge, Komalda recognized the cultural dimensions animating it.

If there was one leitmotif that ran through his discourse, at least in my experience as a listener, it was the primacy of knowledge. Komalda was at once the most ardent seeker of several systems of undocumented knowledge, and the richest repository of its interconnections. In him we have lost a vital link with living traditions on the ground because he was our most precious and reliable point of reference. And yet, I do believe that the dissemination of his knowledge to a veritable diaspora of musicians, artists, anthropologists, folklorists and ethnomusicologists, scattered in different parts of Rajasthan, India, and the world, has been so profound, that the inspiration of his informal knowledge is still circulating.

If we listen carefully, Komalda is still talking to us. He is urging us not to lose sight of ground realities as we theorize our respective disciplines. Above all, he is telling us to be serious but not to lose our sense of humour or the human dimensions of scholarly research. In our internalization of his many hours of conversation, punctuated with his inimitable digressions and transitions, intuitive leaps and startling logic, I do believe that he is still with us. Like an oral epic, with no fixed beginning or end, Komalda will live forever.

Rustom Bharucha