At home in alien land

By Aruti Nayar

WHEN I first heard that American students were in Chandigarh attending a course in Punjabi language and culture, I was a little skeptical and amused. Shades of orientalism... a passing fad, perhaps. This amusement soon changed into admiration and even awe after meeting and interacting with them. The depth of their engagement and extent of knowledge about the region to which "we" belonged was an eye-opener. Meeting Will Glover, Anne Murphy, Farina Mir and Suzanne was quite an experience. They were in Chandigarh as a part of the summer programme organised by Columbia University. For director Gurinder Singh Mann, it is personally fulfilling to bring students every summer to Chandigarh and take them around Punjab.

Mann left for the USA in early 1980s to do his doctorate. A teacher of English literature at the Baring Union Christian College, Batala, he switched streams after a visit to Israel in 1982 when he was repeatedly asked about the origin of Sikhs. Mann opted for religious studies, did his doctorate from Harvard and decided to interpret the Sikh tradition and educate the Americans about Punjab. He could not return to his native Batala after his father was killed on their farm by militants.

"So Chandigarh or Delhi was as foreign as New York for me". The idea was to, through research and academic orientation, generate an awareness and interest in the region and give an impetus to Punjabi studies. That he had been successful was apparent after meeting his students who had covered a whopping 1100 km across Punjab.

Will Glover, 37, is an architectural historian which means he writes social history using buildings as evidence. His research is on buildings in Punjab of the early 19th and 20th centuries. Will stayed in Lahore to study the evolution of the city but it was like trying to see a photograph turned upside down with just a caption. He had to turn the photograph over to see it clearly — that is what the visit to India was like. After the visit to Punjab, Will’s interest in the region has changed. He plans to rethink the organisation of his thesis and incorporate more on Punjab since he has developed a sharper understanding of the institutions and social practices. He feels it’s a privilege to be able to go to both sides and be objective enough to bridge the gap between differing perceptions of the historians in India and Pakistan.

Will enjoys Sufiana kalaam, plays the saxophone and has cultural differences with American girls. His interest in India began a decade ago with a relationship that "has since moved on". Questions such as "What is a White doing with our culture here?"... Or "why are you interested in India?" were unsettling a decade ago but are, thankfully, not so frequent now. Will rues the fact it is impossible to come across a thriving Hindu or Sikh mohalla in Lahore. Despite the fact that Punjab has so many interesting buildings, the state does not figure prominently in the literature on Indian architecture.

Anne Murphy, a doctoral student of Hindi literature, knows 13 languages. Besides Japanese, Tibetan, Sanskrit and German, Anne is also fluent in Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Avadhi, Rajasthani, Braj, Medieval Hindi and Punjabi. She is working on a comparative study of the worship of Gugga Pir in Punjab and Rajasthan. The highlight of Anne’s visit was the trip to Ropar and Sanghol and seeing the fascinating Mathura style sculptures. Anne is engaged to Sohail, a Muslim originally from Madhya Pradesh. The son of her Hindi/Urdu teacher, Sohail left India when he was 14 and never came back. Anne’s interest in the region is so deeply entrenched that she will keep coming back and perhaps bring Sohail back to the country of his birth.

For Farina Mir, a third generation immigrant, the visit to Chandigarh and Punjab was a rather complex experience. A Punjabi whose ancestors left for East Africa 100 years ago, then moved to England before settling in the USA. For Farina Punjab has always had a physical presence. As Farina says: "I am an American but I am not white, I am a Punjabi but I don’t speak Punjabi...." In a way, Punjab was always an "imaginary homeland" for Farina. She was in Lahore for one-and-a-half years and got to see what Partition has done objectively from an outsider’s viewpoint. A trip to Manakpur Sharif near Chandigarh was tremendously moving. It was a "Watershed" experience for her as she saw the Sufi khana-e-khas without the silsila. She saw it as a space that had the physical presence but had been shorn of historical continuity.

Suzanne works as a librarian in South Asian Library at Berkeley. Her interest is in comparative literature. She did her Masters in Hindi and Urdu from the American Institute of Indian Studies, Delhi and is doing her doctorate on Heer Waris The vivid portrayal of socio-cultural matrix by Waris Shah and his Sufi leanings interest Suzanne.

After her research is over she plans to bring out a critical edition of Heer Waris with an English translation. For Suzane travelling through the Malwa region of Punjab was a soul-satisfying experience. Since she grew up on a farm she can empathise with the buffaloes, love for buffaloes, mustard fields and the natural rhythm of life. The old Mughal route that the group had taken to travel across Punjab fascinated Suzanne whose husband too shares her love for the region and has studied the aromatic plants of India. In fact says she, "We feel so foreign in the USA." The Hindi-loving, Sanskrit-knowing cow belt might term Punjabi as loud, crude and rough but for Suzanne the language is sheer poetry. She loves the strong Persian influence in the cultural history of Punjab. The land of Baba Farid, Shah Hussain and Waris Shah has a strong pull for her and she intends to continue with her research on the region and make repeated trips to her "sources" in South Asia.

Ironically, in the group it were the Indian students Ramandeep Lamba, Kiran Kaur Gill and Crystal Suri who had just a passing acquaintance with their own country. Ramandeep, 22, had lived in Bathinda all his life before his parents sought permanent immigration to the U.S.A. in 1992. In six weeks of this programme Ramandeep learnt much more about Punjab, than he did in 12 years of schooling here. Besides learning history and literature the state, he developed an appreciation of Punjabi poetry. An ardent fan of Piara Singh Padam, the poet, he is carrying a bagful of Punjabi books back to Fremington, New Jersey. Jeonda rahe mera Punjab... "I will definitely come back here" says Ramandeep.

Crystal Suri, a student of biochemistry, never learnt Punjabi because her parents (Hindu father and Sikh mother) "never spoke to me in Punjabi. In fact they even gave me a non-Indian name". They never came back to India, neither were they keen that I should do so". Crystal sat in the Punjabi class in Columbia and so enraptured was she with language that she learnt it for three years. She came on this trip to search for her roots because she needed to know where she had come from. Bowled over by the lush green landscape and the hospitality of the people, Crystal loved Chandigarh immensely. "A part of me is already here", says she as she speaks of the calmness of the city and the exhilarating rickshaw rides.

For Kiran Kaur Gill (18), the youngest member of the group, the visit was memorable because she too had learnt Punjabi later on. She never grew up speaking it and now she can read and write it, even though she does not speak it.

I could not help wondering what it will take for us to incorporate the history, culture and literature of the region into our school syllabi — not in a boring, drab manner but to kindle that interest that can lead to a deeper engagement.

Until then we can be proud of the fact that our children know much more about the USA and Europe than they do about Punjab, Himachal or Haryana.