Growing up in Jamia Millia Islamia with my father K.Paul

Jamia Millia Islamia: A Childhood Memory from 1962-1968. Susan Visvanathan My father, Shri K. Paul, was appointed as Lecturer in the Rural Development Programme, under the Directorship of Prof SR Mohsini, in 1957 as he had a diploma in Social Work from Tata School of Social Work in Mumbai, and an M.A in Social Work, from the Delhi School of Social Work . They were the first collaborative colleagues of the Department of Social Work, Jamia Millia Islamia. I was born in March that year, so my father always said I had brought him a great deal of fortune. He had been without a steady job for many years, and this was a turning point in his life. He was well loved in the college, and my memories of Jamia begin from 1962, when we shifted to reside in the campus. My sister, Esther (hereafter Shobha) was then eight years old, and I was five years old. My memories of making friends with neighbours’ children are primary. I have a sharp recall of the friendliness and collegiality that was a hall mark of how the etiquette between teachers was passed on to their children as a kind of legacy. The language used between them in everyday transactions was so polite, honourable and cordial. The 1960s brought along with it all the euphoria of Independence. My mother had worked in the Partition Camps as one of Gandhiji’s eight nurses, and had at the age of 30 years, received the Florence Nightingale Medal from Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, for her work in rehabilitating partition victims. My father, too, had been active as a social worker in partition camps. My mother, Mariam Paul, (nee Thomas) was a very beautifuland erudite woman, who had been courted assiduously by my father, who understood perfectly that she was a career woman. They had been married a decade, when my father decided to shift the family to Jamia campus. Earlier, travelling from Thompson Road, (near Minto Bridge,) it had been a very short distance to New Delhi Tuberculosis Centre, where she was the Head of the Public Health Department, and in charge of training health visitors, as paramedical staff were called then. My parents, had, as tenants, shifted houses eight times, always supported by their friends often subletting houses to my parents, till they were forced by circumstances, to shift again. So, at first, my mother agreed to live on Jamia campus, but very soon after, she found a two room apartment in Daryaganj, very close to Ansari Road. She found it easier to get to work, for TB Centre was at the roundabout of Delhi Gate and Daryaganj, adjacent to Irwin Hospital (Lok Nayak Hospital) and her work place, colleagues and intimate friends in hospital circuits, was surely her life line. For Mummy, her work with the outpatients, home visits to Tuberculosis patients in Old Delhi and the staff jeep to Gurgaon villages, and collaborating with her colleagues in daily practice and occasional conferences came first. My father allowed her this privilege because he understood how good she was at work, and maybe she had demanded this right to prioritise her career, before agreeing to marry him. Both agreed to share the responsibilities of our upbringing, so my sister and I spent half the week in Jamia campus, and half the week in Daryaganj. Since I was so little, I often forgot homework books in one or the other house, and my mother was called to school to explain to the teacher why our residence was in dual mode. I can still see my mother laughing and explaining that there was no quarrel between the parents, it was merely for convenience of work. Jamia Campus therefore, became a kind of continual picnic site for my sister Shobha and me. It was delightful. We lived with our father in the dumpoos, and my father, K.Paul, or Paul Sahib as he was called, did the best he could to give us a sense of adventure, joy, and community ethos in the company of our neighbours. Each dumpoo was a circular structure, and the lecturers usually had two adjacent ones. One for cooking, bathing, and eating, along with women’s spaces circumscribed by curtains; the other was a space for sofas, chairs, work tables and couches. In our case, my father was allotted one room on one side of the narrow road, and another on the opposite side of the road. So we had to cross the road to access our kitchen and dining room. The toilets were shared with other colleagues, their wives and children, in a separate dumpoo. My mother quickly fled to modern amenities in an old fashioned haveli in Ansari Road, where the landlady had divided it into separate flats, independent of each other. My father, K.Paul, immediately got busy keeping his little two daughters occupied. He carved out small plots of land in front of each of our two dumpoos, and started handkerchief sized gardens, giving power and independent choice to each daughter, in sowing seeds, and plant management. First, we laid out small bricks for four separate gardens to mark their size. It was scrub land, not very fertile, and yet within some months, my sister and I under the supervision of my father, were growing desi gulab, (that beautiful red rose with its insistent fragrance), jasmines, marigolds, cosmos and the “ten o’clock flowers” with their magenta bloom. There were