tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90824702024-03-13T04:59:09.193+05:30The Middle StageA garden of Indian and world literatureChandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.comBlogger584125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-62373668073014774202024-01-20T08:33:00.030+05:302024-02-03T17:29:03.620+05:30Travels in the Year of the Ram Mandir<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWuv2bio7mymk_hZ20QWt9yI62CNN-YcJyEFWTVJ05Ml81fkUZ_ethVTaWHACf3WYRbSk9RB2zrEEIaCqmMlWES4eQyhem8iXYY4JQO2Gs4fAwtFjWqAiXzfGM-YdNK6jKt_IngPf95oxf0xrgNVQcsgbi96YJQkCqfHY-wQNZ9AppaBtUeglR/s4032/IMG_9146.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWuv2bio7mymk_hZ20QWt9yI62CNN-YcJyEFWTVJ05Ml81fkUZ_ethVTaWHACf3WYRbSk9RB2zrEEIaCqmMlWES4eQyhem8iXYY4JQO2Gs4fAwtFjWqAiXzfGM-YdNK6jKt_IngPf95oxf0xrgNVQcsgbi96YJQkCqfHY-wQNZ9AppaBtUeglR/w300-h400/IMG_9146.jpeg" width="300" /></a></div><b>"Jai Shri Ram!"</b> All day long, the cry surfaces and reverberates in Ayodhya. It is the rallying call of the public along the wide walkway leading from the main road to the Ram Janambhoomi temple complex, hazy with construction dust and lined by workers with electric drills installing large pink concrete panels to screen off the mottled facades of the decrepit buildings on either side. It erupts with particular intensity among the shoals of devotees as they jostle on the narrow steps leading up to the Hanuman Garhi temple. It is spoken more gently after the moving morning aarti, offered to statues of Ram and Sita swaying gently on a swing, in the courtyard of the hundred-year-old <a href="https://ayodhyamawamandir.org/#/">Amava Ram temple</a> with its crest of a giant bow -- and inside, its own glass-walled shrine to Ram Lalla, installed in the immediate wake of the Supreme Court judgment of 2019 -- where people gather in long rows at lunchtime a generous lunch of rice, dal, pooris and sabji provided for free by the temple's Ram Rasoi. <br /><br />And even closer to the new Ram Mandir, it sounds thrice a day inside the small temporary shrine for Ram Lalla set up in 2020, approached through a winding barred corridor after multiple security checks, after the aartis of morning, afternoon and evening to which only 30 people are admitted by a very democratic first-come-first-served system. When after several attempts I manage to land an aarti pass, several family members send me WhatsApp messages of congratulation.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzLATGyUH6-WSe5_YwgKcEryU9WCIN6185Hqw1cffyIV6JOUUK3YW9BQgEcOCTRx9OGK7Tx3Qrtp7gkatGEANrgIohH071kMZM-xr1anQFNDU6b8aw73ZXOX7EcxqvfvyFnPwSbl3IQNYuqBe-q8ASODxUD05VrDOFyyURfdE4NZeoaRO_LpwZ/s4032/IMG_9944.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzLATGyUH6-WSe5_YwgKcEryU9WCIN6185Hqw1cffyIV6JOUUK3YW9BQgEcOCTRx9OGK7Tx3Qrtp7gkatGEANrgIohH071kMZM-xr1anQFNDU6b8aw73ZXOX7EcxqvfvyFnPwSbl3IQNYuqBe-q8ASODxUD05VrDOFyyURfdE4NZeoaRO_LpwZ/s320/IMG_9944.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>Many people on the streets, and almost all those walking on the Ram Janambhoomi Path to gaze at the new temple complex from afar, have the words "Shri Ram" or "Sitaram" stencilled on their foreheads in red on a base of yellow. This is the one mark of uniformity connecting a thrillingljy diverse array of tongues -- Hindi, Avadhi and Bhojpuri; Marathi and Gujarati; Telugu and Tamil -- dressing styles, and faces on Ram Janambhoomi Path. A substantial share of them are the weathered, statuesque faces of old India -- people who seem to have dipped their feet only lightly in the waters of modernity, and appear to possess a correspondingly large store of psychic space for the adoration of Ram and the moral universe of the Ramayana. <div><br /></div><div>The traveller looks at the faces around him and thinks: our paths will likely never cross again. When a boy comes running up and offers to stencil Ram on my forehead for 10 rupees, I do not refuse the badge of the moment. The stencils are themselves part of a giant new economy of Ram paraphernalia flooding the puja samagri shops of the city: wooden replicas of the new Ram Mandir, Jai Shri Ram plaques, Jai Shri Ram ballpoint pens, Jai Shri Ram car dashboard standees, Hanuman maces, Jai Shri Ram pennants, and Jai Shri Ram charan padukas. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjKcHja_TUMFfdQpuYJzAjPHxHFeg3ReGr_EDdBv8C9mSFhMq1y_g9zbBkkfwzm46mhWaulsGU0yufjROw5aY2rXzP6Da2akozQuyIzQ0YaiwB7Nj67_85o2i0IuLR_dmPxAacWnpCsBN18i7YuKqwjjoiR152pmBgapZIJsaXvPSC9Jvc7oWW/s1610/IMG_9708.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1610" data-original-width="1511" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjKcHja_TUMFfdQpuYJzAjPHxHFeg3ReGr_EDdBv8C9mSFhMq1y_g9zbBkkfwzm46mhWaulsGU0yufjROw5aY2rXzP6Da2akozQuyIzQ0YaiwB7Nj67_85o2i0IuLR_dmPxAacWnpCsBN18i7YuKqwjjoiR152pmBgapZIJsaXvPSC9Jvc7oWW/s320/IMG_9708.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>All temple towns have two orders of reality: the shabby and clamorous world of the lok, and the ethereal and consoling universe of the dev lok. Ayodhya feels like it has three: the newest layer resembles a film set of an unsubtle blockbuster. The shutters of shops for several kilometres on the road from Faizabad to Mangeshkar Chowk are now painted with saffron trishuls, maces, and bows. New bus shelters broadcast pictures of Ram about to let fly an arrow. On the ghats of Ram ki Paidi can be heard the belligerent beat of Hindutva pop (including the hit "Yeh Rama Lalla Ka Dera Hai" by Shahnaaz Akhtar) blaring from loudspeakers to go with the traditional bhajans and kirtans. And there are locals kitted out as Ram, Lakshman and Sita by TV channels keen to provide a dash of theatre to their debate stages.<br /><br />Under the grey winter skies of January, then, Ayodhya -- already steeped in the language and lore of Ram -- awaits its tryst with destiny. Will the city be able to bear the weight of aspirations suddenly invested in it? After all, almost overnight the actual residents of Ayodhya are fated to become a minority in their own city. Millions of Indians and NRIs, not to mention the ruling party and most of the mass media, are avid to transform themselves into Ayodhyavasis, as perhaps they were not to become the self-ruling, difference-cherishing people of a republic, reminded by Gandhi (always such a pressuring soul, and especially towards Hindus) that real <a href="https://www-mkgandhi-org.translate.goog/momgandhi/chap67.htm?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=hi&_x_tr_hl=hi&_x_tr_pto=tc">ramrajya</a> begins within oneself, that it requires great introspection and the abjuring of violence. </div><div><br /></div><div>That privilege, that legacy -- which for decades seemed a great gift -- now seems banal when compared to the chance to be the fervid, righteous praja of a new state and a new epoch, the fortunate generation chosen by Lord Ram to restore order and purity, a single source of authority, to a mongrel millennium. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjB_KRpQtYXbQtr2qvsp1zrVnfMoQ1akkR0-ZLG9lIHM9WnV6iZGy90LY-ChjuidsqynAN826RVdDPzIyogvpIBg7CdO8_e0bQe-R2Ua0wgjW8BFo7DluX81apkpr_bqsWV-LCK3ylr7nOso1pWL7Xasu7zPnpyIvY_EvjV6pZYy9WRIcGX_kD/s4032/IMG_9040.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjB_KRpQtYXbQtr2qvsp1zrVnfMoQ1akkR0-ZLG9lIHM9WnV6iZGy90LY-ChjuidsqynAN826RVdDPzIyogvpIBg7CdO8_e0bQe-R2Ua0wgjW8BFo7DluX81apkpr_bqsWV-LCK3ylr7nOso1pWL7Xasu7zPnpyIvY_EvjV6pZYy9WRIcGX_kD/s320/IMG_9040.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>Amidst the hail of Jai Shri Rams! in Ayodhya, one hears the murmur of the mild-mannered old town saying goodbye to itself. Its destiny is to be the beacon of a renaissance: to make India <span style="text-align: center;">Hindu again, epic again.</span></div><div><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="text-align: center;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg54l7Z1r0j2bEmtJjcVn9kAT2c2WD8PNmwBFEv4OU6wEw0RaBomfvjGf6p-NXLCZ8Uj8-mzdeEzVufOKzgQ5gmMJ4Q7wZKwTqKxW4wzldWKpQkZsS2u_7JyGGB5_Tps54GEzWpHIKB-swglGPccbpw2aRW9bVuxgRE4vTk4aGPBwPiCVWfUkl2/s4032/IMG_9183.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg54l7Z1r0j2bEmtJjcVn9kAT2c2WD8PNmwBFEv4OU6wEw0RaBomfvjGf6p-NXLCZ8Uj8-mzdeEzVufOKzgQ5gmMJ4Q7wZKwTqKxW4wzldWKpQkZsS2u_7JyGGB5_Tps54GEzWpHIKB-swglGPccbpw2aRW9bVuxgRE4vTk4aGPBwPiCVWfUkl2/s320/IMG_9183.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div></b><b>“Bahut kasht hua hamarey sarkar ko”</b></span></div><div><span style="text-align: center;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">On the banks of the Saryu, I come across a group of sadhus clad in shades of saffron, ochre and white, marching from the main road towards the river in a file, like ants on a trail, to take a boat ride. Unlike the local sants of Ayodhya -- many of whom, like Mahant Raju Das of Hanuman Garhi, spew insult and innuendo and espouse a Manichaean worldview in which all who are not for (their) Ram are against Ram -- this lot have the light-hearted and bantering manner of guests at a wedding out on a bit of sightseeing. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">And indeed that is who they are. They belong to a contingent of more than a thousand sadhus just arrived from Janakpur dham in Nepal, "<i>jahan Sita mata ka janambhoomi hai,</i>" emissaries from "<i>Ramji ka sasuraal</i>," bearing truckloads of gifts from the kingdom of Mithila to celebrate the return of their king to his birthplace. What have they brought? "<i>Gehna zevar, sona chandi, bartan bhara, chaul-daal, chappan-sattavan rang ke mithai</i>" and, with a delightful touch of anachronism, even gas stoves. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">The events of the Ramayana may be from another epoch, but to most in Ayodhya they are not remote. The trails of Ram, Lakshman and Sita are still imprinted everywhere in the geography of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Nepal, and are part of a luminous and eternal present of a different dimension from the mundane past, present and future of the human soul sojourning briefly in this world in the body and on the river of history. With the men from Janakpur, as with so many others I meet, the Ramayana is the foundation and frame of reality; the life of this world merely a state of reflected light, as the moon to the sun. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">Our paths seem, paradoxically, to intersect at the same moment in history without us being part of the same age; this is the intractable jumble of samay and kaal that the post-independence Indian state, itself the product of a certain historical conjuncture and committed to contemplating time in secular terms, has found so difficult to accommodate and harmonise without capsizing under the current of cosmic time. To their way of thinking, both archaic and arresting, the world of men and women in society and history was once and forever aligned by Ram, with Ram, and was then cruelly uprooted. As the family members of Sita, they feel the feel the pain of their brother-in-law, exiled from his birthplace not for 14 years but five long and dark centuries.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSM0l29ux78JIr618Uk7htTaQ3KbuP_0QjeHX9h0xK_jyZXjgerveOH-vk2XjpyPS2Kn6DA0xJz_aT5xnJNEQ5n7CJjegSQ-FcLvbSRcFeJicPDYzg79PyjcOci4sDL4KEjEvFPucJdK2V0_GAWqqyvp0DbyE5DjGA6gNMeZfMTnbLMy3gb4-o/s4032/IMG_9217.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="4032" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSM0l29ux78JIr618Uk7htTaQ3KbuP_0QjeHX9h0xK_jyZXjgerveOH-vk2XjpyPS2Kn6DA0xJz_aT5xnJNEQ5n7CJjegSQ-FcLvbSRcFeJicPDYzg79PyjcOci4sDL4KEjEvFPucJdK2V0_GAWqqyvp0DbyE5DjGA6gNMeZfMTnbLMy3gb4-o/s320/IMG_9217.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>"<i>Bahut kasht hua hamarey sarkar ko! Panch sau barees...panch sau barees kasht kiye,</i>" exclaims Deen Dayal Saran, 62, barrel-chested, bearded, tilaked, turbaned, missing two front teeth, and all in all as charming a litigant as one could imagine. Very quaintly, Saran insists that Janakpur has an even deeper relationship to Ram now than ever before, because, being deprived of his own kingdom, "Ramji toh Janakpur mein hi reh gaye." He may have long been a resident of Janakpur, but seen the indelible contours of lineage, family, and marriage in Hindu thought he was nevertheless always first and foremost a visiting son-in-law, a "<i>pahunwa</i>."</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">To these men, as to millions of Indians, the new Ram temple represents the undoing of a traumatic rupture. The architects of this redemption are very clear. “<i>Ashirbaad dete hain Yogiji aur Modiji ko ke aaj hamari behen Sita apne ghar mein padhaar rahein hain. Kot kot hriday se dhanyavaad de rahey hain.</i>" </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">Thankfully, their manner is triumphant without being gloating; they seek the return of a lost utopia, but are without the hubris, partly encouraged by the moral schema of the Ramayana itself, of those who would believe that good is all on their own side and evil is entirely outside there somewhere. For now, it is a time to shower praise on the entire universe, to create a mood of mischief and laughter, singing and taking videos of one another, as one would at a wedding. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">As we float down the river in the company of the boatman and a life-size pink teddy bear (every boat in Ayodhya seems to have a cuddly toy), every man produces a new item for the litany:</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">"Sarju Mata ki...!"</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">"Jai!"</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Janakpur dham ki...!”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Jai!”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Janaki Maharani ki...!”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Jai!”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Janak ke jamai ki...!”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Jai!”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Ramji ke babu ki...!”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">“Jai!”</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">"Ramji ki bahin ki..." (laughter)</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">"Jai!"</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Heard in Ayodhya and Varanasi in the first half of January</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBNNTusV46qVuFAlf-17rGL6S2veC3ST6gxO2j017uIMxY2scdb6LW0NqzQf0z02BNTvLZ4N8q-KQzHIaoMW-8vXfl56hkcDhl-qgMX_Me2rtcbPvSI-jlTUEWt3o1QOKcx_DOLEO75P9w7zqziGwYddIaotpRQOUBQYnDckWHogC49PZ1Emeb/s1800/36D51722-B992-4D2D-9E65-78EEB969C44B.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1800" data-original-width="1440" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBNNTusV46qVuFAlf-17rGL6S2veC3ST6gxO2j017uIMxY2scdb6LW0NqzQf0z02BNTvLZ4N8q-KQzHIaoMW-8vXfl56hkcDhl-qgMX_Me2rtcbPvSI-jlTUEWt3o1QOKcx_DOLEO75P9w7zqziGwYddIaotpRQOUBQYnDckWHogC49PZ1Emeb/s320/36D51722-B992-4D2D-9E65-78EEB969C44B.jpeg" width="256" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>"Pachas saal angreji saasan mein kuch bhi nahin kiya. Aur oo! Dus saal rahkar bhi kitna kuch kar diya." </i></div></i></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><b>An RSS worker and a seller of nimboo chai on the ghats of Banaras, of Prime Minister Modi</b></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: left;">"If you do not accept the ideology of Hindutva today, you are immediately seen as being the product of a colonial mindset."</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Young journalist from Delhi, at a cafe in Ayodhya</b></div></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwBV2cmAJQlEqrqBjIHKaComBYBb8WHeiYazDxWFzGKuvfQIJysOfuHxUHoOiFbahuG81dJ9obc8tQhMzw7_9VzsvBCytiE2LONSkmK0wMR354Gad-FbWKXtjHNhigW-VXT_n81Ka_BTxS67U9QZoFOwuW3laB4WCyfE6OmM5b8RoKV-45PJe1/s4032/IMG_9892.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwBV2cmAJQlEqrqBjIHKaComBYBb8WHeiYazDxWFzGKuvfQIJysOfuHxUHoOiFbahuG81dJ9obc8tQhMzw7_9VzsvBCytiE2LONSkmK0wMR354Gad-FbWKXtjHNhigW-VXT_n81Ka_BTxS67U9QZoFOwuW3laB4WCyfE6OmM5b8RoKV-45PJe1/s320/IMG_9892.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;">"The credit for bringing the Ram Mandir project to fruition rests with only three people. First, Ashokji Singhal. Second, Narendra Modi. And third, Narendra Modi. Of course, the credit for awakening the Hindus and turning the Mandir movement into a mass cause goes to LK Advani. But Advani was not prepared to embrace the consequences of his own rath yatra. Advani and Vajpayee were both cowards. They could not take the matter the whole distance despite coming to power. For daring to do that, the credit goes to Modi."</div></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><b>Retired professor, Varanasi</b></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">"Even after gaining access to education, the people of India did not learn to think logically. They remained highly emotional. So we could not become a real democracy. We remained only a representative democracy."</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><b>A schoolteacher, Ayodhya</b></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">"More and more people are coming to my shop these days asking for history books about India. But of the right kind -- not the leftist or Romila Thapar kind of Indian history."</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><b>Rakesh Singh, owner of Harmony Bookshop, Varanasi</b></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">"Papa! Bachava! Bandar ghoom rahey hain."</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;"><b>Young boy, Ram ki Paidi, Ayodhya</b></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><br /></div></span><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div></div></div>Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-83342402683002263972024-01-17T18:19:00.003+05:302024-01-17T18:52:35.809+05:30Kabir and his Rama<p><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 15px;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: times;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIjFaSOKdOSbqc0ZxzHzlD1_bAXuHDk1RcYNUNXHB2l9ibfkmYiebtrFDvmUFHYq5imRWHPwB2Y5oNMzQPlz6-5miASq05Dkln4UoRbHlFQyikqPn_yPbhtYvKfinHTgAZLpGwlHKhlGMGbM53naZZfnTp0V-ajxTlwIPcQ57gGzw6kYJdi8nP/s554/images%20(3).jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="554" data-original-width="554" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIjFaSOKdOSbqc0ZxzHzlD1_bAXuHDk1RcYNUNXHB2l9ibfkmYiebtrFDvmUFHYq5imRWHPwB2Y5oNMzQPlz6-5miASq05Dkln4UoRbHlFQyikqPn_yPbhtYvKfinHTgAZLpGwlHKhlGMGbM53naZZfnTp0V-ajxTlwIPcQ57gGzw6kYJdi8nP/s320/images%20(3).jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>The poet Kabir deserves to be counted alongside Rumi and Julian of Norwich as one of the greatest mystics of the last millennium. From the fifteenth century onward, his Hindustani-language poetry has resonated across north India, where verses and phrases from the corpus of poems attributed to him are known to just about everybody. Kabir’s power derives from a syncretic, independent-minded reading of God and religion, particularly Hinduism and Islam, that is not only compelling on its own terms but has proved ideologically useful for modern liberal projects like the secular Indian republic. That power can best be experienced in a slim book of translations by the Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.</span><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: times;">Kabir was a low-caste Muslim weaver who was born and lived all his life in the holy city and bustling metropolis of Banaras (now Varanasi). He stands in Indian literary history at the center of an enduring religious and philosophical movement called </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: times;">bhakti</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: times;">, which stresses transcendent spiritual devotion without distracting rituals and doctrine.</span><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: times;">Many translations of his work into English exist, from the slightly orotund, Victorian versions composed by the Bengali Nobel poet-laureate Rabindranath Tagore in the early 20th century to the Americanized versions in the 1980s produced by the poet Robert Bly. But Kabir’s famed iconoclasm, speed of thought, slashing paradoxical style, metaphorical zest and rhetorical brilliance have rarely been rendered into English better than in Mehrotra’s versions.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;">Kabir is that rare thing: a skeptical, disillusioned poet who nevertheless speaks in a voice of rapture and entrancement. His work can be situated within a long tradition of Hindu thought that asks penetrating questions about the nature of perception, and insists that what we think we know through our senses about the nature of reality is merely </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: times;">maya </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: times;">or illusion. Or, as he says in a poem not included in this collection, “The knowledge that knows what knowledge is:/ That’s the knowledge that’s mine.”</span></p><p></p><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: times;">Here is one of his sallies upon the subject in Mehrotra’s brief, bleak and astringent rendition:</span></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i></i></span></div><blockquote><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">The mind’s a shortchanging</span></i></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">Huckster with a crafty</span></i></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">Wife and five</span></i></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">Scoundrel children.</span></i></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><i><span style="font-family: times;">It won’t change its ways.</span></i></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><div><i><span style="font-family: times;">The mind’s a knot, says Kabir</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: times;">Not easy to untie.</span></i></div></div></blockquote><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><div><span style="font-family: times;"><i></i></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;">The mind’s “wife” here is the body, the “scoundrel children” the five senses. Mehrotra’s cunning deployment of enjambment—the breaking of a phrase or sentence across a poetic line—propels us from one line to the next, re-enacting, in the four-line opening sentence, the way the mind pieces together the meaning of the world from the messages of the senses, before knocking it out with the clean, flat declaration of the line that follows.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;">Mehrotra is one of those translators who is not just a facilitator of the original, but almost a competitor. His use of the unclassical and perhaps anachronistic word “huckster” shows us both what he takes from and brings to Kabir’s poetry, which is to allow his own poetic mind to take off from the basic message and conceptual frame of Kabir’s Hindi lines, without hankering after a word-for-word fidelity. At many points in this book his use of a clipped, colloquial idiom (“Friend/ You had one life/ And you blew it”; or “I’ve taken a shine to this thug”) perfectly realizes Kabir’s tart message. Mehrotra’s bucking, slangy versions attempt ambitiously to make Kabir sound in English as Kabir must have sounded to the Hindustani audiences of his day.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;">To those audiences, Kabir’s verse must have come as a jolt. Like Socrates or Thoreau, Kabir delights in asking questions from first principles. He is the scourge of what one might call metaphysical preening, of the certainties that on closer examination turn out to be hollow. This is especially powerful when Kabir applies it to the grand social distinctions of medieval Indian society—like the caste system—that under the light of his corrosive intelligence seem trivial.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><div><span style="font-family: times;">In the first of a series of rebukes to yogic practice, he says, “If going naked/ Brought liberation/ The deer of the forest/ Would attain it first.” To Brahmins, the self-appointed elite of the caste system, he asks, “If you say you’re a Brahmin/ Born of a mother who’s a Brahmin,/ Was there a special canal/ Through which you were born?”</span></div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: times;">Here he is, mocking those who are always speaking of salvation:</span></div></div><blockquote><div><i><span style="font-family: times;">Let’s go!</span></i></div><div><div><i><span style="font-family: times;">Everyone keeps saying,</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: times;">As if they knew where paradise is,</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: times;">But ask them what lies beyond</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: times;">The street they live on,</span></i></div><div><i><span style="font-family: times;">They’ll give you a blank look.</span></i></div></div><div></div></blockquote><div><span style="font-family: times;">The booming opening line seems ever more ironic when found reduced to the “blank look” of the close.