HEART OF THE VILLAGE

Let us start with art. Just as the sun was about to set on the year 2024, an awe-inspiring news dazzled Himachal Pradesh. Two 18th-century miniature paintings belonging to the Kangra School of Art were auctioned for a whopping sum total of Rs 31 crore — one by the unrivalled doyen Nainsukh, and another by an unknown descendent. While I was instantly reminded of the numerous Pahari miniatures I had seen across museums, my mind kept returning to one piece executed in the same style that had always struck me as highly unusual, both in scope and sensibility.

In spite of depicting a real-life episode from the past, the painting wasn’t made in the same era. A contemporary rendition on the inside-wall of an RCC building, this large frame portrayed a battlefield scenario amidst lush green hills, with two sword-wielding men taking centre stage. The one to the left dramatically held on to his weapon even as his skull was being slashed by the person on the right. Behind the fatally wounded fighter lay a cluster of boulders, one of them emblazoned by a bloodstained hand-print. To the right was a castle-like fort lording over the whole space. A woman just below its ramparts gazed at the violence from afar in flowing drapery, so typical of the Pahari style.

Housed in the main office-cum-research centre of the Kangra Lok Sahitya Parishad, dedicated to rural performing arts and folkloric cultures of Himachal, this artwork ingeniously captures the history of the very village that hosts the building: Nerti. Located 24 km from Dharamsala and adjoining the village of Rait, Nerti and its surrounding areas once came under the ilaqa (region) of Rehlu (also spelled as Rihlu), whose fort the painting portrays.

Falling within the domain of the Chamba king Raja Raj Singh, the ilaqa was attacked by the army of the Kangra king Raja Sansar Chand towards the end of the 18th century. The painting alludes to this ambush, specifically the battle of June 20, 1794, when Raj Singh became a martyr. Legend has it that he valiantly fought for an entire hour without his skull, and it was a woman passing through the area who made him aware of his predicament. In his last moments, the Raja rested his blood-soaked hand on a nearby stone, thus leaving a trace of himself on the natural topography.

The most compelling aspect of the painting, however, is not so much that it depicts real-life historical characters, but that it stands at the same site where the actual battle took place. For, the research centre is located within the larger precincts of the ‘Rajmandir Complex’, where Raj Singh breathed his last. It is to his memory that the more-than-two-centuries-old shikhar-style Shiva temple was constructed by his son in 1796-97, with a smaller structure in front that continues to safeguard the boulder soaked in the king’s blood.

Made by award-winning artists Mukesh Dhiman and Dhani Ram, and inaugurated in 2011 on the opening of Himachal Government’s ‘Har Gaon Kuchh Kehta Hai Project’, the painting is as close to an ‘in-situ’ art piece as it gets. And at the heart of the project lies the vision of the father-son duo, Dr Gautam Sharma ‘Vyathit’ and Durgesh Nandan, whose ancestors had travelled to Nerti 200 years ago to act as the temple’s priests and caretakers.

Despite visiting Nerti’s neighbouring village of Rait since childhood, it was only five years ago that I first got acquainted with Dr Vyathit. There was something instantly affable about the now 86-year-old gentleman. His modesty belied his vast knowledge and stature as one of Himachal’s pre-eminent authorities on folk literature and culture.

Born on August 15, 1938, the poet, playwright, novelist and folklorist is the recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Shan-e-Himachal Award, the Himachal Shiromani Samman, the Punjab Hindi Sahitya Akademi Samman, and the Himachal Gaurav Puraskar. With 57 books to his credit, Dr Vyathit started his professional journey as a litterateur and cultural enthusiast at the age of 19, when he was a school teacher in a remote village of Kangra. He then went on to become the first PhD scholar in Hindi literature from Amritsar’s Guru Nanak Dev University, and worked at Dharamsala’s Post Graduate Degree College as a lecturer in Hindi. Whenever I have walked into his sun-lit courtyard that overlooks the grand home-grown vista of the Dhauladhar Himalayas, I have always found ‘Gautamji’ (as he is fondly known) surrounded by files and books, intently working on a new manuscript, or editing an article, poem or a story.

As the memory-keeper of Nerti as well as of Himachal’s history at large, conversations with Dr Vyathit are filled with an enviable diversity. They are amiably peopled too, for he frequently acknowledges the impact that a host of individuals had on his journey of conserving and promoting local wisdom. He especially recalls the encouragement given by the civil servant, art historian and botanist MS Randhawa, who visited Nerti’s neighbouring area of Shahpur in 1964. Passionate about preserving Kangra art and culture, Randhawa keenly sought indigenous wisdom about folk songs. And it was then that Dr Vyathit was brought to his notice. His rendition of ‘Bhala Miyan Manajeraan’, a folk ditty, impressed Randhawa so much that he instructed the then District Commissioner of Kangra “to take care of this boy”.

