Ishwar Ballabh: Goodbye to a bard

Ishwar Ballabh Bhattarai passed away last Sunday of heart ailment. He was 73, and suffered from hypertension, diabetes and prostates. Lately, he had remained quiet and out of public view.

Ballabh Sir was our Sanskrit teacher at Turnbull High School in Darjeeling. He taught the subject from the seventh standard to the Matriculation finals.

Two things about him struck us young students. One was the clothes: long kurta and blooming pajamas, red canvas shoes, a muffler wound around his neck, a sweater and a thick jacket. Except for the pullover, muffler and the coat, the rest were a big No in the windblown cold of Darjeeling at nine thousand feet.

Indeed, Ballabh Sir was a Biharized Nepali in the Darjeeling of West Bengal’s dhoti culture. But he was only one of the many Bahun and Chhetri Nepalis come post-haste from Ranchi, Darbhanga, Varanasi, Lucknow and Kashi – Nepal’s strongholds in India – to study at Darjeeling’s Government College. Some of them even wore dhoti and most of them talked in chaste Hindi. That was the picture in Darjeeling of those days when pro-British air still blew. After all, the British had evacuated Darjeeling a mere nine years ago, and the Empire’s smells still percolated in the erstwhile colonial hills.

The politically turbulent Nepali years 2007 and 2017 brought more political exiles from Nepal to Darjeelingtown, and all these “escapees” were mostly attired in kurta, pajamas, half-cut coats and galaband mufflers. These Nepali visitors were steeped in the habits from where they came and were disposed to effeminate gestures and behaviors, argumentativeness, polemics, talkativeness and debating dichotomies. When I arrived in Kathmandu in 1966, I saw distinct residues of those thinly mustached Nepalis chewing paan, riding bicycles and clad in salwar and kameez. Some even loitered in and around New Road and Pipal Bot in lungis, long shirts and paijama – in stark contrast to the multi-hued and hashish-high Hippies on the nearby Freak Street. Even today, there are Little Bihars in the labyrinthine folds of Kathmandu.

This was valuable education for Ishwar Ballabh in Darjeeling, and he quickly learnt to clothe himself in warm suits and comfortable shoes, tweeds and high-neck pullovers, though like Indra Bahadur Rai, he never tied a choker around his neck. The garbs were essential in the climate and culture of Darjeeling.

Thus, Ballabh Sir transformed himself into Darjeeling’s cosmopolitan colors and choices. Eventually, he even replaced his Sanskritized Brahma-Vishnu-Mahesh tridentity with the Occidental trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as his composite literary icon. He had also walked to the trailhead of the Aayaamik Aandolan with Indra Bahadur Rai of Darjeeling and Til Bikram Nembang, n.k.a. Bairagi Kainla, of east Nepal. The education and training of Ishwar Ballabh a la Darjeeling were thus complete.

The second thing about Ballabh Sir that awed the students at Turnbull High was his cruelty. He was a caning master who made a mess of the students’ palms when they failed to answer his questions on Arjun’s vacillations at Kuruchhetra – all in Sanskrit-Nepali or Nepali-Sanskrit. He did not manhandle the students as other tough teachers did – boxing, bashing, hitting and ko-ing – but caned them. He ordered the dupe to select his own thorny switch from the evergreen thickets that grew in the terraces of the school. If he was not satisfied with the size and nubs of the birch as punishment tool, he ordered the student to select another one to his liking.

Turnbull High had some of the worst street fighters in town, roadside Romeos, eve teasers, cinema ticket black marketers and knifing desperados. So Ballabh, too, learnt to be ruthless with rapid-fire reactions in the classroom.
Ballabh Sir left Turnbull when I was in class eight. He was perhaps not yet even twenty-five. He married a Chhetri girl of Darjeeling, daughter of a rich contractor and businessman and settled down. I saw him looking after his shop on the maidan of the bigger Chowk Bazaar, selling kucho, kalo dal, chiya and other household goods. He had gone the Darjeeling way, finding honor in work and prestige in dirtying his hands. On the side, he was also a civil contractor and writing poems and lyrics.

