The Bhaiyya, The Bandit And The Bak-Bak Artist

( I know this is not related to cinema, but still had to be on RL :-)  No offense to anybody)


HE IS A DESPERADO. HE IS SLOW. HE IS A POET. HE IS A THUG. ABOVE ALL THE MAN FROM UP IS JUST PLAIN GRATEFUL HE IS NOT A BIHARI, SAYS ANNIE ZAIDI

WHEN THE family first began to entertain itself with the notion of obscene amounts of ghee, red meat, zardozi et al, at my expense, the question arose: What kind of man? I wasn’t sure what kind of man I wanted, but I was sure I didn’t want a ‘Bhaiyya’ — a typical UPite. Which necessitates that awkward question: What is a ‘typical UPite’?


Most Indians carry around a little sprinkling of prejudice in their DNA. Geographical and linguistic affiliations are so strong that most of us find ourselves tucked into little pockets of imagination. Call it stereotype. Call it community culture. Call it what you will, but we cannot help identifying each other based on clothes, accents, moustaches and different grade of jollity. But what is one to make of the UPite? What does he look like? How is he to be picked out in a crowd?


Up comes traipsing (well, sauntering, considering it is UP we are talking about) the first identity marker. But it is more a non-identity marker. You cannot pick out an Uttar Pradesh man in a crowd. He is virtually faceless. He has no lavish mop of curls, no twirly beard parted down the middle. He does not like to be seen in a lungi, if he owns trousers. And he does not set store by turbans.


When I was growing up, there were three broad categories into which I cast the UP man: White chikan kurta-clad sons of former zamindars who continue to rear pigeons and fly kites as a full-time occupation and sometimes carried guns, almost like a liability; the lean, inscrutable rickshaw-pullers/stone-breakers/gardeners; and the westernised, English-speaking intellectual. There was a time when, if a Hindi filmmaker wanted to create the character of a provincial intellectual, he would place the character in Allahabad — once known as the Oxford of the East. By the time I grew up, UP had cast off any intellectual pretensions it had and settled firmly into a mould defined by politics, caste and religion.


It is common for a UP man to refer to a woman as ‘my girl’ because he has stared at her every day on the bus or knows her address
My mental picture is fuzzy, cobbled together from sherwanis and black bandgalas, Urdu couplets, paan, dawdling at street corners, gentility, tall tales, long memories, and tongues that instantly betrayed their origin.


But almost as soon as I began to discuss the stereotypes surrounding the UP man, alarm bells went off. I was reminded of soft-bellied Bhojpuri-speakers from Azamgarh who ended up in poetic graves. And of English-speaking goons from Aligarh who force you off reserved seats during train journeys. Or Urdu couplet-spouting men with mafia links. The UP-wala is slippery. He does not like being lumped in a bracket, yet doesn’t make any effort at knocking down the brackets. He is the quintessential migrant who sends money back home, which keeps the land watered and sown, so he can return home and help bring in the harvest. The typical UPite is bound to land. For this, he will fight – with guns, with the little hegemony he can scrabble at, with endless court cases.


RESIDENT UPITES insist that they are pan-Indian: ‘The Hindustani man’. That they have little in common except accidental geography. But they readily admit to one binding feature. As Avinash Pandey Samar, a research scholar at JNU, puts it, “The first characteristic is the huge sense of relief all UPites feel about not being Biharis.” It hurts the UPite’s sense of self to find himself lumped with the Biharis by non-UPites. To the rest of India, UP, Bihar, and parts of Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Haryana are one big ‘Bhaiyya’ blob – the guy who abandons the mofussil mitti, to trundle into metros without the assurance of a bed to dream in.


Like millions of other Mumbaikars, Mahesh Chowdhary, a sales and marketing professional, subscribes to this stereotype. “There are three kinds of UPites,” he says. “The lower class – one that leaves whenever there’s trouble at home. They leave with zero back-up and work in unimaginable conditions. There’s a Marathi saying that means ‘I will break but I will not bend’. The UPite will bend. One of my clients owns a zari workshop. The men who work there come from UP. They are crammed into a room, ten feet by ten, 25 men to a room.” Chowdhary deals with the middle-class and a few upper-class entrepreneurs from UP. “UPites have a decent business mind but one successful man will bring in 10 others from his backyard. There is a lot of cronyism, and that sometimes manifests in the form of gangs.”


There’s no getting away from that stereotype — gangster, goon, hired gun. There was always the bandit from Etawah lurking in the background. There was Rampur, famous for its switchblade knives, and the nascent crude revolver industry, caricatured recently in Ishqiya, a film set in Gorakhpur, in which a young boy says, “In my village, we learn to load a gun before we learn to wash our behinds.” Men such as Abu Salem, Dawood Ibrahim, Mukhtar Ansari, Babloo Srivastav have only bolstered this image. My grandfather had laughingly told me that in the place we come from, only two things are famous – imarti (a fried sweet) and goondagardi.


There’s no getting away from that stereotype — goon, gangster, hired gun. There’s the Etawah bandit lurking in the background
Almost everyone I know has a scary UP story to tell: family feuds in Ghazipur, Lucknow University campus murders, child murders in Nithari. Parvez Imam, a mental health professional turned filmmaker tells me of the time he met a cabbie from western UP who coolly confided that he’d killed a man. “He seemed quite proud of the fact,” says Imam, a gentle, poetry-loving soul who grew up in Aligarh.


Imam believes that machismo is common to all patriarchal cultures, including most parts of UP, but that it has an almost militant quality in parts of west UP, although the Purabiya (eastern UPite) is no saint. Dozens of people hired as contract killers in Mumbai and Delhi seem to have arrived from these dusty, fertile badlands — Azamgarh, Mau, Ghazipur. The usual arguments about lack of development and unemployment are made — that UPites have too much time on their hands and that they resent the emptiness so they begin to stray. But riding on the back of the jobless desperado, another UPite waddles in — the slow, lazy one, uninterested in doing any real work and yet, is hungry for power. I have to confess that I have never seen a UPite running for anything, bar his life. The rolling gait of a bearded professor; the straight-backed stroll of a pensive student; the lithe lolling of a field hand: Yes. A mad dash? No.


On the other hand, why rush? “The UPite’s slowness,” says Imam, “comes from a different approach to time. The language itself is long drawn-out, languid. Whether it is the poor rickshaw-puller or the nawab, they all share this quality. The British brought with them an industrialised mindset, the notion that time equals money. In UP, it didn’t and it still doesn’t.”

Read the rest HERE.