Through her show Jaane Apna Desh, Rama Pandey has discovered many interesting and unknown facts about Indian culture and tradition. She speaks to Shrabasti Mallik about her love for poetry
Some know her as the sister of Ila Arun and Piyush Pandey, a few know her as a director of the series Jaane Apna Desh and for others she is an author. But there is more to Rama Pandey than these. One can actually stop and take notice of her elaborate bindi and numerous rings on her finger or can be easily drawn into a conversation. She talks about interesting discoveries she made in India and about a few dwindling cultures that once defined the country.
She explains, “Different people know me by different professions. Being a director, producer and author defines me but so do my accessories. I always wear five rings and I spend Rs1,000 every month buying bindi from different shops. The days when I face a writer’s block, I let the artist in me create a rangoli on my forehead. When you see a large decorated bindi on my head you should know that I have written nothing that day and I am either out shooting or doing something else. These are ways of expression.”
Not many would know that she is also a poet and has been penning poetry for the last few decades. She calls them her visual poetry because every line evokes an image of the place or situation she is referring to. And she does not make abstract references. She reminisced about a time when she saw a female bird trying to gain attention of a male bird by chirping and hopping from one place to another on a branch. The entire wooing period of the bird, which lasted for half an hour, inspired her to write a poem which ended with, “Chire chire ki is cherta milta koi na ant hai, lagta mujhko basant hai, aya kahi basant hai.” “I am romantic at heart. Every year during the month of Basant I automatically get charged up. It is a month of love and I feel so excited. I can sit for hours in the balcony looking at nature and listening to birds chirping,” she says. Few of her visual poetry have been compiled into a book Guhar, which was recently launched. “Guhar is my first poetry collection but the poetry has been happening for the past 40 years. All my poems are visual and whatever I wrote I filmed it. This is a collection of my choicest poems which I have also captured on camera. There are also poems which have been inspired by my camerawork, too,” she adds.
Jaane Apna Desh, her series on India’s rich heritage, has taken her to the remote parts of the country. Through the show she has not only discovered some unknown rituals of our culture but has also come across interesting individuals. She shares the story of how she filmed the traditional way in which Holi is celebrated in Mathura. There is a lane called Rangili Gali in Nandgaon, where men play on streets while women stand on the roof top and pour buckets of coloured water on the men. The newlyweds stand at the doorstep in their wedding attires, with their face covered with ghoonghat. “Nobody drops even a drop of colour on their dresses. Boys hurl abuses at women but they don’t feel bad about it. later they lovingly hit the boys with lathi and the boys give them some money as shagun. No television channel has ever filmed this but I could do this because I go to the interiors, I sit with them and celebrate the traditions with them,” she says.
She shares the story of how she discovered Sardar Inderjit Singh in Jammu, the only thathera in the place “and perhaps in the country.” “Thathera is an utensil maker. Now people don’t even know what thathera is. The word no longer exists in the Hindi vocabulary because the image has ceased to exist. When this kind of things happen, the tradition of the country slowly goes through a sieve where only the big traditions remain while the finer crafts fade away,” she says. While shooting Singh at his workplace, Pandey was invited to his house where she found utensils, coins and metal artefacts dating 300 years ago. Singh had collected them from refugees at Jammu camps who traded them for money. Pandey adds, “He also had a shawl which had one and a half kg of gold embroidered on it. He did not realise what it was when he was collecting them. According to him, he was preserving someone else’s amanat. But being a numismatic I could understand the value of the coins he has, which dated to the Mughal rule.”
After spending 40 years doing different things, she still wants to go a long way. “Age is just a number but I certainly look back now. We can afford to look back now but I tell youngsters not to look back so early. Even Betal warned Vikram that he would jump on Betal’s back if he looked back. If they look back so early they will only be bogged down by depression. Instead they should look forward to the milestones they have to achieve,” she says.