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Rajasthan-An
Oral History: Conversations with Komal Kothari
Rustom Bharucha
New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003
Rustom
Bharucha’s Rajasthan: An Oral History is a series of
conversations with Komal Kothari, co-founder of Rupayan Sansthan,
an organisation that is doing exemplary work archiving folklore,
local histories, music and cultural narratives of Rajasthan. What
is unusual about the conversations is the focus on the
marginalised groups of Rajasthani society such as the Langas and
Manganiyars, Bhambhis and Meghwals. The book is thus, about
narratives from below. The conversations are not concerned with
the tourist exotica of Rajasthan, which is popularly projected.
The book deals with a variety of subjects in a freewheeling
conversation that covers a wide range of subjects – oral
history, genealogy, myth, music, irrigation and recovery of
indigenous knowledge. The fact that the book is not presenting a
linear argument or that it is dialogic in nature is, perhaps, in
keeping with the concerns of the interviewer and the interviewee.
The book raises a lot of interesting questions about knowledge and
the frames of reference that people use to interpret their daily
experience. The lower castes have their own myths, their
narratives. For instance, backward communities like the Rauts have
interesting myths about the purity of their people in contrast to
the impure lives of the upper castes. The myths are a
psychological prop, a survival strategy.
The book also deals with nuggets of local knowledge about land,
irrigation, about traditional practices of water harvesting, which
might have more to recommend themselves in contrast with
ecologically and socially unsound schemes of official irrigation.
The book also deals with questions about music and cultural
exchange in era of global exchanges, which are both inevitable and
iniquitous.
The book leads us to many pertinent questions. How are we to
retrieve and preserve local knowledge? What are the ideological
parameters in which local knowledge is accessed? Can this local
knowledge be a source of resistance to dominant hegemonic forces
of contemporary society? The conversations in the book raise
interesting questions without offering precise answers. To get a
sense of the conversations, Humanscape interviewed Rustom
Bharucha. The interview is thus, a conversation about a
conversation.
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What has been your motivation to do a series of conversations with
Komal Kothari around concerns of indigenous knowledge? What made
you unite this book in this particular form, which is wary of
getting into any standard academic discourses?
Komal Kothari is, to my mind, one of those very exceptional
Indians, who have done stellar work in the post-Independence
period when there was almost no support for grassroots cultural
research in the traditional sectors. In the early 1950s, he
started a magazine with one of his closest friends, Vijay Dan
Detha, who is one of the greatest writers in Rajasthan. This link
with the little magazine movement, an all-India phenomenon, is an
important cultural factor. We always think of cultural movements
in metropolitan cities like Calcutta and Bombay, but we don’t
think about the intellectual or cultural life in small towns like
Jodhpur.
In their first journal, Vijay Dan Detha and Komalda felt the need
to represent folk culture. Over the years this developed into a
very deep commitment towards observing, recording and documenting
folk and indigenous cultures all over Rajasthan. We have to keep
in mind that Komalda has been in the field for over 50 years,
which is a very long-standing commitment for anybody to sustain.
In the early years, he literally trudged from village to village,
locating the diverse instruments of the Langas, Manganiyars and
the Kalbelias. Today these traditional musicians have been
internationalised in the world music circuit, but in those early
years, almost no one was aware of them.
I should stress, however, that Komalda has never viewed these
communities in developmental terms as ‘underprivileged’ or
‘oppressed.’ He realises their economic deprivation, but for
him, it is their cultural resources that matter, their specific
capacities to sing and to remember hundreds of songs, and to
maintain genealogies over generations. Therein lies their strength
and cultural value.
When
did you first meet Komalda?
We first met in 1986, and I remember the meeting vividly. For me,
Komalda is not one of those brilliant individuals who may be
interesting to some and not to others. He is more like an epic
character, a constant in that sense, who has a more or less
similar impact on almost anybody he meets. He has this
extraordinary capacity to hold your attention by talking about
everything under the sun. The conversation could begin with a
material object – invariably, it is always something concrete
– and from that material object, he will begin to trace its
process of production, and the process of production will take him
to the community producing the object. The community in turn will
take him to songs, oral epics, genealogies, stories, agricultural
practices... The conversation will meander, drift and digress in
ways that I have not encountered in anybody else. It is like
listening to a living epic.
