Echoes
of a Living Past
Legend has it that
sometime in the 10th century, shiploads of Zoroastrians, fleeing
persecution in their native Iran, landed on the coast of Saurashtra in Western
India. They met the local king and sought asylum. The king, Jadi Rana, pointed
to a tumbler full of milk, indicating thereby that his empire was full to the
brim and he had no place for more people. The leader of the strange new people took
a pinch of sugar and mixed it with the milk, telling the king that his people
would add sweetness to the milk but never let it overflow. And so they stayed,
putting down roots, in Sanjan, Variav, Thane, Broach and cities as further
afield as Bombay and Karachi. Their women wore saris and spoke Gujarati, the
men excelled in trade and commerce with many occupying high posts in government
– from Mughal times to colonial to present day. Called Parsi (having come from
Persia), they are India’s smallest minority constituting less than 0.02 % of
the population. However, being a distinctive community due to their dress,
speech, culture, food as well as their visible presence in fields as diverse as
law and medicine, politics and industry, arts and cinema, they have a hold on
the Indian imagination disproportionate to their actual numbers. Possibly this
is to do with the largely stock characters that the Indian film industry has
propagated of the Parsi bawa.
Cinematic representations
continue to be unfair in some ways, showing the Parsis as colourful and
privileged but also dysfunctional, antsy, idiosyncratic, miserly and querulous;
Being Cyrus, Pestonjee and Earth, being recent examples of this
brand of cinema verite. On the other
hand, a slew of books has provided a corrective and portrayed members of this
community in a more realistic manner. Rohinton Mistry, Thrity Umrigar, Sooni
Taraporewla, Farrukh Dhondy, Firdaus Kanga and Cyrus Mistry have, in different
ways, explored the Parsi psyche but also located them firmly within the
mainstream of Indian life. Cyrus Mistry’s latest offering, Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer, shows how the story of a small,
marginalised community of untouchables – the khandhias who bathe and carry
corpses to the Towers of Silence – can rise above its time and circumstance and
speak of larger, universal concerns.
In speaking of the
Khandhias and the terrible humiliation, isolation and segregation they suffer,
Mistry not only throws light on this almost invisible sub-group but also weaves
a compelling story of love and loss. Phiroze Alchidana, son of a revered
priest, falls in love with Sepideh, the daughter of a corpse bearer who lives
in the Doongarwaadi atop Malabar Hill. To have Sepideh, he
must leave his father’s home, become a khandhia and live the life of a pariah
for such is the fear of contamination from the dead and those who handle dead
bodies. Sepideh, a fey child-woman who has lived her entire life in the deeply-forested
Doongerwaadi, dies a few years after their marriage leaving Alchi to weather
the rigidly-enforced isolation as well as take on the might of the powerful
Parsi Punchayet.
Running through the
warp of Alchi’s benighted love story is the woof of India’s struggle for
Independence. Gandhi’s call for Satyagraha finds an echo deep in the khandhias’
disaffected, disgruntled hearts, inspiring them to launch their own peaceful
non-cooperation movement, to go on hartal
to down tools or, to be precise, not lift corpses, till their demands for
more humane working conditions are met. When Gandhi urges the nation in a radio
address – ‘The chains of a slave are broken the moment he considers himself a
free man’ – his words become a catalyst for change. Part-fiction, part-truth, Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer is a story
of courage and hope, a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story of one man and a
nation on the high road of history.
(Rakhshanda Jalil blogs
at www.hindustaniawaaz-rakhshanda.blogspot.com)
Also
Read:
1. The Ground Beneath Her Feet
by Salman Rushdie dealing with the
rise of a world famous Indian rock star named Ormus Cama, has shades of Freddie
Mercury aka Farrokh Bulsara.
2. Such a Long Journey
by Rohinton Mistry, details the travails of a Parsi family living in Bombay in
the 1970s.
3. The Space between Us
by Thrity Umrigar outlines the lives of two women: a privileged Parsi lady and
her maid
excellent piece -- sudeep
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