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: times;">Although Kabir frequently chastises the godly, it is not that he is godless. Rather, the God that he believed in was—to use the majestic phrase of one of his other translators, Vinay Dharwadker—“the God beyond God.” In his poems he frequently enjoins his auditors to cast away the masquerades of conventional belief and to put their faith in “Rama.” But this Rama is not the historical prince of the Ramayana epic or the idealized Hindu god of many attributes who derives from that epic.</span></div></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;">Rama, in Kabir’s verse, is rather the luminous personal god within each man, who becomes available once he learns how to go beyond the colorful constructs of the human religious imagination and “open the inward eye.” Mehrotra’s rousing versions perfectly capture the message, at once sardonic and ecstatic, of a great poet who insists that “Looking heavenwards/ For heaven is to look/ In the wrong direction.”</span></div></div></div>Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-92141780374375013162023-05-26T09:25:00.002+05:302023-05-26T09:28:06.936+05:30The Indian Novel as an Agent of History<div><i>This essay appears in my recent book <a href="https://www.amazon.in/My-Country-Literature-Adventures-Reading/dp/939209910X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">My Country Is Literature</a></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div>Human beings experience their lives as embedded not just in time, but in history. And we deploy a variety of modes and instruments to make a personal map and mood of history: individual experience and cultural memory, political ideology and historiography, myths and legends, the news on TV and the chat at the barbershop. Among these ways of constructing or examining the past, a somewhat late-arriving one in India—only about 150 years old—is the novel.<br /><br />But what is so noteworthy about the novel as a lens on history? It might be argued that even as a form of story, let alone history, the novel does not enjoy great currency in India, for it is neither an indigenous form nor a mass one. Cinema has far greater mass appeal, and the stories and narrative conventions of epics like the Ramayana inform everyday life and moral reasoning much more than any novel does (notwithstanding the apparent desire of nearly every educated Indian to write a novel, ideally bestselling).<br /><br />Yet if the novel deserves to be studied as a site of Indian history, it is because Indian history itself is one of the great subjects of the novel in India. A preoccupation with Indian history—its pleasures and possibilities, its continuities and its fractures, its burdens and its freedoms, its shape and its mysteries—is a thread running through the work of some of the greatest Indian novelists of the past century and more, across more than two dozen Indian languages and literary traditions. In the great diversity of narrative forms and interpretative cruxes generated by the Indian novel, there lies, waiting to be unpacked by the active reader, a wealth of wisdom about Indian history—and therefore about how to live in the present time as an Indian and a South Asian, as a modern person of the 21st century and as a citizen of the first century of Indian of democracy. (Some of these possibilities are apprehended or activated by characters in novels themselves, allowing us to experience vicariously, or in advance of actual historical fact, difficult dilemmas and choices in our own lives.)<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjykU9cKG08EC3sRvToF4Mwpjky_mt1ZQlbqQ585X03K7F6T9tjEkp_U-IDkIi-blPV9c0dKXaGojnE1OhFBtqM0tadCA3pi2W4K5XH8k2ozrqRK9XrUyOEchBDSOGAyz2dtvGq6MUSliFfA2nMqWDkaDNqddn9nIEaQEnPSl_M2q5e2XKbDw" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="255" data-original-width="197" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjykU9cKG08EC3sRvToF4Mwpjky_mt1ZQlbqQ585X03K7F6T9tjEkp_U-IDkIi-blPV9c0dKXaGojnE1OhFBtqM0tadCA3pi2W4K5XH8k2ozrqRK9XrUyOEchBDSOGAyz2dtvGq6MUSliFfA2nMqWDkaDNqddn9nIEaQEnPSl_M2q5e2XKbDw" width="185" /></a></div>Consider Fakir Mohan Senapati’s enormously sly, satirical and lightfooted novel <i>Six Acres and a Third</i> (1902). The plot of Senapati’s novel revolves around a village landowner’s plot to take over the small landholding of some humble weavers. But this is also the Indian village in the high noon of colonialism, and the first readers of Senapati’s story would have delighted in the many potshots taken by the narrator against new and perplexing British institutions or perverse intellectual fashions, administered and advanced by a new class of English-educated Indians. ‘Ask a new babu his grandfather’s father’s name, and he will hem and haw,’ the narrator chirps, ‘but the names of the ancestors of England’s Charles the Third will readily roll off his tongue.’<br /><br />The story appears to be generating, then, an argument about history and about political resistance. India must rid itself of its colonial masters, it seems to say, because they have delegitimised many of the traditional knowledge systems and truths of Indian society, and in the process made the modern Indian self-imitative and inauthentic. (The argument persists in today’s debates about ‘westernisation.’)<br /><br />But this raises a new question, one that is not lost on Senapati. Was traditional Indian village society itself ever very wise, just, or balanced? As the story progresses, we see that anti-colonial sentiments have not blinded the narrator to the need to subject his own side to the scrutiny of satire. When we hear that ‘The priest was very highly regarded in the village, particularly by the women,’ and that ‘The goddess frequently appeared to him in his dreams and talked to him about everything’ the complacency and mystifications of Brahmanical Hinduism are also laid bare, as is the credulity about those who would place their faith in such a system.<br /><br />Senapati’s irony is particularly effective because of its double-sidedness, and leads to a point useful as much in our time as his own. That is: criticism of a clearly marked-out ‘other’ (to Indians in the early 20th century, the British; to Hindu nationalists today, Muslims and Christians) often legitimises a sweeping and complacent faith in one’s own worldview; that the search for truth or meaning in history must remain a charade if not accompanied by the capacity for self-criticism. The novel’s argument, buried in its details and never overtly stated, is liberating not because it is comforting or inspiring, but precisely because it is disenchanted. Fiction shows us how human beings are themselves fiction-making creatures, and must therefore take special care to scrutinise what they believe to be foundational truths.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgAEo4TA_CQKcE1IR_g8KTl_8YGtNvGBAv907Cqz2AQ-zVZR4td6Eeew4q33Y439YHOAYZ87kKdtLt7TTRRUX54Da_Wc9qMfS1jtmEuWIkKex4g1FDHnxUyIdbJ4mVwxv4SrLnoBOa-JyAOdmcokls4EqimVlrdbEZ0jkp0u1DfcpO6yV4GCQ" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="701" data-original-width="437" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgAEo4TA_CQKcE1IR_g8KTl_8YGtNvGBAv907Cqz2AQ-zVZR4td6Eeew4q33Y439YHOAYZ87kKdtLt7TTRRUX54Da_Wc9qMfS1jtmEuWIkKex4g1FDHnxUyIdbJ4mVwxv4SrLnoBOa-JyAOdmcokls4EqimVlrdbEZ0jkp0u1DfcpO6yV4GCQ" width="150" /></a></div>A different kind of novelistic irony—cosmic rather than comic—radiates from <i>This Is Not That Dawn</i>, the English translation of <i>Jhootha Sach</i>, the Hindi novelist Yashpal’s thousand-page novel from the 1950s about Partition. The story tracks the lives and loves of Tara and Jaidev, a pair of siblings, across the worlds of Lahore and New Delhi in the years both before and after Partition. In so doing, Yashpal’s novel generates dozens of alternative views of that cataclysm from viewpoints male and female, Hindu and Muslim, Indian and Pakistani (at the very moment that these new highly charged and adversarial identities are coming into being), prospective and retrospective.<br /><br />Each character’s position or dilemma carries its own distinctive charge of hope, memory, conviction, doubt, naïveté, prejudice, fatalism, cynicism: a vast narrative collage of human beings swimming valiantly with and against the tides of history. If the narrator himself has something to say about the logic or validity of the breaking up of India, it remains parcelled out among the characters, and must be intuited by the reader.<br /><br />In fact, although the book faces up squarely to the tremendous violence and horror of Partition, the feeling we take away from Yashpal’s novel is not that of an entirely tragic story. Of course, Partition destroyed a particular shared and longstanding, if uncodified, sense of what it meant to be Indian. But as we perceive from the quest of the protagonist, Jaidev Puri, to start his own newspaper rooted firmly in a rejection of religious partisanship of either a Hindu or Muslim stripe, what it means to be Indian would, in a new democratic and secular republic, have entailed building upon a new foundation in any case. At certain junctures in history, the novel shows us, tragedy and moral progress may be inseparably mingled.<br /><br /><div>As we can now see more than seven decades later, the new Indian republic has faced many challenges in remaining secular (and indeed democratic). Perhaps, in retrospect, we might say that it asked too much of the first citizens of independent India, who might have preferred political independence while remaining wedded to their old ways of social organisation. A splendid insight into the tensions between the hierarchical imperatives of Hinduism and the egalitarian impulses of the new Indian democracy might be found in the novels of the great Kannada novelist UR Ananthamurthy, and nowhere more convincingly so than in his early novel <i>Samskara</i> (1965), published when Ananthamurthy was just 33.<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVt-Ou5lfBnNh61JBBNL5mj0h8WoYQnVHWCg5BILzfb3O-ZKhDomQNSLY8zDiy8xfFQpJSoDW3HuI7MWyZZ-elkROlSEwX3DtZR7P6qrxkbSuUeyT52GP1watofQil44-YxjSA_SRXy98rb1LCBySClTL7SwYZxJ1nwEM0Ha-QfM4-qvLnnQ" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="250" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVt-Ou5lfBnNh61JBBNL5mj0h8WoYQnVHWCg5BILzfb3O-ZKhDomQNSLY8zDiy8xfFQpJSoDW3HuI7MWyZZ-elkROlSEwX3DtZR7P6qrxkbSuUeyT52GP1watofQil44-YxjSA_SRXy98rb1LCBySClTL7SwYZxJ1nwEM0Ha-QfM4-qvLnnQ=w200-h320" width="200" /></a></div><i>Samskara</i> is, as the title indicates, about rites for the dead. Its plot turns on the dilemma posed by Naranappa, a man even more troublesome dead than alive. Naranappa is a member of a small agrahara, or settlement, of brahmins in rural Karnataka. The brahmins are, for the most part, almost stereotypically true to type: they live off alms and donations, perform rituals for the rest of the community, interpret the sacred books, and uphold through both poetry and penance the values of an ancient (and apparently eternal) hierarchical social order.<br /><br />But Naranappa has gone rogue, profaning the tradition, provoking his neighbours with orgies of drinking and meat-eating, living in sin with a woman of a lower caste. There is no taboo he has not traduced. If he has not been excommunicated, it is only because the agrahara’s leader, the wise and compassionate scholar Praneshacharya, has long waged a war to reform his demoniacal nature. When Naranappa suddenly passes away, a question of profound significance comes up, one on which the entire world order seems to turn. Must the dead man be cremated with all the respect due to a high-born Brahmin? Or will the brahmins who survive him themselves be polluted by performing the last rites of someone who devoted himself to ‘kicking away at brahmanism’? It is Praneshacharya who must decide. Confused, the man widely known as ‘the Crest-Jewel of Vedic Learning’ turns to his palm-leaf manuscripts for guidance. What precedents exist for a conundrum such as this?<br /><br />Upon the horns of this beautifully counterbalanced conflict—dead against the living, hedonism against self-restraint, profaner against pardoner, sexuality against textuality—Ananthamurthy sets down an allegory of Indian history with a particular resonance for the 20th century, and indeed the one after. For although the novel appears to be set in the unchanging Village Time of old India, in actual calendar time we are somewhere in the 1950s, in the levelled world of the new Indian democracy, that has made its touchstone not the books of revelation, but a constitution thrashed out by human beings.<br /><br />Slowly, our view of the dead man’s misdemeanours changes colour. Perhaps Naranappa, underneath the obvious provocation of his saturnalia, represents the spirit of the new freedom, blowing away the fossilised thinking sanctified by the centuries. In openly falling in love and living with a low-caste woman, Naranappa shows a greater humanity than that required merely by ‘keeping the faith.’ Unlike his compatriots, flapping cantankerously in manacles of jealousy and moralism, he thinks on his feet and with his body.<br /><br />Even the spotless Praneshacharya finds himself morally discombobulated by the age: his righteousness is founded upon a deep social conservatism, and he thinks through the foundational categories of purity and pollution, which find no place in the new social compact. The brahmins, we see, are prisoners of history, huddled in a cocoon of hypocritical piety; never daring to live beyond the ‘duties a brahmin is born to.’ Teaching all other castes to keep their own boundaries, they preside over a sterile society, when the age demands a new moral creativity. When they face a dilemma, they delve into their palm-leaf manuscripts, not into themselves. Praneshacharya begins to perceive this, but is powerless to act upon his intuition. Until his body does. On a trip deep into the forest to seek out an answer at the feet of a god, he encounters Naranappa’s voluptuous companion and ends up sleeping with her.<br /><br />Now Praneshacharya, too, is a sinner, forced to confront his own repressed carnality. ‘I suddenly turned in the dark of the forest,’ he ruminates. Smarting with shame but rapt with a strange exhilaration, he takes to the road, both running away from himself and in search of himself. Ananthamurthy’s finespun prose, rendered in exquisite cadences by his late translator AK Ramanujan, tracks with great rigor the inner monologue of Praneshacharya as he arrives a new vision of the self. And as we follow Praneshacharya there, we see that we have reached a point not just metaphysical but metafictional. In place of the Sacred Books, perhaps it is the novel that contains the wisdom and the doubt that India needs for a new age in its history (which would make Ananthamurthy a kind of novelistic Naranappa). It’s a startling story, one as provocative for its time and place as those of Cervantes, Sterne and Diderot must have been in theirs.<br /><br />As these examples show, the work of novels is not confined to mere representation of historical realities (although this is where they may start). Rather, a novel may be a creative intervention in history in its own right—an actual agent of history, passing on to the reader who passes through its narrative field both its diagnostic powers and visionary charge. Indeed, from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay to UR Ananthamurthy, Bankimchandra Chatterjee to Kiran Nagarkar, Qurratulain Hyder to Salma, Phanishwarnath Renu to Amitav Ghosh, novelists have generated some of the most layered and sophisticated visions of Indian history produced in the last two centuries. Yet as a group they fall into no school or political camp—some of them possess a conservative rather than progressive sensibility. What unites them is their interpretative power and their ability to illuminate and complicate the particular historical crux they focus on.<br /><br />It would appear that there is something inherent in the novel form—the persuasive power and freedom of a story when compared to a discursive argument; the prospect of linking the world of the self with that of the community and society; the freedom to rove in spaces of the past that we cannot access by means other than that of the imagination; the potential to think dialectically in exchanges between characters or switches in perspective between the narrator and the characters—that makes the space of the novel a particularly fertile ground for historical thinking.<br /><br />And when they are themselves reinserted into the canvas of Indian history, it seems to me that the projects of the Indian novel and that of Indian democracy (both fairly new forms in Indian history) appear uncannily similar—and perhaps similarly unfinished. As Indian democracy has over the last seven decades sought to fashion a new social contract in a deeply hierarchical civilisation, so the great Indian novel has attempted not just to address but also to form a new kind of reader/citizen, alive to both the iniquities and the redemptive potential of Indian history.<br /><br /><br /> </div></div>Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-12917818384236143492023-01-09T18:27:00.060+05:302023-01-16T18:55:42.624+05:30Mahatma Gandhi and the meaning of being a Pravasi Bharatiya<div><i>Since 2003, the Republic of India has marked January 9 as Pravasi Bharatiya Divas. Here is a piece on the overseas Indian whose journey it commemorates.</i></div><div><br /></div>Today, January 9, marks the anniversary of the greatest homecoming ever by an Indian, one now celebrated in India – the mother country of perhaps the <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/diasporas">largest</a> and most farflung diaspora in the world – as Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, or <a href="http://www.pbd-india.com/">“Overseas Indian Day”</a>. <br /><br />On January 9, 1915, a lawyer and community organiser from Gujarat called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (at 46, already in late middle age) <a href="http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/et-commentary/gopal-krishna-gokhales-repeated-requests-brought-mahatma-gandhi-back-to-india/">stepped off</a> the ship SS Arabia at Bombay Harbour. Gandhi had spent the previous two decades in South Africa, where he had made a name for himself representing the civil cases of the prosperous merchants of Indian origin there and the struggle for political rights of indentured labourers of Indian origin in a society divided on racial lines. Before that, he had also spent a few years as a (fairly mediocre) student in England.<br /><br />In between these two stints abroad, Gandhi had already made one brief, unsuccessful attempt in the 1890s to return to India and set up his own legal practice. One reason for his failure then was his own diffidence; another, the fact that, as an Indian who had travelled abroad <a href="http://historicalleys.blogspot.in/2009/01/hindus-and-ocean-taboo.html">across</a> the <a href="http://indenturedindian.wordpress.com/about/">“black waters”</a>, he was seen as having <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117802/gandhi-india-ramachandra-guha-reviewed-maya-jasanoff">lost caste</a> in a highly stratified and cloistered social world. Indians of that time preferred to deal with somebody uncorrupted by contact with the great unknown.<br /><br />Though he returned to India a successful and even wealthy man, Gandhi’s travels had not made him arrogant, but rather more curious and more humble, even at the age of 46. It’s worth noting that he had promised his political mentor, <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/237223/Gopal-Krishna-Gokhale">Gopal Krishna Gokhale</a>, that he <a href="http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/et-commentary/gopal-krishna-gokhales-repeated-requests-brought-mahatma-gandhi-back-to-india/">would not</a> speak or write on India for a year, till he had travelled around the country and acquainted himself with its problems.<br /><br />During his sojourn in South Africa, Gandhi had discovered something enormously liberating about the life of émigrés. The boundaries drawn by Indians at home between themselves were blurred, and sometimes entirely abandoned, by the solidarities and hardships of being Indians abroad – which experience, for the rest of his lifetime, was to be expressed in Gandhi’s optimism about the ability of Indians to transcend their differences and work together.<br /><br />Gandhi’s early life in Gujarat, then, and his outlook as a devout Hindu, were orthodox; his life experience for an Indian of the time, unusually heterodox. Among the protagonist in the movement for Indian independence (which he transformed within a decade from a primarily upper-class, small-scale campaign to a mass movement), no one possessed a sophisticated sense of the possibilities and civilizational blind spots of both India and the West – or such a willingness to turn the harsh light of criticism upon his own country (and indeed himself).<br /><br />Through his capacity to combine homegrown ideas with those from around the world, Gandhi forged, first abroad and then at home, a creative new political philosophy called <a href="http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/books/universal-man-1-909953">“satyagraha”</a>, or “truth-force” – a compound of nonviolence, active resistance, and demanding self-scrutiny that was to become part of <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/AZCAAbALxjP1lfpyiiCV7O/Civil-resistance-from-theory-to-practice.html">the basic vocabulary</a> of modern political resistance. He came to it by way of the theories of Tolstoy and Ruskin, as also <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-most-influential-book-in-indian-history-1418061630">the Bhagavad Gita</a>. To this day, Gandhi's thought holds a prominent place in the world’s sense of what it means to be Indian (even if its ideals are today under siege in India itself).<br /><br />South Africa, as many have argued, was the making of Gandhi. The scholar Judith Brown put it well when <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gandhis-Rise-Power-1915-1922-Cambridge/dp/0521098734">she wrote</a>, “Gandhi's twenty years in South Africa were not just his apprenticeship as a political mobilizer. They also provided the time and circumstances in which he formulated his attitude to India and the West; and this, far more than his political capacity and experience, was to mark him out on his return to India.”<br /><br />One might even say Gandhi's travels had ennobled him. Having fought for the cause of Indians in South Africa, many of them Muslim, he could not bring himself to divide Indian society reflexively into Hindus and Muslims, as so many of his companions in the independence movement did explicitly or privately. He sought an independent Indian nation-state that would be home to all the faiths of the subcontinent.<br /><br />Having grown up reflexively obeying the codes of Hindu social life – including marriage to a child bride – Gandhi returned to India transformed by his experiments in thought and morality. From now on (as we see in <a href="https://middlestage.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-mahatma-gandhis-autobiography-my.html">his autobiography</a>, one of the twentieth century’s greatest books), he was determined to move the giant edifice of Hinduism back in dialogue – and if necessary in conflict – with the call of the individual conscience. He was eventually to pay the price for this with his life.<br /><br />What can Indians today learn from Gandhi’s attitude to travel? From the time of Gandhi’s return to India onwards, a great change has come about in the size and character of the Indian diaspora. Indians began to leave the country in ever-greater numbers, on terms more amenable than those of indentured labour; no longer were they resented for their departure, or rejected on their return.<br /><br />Everywhere they went, they came together to form small replicas of the beloved world they had left behind. Some lapsed into conservatism, nostalgia and a partitioned mental life, while others, like Gandhi, embraced the challenge of refashioning many of their values and beliefs in the light of their new experiences–and often brought the results home. <div><br />The story of the homecoming, more than a hundred years ago, of the greatest overseas Indian in history makes for an eternally resonant parable. As Gandhi proved, sometimes the best way of knowing oneself and one’s civilization is by going away.<div><br /></div><div><i>A version of this piece was first published in Bloomberg Opinion</i>. <br /><br /><br /> </div></div>Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-82931907804479412552022-04-25T16:12:00.004+05:302022-04-25T16:20:17.612+05:30On Nico Slate's Gandhi's Search for the Perfect Diet<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgEe-ICnfNI5fFVd4hrxb81s5gf-PPxi6NZm1eLuTRBtzeHOvJKJmPcl-TgqlhD9uxanb0XU_J_fvXrB2oy8TzKx0lmjgBFIqnckReST1Dx4doMZCOQ_O_YsbgTQGAR_P3Piza4ewNWLxBm50_ZNLYuQ1AMATjIOHJV6GKRH_-AYEeEXsazrw" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="945" data-original-width="630" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgEe-ICnfNI5fFVd4hrxb81s5gf-PPxi6NZm1eLuTRBtzeHOvJKJmPcl-TgqlhD9uxanb0XU_J_fvXrB2oy8TzKx0lmjgBFIqnckReST1Dx4doMZCOQ_O_YsbgTQGAR_P3Piza4ewNWLxBm50_ZNLYuQ1AMATjIOHJV6GKRH_-AYEeEXsazrw=w214-h320" width="214" /></a></div>There are two kinds of people, the saying goes: those who eat to live, and those who live to eat. But over the course of a lifetime, each one of us is perhaps both kinds of person. One could just as easily discern a pattern in which human beings typically eat with a bias toward pleasure, taste, excess and conformity in the first half of their lives, before gradually listing towards seeing food through the prisms of health, nutritional value, novelty, and diversity, as well as dietary questions of a social and political nature and a sense of the importance of tradition in cooking and eating. Hyper-aware and pleasure- virtue-signalling moderns, we are sometimes both these people on the same day.