also purple verbena, which my father called “Virginia”, and till recently I thought that was what they were called till the world wide web aided me. Next door our neighbours, Parvez, Feroze, Suhel, Shaheer, Shakeel, Munna, Munni and their elder sister Fatima were growing kitchen garden vegetables. We exulted over their bountiful produce, while their father Soze Sahib, who taught English Literature, remained continually meditative, detached, bowed over his books. Their mother, Ammi, was always busy cooking delicious food for the children, and they were stunningly hospitable, sharing their food with us at every opportunity. My father was a brilliant cook, himself, so he set Shobha to make rotis for our meals, and at age eight she made fragile chappatis which ballooned with air. I was set to cutting vegetables, usually spinach and ladies fingers, and salad vegetables, for him. He liked to cook meat, and left cooking fish to my mother who dropped by on weekends. We got our supplies from the ‘Store’, as it was called, which was a kilometre up from where we lived. It was 1962, and the opening of the Store came as a kind of innovation, with its neat supplies of stationary, household goods and fruits and vegetables. Close to it was the post office, where we paid for our annual radio license, and other things such as inlands, postcards and stamped envelopes. Otherwise, my Dad walked to Okhla village with us, or more often to Jullaina, opposite Holy Family Hospital, where there a grocer just beyond the thick metal studded brown wooden door, who was happy to see us, and always gave my sister and me free toffees. I can still see the mounds of red chillies and dried mangos, in jute sacks though sixty years have passed. We went swimming in the Okhla canal too, but stopped after I said, fearfully, I had stood on a rock, which was not there, the next moment, when I stepped back. My father thought it might have been a tortoise, and we did not go back. Our dogs, Brownie and Whitie always accompanied us on these long walks, on leashes. They would bark vociferously at the lorries, and chase them. We never ate out, and although the mounds of fried foods in Okhla bazaar were inviting, they were never purchased. Street food was not eaten, we always went home to have fruits, peanuts, rusks, black gram, boiled eggs and the usual sambar, masoor dal, rotis, and in-season vegetables. At 5 a.m, my father woke us up, made us wash and change into our school uniforms, eat our breakfast, (bread and butter, fruit, boiled eggs) take what he had packed for 11 a.m “Break” in school ( a few kashew nuts, tomato and cucumber sandwiches, or rusks with butter, salted boiled black gram (kalla channa) with a compulsory bottle of Roohafzah and lime juice) and accompanied us to the bus stop. The two pets dogs waited with us, and sometimes leapt into the bus and hide under the seats when it came. At 5.45 a.m the first buses would have started plying. There was Bus Number 18, which went to Shehar (town) as old Delhi was called. Another was Bus Number 24, which went to Connaught Place. I was in Class 1, my sister was in class 3. My father put us in the care of the conductor, who made sure that we got off at Hardinge Bridge (now called Tilak Bridge). Here, we waited for the bus which would take us to Baird Road. From Baird Road, my sister and I walked two kms to reach our school, Convent of Jesus and Mary, opposite Gole Dakh Khana. It was something we did cheerfully, not because it was our duty(!) but because my 9 year old sister was just very enterprising. She made everything seem like a game. In the afternoons, I would be very sleepy, but she pushed me into all the right buses, buying me orange ice cream in summer as incentive, and in winter, it would be warm peanuts wrapped in a cone shaped newspaper. It must have been a huge risk all around, but my father, like my mother, had worked in partition camps, and had seen the terrible tragedies of 1947, as well as lived with its victims. Certainly, whatever their personal problems, they continued to communicate a certain personal euphoria, and belief in the system: it was “Freedom!” hard won by their generation. We had half an hour every morning before the school bell rang for Assembly at 7.30 a.m, so we had the ‘jungle jim’ and the slides to ourselves, and we had a good time playing on the swings. We were in the habit of picking a rose for the teacher everyday, from a large commercial rose field, just behind the bus stop before we got the bus. However, one day, the gardener caught us. It was very embarrassing for my father, who was busy reading the morning newspaper, and he just did not know what to say on our behalf. However, fortuitously, the gentleman who owned the rose field, was walking past us on his daily morning walk, and he smiled sweetly at us, and told the gardener not to shout at us. Everyday, we travelled with huge unaccompanied sacks of red roses and marigolds, which went independently, on behalf of the garden owner, in the first morning bus to Shehar, as they had to be made into garlands for the religious places in old Delhi. There were also two beautiful ladies who travelled with us, one of them was dark and glamorous, and a little pock marked, and my sister whispered that she was a famous