Nidhi Dugar Kundalia’s The Lost Generation: Chronicling India’s Dying Professions is a collection of essays about anachronistic professions that continue to exist in India even as modernisation makes them barely relevant. Traditional, ancestral trades, for the most part determined by caste, are practised around the vast landscape of India, and Nidhi seeks out 11 such professions to write about.

The Lost Generation brings together the rudaalis (mourning women-in-black) from Rajasthan and the letter writers of Bombay, the storytellers of Andhra and the Urdu scribes of Delhi. Clearly, technology has rendered some obsolete — what value is there of oral storytellers who walk through a region gathering and spreading news, fact and fiction, when television and radio have penetrated all parts of the country. Similarly, with mobile phones in every household or at least neighbourhood, the painstaking art of letter writing has been virtually lost. These are professions that were once immensely significant in connecting people, and date back centuries, but today the penultimate or possibly last generation of practitioners eke out a living in conflict with urbanisation.

There is a sense of nostalgia pervading the pages of Kundalia’s essays as we recall other occupations that once existed and now are rarely heard of. Some are particularly significant to Hinduism, like the genealogists of Haridwar, “Pandas — the priests who double up as genealogists” who maintain the family registers with details of marriages, births and deaths. Once, even the ink was a “pure Brahmin product” containing ingredients like almond peels and sap from banana trees but today, Pandas make do with commercial ink. As the world becomes less concerned with family roots, as caste ceases to be the sole determinant of how a life will be led, and as sons of Pandas are becoming bankers, the more traditional and religious families continue to update their registers via the Pandas but the relationship is unravelling.

A look at traditional occupations in India and their practitioners who are losing relevance as times change

The Pandas, of course, belong to the highest of castes — the Brahmins — while many of the other identified professions belong to more vulnerable segments of Indian society. They lack permanent residences, live semi-nomadic lives and are unable to benefit from state support. Across the essays and castes, however, there is a sense of pride and prejudices of the practitioners and the communities they serve. The professions are defined by many layers of which caste is but one; class and gender are equally relevant.

The rudaalis from the sand dunes of Rajasthan are professional female mourners for the feudal lords or Rajput Thakurs of the region. While social mores prevented the author from speaking to a rudaali, the Thakur explained the need for bought tears to Kundalia, saying, “We don’t allow the women in our families to make a sight of themselves outside our homes. High-caste women do not cry in front of commoners. Even if their husbands die, they need to preserve their dignity. These low-caste women, rudaalis, do the job for them. The whole village feels the loss … She represents their sadness.”

Among the Rajputs, patriarchy and male hegemony finds expression in more extreme ways than just controlling the tears of ‘their’ women. “The birth of a daughter, even from a legitimate wife, is not liked by the Rajputs”, writes Kundalia, alluding to female infanticide which continues to take place in the region. Women who survive birth to a low-caste mother, and lose their husband or for some other reason become impoverished, have few choices, and learning to cry on demand is a better profession than the few other choices open to them.

In a less remote part of India, Bombay, Kundalia introduces us to Dilip Pandey who sits across from the Mumbai General Post Office where in years past he and others of his ilk would “lend an ear to a largely illiterate India, penning letters on their behalf to be dropped into the red letter box.” When the British introduced the modern postal system in the 19th century, there was a natural creation of jobs for the literate who would write the letters. These letter writers became privy to details of the lives of their numerous clients, following mundane routines, from instructions as basic as ‘pay the rent’ to intimate conversations between young couples.

Dilip’s regular clients over the years have included an old Parsi widow who was partially blind and needed him to read the letters her son and sister would send, a sardar who drove a truck but did not know how to count money and “sometimes came with gunny sacks full of notes, mostly one-rupee”, to be counted, and a sex worker who sent money to her son and in her letters lied about her profession. Now, Dilip says, “Mobiles and banks ka zamana hai, bhai. Post office aur humara zamana khtam ho gaya.”

That remains the common thread linking the stories, that their time is past. For each story, Kundalia has found a protagonist who represents his or her profession (with the exception of the rudaali, for whom the Thakur spoke), creating the space for the author to personalise the narration. The book is not an academic look at an unobtrusive layer of Indian culture but an invitation to empathise with those individuals who are a lost segment of the populace in modern society.

These are people who ended up in their professions not by choice but by virtue of being born in a particular caste and in a particular place. They are masters, or at least skilled practitioners of their crafts, having learnt them from their parents, from the expectations of their environment, and from the need to earn a living. What is consistent across each story is the expertise of the person spoken with. For instance Anil Sood, the kabootarbaaz of old Delhi, rivals the knowledge of a vet in the feeding, training and racing of pigeons. Kundalia writes, “He inherited his love for these birds from his family who have been flying pigeons for five generations now. ‘My ancestors could recognise the breed of a pigeon just by inspecting its droppings,’ he says proudly.”

In each story, Kundalia intersperses conversations with the protagonists with a sketch of the area, details of the historical significance of the profession, and some technicalities of the profession itself. As we travel through India from the streets of cities like Kolkata and Hyderabad to the far reaches of the Rajasthan desert, the diversity of Indian culture is clear, as is the ephemeral nature of much of that diversity as urbanisation, modernisation, technology and uniformity of infrastructure wipe out the need for traditional roles and professions.

For some, like the ittar wallahs of Hyderabad, remaining true to their profession is a matter of morality and honour more than necessity. As Syed Abdul Gaffar says, “If not money, my ittar earns me respect. I know my sons will have to start selling only synthetic perfumes soon, but till the time I am around, I’ll keep making and selling pure ittar.”

For some, the move away from their family professions will be a step away from caste restrictions and a chance at vertical social mobility, for others the future of their children is uncertain but they are the lost, and most likely the last, generation who dedicated their lives to these dying professions.

The reviewer is a development consultant and freelance journalist in Islamabad. She is also a director of the School of International Law.

The Lost Generation: Chronicling India’s Dying Professions
(ESSAYS)
By Nidhi Dugar Kundalia
Random House India
ISBN: 978-8184007374
247pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 21st, 2016