<div><br />But whichever way you look at it, our relationship with diet and consumption is profoundly detailed and layered, encompassing our deepest, most primitive instincts, our childhood memories, centuries of culture and tradition, and large social and political crosscurrents. As our relationship to our own bodies and to the world changes over the course of a lifetime, so does our thinking about food.</div><div><br />And modern consumer society makes huge demands on our eating lives — both in the negative sense of continuously presenting us with scores of tempting food choices, many of them unhealthy, that we must discipline ourselves to resist, and in the more positive one of offering us culinary possibilities from the entire world and the chance to grow and learn from the experience of traditions not our own. In England, when I combine in a single morning a visit to Sainsbury’s with the South Asian and East Asian and Caribbean supermarkets, I often come away with the same feeling of gastronomic pleasure and possibility that I did intellectually as a student when I visited the Cambridge University Library (home to a few million books, and therefore all the knowledge acquired by humanity).</div><div><br />But I also find myself asking many questions, as I’m sure you do when you shop for food. Pleasurable though it is to eat, what is the carbon footprint of the Chinese pear or Brazilian mango in my shopping bag? Do microwave meals cut down time in the kitchen and allow harried parents a spot of leisure, or do they help create a convenience culture of culinary illiteracy and dependence on processed food? What food system is better for farmers and food sellers: The highly consolidated, corporatized, imports-oriented model of the West or the much more diversified and localized but disorderly one of India, with its millions of small farmers with a deep relationship to the land but without proper access to (or any power over) markets and often themselves living in food insecurity? With every meal that I put on the table, what ripples in the food universe do I create or participate in?<br /><br />These questions have acquired a deeper resonance for me since reading <a href="#">Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet</a>, the American scholar Nico Slate’s deep, wise book about the eating life of one of the moral giants of the modern world. Very few people think of Mahatma Gandhi as an authority on food. His emaciated figure seems, if anything, to suggest a lifetime of ignoring the rich and varied culinary delights of the Indian subcontinent. And, of course, he was vegetarian too; he never knew the pleasure of a Lucknowi galouti kabab, a Bengali daab chingri, a Peshawari raan, a Konkani surmai rava fry, or a fiery Kerala crab roast. Sad.<br /><br />But, as Slate shows, Gandhi was, in his own way, an extremely ambitious eater -- even a peculiar kind of gourmet -- continuously experimenting with new foods and new dietary combinations throughout his life. Although brought up in a strict vegetarian environment, he lived for 25 years of his adult life in vegetarian-unsympathetic England and South Africa, becoming part of the small vegetarian and radical countercultures in these countries (meaning that, even while eating less food than most, he had a more varied and cosmopolitan diet than most).</div><div><br />Food was an integral part of Gandhi’s politics and spirituality. Sometimes he changed his diet to identify with an oppressed community, such as when he started eating mealie pap, a corn porridge that was a staple of the Blacks of South Africa, after first resisting it when given it in jail. When the relationship between sugar, slavery and empire became clear to him, he stopped eating sweets. And when he wanted the people of India to rise up unitedly against the British Raj, he launched an agitation for their right to produce their own salt, a basic necessity of life that was produced and heavily taxed by the state.<br /><br />A critic of many aspects of modernity, Gandhi also criticized the growing industrialization of food culture. He pointed out that eating highly processed food was not only unhealthy, but that it could also insulate the consumer from inequalities and injustices in the chain of production. The raw food, organic food and local food movements of our time can all find an ally in him.<br /><br />Gandhi strived all his life for mastery of his palate, believing that gluttony was a symbol of indiscipline and spiritual corruption, not to mention unhealthy and unseemly in a world where so many people do not have enough food to eat. He was highly impressed by those who kept fasts, believing that fasting was not only good for health, but that it also developed self-mastery. Sometimes, Slate points out, his austerity and quest for dietary perfection could become obsessive — almost an egotism of sacrifice and renunciation. Yet he was alive to the social and pleasure-giving power of food and — for someone who ate so little — he gave, or attended, a surprisingly large number of dinner parties.</div><div><br />Most importantly, unlike many food (and other) crusaders of today, Gandhi was not arrogant and inflexible about his moral positions on diet. For such a passionate vegetarian, he was a greatly tolerant one. To those who defended meat-eating, he asked only that they make an effort to eat less meat. “Understanding Gandhi’s diet," writes Slate, "is… to connect two of history’s perennial questions: How to live and what to eat.” It might be hard for ordinary people like you and me to subject their diet to such rigor and moral ambition. But we could all do with inviting Gandhi, metaphorically speaking, to dinner.</div><div><br /></div><div>And two old posts on The Middle Stage: on <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2007/07/on-rajmohan-gandhis-biography-of.html">Rajmohan Gandhi's biography of Gandhi</a>, and on <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-mahatma-gandhis-autobiography-my.html">Gandhi's autobiography</a>.</div>Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-85474591600864281452022-04-05T21:29:00.008+05:302022-04-11T12:04:42.407+05:30On Upendranath Ashk's Girti Deevarein<div class="separator"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/#" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhXcuT7ThjE7ebZQOmWdXE6XppSzVy_mA6xcwFnRO65o-ktNcTUwuCnrpWjktKWAe2RspuiGG0cCh12nbhmJsbvIDmb6XK-UPFI9pJtev6AurlajBWjft2EqD4aRJ6xIIQ63Eiw_f1rvrdfqLlXSxrZd7u_KBq_p2i53AA7PowTNLpJty_f_g=w219-h320" width="219" /></a></div><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"></span></p><br />In the novel form’s capacious chest of mysteries, one intriguing phenomenon is the attraction of so many novelists who call themselves realists to protagonists who are anything but. (Of course, they can be “realists” in different senses, but equally, sometimes they are not.) Like all paradoxes, this one too points to an important truth. <br /><br />From Cervantes onwards, naïve protagonists in fiction, their hearts full of great dreams and noble ideals, believing that a more just world can be realised, often rudely schooled in worldly truths by the cynical, provide a point of view on human nature that eventually unsettles the reader just as much as their fictional milieu unsettles them. Of course, they may come across as purely comic if they, like Don Quixote, refuse to learn anything at all. But equally, should they learn to adapt themselves completely to their circumstances, we sense something tragic about their pragmatism, like that of a parrot that has made peace with living in a cage. And so their education has not been in vain, for even as these characters become more worldly-wise, we feel the need to defend or rescue exactly what they are abandoning. It is a good template for a story...I feel it myself as I write this schema out.<br /><br />Something like this narrative arc – one says “something” because this 500-page novel is nevertheless only a fragment of a massive, seven-volume story, and much remains to be realized in the “future” of the story – appears in <i><a href="https://penguin.co.in/book/falling-walls/">Girti Deevarein (Falling Walls)</a></i> by Upendranath Ashk. Ashk was one of the leading lights of Hindi literature in the twentieth century, and remains, alongside Premchand and Yashpal, one of the realist Hindi novel’s holy trinity. The <i>Girti Deevarein</i> series was his great novelistic project: the story of five years in the life of a highly sensitive young man that he hoped would also become a portrait of the age.<br /><br />Here is a writer, therefore, who is no hurry at all. (How was he to know that his first readers in English would be reading him decades later in a time when there is time for nothing, and especially not novels?) For three or four hundred pages, all we are given are the torments of the provincial young protagonist, Chetan, in the town of Jalandhar as he flaps, stumbles, falls, and gets up again, buffeted by the storms of family, education, livelihood, poverty, marriage – and his own questing self, which will not allow him to accept easy answers to his questions, even as it cannot reject the dictates of convention.<br /><br />Brutalized by a belligerent, hard-drinking father who is nevertheless perfectly secure about his place in the world, Chetan knows he can never become the same kind of man. But has no sense of what kind of man to become instead. He needs time to grow into a place of independence, but meanwhile time is a rope steadily twisting tighter knots around him: a wife who does not represent what he wants in a woman, a job in a newspaper that bears no resemblance to what he seeks from work. He is tormented both by his feelings of towards women who cross his path – most notably his own sister-in-law, Neela – and by his inability to do anything about them. Not having a strong sense of self, he repeatedly places his trust in older men who seem to represent some kind of power or virtue. But each one of these engagements leads him only to a further revelation of “the duplicity of the age.”<br /><br />Above him, another figure seems to proceed much more serenely: the narrator, building up in painstaking (and occasionally pointless) detail the surfaces and structures of lower middle-class life in undivided Punjab in the nineteen-thirties. We are in a universe of galis and mohallas, charpoys and turbans, thundering patriarchs, downcast mothers, the frames of karma and dharma, the Arya Samaj and the Congress party, a glass of milk before bed and one set of new clothes every year. Men prefer the company of men, women only open up to other women, and both sexes sublimate their unactable yearnings in story or song or silence. Late in the book, at a restaurant in Shimla, we learn that Chetan “tasted salad for the first time in his life” – a novel taste in a world where milk reigns over not just meals but metaphors, and the prevalent theory of parenting holds “that the curses of a mother and father are like drops of milk and ghee.”<br /><br /><a href="https://scroll.in/article/878800/meet-the-american-who-translates-some-of-indias-finest-hindi-writers-into-english">Daisy Rockwell</a>, Ashk’s greatly involved and touchingly partisan translator (she has also written a critical biography of the writer, and published a collection of his stories called Hats and Doctors), has elsewhere compared Ashk to Proust. The resemblance is certainly worth contemplating. Both writers wrote a seven-volume novel sequence that remained unfinished; the theme of <i>In Search of Lost Time</i> is also the development of a nervous and questing young man into an artist; and both protagonists return obsessively to the fevered climate of their childhoods.<br /><br />But the fundamental difference between the two writers is that Proust’s story is told in the first person by the protagonist, who by the force and beauty and peculiarity of his obsessions succeeds in converting us to his poetic vision of reality, while Ashk’s narrator shows us Chetan from the outside as the prisoner of his circumstances, and reality in Ashk’s world remains stubbornly prosaic and mean. The workings of memory are central to the narrative method of both writers. But the dozens of flashbacks into Chetan’s childhood in Girti Deevarein reveal not just of a character who seeks refuge from his own present, but also a writer wrestling with his own rather rudimentary technique and generating more mass than meaning.<br /><br />About a hundred pages from the end, though, the writing suddenly takes wing, and Chetan’s difficulties with the world suddenly begin to be marked by insight rather than incoherence. Glimmering observations begin to appear about the relationship between art and life, self and society, religion and morality. Trying, for instance, to compare the boy Chetan’s genuine love of nature with the adult Chetan’s equally genuine love of art, the narrator observes that “with art, he found what he couldn’t attain in nature: self-expression” and that “Art is really the daughter of nature.”<br /><br />The story builds up to a devastating denouement. After having meditated for long upon his discontents, Chetan decides that he is at fault for the emotional distance between him and his wife. He resolves to make a genuine effort to scale the wall of gender difference so deeply built into marriage by tradition, and make his wife not his slave but his friend.<br /><br />Just then, though, comes the news that Neela, his sister-in-law, is about to be married off at a very young age. And Chetan remembers that it was he himself who, having nearly committed a misdemeanour with Neela, had advised her father to have her married off and in so doing, congratulated himself on his own powers of restraint.<br /><br />Now, attending the wedding, he sees that the girl is being married off to a well-off, well-over-the -hill widower. Yearning for a genuine soulmate himself, he has just ensured that another human being will forever be denied one. Yet again Chetan feels hapless, but there is a difference: he feels hapless for the sake of someone else. And in the same breath he ceases to lie to himself.<br /><blockquote>The naked truth appeared before him. He was in love with Neela. Despite a year and a half of married life, he loved her….Intelligence, religion, morality, society, marriage – all those walls which in reality had kept his desire hidden from him had fallen in his imagination.</blockquote>Watching these walls fall so dramatically, one moves from asking more of Ashk to asking for more Ashk.<br /><br /> Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-50947961484299466902021-12-30T22:18:00.002+05:302021-12-30T22:18:18.136+05:30A new book: My Country Is Literature<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgW75pGp2Q34SKe6iEsUahJpPufWNW4PCdcsoGu4h84L_6nnhtYLpG9M0FktvthL7XwmGR6_mLZHSnXcGf0Lnoj72JuxGKfjvNawoJucJaEdbXCsnZ6j3-V6CTr56XBuqlsBnhkltoO3GzKtunSoepgrbks6kqvrSi-adsTRPraEwDK_GhC0Q=s2550" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2550" data-original-width="1554" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgW75pGp2Q34SKe6iEsUahJpPufWNW4PCdcsoGu4h84L_6nnhtYLpG9M0FktvthL7XwmGR6_mLZHSnXcGf0Lnoj72JuxGKfjvNawoJucJaEdbXCsnZ6j3-V6CTr56XBuqlsBnhkltoO3GzKtunSoepgrbks6kqvrSi-adsTRPraEwDK_GhC0Q=w195-h320" width="195" /></a></div>I have a new book out this month: <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.co.in/books/My-Country-Is-Literature/Chandrahas-Choudhury/9789392099106">My Country Is Literature</a> — a book of literary essays, some of them first published here on the Middle Stage. It is published by Simon & Schuster, and has over 60 essays on writers and books (including a great many Indian novelists from across the history of the Indian novel) and a long introduction, "The Books of My Twenties, or, How I Became A Literary Critic," that is a memoir of my life in book-reviewing.<p></p><p>Two excerpts from it — one, a passage about the relationship of literary criticism to the essay and of the novel to life, and two, some memories of my father, who taught me to love books and to treasure libraries — are <a href="https://openthemagazine.com/lounge/books/imaginary-homeland/">here</a> and <a href="https://scroll.in/article/1012670/i-couldnt-have-been-a-writer-without-my-father-i-couldnt-have-been-one-with-him-either">here</a>. Here is a paragraph from it:</p><p></p><blockquote>A book is only one text, but it is many books. It is a different book for each of its readers. My <i>Anna Karenina</i> is not your <i>Anna Karenina</i>; your <i>A House for Mr Biswas</i> is not the one on my shelf. When we think of a favourite book, we recall not only the shape of the story, the characters who touched our hearts, the rhythm and texture of the sentences. We recall our own circumstances when we read it: where we bought it (and for how much), what kind of joy or solace it provided, how scenes from the story began to intermingle with scenes from our life, how it roused us to anger or indignation or allowed us to make our peace with some great private discord. This is the second life of the book: its life in our life.</blockquote><p></p><p>It's a book about all the pleasures and glories of being a reader and trawling the boundless seas of literature. If you know of someone, especially a young person, who loves books, please present them a copy.</p>Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-57574774396063094322021-02-10T14:44:00.002+05:302021-05-24T10:05:24.977+05:30Shakti Maira and the Promise of Beauty<p><span style="font-family: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vOfPMXhAKf8/YCOjw85P0EI/AAAAAAAAD2U/lsPV9_ORKH0rvf1jWbaH7ulAYs3JX-lKgCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Shakti%2BMaira.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vOfPMXhAKf8/YCOjw85P0EI/AAAAAAAAD2U/lsPV9_ORKH0rvf1jWbaH7ulAYs3JX-lKgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Shakti%2BMaira.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">"Saundarya drishti </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">– an eye, a sense, an instinct for beauty – is a quality naturally available to every human being.” </span></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The painter and sculptor Shakti Maira reclines in an armchair, and in a patch of morning sunlight, in his family home on a quiet, tree-lined street in Delhi’s Greater Kailash I. “And further, the experience of beauty is such a vital part of the human sense of </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">well</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">-being. Sadly, we have become so acculturated today to the idea that well-being is basically economic. And the idea of beauty has become mainly about looking good, or at the most about visual experience. Today we are constantly taking in-breaths in our lives…and I’m not sure that the experience of beauty is possible without the capacity to take out-breaths.” </span></span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-6f79f6e4-7fff-9686-4838-64beff5babaf"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As Maira looks around the room, it is not difficult to see the beauty in him. In profile, his head and broad shoulders radiate the nobility and classical proportions of a Greek bust from antiquity – an effect only accentuated when his serene gaze trains itself back onto you. During our conversation he frequently takes my name, as if to emphasize that, even if he is doing most of the speaking, this is a dialogue. His use of a meditation metaphor reveals the basic ground of his thought; his widely admired art is intensely focussed on ideas of inner harmony and balance. His smile is mischievous, but underneath it there is something enigmatic that reminds one of the face of the Buddha. This is only his temporary residence – his mother, who lives on the ground floor, is 95 and he wants to be near her – but it is lined with beautiful objects, including many made with his own hands, such as his distinctive long human figurines in wood and metal. (“When I think of human beings I see them as feeling, perceiving, imagining creatures, but deeply rooted in the earth. That may be why their bodies look like the trunks of trees.”).</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Beauty, clearly, has never been far from Maira’s thoughts. At 70, he has lived many lives – including two decades in corporate life in America before returning to Delhi at the turn of the century – and has won accolades for both his painting and his sculpture, not to mention a book about aesthetic experience and spirituality called </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://www.amazon.in/Towards-Ananda-Rethinking-Indian-Aesthetics-ebook/dp/B01MUA1ACX">Ananda</a>. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-6gCSJDQRQLQ/YCOia9rFAmI/AAAAAAAAD2E/36BNRF-3Kn4dYZ7vA0Il2bZjrBWO3FBQQCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1334" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-6gCSJDQRQLQ/YCOia9rFAmI/AAAAAAAAD2E/36BNRF-3Kn4dYZ7vA0Il2bZjrBWO3FBQQCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="156" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">His new book, </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Promise of Beauty</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, is notable for being both an emphatic act of assertion and a graceful gesture of self-effacement. Although there are in it dozens of pages of vivid, magisterial writing on the meaning and experience and history of beauty – Maira belongs to that line of protean Indian fine artists who are as comfortable with words as with paint and wood – the bulk of the book is devoted to a set of eighteen long conversations. A cast of eminent scientists and philosophers, poets and painters, dancers and ecologists, architects and politicians are engaged by Maira on the subject of beauty: how and why we experience it, and what it can and should mean to us. </span></span><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Most Indian readers will know some of the names in the book – Muzaffar Ali, perhaps, or Vandana Shiva – but the range of the cast and the continuum of science, art, economics and ecology along which the subject is explored will surely be a surprise. If our instinct for beauty is innate, Maira asks, to what extent can it be further trained? Are ideas of beauty cultural constructs, or are some things universally beautiful? Is beauty a static or a dynamic state, a state of balance or of sublime disruption? Are there many dimensions and planes to beauty – sensual, intellectual, spiritual – and how might we climb this ladder of beauty? Is the experience of beauty confined to human beings, or might animals, too, have a sense of aesthetic delight? When we experience something beautiful, what exactly is going on in the brain and what can modern neuroscience tell us about it? What are the aesthetic theories of India and how do they compare to those of the West? Is the world of economics and the active enemy of a beauty-centred existence, or can there be an economics rooted in respect for beauty? Must beauty have any place in policy-making? Why are the modern fine arts so suspicious of beauty? If our experience of beauty is closely tied to the quality of attention we bring to songs, paintings, or people, doesn’t beauty lead out naturally to ideas of responsibility and care? Are beauty, truth and goodness inextricably linked, or can each of these exist without the other?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maira’s interlocutors are clearly provoked and delighted by these questions, for they throw themselves wholeheartedly into the dance he proposes. The biologist Pushpa Mitta Bhargava wonders if we find some forms in nature especially beautiful because we ourselves are part of the world of such forms (something we often forget in our sense of separateness from the world produced by the alienating sophistication of our consciousness, itself an object of beauty in its own right). The scientist Rupert Sheldrake dwells on the beauty of flowers and fruits from a evolutionary perspective – they are beautiful in order to attract pollinators – and riffs on the idea of beauty as a web of interconnected relationships, an idea echoed by the poet Ruth Padel when she speaks of humans as “membraneous beings” who are constantly navigating between what is inside and outside them. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These are magnificent, memorable encounters: the more that people say on the subject, the more, it seems, there is left to say. The philosopher Roger Scruton compares the bliss of beauty to the experience of love – “It wells within us but is directed outwards and involves a self-giving of the person who feels it.” The architect Gautam Bhatia ruminates on why modern Indian cities are so ugly when the older facades amidst them are so much more harmonious, and what contours a new imagination of the beautiful Indian city might have. The filmmaker Muzaffar Ali describes the vision of beauty at the core of Sufism (“Beauty, especially in Sufism, is a continuous battle between the visible and the invisible”). It’s like a one-book literary festival on one of the richest and deepest of human themes, with Maira playing the role of a shrewd and sagacious Master of Ceremonies.