Tuesday 6 January 2009

Folk Lore And Climate Change

Brian Lewis

The folk tale, depending as it so often does of a narrative and a moral, offers a structure which could well carry the debate about climate change forward and attract a broad audience which includes children, students, singers, painters and writers.

This thought came to me very forcibly one evening in November 2008 as I sat in a boat rowed by a young boatman across the River Mahi in the State of Gujarat. My companions, three women and a man - a poet, a scholar and two teachers - were involved in a conference which took as its theme rivers, climate change and how to restore old balances. I was from England and had published a book about the summer flooding of a local village. My Indian colleagues were local people from a nearby university town and they had been partticularly concerned about the shortage of water in the Sabamarti. the design of the waterfront in Ahmedabad and how the building a new shoreline had changed the face of the sixth largest city in India. This renewal programme had destroyed homes and displaced people.

The area where we had parked the taxi was very polluted though beautiful. It was a beautiful evening though for the time of year had been over hot. Was this a possible consequence of climate change​ There was a temple and a steep flight of steps which led to the shore and three boats. They were moored close to another smaller temple and a delicate ancient whitewashed pavilion.

Mitali Baxi, a young teacher, someone who did not seem especially religious though I may be wrong, immediately we got there said, ‘Look a Kingfisher welcomes us to the boat’ It was perched on the rough mast of an ancient boat which stood ready to take us across the river.

The Kingfisher, a native of both Gujarat and Yorkshire, was doing what a bird does. It sat perched high up so that it could look at the surrounding environment. However Mitali understood something more. She saw him as a fellow creature wishing to engage with us in its own way. She was not speaking in a rational way but extending our understanding, referencing a truth which have been sown and harvested by folk poets and story tellers for thousands of years. She was suggesting that people and other creatures are all capable of communicating with each other.

I do not know anything about the symbolism of the King Fisher in the Indian folklore tradition, though I suspect that it will nave made its presence felt, because it is such a strong and distinctive bird. In the European tradition its colouring and its habits have been subject of a lot of comment. It catches the red rays of the sun on its breast and the blue of the sky on its back. The Greeks named it Halcyon, a protector of good health. Regal it sits still reflecting days spent in fond memories, the Halcyon days. To be greeted by a Kingfisher as we crossed the river Mitali suggested was auspicious and comforting.

The boat was anything but that. How old it was was difficult to judge. It was long and flat and although we were told that if could carry fifteen passengers that number would have been brave to venture forth. We picked our way gingerly to the front and perched in the bow. The decking planks were weathered to silver, planed but otherwise rough cut a bow and stern..

The boatman's name was Sanjay and as he propelled us with a long pole out of the polluted waters of the south shore to the clear northern one Adam and Falguni – the poet and the scholar - questioned him about his family, life and response to living close to the river.

He said he thought that he was fifteen and knew little about his ancestry beyond his father and had been born close by. One answer was especially interesting. When asked what he would do about the pollution which was very obvious on the receding bank, he said that that the Goddess of the river would know what to do. He had a deeply held belief that if Goddess Mahi was displeased She would act and punish the evil doers, doing this in her own time and in her own way. Mahi was very real to him and she would act on her, and his, behalf. To him the local deity, what in the European tradition we might have called at an earlier stage of our civilisation 'the spirit of the place', (genius loci) was very real.

Falguni knew about the underlying traditions of this part of the river. It was on the spot on the opposite bank where the pavilion stood that Chandra the Ocean coupled with Mahi. At first the Ocean had rejected her for her skin was too dark but in the end they had become lovers and according to tradition he still visits her twice a month, once on the night of the full moon and once when there his no moon.

In India preferences over pigmentation and the rejection of darker people shocks me for it seems so out of touch with tomorrow's world and is against India's democratic community spirit and usual tolerant values. Found in marriage advertisements I find it quaint but at a personal level repulsive. It is a primitive throw-back to a complex anthropological past, like a gender preference which favours sons, dowries and an acceptance of abject poverty, it is one of those things I find difficult to swallow for I know it will impede India's progress. Yet there is a difference between fresh water and salt water, and stressing this through symbolic language in this folk tale of the marriage of the ocean and the river the story told in the folk tale accommodates the differences.