“Bina lok ke jeevan poorna nahi hota hai (Life is incomplete without folk knowledge),” observes Dr Vyathit. It was with this thought that in 1973, Gautamji established the Kangra Lok Sahitya Parishad for the advancement of folk knowledge, a forum that got a permanent base within the leafy environs of the Rajmandir Complex. Here, an amphitheatre descends in the shadow of the temple and ends in a performance stage, that has been hugely instrumental in giving recognition to artistes and performers of various hues for over half a century.

Whether it is the women-led ‘jhamakda’ folk dance once executed only behind closed doors during wedding ceremonies, or the theatrical genre of ‘bhagat’ and songs belonging to the ‘dholru gayan’ rituals (both rooted in the marginalised sections of society), it was the painstaking work of the Parishad that led to their greater visibility across different domains. The forum also gave a platform to renowned artists like OP Tak and Chandu Lal Raina, who would exhibit their miniature paintings during the Parishad’s tours across the district. Interestingly, Raina happened to be a descendent of Nainsukh, and was charged with heading a training centre for Kangra miniature art in Rait set up by the government of Himachal Pradesh in 1973 — the same year in which the Parishad was also constituted.

Beholding the contemporary painting of Raj Singh’s martyrdom at Nerti, one truly feels the artistic legacy of Nainsukh and his descendents being put to good use. As Dr Vyathit elucidates, it was only “appropriate” that he commissioned “an artwork to visually tell the story of Nerti’s genesis in the already prevalent style of the region”. While earlier the story was locally enacted in the form of occasional “plays”, the painting gave it a more “permanent” form, like an act of memorialisation.

The Parishad also promoted people who weren’t traditionally tied to artistic families. For instance, in the 1980s, a local woman named Jamna broke the shackles of her gendered and agricultural identity by expressing her desire to learn Kangra art in all its avatars: from small-scale sketches to ‘bhittichitra kala’ (wall paintings) and ‘dehradarwaza kala’ (designs done around doors on special occasions). With the Parishad’s support, she entered a field historically dominated by men, and also gained economic independence and fame in many villages.

Gautamji’s son, Durgesh Nandan, has passionately supported his father’s work for several decades. In the early days, Nandan would shepherd the Parishad’s troupes to various fairs and festivals across Himachal. While he now serves as the forum’s manager, he also divides the editorial responsibilities for the magazine Baneshwari with Dr Vyathit. An endeavour that the father-son duo has been helming since 1983 in Hindi and Pahari, Baneshwari gives a consistent voice to a diversity of folk matters.

Deploying poetry and prose to precise effect, Nandan’s creatively rendered meditations on everything from village rituals to old artefacts and technologies like ‘gharats’ and ‘water springs’ (‘chharurus’ in Pahari), to deliberations on nature-culture interface, reveal a world swiftly disappearing. His efforts have not only straddled artistes but also children of two schools his father set up in and around Nerti.

Significantly, it was Nerti that spearheaded female education in Kangra district. The gentleman to do so was Swami Vijaysheel, who had migrated from present-day Pakistan to Nerti in 1945, and befriended Dr Vyathit’s parents. During 1945-50, the educationist and freedom fighter started 13 primary schools for girls in the vicinity, and it was after him that Dr Vyathit named the schools that he himself set up in the 1980s.

My visits to Nerti since the last half a decade have invariably doubled into time travels of various sorts, where every new interaction with the father-son duo reveals something more about the place and its inhabitants. For instance, I had no idea until recently that it was the rice-fields of Nerti and the Rehlu ilaqa at large that had supplied food to the Mughal court in Delhi, as well as to the Delhi Durbar of 1911.

The fertile memory of Dr Vyathit and Nandan seamlessly accommodates such wealth of information. As they put it, the efforts at conservation are, after all, a continuation of Raja Raj Singh’s own advocacy of art and culture during his reign.

Even though both are appreciative of the bureaucratic interest in their work, they simultaneously underline the woeful lack of funds to sustain the Parishad and the Rajmandir Complex in a consistent fashion. For instance, the money allocated for the Parishad’s office only helped in raising the basic RCC structure in the 1990s; the 1,500 books and cultural artefacts constituting the wealth of the research centre were entirely donated by Dr Vyathit’s family. Likewise, the Shiva temple also suffers from the paucity of maintenance assets.

While rejoicing at old folk productions fetching crores is but understandable, it is equally imperative to pay material attention to endeavours like Dr Vyathit and Nandan’s, who are truly the living embodiments of the overall ethos captured by Kangra art and culture: an ethos that speaks of unstinting pride, but also necessarily relies on ideas of diligence and care.