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The conversation is not all amiable: Maira’s interlocutors resist or elude him, too, which friction generates productive channels of its own. Padel rejects his attempt to give beauty a very transcendent, even salvific, status in human affairs, allowing for nothing more ambitious than “Beauty is a working okayness.” The painter Anjolie Ela Menon finds Maira’s vision of beauty as gladness, well-being and balance somewhat underwhelming, pointing out that at the pinnacle of beauty, “there is ecstasy” – the ecstasy, for instance, of love-making, which has no connection with making the world a better place or the lovers more truthful people. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Promise of Beauty </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is idiosyncratically written: after every two or three chapters, Maira pauses to take stock on the advances that have been made, and to draw together some of the strands of what has been said with his own thinking on beauty. “Beauty is more than a concept,” he writes, “and is best taught through lived experiences of mind and body.” Some of the best moments in the book are when takes us into such experiences of his own. There is the state of alertness, wonder and centeredness that comes with the casting of a bowl in a pottery studio. And the devastating and yet cleansing experience of releasing the ashes of his 26-year-old son into the waters of the Ganga, and then, a year later, of taking up some clay from the banks of the same river, further downstream, to use on a canvas – an experience that leads organically to “a renewed wholeness” as life, time, and art form ever-new patterns and combinations.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I would say that my life has been and continues to be blessed by beauty,” Maira writes in the book’s concluding pages. But while there is much beauty to be found in the world, “my most profound experiences of beauty have come in meditative quietening, when I have found access to the mind’s inherent spaciousness, its light, peace and well-being.”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maira’s overall diagnosis, his sense that there is something profoundly out of joint in our world today, is, I think, correct. For all the freedoms and energies and aspirations released by post-liberalization India, there is today in our civilization also a crisis of beauty. We are harrowed by the chaos and violence and pollution of the city without being able to change anything about it, bemused by our own unending gush of material needs that thrill to the invitations everywhere to indulge them, out of touch with the continuity and consolation of traditional Indian forms, and diminished by our inability to pay close and sustained attention to anything by the white noise of our smartphone lives. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If we were to pause and “allow our instinct for beauty to become more manifest in our lives,” he believes, we would be able to make a new compact with ourselves and each other. “To live in beauty might be a good working definition of a happy and healthy life at all levels of existence.”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><div><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span></div>Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-44731523044840054892021-01-01T23:42:00.007+05:302021-01-12T17:16:44.610+05:30On Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Birth of a Dream Weaver<p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XWJzrgD0gqw/X_2L974wyYI/AAAAAAAADzQ/e_8xLr8TSsgWZ9a6M1s84XvHAlDvyFvXACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="190" data-original-width="145" height="240" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XWJzrgD0gqw/X_2L974wyYI/AAAAAAAADzQ/e_8xLr8TSsgWZ9a6M1s84XvHAlDvyFvXACLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" width="183" /></a></div>Have the pleasure and power that a BA in English can confer on a human being ever been described more movingly and inspiringly than in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://thenewpress.com/books/birth-of-dream-weaver">Birth of a Dream Weaver</a></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? The new book by <a href="https://ngugiwathiongo.com/about/">the great Kenyan novelist and playwright</a>, now 78 and a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, is the last of a trilogy of memoirs he has published this decade. </span><p></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-ca728fc0-7fff-8631-249c-c23f45538f5d"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The story of his years at university, it can quite profitably be read on its own as the account of the ripening of a writer’s artistic consciousness. But for the full force of its revelations, ironies, and moral and literary cruxes, one should first take in its predecessors, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dreams In A Time of War</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (childhood) and </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In The House of the Interpreter</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (adolescence).</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In those books, we saw the boy Ngugi growing up amongst a vast brood of siblings in the large, raucous rural homestead of his father, a goat-herder – and then suddenly being cast out when his mother, one of four wives, flees to her own father’s home after being beaten by her husband. We are in the nineteen-forties. The world is at war, and Kenya is an impoverished colony of Britain, with a nascent freedom struggle masterminded by an outlawed group called the Land and Freedom Movement, or the Mau Mau. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g1bgLc2Ar3A/X-9k495kP7I/AAAAAAAADyQ/4Qfu5b93tE8skT1uzLiH40az4g2NfftewCLcBGAsYHQ/s360/Ngugi.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="240" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g1bgLc2Ar3A/X-9k495kP7I/AAAAAAAADyQ/4Qfu5b93tE8skT1uzLiH40az4g2NfftewCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Ngugi.jpg" /></a></span>The young boy is poor, powerless and often hungry, the captive of a present “born of the power plays of the past”. He takes refuge from history in the consoling power of stories, including those narrated by a blind half-sister, Wabia. Although illiterate and a single parent, Ngugi’s peasant mother has many dreams for her son. When the boy wants to go to school, she makes a pact with him. She will find the money as long as he agrees “to always give his best”. This refrain echoes through the books, setting up the sense of a private ethic – the idea that one is answerable to oneself even more than one is to the world – that overrides worldly standards. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Having excelled at his studies, Ngugi wins a place at an elite boarding school, Alliance. He wears shoes for the first time and goes forth into the world. The ironies multiply: the arbitrary depredations of colonial rule menace Ngugi’s every dream, but it a school run by Christian missionaries that provides him a physical and intellectual sanctuary from the strife of the larger world. English books give him a sense of the power of literature and the imagination, but English is also the language in which the colonisers assert their power and stereotype the native as a primitive, not much better than a beast. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, in </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Birth of a Dream Weaver</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the steadily expanding frames in the story of both mind and world reach an apotheosis. Innocence is no longer a virtue, or a crutch to hold on to. Ngugi is in his early twenties and has won a scholarship to Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, the most famous educational institution in East Africa. The sense of a divided self remains. The railways in Africa were set up for the exploitation of the continent’s natural wealth. Even in taking a train to Kampala, “I was benefiting from a history that had come to negate my history”.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But even so, Ngugi is now in a position to fight for his own side of history. Once a passive watcher of events in the world (“In my mind, political actors had always appeared as fictional characters”), he is now part of the intellectual elite of his generation. All around him, decolonization movements are changing the old world order; he looks up from his book to “the rise of new flags” and throws himself into passionate debates about race, religion, politics, language and literature. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ngugi decides he wants to become a novelist, and is persuaded by his peers to become a playwright to dramatize the burning debates of the day. His work as an artist brings a new thrill and tension to the interplay in these books between the worlds, not always antithetical to one another, of “history” and “story”. When a contract for his first novel arrives in the post from a London publisher, Ngugi is over the moon. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Meanwhile, back in his native Kenya, the independence movement delivers the country back to its people. Ngugi leaves university both a free man – in the sense of having become an thinker who has transcended his limited origins – and the citizen of a free country. Even so, the book ends on an unusually pessimistic note, with dark forebodings of the crises to come: the dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi (under whose regime Ngugi would later be thrown into prison) and the sense that colonialism had, even in departing the scene physically, left its tentacles in Africa. The face of the young man slips away, replaced by that of a disappointed 78-year-old.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">None of that will distract the reader, though, from the central emphases of these books: their unflinching faith in education and in the power of literature to liberate the imagination and ground the moral sense. Indeed, it’s hard to think of another living writer today – <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2011/03/on-orhan-pamuks-naive-and-sentimental.html">Orhan Pamuk</a>, perhaps – who speaks so inspiringly and convincingly about the values of literature. For some years now, Ngugi has been spoken of as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize. The publication of this riveting story of “how the herdsboy, child labourer and high school dreamer…became a weaver of dreams” makes this an ideal year to give Ngugi wa Thiong’o his due.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And some other old posts on the Middle Stage on autobiographies: <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2006/07/acid-thoughts-of-sasthi-brata.html">"The acid thoughts of Sasthi Brata"</a>, <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-mahatma-gandhis-autobiography-my.html">"On Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography </a><i><a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-mahatma-gandhis-autobiography-my.html">My Experiments With Truth"</a>,</i> <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2006/12/on-memoirs-of-president-pervez.html">"On the memoirs of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan"</a>, and <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2007/07/on-muhammad-yunuss-autobiography-banker.html">"On Muhammad Yunus's autobiography <i>Banker to the Poor"</i></a>.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.295; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>A slightly different version of this essay appeared in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?next_url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.washingtonpost.com%2fopinions%2fhow-the-son-of-an-african-goat-herder-became-a-nobel-prize-contender%2f2016%2f11%2f22%2f843a98d4-8020-11e6-8327-f141a7beb626_story.html">the Washington Post</a>.</i></span></p><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span>Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-81238958725763351092020-10-31T17:21:00.009+05:302020-11-01T16:35:52.075+05:30On Boyd Tonkin's The 100 Best Novels In Translation<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C6xhIeMZo5s/X51OgKV5NkI/AAAAAAAADuk/bljeh5WM92IEnEQGbKCApwMk6rb3avYewCLcBGAsYHQ/s520/100_best_novels_in_translation.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="341" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C6xhIeMZo5s/X51OgKV5NkI/AAAAAAAADuk/bljeh5WM92IEnEQGbKCApwMk6rb3avYewCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/100_best_novels_in_translation.jpg" /></a></span></span></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Over the last 400 years, the novel has become the pre-eminent prose storytelling form around the world: a torch that passes from country to country, language to language, lighting new fires of story everywhere and finding, or making, new audiences. It follows, then, nobody counts as a serious reader of novels who does not read novels in translation.</span><div><p></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Many of our great novel-reading experiences are actually the result of the work of two artists, not one. How would we know Chekhov in English without Constance Garnett, Proust without CK Scott-Moncrieff, Garcia Marquez without Gregory Rabassa? How would the Arab novel have travelled to Anglophone shores without the pioneering work of Denys Johnson-Davies? </span><span>As the British literary critic Boyd Tonkin argues in his exciting new book </span><i><a href="https://galileopublishing.co.uk/100-best-novels-in-translation/">The 100 Best Novels in Translation</a></i><span>, translators are the great travel agents and bridge-builders of the novel form, allowing books written in one language to be read – with pleasure approximating the experience of the original – by readers in many others.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Since no one language or country has a monopoly on novelistic excellence, every reader knows a majority of his or her favourite novelists in the words fashioned by their translators.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span>In fact, without translators to give them new material to feed on, even novelists would be stuck with models solely from their own linguistic tradition. Unsung, often even unnamed, translators are the silent heroes of literature.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"><br /></span></span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>And although the Anglophone world is extremely rich in translators, a sad consequence of the spread of English and of monoglot culture has been the marginalization of works in translation. </span><span>But here comes Tonkin to remedy that. For many years the literary editor of the British newspaper </span><i>The Independent,</i><span> Tonkin has always been a committed proponent, in a literary culture all too often unconsciously insular, of the pleasure and power of the cosmopolitan tradition of the novel and the translators that make it come alive.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span>Uniquely, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, an annual prize he helped found, awarded its prize money equally to author and translator.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Now he presses his decades of reading world literature into a literary panorama of great geographical sweep and intellectual charge, making a list of his favourite novels in translation across 400 years, from Cervantes to Balzac, Mario Vargas Llosa to Orhan Pamuk (one of the rules of the game is that no author is allowed more than one book). Here is a book that makes a hundred other books come alive.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>In fact more than a hundred, as Tonkin often points to more than one translation of a novel, pointing to the relative merits of each in a way that might disconcert those readers who want him to recommend “the best translation”. </span><span>Certainly, many versions exist of the first book on the list, Cervantes’s </span><i>Don Quixote</i><span> (1605), “the acknowledged pattern-book or seed-bank which germinates every branch of Western fiction”. But if Tonkin is to be taken at his word, Edith Grossman’s 2003 translation is the most readable of them all and the most faithful to Cervantes’s style.</span></span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span><br /></span></span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>For all those of us who loved novels in our youth but have sacrificed their pleasures to the demands of family, work, and social media, here is a book to make you fall in love all over again. In almost every essay, Tonkin says something illuminating and memorable.</span><span>In Marcel Proust’s great novel sequence </span><i>In Search of Lost Time</i><span>, “Not quite all human life is here. All human feeling is.” In his essay on <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2020/06/naguib-mahfouz-and-truths-of-novel.html">Naguib Mahfouz’s</a> </span><i>Cairo Trilogy</i><span>, he gets to the heart of what has made the novel such a good traveller when he says that the books “enact a dialogue between Egyptian ways of being and European ways of knowing.”</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"><br /></span></span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Each essay has many wonderful quotations from the books themselves, allowing the reader direct access to the novelist’s style and sensibility. How I wish I’d had this book when I was a literature student 15 years ago. It would have saved me so much work.</span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Tonkin is at his most revelatory in his selections from 17<sup>th</sup> and 18<sup>th</sup> century novels, ands then again in the final decades of the twentieth century. I only found him somewhat limited – and more than a touch Eurocentric – in the middle. The core of his list is made up of novels from between 1920 and 1960. </span><span>Here there are too many predictable choices – and too many men. I’m not convinced that Sartre, Camus, and Mann are as essential as Tonkin thinks. And there are a host of great Italian writers (Buzzati, Pavese, Bassini, Svevo) whom one might also consider not indispensable, especially when one sees there are so few novels from the Indian subcontinent (two), Africa, or the Arab world.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"><br /></span></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Tonkin is too hung up, one might say, on European ways of knowing European ways of being. A cosmopolitan literary critic brought up in Delhi, Rio or Cairo would probably add many exciting novelists to such a list (<a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2020/04/gopinath-mohantys-immortal-indians.html">Gopinath Mohanty</a>, Jorge Amado, Nawal el-Saadawi, <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/REVIEW-No-sheltering-sky-in-this-desert-story-2515483.php">Malika Mokkedem</a>) while still covering the great European tradition. </span><span>But this is a small cavil at a large and generous project. As Tonkin shows, we are living in a great age of translation, with many of the great classics of old also being presented in exciting new versions. (“Translations, notoriously, age faster than their originals.”)</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> W</span><span>e need people like Tonkin to bring the big picture into focus – and to allow us to refocus it to make big pictures of our own.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p1"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i>A version of this piece first appeared in The National.</i></span></p><style type="text/css">
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</style></div>Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-38829814737410908472020-08-30T13:05:00.005+05:302020-09-01T19:50:11.816+05:30Talking History with Romila Thapar<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FNEXTaKfOBw/X0tV2n5kO_I/AAAAAAAADrk/6piwp6BeR-EaGEUQP-0UiCrWnzx-Z2RCACLcBGAsYHQ/s499/images%2B%25282%2529.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="323" height="399" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FNEXTaKfOBw/X0tV2n5kO_I/AAAAAAAADrk/6piwp6BeR-EaGEUQP-0UiCrWnzx-Z2RCACLcBGAsYHQ/w258-h399/images%2B%25282%2529.jpeg" width="258" /></a></div>Human beings live not just in time, but in history. History is an account of the events of the past, but it amounts to much more than that, for it is also a theory of cause and effect, a source of identity and consolation, a narrative that includes some and excludes others. History may have taken place, but it is never finished: it remains a dynamic entity, capable (like memory) of generating new meanings. History not only influences the present, it is also influenced by it. We go to history in search of answers to questions that are of importance to us now, and so different histories ebb and fade in conjunction with the needs and preoccupations of the present. <p></p>These and many more ideas about the nature of history pop up in <i><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/talking-history-9780199474271?cc=us&lang=en&">Talking History</a></i>, a freewheeling book-length conversation about the practice – as also the politics – of history with Romila Thapar. <div><br /></div><div>Thapar is the doyenne of Indian historians, someone who has lived and worked in two centuries and taken readers into the India of many more, from the world of the Indus Valley civilization to that of the Ramayana, that of Ashoka to the medieval Kashmiri historian Kalhana. Even in her late eighties, she is still very much a vivid and forceful presence on the Indian intellectual scene – not least of because the ascent in recent years of the Hindutva school of history and its votaries, whose keenness to dismiss her outright as “anti-Hindu” and a “Marxist” is a grudging acknowledgement of Thapar’s stature. Her co-discussants here are the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo (now virtually an honorary Indian after having produced several such book-length dialogues on themes in Indian life with other intellectuals) and the historian Neeladri Bhattacharya. <div><div><br />Here is a book to initiate any lay reader into the subtleties and difficulties of the historian’s craft. Although it is not Thapar’s aim to say that history is best understood only by historians, she does want us to appreciate that history is hard: not an open plain, but a dense forest. Finding one’s way around the terrain of history is not easy, and much depends on the intellectual resources, scepticism, imagination and even self-restraint we bring to the quest. </div><div><br />And just as everything – tea or coffee, monarchy or slavery, a word or a worldview – has a history, so, Thapar reminds us, does the writing of history itself. The study of history-writing is called historiography, and from it we see that there can be many ways of thinking about the past, some compatible with one another and some not. The Ramayana may have much to tell us about ancient India, but in its literal form it is not admissible as history, even if some people think of it as such.</div><div><br />Over 300 pages, Thapar takes us on a journey through Indian historiography over the last fifty years as it has attempted to interpret themes and events that take place over a span of at least five thousand years. These are questions of great import over which much ink – and sometimes blood – continue to be spilt. Is it true that Indians lack a sense of historical consciousness, as claimed by writers on India across a whole millennium from Alberuni to James Mill? (“Contesting this,” says Thapar, “has been my lifetime project.”) Was the defining historical event of ancient India an invasion, or waves of migration, from the north-west of the Indo-European peoples that we now call the Aryans? Or, as some writers today would have us believe, were the Aryans indigenous to India and migrants out of India to the west? What kinds of linguistic, archaeological, and literary evidence are admissible in the court of these debates, and must the historian ask different types of questions of each kind of source?</div><div><br />The best pages in the book are those in which Thapar shows how history, even when not motivated by any overt ideological agenda, gradually becomes aware of its own biases and develops new eyes and ears for the past. For instance, since so much of what we know about the past comes from textual evidence, elite groups that had control over the writing of those texts come to dominate our view of the past. The default version of Hinduism we project onto the distant Indian past, therefore, becomes text-based Sanskritic Hinduism. The actual practice of Hinduism may have been much more variegated and idiosyncratic, the product of little and local histories that time has rubbed away.</div><div><br />Nor are details of material culture in texts always set up with factual accuracy as their primary aim: the descriptions of vast wealth and splendour of the imperial court and capital in the <i>Ramayana</i>, for instance, may have behind them the literary impulse of inciting wonder and awe in the reader. Similarly, is easier to write the histories of settled societies than those made up of nomads, to trace a broad narrative of unification and consensus rather than the smaller ones of resistance and heterodoxy, to project modern religious and political categories and motivations upon the past rather than face up to its strangeness. “We should not forget,” says Thapar, “that there is always a part of history which is forgotten.”</div><div><br />And what of the future of Indian history? The arrival of the nation-state in the eighteenth century, Thapar reminds us, led everywhere in the world – whether the nations of Europe or the later decolonization struggles of Asia and Africa – to the gradual reinterpretation of the past through a nationalist frame. Although it was finally riven by a Hindu-Muslim divide that became the basis of a “two-nation theory”, Indian anti-colonial nationalism was an inclusive ideology that did not see Indianness as anchored in a particular religion or language. </div><div><br />This led, at independence, to the ambitious construction in the new nation-state of India of a new platform for Indian history, one that sought to draw a line around the violence and iniquity of the past and endowed all those who lived within the boundaries of India with the same rights and freedoms. </div><div><br />The secular and democratic leanings of this new order (as also trends in the wider world of historiography) greatly affected, Thapar explains, the aims and aspirations of Indian historiography. Indian historians aimed to recover the marginalized histories of women and Dalits, peasants and artisans, traders and travellers, even nonhuman histories focussed on ecology or geography.</div><div><br />Indian history became richer, more textured, more clamorous. But its political implications and reluctance to endorse a grand narrative were vigorously contested by Hindu nationalism, with in its emphasis on religion as the main constituent of Indian identity across the millennia and Vedic Hinduism as the starting point of Indian history (thus the desire to prove that the Aryans were actually native to India). As Hindutva has gained political strength, so too it has attempted to reclaim Indian history for itself – paradoxically often using concepts and formulations, Thapar reminds us, first proposed by British colonialism.</div><div><br />There is a civil war raging in India today, only it is being fought on the ground of Indian history. What we make of our history today will be a great influence on the history that we make.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>An excerpt from <i>Talking History</i> is <a href="https://m.thewire.in/article/books/romila-thapar-talking-history-book-excerpt">here</a>.</div></div></div>Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-82252946309779313502020-06-21T11:36:00.002+05:302020-06-21T11:51:55.829+05:30Naguib Mahfouz and the truths of the Novel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://cdn.britannica.com/36/195536-050-B78107E9/Akhenaten-Egypt-Alexandria-National-Museum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="568" height="320" src="https://cdn.britannica.com/36/195536-050-B78107E9/Akhenaten-Egypt-Alexandria-National-Museum.jpg" width="227" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/05/akhenaten-revolutionary-egypt-king/">Akhenaten</a>, an Egyptian pharaoh, also called the 'Sun King'
