Kitsch-es and Cliches

They sprinkle them with cyanide, those elongated wires from copper rods. They play with silver, they play with the constant humming sounds of the winding into kasabs, those rolls. They match the sounds with the songs and jokes on the radio channels, playing loudly through black speakers. They compare its thickness with the strands of hair. They try to make it glistening through gold plating and flattening. Sometimes, all that glitters, has some amount of gold, probably 30 grams in 100 kgs of copper, beautifully made into threads. They run through Kimonos in Japan, minutely blossoming into golden flowers, or inspiring a writer by taking form of small pattern in a diary. Oh, you might be wearing a scarf from France bought via Madame Soussou that has antique golden threadwork. Or who knows, you are glued to a textile art piece in the Metropolitan museum in New York that states its existence in Safavid, Iran.

But people of the Rana Samaj do not know that which bride blushes in her Banarasi Saree, filled with the Zardozi work of these threads, Jari. They just know the constant working hours, that fetches them 5-7 thousand every month. Their hair smell of chemicals used in the gilding process. Their fingers, as if made blunt and short through constant work and their eyes yellowed and greyed with vision of work in those narrow gala type houses. Gola Ranas live in the typical gala type houses in Surat. Their houses are long and narrow, just to accommodate those Jari machines. These houses were probably constructed by the Britishers after a fire diminished the slums in the early 1920's (that's what their narratives told me). Their memories peal when they see the road running on the Kotsafil road close to the walled area of the city. They remember the dirty moat running through the city which has been covered and a road runs on the same path now. Even today, their life is all within the circled area of that moat and their relatives living within that area. Their Surat is quite small, with its own borders and its own communities. In the Ka, Kha, Ga, Gha of Surti communities, (Ka for Kanbi, Kha for Khatri, Ga for Golas and Gha for Ghanchis), they have replaced the Ka with Kathiawadis. The traders and the merchants in the Jari industry were Kanbis and they had the hold over the capital till the 1960's. Kanbis did the labour work and brought the Jari home for flattening it and filling them into kasabs.Women in the Rana community also indulged in the work and tied the Jari bundles with cotton and wool threads and saved 50 grams of gold in every 100 kgs of gold as the weight of the final product increased with the threads.After saving money, they raised capital for buying their own machineries, lowered the costs by asking every member in the house to work in the Jari production and literally threw out the Kanbis from the Jari industry. Kanbis used to calculate individual labor cost, rent of the house (even if they owned the house) and other small costs. Ranas never did that and kept the Jari prices quite low. Agents from Bangalore, Banaras, Coimbatore started buying from the Ranas.

But somewhere the complexity has occurred and the Ranas could never play with the markets and the savings could never translate into accumulating more capital. Capital could not generate capital, losing on the front of 'small town capitalism'. Capital again went to the Kathiawadis and the Marwaris in Surat in the form of contracts and initial supply of materials. Although, there are still saddened faces of the Ranas with the fluctuation of the prices of the precious metals- silver and gold because they face lots of problems with the payments on finished products.

But they still dance wearing glittery sarees on loud music when they go to weddings. Some of them still drink Jack Daniels in the evening just to forget the day's hard work. They still dream of owning ATM cards so that they'll be allowed in the shopping malls in the posh localities like Ghod-dod road in Surat. Women love the autonomy of spending the way the like- be it on a tea in the nearby tea-stall or be it on the latest Deepika Padukone movie. They don't mind being the actors of Modern times and enjoy the form of leisure as defined by James Fulcher, going to the Piplod area every Sunday and enjoying food sitting on the pavements in 'Gaurav-path'.

They create Kitsch-es, with piles and piles of glitter to be woven into popular art and piles of smiles to be imitated by all the workers.

Their story is a cliche, to be entangled in the world of capitalism. Almost everyone today has his/her form of the same story.