As the sun went down Chhaya's nephew, Shyam having finished skimming flat stones into the river, a universal childhood pastime, climbed back into the boat and, raced by a faster one, we made back to the polluted shore. There we paid the boatman and disembarked close to the side of the temple. The sun was going down and as it did the emerging moon took on a hint of gold. Slipping off my lace-up shoes, a most inappropriate footwear in India where you enter homes and temples barefoot. With the others I mounted the whitewashed steps to a second floor balcony and looked through a small window at two figurines who represented Chandra and Mahi. On the wall there was a sun symbol which resemble the swastika, a symbol tainted in Europe. Having walked over it on more than one household threshold in the last week where it welcomed me I was coming to see that symbols are what you make of them. In one place a wish for good luck, in another a symbol of genocide

Shyam, the young boy, leaned through a glassless window and pulled on a bell rope. A small bell hanging from the ceiling tinkled. Later in another temple I would see him moisten a finger and touch the vermillion paste which covered the feet of Lord Ganesha and apply the colour to his forehead. Rituals are a establish parts of the folk lore and religious traditions. In Catholic churches in England, when the host, representing the body of Christ is elevated by the priest, a boy, or more frequently these days, a girl, rings a handbell. Worshipers coming into church stop at the Holywater stoop and use its water to make a cross on their heads. Here they apply colour to the part of the face the English call 'the temple'.

As we stood Falguni told me that on the festival of their Gods' wedding villagers from the very poor local local villages come to this shore to eat, dance and tell stories.

The experience of the ritual, story telling, bird lore and folk tales in an environment which cried out to us because of pollution, water loss, climate change and community poverty was as wonderful as it was strange. The setting made me see the extent to which a mighty river could be laid low by filth but the overall impression I felt there was one of optimism. My companions, with the exception of the Muslim poet Adam, were younger than than me by forty years and I could sense that given a chance they could do more than they thought possible. That night I started to to seriously think about where folk lore fitted into the climate change agenda.

I had come to India partly because in England there was an impression that whatever we did to combat climate change in our country the people of India and China would undo it in their rush to industrialise and modernise. At the time I was writing a book on public buildings, construction practices and low carbon footprints therefore I was beginning to take the issue very seriously indeed.

As a writer and I saw myself as someone who had the sort of contacts who might at least start a small debate in a receptive area of India, the university English departments of Gujarat. I also did not agree with the general analysis found in the West. I did not see India as a negative force. It was undergoing rapid social and economic change and in the short term there would be casualties. However there needed to be a developed critique. We all had to keep up the pressure to find alternatives to concreting over land, deforestation and the irresponsible irrigation practices.

I reasoned that the flooding and climate change could be the subject of study and that the development of creative writing which took climate change as a subject. If love poetry and books which tell love stories why not creative compositions which set out to celebrate the balances of the natural environment and the part it plays in the 'good' life and attack the evils of pollution. When I explained my views Professor Falguni Bharateeya she suggested a way in which the strategy was strengthened. Instead of tackling such a universal theme we should focus on rivers and in that way reduce the subject area but leave ourselves enough content to look at the spiritual and creative as well as the scientific, socio/economic and political implications of the slow erosion of our living space. It was a master stroke. In minutes we were getting down to the specifics, talking real rivers: the Gujarati Narmada and Mahi and the Yorkshire Aire and Don.

She would take responsibility for conducting workshops on the banks of a number of Indian rivers and I would do the same work in England. Neither of us had any money, though we felt that in India at least we could rely on the support of the HM Patel Department of English and fraternal colleges, in England the only money we could find came from a small Ruskinian charity the Guild of St George. Coming as it did with £500, with no strings attached and a lot of faith, it was enough help with the costs of air fares for the freelance writers who made up the English team. It was agreed would return in November 2008 with a small team - accommodation free - and we would work together. This was the conversation in the guest house of courtesy of Vallabh Vidyanagar University took me to the banks of the Mahi.