Tellingly, Komalda is not academic, he’s not a scholar in the
strict sense of the word. At one level, we can use the word
‘amateur’ to describe his encyclopaedic grasp of local
knowledge. He hasn’t studied Rajasthan like an anthropologist or
sociologist, even though it is most convenient to describe him as
a folklorist. His knowledge is based almost entirely on
observation and close interaction with communities over a period
of years. I should add here that some of the greatest
post-Independence Indians in the cultural sector were amateurs,
but not amateurs in a superficial sense – amateurs in the sense
they did what they had to do for the love of it and with deep
professional commitment without necessarily being paid for their
efforts.
It
appears to be a kind of cultural activism, though not quite.
You’re right, Komalda is a most unusual activist, though not in
the literal sense of being attached to an NGO or developmental
group. Almost all the social activists of Rajasthan respect him
greatly for his autonomy. Komalda himself comes across as
seemingly non-political. Indeed, he is a very non-polemical
person; he is not interested in making any evaluative judgments.
He doesn’t run down anybody. But if you listen to him carefully,
you will realise how things have gone terribly wrong with
governance and local knowledge systems.
For example, the infrastructure for traditional water harvesting
has almost completely collapsed in Rajasthan, as in other parts of
India. What I found valuable about Komalda is that he will not
concentrate entirely on traditional water harvesting systems, or
say, that is the only way in which one can recover the
ecology of a particular region. He’s not opposed to other
subsidiary modern technologies, but he does emphasise that if we
don’t respect traditional knowledge systems and learn from them,
then we could land in deep trouble.
Why
did you use the format of the conversation?
I felt the only way that I could be true to the narrative of the
book was to capture Komalda’s voice in the flow of his
conversation. He hasn’t written very much. When I questioned him
about this in one of our early conversations, he said, “The more
I know, the less prepared I feel to put it down in words”. My
reading of that statement was that he had a certain idea of
history against which his own representation was bound to fail. In
my book, too, this history falls short and academics could say
that my narrative is not rigorous enough. But this is one
perspective.
When I started the book, I had just completed a very tough
theoretical book, on the politics of cultural practice. It was a
very difficult and important book for me to write that dealt with
all kinds of theories (interculturalism, multiculturalism,
secularism) in relation to local cultural practices. After
completing the book, I reached a point when I felt somewhat tired
of theorising the same stuff. Today we have reached a saturation
point in cultural theory where we seem to be theorising the same
texts and phenomena over and over again. We don’t renew our own
sources of knowledge. So somebody does a reading on a particular
text, and then somebody else does a counter reading of that text,
and so on. It’s parasitic – it’s a reading of a reading of a
reading. I wanted to get away, however temporarily, from this
cycle of references. I wanted to be exposed to new sources of
knowledge, to things that really matter.
To
what extent can one always turn to indigenous knowledge, say about
water harvesting? Your book gives instances of what might be
ideological mis-recognition on the part of those whose knowledge
one needs to respect. How do you balance this out?
I think the key word is ‘balance’. You know the
communitarian/secularist debate that we have been locked into in
India over the last years. What I have come to realise about the
communitarian position – in which there is much to respect –
is that many of the so-called communitarian theorists have not
done any fieldwork in rural areas or among the traditional
communities they claim to represent. They haven’t really
followed the life of a community at ground levels. They have
theorised ‘the community’ against the state, modernity,
secularism, and so on. They have made an ideology out of it. For
the most part, they have assumed that the knowledge of the
community is more wholesome, more holistic, more pluralist, as
opposed to this terrible ‘modernity’ that has messed up our
lives so thoroughly. Invariably, this anti-modernist communitarian
position is substantiated through polarisations, which become very
counter-productive after a point.
Instead of merely continuing this debate represented in The
Politics of Cultural Practice, where I had taken a somewhat
critical position against communitarianism, I have tried to free
myself from the binaries of that critique. I am not interested in
‘defending’ modernity or the nation-state, but I am also not
saying that community does not matter. Indeed, community – or
more specifically, communities – matter a lot. That’s all the
more reason why we need to constantly refresh our perspective on
their mutations and interactions with modernity, instead of
reducing them to traditionalist, essentialised dogmas.
