Carving and shaping for Diwali

This piece along with the pictures were done in a two hour period after a advertisement which was to be filled in this space fell through and the RE asked me to quickly think of an Photo Medley. After a lot of thought I came about this idea since I see these clay workers toiling every day on my way to the office. So rushed to the place which a large number of this craftsmen community has named the ‘Prajapati’ in Bhopal on 22nd October, 2002. This was published the next day in the Hindustan Times – Bhopal Edition.

Giving final touches to the lamps (left), a lot of labour goes for the earthen look that wins clients aplenty (right).

Come October, the City market is flooded with earthen lamps and Lakshmi idols in myriad shapes and sizes. It’s during this season that the Prajapati community gets busy with mud and clay. This community which for generations has mastered the art of making Lakshmi idols and earthen lamps are small in number but enough to serve the City’s demands so much so that their clientele range from far flung cities throughout the state and elsewhere, too.
This community became popular in the early 20th century when Ram Prasad Gajapati Prajapati was awarded for Lakshmi idol carvings by the then ruler of Bhopal. More Prajapatis came to the City and started this handy job which lasts only for a couple of months or so.

Rekha Prajapati with her son Gajnand completing the colour work of the idols at their home in Nehru Nagar (left), Ram Dayal Prajapati takes his lamps for heating them under fire (right).

There are two different sects among them – one making the earthen lamps and the other that makes the Lakshmi Idols. The community is spread all over the City from Bairagarh to Mangalwara; from Arera Colony to Nehru Nagar.
What is unique about their idols? Sharp features, interesting color combination says Muni Prajapati, the granddaughter of Gajapati while the great grandson Uma Shankar Prajapati, who has a masters degree in science, says that for want of any good jobs he helps his mother during these months. He also added that the community has ventured into making Durga, Ganesh idols apart from the original Lakshmi idols and lamps.

Sunita Prajapati works on the Lakshmi idols (left), Uma Shankar, a masters degree holder, arranging the idols to help his mother (right).

The Lakshmi idols cost around Rs 15- 25 a piece while the lamps would cost between Rs 175 – 200 per thousand pieces. When Kailash Prajapati from Mangalwara was asked about the profitability of their vocation he insisted that if the buyers are happy during Diwali then they are happy, too. Gain or no gain, thanks to this community, the city definitely gains with several houses worshipping idols shaped by them and lit up with earthen lamps that have been their creations for several decades.

Naresh Prajapati adding colour to the idols (left), Muni Prajapati working at her house in Nehru Nagar (right).

Hisaab-kitaab days are up

This story idea was given to me by a friend who was a businessman over dinner. He told me how the invasion of the computer has put to end an age old tradition of manual writing on the ‘Hisaab-Kitaab’ book. After learning more about the book which was facing extinction I went around the old Bhopal area to find out more about them and then after getting enough material spoke to my editor who asked then asked me to file the story during my stint with the Hindustan Times.

Diwali may still retain all its pristine glitter but the sale of the traditional account books “Hisaab-Kitaabs’ – the kind that have taken a nosedive, thanks to the invasion of information technology. These colourful books bound in red cloth with ‘kadhi’ strings cost between Rs 40 and RS 500.
Traditional businesses open new accounts on Diwali day and the old books are usually replaced with new ones. The book comes in various categories of accounts to be kept such as “Kaachada Hisaab-kitaab”, “Tibandi hisaab-kitaab”, “Choubandi hisaab-kitaab”, “Matabandi hisaab-kitaab”. The book itself is two to three feet long and about a foot wide with 150 to 500 pages of paper either white or pale yellow. These books are in demand during the Dhan Teras during the Diwali festivals.
According to Gore Lal Ramesh Kumar Jain, owner of the oldest (55years) “hisaab-kitaab” shop on the Marwari Road in the walled city, the sale of the book has dipped in the last five years by 25-30%, primarily because well-off businessmen have opted for computers to maintain their accounts.
The city has only three such shops and all of them are in the Chowk Area. According to Maulana Syed Saab of one such hisaab-kitaab shop, people used to come from Guna, Barailley, Sehore and even other states to buy the account books till about 10 years ago.
The hisaab-kitaab books used to be made in the City by the Jains till the 1980’s. But they left the business because of huge losses. Now the books come from two different cities, with the pages coming from Indore and the cover from Nagpur. The books are merely assembled here and sold.
The old order appears to be changing, yielding place to the new. Businessmen say though small traders and businessmen may continue with the tradition for some more time till the red-bound “hisaab-kitaabs” would slowly be replaced by the sleek and fast computers.