poetess. They didn’t pay us little girls any undue attention, just smiling at us briefly when we entered the bus. They too got off the bus, at Supreme Court where we disembarked to change buses. One memory I have is of the small pathways to our dumpoos, being constructed by us children, who were eight or nine. There was not much distinction made between girls and boys of that age, so we all worked equally together, carrying bricks, laying them out, and the older children who were in their early teens cementing the spaces between the bricks. I don’t remember adult supervision over this path building activity between dumpoos, particularly, except that Prof Mujeeb, the vice chancellor did come and congratulate us children one day. He was a charming presence, with his bushy eyebrows. He visited our dumpoo one evening, a surprise, because my father had bought a Gulmarg cooler. In 1962, the Gulmarg desert cooler was a novelty. So the VC just dropped by to check it out! My father was pleased, and proud. Another vivid memory I have is of a venerable Sufi, who used to reside as a wandering mendicant and seer- guest, in Soze Sahib’s living room in the dumpoos, reading and sleeping on the couch (takhat) there. He was a grand presence, and knew us all by name and temperament. One day, while my father was taking a class, my sister sat on a grapevine, which formed a swing like a natural arc. I was 7, and involuntary pushed the thick tendril rope of the vine, and a brick which had been placed invisibly on the roof to keep the vine in place, fell on my sister’s head. She started bleeding terribly, red blood trickling on her brow, and the only person who was around, was Sufi Sahib. He put his large hand on my sister’s head wound, and then told me to call my father from his class. I ran to his classroom, he was sitting on a chair lecturing to a class of 25 or so Social Work students. Seeing me, crying and howling, he mouthed the words, “Go away” as he thought Shobha and I had quarreled, and I had come to complain to him. Our dog Brownie, who had been sleeping under the table in the classroom bounded up to comfort me. Atlast, after much questioning I could make myself understood in between my howls. Shobha was taken to Holy Family Hospital for stitches, and I was sent by bus with one of the students to Daryaganj. First, the student, (a boy of about 20 or so, whom I had never seen before in my life), and I went to the T.B Centre, (one had to get of the bus at Parsi Anjuman and walk to her office) but the guard told us that she was at home as it was a Saturday, so we walked the two kms to our Ansari Road flat. Then she came back with us to Jamia. I don’t remember any one shouting at Shobha and me, for what had happened, such as “Why were you sitting on a grape vine, for God’s sake???” “ Why did you pull at the vine???” We were small children, we were alone at home, other neighbours’ children were at school, and our parents must have felt terrible and anxious, but other than feeding us, and comforting us, and reassuring us, nothing was said. Thank God, Sufi Sahib was in his room saying his prayer beads, and could help Shobha and me when we had a terrible accident. Imagine, the Soze family with eight children, an austere intellectualist husband and an overemotional hardworking wife giving their ‘other room’ to a saintly mendicant, while they all crowded and lived in the kitchen and dining quarters, sleeping at night on an inordinately large cot, and on mattresses that appeared from steel trunks. The same type of steel trunks would become repositories for Fatima’s trousseau, in which Ammi collated some beautiful sequined and gauze ceremonial ware. I remember Feroze Bhai always had All India Radio songs on, and had a fund of the most terrifying ghost stories, or police-robber (“daku-poolis”) stories, where everything happened in the North Indian district towns of Bulandshahar and Rampur, with which he would entertain a whole pack of wide eyed children from the ages of 7 to 12. It was heartfelt sorrow that gripped me when decades later, I opened the newspaper one morning, and I saw my gentle childhood friend Shaheer, photographed with the President of India, as his own son an art student from Jamia Art College, had been killed by a marauding band of students, who scuffled and beat his boy to death. Shaheer had been the gentlest of the troop of boys who played with us, as small children, and had grown up to be the Yoga teacher in Jamia Middle School. I went to visit him, after reading of the tragedy, in the block of flats where he lived with his family in the Jamia School Quarters. We were meeting after 50 years, and it was unimaginable that Jamia could have changed so much, where such bullying and death could happen without warning. After my sister was injured by a brick falling on her head by a misadventure, my mother found a house midway, between my Dad’s work place and hers, where we could all stay together as a family. Once we shifted to Jungpura in 1964, our visits to Jamia were limited to weekends: to look at our familiar campus with its rolling scrub grounds, its frequent collegial festivities, play with our dog Brownie (Whitie had been poisoned by an irate trucker or milkman in 1963, as she was extremely aggressive when dropping