That night we began to hope singers, musician's. photographers, film producers, philosophers, poets, storytellers, creative technologists, workers on the world wide web scientists and seers would take their inspiration from the rivers and their banks on both sides of the world and work together to restore something closer to the old environmental balances. On river banks the spiritual, technological and the pragmatic might come together.

At the beginning of 2008 I was looking at major public building projects and their relationship to the environment, by its end I had a new book commission. Called Castleford on Aire it was about how Wakefield Metropolitan District Council set about using public consultation, government money and design to regenerate a Yorkshire town which had been hit by trade recession. Using regional and national grant aid local government had moved a market place, built a town green, designed children's playgrounds, and most importantly for the Gujarat Rivers Talk To Yorkshire Rivers project, built a new pedestrian bridge.

To understand why Wakefield, one of the small Yorkshire cities, was prepared to chance many millions of pounds on this project you need to understand current attitudes to funding, spacial awareness and 'pride of place.' If a district council was prepared to match regional government money twice the amount of money would be available for projects. There had to be a willingness to build or renew buildings in a town in such a way that the structures were challenging and enhanced the existing urban environment. Their designs had to be adventurous and come with the stamp of community approval. This process was called the Yorkshire Renaissance initiative. Central to the main agenda was need to nourish in its community a 'pride of place'. To do this an understanding of local heritage was fundamental.

In England we are in the middle of a debate about heritage. Some in government and the heritage agencies support the further promotion of the 'tangible heritage' while others explore the 'intangible heritage'. Tangible Heritage focuses on the architecture and artefacts of the past and present to produce an heritage that actively acknowledges pride of place and educates people for the future by actively embracing the lessons and experience of the past. Tangible Heritage is about those remains from the past that still exist to be looked at, touched and studied.

Intangible Heritage, is not passive, it is about learning and then doing. It can be scholarly but in a different way. It is not just archive and archaeology based. Its agenda is broader than Tangible Heritage for it embraces theatre, singing and playing, writing and publishing, art, citizenship, formal and informal education and street celebrations. It is not unscholarly, dedicated library studies matter but it does not stop there. It is about the active engagement of local communities with their past and animates local people and requires them to examine their town's present needs and create a vision for the future of their community.

Although trained as a social historian with a good general knowledge of the 'tangible heritage' found in buildings and museum collections, my interest in community development and the arts drew me toward 'intangible heritage'. The recognition that this was where my enthusiasms lay was enhanced in India. On the banks of the rivers Mahi, Narmada and Sabarmati I found that I was more interested in how I felt about the experiences and how I could represent them than the pavilion of the Goddess, the new dam and the Gandhi ashram.

Following a visit to see the Narmada Dam and a visit to a shallow bank where we dipped our feet in the tepid waters of the sacred river next day we travelled by taxi to see evidence of tangible heritage at Dabhoi. There we touched, photographed and studied the town's tangible heritage. Its sites are important for several reasons. It is a major fortified town and its four gates are covered with wonderful carved brackets showing sculptures of elephants, nymphs, warriors and pilasters portraying Lord Vishnu. For anyone visiting Gujarat, who can afford the taxi fare, and is interested in architecture, military history or the way figurative art is used to decorate building, Dabhoi is a must.

Yet it is not to the ruins which my mind and imagination return when I think about that strange morning but the stimulus offered by the town itself and the 'intangible heritage'. As a writer who has spent thirty years of my life working with actors, story collectors, writers, drummers, banner makers, musicians, social commentators, as soon as I turned my back on the Great Gateway and walked down the street towards the shops I saw a need to create and sing the song of Dubhoi. The writer in me wanted to write a short story in which the central character was a plain clothed drunken policeman on a bike who wanted to impress the visitors with his importance. As a painter I wanted to depict the shrine where you went if your child had measles. Jane, a photographer was drawn to architecture and textures, to fruit, cloth and jewellery. Jenny looked for small intriguing corners in courtyards, Ruth odd pieces of handed carved decoration.

