Sadanand Menon: A little more than paratha rolls

CRITICALLY INCLINED

Samovar, the remarkably non-fussy, yet trendy, restaurant attached to Mumbai's Jehangir Art Gallery, faces eviction. It has been served notice and has been dubbed "an illegal occupant." A group of local artists wants it closed up and converted into a new gallery for young artists. The struggle to protect it too has snowballed and, recently, some celebrity names have spoken up on its behalf with nostalgic evocation of their first paratha rolls there.

The past few weeks, this news has shared column-space with the protest of hundreds of "project-affected people" from the Narmada valley, who face eviction as the height of the dam gains further increment. The more than 200,000 displaced persons from this project hardly evoke the empathy that the paratha rolls of Samovar seem to do.

During the same period, we have also witnessed the spectacle of another kind of abandoned "project-affected people" in Bihar. Over three million people have become victims of some 60 years of the embankments-building project to contain the Kosi river and, later, the other north-to-south flowing rivers like the Bagmati, Gandak and Budhi Gandak. Much of north Bihar has been reduced to a maze of crisscrossing embankments. The initial barrier height of seven feet has been systematically raised over the decades, as the river levels rose due to rapid siltation. Today, most of the rivers of this region flow a good 14 feet above ground level. If the embankments breach during monsoons, as they do annually, either due to accident or deliberate blasting to save Patna, the bulk of the water inundates the densely habited areas below. There is no way this water can leach back into the river basin, because the river is flowing above their heads. As fields and houses submerge (and remain submerged for months on end), the only option left the populace is to clamber on top of the embankments, a space wide enough maybe to drive a jeep, and eke out a temporary living there in abysmal conditions. This year, an estimated 2.5 million people have had to shift atop the embankments. No paratha rolls for them; only a dry roti made from roots of a grass that grows on the slopes of the embankments. And, of course, no concerned voices from urban centres on behalf of these doomed people.

Is it crude to make such comparisons? I suppose it is. But I too have had my rolls and beer over several humid afternoons at Samovar. Besides, I'm an unabashed fan of the sixties' 'let-it-be' ambience of the place and feel engulfed in a warm sense of 'community' every time I step in. So, let me nuance what I'm saying.

The saga of Samovar, as much as that of the Narmada oustees and the marooned of Bihar, draws us within the heart of the debate around the systematic throttling of a healthy 'public sphere' in our times. In the Narmada basin, the official agencies treat one set of people as dispensable in order to benefit another set. It is unimaginable how the pain and anguish of those displaced and 'affected' can contribute to the democratic aggregate of those 'benefited'. It almost seems a process by which the system manufactures disaffection so as to legitimise its increasing use of force and human disregard.

The marooned citizens of Bihar, trapped between the devil and the deep sea, provide the profile of a people who are the inevitable end result of this kind of non-democratic, non-consensual and high-handed, funder-inspired project-making. The embankments, supposed to rescue people from the fury of floods in the Kosi, once called the 'sorrow of Bihar', have ended up wreaking even greater ravage on the same people, rendering them entirely incapable of being part of vital democratic processes.

Far-fetched as it might sound, it is a similar squeezing of the 'public sphere' that we can trace in the Samovar story. The fight for Samovar cannot be for an individual case. It needs to amplify into a fight for more supple public spaces that can foster more active democratic encounters and links between the displaced tribals of Narmada valley, the displaced farmers and artisans of Bihar and the displaced artists of Mumbai.

The idea needs to be respected that an art gallery is not a mere physical space; it is also a living mind space. While display space is important, those steps, bookshops, coffee shops and commons of free exchange too are integral to the creation of an art community, which looks beyond the new hedonism of the gallery. We need a little more than a corner for paratha rolls.