us to the bus stop, chasing every moving thing in sight). We would sweep and clean out the dumpoos which my father retained till 1981, as he slept there in the afternoons sometimes, instead of attempting the journey back by recalcitrant buses, after finishing class. The neem tree outside the kitchen/dining hall dumpoo had been planted by Shobha, and the mango tree, laterally in the adjoining garden placed by me. We did not know at that time, that asbestos roofs were singularly poisonous and dangerous. I cannot even begin to describe the heat of those summers. The legend was that on one of his many visits to Germany, M.Mujeeb Sahib, the V.C, had seen aeroplane hangars and thought them to be good models for cooperative housing and class rooms for Jamia Millia Islamia. Qureishi Sahib who was the Librarian for Department of Rural Development and Social Work, kept the dumpoo Library very cool, with flower pots of periwinkle and spider lilies, and Shobha and I spent so many summers in there reading. Small though we were, we really enjoyed the vast compendium of collated children’s stories the library had in the extreme far corner on a shelf, near the window. My father could leave us there safely for several hours in the morning, as he went about his chores as a parent who had to feed two hungry little girls, and have their uniforms ready for school. My mother always had a servant to help her with housework, but my father did all the house work himself. Once, coming out of the bath, he killed a snake in the garden one summer evening, and though my mother and sister were there, I felt very nervous. The crowded night sky, so many stars, the fragrances of the garden, the accompanying mosquitos fended off by my father, who tied mosquito nets on 4 poles on each wooden and rope charpoy, lined up on summer nights, carried the breeze as well as the torpor of the tropical night. And he always told me long complicated stories before bed time, from Shakespeare and the Ramayana. He had grown up in Niranam, a village in Kerala, which was associated legendarily with the conversion of a Brahmin boy whom St Thomas converted to Christ’s path or way, in 52 C.E. Furthermore, Niranam was where three poets associated with the Malliakal family were said to have composed a Malayalam version of the Ramayan in 14th century after a Tsunami flung the village inland. He was a Communist, and simultaneously a Gandhian, as many Malayalis were who had studied in Union Christian College in Aluva, in 1938, such as his class mates and close friends of his youth, M.M Thomas and Mar Philipose Chrysostum, Emeritus Bishop of the Mar Thoma Church who died at 104 years on August 17th 2021. The Department of Social Work was in an adjoining dumpoo to the Library, where my father had an office, and my father’s other colleagues, Gandhi Sahib, Siddiqui Sahib, Jain Sahib, were very dashing young men, with beautifully tailored clothes. I remember how well dressed they were when they were in their 30s, flaunting their youth and their sophistication to us gauche children, who admired them tremendously, when we saw them at Annual Day functions. While my father was wearing white drills, with hems stitched up, (clothes from 1950s) and very expensive linen shirts with Nehru jackets, these men were wearing trousers and suits in the latest fashion, with very narrow rims, not broad ones. The exquisitely pretty Mrs Hemraj joined Department of Social Work around the same time, and since her husband, Dr Hemraj was my mother’s colleague at Tuberculosis Centre, there was an added reason for those pleasure filled lunches with my parents and their many colleagues in the late 1970s. The Professors Syed, a star couple for United States of America, migrated to India, and to Jamia, bringing their skills of Sociology of Education, into the Social Work Department. It’s not surprising that activist or practical oriented Sociology in Jamia was the result of the two departments sharing a common space, library and meeting ground. For the purposes of collegial tea drinking, there was a dhabha in the vicinity, where the dark, bearded and monosyllabic owner provided hot strong tea in glasses, with a unique savoury mixture along side, called ‘dal moth’, served in small white ceramic saucers. It was a pungent snack which we enjoyed having in large quantities, when visiting the library. We played with our friends morning to evening, when there was no school. Or atleast I did, as Shobha preferred to read by herself, in the dumpoo. We, girls and boys together, foraged for little velvet mites, red and furry, after the rains. Unlike lady birds with spots, who flew away when we whistled at them, these red velvet mites would act like they were dead, as soon as we collected them. We chased butterflies, collected all kinds of stones, and gleaming mica in the ‘raith’ or river sand which was typical of that region, and the rolling scrub grounds behind the dumpoos. On a clear day, we could see the sails of the yachts on the Okhla canal, filling us with delight and wonder, as did the blue sky and floating white clouds. .My friends, Moon and Pappu, our neighbours, who were the Lecturer in Hindi Literature, Sharma Sahib’s children , would always have interesting stories. They too had a garden, which they