Komalda, it should be kept in mind, is not part of the
communitarian/secularist debate. He is not informed about the
positions of Ashis Nandy or Partha Chatterjee or the Subaltern
Studies collective. He may have, in that sense, a non-theoretical
approach to community. Of course, it could be argued that
there’s an implicit theory in whatever one observes. But the
point is that Komalda is not part of the academic theoretical
debate at all, and it is precisely for this reason that I turned
to him for another perspective on community. I felt that there was
something to be learned from being open to a different kind of
knowledge.
On listening to Komalda talk for hours on end over a two-year
period, I learned to my surprise that that knowledge is not
perfect. Indeed, it is not concerned with perfection at all.
Neither is it omniscient. Local knowledge is imperfect knowledge
and this respect for imperfection was very moving to me. If you
ask Komalda something he doesn’t know, he says, ‘I don’t
know.’ He doesn’t try to cover up his areas of darkness.
Knowledge, I realised, is not afraid to be revealed as incomplete
or provisional. I think what happens with most communitarian
theories of knowledge is that they tend to essentialise knowledge
– they make it something eternal. It will always be there
because it has stood the test of time, etc. I think, Komalda, in a
much less rapturous mode, acknowledges there are limits to
people’s knowledge systems, but there are things to learn from
within these limits that open up other possibilities of thinking.
So it’s a more humble position. He is never trying to tell you
that all India’s agricultural problems can be resolved, for
instance, by turning to the entomological knowledge of the
Kalbelias!
You
say in the after-word of the book that you can draw upon this
knowledge as a resource for resistance sometimes. You mention
Gayatri Spivak when she questions whether one can draw on
‘residual’ elements that can counter the ‘information
command’ of the global system? The value of this knowledge is
undoubted. But the problem arises in the way this knowledge is
mediated within the constitutions that we live in. Is that
something we cannot be very hopeful about?
Gayatri Spivak’s position has to be seen in the context of what
she correctly prioritises as “learning to learn”. She is doing
a lot of work with what we now call ‘subaltern communities’ in
Bengal and is primarily concerned with education. She has written
an amazing essay on rights called Righting Wrongs. When she
goes into the rural areas she observes that there is no respect
for thinking in the primary education system; there is no respect
at all for a thought process. Children are expected to learn
everything by rote and that is very distressing for her. In this
context, in the larger project of ‘learning to learn’ about
rights among other democratic resources for changing one’s life
and political system, she is compelled to ‘teach the
teachers’. How does one teach the textbooks? Her deconstructive
manoeuvre comes out of a respectful, yet questioning, alignment
with the enlightenment tradition, which dates back to Iswar
Chandra Vidyasagar who, she acknowledges, ‘has pre-empted me
every step of the way’. Vidyasagar had a very organic way of
teaching children through his celebrated primer – first the
formation of the alphabet, and from the alphabet moving onto
sentences, and then into larger conceptualisations. In his primer,
you have a model for organic thinking that, unfortunately, is no
longer comprehended or adequately translated within the actual
deprivation of rights faced by children in the rural areas of
India. From problematising this teaching process, there are things
to learn – and unlearn – about how to think in our disparate
world.
Komalda does not deal with education as such, but from his
observations of traditional cultures in the desert, he
unselfconsciously throws out questions as to how we can cope with
larger realities. In my conversations with him, there was one
particularly memorable learning process around Hir Ranjha.
When Komalda first mentioned this epic, I immediately thought,
“Oh good! Now we can deal with literature, metaphor and song. I
can connect it to Puran Bhagat!” and so on. But what does Komal
Kothari say? “Hir Ranjha is an epic that is sung during
epidemics of foot-and-mouth disease.” All your subaltern and
postcolonial studies, everything goes out of the window!
But gradually, as you listen to him, you begin to realise that
there is logic in this seemingly bizarre connection. Hir Ranjha
is used as a quarantine therapy. If you remember the recent crisis
faced by the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in England and
Europe, you will recall how violent it was to watch the burning
and destruction of animals en masse. On our television
screens, we witnessed an unprecedented display of savagery. In
what way were these poor animals responsible for the epidemic that
they should have been so summarily slaughtered? On watching the
television footage, I realised that the farming communities in
Europe had no way of coping with the problem. Despite all the
advances in animal and veterinarian sciences/medicines, they could
not cope with the scale of the epidemic in physical terms.