This Village keeps Govardhan Puja Spirit Alive

This story was part of the Diwali package which I had written for the Hindustan Times, Bhopal in 2001. During my ride to visit the village side I had go a whiff of what kind of fun they will have one day after the Diwali festival. So I followed it up and landed at the village where every year this play is enacted to keeps the tradition going.

The Bovine element in the cow-belt festival psyche may be withering away in the urbanized settings of the State Capital but the traditions of Gavardhan Puja, performed to worship Lord Krishna the next day of Deepawali, come into their own in villages on the city’s outskirts.
It’s another matter that the same day, a religious Chief Minister Digvijay Singh was performing the traditional foot march around the Govardhan hill in Mathura that , as mythology has it, was lifted by Lord Krishna to save his devotees from a downpour of catastrophic portions.
Gora Gaon, a tiny village near Bhadbhada reservoir – the type that dot the City’s boundaries without ever being noticed was the scene of a traditional challenge thrown at a mendicant drifter “Baba” by a snake-charmer to prove his prowess of the occult.
The wide-eyed villagers gathered in large numbers to watch the exchange in awe in the hamlet dominated by Meena tribe that hails from Rajasthan but who has sizable population in pockets of Western Madhya Pradesh.
Starting his rituals, the Baba soon went into a trance, shaking, shivering and mumbling incoherently. He claimed to possess recondite powers to even transform the fortunes of men.
The snake- charmer followed up by doubting his claims, derisively mocking at the Baba for being a phony. As the snake-charmer, Raghu Sapera, began to blow his pipe, Baba’s gyration and incantations grew more fierce. Women crouched and kids shrank away behind elders in fear.
Both swore at each other in a dialect for more than one hour while running into knocks and corners of the village and in between creating an mock fight. After a half a dozen such mock fights the Baba finally settles the score by ensuring the death of the snake –charmer, thus ending an generation old tradition of the Evil (snake-charmer) being killed by the Good (Baba).
Soon the elders started to stand up and gave away loads of money to the traditional artists who have played this very same role for more than a decade now.
The tradition village skit over with the elders happy that the evil in the village has been killed, while the middle aged were seen assuring the their young ones had learnt a lesson or two, so that they could keep the alive the tradition and festivity of the Govardhan Puja going in future too.

Villages doll themselves up to welcome Diwali

During one of my weekly scooter rides into the villages I happened to see the ladies of villages paint their home wall exteriors and interiors with cow dung and chalk powder. After talking to them, I got to know that this was their way of ushering in the festival of lights. Most of the other newspapers in Bhopal had stories of people preparing for the festival of lights while we at the Hindustan Times, Bhopal showed the village side instead.

Barely a few kilometers from the loud and shimmering Diwali celebrations in the State Capital, the rural hamlets are abuzz with preparations for a more simple and traditional festival of lights. Despite the in-efficient rains – which have spelt a difference of fest-harvest bounty and disaster for adjoining villages separated by just a few kilometers – the villagers are upbeat about welcoming the festival.
Houses with the thatched and tiled roofs are being given a new look with women shading from the front by applying fresh cow dung paste on the outer walls of their homes. Come to think of it, they’ve never even heard of the oil-based distemper that’s so popular in the nearby State Capital.
Villages on the Old Sehore road have a different pattern for decorating their homes than their counterparts from the Hoshangabad road side. The villages of Gora, Bisankedi, Ratibad, Neelbad and Sehore first plaster the walls with cow dung and then paint drawings with white and red limestone water.
In other parts, they just make do with the cow dung paste. “This is because we on the Misrod road have forgotten our traditional values,” says 70 years old Umrao Singh Patidar. He adds that since the city of Bhopal is growing in all directions, they had to stop performing the tradition “Gau Pooja” on Diwali. “The BDA has acquired the land on which the entire village used to get together every year to perform the Pooja,” he rued.
The villages on the Old Sehore Road have managed to keep alive their reverential rites for the bovines.

Fourty years old Sharda from Ratibad village feels that city slickers should watch the full pooja rites collectively performed by the villagers to go back to their roots. She adds that the tradition cuts across caste and creed.
25-year old farmer Ganshyam Patidar from Jaatkhedi village off Misrod says that this Diwali is a happy one for him and his family because the rains were enough to reap a good harvest.
However 60 years old Hari Singh, a farmer from the Neelbad village on another side of the State capital, says it is a poor festival for him because of the excessive rainfall towards the end of monsoon that damaged his standing crops.
The cow owners strike a rich harvest during Diwali with the demand for milk going up by 75%.
Harvest or no harvest, the quaint Diwali traditions of the rural folks will go on for the time being, till such time that being, till such time that the State Capital’s miasmic urban sprawl engulfs their little hamlets and fields.