tended carefully, and actually grew addu, or peaches on bushes. Safdar Sahib, from the engineering college, with his children. Their father fell ill one day, and to communicate from his bed, with his wife in the kitchen and dining hall dumpoo, he built a contraption, a transistor type intercom, to the wonder of Moon’s friends.At eight, Moon was straight haired, serious, friendly, and like my sister Shobha enjoyed her privacy, and generally repudiated gang life. Her smaller sister was too young to join us in active play, but Pappu was ever present, and we lugged him around every where as he was a chubby child and could not keep up with us. Tariq and Asma who were our age, were also our friends, joining in our collective games. Their father, Safdar Sahib, who was in the engineering department was asked by my father, to help me with geometry, (or “space work” as it was called in junior school,) as I was truly ignorant, mathsdyslexic, but he too, scratched his head in puzzlement and gave up on me. My father’s hobby in 1962-1965 had been the construction of a hen coop in the back yard behind the dumpoo. We went together to Chandni Chowk, by bus, and got wire mesh,and with bamboo poles put up a very large hen coop. He got ten white hens, and a multi coloured rooster, to contribute to their fecund status. After having success with that, he got two Rhode island birds. Then he collected all the eggs, white and brown, and had the Rhode island birds sit on them, and hatch them. Once, he woke me up in the middle of the night, to check on the bird. I sleepily accompanied him to where the bird was sitting on the eggs, holding the torch, and following him. It was a very rainy night, and she was sitting on the eggs, resolute. So we had a clutch of little fluffy chickens, which I had to protect from the eagles as they ran about. I was just beginning to read, and one day, I opened the steel trunk in which he stored the collected eggs, and the headline said “Winston Churchill Dead”. I had no idea who that was, but event today, I can remember the large black ink headlines, and the excitement of being able to read a newspaper, and asking my father who it was who had died. It was 1965. There had been the day, earlier, when we were ready to go to the bus stop to catch the bus, and my mother stopped us, as she had the newspaper in her hand, and she said sadly, “John Kennedy has been shot”. That was 1963. Then there was the death of Pandit Nehru, 1964. All these created a huge sense of a vacuum in our lives, a sense of an ending, because our parents looked so distraught. Life was different because people had emotions, they were expressive, they interacted, they felt deeply, they aired opinions. 1984, and the genocide of the Sikhs, and the decades of consequent homogenization, with Hindu majoritarianism rising in an ever volatile democracy changed things. People became aggressive, hid their real feelings, wore masks, and communicated constantly that they felt marginalized or aggrieved. The decades of women’s education and mobility which had been prioritized since the 1960s started to take a beating. Being a woman was seen to be a problem, by fundamentalists. Exclusion of women, and the shaming and the hiding of their real selves became something which I associated with religious homogeneity. My generation had been taught to feel that the world was our home, and the decisions we made, and the mistakes we made, was something we should take responsibility for. Jamia changed in many ways, but I was out of the radius of its active life. Right through the later decades of the 20th century, I was pleased to be invited to Staff College, and to Department of Sociology, and to meet close friends who were teachers there, such as Sheena Jain and Savyasaachi, who invited me for thesis examination work . Prof Mohini Anjum, always warm and friendly, had shared an office with my father in the last years before his retirement circa 1978-1980. Other colleagues remembered Paul Sahib’s sense of humour, his beautiful sherwanis and Nehru jackets, his red Vespa, (which my sister Shobha learned to ride in Jamia in 1969 and crashed into many bushes before taking it to Lady Sri Ram College every day) and ofcourse Brownie, who was generically known as Paul Sahib ka kuttha ( Mr Paul’s dog). Neighbours’ children loved my father because he always had a packet of toffees which he freely distributed every day to children and colleagues, on being greeted. He was severely diabetic, on insulin, and never without sweets. I don’t really remember those years as being a hardship, without telephone, car and fridge. My father would purchase a large block of ice every morning, which he kept in an icebox, and preserved our milk, curd, butter for 24 hours. We were too young to want things, really. We were fed well, looked after by our parents with an obsessive devotion, and best of all, we had friends, a gang life in both Jamia where we stayed with my father, and Daryaganj where we stayed with my mother. I remember my father sent her a dozen Rhode island brown eggs in a packet, with my sister. We had to catch several buses, go to school, then catch the School bus to my mum’s flat. Unfortunately, one egg splattered all over Shobha’s arithmetic text book. I remember her dismay