or the 'heretic', ruled briefly in Egypt more than three thousand years ago.
Akhenaten's peculiar appearance, as if part man and part woman, his inscrutable
ways, and the wrenching changes he ushered into the life of his kingdom –
shortly after coming to the throne, he overthrew Egypt's traditional polytheism
and decreed the worship of a single god, the sun god Aten – brought him a
notoriety that secured his place in history, where he still floats untethered
to a line of interpretation, a ghostly figure now
perennially shrouded in ambiguity. </div>
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Akhenaten's story nevertheless carries a
certain resonance for all who hear it, because it serves as an archetype
of a conflict that is one of the threads running through the history of
civilization: the conflict between religion and freedom. It is a story remote
in time that links the present to our past. Further, "truth" is one of the keywords of human language and consciousness and is at the centre of every human quest; a narrator who in the very title of his story declares that his protagonist is a "dweller in truth" suggests to us that, whether he is being ironic or sincere, there will be much to learn in the story about what truth is and how we may arrive at it (or the impossibility of ever achieving it). The legend of Akhenaten is
explored, and indeed enriched (because presented in a way that brings into
being before our very eyes the mystery that was Akhenaten, and also given a
thematic direction, a focus on one or two repeated words that is one of the
ways in which novels are most truly novelistic), by the Egyptian Nobel laureate
Naguib Mahfouz in his slender, glancing novel <i><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/106169/akhenaten-by-naguib-mahfouz/">Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth</a></i>.</div>
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Mahfouz's story is narrated from a vantage point relatively
close in time to Akhenaten, through the eyes of a character who grew up in
Akhenaten's Egypt, Meriamun, who becomes a second protagonist. We are not told
Meriamun's exact age, but his thoughts and his language suggest he is in his
early twenties, somewhat unformed, and hungry for experience. On a journey down
the Nile with his father, himself a venerable man with 'a passion for knowledge
and for recording the truth', Meriamun espies on the river a gloomy and
deserted city which he learns is Akhetaten, the dead pharaoh's capital, where
his wife and consort Nefertiti still lives in isolation. "It all began
with a glance, a glance that grew into desire, as the ship pushed its way
through the calm, strong current at the end of the flood season." </div>
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Meriamun's father calls Akhenaten 'the heretic,' but Meriamun is struck by the
pharaoh's story, and senses a suffocating narrowness in the verdict that
history has passed upon him. He quotes to his father a saying by Qaqimna, a
sage they both respect: "Pass no judgment upon a matter until you have
heard all testimonies." Many of Akhenaten's friends, family members, and
followers are still alive, and Meriamun's father is an influential man and can
get them to open their doors to him. With his father's approval ("Your
forefathers sought war, politics, or trade, but you, Meriamun, you seek the
truth instead"), Meriamun sets out to meet all those who knew Akhenaten,
and, as Qaqimna instructed, hear all testimonies.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Akhenaten is dead; each person that Meriamun meets tells him
about the Akhenaten they knew. A basic framework of facts is established.
Akhenaten's mother, Tiye, came from a commoner's family. Having married the
pharaoh Amenhotep III, she then exerted great influence over the royal
household. Akhenaten's name at birth was Amenhotep, like his father; it was
only later, whe he came to the throne, that he changed it to Akhenaten. He was
frail and feeble from birth, but when he and his healthier brother, Tuthmosis,
contracted the same illness, it was Tuthmosis who succumbed to it and Akhenaten
who survived. While he was growing up Akhenaten, although the heir-in-waiting,
showed no interest in matters of government. Rather, his interest lay in
spiritual matters: Ay, his tutor in his youth, recalls that it seemed to him
that he was born 'with some otherworldly wisdom.' Before Akhenaten came to the
throne Queen Tiye had already declared her veneration of Aten, the Sun God, in
preference to Amun, the master of all the deities in Egypt. As he grew mature,
Akhenaten too began to believe in the preeminence of Aten. One morning, while
watching the sun rise, he had a religious vision that affected him profoundly,
and became convinced that the truth had been revealed to him – the truth that
there was only one God, Aten. He resolved thereafter only to 'dwell in truth,'
and walk the path of love and non-violence, and though the pharaoh tried his
best to draw him away from these beliefs, he remained stubborn. <o:p></o:p></div>
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One of Ay's two daughters, Nefertiti, was drawn to the
prince and his beliefs, and they fell in love and were married. When the
pharaoh passed away suddenly, his son came to the throne, upon which he changed
his name to Akhenaten, and immediately set about purging Egypt of its plural
religious traditions by decree, declaring that there was only one god, Aten. He
toured his empire preaching the new religion and proclaiming the message of
love, and set up a new capital, Akhetaten, where he lived with Nefertiti and
his closest followers and gave himself over to devotion. But there remained a
disenchanted faction in the country, followers of the old beliefs and the old
order. At the same time the country's enemies pressed in at its borders,
sensing an opportunity to invade it. But Akhenaten refused to send an army to
the country's borders, saying he would confront the intruders himself with his
message of peace. Finally Akhenaten's chief of security, Haremhab, rebelled and
declared his allegiance to a new pharaoh, Akhenaten's half-brother,Tutankhamun.
Akhentaten was deposed and put under house arrest, his capital was emptied of
his followers, and the country successfully defended by the new regime. Egypt
returned to its old traditions, and Akhenaten passed away soon after. The
official reason for his death, a sudden illness, was contested by his wife, who
continued to reside in the deserted capital, and his followers. The aberrant
monotheistic religion dedicated to the sun god Aten died a swift death after
the pharaoh's passing away, and Akhenaten became established as a heretic in
public memory.<o:p></o:p></div>
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These are the facts: now what is the truth? As Meriamun
covers the territory of Akhenaten's life over and over again with the people he
meets, he encounters a swarm of different narratives of Akhenaten's life, each
with its own particular emphasis: psychological explanations of his behaviour,
speculations that he was a puppet in the hands of his mother or his wife, providential
readings of history, accounts in which he seems remote and otherworldly
contrasting with those in which he seems all too human, assertions that he was
foolishly or tragically deluded milling with those that he was in possession of
a higher truth and hence a martyr.<br />
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Although the characters, who between them
comprised the milieu in which Akhenaten walked, variously express anger, love,
warmth, sadness, or bitterness, few, if any, speak complacently, as if
confident of possession of the whole truth: they are aware that what they
express is an account of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">relationship</i>,
not a one-way stream of knowledge about the life of a man. The novel suggests
that when we seek to establish something definite about human beings, we must
resign ourselves to approaching only the threshold of truth, and not totally
comprehending it: firstly, because we ourselves are implicated in the search,
and bring to it either beliefs or perspectives that are our own and that we
cannot quite lay by, and secondly because, even if we have had an opportunity
to know the person closely or even intimately, and feel confident of a wide
understanding and therefore a kind of objectivity, there is nevertheless still
something about that person that we do not know about or is hidden from us – several
people make some individual observation about Akhenaten that we could consider
of importance, but that others close to him seem not to know. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Nevertheless, the novel is not pessimistic about our desire
to know the truth, our belief that we can ascend to the truth through effort.
It does not regard Meriamun's 'desire to know the truth' cynically, but rather
shows him arriving a more complex conception of it. In fact, something of what
Meriamun will eventually understand is hinted at early in the novel in his
words to his father asking for letters of introduction to all those who knew
Akhenaten and have something of importance to say about him: "Then I could
see the many facets of truth before it perishes like this city." Truth
here is not seen as something easily achieved or formulated; it has many
facets, each of which must be discovered, after which it may not be further
reducible. Also, it is significant that Meriamun speaks of the many facets of
truth before 'it perishes' and not 'they perish': it is as if when even one
facet of the truth is lost then the truth itself stands imperilled. Meriamun
wants to take advantage of his historical proximity to the dead pharaoh to
grasp the many faces of the truth before they begin to ebb away one by one,
leaving behind a thinner, a more famished 'truth' – for instance, the current
understanding of Akhenaten as a heretic.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But it is not Meriamun only, in this novel, who is preoccupied
with the idea of the truth. For that word was also the most important word in
the whole world for Akhenaten, who believed he was a ‘dweller in truth.'<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The novel achieves its charge through the
interplay and contrast of these two conceptions of truth, which we might call
the truth of reason and the truth of religion or faith, a truth that prizes
skepticism and one that resides in belief. We note the differing ways in which
the two protagonists speak of the subject: Meriamun is a seeker of truth;
Akhenaten, a dweller <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in</i> truth. And
through this contrast Mahfouz thrusts us onto rocky ground: is it possible to
make some judgment of the truth about Akhenaten without first making a judgment
of Akhenaten's 'truth' – the vision that came to him and which he codified into
a religious system and propagated as the only true way of knowing God? From
what standpoint can one make such a judgment?<o:p></o:p></div>
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The novel form, which is itself a product of the waning of
religious belief in the world, has sometimes found this judgment easy; it is a
form skeptical of absolutes, and for believers religion is an absolute. But the
great beauty of Mahfouz's novel is that it allows us to enter and inhabit not
just the universe of Meriamun's worldly truth but also that of Akhenaten's
otherworldly truth. For Akhenaten's opponents his religion was a sham religion,
the result of his hallucinations or else a piece of deliberate trickery; Toto,
the chief epistoler in Akhenaten's chamber, thinks it 'the shrewdness of a man
humiliated by his own weakness.' But these judgments are destabilised by the
tutor Ay, who noticed the young Akhenaten's religious bent; by his wife
Nefertiti, who confesses she was drawn to his beliefs 'as a butterfly is drawn
to light,' and by the pharaoh's aged physician Bento, who was skeptical of his
vision at first but then became a believer, and helped set up his capital at
Akhenaten. Akhenaten's followers convincingly describe the ecstasy, the
paradoxical wholeness of being that arrives from surrendering before the divine
that, if at all we admit of the authority of religion, we know as being one of
the authentic experiences of faith. "Every morning I compared what I heard
in the temple of the One God to the liturgy of the old gods," recounts
Bento. "I became certain beyond doubt that a stream of divine light was
filling us with pure happiness. [...] Today, Akhenaten is known only as 'the
heretic.' But despite all that was said about him, my heart still fills with
love at the mention of his name. What a life he created for himself! Did he
really devote his life to love?"<o:p></o:p></div>
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There is a polyphony, then, in Mahfouz's novel similar to
the one we find in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Brothers Karamazov</i>.
Difficult matters are not resolved but addressed so compellingly from different
angles as to give us a true sense of their difficulty. (It could be said that
the novel's striking last paragraph is indeed a kind of resolution, but it is a
private one, not to be generally applied.) Since no final judgment is passed on
Akhenaten from the evidence Meriamun has compiled, one attitude towards
Mahfouz's novel might be that Mahfouz has left it to <i>us</i> to make a judgment
about Akhenaten. But this is to flatter ourselves. The novel is complete without the reader – complete with respect to
the complexity and elusiveness of its subject, and also complete in the manner
in which it is all-seeing, in the way in which it manages a omniscient,
magisterial presence through nothing more than juxtapositions: of narrator and
subject, and of different testimonies. Mahfouz’s narrative method reminds us of
“the calm, strong current” with which the book began; he does not press a
reductive idea of the truth upon us, and in doing so reveals the truths that
only novels can show us.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
A lovely essay by Peter Hessler on Akhenaten is <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/05/akhenaten-revolutionary-egypt-king/">here</a> on National Geographic. Mahfouz's Nobel lecture is <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1988/mahfouz/lecture/">here</a> ("One day the great Pyramid will disappear too. But Truth and Justice will remain for as long as Mankind has a ruminative mind and a living conscience.").</div>
Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-83443559083695834592020-04-20T12:10:00.001+05:302020-04-20T12:22:14.853+05:30Gopinath Mohanty's Immortal Indians<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Is
there another Indian novelist whose books contain, not just so many beautiful
sentences, but so many different <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kinds</i>
of beautiful sentences, as those of <a href="http://gopinathmohanty.in/">Gopinath Mohanty</a> (1914-1991)? No Indian
novelist is as consistently and meaningfully melodious as him, and with no one
else’s material does the reader feel such a strong sense – very hard to achieve
in novelistic prose – of the concentration and economy of music. Most
thrillingly, when one reads Mohanty’s great novels of tribal life in Odisha,
one realizes that the notes he summons derive not just not from his own feeling
nature, but from his material: the pleasure and danger of the forest, the
proximity and capriciousness of the gods, and the elemental beat and spark of
the life-force itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Thankfully,
the impact of Mohanty’s stylistic dexterity and felicity in Odia shine through
even in translation – or have been made to do so by some very painstaking and
adept translators. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Amrutara Santana</i>, published
by Sahitya Akademi in a translation by the Odia scholars and professors of
English literature, (the late) Bidhubhusan Das and Prabhat Nalini Das, as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Dynasty of the Immortals</i>, is one of
two great novels about Odia tribal life written by Mohanty in his youth. The
other is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Paraja</i>, which appeared
almost thirty years ago in an excellent translation by Bikram Das. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Mohanty’s
engagement with the tribals of Odisha began fairly early in life. As a young
bureaucrat enlisted in the Odisha Administrative Service in the years just
before independence, he lived in distant outposts in the district of Koraput,
then, as now, one of India’s poorest regions. But when the young city boy with
an MA in English Literature came into contact with people whom those of the
social order to which he belonged thought of as primitive, simple-minded
hillmen, he found in them a beauty and integrity, a generosity of spirit and a animistic
empathy, a love of song and story that cried out to be enshrined in words. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But
the tribals were also the “other” of mainstream Indian civilization, relentlessly
patronised and exploited, destined to be on the wrong side of history even when
India rid itself of its colonial masters. (“The Kandha,” Mohanty writes
presciently, “is to be found wherever the forest is. However, once the forest
is opened up, the Kandha is evicted from his land.”) Like his contemporary
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay in Bengal with his forest novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aranyak</i>, Mohanty set out to describe
both the rapture and the tragedy of this other way of life. But unlike
Bandyopadhyay, he chose to do so from the point of view of the forest-dwellers
themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Readers
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Paraja</i>, about the tribe by that
name, will immediately recognise the feel and force of the limber, capacious,
almost centreless point of view in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dynasty
of Immortals</i>, about a group of Kandha tribals in a group of isolated,
impoverished villages (“Here, humankind did not get anything from nature
without a struggle”) in the Eastern Ghats. The narration ricochets continuously
from the intimate and the domestic to the wide-angle and the cosmic, from the
narrator’s almost ethnographic observations about the Kandhas to a tracking of
the minds of diverse characters that unspools for us the same worldview from
the inside. Mohanty’s translators find short and long, shapely and broken,
sentences that capture the many shades of light and dark, the many intricate
subtleties, that he conjures up. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Mohanty’s
distinctive narrative method adds to the feeling of extreme intensity and
compression: in tightly sculpted and focussed chapters no more than five or six
pages long, written almost as short stories, we are hit by wave after wave of
powerful feeling. But the jolt in this case is not just aesthetic, but – in
Mohanty’s time and in our own – political. Mohanty’s ecstatic style is an
instrument precisely designed to reveal the beauties of the way of life of his forest-dwelling
protagonists. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Out
here in the forest, distinctions between the human and the animal realm, the
world of human artifacts and that of nature, the living and the dead, seem to be
much more blurred than in modern industrial society. We sense this right from
in the opening chapters of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dynasty</i>,
when the man who appears to be the protagonist of the story, the elderly
village headman Sarabu Saonta, collapses and dies; nevertheless, his presence
echoes across the 600 pages that follow. “Sarabu Saonta loved this earth,” we
read. “He did not know how to love with discrimination. Life was truth, beauty;
let the old body be destroyed, he would be reborn in this beautiful land.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">After
Sarabu dies, his son Diudu, daughter Pubuli, and daughter-in-law Puyu are left
to carry on all the rituals and reveries of their realm: the forbidding and
enchanting forest, with its light and shade, cooing birds and hungry tigers. In one scene, reminiscent of the story of the killing of the male krauncha bird and the grieving sounds of its mate that inspired Valmiki to invent the shloka meter of the <i>Ramayana</i>, Diudu kills a bird on a hunt and, reaching it as it lies thrashing on the ground, thinks he sees a cloud rising in the pupils of its eyes as it expires—an astonishing image. There are other thrilling hunting scenes, in which the contrasting energies of human social dynamics and violence towards beasts are mingled as expertly as Leo Tolstoy did in <i>Anna Karenina</i> (Mohanty was a voracious and cosmopolitan reader and even translated <i>War And Peace</i> into Odia). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In
choosing characters who approach the business of living with such rapture and
intensity, Mohanty reminds one of other twentieth-century artists and
philosophers who, in an ideological age, have resisted the reduction of life to
any system – people like the French film-maker Jacques Becker, who declared,
“In my work I don’t want to prove anything except that life is stronger than
everything else”, or the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, who after being
incarcerated in prison comes to the paradoxical realization that “the meaning
of life is life itself.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
forest is the realm not just of food-gathering, of the hunt, but also of love,
the place where human beings succumb to “the instinct of eternal nature”. It is
the place, in other words – and this is where Mohanty’s focus on a very
particular social world at a particular historical moment acquires a universal
resonance – where man and woman become Man and Woman, carrying on the eternal
dance of life and creation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Repeatedly
in Mohanty’s novels, we are given this sense of what one might call deep time,
the sense of an archetype playing itself out repeatedly across the centuries.
