Phantasmic ecologies

SAROVER ZAIDI

A RECURRING image of a European philosopher, trying to rearrange his library has been haunting me the last few months. His rearrangement is aiming to, I guess, achieve some coherence, yet he writes a mostly incomplete sounding essay on it. I have an affinity to libraries, having lost mine three times, I now have built newer techniques to attempt coherences.

Ramchandra (Ramu) Gandhi’s book Sita’s Kitchen: A Testimony of Faith and Inquiry came to me from Darya Ganj market in 1999. It was fairly decent copy. My mother read it first and left her pencil markings on it. The book was eventually lost in the loss of homes, selves and libraries. Yet the life of the mind persisted, and as I was walking in Ayodhya 30 years later, searching for Ramu Gandhi’s mytho-philosophical phantasm, the desire to complete a library persisted. This took me on a six am drive from Lucknow to Faizabad.

‘Ramu’, as he was known to his friends and students, many of whom continued to be in dialogue with him by evoking his ideas in classrooms and discussions was a continental philosopher. I came to closely know him and his works through my philosophy teacher and friend, Rishi Nanda, in our many conversations over the last 20 years. It was Nanda, who once told me, that Ramu felt a strange urgency to go to Ayodhya in 1992, as the Babri Masjid was pulled down by the right wing mobilisation of the BJP. Today, this event gets distributed as part of our everyday life and our political formations. Arrests, demolitions, hate speeches, roadside lynches all feed into this master signifier. The ecology of the street corner is destroyed to signify a flat land future, or one which is embellished with Hindutva formats of existence.

Ramu’s urgency was to contain this future, and propose an alternate ecology to the Ram Mandir/Babri Masjid dispute. Gandhi’s proposition was to see the dispute, through the feminine, through Sita, as the disruptor of the ‘male space’ that the Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid case had become. In the middle of all the destruction he believed that a grove, a courtyard, a kitchen, is an alternate ecology where everyone would be fed with equal love, compassion and without the discrepancies of fundamentalist religious/caste identities. He writes about this in his book Sita’s Kitchen: An Testimony of Faith and Inquiry.

A strange light tilts over the open carcass of a landscape – I have been sucked into the vortex of the new temple construction site at Ayodhya. It’s a long walk, there is a background echo of ‘incessant security checks, a police post at every few steps, surveillance cameras and drones buzzing overhead, mountains of construction debris, dust, praises to ram lalla, passage ways directions , people reminding me that Mohamadan’s are not allowed inside, etc.’ The walk is long and as one jumps over broken ledges and dug up trenches, passing by debris, smashed buildings, a sense of broken people and cracked nations takes hold. Local people, women, children, old men are trying to walk to small ashrams, houses and corners still existing on the area, pretending to continue their old normal qasba town life. All to be absorbed soon into a colossal flatness of the new city, new temple plan.

The December sun retracts into strange angles, there is another trench, another security check of my little green wallet, a woman security guard tells me, ‘keep your money safe, they have too much money, don’t give any there…’ I reach the main darshan spot and the priest hands me the largest share of the prasad, which is like the tabaruk from the Nizamuddin Dargah. I am mostly full of ironic rage towards the priest handing this out. I think of my father, his reminder on the night of 6 December 1992, to get out of the country if one can, something has been irrevocably altered. But here I am, standing at the centre of this change in post-independence India, at the chabutara of the Ram Mandir.

What am I doing here? I think of Ramu Gandhi and I speed walk out of the area. Reaching the outside takes a while. The fruit and water sellers ask me if I need anything. Perhaps they can see the exhaustion of many generations on my face. I tell them, I only came here to see ‘Sita ke Rasoi’, and they nod warmly, speaking in the familiar Awadhi, saying, ‘You will find it…’

I do find a smaller temple away from the main Ram temple complex, called ‘Sita ke Rasoi’. Its scale is small, a few old sadhus are walking around, fixing the wood fired kitchen, cooking for the langar. A boy who had enthusiastically joined me in my search for this place, is saying ‘inko bahar ka paisa nahee aata’. The old sadhus seem lost in their tasks of chopping, cooking, letting the fire of the chulha running. A strange calm takes over the courtyard. The background noise vanishes. I am still thinking of Ramu Gandhi. The courtyard, after all, has been making space for all kinds for centuries now.
As in Ramu’s imagination, in this courtyard too, the background noises of the construction site dissolve into a powerful calm.

Ramu’s library was dismantled on 6 December 1992. So were the many coherences that we tried to articulate about the self and the world we wished to inhabit in this country. What exists now are courtyards, groves, maybe a few corners, and circles of friends, where we can still be able to grasp a sense of a complete library and an infinite dialogue – the ecology of a library. The Shaheen Bagh protests, the Farmers protests, the langars that have tried to resist and exist within demolition regimes, provide us ecologies of possibilities to a future that only Ramu could have imagined, prayed for, wished for….

The book was lost to me years ago, yet I try to find ‘Sita ke Rasoi’ in as many places I can.

Footnotes:

* Editor’s note: How do you write a book review for a lost book, a forgotten book? In this reflective essay, Sarover Zaidi answers the call to review a book that has been lost, and yet remains in one’s imagination, and life of the mind. The book compels her to undertake a trip, and this review then emerges as her a psycho-geographic map. Meandering across multiple registers, of the personal and the political, it leads to a strange encounter with the real, and the reality of the country. The book, which is also setting for an alternate horizon brandished with distress, erasures and possible hope. Can these phantasmagorical landscapes become the alternate ecologies for new knowledge production, for a new hope?