As a burgeoning songwriter, I met Ballabh Sir at Amber Gurung’s Art Academy of Music where I was his latter-day chela and musician in the early 1960s. Some of the many new-imagery songs of his I remember from those days are Duitaa phool Deuraalimaa (later gone to Narayan Gopal), Ki raat yasai kaatun, Jali kharaani bhaisake and other masterpieces set to music and sung by Gurung then but remaining unrecorded and unpublicized to this day. Bairagi Kainla came forth with his shattering Khoji rahechhu nistaar pyaardekhi and Aaye ti sab yaad aaye (recorded by Gurung in the late Eighties), Seuli raakhe sukijaalaa and Mero dukhi mana sapanaa nakhoja, and others. No era equals this fecundity in colloquial Nepali lyricism as compared to the rigidly Sanskritized poesy in Nepali literature. The wonder of it all is that it all happened in the tiny town of Darjeeling.

From then on, Ishwar Ballabh’s life is documented well in the annals of Nepali poetry, lyrics, prose, essays and columns in which he proved his mettle to the last months of his life.

I met Ballabh Sir again at Freak Street of Kathmandu. This became our rendezvous. He had made peace with Kathmandu, and the return of the native took place amidst the fanfare of his receiving the Madan Puraskar for his anthology, Aagokaa phoolharu hoon….This was in 1972.

One day, he saw my poem on “ranke bhoot”, those nocturnal torchlight demons or flaming phantoms you see in the wintry forests of Darjeeling and Sikkim. He took me by my hand and we walked to the nearby Dhoka Tole and Rupayan Press and handed the piece to Bal Mukunda Dev Pandey who promptly ok-ed it for the next issue of Roop Rekha.

We sometimes frequented those dwindling Hippie joints of Kathmandu for music, among other things. We went to sing-along nights held by Peace Corps volunteer friends and teachers of Lincoln School and listened to the traditional music of the Americans’ respective states in addition to Janis Joplin, Arlo Guthrie, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Beatles and the Jefferson Airplane/Airship.

Then we parted ways. I became a highway builder in Chitwan and Ballabh Sir settled down in Kathmandu. I went places while he found a berth at the Royal Nepal Academy where, with my assistance, he planned a translation project of Nepali poems into English. But this was nixed by his fellow academicians. We met every now and then, but not as closely as before. But we saw each other at literary events, musical soirees and other interactions at campuses and societies.

I have a confirmed feeling that Ishwar Ballabh maintained a certain rage and anger throughout his interesting life. It was not his simply being an Angry Young Man or belonging to the Hungry Generation of India. This lifelong fury can be seen in his poem, Mero aamaale aatmahatyaa gareko desh in his seminal “Aagokaa phoolharu hoon…” anthology. The poem reads like a riot act to Mother Nepal and his fellow Nepalis, and the sight and shock of his Newar mother destructing herself was a stigma he carried from an early age. He has written an essay on the incident of his mother having committed suicide with a khukuri, the instrument wet in blood, the room splattered in red. The sight and sound of his mother’s own elimination made him a rebel.

But nowhere is there a single indication of why did it happen. Was it because of love and affection gone awry? Was there an intolerable social, class and caste ostracism on all sides for being the Newar wife of a Bahun puret in feudal Kathmandu? The meta-language of Ishwar Ballabh is mute even in suggesting, much less revealing, the mystery in both his poem and essay behind the tragedy. Now the secret behind this version of Sati’s Curse goes with his passing away.

Ishwar Ballabh Sir dedicated an entire Saturday write-up of his in Kantipur daily to me because “Peter J. Karthak has written about us Nepali writers in his English-language columns in The Kathmandu Post and other publications.” The previous teacher and student had thus become accidental collaborators, and he thanked me on behalf of all Nepali writers who would do well with some exposure to the wider world. My Guru had gratefully paid his dues to me, and that remains his most noble goodwill gift to me.

So long, Ballabh Sir! It was good to have met you!