Economically and psychologically, too, they were panicking.
Against this backdrop of hysteria, I don’t think there is a
deterministic or causal relationship that can be made between the
singing of Hir Ranjha and the solution to foot-and-mouth
disease. You have to cope with the situation – that’s the
lesson that needs to be recognised. What do you do to yourself
during that period of time? Instead of killing your poor animal,
keep your animal in one place and go through a range of other
quarantine practices. So, while singing Hir Ranjha, the
traditional communities are also isolating the affected animals,
they are disinfecting the water, and practising more rigorous
modes of hygiene and cleanliness in their household and cooking
practices. Hir Ranjha is not going to remove the problem;
it is going to help you live with it.
Think of the recent outbreak of SARS among other recent epidemics.
At one level, they can be regarded as manifestations of global
panic. To a large extent, they are manufactured and kept alive by
the media. We are not trying to say there are no real problems
with the epidemiology of disease, but after a certain point, the
epidemic orchestrated around the disease becomes a fiction. In the
recent SARS outbreak in China, it became very clear that the
people were absolutely enraged by the government’s lies and
inaction. They resorted to blocking their own neighbourhood by
preventing outsiders from entering it, just to protect themselves.
A kind of siege mentality and paranoia was on display here. In
contrast, traditional quarantine practices have the potential to
make its practitioners cope with the disease by respecting it.
This may seem like an odd insight, but I was very moved to realise
that one way of dealing with natural calamity is to allow the
moment to pass by living through it in a human and dignified
way.
Speaking
of intellectual property rights, you have mentioned how when
troupes have gone abroad, other people are making money of which a
share is due to the local performers. Normally it is the West that
talks of intellectual property rights. The question seems be, to
what extent is this property because it comes from a community
(its heritage and tradition). Does it not become a very difficult
question to deal with? Komal Kothari is trying to be fair by
saying that a different set of musicians should go each time. But
sometimes I feel even that doesn’t solve the problem. We are
drawing on a collective tradition and that collective tradition
does not get recompensated in this way.
Difficult as the issue may be, we have no other choice but to
deal with intellectual property rights and the larger issue of
copyright. As idealistic as it may seem to abolish copyright
altogether, I don’t think that this is feasible at all. In the
best of all possible worlds, ethics and equity could share a
harmonious relationship. We could talk about ‘this is my work
and do what you want with it and we will create more beautiful
things together’. The problem is that in the age of
globalisation, such altruism doesn’t work out on account of the
imbalances of technology, of representation, of economy, media
recognition, and many other factors. In the context of growing
disparities, we have to acknowledge that subaltern musical
performers and pop musicians don’t share the same playing field.
Multi-million-dollar pop songs have been released and discs have
been cut using traditional melodies and folk songs from, say,
Tahiti, and they have been mixed and re-mixed and electronically
treated, but the source is rarely acknowledged. Megabucks have
been made by corporations at the expense of indigenous cultures.
Some artists even have the nerve to acknowledge the source of
their inspiration without paying their ‘gurus’ anything.
On the question of how do you compensate ‘a tradition’ or an
entire community? That’s where the role of mediators becomes
necessary in the form of institutions. I have no doubt that
Rupayan Sansthan’s role is going to get increasingly more
complex over the years. More than anything in the book, I think
Komalda has really appreciated my articulation of the problem of
intellectual property rights. But he doesn’t realise that he
contributed to the framing of the problem with his considerable
inputs.
Indeed, the actual decision to write the book was sparked when I
met Komalda at a documentation seminar in New Delhi where he was
sharing this incredible story of a three-minute piece of the first
professional flute recording of Rajasthani folk music from the
field. Many years later, an American insurance company discovered
this music and wanted to use it for a television commercial. And
it was honest enough to get in touch with the ethno-musicological
organisation in France that controlled the copyright of the
musical piece and offer to pay a licensing fee. I can’t go into
the details of this negotiation here, but eventually, the money
was distributed three ways, between the research organisation in
France, the French researcher who had initiated the recording, and
Rupayan Sansthan. Through this very concrete exposure, Komalda
entered the area of intellectual property rights and has been
vigilant ever since about the need to create new norms for the
distribution of money and recognition of individual performers.
