By Dilip
D’ Souza
Rajendra wants to
show me how easily the liquid burns. He lifts a small quantity of it
out in a steel cup, and flings it into the fire below. I half expect
a minor conflagration, as you might if you flung petrol or kerosene
on a fire. But the fire only burns slightly higher for a few seconds,
the flame a thin orange as it licks upward.
”Did you
see that?” asks Rajendra, almost proudly. “It’s good!”
I’m struck
by the incongruity of the scene: this slender 50-year-old man is selling
me the virtues of his illicit liquor by showing me how volatile it is.
No: despite his pride, the orange flame doesn’t say much for the
quality of the stuff.
I agree to take
a sip, gingerly. It’s putrid.
In Ahmedabad’s
Chharanagar, little stills brewing liquor are all over the place. A
random walk through just one part of Chharanagar would throw up half
a dozen. There’s no stealth in the enterprise, certainly no shame.
Yet it is all “illegal”. This is part of what gives Chharanagar
its fearsome reputation in Ahmedabad.
Rickshaw drivers
might take you there willingly, but anyone notches above that on the
economic ladder speak of Chharanagar only with fear and contempt. “I
would never go there! All bootleggers in that place!” exclaimed
Tejal, and this is a young woman who works in slum schools, running
a novel education programme.
Chharanagar then
is a step beyond a mere slum. People have an idea that it’s full
of gangsters selling country liquor and thieving, and probably worse.
I try hard to understand that idea. But I simply cannot see Rajendra
— Rajendra so proud of his brew — as a gangster.
Chharanagar is
home to the Chharas, a community that the British listed, in their bigoted
Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, as criminal. The stigma stuck. A century-and-a-half
on – despite the Act’s demise in 1952, despite being referred
to officially now as a “denotified tribe” (DNT) —
Chharas are still considered criminal. So deep-rooted is that impression
that there’s almost nothing Chharas can do to escape it. It becomes
a self-fulfilling description. They are reduced to making that brew
because nobody is willing to give a Chhara like Rajendra a chance at
anything else.
In his recent book
A Nomad Called Thief, the scholar-activist GN Devy writes of a doctoral
dissertation he found in Gujarat University, about the Chharas. This
learned academic thesis, Devy says, claims that:
•
“Chharas ... train their children, particularly girls, at a very
young age to run liquor stocks, often smuggling them in balloons put
inside their blouses.”
•
“A Chhara who works as a clerk in some government office carries
his wife on his bicycle so that she can beg outside the office.”
•
Chharas are “petty thieves.”
What do you mourn?
That there are such impressions out there? Or that they get awarded
a Phd?
The world outside
Chharanagar is changing at warp speed — Ahmedabad, for example,
is awash in new prosperity, shiny cars and flashy if ugly glass malls.
But if you step into Chharanagar, ignoring Tejal’s wails, it’s
as it must have been for years. Cops come through and collect their
“hafta” regularly, openly. The stills pay, then go back
to brewing more. Garbage collection is minimal. Things seem...
well, I nearly
said hopeless. In other DNT communities, you sense that hopelessness,
sometimes sunk so deep you wonder if it can ever be exorcised, and how.
But in Chharanagar, there’s something else, something more. There
are young Chharas here with law degrees, others who teach, some who
have studied fashion and tailoring, others who go to college dressed
like any other college kid. There are mobile phones here, thriving little
shops, occasional signs that some Chharas have arrived smack in the
middle of the middle class.
Even so the prejudice
against Chharas is so strong that educated Chhara kids often cannot
find jobs.
And there is Budhan
Theatre — created by a group of young people who have thrown themselves
into theatre.
The name Budhan
belongs to a young man from another denotified tribe, the Sabars of
West Bengal, who was killed in police custody in 1998. In some of their
plays, they act out the desolate, wrenching dramas of torture and death
among DNTs, the burden of being considered criminal so easily for so
long; the burden they carry despite their forays into education and
middle-class respectability. It’s not Oscar-level acting. But
it is anguished and heartfelt, and thus surprisingly powerful.
The group travels
one evening to the plush new Gujarat Police Academy near Gandhinagar
to stage a play for the police. They reach early, in time to have a
rehearsal. One boy sits in a corner intently practicing the sole line
of English he has to say: “Two Chharas arrested in multiple robberies
and thefts”, as if reading from a newspaper. He says it too fast,
he says “robberi-as”, over and over. Until the director
and moving spirit behind Budhan Theatre, Dakxin Bajrange, tells him
it is “robberies”, and that he should say his line loud
and firm but s-l-o-w! The boy sits in the corner intently practicing
some more, but now loud and firm and slow.
Then they perform,
for an airconditioned room full of police officers and constables. The
ironies are piercing, sitting there and watching this. Here are these
youngsters, referring openly to illicit liquor and weekly bribes and
inexplicable arrests, dramatising true incidents of incomprehensible
savage brutality by policemen. Yet here are these policemen, watching
intently before applauding long and hard at the end.
An unaccountably
moving experience.
Inspired by Budhan
Theatre, there is a small groundswell of activities aimed at the youth
of Chharanagar. There’s a “Hole-in-the-Wall” (www.hole-in-the-wall.com)
set of computers set up in one roadside... well, wall: the first in
Gujarat, courtesy niit and the ngo Sneh-Prayas. There’s an evening
“school” where kids volunteer to teach younger kids. The
school is held in a small room that’s also a library with an eclectic
mix of donated books. Heidi and Markandeya’s Handful of Rice;
History of Printing and Biology for Class xi; Navneet English Essays
and Golding’s Fire Down Below; besides dozens of books in Gujarati.
Freely accessible
computers and literature in Chharanagar, whatever would Tejal say?
With these signs
of hope, yet with the sordid realities that the play at the Academy
spoke of; with openly-brewed liquor and free talk of bribes and false
cases, with the inevitable comparisons to denotified communities elsewhere
in the country — with all these things, one doesn’t know
what to make of Chharanagar.
At one level, nothing
has changed here. The dust and desperation remain as it has for years.
At another level, much is different. Chharas still face intense prejudice,
but they are visibly pulling themselves up and out of that mire: via
theatre and learning and books and using the courts. At a third level,
there are still the little breweries and the petty corruption they bring
to Chharanagar.
These rambling
thoughts are broken by a young man called Raj, sitting nearby. He starts
singing a song he has composed for a future Budhan Theatre production.
Pollution ka karo No Entry, it’s called, based on the hit from
Salman Khan’s No Entry. The words go something like this:
Kisi ko diarrhoea
hua
Kisi ko malaria hua
Kisi ko piliya hua
Kisi ko dengue le gaya.
Lut jaye na yun sari country
Pradushan ki karo ab no entry!
(Somebody’s
got diarrhoea,
Somebody’s got malaria
Somebody’s got jaundice
Dengue took somebody away
The whole country will be robbed blind this way
So put an end to pollution!)
Not Grammy-winning
lyrics. But Raj is clearly proud of himself.
Rajendra asks quietly
if I would like another taste of his volatile witches’ brew. Still
putrid.