The young people falling in love for the first time thrill to this new emotion;
the storyteller, meanwhile, thrills to the sense of the very same figures
becoming indistinct, bringing the past to life within the folds of the present.
“Then the dialogue of Kandha courtship through question and answer ensued, the
exchange of words from time immemorial; thousands of years had rolled by in the
formulation of such exchanges.” For his characters the link to the past is not
a matter of the historical record but rather an imaginative one rooted in a
feeling for nature and the cosmos; it is in this sense that the tribals with
their short life-spans and many hardships are nonetheless “the dynasty of the
immortals”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In
1953, a letter of complaint arrived at the office of Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru, sent to him by the land-owners and moneylenders who comprised the elite
of Koraput. The letter said (I take this from an essay about Mohanty written by
the critic JM Mohanty) – “To our great calamity and disaster Sri Gopinath
Mohanty is posted here as the special assistant agent at Rayagada. He is always
fond of hillmen and behaves like hillmen himself. He very little respects other
classes of people before them. He behaves as if only born for Adivasis." <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Perhaps
the letter had an unintended effect. When the Sahitya Akademi was founded in
1954 to award literary achievement in the 24 major languages of India, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Amrutara Santana</i> was judged the
first-ever winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award for Odia literature. It has
taken sixty years to produce a worthy translation in English (marred, sadly, by
the terrible layout and copy-editing that has unfortunately come to be the
general standard for Akademi publications). The wait, though, has not been in
vain. Mohanty’s ecstatic vision, shot through with light and dark, sings here
on every page. In time, the world will grant that this contemporary of Garcia Marquez and Vasily Grossman had a vision of life no less original and enduring than them. But for now, let at least us Indian readers ignore no more this marvellous hillman standing at our very own doorstep. </span></div>
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Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-78105493202449250252020-03-24T14:42:00.001+05:302020-04-03T18:42:29.003+05:30Conjugal and Fictional Possibility in Perumal Murugan's Kali-Ponna trilogy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12pt;">One reason why we gravitate to fiction is for the pleasure of entering imaginatively into a highly worked-up moral field that is not our own and often very different from it. In fact, fiction reassures us of the plasticity of our own consciousness: after only a few pages of acquaintance, we are able to bind ourselves with the point of view of one or several characters. Even if they themselves seem trapped or bound down by a situation, a city, or their own natures, in living vicariously through them we experience the space between own imaginative life and theirs as freedom, an enlargement and deepening of our own sense of life and of our awareness of cause and effect. No reflective reader deeply stirred by a novel ever quite relinquishes the trace it leaves behind, and when those novels do not supply a neat closure we often "carry on" the lives of the characters in our own minds beyond the point at which the writer left them. Having once made the story the object of our reading life, we now make it a part of our reading of life itself. It is perhaps the greatest compliment we can pay a writer.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Ten years ago, the writer Perumal Murugan proved himself worthy of just
such respect and reverberation – left us tantalized with the sense of a book having ended
when the story had in a way only just begun – with his 2010 novel <i>One
Part Woman</i> (in Tamil, <i>Maadhurbaagan</i>). Set in a village in
western Tamil Nadu some time in the early part of the twentieth century, the
book illumined in a torrent of exquisite, empathetic detail the predicament of a
peasant couple, Kali and Ponnayi, deeply (and for those around them, often
provokingly) in love with one another but unable after twelve years of marriage
to conceive a child. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Although Kali and Ponna are utterly rapt in one another, the norms of
the world and the tongues of people around them always remind them of what is
missing from their lives. The child-shaped hole in their lives is brought up in
nearly every social encounter and finally in their own dealings with each
other, although never to the point of breaking the bond between them. If
anything, Kali is repeatedly counselled to take a second wife, but refuses to
do so. Instead, he grows ever more reclusive, spending all his hours in the
barnyard that lies a little distance from his home, tending his fields and his
animals. Meanwhile, Ponna, compulsively scratching the wound, turns every subject to the question of children:
"The plant that we plant grows; the seed that we sow blooms; is it only me
who is the wasted land here?" <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">When all patience and propitiation has been exhausted, one final option,
if extreme, presents itself. At the popular annual chariot festival of the
half-male, half-female god Ardhanareeswara – in his encompassment of both sexes
into one whole, the very emblem of conjugal felicity – in the nearby town of
Thiruchengode, there opens up on the final night an abandonment of all norms
and the erasure of identities. Then, any man and woman may consort with one another
in the dark, and children born of such encounters are held to be bestowed by
the god himself. It is suggested to both Kali and Ponna by her own brother
Muthu that she journey to the festival all alone to find a man on this night to
be impregnated by him. It is very hard for her to contemplate this act of
tawdry yet potentially liberatory adultery, but she wonders if she would do it if her
husband gave his permission.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The tension between the present and the future, the individual and the
couple, between sexual fidelity and the need for children, is thus strung by
Murugan to the highest pitch. In the end, as the result of a misunderstanding
orchestrated by Muthu for what he believes to a good cause, we see Ponna going
to the festival and being seduced by a man believing her husband has discreetly
consented to it, and Kali belatedly discovering what he then takes to be the
greatest of all betrayals. <i>One Part Woman</i> ended with an image
of Kali, drunk and devastated, in the very barnyard where he and his wife had
spent so many happy hours, and looking up at the portia tree that he himself
had planted many years ago – the most prominent motif in the book: a symbol of
pleasure in the natural world, of Kali's own capacity for creation and nurture,
of the passing of time, and of the slow ramification of of events. What would
happen next? Would he take his own life? We could not say: people need air to live, and characters their creator.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And what was happening to the creator? It is clear Murugan himself was exhilarated by his own story in <i>One
Part Woman</i> and unwilling to take leave of his characters. In fact, he had generated such a cloud of possibilities that in the
years that followed, he came up with not one but two sequels, now ably
translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan as <i>Trial By Silence</i> and <i>A
Lonely Harvest</i>. What is thrilling about this follow-up is that the books
are not contiguous. Instead they audaciously take they take advantage of the
freedom that fiction allows and life does not, and explore two versions of
events arising from the same narrative crux: Kali and Ponna sundered by the
eruption in their lives of a single night's events and their consequences. Some
events are common to both sequels – in both, for instance, Ponna discovers she
is pregnant – but the meanings and feelings they generate are very different
because of the circumstances in which they transpire, allowing us, in effect,
to choose a path on a fork on the road, then come back and take the other one.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In <i>Trial By Silence</i>, we see Kali where we left him, now
attempting to kill himself by hanging from a noose on the portia tree. But his
mother arrives just in time and saves him. Shortly afterwards Ponna arrives
home from her night at the chariot festival and is shocked both by his brush
with death and by her discovery that he had never given his consent. She is
branded a whore by her husband, who refuses to touch her or converse with her
and retreats into a private universe, stewing and suffering silently in his
barnyard with his animals and becoming even more estranged when it turns out
she is pregnant. Ponna herself cuts off all her ties with her own family for
having plotted the destruction of her marriage. In this way an entire web of
connections is broken up; the world of the family becomes a set of solitudes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And the other book? In <i>A Lonely Harvest</i>, we find that Kali succeeds in killing
himself; the grotesque details of his grimace at point of death and his cadaver
are no less unsettling in light of the knowledge that he continues to live in
another book (which experience leads to the insight that the "reality" of fiction is of a different order than that of life). Ponna is left a widow with a small farm, an aged mother-in-law,
and (soon) a child in the womb. But she refuses to leave the barnyard where
Kali spent all his days and in fact moves house there, seeing his presence in
every small detail and especially in the portia tree. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">We are thus made
spectators to two kinds of tragedy. In one, we see how lonely and riven two
partners in love and domesticity may become while keeping up a kind of
perfunctory life in the world together. In the other, the desire to
perpetuate life results instead in the snuffing out of a life, and in the
desperate efforts, pervaded by regret and yearning, of those left behind to
patch together an existence that will never yield the pleasures of the past. These are exquisite formal patterns.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">And they are realized in writing of great involvement and fidelity to point of view. Nowhere is Murugan's mastery of his material more evident than in his
depiction of space as a reflection of human personality, and in his intricate braiding of the human and natural world. In a seemingly artless, low-key
"village prose" that is nevertheless limpid and expressive, he makes
us partners in the peasant's endless round of chores, showing how in his
imagination the possibilities of trees and soil, birds and beast, water and
stone, sun and season, are channeled into mutually supportive combinations.
Raising livestock and working his fields in <i>One Part Woman</i>, Kali is
a master of creation who is yet mocked by the world for being impotent; then
in <i>Trial By Silence</i>, his decision to abandon his crops and cattle
and let everything decay around him in his beloved barnyard becomes a metaphor
for the blighting of his mind by the plague of cuckoldry; then in <i>A
Lonely Harvest</i>, he kills himself in the very same haunt, and the control of
the space passes over to the two women of his house, who in taking it over and
adapting it to their own needs and capabilities discover its pleasures all over
again while finding in it disturbing hints of his presence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">There is much to admire also about the equity of empathy distributed by
Murugan between his male and female protagonist – sometimes expressed in very
shape of the story, in the form of chapters alternating between their
respective viewpoints. And, given his own starting position, his
extraordinarily layered and lucent exposition of female subjectivity and agency
in the characters of both Ponna and her mother-in-law Seerayi give the lie to
what has regrettably become an axiom of modern gender politics and of some
strands of feminist literary criticism: that male writers can never write
truthful portraits of female characters because they somehow “just don’t
understand”. (If the only identities we could depict truthfully were our own,
there would no point in writing fiction in the first place.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">If anything, the most powerful emotional effect of the book is the sense
that in their long years of mutual adoration and affectionate mockery (of which
many lovely scenes fleck all three books) both Kali and Ponna have become, like
Ardhanareeswara, half-man and half-woman, able to treat gender and sexual difference as a bridge to
the other and not as an island.</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.0pt;">Kali was intimately familiar with every inch of Ponna's body. He did not
even know his own body that well. There was one little lash on Ponna's eyelids
tht was thick and slanting away from the other eyelashes. He sometimes
held it between his lips and tugged at it. She once said to him, 'Let me know
if you want to remove it.'But he replied, 'It is my most favourite piece of
hair, let me tell you.'<br /> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.0pt;">He also liked to play with her tongue by keeping his finger on it. She
would pull it in at his touch, and he would ask her to bring it out again. 'If
feels soft, like touching a snail,' he said once.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.0pt;">'See, now the snail's going into its shell!' she said, and closed her
mouth. </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /><o:p></o:p></span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.0pt;">He loved the fine lines on her lips. He once counted them and said,
'Fourteen.'</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">She said, 'You are crazy.'</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">
And he agreed. 'Yes, indeed I am.'</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;">And, as an extension of the same experience of reaching out, both parties are able to marshal imagination and memory as an antidote to pain </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 16px;">–</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;"> and even as a substitute for embodied presence. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;">“She pervaded his thoughts,” we read in </span><i style="font-size: 12pt;">One Part Woman</i><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;">. “She came to occupy them so much that he could tell her every movement and gesture.” And in a startling scene in </span><i style="font-size: 12pt;">A Lonely Harvest</i><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;">, we see Ponna going into the fields after Kali’s death and finding a brinjal patch that had been lovingly planted by him. The effect gradually metamorphoses into the cause; creation back into the creator. “Ponna caressed the bristly stem of the brinjal plant. It felt like she was caressing his arms. She held the stem against her cheek. Definitely his hand….She kept walking through the plants. How many hands did he have!”</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12pt;">Is this one of the essential works of Indian fiction in our century? It absolutely is.</span></span></div>
Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-28174159572409148962020-02-13T22:37:00.001+05:302020-02-13T22:40:32.719+05:30Basanti's Dream: Reading women in the early Indian novel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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A striking feature of early Indian novels – novels published, say, between 1880 and 1910 in English, Bengali, Urdu, Odia, or Malayalam -- are their readers. By this, I don’t mean, however, readers <i>of</i> these novels: students, intellectuals, the educated upper class – the natural constituency that early Indian novelists sought out. That readership was almost embarrassingly small – inevitably so, because the writers were working in a form alien to the very people whom they wished to depict and sometimes provoke. And in any case there was often little for that readership to savour: the writing was earnest, clumsy and derivative of the English novel in language, form and content.<br />
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No, what is fascinating about these novels, when read at a distance of a century, is how often contain scenes of characters reading books – very often western literature, and just as often novels. Sometimes the most important thing a protagonist does to assert him- or herself in early Indian fiction is just read. This was not just an ingenious kind of self-publicity – the desire of a new and novel literary form to validate itself by representing common people engaging with it. Rather, reading is often a controversial, provocative activity in early Indian novels, as sexual experimentation and drug-taking might have been in the novels of the post-Independence generation. To show a character – especially a woman – reading was to show her thinking, reasoning, reconsidering her position in society and her relationship to patriarchal tradition, and becoming, page by page and line by line, an individual in ways newly sanctioned in the West but unfathomable or undesirable in the social world in which the early Indian novelists lived.<br />
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Reading, then, is rarely a benign detail in early Indian novels: it stands for a revolution within the spirit, and therefore potentially in society. As soon as a character is shown reading, we know that a faultline, a thread of self-consciousness and potentially of conflict and alienation, has been opened up between her and her world; they will never be joined up again in perfect comity, and even if they do then it is us, the readers, who will mourn the cost at which they have been brought back into line. Even the tawaif Umrao Jaan Ada in Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s book by the same name loves to read, slowly substituting books for men as she ages, saying of her former admirers, “When they began to drop out of my life one by one...I developed a taste for books.”<br />
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By showing their characters reading books, the early Indian novelists – almost always male, we must remember – wished to imply that these fictional (in every sense) women had the same aspirations to intellectual independence and linguistic power that they had themselves, as readers, witnessed in female characters of English novels of the day. A woman who read was a woman whom both the male hero – himself often somewhat alienated from tradition by an English education – could desire and the reader could love. She was a person who could validate the very existence of the novel itself.<br />
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This viewpoint, we see, is almost never shared by figures of authority in the novels themselves. To them, to allow a girl an education, and especially an English education, is usually seen as fatally corrupting (although it was fine for men to study English) and radical. To allow them to read novels <i>in English</i> was to reach the heights of libertinism. “I lately found her reading an English book,” complains the old patriarch Panchu Menon of Indulekha, the spirited 16-year-old heroine of O. Chandu Menon’s novel by the same name in 1890. “She told me the story was only a made-up thing, but...just consider the consequences, my dear Panikar, if girls are allowed to read such trash.”<br />
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Even writers who did not share the general consensus among early Indian novelists that western education is good for young Indians – for instance, Bankimchandra Chatterji – can be found populating their books with images of women reading. In <i>Debi Chaudhurani</i>, <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2010/07/bankimchandra-chatterjis-debi.html">Bankim’s most radical vision</a> of a martial Bengali nationalism, the humble female protagonist Prafulla, cast out of her marital home by her in-laws, becomes a bandit in the forest under the tutelage of a Sanskrit-speaking brigand who teaches to fight – and also to study the <i>Gita</i>. A program of reading was essential for any woman who aspired to agency in the world. Only the choice of books differed.<br />
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This stark divergence at the turn of the century between the generations on the matter of female education and learning the language of the coloniser is both made a tragic crux and finessed for comic effect by the authors of <i><a href="https://www.india.oup.com/product/basanti-9780199489862?">Basanti</a></i>, an Odia novel first published in 1931 and just translated into English by Himansu S.Mohapatra and Paul St-Pierre. In <i>Basanti</i>, the disapproving matriarch Subhadra Devi – mother of the idealistic zamindar Debabrata, who seeks to marry the highly educated and capable (if socially marginal) young heroine Basanti – is appalled by her son’s choice of consort.<br />
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“Yes, it was good for daughters-in-law be well-read,” we read, following the lines of an argument still widely echoed in familial and conjugal reasoning in India nearly a century later. “They ought to be able to sing the Bhagabata and read out <i>Kesaba Koili</i> and <i>Jema Dei Kanda</i> for their mothers-in-law. But then, heavens, what was all this! Learning English, learning Bengali, reading newspapers, singing – what on earth was all this!” Basanti’s reading life is connected up to her lack of compliance with social norms for women. “The thing she disliked most about Basanti was such a grown up girl, far from speaking softly in hushed tones from beneath a foot-long veil, wore nothing on her head and her words rang out loud and clear.”<br />
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To be sure, this scene in <i>Basanti</i> is echoed by situations in many Indian novels of the time emphasizing a progressive view of women and encoding a critique of Indian tradition into their plotlines and narratorial ruminations. But there is still something unique about the book that should give it pride of place in any essay (such as this one) or reading list focussing on the theme of reading as a road to independence and female emancipation in the Indian novel. For what is most exciting about this ironic recapitulation of the critique of “reading girls” in Basanti is that it is not composed by an English-educated male writer with a progressive outlook (which would give such scenes a certain meaning), or even by a rebellious female writer with feminist leanings (of the kind who would arrive in Indian fiction within a generation). Rather, this novel published in 1931 is written collaboratively by a group of young writers who might be said to be the very kind of people of whom the first generation of male Indian novelists sought to produce an image in their writings.<br />
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Nine young Odia writers of the 1920s (six men, three women, some of whom, like Kalindi Charan Panigrahi, Annada Shankar Ray and Sarala Devi, went on to have significant literary careers) come together in <i>Basanti</i> to write a story on the theme of gender for the youth of India. In keeping with the spirit of the novel form, which is always aware of ambiguities and of discordances with any idealistic project, the book is also a richly imagined scenario of the pitfalls that might lie in the path of this Indian new compact of love, compassion and intellectual companionship in marriage.<br />
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At the beginning of the novel, we see young Basanti, a spirited, book-loving girl in the town of Cuttack, left orphaned when her beloved mother passes away. No matter: she has many well-wishers, and none more than the good-hearted college student Debabrata, who greatly empathises with her difficult position in the world. Debabrata loves reading, writing and social work – and is apparently a feminist to boot. In an early scene, he is seen giving a speech to the student union of his college on “The Duty of the Student Community with Regard to the Autonomy of Women” and is laughed out of the room, partly because some of the other students allege that he thinks what he does because he is in love with Basanti.<br />
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Despite these challenges, Debabrata and Basanti come ever closer together, the only hurdle in their way the skeptical figure of Nirmala Devi, to whose village household Debabrata must return – and perhaps take Basanti – when he has finished his studies. Eventually, this is what happens, although it is Debabrata who announces unilaterally to Basanti that he has decided they are to get married – the first sign that he may not be as immune to the old complacencies of masculinity as he fancies.<br />
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The novel is a very sensitive rendering of what happens to a intellectually agile woman when subsumed to the hoary old pieties of family life – because no other choice is available to her. Basanti’s life in the village becomes a never-ending round of service to her mother-in-law, in the hope of earning her approbation. But this is merely to cede power to the institution and authority she has reluctantly embraced. Even Debabrata begins to feel guilty for suppressing his wife’s individuality and intellectual spark, but nor can he criticise his mother.<br />
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The writers of <i>Basanti</i> take turns to show how their heroine slowly loses her sense of self in her new surroundings. The two secure sources of solace in Basanti’s life are her old friends and her books. In a key scene in the book, we see Basanti reading Tagore’s <i>Gora</i>, a novel she greatly loves. She tells her new friend in the village, Nisa, “As I was reading this book, the thought came to me that like the characters in this book we too could do something” – the clearest sign possible of the early Indian novel’s desire to light a lamp for a new path in Indian history, and also an indication of Odia writers fashioning their own Indian novelistic canon. Basanti thinks of starting a school for the village girls – an idea that sends her mother-in-law into a fury.<br />
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Matters eventually come to a head, turning once again upon an act of reading or writing. Debabrata comes across an article written by Basanti in a literary magazine. There, he questions the pervasive patriarchal cast of the world and asks, “Why is the idea that women are subordinate so lasting and all pervasive? Why has no one imagined a distinct and independent identity for women, separate from men?” Ideals clash with reality: he takes this as a personal criticism of him. When we hear him say, “Now Basa, please tell me what kind of autonomous life you would lead that has nothing to do with me,” we know that, whatever the state of their marriage at a legal and social level, the marriage of minds that the two of them had once dreamt of is over.<br />
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<i>Basanti</i>, then, is a book about the recasting of the balance of power between man and woman in modern India. Most interestingly, it is written in a self-reflexive way that greatly deepens the relationship between reading, selfhood, freedom and agency so prominent in the early Indian novel. While reading the novel, we are always aware, every time we start a new chapter and see that the narration has changed hands, that the nine men and women who wrote it come together in the book not just as writers but as readers. In order to take the story forward, since each one had first to absorb the character and narrative cues set up by his or her predecessor, and to work in a spirit both of individuality and partnership. All nine of them were Basanti by turns and together, sometimes as writers and other times as readers.<br />
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In an echo of Prafulla’s fate in Bankim’s <i>Debi Chaudhurani</i>, Basanti, too, is cast out of the house by Debabrata. Eventually, the sundered couple are reunited – but in a somewhat melodramatic way that goes against the realistic spirit of the first half of the book, and that may have been a concession to readerly expectations.<br />
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Basanti’s dream of a world in which women may have their own identity, however, rings as clear as a bell long after one has put the book down – as does her idea that men and women may reshape their historical relationship by reading and reflection. Echoes of Basanti’s dream can be found in Indian novels all the way through the twentieth century, such as in Yashpal’s <i>Jhootha Sach</i> (1955).<br />
