Myth is the Man

Mason, pick pocket, story teller, painter, folk lore expert, and then, `Professor Kazak'

                                             BY S.P. SINGH

``You are crying because no one tells the whole truth about his own life.

Autobiographies often are about the kind of life people would have loved

to live. When I finally decided to narrate my own life, my ideal was

Rousseau whose Confessions are harshly honest.''

Professor Kirpal Kazak's CV is the stuff of stranger-than-life stories.

Academic qualifications: Ninth grade (No one knows pass or fail)

Special skill: Masonry work

Past life: Spent years with pick-pockets, prostitutes, nomads, sikligars

and other tribes in Punjab, Bombay, Rajasthan, West Bengal and elsewhere.

Run away from home several times.

Other qualifications: A friends' list that includes the who's who of the

world of letters, and published works in many literary journals.

Final recognition: A professor for 52 days.

Regrets: None

For years, only his close friends knew the whole story of his life, warts and all, but the man -- ``one of the finest human beings among us'' is how most describe him on the varsity campus -- has finally spoken. If he pauses for a brief moment to fight back a tear, you do likewise. If some confess to sneaking into the nearest washroom to weep unabashedly, it is understandable.

``Everyone's life is made of accidents, of chances, of fate,'' Kazak philosophizes. His certainly does.

A renowned scholar accidentally met him at a fellow professor's house in 1986, found he was a mason, and got him a mason's job at the university. Years later, another one was passing by on a street when someone called out loudly to the mason. Stunned by the discovery that the mason was a top-notch writer, he rooted to get him an assistant's job in the Literary Studies Department.

And when a professional administrator took over as Vice-Chancellor last year, and found that the man was far bigger than his post, he made him a Professor, an honour which Kazak will enjoy for 52 days, before he turns 60.

Kazak is Punjab's Verrier Elwin. But his foray into the world of nomads was perhaps an accident of fate, and love. Son of a mason in Sheikhupura, now in Pakistan, Kazak's childhood is a tale of poverty. When a village tantrik asked his mother to eat only left-overs begged from others, she obediently went around begging, and Kazak was brought up on left-overs till he was four or five. 1947 intervened, and the family migrated to Patiala. "Azadi to baad jootha ghatt he khaya,'' Kazak told me, very matter-of-fact. I wasn't looking at him, and I didn't have a hankey that day.

``Father tried teaching me masonry, but it was tough working under a scorching sun. I quit studies, fell into bad company and ran away from home with a gang of pick-pockets. After a botched up operation, I split from the gang and joined naga sadhus at Hardwar, but then left them after I found that some sadhus were into paedophilia,'' Kazak said.

An accidental meeting in Hardwar with As-Haq Ahmed, then recognised as an established afsana-nigar and prolific writer in urdu journals Beesvi Sadi and Shamma was a significant turning point as Ahmed, since he too belonged to Sheikhupura and was a fellow Ramgarhia caste, convinced his father and took him under his wings. Kazak learnt sculpting from him.

But fate intervened again, this time in the form of Cupid. Kazak fell for a
nomad tribeswoman, started following her every day to where the tribe had
pitched tents, succeeded in winning their confidence but then came back to
Ahmed dejected after he found that the woman he loved had become pregnant.

Ahmed put him in touch with Sohrab Modi and Kazak landed at Roop Tara Studios in Bombay. (Mumbai was unheard of then, and Bollywood was still to be coined.) For nearly four years, up to 1959, Kazak was at Roop Tara, doing a little sculpting but gaining expertise in movie banners.

Those who have listened to him describing how to draw the curve of a 40-feet moustache need not watch Cinema Paradiso. ``Painting a 40-feet long moustache had a romance of its own, so huge were the banners meant for high-rise buildings. And Ranjan, Mukri, Nirupa Roy, Sheikh Mukhtiar were big names,'' Kazak recalls.

But he himself lived with the nameless in Boribunder, with pick pockets and prostitutes. ``Life bloomed in the evenings in badnam bastis, and evil too. But living there helped save money as I didn't have to pay much rent,'' he says. But he left Bombay after watching the gruesome blinding of a young girl in the basti to turn her into a lucrative beggar. This was normal life on Bombay streets; Kazak had heard of skills of people who could make a child blind without letting a drop of blood fall, but this was different. He saw it happening.

The romance of closely watching the strange world of nomads, their customs, traditions and highly codified lifestyle attracted Kazak, and he came back to the kabila. But by now he had some ideas! In Bombay, Ahmed, because his hand was injured, had got him to take dictation for a story about a girl they both knew but since Kazak too knew what had happened to the girl, he objected to the way Ahmed ended the story.