Inevitably, it becomes clear that contracts are a necessary part
of any professional negotiation, but this poses considerable
challenges when you are dealing with traditional performers, who
are, for the most part, illiterate. There can also be larger
philosophical objections to the understanding of musical
traditions in terms of ‘property’. It could be argued that
traditions deal with ‘universals’, they don’t belong to any
one individual as such, but the sad reality is that
‘universals’ themselves are being appropriated by global
agencies. I am afraid the only way one can counter this marketing
mentality is through legal action and legal processes. Artists
have to protect their rights, and when they are not in a position
to do so, they need to be affiliated to organisations that can
represent and mediate their individual cases. Increasingly, we are
seeing the emergence of new global agencies which are specifically
concerned with copyright violations. The challenge is to link
these associations at local levels in dealing with anonymous folk
performers. Or else these associations are likely to become new
sources of exploitation.
Let me now share a very sad story of Methi, one of the greatest
Rajasthani women folk singers, who was also a phenomenal composer
of numerous songs. Methi composed hundreds of songs and they were
listened all over Rajasthan from construction sites to dhabas
to weddings. Her voice was recognised immediately. When I met
Methi at Komalda’s house for an informal musical session, she
looked very ordinary, wizened with age (even though she was
comparatively young), and very poor. I was told that her career
was beginning to take off – she was beginning to receive more
national programmes, even though she had not yet gone abroad.
Then, out of the blue, I heard that Methi was murdered in a brawl
involving a co-singer and her family. It is a very sad story of
poverty, alcoholism, illiteracy and a lack of protection.
Methi’s songs were heard everywhere, but she used to get around
Rs 1,500 or Rs 2,000 for one recording. There was no possibility
of negotiation. She had no copyright over her recordings; the
local cassette manufacturers in Rajasthan thrived at her expense.
In this situation, I believe that there is a real need for some
activist intervention. Komalda himself is reticent about
intervening beyond a point. His personal help to the musicians and
their families is considerable but he does not see himself as a
political activist. Inevitably, an activist would prioritise the
conscientisation of musicians, their education, the availability
of bank loans, and so on. Komalda would be very wary of taking on
this kind of activism, preferring to deal with the cultural
dimensions of sustaining particular means of livelihood.
The challenge of any political intervention lies in figuring out
the complexities of local contexts and the intricate social
relationships that hold them together. I strongly believe that the
local is more complex than the global. The global is invariably
played out in any number of discourses, if not media hype. There
are also any number of anti-globalisation counter-discourses that,
ironically, reinforce the hegemony of the global. In the
omnipresence of the so-called global Empire, the local invariably
gets lost, or else, is summarily marginalised. It is almost as if
the local no longer matters if it is not capable of being ‘glocalised’.
And yet, the reality is that the local matters at levels and in
languages that have yet to enter global discourses. The local
doesn’t disappear in the absence of recognition. It continues to
be obstinately alive, if not intransigent. It need not lend itself
to easy translation. But this very absence of assimilation is what
should challenge activists to seek out new structures of equity
and democracy in our world.
In
the last chapter on the local and the global, what strikes one is
that you have taken an insular view. One wonders how to counter
the paradigm within which those equations take place. You have
talked of activism, which I think is the only way one tends to
intervene.
What you read as ‘insular’ could be read as a new mode of
asserting what has been termed ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’,
or as I would prefer to say, ‘local cosmopolitanism.’ As a
cosmopolitan thinker, who has never tried to conceal the mixed
benefits of modernity – I suppose this makes me a critical
modernist – I have nonetheless been increasingly concerned about
calling attention to local cultural contexts which are
marginalised and in the process of being eliminated. I do not
valorise the local, but I think its dynamics demand critical
attention.
Indeed, there are some deep encroachment being made on local
cultures all over the world, not by global agencies per se,
but by national governments. For example, in the province of
Kelantan in Malaysia, local performance traditions have been
proscribed by the regional Islamic government. Puppet traditions
like Wayang Kulit and other kinds of story-telling traditions and
shamanic performances, find it difficult to get licenses from the
municipal government. In effect, this is one way of killing the
tradition, and in the process, of depriving traditional performers
of their livelihood. A similar kind of indirect censorship is
going on in Bangladesh with jatra performers. They don’t
get licenses for their performances because the government wishes
to control the so-called ‘anti-social’ activities (like
drinking and gambling) that take place during the performance. How
does one intervene in such situations? Negotiating cultural
politics at local levels demands different skills and strategies
from global interventions.
