Perfect Tool of Swachh Bharath! ‘Maipusudi-Idisudi-Saroon’- whichever language you want to call It
Mangaluru: On the footpath leading to Mangalore Central Railway Station, you can’t miss seeing a couple busy making brooms- and it has been their make-shift shop for the last few days, and very soon they will be heading back to their village in Tamil Nadu. Meet 62 years old Edapaddi and his 57 years old wife Jayamma hailing from Cuddalore district in TN, have been coming to Mangaluru since decades, when their farming business slows down in their village- and make and sell brooms made out of coconut leaves.
The couple reach Mangaluru from TN by train carrying a pile of brooms that has just been readied for use, and also piles of dry coconut leaves. Edapaddi is one among the many residents of Cuddalore district, who have been forced to venture into this business after the land on which they worked as labourers became unfit for farming. Moreover, making brooms has become a family vocation and a source of livelihood for them for the past two decades. While the unabated quarrying in the adjacent hillock in their village, resulting in stone dust settling on agriculture fields has been the main reason for declining agriculture activity, many farmers stopped hiring landless labourers since cultivation of rice/ragi became enviable.
“We get dried leaves from coconut palm from villages near by, clean it and prepare brooms before selling them to wholesalers in nearby cities like Bengaluru, but me and my wife prefer to come to Mangaluru. It’s a pleasure to do business here, because people here in Mangaluru are very cooperative and nice. We prepare about 150 brooms a day, especially when we can source the dried palm easily,” said Edappadi. While He and many others sell brooms for about Rs. 15 a piece in the wholesale market, they procure palm leaves in bundles from villages. According to Edapaddi, he incurs a cost of about Rs. 9 to Rs. 10 a broom on raw material. “Adding to this is our labour and transportation cost to Mangaluru. We hardly get anything if our volumes are less,” adds Edapaddi.
Edapaddi who has been fighting quarrying for over eight years now, said the village residents were forced to change their vocation. “Nobody is employed now. It works like a cottage industry with minimum investment and the involvement of the entire family.” Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has put the broom in the limelight but history reveals what the broomstick has to do with caste, superstitions and even tourism. Every home has brooms, and most use multiple types whose separate tasks from cleaning courtyards to kitchens to cattle-pens to puja rooms sketch a picture of daily life.
Different brooms are made and used by different communities, like grass brooms by Banjaras and bamboo brooms by Harijans. They are made from a wide variety of materials, like grasses, reeds, date palm and coconut leaves, some local, some transported from across India. Brooms are big business, with huge volumes sold every year and possibly major money made by a few businessmen. Yet the actual brooms are still mostly handmade, by families who do it for basic sustenance, and with women doing much of the work. And all this was even before one got into their ritual uses or role in political activism. “The entire world can be traced in the broom,” says Edapaddi.
Brooms are much in the news now. They have been ever since the Aam Admi Party (AAP) chose a broom as its symbol. Prime minister Narendra Modi’s launch of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has involved much posing with brooms. It has been like the ice-bucket challenge in India, with politicians and celebrities rushing to be seen sweeping up some carefully placed garbage. Broom stories abound — not long ago Baba Ram Raheem of the Dera Sacha Sauda in Haryana visited Mumbai with hundreds of followers, all wielding big brooms with which they set about energetically cleaning up a rather surprised city.
Few months back a newspaper carried a report on how broom traders were doing very well from all this clamour for cleaning. They had even devised a broom for “political consumption” that was less wide and thick, more for show than use, and priced at Rs 15 against the regular Rs 20. But whatever this might say about the cleaning power of today’s political brooms, symbolism has always been part of the use of brooms. The very act of wielding them signals domesticity and responsibility, the clearing of a space for living amid the un-swept chaos of the wilderness.
Narrating a little more history, Edapaddi said Brooms signify health, which is why the goddess Shitala, associated with skin diseases like smallpox, carries one. “Shitala causes the disease when angry and takes the disease away when calmed down,” he said. He describes an occult ritual, shown in Jharu Katha, of a peacock feather broom being use to sweep away ‘nazar’ or bad influences from the body. Jharu Katha also shows the shrine of Dher Baba Pir in Barmer where a broom is given as an offering.
Yet these auspicious uses of brooms have their opposites. Brooms symbolised the degraded roles forced on untouchables, who sometimes had to wear them as tails to sweep away ‘contamination’ from behind them. Beating someone with a broom is seen as particularly cursed — in Jharu Katha it is said that anyone who beats a child with a broom will be that child’s slave in their next life for as many years as there are twigs in the broom. Given the symbolic power contained in a broom it is no surprise that reformers long before the AAP wielded the broom for their cause.
From his days in South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi was always ready to take a broom and start cleaning. “My innermost desire would be to join him with a spade, a broom, a chunam bucket and a brush,” he wrote in 1925, commending the work of Dr Hariprasad Desai, who was trying to clean up Ahmedabad. Sant Gadge Maharaj, the Maharashtrian reformer and wandering singer was another famous bearer of the broom, which he would use to start cleaning in the morning in villages he visited, and then would sing kirtans about social reform in the evenings.
We are familiar with the use of brooms, but much less so with their making. Coconut leaves are one of the most commonly used broom materials. The success of broom industry points to another key aspect of Indian brooms -the fact that they continue to be made from natural materials. Even the most modern houses which use vacuum cleaners will nearly always have a broom hidden away for those piles of dust that are too small or too awkwardly placed to bother with the vacuum cleaner. Plastic might have taken over other parts of homes, like kitchen utensils, but not brooms.
Whatever the future of campaigns to clean up India, hand-made natural brooms will remain a part of our lives -simple tools, yet complex in their symbolism and manufacture, and well worth celebrating for themselves and what they do. Thanks to Edapaddi and his wife Jayamma, for sharing a little bit history of Maipusudi-Idisudi-Saroon-aka BROOM!