Ruins

“Each statue will be broken
if the heart is a temple. When

the gods return, from the ends
of the fasting sky, they’ll stand

in the rain and knock and knock.
They’ll force open the heart.

In the grief of ruins, they’ll pick
up their severed arms

and depart and depart and depart.”

— Agha Shahid Ali, “From Another Desert” *

Tonight, I am thinking about ruins. Tughlaq tombs with chrome-striped walls at sunset, footsteps echoing into egg-shaped ceilings; ruins of a baoli buried in urban depths, steps away from a Metro station; ruins of a Fort toeing the Arabian sea, the sea link draped within view like a ship’s mast: these are all ruins that I have visited, known, and loved. But I am also thinking about what it means when we recognise, or don’t recognise, something as ruined. To ruin something on purpose is to lay to rest a recognisable past. To ruin something is also, however, to warp something toward the future.

The film we watched this evening, Rahi Anil Barve’s period-horror fantasy Tumbbad, is set in a ruined mansion in the village of Tumbbad in rural Maharashtra, and takes place across three titled chapters, each unfurling in a different period of the twentieth century, from 1918 to the year of Indian independence. The story has mythological origins: Hastar, the insatiable son of the goddess who created the universe, faces the wrath of other gods after he steals his mother’s gold, and is on the verge of stealing her food. His mother, the goddess of prosperity, saves him but on the condition of a curse — that he would never experience worship, and thus be forgotten forever.

The villagers of Tumbbad cross the goddess and build a shrine to Hastar, hoping to unearth the gold he stole. They are punished with ceaseless rain, but the punishment does not end there. Our protagonist Vinayak Rao, a brahmin boy who inherits the decrepit mansion, learns about its horrors — and pleasures — from his grandmother, an immortal creature who was deformed by Hastar’s curse when she went in search of his gold as a child. She passes on to her grandson the location of Hastar’s treasure, as well as the secret of surviving Hastar (flour), warning him of the pitfalls of avarice.

Over time, the treasure results in Vinayak Rao becoming a wealthy man, perched at the top of a feudal society. He has everything, which is in keeping with brahmanical patriarchy: he has land, a house that grows every year, a motorbike, then a car, a flour-churning business, a wife and a mistress, and a family. He has prestige, and he has infinite wealth. And yet it is not enough. As with people who want two houses when they already have one, and billions when they have millions, he knows only to want, and to preserve the need to want. He sees the curse of defiled immortal suffering that befalls people who are unable to trick Hastar, the red-skinned god who lives in the tomb (womb, we are told) of the mansion. But he risks it, and continues to do so, until he is old, and his instincts aren’t as quick, and his body — his labour-power, and therefore his usual ability to control the means of production — is wearing thin. Vinayak Rao sees the fleshy ruination of those who fall to their greed and burn in the ruins of Tumbbad, but he also sees himself as ruined if he were to keep his body away from chasing gold. It is not economic necessity at this point, but destiny.

What is a ruin? A ruin is a devastation thats stands brittle. A ruin is an injury that you preserve, even as it grows more infected.

Throughout the film, I thought Hastar would be the ruin of this man, Vinayak. His masculinity and his caste-pride lead him to Hastar, over and over again. His ruin, however, is his inheritance, which is much more than caste-pride: it is caste itself, which is the thing he inherits, and the thing he offers as his inheritance to his son. Take it, he tells his son in agony, holding out the treaure, take the money from Hastar.

Take the money I learnt to steal, and that I am teaching you is yours to take. Take the money, and conserve the family name, and wealth which is rightfully yours but which you will also have to “earn.”

Take your caste.

Being acquainted with a cinematic history which has traditionally portrayed Dalits and Adivasis as monstrous and deformed, it felt startling — and radical — to see the deformation of a brahmanical body in, as Kiran Kumbhar notes, a film with deep anti-caste strains. Not just the defiling of one brahmin body, but a long familial line of them. Take your caste, become like me — deformed, but still of the caste of your forefathers.

In “The Annihilation of Caste” (2022: 70) , Dr Ambedkar writes:

Civilizing these aborigines means adopting them as your own, living in their midst, and cultivating fellow-feeling, in short loving them. How is it possible for a Hindu to do this? His whole life is one anxious effort to preserve his caste. Caste is his precious possession which he must save at any cost. He cannot consent to lose it by establishing contact with the aborigines the remnants of the hateful Anaryas of the Vedic days. Not that a Hindu could not be taught the sense of duty to fallen humanity, but the trouble is that no amount of sense of duty can enable him to overcome his duty to preserve his caste.

There it is. Vinayak Rao’s assets are many but his preservations few. His ground flour — a food that notably occupies a place in the caste hierarchy of deprivation, and has been at the heart of savarna assaults on Dalits — is produced by his own family’s hands, keeping capital and caste-purity within the family, acting as a literal barrier to the curses of the outside world. But it also makes him meal to those very forces: at various stages of the film, Vinayak Rao, as a boy and as a father, and his own son both find themselves covered with flour, and mostly by accident. This appears to us as a warning, but to them it is merely fate, as with the red-skinned god who cannot eat enough, and yet remains perpetually alive and hungry. Roti, kapda, makaan, but what else: in this country, hunger is always kept alive, because brahmanical duty demands one preserve oneself; keep one’s caste warm, untouched and throbbing, always fed, always passed on, even in the jowls of death, or the threat of a painful immortal experience.

What is a ruin? A ruin is something that could die, but doesn’t.

While watching the film, I was rarely able to look the amphibian-like Hastar in the eye, mostly choosing to hide behind J’s shoulder or pillow whenever the creature appeared. This reaction had to do with my low tolerance for horror, and bodily squeamishness, but it was also because a memory from my childhood peeled itself over every flash I had of the god on screen.

In the memory, I am standing, amidst people, before a small hanuman idol, vermillion-coloured, that was and perhaps still is nestled under a tree in a roadside shrine in Calcutta; in Kali bari or Gariahat, I am not certain. This idol, somewhat shapeless and rock-like in my mind, used to frighten me as a child. I could not understand the crowds gathered out on the pavement to pray to an idol that was so red that it hurt my eyes to simply look at it. As a child, I felt this pain in my eyes as a weakness on my part; an inability to appropriately comprehend the will and consciousness of the god.

I would, in later years, with good humour, align the red hanuman with Kolatkar’s Chaitanya: he popped a stone/ in his mouth/ and spat out gods. But the memories I have of sweaty evenings in my childhood spent standing in front of that shrine in Calcutta, jostling for space, are primarily of impatience and fear. Fear, I imagined then, of retribution for not praying properly, of thinking my own thoughts instead of his, of finding the almost-ruined idol funny yet terrifying.

This evening, I realised, it was fear of something else too — fear of not seeing what everyone I loved was seeing, and losing what everyone I loved was getting. A fear of losing faith. A fear of losing my inheritance.

A fear of losing caste.

A fear of ruination.

Notes:

B. R. Ambedkar. From Subjugation to Emancipation: Four Groundbreaking Essays. Nagpur: Panther’s Paw Publications, 2022.

*A part of this poem appears to have previously appeared under the title “Ruins.” See Agha Shahid Ali. “RUINS.” The Journal of General Education, vol. 30, no. 4, 1979, pp. 297–297. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27796725. Accessed 28 Aug. 2022.