'Would you like to see the inside of someone's house,' asked Falguni. Some saw this as odd, she knew no one in the town, but soon we were talking to an old gentleman on a swing and within minutes, sans shoes, we were meeting his wife in her kitchen. Soon we we moving along the road towards the town centre and the inevitable statue of MK Gandhi, striding purposely towards the char vendor's. At the stationery shop, to prove that we are one world, I phoned home. There, having sold me a devotional card of Kali, tongue out festooned in a garland of men's heads, its owner of the Shriji Stores gave me a calendar in Gujarati and indicated that if I ever came back there was his address.

On the return journey I thought about our tour of Dubhoi and tried place it into context. I and my colleagues had come to India with a serious purpose, to examine with people living on another continent the need to combat climate change and cherish rivers. This could have been a mechanistic process, we could deliver facts, figures and strategies, and in time we intended to that, but we were in the process of doing something else. We were trying to cherish and develop other aspects of the creative spirit. We wanted to borrow metaphor to draw out the energies found in the intangible heritage. We only days into the project but we already had poems, stories, paintings, photographs and videos which allowed us to examine problems associated with climate change. This approach allowed us to build a strong network of friends in Anand who wished to be identified with the project.

We had also managed to transmit to Yorkshire and seen Yorkshire faces, and heard their poets' voices coming from the side of the River Aire as we sat in a university conference room. The two hour transmission with primitive technical equipment was conducted by two skilled operators, Professor Reinhold Behringer of Leeds Metropolitan University and Jake Schuhle-Lewis the Pontefract Press. The link kept breaking up and we all agreed that it resembled Marconi's first broadcast rather than the BBC at its best but we had shown what was possible and had a model to build on.

The November the experimental creative writing workshops, under-developed in Anand and probably in other Gujarati universities but common in Leeds, had been a success. We had passed beyond the 'this is what we would like to do' to the 'this is what we have done' phase. New minted poems had been read and images transmitted in real time. Friends were seen and made. We still had no money to develop the British end of the experiment but we went back determined to make links with interested communities in Bolton, Birmingham, Bolden, Barnsley and Batley, with the rest of the ABC coming on fast track. The newspapers were taking up the story and headteachers in Castleford and Doncaster were in touch with Indian teachers.

Two local authorities in Yorkshire had responded and a residential community college was seriously thinking of using its overseas development agenda to host a regional conference on the Arts, Science and Climate Change. The team we had taken knew how to unlock doors. I had also decided to return in January 2009 and use the material collected two months before with lecturers and post-graduate students at a translation conference. I would also take the newly minted message into schools.

At some point in the morning of the transmission day, having done most of the work, we decided to try to explain to each other what were were doing and place on record our Aims and Objectives. Some would see this as a topsy-turvey way of doing things. I don't for I believe that the 'general' must follow the 'particular' in a creative agenda. You cannot know what is possible until after you have followed your instincts Strategic programmes are usually stuffed with buzz words that when analysed don't mean a lot. For instance the word 'culture' gets used without much of a definition and it is not alone. However close to the beginning of the discussion one of our Indian colleagues used a word which I have never seen used in such a no noesense strategic document before. She said that we should be driven by 'the spirit'.

Exactly what that meant I am not sure. I have never been the sort of person who wanted to come to India on a hippie trail to 'self realisation'. I had come to Gujarat for technical reasons. I arrived to help out at a translation workshop two years previously and kept coming back because I enjoyed working with the students, meeting scholars and eating Gujarati food. However when the word 'spiritual' was used it resonated and even though I did not completely understand it, I knew it was central to what we were doing. The more I thought about it I could not see how we could succeed if we were not driven by things which emanated from deep within us and defy too much analysis.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Great stuff, Brian! Keep it going - we have only one, very beautiful, very fragile planet. Darwin's 200th birthday cries out for your kind of celebration.

chhaya said...

What issue we choose n what stand we take on that reflects our self concept. when one chooses to work for issues like river on which the whole civilization has evolved n for climate change, it declares that the person is concerned for the harmonious evolution n sees one self as an integral part of the universe. Bravo to all efforts.

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