Week 1: Madhuri Purandare, Shh…Kuthe Bolaaychay Nahi, Ek Unaad Divas

No-one recommended that I read Madhuri Purandare, except, well maybe the Amazon algorithm. As I blazed through five books by her in a week, I realised that there was no-one better to take me along this Marathi learning journey. Her language is simple, concise, there were maybe five words I didn’t know before in total, and none of the stories are saccharine or sweet and quite a few of them were downright absurd. I actually wanted to know what happened next and wanted to preserve these books for my children, always a good sign.

One of my apprehensions before the deep dive into Purandare’s work was an issue I had with Marathi since my teens. Because I really only spoke it and thought in it for a brief moment when I was a wee young thing, I have always thought of Marathi as some sort of infant language. Infant not just because of time of my life I am reminded of when I hear it but also because it seems to me that ideas of any kind of complexity cannot be conveyed in it. All the things that appealed to me as a I grew up, anarchist philosophy, angry punk rock, profanity, vulgarity, ideas that challenged everything we believed in it, everything unconventional could never be expressed in the language. That notion was eviscerated when I read a collection of Namdeo Dhasal’s poetry in English but the idea has always remained at the back of my mind that mainstream Marathi is more or less the domain of the people I hated: whose houses emitted orange, and who rarely smiled and frequently taunted.

But these books weren’t anything like that. There was a sense of fun and the idea that most adults are sort of stupid or maybe have sort of lost some kind of spark of life. Maybe that’s my reading of it and not the author’s intention. That idea appealed to me. But more than anything it was the absurdity of it all. Stupid things like a princess called pencil with three legs who excels at langadi because even when one leg is up, two legs are down, and no-one can beat her. That’s what my dreams are made of.

It’s also that I lucked out by picking the perfect set of books.For those who are well versed in Marathi literature, 65-year-old Purandare is a figure of some renown, a noted translator, teacher, painter and singer. And she herself explained perfectly why her books work.

“I use simple words,” Purandhare said in an interview when speaking about her use of “simple language”. “Construct the sentence in such a way that child could read it without stumbling. You have to understand- which words they might know and when and how to introduce a new word. It is boring when child has to go back and refer earlier sentences to understand the meaning. But let me make it clear. Simple doesn’t mean childish. Don’t underestimate the kids. Many people think that if they are writing for kids they have to use childish language.”

A stray observation I had, but then again it might be based on the limited sample size of my extended family is a comment on the treatment of pet animals in most houses in India. I think my favourite of the lot I had was Laloo, The Cat which is a cycle of stories about an existential cat who eats too much, sleeps too much and doesn’t want to catch rats. At a crucial point in the story, both the mother and daughter punch him because he behaves like a cat and refuse to feed him unless he catches a rat. It’s a child’s story I know so no need to read into it. But I think this would be acceptable behaviour outside of the world of the book as well and not just to strays but even to animals in your homes, which I think is a larger comment about a certain kind of Indian person because taking care of animals is linked to joy and vulnerability, both of which are hard to do.

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The search for a cult Marathi play

Like the Bollywood movie Nayak which played on television more than a few times daily, and once numbered 37 times in one week, according to a community on Orkut that kept track, Shh…Kuthe Bolaayche Naahi played frequently on Prabhat TV (which most of the internet saw it on) and Alpha TV Marathi, the channel I saw it on. It’s grown on to become something of a cult hit, although I am assuming that from isolated comments on YouTube, Reddit and Facebook but countless viewers like me remember watching this play on repeat and haven’t been able to find it since.

Cycling through a sea of disappointing, sexist and “paanchat” Prashant Damle plays, Ek Lagnachi Goshta et all, I was bracing myself to discover that another childhood favourite would be terrible. I just wanted to see it for the fervour with which the characters pronounced “ghataspot”, Marathi for divorce. When I heard it then, I didn’t know the meaning, my mother refused to tell me, changed the subject. Consequently, the word had an element of the forbidden. It also has a peculiar ring to it. Divorce is too staid a word for what happens in a relationship. Ghataspot is perfect, like bomb spot, which seems to be closer to what happens when a relationship breaks up. It’s also more fun to say. The other was one of the characters saying how they were attracted to the smell of Seventh Heaven, which they pronounced in one flow: se-won-dhe-won, which is an actual perfume made in 1940s Hollywood.

I wonder how much things percolate into our subconscious because the play has a character, a Marathi girl, born and brought up in Germany, whose a paying guest at the protagonist family, trying to learn Marathi and there are a few language jokes in the first half. Both my sisters and I ended up learning German, although I am not sure whether Shh..Kuthe Bolaaychay Nahi had an influence. It’s the best of Damle’s plays with some actual jokes and I have trouble deciding whether its subversive or just dad-joke level annoyingly offensive when it comes to gender relations. The lead couple, played by Damle and Gupte, has hit bit of a rough patch because Damle is too nice of a husband, so his wife wants him to come home drunk and fall in love with other women, so she call yell at him. Go figure.

Movie roundup

The week ended with two good movies: Ringa, Ringa (2010) and Ek Unadh Divas (2006). The first was an absolutely bonkers, stylish thriller made by cinematographer-director Sanjay Jadhav replete with multiple people with paranoid schizophrenia, political conspiracy, nursery rhyme chanting contract killers and kinetic pacing. There were a few flaws logically but everything is so sped up that you don’t have time to stop and think, which might have been intentional. Too many thrillers try to explain things or slow up the action and are undone as a result. The overrated Kahaani (2012) is a classic case in point.

The second, Ek Unaad Divas (2006), belonged to my favourite genre of movie, the real-time movie, which takes places over a single day in more or less a similar setting. It starred Ashok Saraf, who I’m realising is not only much more than the dad in Hum Paanch, not just a comedian but a bonafide star in Marathi cinema. Here, he plays a middle-aged corporate guy whose hobbies include being punctual and following proper etiquette. The writers illustrate the depths of his boring persona by having him say that he only prefers cream and white shirts to coloured ones. I only found out a few years ago that this was a classic Maharashtrian characteristic and thankfully I never grew into that kind of taste and just junked all the t-shirts people gifted me of these colours, lest I in any way shape or form resemble them.

While I enjoyed it, it reminded me one of the greatest failings of these kinds of stories about middle-class characters. Saraf’s character roams the streets of Mumbai, in the Fort area, and meets an old friend who earns only 2500 (much less than my driver, Saraf’s character notes) but is happy. Then he runs into a gang leader who has organised the taxi strike, some gamblers and a tantrik. All of these guys teach him that they are happy with less and he realises he should be happy. It’s a good message, one I subscribe to. But it seems to me to be the classic middle class imagination that actually everyone in India is happy just where they are so there’s no need for a welfare state, or to do anything to change or better their lives, which helps us be complacent.

Stray observations about Marathi learning

• I wanted to focus on removing the alien feeling of Devnagari script. If I see it anywhere, my eyes instantly glaze over and I have to focus to read it. It’s become better but I was in line at Aadhar and just couldn’t bother to read the Marathi signage. I guess a sign that I am closer to my goal will be that I read Marathi even in situations where I’m stressed out, like government offices.
• A teacher in college would like to say that people in India have no languages. They can’t speak English well because they aren’t taught it and because they don’t read, they often can’t speak their mother tongues. All of us just get by with our limited understanding of three languages. I spent 10 years learning the language and giving exams in it, yet at the end, I can only speak it because of my parents and upbringing but can barely read in it. Of course, this is not new information. But if you get any opportunity to shit on education, especially Indian, you must take it.