when she had to wipe it all off with her handkerchief. Then, we had to pack some clothes in our bag during this to-ing and fro-ing between our two homes. I was always nervous someone would accidentally open my suitcase (we carried suitcases in those days, little attaches with school books) and find my personal clothes and ask questions about our two homes. We didn’t think our parents odd, they were our parents. When we shifted to West Nizamuddin in 1968, we tried to bring Brownie with us. This involved walking from Jamia to West Nizammud-din with this tall husky mongrel hound. He looked like a hound, but was a mongrel. He walked through the busy main road companiably with my father, my sister and me on a leash. He greeted my mother, ate a good dinner, slept in the living room on a small charpoy. Next morning, he was gone, he didn’t even stop for a day or tell us his plans. Then, it turned out he had had walked back to Jamia safely, as he had urinated frequently on lampposts enroute. Soze Sahib’s family made Brownie his dinner everyday, and if they forgot, he stood on his hind legs, and knocked at their door. My father stopped at the butcher every day and bought him some offal, usually the lungs and wind pipe of goat and took it to him everyday in a steel box.. Brownie lived till the age of 14 years. He was the gentlest, most humane and aristocratic dog I have ever had the fortune to come across. We used to bathe him on weekends with Margo soap, I don’t remember him having ticks, or being vaccinated. All those fears became evident when my mother adopted two adorable lapdogs in Nizamuddin. Brownie was a country dog, running wild in the campus, sleeping under my father’s feet when he taught every day, accompanying me on my lone jaunts as I ran around Jamia campus when I was eight years old. We would be found most days under the giant Gulmohar trees near the administration office precincts, (at that time they were residences) very close to the main gate, where I found gulmohar buds good to eat. In 1964, a new teaching building was planned, and mountains of sand was made available for us children to play with. I lost my slipper there, and was very distraught, since one could get shouted at for losing things. When the building was completed, and the Ghalib statue came up, I actually saw my slipper, lying there as lost things do with no one to claim them like ball point pens and lone rubber slippers. I was older, and I remembered that game we children were playing in 1965 when I lost them, a war game, with soldiers, survivors and bullet victims. One of our favourite games were to line up vertical bricks in a line, maybe 100 of them, then with a gentle nudge, send them all tripping on one another, shouting “train, train.” The school of Aeronautical engineering came up during that time. The Director lived in the adjoining dumpoo, and he gave me a book on Dinosaurs. I read it, I was 7 years old, but found it more interesting to colour the animals and write my name on every page. I was fond of it, and it got terribly dogeared. Then he asked for it back, because he wanted some other child to read it. I was really embarrassed to hand it to him, but he did not rebuke me. He had some American Exchange Programme students come to stay with him. They were called Mr and Mrs Wold. I found them interesting, and being a sociable friendly child would drop by to see them. Mr Wold always had a sweet baby rheseus monkey on his shoulder, and Mrs Wold would ask me questions, to which I arbitrarily answered “Yes” and sometimes, “No” without understanding her accent. They were picture book Americans, she has a blonde brown pony tail and a pretty face, and he a had brown beard and wore checked shirts and shorts. When the baby monkey sometimes shat on his shirt, he just laughed and changed his shirt. Opposite them stayed the calm and very well dressed Mr Qureshi, the librarian. Jamia’s hospitality, and its languor were the most interesting thing about it. No one was ever in a hurry, and no one ever felt threatened by the slow pace of life (except my mother!) “Tashrif Rakho” was the invitation to have tea, and to be patient about pending bureaucratic work. I was grateful that my father gave us the opportunity and freedom to get to know his work space so well. His colleagues were ever present, offering us support and advice. At night, we pulled out charpoys, and made our beds in the garden spaces of our houses, and there was no infringement of privacy or no lurking sense of danger. In summer, the trees we had planted gave us fragrance of flowers, and also shade. When we shifted from Jamia to Jungpura, and then after two years to Nizamuddin, that tehzeeb of the college still followed us, though our mongrel hound, Brownie, preferred to stay back in the environs of the dumpoos, without us and be loyal to JM campus. It wasn’t that we visited often, or kept up with our childhood friends. They just occupied a very large phalanx of my memory, like a relic, reminding me of our cohorts in games of “pachasa” (count till fifty, or, hide and seek) and childhood experiences of understanding the habitat of grasshoppers. Once we reached our teens we stopped interacting, because our habitats and hobbies were different. That is a normal part of growing up.