``It deviated from the real life. So, in anger I wrote my own version, and someone sent it to Panj Dariya, an established Punjabi journal. Mohan Singh, who edited the journal, not only published it, but wrote back asking for more. ``Suddenly I was a writer,'' he laughs. In 1961, he liked a girl at a village mela, followed her and married her.

Till 1969, writer Kazak lived among the tribesmen again, and wrote about them. But the wordsmith's job didn't bring much money. Kazak turned back to a mason's job and dabbled in it alongside his writings after his father died.

Grand man of Punjabi literary scene Sant Singh Sekhon, who liked his writings, inspired him to educate himself. To earn some extra bucks, Kazak opened a roadside painter's shop with an ostentatious name -- ` Patiala Art Gallery'.

``Someone suggested that this kind of art work was in demand in Delhi, so I
joined the `Glamorous Art Gallery' in Connaught Place and met writer Imroze
whose office was on the top floor in the same building.''

Imroze to Amrita Pritam, and then to Khushwant Singh to Jaswant Kanwal and Ajit
Kaur, Kazak came in touch with the creme de la creme of Punjab's literary scene. Back home, Dr Attar Singh translated some stories into English.

Amrita Pritam advised him to focus on his special talent -- getting into tribes and writing about them for the world outside which knew little of the tribes or their culture.

A reference from Amrita to Mahashweta Devi helped as the latter then arranged for Kazak to penetrate into Ranchi's Santhal tribes. Kazak then moved on to Gujarat, MP, Rajasthan studying and writing about many other tribes like �iBhat Ganvantri, Todas�r etc. He was writing, and some five books had hit the market.

Delhi University and Kurukshetra University had prescribed his stories in their syllabi, and Kazak was now known to most readers of Punjabi literary journals. Some stories, thanks to translators, made it to Soviet journals also.

So when Kazak came back to Patiala, he was a man of letters. But the simpleton in him was a mason still. One evening when he was doing masonry work at the house of renowned Sikhism scholar Dr Jodh Singh, Prof Harbans Singh of `Encyclopedia of Sikhism' fame walked in and was stunned to know that his favorite author whom he read regularly in Sarika, Dharamyug and Saptahik Hindustan was a mason!

``Some people did oppose it, but my view prevailed and Vice Chancellor Bhagat Singh employed him as a varsity employee,'' Dr Jodh Singh recalls.

But he was employed as a mortar-mate, a glorified term for a mason's job.

And for a year, the mortar-mate wrote prolifically, his writings often finding their way into Khoj Patrika, a prestigious research journal of not just the varsity but the entire country as far as Punjab studies are concerned.

A mortar-mate is often asked to run errands, and Kazak was no exception. But when someone called out loudly to him in the street for an errand, renowned author Dr Rattan Singh Jaggi was passing by.

``Is this man Kazak?'' he wondered, and after he found what Kazak was employed as, Jaggi was shocked.

``The man should have been playing with words, not working with bricks. The VC was convinced again, and he was now employed as a folklore assistant,'' Dr Jaggi recalls. The post came with a rider: ``Produce a work of Ph.D. level within a year and we will take you into Literary Studies department.''

Kazak worked like a man possessed. During research period, Patiala cops heard him on their wireless sets when he was using an FM tape-recorder while talking to tribesmen. ``I claimed to be a researcher, but they found the old mortar-mate ID card in my pocket.'' He was put through third degree torture as cops suspected him to be a terrorist. He didn't waver and a year later the work on Sikligars was ready.

``Indeed, it was better than even Ph.D. dissertations,'' Dr Jaggi says.

Kazak moved into Literary Studies department of the university, and it wasn't very late when he was editing Khoj Patrika himself. He was the primary force behind Punjab Da Kitta-Kosh (Encyclopedia of Punjab's Vocations), and is now working on an Encyclopedia of culture.

When Dr S S Boparai took over as Vice-Chancellor last August, and went through the file about Kazak's projects, not for once had he any doubt about the man's talents.

Kazak was made a professor to ecstatic welcome from the world of letters. He
joined on December 11, and will be retiring on January 31.

``How do you feel now that Kazak is a Professor?'' a colleague asked his wife. ``What was he earlier?'' she asks back. ``He was the same -- the finest human being,'' Dr
Jaggi and Dr Jodh Singh are unanimous, so are thousands who have known Kazak for years and enjoyed his tales of tribesmen in journals, on campus and at the coffee house where his table is invariably the most crowded one.
 

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