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There, the protagonist Jaidev, a journalist, mourns the loss of the great love of his life, Kanak, because of Partition, as the loss of a marriage in which both husband and wife would have been equals, if not in the eyes of the world, then certainly within their own home. “Had she been there, they would have worked as one and achieved great new heights. Kanak's dream was to have a house of their own, both of them at their desks, writing and creating.” The new translation by Mohapatra and St-Pierre restores to the Indian novelistic canon a text that represents a kind of apotheosis – both in terms of the story and the conditions of its composition – of a grand theme of the early Indian novel: women who read so that they may imagine a new womanhood, and world, into being.<br />
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[<i>A slightly different form of this essay appeared recently in Open magazine under the title "<a href="https://openthemagazine.com/special/basantis-dream/">Basanti's Dream</a>".]</i><br />
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Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-80006703153555951782019-02-02T12:58:00.002+05:302019-02-02T13:18:19.190+05:30On the Penguin Book of Haiku<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The most famous tiger in world poetry lopes in William Blake’s “The Tyger”; the most melodious nightingale trills in the pages of Keats. But the greatest poetic frog of all – one who remains alive through the centuries, and is actually set in motion anew by the reading eye – appears in a poem by the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. In the original, it goes:<br />
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<i>furu ike ya</i><br />
<i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>kawazu tobikomu</i><br />
<i><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>mizu no oto</i><br />
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In Landis Barnhill’s fine translation from 2004, this is rendered as:<br />
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The ancient pond<br />
A frog leaps in<br />
Water’s sound.<br />
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And surely most readers, when they see this poem, will recognise not just the frog but also the form. Japan’s greatest export to the world is probably neither bonsai nor origami, not noh theatre nor manga comics, not Asahi beer or Mitsubishi cars, not Kurosawa or Murakami, but haiku. This short three-line verse form, usually following a 5-7-5 syllable structure and capturing some flash of sensory experience, some concrete but transient detail of the natural world, has been around for nearly four centuries.<br />
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To most non-Japanese readers, haiku seems an expression of Japanese aesthetics in its most concentrated form, a nugget of gnomic wisdom distilled into a few spare details. And it is one of the most cheerful travellers among poetic forms. Alongside the sonnet and the ghazal, haiku is today an indispensable part of the education of any young poet working in English. Just the haiku composed in a single year in American MFA programmes would be enough to silt up Basho’s frog-pond.<br />
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So <i><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317452/the-penguin-book-of-haiku-by-translated-with-an-introduction-by-adam-kern/9780140424768/">The Penguin Book of Haiku</a></i>, a substantial new anthology of over 1000 translations made by Adam Kern, a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, will surely be one of the bestselling poetry books of the year. All new haiku translators are judged by what they do with Basho’s frog. Kern’s amphibian, perhaps feeling the heat of the competition, is a touch disappointing (“old pond! / a frog plunges into / watersound”).<br />
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Kern also breaks with tradition in organizing his selection not in chronological order, or by poet. His book a single linked sequence of haiku revolving around keywords. Poems about frogs shade into poems about cats and thereon to mistresses, who themselves give way to downpours and and parasols – from which section there is this gem from an unnamed poet:<br />
<br />
rain lets up<br />
and the price of umbrellas<br />
comes back down!<br />
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Some readers might find this approach a bit laboured (how many poems about umbrellas can one read in a row?) and probably more arbitrary than a chronological selection. But Kern’s method does have the virtue of restoring to our understanding of haiku a sense of its distant origins as a form of light verse composed in long sequences by multiple hands, each poem serving as a stimulus for an impromptu “reply” by another poet. A cat haiku generated another, and another.<br />
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In such circumstances, the haiku poet did not work alone in a garret, but in playful and inventive dialogue with a milieu. “Spontaneity, the ability to think on one’s feet,<br />
wit – these were the cardinal virtues,” Kern writes in his introduction. “Haiku was the collaborative art of instantaneous and contingent refiguring, not unlike a jam session in improvisational jazz.”<br />
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But once this emphasis on the comic and improvisatory aspects of haiku is taken on board, a 21st-century haiku anthology such as this one can bear only so much recasting of the tradition (just as it would not help a book on democracy to insist on the normative nature of early forms of democracy in Greek city-states, that denied the vote to women and slaves).<br />
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Every culture, after all, has a tradition of light verse and wordplay. To this writer, at any rate, haiku rose up to its Olympian status in the world of poetry when it transcended its origins in light verse and began to generate glimpses into the deepest truths of life – all in the amount of time it takes to light a cigarette.<br />
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Partly it did so with wonderful “jump-cuts” in language to defamiliarize quotidian experience and shake up the reader, such as this haiku by Ryoto:<br />
<br />
Violets –<br />
the geisha will want<br />
to view the fields<br />
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And partly it was because haiku grew more poetic muscles and became more aesthetically and philosophically ambitious, producing an unforgettable vision of human life that was rueful, mysterious, elliptical, profound. A poem like Basho’s, or Buson’s haiku (taken from Kern’s anthology)<br />
<br />
perched asleep<br />
on the massive temple bell:<br />
a butterfly!<br />
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gives us new eyes for the tremors and stillness of the world’s varied life-forms and allows us, however briefly, to slough off the kind of self-interested perception generated by the ego. Quite deliberately shorn of the language of emotions, haiku nevertheless gives us powerful snapshots of feeling rooted in human relationships (as with Ryoto’s haiku about the geisha above) and situations.<br />
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Kern’s anthology, then, links haiku across the centuries into a giant tapestry quite inventively. But his highly Americanized and sometimes incongruous diction, sometimes unconvincing focus on the comic and grotesque notes of the form, and overuse of exclamation marks make this book less of a pleasure to read than some of the extant translations of the great haiku masters like Basho, Issa, Buson or Masaoka Shiki.<br />
<br />
The range of moods and notes in the haiku tradition is, one feels, too vast and subtle to allow for realization by a single translator. A better way for Kern have done it might have been to make <i>The Penguin Book of Haiku</i> an anthology bringing together a host of translators including himself, which would have granted to it the sociality and give-and-take between different poets that he himself insists is fundamental to the form.<br />
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Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-21753789888934584182018-07-28T14:43:00.002+05:302023-01-19T15:45:09.149+05:30The Year of Reading Adam Smith <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">The flight lounge was Kuala Lumpur, the crisps were jackfruit, and my companion was Scottish and had been dead for over 200 years. I had left home in Delhi for a short trip to Vietnam. My cut-price ticket allowed for no checked-in luggage; what I had on me was all I had.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Even pared to the bare essentials, however, there was room for the 1,200 pages of Adam Smith’s <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Wealth Of Nations</i>. This is one of the foundational texts of the modern world. Every right-leaning person keeps quoting stuff about free markets at you from this book, but no one actually seems to have ever read it in its entirety. Journeys are a good space for intellectual challenges. While in the skies and then abroad, I wanted to break not the sound, but the Smith barrier.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Thankfully, the gamble proved to be a good one. High up in the peace of the clouds and down in the clamour of airport lounges, in the little cafés of Ho Chi Minh City where people sip jasmine tea and drink coffee from <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">phins</i>, recumbent at night in the silence of a little hotel room, I read Smith’s magnum opus with pleasure—and a steadily escalating admiration for his intellectual ability, stealthy empathy, and rhetorical flair.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Two weeks later, one journey had ended, but another was just beginning: one of the great intellectual love affairs of my life. Over the next year, in Delhi and Varanasi, Stuttgart and New York, Prague and Paris, Athens and Rome, I read as much of Smith, and about Smith, as I could.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">*****</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">The first thing that strikes the reader about Smith is that he is so much more than even his admirers and proponents make him out to be. Often, his arguments can’t be reduced to a precis: As with the great novelists, you have to immerse yourself in his long, delicately weighted sentences and paragraphs to catch the full drift of his meaning. Then, when you hear other people paraphrasing Smith, you always find yourself saying, “Yes, but….” He is like that charismatic friend that everyone in a group fights over, everyone thinking “I know him best”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Second, what is so engaging about Smith is not just his matter (which, as I will show, is even more considerable than is commonly granted) but his manner. He is a writer of great clarity and courtesy. Brilliantly and convincingly, he first recapitulates the arguments of his opponents—the cheap point-scoring of our television debates would not have been his thing—before just as dexterously undermining and refuting them. Once you pick up the sound of his voice, you hear it in your head all day long like a tune.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Third: his philosophy. Smith comes across as exceptionally well-adjusted. He is a realist who never seems to lapse into cynicism or dogma, a worldly man who insisted nevertheless that life demands from us some grand ideal and commitment, even sacrifice. He seeks the continuous advance not just of markets but also morals; not just knowledge, but self-knowledge. When you read him, you feel that somewhat like Gandhi, he seems to know you even better than you know yourself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">And last—and this is something no scholar of Smith ever tells you—the great Scotsman can often be laugh-aloud funny, as piquant as an Indian grandmother observing modern life from a <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">charpai</i>. Has anybody ever managed to match the truth and tartness of Smith’s characterization of love as “the passion [that] appears to everybody, but the man who feels it, entirely disproportioned to the value of the object”? There is a discussion of value here, as befits someone known for his attention to costs and benefits, but one also senses a distinct sympathy and even admiration for the deluded.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">That cracking sentence appears not in <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Wealth Of Nations</i>, but in <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Theory Of Moral Sentiments</i> (hereafter, <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">TMS</i>). Yes, you must read both these books, or none at all. And <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">TMS</i>, Smith’s other masterwork and one that describes the peculiarities and potential of man as a social and ethical creature, was long given short shrift by economists, who built their representations of Smithian thought—and applications of it for economic debates of the present day—entirely upon the argument of <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Wealth Of Nations</i>. It was written when he was just 36 (he published <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Wealth Of Nations</i> when he was 53), and Smith remained so engaged with its argument that he revised and expanded it through his lifetime, publishing a final edition just before his death in 1790. One might even say, as a riddle, that Smith’s first book was also his last.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Yet it is the book in the middle that immediately caught the imagination of the world—and not without reason. <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Wealth Of Nations</i> is still the core of Smith’s intellectual achievement, a seminal moment in the human effort to understand how our material lives cohere and interlink on the macro level. And it is especially worth reading today, when capitalism—Smith himself never actually used this word—is under attack from many sides. Partly this is because it seems to have been taken over (as Smith himself feared) by elites who want more to capture than to produce wealth. But also, a combination of rising inequality, static real wages, and an explosion of human desires linked to mass media and consumer culture have made both white-collar and blue-collar workers in the developed world unbalanced and resentful. In fact, the journey from poverty to (relative) prosperity described in <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Wealth Of Nations</i> is a story Indians today can appreciate better than most Europeans, for it is the great Indian story of the last 25 years (and one that <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Mint</i> has chronicled extensively over the last decade).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">*****</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">The core of <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Wealth Of Nations</i> is devoted to Smith’s magnificently comprehensive description and original and frequently counter-intuitive defence of what he called “commercial society”. This was the newly emerging 18th century world order in which the eternal human need “to truck, barter and exchange” (Smith loves sonorous and evocative verbs) was taking a new form, very different from the top-heavy economic order of the feudal world with its lords and vassals.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Smith, at heart an egalitarian if not exactly a democrat, greatly approved of this transition and gave it the intellectual steel frame it needed. With a wealth of rigorous and ringing detail, he showed that simple price signals in a market could deliver justice, and stimulate an economic energy that no regent or government could fashion or force. If economic actors were allowed to work in their self-interest, the “invisible hand” of the market would likely allocate goods and prices in a way that could serve the interests of all. A liberal new economic order would provide rich rewards for the exercise of the virtues and habits that Smith admired the most: prudence, thrift and industry (Smith is actually not a big one for spending money and—readers of <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">TMS </i>will find—is even sceptical of the idea that great wealth is conducive to happiness).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">But there is more to Smith’s theory than just a defence of the profit motive as an engine of growth. As the great Smith scholar Ryan Patrick Hanley neatly puts it, Smith saw that “commerce substitutes interdependence for direct dependence and makes possible the freedom of the previously oppressed”. In commercial society, the shape of material life begins for the first time to lean towards economic independence and political freedom even for the meanest labourer. The gates of commercial society open out, eventually, on to the garden of freedom (a difficult, challenging freedom) and democracy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Sadly, though, over the course of 200 years after his death, for a wealth of reasons, Smith was co-opted as the father of pure capitalism, insisting, apparently, on the primacy and inevitability of self-interest in all human dealings, and on the need for governments to allow the market mechanism to determine how resources in a society are allocated (and by extension, how social problems are resolved). Smith’s famous sentence about butchers, bakers and brewers working not out of a sense of benevolence for others but from a regard to their self-interest was taken as the touchstone of his thought.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">But no one who reads <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Wealth Of Nations</i> can fail to see that this is a very distorted (one might even say self-interested) view of Smith. Amartya Sen, who has done as much as any other modern scholar to draw attention to the complexities of Smith’s world view and rescue him from the clutches of free-market fundamentalists, gets Smith’s view of the powers and limits of the market exactly right in his contribution to a comprehensive new book of essays called <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Adam Smith: His Life, Thought And Legacy</i> (Princeton University Press, 2016). “It would be hard to carve out from Smith’s works,” writes Sen, “any theory of the sufficiency of the market economy (as opposed to the necessity of markets). He sought substantial <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">supplementation </i>of the market mechanism, though he would not endorse any proposal to <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">supplant</i> it.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Even the invisible hand of market forces needs visible hands to supplement its work in a just society. One of the surprises of <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Wealth Of Nations</i>, I found, is how often Smith sides with the interests of labourers against those of merchants and manufacturers, and proposes and delineates a system of moral reasoning that will frame and discipline the very markets whose virtues he extols.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">*****</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">In July, I moved on to <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">TMS</i>. I had by now become convinced of Smith’s great qualities not just as an intellectual guide, but as a travel companion. Every time I packed a suitcase, he was the first thing I threw into it after my toothbrush and notebook. Whenever my days became disordered and giddy, whenever I woke up with a hangover or drooped with a sense of inertia, I had only to read two or three pages of his even, tranquil prose to set the world in order again (“Happiness,” he states quite simply at one point, “consists in tranquility and enjoyment”).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Smith was 36 when he published this precociously wise book, the same age that I was now when I was reading it. It took me many more months to read than <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Wealth Of Nations</i>. Realizing that when I was done there would not be much more of Smith left to read.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Trade and economic activity barely appear in <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">TMS</i>. Rather, Smith is found here contemplating another kind of economy: the economy of our emotions and the moral commerce of our lives in society.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">For Smith, man is fundamentally a social being, embedded in multiple networks that answer not just his material needs but his need to be loved and respected. Or, as the Smith scholar David Schmidtz puts it, “a human life is a social life”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Yet this does not take away from the inescapable truth, Smith observes, that we are violently self-centred. We feel our own pleasure and pain, our own joy and sorrow, much more deeply than that of others. A cricked neck troubles us much more than a war in which thousands lose their lives. Our instinctive reaction to any new development is to think, “What does this mean for me?” If possible, we would always privilege our own self-interest over that of others—until we come to realize that others must feel exactly the same way about themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Where do we go from here? It follows that to form a truthful understanding of reality, we need to be able, habitually, to see ourselves as “an impartial spectator” would. “The natural misrepresentations of self-love,” writes Smith, “can be corrected only by the eye of the impartial spectator.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Here we arrive at one of Smith’s greatest concepts, perhaps even more central to his thought system than of the invisible hand (which phrase, after all, appears only twice in his work). The impartial spectator is something more than just a conscience; it is an emotional rudder that keeps us balanced. By listening to the whispers of this invisible companion, we work out just how morally complex and quirky and fallible we are; true selfhood requires continuous self-command.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Our moral sentiments are full of strange biases, just as any landscape has slopes and ditches. Many of Smith’s insights—for instance, that pain leaves a much more lasting impression on us than pleasure—have today become the province of behavioural economics. To take another example, he observes that we are instinctively much more sympathetic to the woes of the rich than those of the poor, and mourn the overthrow of a king, although most of his material privileges remain unaffected, much more than, say, the tragedy of someone going hungry. What we need to do is to acquaint ourselves with the general terrain of our moral nature, and then use self-knowledge to compensate for our weaknesses and oversights.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">Virtue, for Smith, inheres not so much in what we believe, but in how—and how much—we act. And here Smith issues a clarion call, a sentence one never forgets once one has read it, “Man was made for action,” he writes, “and to promote by the exertion of his faculties such changes in the external circumstances both of himself and of others, as may seem most favourable to the happiness of all.” Man’s actions must be guided both by the invisible hand of the market, showing him opportunities for work and profit, and by the ethical promptings and expanding social imagination of the impartial spectator, “the great inmate, the great demi-god within the breast”. The market can be man’s friend, but he diminishes himself when he makes it his god.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">*****</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">It seems clear, when one has finished reading Smith, that it will not do to call him an economist. He is certainly one—maybe even the father of economics—but he is so much more than that, and this very word is, like one of those human biases he describes, an unreliable road into his thought. He is also a moral philosopher, a historian, a literary critic, a student of linguistics. Even his economics might more properly be called “humanomics”—this is the phrase used by the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, who in the last decade has published a thrilling trilogy about how the modern world came to generate so much wealth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">One morning last February, I sat in my balcony in New Delhi, drinking coffee, and put my marks on the last page of <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">TMS</i>. It was over. A whole year had passed with Smith by my side. I felt enormous gratitude for everything he had given me. But perhaps there was some wealth I had generated for him as well, across a gulf of two centuries. After all, doesn’t he say in <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">TMS</i> that “the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved”?</span></div>
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Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-15168226070267589042018-07-13T08:34:00.000+05:302018-07-13T12:13:35.943+05:30The Indian novel not yet translated into English that I most want to read...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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...is Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's <i>Adorsho Hindu Hotel </i>(1940). Long-time readers of the Middle Stage will know what a great admirer I am of this Bengali novelist's poetics and fictional ethics (<i>fictional</i> as in "relating to the writing of fiction", not "fictitious"). I explain why I love him so much in this post from 2005, <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2005/09/world-of-bibhutibhushan-bandyopadhyay.html">"The World of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay"</a>. In fact, if I could have a dinner party in which I could invite half a dozen writers from the length and breadth of literary history, the four certainties would be <a href="https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/8T4dI7fA9Ncgckp5u43MbO/A-year-of-reading-Adam-Smith.html">Adam Smith</a>, Alexander Hamilton, Jorge Amado, and Bibhutibhushan.<br />
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Many of Bibhutibhushan's novels are translated into English, but one of the most famous, <i>Adorsho Hindu Hotel</i>, is as yet mysteriously untranslated. When I was Fiction & Poetry editor of The Caravan between 2012 and 2014, I used my small powers and privileges to commission to the great translator of Bengali literature <a href="https://arunavasinha.in/">Arunava Sinha</a> to translate the first chapter of this book, and it was every bit as good as I'd anticipated. You can <a href="http://www.caravanmagazine.in/fiction/adorsho-hindu-hotel">read it here</a>, with a short introduction by myself:<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SutnLRMifVg/W0gVj43N4fI/AAAAAAAAC_I/C1xqx1ZQVkEBOkb852dvNl3SHUDfHgZvgCLcBGAs/s1600/Adorsho.1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="765" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SutnLRMifVg/W0gVj43N4fI/AAAAAAAAC_I/C1xqx1ZQVkEBOkb852dvNl3SHUDfHgZvgCLcBGAs/s320/Adorsho.1.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span x-small="">Arguably the twentieth-century Indian writer with the imagination and technical gifts most suited to the creation of great fiction, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay continues to enjoy renown across India—though unfortunately not elsewhere—for his stories and novels, written in his native Bengali.</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br style="color: #222222; font-size: small;" /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span x-small="">Every reader finds some new way to describe the legerdemain of Bibhutibhushan (as he is commonly known in Bengal). One interpretation holds that here is a narrative artist who seems to drop into the world of his characters and then become invisible, producing the illusion that the story is telling itself. His sympathy is so vast that each person touched by the roving lens of his fictional narration seems momentarily to turn into the protagonist of the story. The work of many great fiction writers seems somehow self-consciously literary, but not so with Bibhutibhushan, who prizes—and produces—narrativeness (a term used in literary theory), that mysterious quality of constant motion and confident verisimilitude that makes a reader forget he or she is reading a story.</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br style="color: #222222; font-size: small;" /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Here are the opening pages of one of Bibhutibhushan’s best novels, Adorsho Hindu Hotel. For a while, the narration holds the daily life of the hotel in focus. Then, from out of the picture, emerges the unforgettable figure of the cook Hajari, a middle-aged toiler and dreamer. “Why then did he weave these dreams every day here by the Churni?” the narrator asks. “Because it was pleasant, that was why.” No greater insight is required—and Hajari’s reasons are also the reasons why we read fiction.</span></blockquote>
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<br />
Which Indian publisher will commission Arunava to translate the rest?