In Rajasthan, there has been no censorship as such of the
performing arts, but there have been considerable constraints
through the absence of a meaningful alliance between the
performative demands and social sustenance of local traditions.
One particularly successful NGO, Pehchaan, has come out of
the local cultural initiative of a Manganiyar musician, Gazi Khan,
who is better known as an excellent khartal player. Komalda
really commends this kind of grounded intervention, particularly
in periods of drought and famine, where Pehchaan has
managed to mobilise money and distribute resources (fodder, water,
etc.) with considerable accountability. The education of children
is also being prioritised.
Komalda’s most memorable cultural intervention to my mind has
involved a large-scale construction of new musical instruments. He
realised that the old musical instruments were breaking down and
that a new stock of instruments was needed not only for the future
of the musical traditions but for the livelihood of the new
generation of musicians. Once again, Komalda served as a mediator
between the musicians and the local engineers, and after numerous
experiments, they managed to come up with a fresh stock of
instruments where the traditional principles of constructing the
instruments were modified and adapted with new materials and
technologies. These new instruments were then distributed to over
a hundred children from the Langa and Manganiyar communities.
Today they are all playing on them, and the tradition lives on.
How
do you think cultural geography stretches across political
boundaries?
Whether it is in Pakistan or in Rajasthan, within certain
communities, the story of Hir Ranjha is used to cure
foot-and-mouth disease. Of course, there is a political border
that divides these herding communities. It would be naive to
ignore the reality of political borders. But it is also necessary
to acknowledge that these borders are, at one level, meaningless
when dealing with the cognitive processes of cultural practices,
on the basis of which entire communities sustain their lives. In
grounding his cultural insights within the material realities of
land, agriculture, livestock and irrigation, Komalda has been able
to push the limits of existing political boundaries by opening
himself to the continuities and linkages of cultural geography. It
is within the contours of this geography that people make sense of
their own lives.
Tellingly, when Komalda was at the beginning of his research in
the late 1950s, he felt that it would be useful to begin at the
geographical boundaries of Rajasthan and then move towards the
centre. But, as he soon discovered, there is no such thing as a
centre. What existed instead were individual regions with
recurring patterns, and, for him, the recurring patterns emerged
out of staple-food practices linked to makka, jawar and
bajra. The cultural patterning of a particular region would
revolve around the consumption of one particular grain. With food,
one inevitably has to think about cooking preparations and
agriculture and soil, but also the music that is played in these
regions. So there is a very intricate connection between eating
and singing, at least for traditional communities – a connection
that one is not likely to find in the academic scholarship on
Rajasthan. When academics map the cultural geography of, say, oral
epics, they see it in terms of distance, area, and the genre of
epic sung in a particular area, but when Komalda talks about
cultural geography, he calls your attention to the grass growing
on the ground and the food people are eating. The connections with
geography are more intimate and textured.
Even as we talk, he is dreaming now of a museum devoted to the
cultures of the desert. He is actually challenging the existing
idea of the museum in terms of storing cultural artefacts and
beautiful objects. He is more interested in representing processes
of work and production. He doesn’t have a Kosambi-like
vocabulary to talk about these matters. What concerns him are the
cultures of everyday life.
His greatest obsession at the moment is with the jhadoo –
the different ways of producing the ordinary, household broom. At
first, it is possible to be cynical about such obsessions, because
a jhadoo can so easily become an ethnic object. What should
be stressed, however, is that Komalda as a grassroots curator is
not interested in the aesthetics of the jhadoo, but in the
diverse ways in which it is made. Who produces the jhadoo?
And where do its materials come from? Once again, we find
ourselves returning to the environment and to plant life, because
if you don’t have the right reeds then there is a possibility of
the jhadoo falls apart.
Without making an issue out of it, Komalda is concerned with the
ecology of material and cultural production. In a more simple way,
it could be said that he makes us aware that we have to care for
our world if we wish to hold on to our steadily depleting sanity.
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