Message in a bottle

There’s more to the East Indians than just their famous masala, discovers Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia

As one walks up the dingy stairway of Grace Residence in Kharodi village, Mulund, one cannot help but wonder what has become of this once-quaint area. All around stand tall buildings with shops strewing the side of the road. A line of autorickshaws lie idling. People speaking chaste Bihari and Hindi pass by. But nowhere in sight are those small, idyllic houses with red-tiled roofs that once made Kharodi the village of the East Indians.

Inside flat no 24, the Patels are busy at work. Nelson Patel, along with his 76-year-old mother, his 11-year-old son, brother, domestic help and his neighbours are browsing through stacks of CD and assembling them into packs. The CDs are the soundtrack of his latest movie Tu Maaza Jeev (You Are My Life) and the Patels are trying to make enough packs to send them to Crossword and Rhythm House.

Tu Maaza Jeev is the first-ever film to come out of the community that gave us the bottle masala. The plot: a poor East Indian boy falls in love with a rich Mangalorean girl.
When the MNS went on a rampage in the city demanding that every theatre screen Marathi films, Nelson conceived the idea for Tu Maaza….. “I thought that going by the MNS’s logic, theatres must also screen our movie. After all, it is a dialect of the Marathi language,” he says.

The film was made on a shoestring budget of 12 lakh. Patel, a photographer by profession, had to put in all his earnings and had to take loans too. “I know I cannot make money out of this project,” says Patel.

Patel was helped by a flock of good Samaritans. The cast and crew cut their fees, the local church provided the ‘free’ locations, and people from the community helped in getting the costumes and props ready. “We would cook in the house to save on costs,” says Patel. “Had everyone not chipped in, the film would not have been made”.
It is indeed surprising that Tu Maaza... is the first film from the East Indian community considering the community’s long history. Sources like the Bombay Gazetter trace their presence to the 6th century when the Nestorian Church made its presence felt in India.
Sitting in his hall-turned-office in Kirol village, Vidhyavihar, dressed in an impeccable white shirt and trousers, 71-year-old Wilfred Pereira looks up from a pamphlet he has published on the history of the East Indians. “We were not always known as East Indians,” he says. “We don’t live in the east coast of India, but on the west. Yet we are called East Indians. There is a story behind it,” Pereira continues, much like a doting grandfather ready to embark on a fairytale. “We were the original inhabitants of Bombay, Thane, Raigad and Vasai. When King Charles II of England married the Portuguese Princess Catherine Braganza in 1662, the seven islands that now make Mumbai were given as dowry to the king by the Portuguese,” he says. “As Bombay prospered and grew, immigrants from Portuguese-ruled Goa and other places began to come here. We wanted to distinguish ourselves from the Catholics who had come from other regions and settled in Bombay,” explains Pereira. “We also wanted to curry favour with the East India Company who had a lot of jobs and business to give out. That’s why we decided to call ourselves ‘East Indians’,” he says.

The East Indians have held on to their pre-Christian Marathi culture and traditions, “but many Portuguese influences have also seeped in,” says 76-year-old Mary Stella Patel, Nelson’s mother. Though Mary Stella goes to church, she wears a sari and a bindi and mangalsutra.

One pet peeve with the community is the fact that they often get mistaken for Catholics, Goans, Konkans or Mangaloreans. This is reflected in the portrayal of East Indians in Bollywood’s films. “Bollywood has also stereotyped them,” says Professor KP Jayasankar, from the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies in Tata Institute of Social
Sciences in Mumbai. “They are portrayed as easy-going, lazy, hard-drinking, loose on morals, people who think simply, strum the guitar and wear a cross in their cleavage,” he says. “This exotic ‘other’ has been constructed to contrast with the so-called ‘Indian’ (read upper caste Hindu) identity which stresses on hard work, high morals and education,” he says.

East Indians have left their mark on Mumbai. They have given the city the ghumat, a musical instrument in the form of a pot with an animal skin on it. Then there’s their food and the famous Bottle Masala. “Our cuisine is unique — it is a blend of Koli, Marathi, and Portuguese,” says Mary Stella, she pauses to ask if anyone knows that pork vindaloo is not a Goan dish but an East Indian one.

Their  music has also left an imprint on Bollywood. “Who can forget Deepak Tijori lip-syncing to Hi pohri konyache (an East Indian song) in Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin or Kamal Hasan portraying an East Indian in Saagar,” says Professor Jayasankar.

“Every East Indian is born with music in his blood. Every house has either a singer or a musician,” says Cedric Tixeira, a music teacher at a Powai school. “My father used to play the harmonium with one hand and with the other, he’d play the ghumat,” he says.
Tixeira is the music director of Nelson’s film. Nelson was clear about the music of the film from the outset. “Traditional East Indian music only” was his brief to Tixeira. “I wanted our music to play at every East Indian wedding,” says Nelson. To popularise the soundtrack, Nelson arranged for free CDs to be distributed at various Ganpati pandals. “When we held the first CDs of Tu Maaza Jeev, it was the fruition of a dream,” says Patel, “not just mine, but of an entire community’s.”

But the dream has not been realised yet. Nelson has to find a distributor first and a theatre that will agree to screen the movie. But Nelson’s undaunted. “I am waiting for the day when I’ll be sitting in the front stall alongwith a packed audience and on the screen will appear the title Tu Maaza Jeev.”
b_lhendup@dnaindia.net