HE WORE the loose, soiled clothing of his people, with a tall turban; there was a bag on his back, and he carried boxes of grapes in his hand.” This was how Rabindranath Tagore painted the picture of the Kabuliwala in his iconic short story of the man from the barren mountains of Afghanistan who waded into the multi-layered narrative of Kolkata with a quick wit and a large heart.
Many, including the five-year-old Mini—Tagore’s literary bridge with the migrant’s mysterious past in Kabuliwala—believed the bag contained two or three kidnapped children. Unlike the Anglo-Indians, who mixed elegantly with the rest in the great city of the east, the Kabuliwalas didn’t offer much insight into their lives other than the almonds and raisins in the bags on their backs. Published in 1892, Tagore’s poignant story of a Kabuliwala called Abdul Rahman opened the lid into the curious case of a community that came to live in Kolkata nearly two centuries ago. Two films that followed the story and going by the same name Kabuliwala, first by Tapan Sinha in Bengali in 1957 and Hemen Gupta four years later in Hindi with Balraj Sahni, extended the Tagore’s mystic into mass consciousness.
Now, an attempt to portray the Kabuliwala of the 21st century has been made more than half a century later by a journalist-media consultant born in Afghanistan and raised in India and a writer-translator who came to live in Kolkata from Bardhaman. Moksa Najib and Nazes Afroz, who took the route of “visual ethnography” to document the lives of the Kabuliwalas in Kolkata, did so by training cameras on them in their homes and in streets, markets and parks.
About 50 selected pictures from their two-year-long photography project were first mounted for two weeks in an exhibition at the Afghanistan Centre of the Kabul University until early last month. Titled From Kabul to Kolkata, the travelling exhibition, which has just concluded in Dhaka before a show at the Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi, will make its last appearance in Kolkata between May 16 and 29.
For Najib and Afroz, the inspiration for documenting the story of the Kabuliwalas of Kolkata was provided by Tagore’s short story. “We were drawing inspiration from an invented story about a community but documenting it as it existed in real life and at a different period in history,” explains Najib, a former BBC producer and correspondent based in London like Afroz.
As per Afroz, the Kabuliwalas they met last year were a closely-knit community of people, who gradually opened their doors to the two outsiders wanting to tell their new story to the world. “We held several meetings with the leaders of the community represented by the Kudai Kismat-Ghar-e-Hindi (an organisation of Pasthuns in Kolkata) before we were given access to their homes,” says Afroz.
“The Kabuliwala was an outsider when Tagore wrote the story in 1892. Today, they have made several Indian friends,” he adds. The Kabuliwalas with a modest, austere lifestyle have also kept their traditions intact though many of them have never been to their home country.
Najib and Afroz were able to photograph only two women from the community. “The women remain behind the closed doors of their homes,” says Najib, who feels sad about the way Tagore’s story ended with a jailed Abdul Rahman returning in time for the wedding of a grown-up Mini. At the end of their photography project, Najib and Afroz took a Kabuliwala to a Bengali wedding, a picture of which is a highlight of the exhibition.
From Kabul to Kolkata is open for viewing at The Harrington Street Arts Centre, Kolkata from May 16 to 29, 2015.
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