On Eritrea

Bernal, Victoria.2014. Nation as Network, Diaspora, Cyberspace and Citizenship. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 208.pp; $115.49. ISBN:978-0-226-14481-8 Victoria Bernal writes about the survival battles that Eritreans engage in. Eritrea got it’s independence in 1991, but the war with Ethiopia never quite came to an end. Further, their President, as Dictator and War Hero presents a Janus face to his people. The web then becomes the space where war crimes, present day repression, and the agonies of the people are clearly voiced. Dehai was the first and most well known website. The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) was a splinter group from the Eriterean Liberation Front, which had begun armed struggle against Haile Selassie as early as 1961. In the thirty years of war that followed, many left home and went to many parts of the world, such as America, The Gulf and Europe. The war jeopardised everything. With the disruption of agriculture, foreign investment, and the building of support institutions, in order to conduct the long war, the people fled. In their new homes, they kept in touch with those whom they had left behind, and those who shared their servitude in distant lands, through websites which were also politically and government monitored, and sometimes manipulated. Bernal records the ways in which the Netizens discussed key issues such as Martyrdom, the role of the citizen, the dictatorship of President Isaias Afewerki and the funds coming into the country from those who felt that their monetary contributions would set the agenda for development. By paying taxes, the Diaspora could legally say that they had contributed to their country’s growth. Bernal describes in Chapter 1, Infopolitics and Sacrificial Citizenship how difficult it was for people, often holding refugee or political asylum status, to donate to the cause, but their feelings were strong, and it was the only way that this concept of nationhood could work for them. The second chapter, Diasporic Citizenship and the Public Sphere, discusses how Dehai, Asmarino and Awate, as websites, in the 1990s and onward, deal with political participation, the venting of feelings, and the expression of solidarity. The relationship between the small groups of gatekeepers, as well as individuals posting on the web, represented the volatile nature of identity politics, and the sharing of information. It’s not just commitment of money and ideas, it is also time, as it is spent on the web. As one informant told Bernal, “I didn’t do anything else on the internet. I just went to Dehai. It is a big commitment of time.” (73) From supporting the State to defining freedom in a portal took time, but when it happened, the critics were able to be judgemental about how the State was evolving and the policies associated with it. Chapter 3 is called The Mouse that Roars and attempts to understand how plural voices in the public sphere meant that dissent could find a place in discussion. Cyberspace became the platform where discussions could find free rein, questioning violence, patriarchal imperatives of state policy, and dialogue between the Nation state and it’s citizens. Censorship would begin to tag the writers, and web managers were thought to be complicit with this form of regulation. Bernal believes that self censorship and peer censorship were more important forms (109) The subjective states of writers who did manage to get their opinions published on the web expressed the nature of their very strong emotions, and the responses were also equally abundant and mercurial. There were suspicions too, that Dehai was a tool of the State. Diaspora websites thus collaborated with official websites. Dissemination of information and news was seen to be Dehai’s basic rationale, while Asmarino and Awate were not so subtle and were often openly and loudly critical. In Chapter 4, Mourning Becomes Electronic, the author looks at war memorials. Martyrs are paid tribute, dying is a national and voluntary sacrifice made for the nation, in which women might be mere survivors. War is a vocation, and fending off the Ethiopians continues to be a challenge. Like museums and maps, the memorial reads territorialisation in unique and biographical ways. These questions of sacrifice are profoundly raised by Bernal in Chapter 5, Sex, Lies and Cyberspace, where the author adroitly looks at rape as a weapon of war, the silence of women, and the servitude of the diaspora in other countries. The tragedy is internecine warfare, showing a new diaspora is now in place, which is escaping from the violence of President Isaias Afewerki. Susan Visvanatha. thanks to Vlad Naumescu for sending me the book many years ago.

Book Review "Medicine Wheel and the Planet" : Jennifer Grenz www. upress.umn.edu (presspr@umn.edu)2024

Jennifer Grenz: Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Towards Personal and Ecological Healing. Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London. 2023 Jennifer Grenz writes an activist autoethnogrphy, almost an occupational memoir. Grenz knows everyone in her environment of salvaging ecology from the great crushing lethargy of colonialism and capitalism. Yet, her ancestral memory surfaces, though she was robbed of it, by the process of assimilation. Her grandparents hid their native roots from the ledger keepers of colonial imperialism. The trauma of knowing who they actually were is replaced by relief, in discovering hidden from sight grandmothers, and the humanist ability to keep the genealogies alive. Jennifer Grenz turns to the University to learn and get legitimating degrees. It is commonsense to realize that native peoples/ tribal communities/nations have survived climate change and mass migrations, so will surely have knowledge to help humanity through the present crises. Grenz found that as an environmental activist, there was an emphasis on following given procedures. Nature, however escaped the grids, and plants turned up where they were least expected. The Himalayan Berry was an invasive species that turned up in British Columbia. She and her team members would pull them out, and plant conifers. When they returned, to examine their restoration project, the conifer