Nadi nare na jao shyam paiyan padun…
Don’t go near the river, Shyam!
— Gulab Bai’s famous dadra sung since the 1930s
I beg of you.
Rashid met Gulab Bai at a fair in a Sufi shrine in Mau, a town in Uttar Pradesh (UP), to sell her the sarees he had run away with.
She was from the Bedia caste, classified by the British as a “criminal tribe”. The women of the community traditionally engaged in commercial sex work. In the state of UP, they came under the Scheduled Caste category and were seen as ‘untouchables’.
In 1955, Gulab Bai, reputed to be the first woman to join the nautanki, an all-male space till the 1930s, started her own company: The Great Gulab Theatre Company.
Gulab did not just break away from her community’s traditional work and marginalization but also created a new establishment that gave work to people regardless of caste, gender, tribe or religion. Many of Gulab Bai’s songs were shamelessly copied by the emerging Hindi film industry without crediting her.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the company did well and generated enough revenue. The heroines wore the latest fashions and expensive Banarasi sarees as they played freedom fighters, goddesses and policewomen on stage.
Rashid often said that it was difficult for him to imagine those spicy, soulful songs being sung and performed by this big, commanding, voluptuous, assertive woman, who swore very often, yet was so kind, as she sat on the ground, clad in a plain cotton saree.
He used to say that no one sang the way she did, with that tees.
Tees. Pangs. Of pain, oppression, discrimination and isolation. Many people in the nautanki had the same story as Rashid. Sneered at for their interest in gaana bajaana, music and dance, not doing traditional jobs, and not conforming to gender roles, they had run away and found their way to the nautanki.
The nautanki was a synthesis of cultures. There were musicians, performers and artisans, most of them self-trained. An artist has no caste, Gulab Bai would famously say.
You could be a cook and play the dholak, or be a carriage driver and learn how to deliver dialogues.
Rashid truly felt he belonged to the company, where he could learn whatever he wanted to. He was particularly drawn to the eclectic costumes in the nautanki. The performers wore contemporary fashions. Raja Harishchandra, an Indian king, would wear a Western-style velvet coat with collars. Goddess Sita would wear trendy sarees and blouses with frills. It was a new way to imagine history and mythology.
In 1960, after doing odd jobs in the nautanki for some time, Rashid started working as the nautanki tailor. But he missed Banaras. He had even written a few letters to Abbaji but received no response.
In 1964, Abbaji succumbed to tuberculosis, a common disease among weavers. Years of ingesting fibre has fatal consequences for the lungs. That was when Rashid came home for the first time in five years.
Mehreen, with her childlike face and two long twin braids, was still considered “slow”. But she was the most efficient worker. When others would cut threads and finish four sarees in a day, she would sometimes go up to six.
She was happy to receive Rashid and did not judge him like their other worldly-wise family members did. This comforted him and he renewed his family ties.
Monsoons were not good for nautanki companies but they started to bring joy to Mehreen. For those four months, known as chaumasa, the nautanki could not travel from one place to another because of rains. This was also a period when weaving work came to a standstill because the yarn could not be dyed, dried or spread out to mount on the spool to weave sarees.
Rashid started visiting her around this time every year. One after the other, three barsaati mendhaks were born.
Rain frogs.
The last rain frog was Syeda, their only daughter after two sons, in 1973.
On 11 May 1973, the Hindi film Zanjeer, starring Amitabh Bachchan, was released. It popularised the angry young man prototype in Indian movies.
Rashid had already married an actor in the nautanki and started another family in Kanpur. Many nautanki team members had two families, one in the company and the other in their hometown. Mehreen did not probe too much into this. She didn’t want Rashid’s annual visits to stop.
By the time Syeda was born, cinema had become the preferred and more respectable form of entertainment over nautanki. Gulab Bai’s company was struggling financially. To cut costs, the cook, the tailor, the accountant and the support staff all started doubling up as performers.
Syeda has a faint memory of Rashid in her growing-up years. He told them that he played the role of vidhushak, a fool who makes people laugh, during the interval when the set was changed for the next act. With the popularity of Mera Naam Joker, a movie set in a circus that released in 1970, this role began to be known as “the joker”.
Syeda remembers Rashid saying animatedly that painting the face in red, white, blue and yellow did not make people laugh; just several facial expressions and witty humour were enough. She often thought if Rashid was the reason why she couldn’t imagine her life without cinema.
Over the years, Rashid’s larger family had become poorer and also more ritualistic and judgemental. He could not relate to them any longer. He grew more distant and slowly started visiting less often, only every alternate year. One day in 1982, they heard he had died in a road accident while driving a nautanki truck. They never heard from his second family ever.
Syeda was nine then.
Ek do teen,
— Song from the movie Tezaab (1988)
Chaar paanch chhe saat aath nau,
Dus gyarah, barah terah,
Tera karun din gin gin ke intezaar,
Aaja piya aayi bahaar!
At one point, every nook and cranny in Banaras had a cinema hall. And those narrow lanes were flooded by a sea of cinemagoers each time a blockbuster film was released. People from the neighbouring towns and cities from all over Purvanchal – eastern UP – ditched work and stood in queues all day to buy movie tickets.
Syeda loved films.
Since watching Tezaab with her brothers at Deepak Talkies, her ardent hope was that her would-be husband have a similar interest in films and, if not, would at least not stop her from watching a “picture” once in a while.
Mohini, the protagonist in Tezaab, played by Madhuri Dixit, was forced by her father to dance to make money. Like the young Gulab Bai. And that is why Mohini’s father did not want her to get married.
Making money means you don’t need to get married. Syeda was being married off because, after Mehreen’s death in 1987, no one wanted to take over her “responsibility”.
Mehreen died within a few hours of catching a fever, before she could be taken to the doctor. No one ever found out the exact cause of her death. She was gone, just like that. After years of doing unpaid labour for her brothers-in-law and uncles and living on their generosity. After years of being called slow and a simpleton, with only spurts of affection from here and there to survive on. After years of living with an absent husband and three children whom she treated as grown-up friends, not children, and with whom she would get into fistfights and bawling matches.
Syeda always thought Mehreen was not the mother she needed. Mehreen would turn to Syeda for advice, burdening her with emotional responsibility instead of guiding her and nurturing her. It was Syeda who had to mother her, take care of her, protect her, and cook for her and the entire family. Her two elder brothers had deftly slipped into the roles decided for them under the tutelage of Abbaji and Akbar, Mehreen’s father, who was a master weaver himself. Their future was secure.
Saleema, her grandmother, had already declared that her last wish was to see Syeda in “her own house”. It is considered okay to keep repeating to an Indian girl all her childhood that her parents’ house is not hers. Her husband’s home is supposed to be hers – except that it hardly ever is.
It has also been a common Indian practice to coax people into getting married to meet the last wishes of the ageing elders in the family. Except that it is never the last last wish.
For the first three decades of Indian independence, the handloom sector, as part of the cottage industry, was supported as a space for employment generation and to uplift the weaving communities. Handlooms exclusively produced traditional products like border sarees, dhotis and bed sheets.
Syeda’s growing-up years were considered a golden period for Banarasi sarees. But the new textile policy of 1985 changed everything.
Only eleven items were reserved for handlooms to produce, down from twenty-two.
The new policy favoured exports. It gave more incentives to set up a power loom and replicate handloom products at a cheaper cost and in less time. Many handloom weavers were unprepared for this kind of quick mechanization and market competition.
Excerpted with permission from The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown, Neha Dixit, Juggernaut.
