The One About Ponga Pundit

(Originally published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, September 2, 2003)

“We were left with the touchy business of having to get final approval for the film from [Bhaskar Ghose’s] successor, Shiv Sharma (called ‘Shivering Sharma’ for his alleged cravenness towards his political bosses). Fortunately there were only a couple of hitches—we had to remove ‘fuck’ and ‘screw’. But ‘screwed’ and ‘shit’ and ‘balls’ were allowed to pass. (‘Han yaar, “balls” chalega, voh toh hum bhi college mein bolte thhe,’ Shivering Sharma said to us.)”
Arundhati Roy brought the house down when she came to this particular episode in the making of In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, screened last week at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi. All of us sitting in those chairs got the humour, even the ones who squirmed out of polite discomfort at hearing “those words” (two rows ahead, a girl muttered, “Lekin what is the need to say fuck all the time, yaar?”, which was kind of funny considering the number of people who walked out of the hall saying, “Hey, the film was fucking good, wasn’t it?”). And I loved the thought of a craven-hearted bureaucrat sorting through a mental lexicon: screw as in not the kind you get in a hardware shop—Verboten! No! Nahi!; screwed as in the past tense thereof, diluted by automatic overuse—okay, we can stamp that in accordance to regulation 3.ii (a).
Last week, an equally bizarre debate erupted over Habib Tanvir’s performance of two plays—Jis Lahore Nahi Dekhya and Ponga Pundit. Both these plays have been performed before by Tanvir and other troupes without raising more than the discomfort that the playwrights intended. Ponga Pundit was written in the 1930s by two Chattisgarhi folk artists, Sitaram and Sukhram and has been performed many times since then.
So there was considerable surprise when the Sangh Parivar’s monkey brigade decided to picket performances of the plays, claiming (here we go again) that Hindu culture was being attacked, even desecrated, by these plays. The Sangh Parivar tends to recruit people given to deep emotional outbursts, and in Bhopal, they expressed their deep sense of injustice and hurt by throwing rotten eggs at the stage, breaking chairs and engaging in other time-honoured forms of intellectual debate and argument.
It should be explained that Ponga Pundit is a classic that plays well among most audiences and especially among the Dalit community and has often been performed by members of the scheduled castes. It’s a takedown of organised religion, a pithy jab at the corruption and insecurity of certain priests, an indictment of untouchability. The plot includes a corrupt priest—the “ponga pundit” of the title and the rituals he sets up, all intended to exclude his sweeper from participation. I saw it years ago at a college theatre festival and thoroughly enjoyed its broad humour and its pointed critique of organised religion.
Not only have the members of the Sangh Parivar directly involved in the protests not seen the play, they appear to be completely unaware that Habib Tanvir is not the author. Part of the campaign launched attacking the troupe last week was based on misinformation—Habib Tanvir, a Muslim, had written this play that criticised Hindu priests, said some members of the Sangh. I’d object to this anyway, on the grounds that any Indian should be free to critique or comment on any aspect of his country, including a religion that he didn’t belong to, but the fact remains that they’re plain wrong. Ponga Pundit has always caused some discomfort among the more backward members of the supposedly high castes—a play written by folk artists, written for the Dalit community, overturns assumptions about who in our society is entitled to a voice, or is allowed to use a language, or may have a platform.
They are also completely unaware of what the plays are about, as is evident from news reports. “State BJP organising general secretary Kaptan Singh Solanki said: ‘Ponga Pandit aur Jamadarin are two separate plays through which bhartiya sanskriti pe hamla hua hai.’"
I loved this quote. It used precisely the same kind of Hinglish that Arundhati Roy and her friends were attempting to lay claim to in Annie, at a time when, unlike today, nothing else in the culture reflected the reality of our hybrid tongue. It’s exactly like the bit Roy quotes from Annie where Lekha Saxena says, “Hai sir, I’m so confused, pata nehi kuch samajh nehi aa raha what to do,”—much as Kaptan Singh Solanki might dislike being compared to a character in a film that just escaped being dubbed profane thanks to the bureaucratic ruling over acceptable and unacceptable slang. I also loved the fact that he knew so little about the play that he had made two plays out of one; I loved the fact that Solanki squarely equates Bhartiya Sanskriti with the culture of the priests at the high table, and not (heaven forbid!) with anything as low as the feelings of the Dalit community.
Even better than Solanki was former leader of Opposition Gauri Shankar Shejwar, who said that he had not seen the play and continued undaunted: “"I object to the name. It clearly shows a desire to drive a wedge based on caste. Panditon ko Ponga nahin kehna chahiye (Pandits should not be called Ponga)."
I visualise a present-day equivalent to Shivering Sharma whose job will be much the same, with a slight shift in definition. What, presumably, made Shivering Sharma uncomfortable was the taint of “Westernisation”, which made his task of sifting out Good Language in its neat party frock from Bad Language in its ripped jeans and tight T-shirt that much more difficult. (I wonder how he would have felt if someone had offered him the example of the Anglo-Indian Ball Curry, also known as Bad Word curry? Perhaps “balls” would have then been banned, along with that forbidden Eff Word.)
Today’s Shivering Sharmas will have a different mandate: no plays allowed that insult Religion (defined presumably strictly as Hindu), no plays allowed that question Religion (ditto), no references to Ponga Pundits, even if the phrase itself is part of popular dialect.
It may even become a criminal offense to call a pundit ponga, in print or verbally, and then we will have to do unto that phrase what for years squeamish editors did with the f*** word: “P**** Pundit”, news reports will say carefully. And the debate will continue to grow ever more hysterical, until someone finally loses their patience and tells this bunch of philistine barbarians to just Ponga off.