saplings were dead, and the berries were back. Many such instances of heart break led her to pursue a university degree to find solutions. Quite often, her co workers would not believer her findings from the field regarding adaptation practices of plants. Grenz began to ask new sets of questions which she shared in conferences. If the Himalayan Berry provided food for humans and fauna in cities when growing wild in pavement crevices, why pull them out? We know that the arctic circle is a concentric circle of migration patterns from Mongolia onwards, including the Himalayas and Europe, so its possible that the birds and bees as migratory pollinators and seed distributors carried the plants forward. It was unnerving for her to see that field procedures, often made by her, as a native/indigenous practitioner, using Western science categorization and classifications undo the “scientific” known and the “given” by the application of intuitive knowledge, through induction. Grenz’s ‘big bang’ moment comes at a time of family illness, when she discovers that the invasive species that she routinely pulled out as a scientifically trained ecologist are actually potent healing medicines in the indigenous systems. She also discovers that some plants, termed invasive weeds, are butterfly attractors. A sudden conversion is embarrassing to say the least, as she has a relational attitude to plants and talks to them. So, it means talking to the ‘enemy’ as weeds are considered to be, in invasive biology activism. Many such transformative and intimate moments happen in the book, as she use stories, legends and dreams, and draws on conversations with native elders. One is reminded of Levi Strauss’ “Savage Mind’ where he describes the large vocabulary of native children, and their ability to recognize and classify plants. Here, too, with the extinction of tribal languages, and the knowledge systems that they carry with them intrinsically is now lost. It is in this context, that she devises a new terminology for ecologists where nurturing, caring, protecting become the new terms invested in traditional knowledge systems, rather than referring to “stakeholders” privileges. She provides a gentler terminology, where “healing” is used as a substitute for “restoration” arguing that many workers who are enlisted in conservation work , who put in long hours in arduous work environments would prefer such a celebration of their skills. She writes, emphasizing that, we must have, “A language that ensures that Right peoples and relations are not missing from conversations that determine what happens to those lands, waters and resources.” (Grenz 2023:146) Part of the problem with old terminologies is that they remain as they are. Grenz faces some difficulties with the term “garden” as used for tribal communities. However, as Malinowski pointed out in his book, “Magic, Science and Religion” that, for the Trobrianders in the Pacific Islands, people’s horticultural practices, or ship building techniques are as efficient as their reading of the stars, or their ability to travel long distances by water to trade in ceremonial arm bracelets, shell necklaces, fish and yams. In Jennifer Grenz’s ancestral lands scholars find archival and archaeological residues of many types of fruits and vegetables that would have travelled long distances. Grenz suggests that conventional ecology oscillates between a ‘live and let live’ policy, contrasted by militarized forms of exclusion or inclusion of indigenous practices. Instead, she would wish a relational webwork that demands conscious relationality. By this she means networking with an understanding of shared interests and motivations. Here, material culture is a reconnaissance of terms/translations inviting both conscious as well as latent knowledge systems to be in interaction. Some of the things that Grenz underlines in her theory of networking is sociability and responsibility. This involves reciprocity, friendship links and conversations, a knowledge about the needs of the earth couched in the intimacy of interactions. As an activist she knows that the paid labour that goes into ecological awareness is a pittance. The funding dries up, the jobs are varied, the same person is in charge of cleaning latrines as well as taking visitors around, sweeping, collecting seeds and planting and watering. Can tourists, cyclists and people visiting forests to walk their dogs be called in to active responsibilities to the environment? It is in Ye’yumnuts, in Vancouver, the territory where she had collected her data, that Grenz sees the sacred snake Sisuital, two headed and unnerving. Her community translates this vision as a learning device, where she is told to adapt to the present, while invoking the dream time of the past. Contradictory though this is, it helps her to forge the significance of local histories, going back to 2,500 years ago, and accessible through carbon imaging. Yet settler colonialism has its heavy imprint, which she attempts to understand through concepts of invasion and theft. This tragic loss is the underpinning of memory, where amnesia and assimilation shadow the family history of those who seek to fit in. Ecological sensitivity demands both the respect to mortuary sites where ancestors are buried, as well as socialization of the young into the symbiosis between community livelihoods and nurturing the land. It is this mutual dependence between people and territory that is the most sensitive of debates for Jennifer Grenz. The work of committees is often autocratic and oligarchic, while collating individual responses gets the greatest diversity in terms of planning ahead. What she calls an “assembly of knowledges” depends on the unique configuration that does not call for mixing or syncretism, which in fact, respects the individual. (Grenz 2023: 231). This methodological insight comes from the indigenous crafts of mosaic work/beading, where each individual artifact contributes to the design as a whole. Dr Susan Visvanathan is the author of “The Children of Nature” (Roli 2010). Her most recent books are “The Wisdom of Community” (Bloomsbury India 2022) and “Work, Word and the World” (Bloomsbury India 2022) Book sent to Aleppey by Minesotta Press, for favour of review