When was the last time a nadaswaram player came to your door in the city, playing your favourite tune? Does the knife sharpener still call out asking if your cutting tools need a doing over? Some of us have seen these purveyors of expertise sometime or the other, maybe even transacted business with them. The rickshaw-puller in Kolkata. The knife-sharpener from Arakkonam. The lakeside barber and ear-cleaner in Srinagar. The itinerant nadaswaram player. The parrot astrologer. The pavement tailor. The travelling acrobat. Job done, we've moved on. But Nidhi Dugar Kundalia has followed them home, so to speak, and shared what she saw and heard in a small book. Indeed, in the larger scheme of things, 11 professions may be a minuscule number in a country like India, especially for those with an interest in the subject. Still, The Lost Generation: Chronicling India's Dying Professions is unpretentious and, for the most part, nonjudgmental collation of interview-based writings that draws attention to livelihoods that are on the edge, and the world of insights they unravel.
I found the new and old worlds intersecting in unpredictable ways even as modernisation spreads through the country. Outside Vikarabad, in Telangana, I met in a church compound a lady gravedigger who had taken up her father's job – a job originally reserved for lower-caste men – despite protests from her community.
The author explains that "while recording the interviews, I found myself being critical of the patriarchal, casteist, classist and sexist world-view seemingly espoused by these professions and the organised religion they practice", but the narrative mostly remains free of authorial comment. In hindsight, this gives the reader a more direct access to the different worldviews chronicled in the book.
While the introduction to the book starts off promisingly, it peters into a bit of a ramble and so it makes better sense to plunge directly into the narratives. The first chapter tells the story of godna (tattoo) artist, Dubru, from Jharkhand. It talks about little girls being subject to bloody, painful tattoos in order to protect their husbands "from Yamraj"; the girls will continue to be tattooed as they grow into women because the tattoos are considered to be their "assets". As a woman describes them: "The only things we take with us to the heavens". The chapter talks about how Nowri, the grandmother of the child whose godna ceremony is recorded in the book, makes it abundantly clear that she will have no truck with a man such as Dubru, a mere malhar, only for the godna: