Morchas

In the 70s and 80s, Bombay fielded a morcha a day. Starting from near Azad Maidan,  morchas walked Dadabhai Naoroji Road, Flora Fountain and Kala Ghoda before being stopped by the police. Most, if not all, were in the evenings, halting traffic, public murmuring... the chanawala and chaiwala into some brisk money making... a morcha for any and every cause... have seen Ahilya Rangnekar and Mrinal Gore boarding BEST buses after morchas.... is there one politician, right or left, today taking a BEST bus or a Kalyan local? They are always in SUVs. IAS Lords and Ladies at Sachivalay and then Mantralay were never upset.... none came to meet the morcha leaders .... and today there are no morchas in Mumbai. Nor are there protests in Calcutta, men and women flagging Chowringhee .... maybe something has changed; maybe protests do not matter; perhaps, there are no causes; or  morchas do not help.... have no clues. Who birthed the idea of a morcha and when was the first morcha? A morcha dictionary needs to be worked on. Maybe, the first morchaists were the Bhakti poets between the 6th and 8 th centuries. Janabhai, Mahadeviyakka, Tuka, Kabira .... for me were the originals. Most if not all of them have no bio data, all were lower castes, bonfired norms .... their worlds had no rules....they had no flags... no theories..... just Compassion .....were the most decent Indians. Am proud of them. (A confession: Read bhakti poets in English as cannot read Indian languages, an English bhakt). Janabhai a low caste, worked as a maid at the home of Namdev, illiterate, composed abhangs; Cast off all shame, a  Janabhai abhang, translated by Vilas Sarang:

Cast off all shame,
and sell yourself
in the market place,
then alone
can you hope
to reach the Lord.
Cymbals in hand,
a veena upon my shoulder
I go about;
who dares to stop me?
The pallav of my sari
falls away (a scandal);
yet will I enter
the crowded marketplace
without a thought.
Jani says, My Lord,
I have become a slut
to reach Your home.

If this is not a morcha, a protest, what is? Something beyond Communism. Janabhai's God is a human, a loving human, without castes, creeds, books, rules .... poetry alone. Bhakti poets are that. For a human to be a human, an ordinary human, creed is a blank. Janabhai protests to live and this is way different from Hindutva and shooting down of Govind Pansare. In Kabir, The Weaver's Song, Vinay Dharwadker tries to create a biography of Kabir from unsureties. In Essential Kabir, a fine special bilingual edition with the Hindi alphabet Ka, embossed on the cover, translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra writes: Very little is known about Kabir outside what can be culled from his poems or from hagiographies and legends. Yet bhakti poets live in Hindu homes. Tuka abhangs can be heard in Mumbai. On Ashad Ekadasi, me friend Govind, a dabbawalla, is a regular at Pandharpur. Bhakti poets and poetesses were simple, honest customers. They took on a violent, Brahminic society; lost could not win. Today, there is no Shiva of Mahadeviyakka to sip the Hindutva poison. We need a Kabira, a Tuka, a Janabhai. They are original, Indian Marxists, not the European variety. They define protest, Indian style. They make the morcha.