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Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-90879571426596029252018-06-24T16:32:00.000+05:302018-06-24T16:41:14.640+05:30Khushwant Singh On—And In—Love<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MtQtcXDkQIk/Wy949IBa6KI/AAAAAAAAC9s/hyoopTig-XQQribyJljK9-J4VLeYsQ6ygCLcBGAs/s1600/Khushwant.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="281" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MtQtcXDkQIk/Wy949IBa6KI/AAAAAAAAC9s/hyoopTig-XQQribyJljK9-J4VLeYsQ6ygCLcBGAs/s320/Khushwant.jpg" width="199" /></a></div>
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In a novel, the writer sells the reader a story; in
reportage, his or her powers of perception and analysis. In the realm of
autobiography and memoir, it might be said, one sells oneself. The more
dramatic one’s life experiences and the more divergent one’s beliefs from the
mainstream of the culture, the more readers one wins. Khushwant
Singh always enjoyed the persona of a professional provocateur, as
suggested by the very title of his widely syndicated column, “With Malice
Towards One and All”. The purpose behind his writing, he tells us in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Absolute Khushwant</i>, has always been “to
inform, amuse, provoke”. <o:p></o:p></div>
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He certainly does so this book, an engaging if somewhat
uneven collection of opinions and reminiscences on various subjects,
transcribed by the journalist Humra Quraishi. Long-time readers of Singh are
unlikely to be surprised by any of his stances. He continues successfully, to
cast himself as part monk and part libertine, rising at 4am, working through
the day, always keeping himself gainfully occupied, speaking truth to power,
and avoiding idle pursuits, while simultaneously enjoying his drink and his
gossip sessions, keeping his sexual life alive in mind if not in the flesh,
recalling his many affairs, and vigorously contesting (while also clearly
enjoying) his public image as a dirty old man, accepting it finally as the
price to be paid for his candour.<br />
<br />
“Usually, writers are an interesting and
colourful bunch,” he writes – and clearly he has set out his stall to be the
most interesting and colourful of them all. This carries a certain charm, and
certainly the house of Indian literature (which at one point in the book is
compared to a brothel) would be much duller without Khushwant Singh’s two
rooms, one for work and one for play.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Absolute Khushwant</i>
reads very much like – this is both its strength and its weakness – a string of
quotable quotes pulled together for maximum impact. Dozens of subjects are
raised, from the place of sex, marriage, work, and solitude in life to
secularism and communalism in politics to Partition and the persecution of
Sikhs in 1984 and Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, but on most issues the discussion
ends abruptly just as matters are beginning to become interesting. Many
contradictions arise, few of which are explored.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Stubbornly, Singh continues to defend his support of the
Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975, and indeed the thuggery of her son
Sanjay (“He had a vision and this was not really understood...He had been good
to me. He put me in Parliament. Even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Hindustan Times –</i> it was he who called up [KK] Birla and told him to give
me the editor’s job!”)<br />
<br />
This is to put personal relations over reason. “If
[Sanjay] has lived, this country would not have been a democracy,” writes
Singh. “There would have been order and faster development, but no democracy,
of that I am sure.” This makes it harder to sympathise with Singh’s persistent
agitation against the politics of Hindutva (“My present mission is to warn
readers against the dangers posed by Hindu fundamentalists”). It seems
reasonable to ask why democracy may be sacrificed for development, but not
secularism. After all, Narendra Modi, though considered a murderer by Singh,
too boasts of a record of “order and faster development”. <o:p></o:p></div>
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One of the most intriguing angles of the book is Singh’s
view of sex, and of all those other aspects of and appendages to desire – love,
marriage, companionship, family – that exist on the same continuum as sex while
also being in tension with it, never quite working themselves out into a
straight line. “If you ask me what’s more important, sex or romance, it’s sex,”
he declares. “Romantic interludes take up a lot of time and are a sheer waste
of energy, for the end result isn’t very much.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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But even the road of sex only takes one so far, for “sex
with the same person can get boring after a while...you know, routine...A
partner once bedded becomes a bore.” That would suggest a sexually fulfilled
life is incompatible with the institution of marriage and its presumption of
monogamy and sexual fidelity. As one season keeps giving way to the next, so – if
one is really to be honest to oneself – must a sexual partner. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This is an interesting and perhaps quite logical (if
somewhat disillusioned and possibly very male) view of desire, worth contrasting, for instance, to the sexual code implicit <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2013/04/sadat-hasan-mantos-bombay-stories.html">in Manto's fiction</a>. But here it is complicated, and in part
explained, by Singh’s personal experience. In an essay on his wife, Singh
writes that he was married for over sixty years and “It wasn’t a happy
marriage.” In part this was because his wife got very close to another man
“from the very beginning of the marriage, probably from the very first year.”
“I felt I could no longer respond emotionally,” he confesses, “and had nothing
left to give.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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There is something quite heartbreaking about this, and while
many of Singh’s views on sex are refreshingly unorthodox and candid, it’s hard
not to feel that they involve an element of compensation and rationalisation
that have to do with his own lacks and losses.<br />
<br />
Singh is a great admirer of old
English poets (Tennyson, Edward Fitzgerald), even casting his translations of
his beloved Urdu poets (whom he also quotes liberally in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Absolute Khushwant</i>) into a style and meter similar to theirs. So
one might perhaps offer, as an alternative to his view of love and sex, William
Blake’s view: “What is it men in women do require?/The lineaments of gratified
desire./What is it women in men require?/The lineaments of gratified desire.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
And some older posts on writing about love: <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2005/04/sirshendu-mukhopadhyays-language-of.html">"Shirsendu Mukhopadhyay's Language of Love"</a> and <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-ilan-stavanss-love-and-language.html">"On Ilan Stavans's <i>Love and Language</i>"</a>.</div>
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Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-79324923636447827202018-02-22T00:02:00.000+05:302018-02-22T00:04:32.492+05:30Clouds is out now!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9IykvcvStyA/Wo26-5e00eI/AAAAAAAAC4Y/jxXgE_tn8HQIVfB3b61Jf4OnEoUPIPupwCLcBGAs/s1600/Clouds%2BCover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1046" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9IykvcvStyA/Wo26-5e00eI/AAAAAAAAC4Y/jxXgE_tn8HQIVfB3b61Jf4OnEoUPIPupwCLcBGAs/s640/Clouds%2BCover.jpg" width="418" /></a></div>
<br />
My new novel <i>Clouds </i>is out now from Simon & Schuster: a double-sided story "about Indian democracy at 70 and Indian love at 7000". The lovely cover art is by the painter Golak Khandual. You can read an excerpt <a href="https://scroll.in/article/865238/two-parsis-walk-into-a-bar-and-that-is-almost-the-beginning-of-a-remarkable-new-novel">here</a>, buy it <a href="https://www.amazon.in/Clouds-Chandrahas-Choudhury/dp/9386797062">here</a>, and a piece about how I wrote it over seven years is <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/V7Gte6HsFCVDwrhLEDNNQO/Lost-in-the-clouds.html">here</a>.</div>
Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-48654436396663707792017-05-23T20:09:00.000+05:302017-05-23T20:14:40.933+05:30On Junichiro Tanizaki's The Maids<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>This piece appeared recently <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-greatest-novelist-1494610537">in The Wall Street Journal</a>.</i></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K4ur9sRi-Ys/WSRKgfr9IEI/AAAAAAAACnk/p5-kGzfFoEEdjiEhNRlprMcNRDvQDxsUACLcB/s1600/The%2BMaids.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K4ur9sRi-Ys/WSRKgfr9IEI/AAAAAAAACnk/p5-kGzfFoEEdjiEhNRlprMcNRDvQDxsUACLcB/s320/The%2BMaids.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>
Novels, like life, tend not to take much notice of maids. In most novels domestics serve only to open and close doors, make meals, or assist with the toilette of those who have attained true selfhood. At best, they might pass a message between lovers or stumble upon some conspiracy. They are points in the plot—agents, not actors.</div>
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<span lang="EN-US"> </span>What a pleasure, then, to come across a story in which maids occupy center stage from beginning to end and are as clever and capricious as any bourgeois heroine. To many followers of Japanese fiction, the present writer included, Junichiro <span class="il">Tanizaki</span> (1886-1965) is the greatest Japanese novelist of the 20th century, and “The Makioka Sisters” (1949)—his book about the familial and marital dilemmas of four sisters of an upper-class family, in which maids stand by in the shadows—the greatest Japanese novel.</div>
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But while at work on that book, <span class="il">Tanizaki</span> was also engrossed in translating a foundational work of Japanese literature, a book written by a woman on the far side of the millennium. <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-dawn-for-a-dashing-casanova-1454347527&source=gmail&ust=1495636047393000&usg=AFQjCNHhi793ehccL_tsxkXnh7pdH3jRYA" href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-dawn-for-a-dashing-casanova-1454347527" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">“The Tale of Genji,”</a> a richly detailed story about the life of a sybaritic prince and his lovers in the imperial court of the Heian dynasty, was written by a lady-in-waiting, Murasaki Shikibu, at the turn of the 11th century. Some scholars call it the world’s first novel.</div>
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The book’s storyline—Genji’s roving eye means he does not limit his attentions to women of blue blood alone—requires many detailed portraits of accomplished women in service, women much like Murasaki. And while it would be a stretch to call them maids, their example seems to have given <span class="il">Tanizaki</span>—the rare male novelist more comfortable writing about women than men—the idea of re-presenting the bourgeois world of “The Makioka Sisters” from the point of view of the kitchen rather than the salon.</div>
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Published in 1963, and set in what was then the recent past, “The Maids” is <span class="il">Tanizaki</span>’s final novel. It is also—as Michael P. Cronin’s translation, the first into English, shows—one of his best. Loosely organized but written with <span class="il">Tanizaki</span>’s usual narrative brio and sly intimacy, “The Maids” is a homage to the work of the humble in making a house a home.</div>
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In this case, the household is that of the elderly novelist Chikura Raikichi and his wife, Sanko. This prosperous couple own and rent a number of homes in the Osaka-Kobe region, and deploy a retinue of maids across them like pawns on a chessboard, judging them by their housekeeping, cooking, account-keeping and general tractability, but also by their liveliness, conversational skills and aesthetic sensibility.</div>
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Without exception, the maids all come from the same region, Kansai, in the extreme west of Japan. They speak a dialect worlds removed from “the smooth, clipped Tokyo way of speaking,” and even have in common a certain regional style of peeling vegetables. Here we see <span class="il">Tanizaki</span>’s skill not just as a novelist but also as an ethnographer, taking great pleasure in the specifics of time and place. </div>
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The maids’ congested quarters in the main house, a room off the kitchen “only four and a half mats in size,” becomes a domestic subculture not just of class but of thought, feeling and memory. To understand these women as individuals, the narrator seems to be saying, we need to make the journey—the reverse of the one they themselves have made—to the place where they come from.</div>
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<span lang="EN-US"> </span>“Raikichi,” we are told, “liked to have a lot of maids around—he said it made the house bright and lively.” But <span class="il">Tanizaki</span>’s lifelong focus on feminine allure and male erotic obsession, from early novels such as “Naomi” to the late masterpiece “Diary of a Mad Old Man,” is here reprised in a subdued, autumnal key.</div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Raikichi is clearly the aging sensualist, drinking in the freshness and innocence of youth to keep up his interest in the world. But when sexual scandal finally erupts, there is no male hand in it. Two maids who have left Raikichi’s for another household, Sayo and Setsu, are discovered by their new mistress in the throes of passion. It is society that is shocked by this, not the narrator, who in a perfectly weighted detail gives us the two girls in their room, “seated in careful composure” and with their bags <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null">packed</a></span><span lang="EN-US">, waiting to receive notice.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
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Other maids, such as the beauteous Gin, make eyes at the tradesmen who visit the house and make use of the family telephone to advance their amours. And some girls just fall in love with themselves. When the maid Koma is taken to a department store with a closed-circuit television setup, she is thrilled to see herself on TV, “and she [rides] the escalator again and again, watching herself.” That Koma is not alone in her abundant self-regard becomes apparent when—in an allusion that works on many levels—we meet the maid Yuri, a great reader who owns “a complete set of <span class="il">Tanizaki</span>’s adaptation of ‘The Tale of Genji.’ ”</div>
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<span class="il">Tanizaki</span>’s focus on the pleasure and drama of everyday life is so all-encompassing that when the eruptions of history intrude—in the form of the second Sino-Japanese war and World War II—they ring, as desired, like pistol-shots at a party. As men are drafted into wartime service, many maids are sundered from potential husbands; others rush back home to help their aging parents. </div>
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<span lang="EN-US">But time has many gears. Even without these cataclysms, we come to see—<span class="il">Tanizaki</span> is an insistently elegiac writer—that the world is always in flux. By the end of the story, we are in the 1960s; domestics now stay in service no longer than a year or two, and the very word “maids” has become archaic, replaced by “helpers.” <span class="il">Tanizaki</span>’s great success is to make us see how it is not only the masters who mourn the passing of such a world, but also the old maids.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><b>And for fans of Japanese literature</b><i style="font-weight: bold;">, </i>some other pieces: <a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.com.br/2010/03/kobo-abe-and-face-of-another.html">"Kobo Abe and the Face of Another"</a>, and a piece on Murasaki Shikibu's astonishing <i><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-dawn-for-a-dashing-casanova-1454347527">The Tale of Genji</a>.</i></span></div>
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Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-1436483655913016082017-01-11T05:00:00.000+05:302017-01-11T05:00:08.586+05:30On Donald Lopez's The Lotus Sutra: A Biography<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This piece appeared recently <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-buddhas-brilliant-deception-1482439806">in the Wall Street Journal</a>.</i><br />
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<b><span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0cm; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN; padding: 0cm;">Every
morning</span></b><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;"> at thousands of Buddhist shrines in Japan—and at the Nichiren Temple
in Queens, N.Y., the Rissho Kosei-Kai Center of Los Angeles, and the
Daiseion-Ji temple in the small town of Wipperfürth, Germany—there rises the
chant “Nam myoho renge kyo.” These five syllables don’t sound so lyrical in
translation—“Glory to the wonderful Dharma of the Lotus Flower Sutra”—but for
those who utter them they proclaim the enduring mystery, wisdom and salvific
power of one of the most important and ancient books of Buddhist teachings, the
Lotus Sutra.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">The lotus, which roots in mud, rises up through water and raises its
beautiful petals towards the sky, is the most ubiquitous of Buddhist motifs, an
image of the ascent from the morass of worldly desires and suffering to beauty,
peace and virtue. Sutra comes from the Sanskrit word “sutta” or “thread,”
meaning a set of thoughts or aphorisms on a given subject (as in the Kama
Sutra, a treatise on love and courtship). Since there is no written record
of Buddhist doctrine from the time of the Buddha, the canon of Buddhist literature
brims with hundreds of such sutras which purport to reveal his true teaching.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">The Lotus Sutra has a special place in the Buddhist canon. A lively if
often confounding grab bag of parables and proclamations told in both prose and
verse, it is rich in narrative pleasure and contains more braggadocio than
a Donald Trump speech. (“The Buddha is the king,” we read at one
point, “this sutra is his wife.”) Indeed, many scholars trace its
self-promotional tone back to the era of its composition, when it had to
establish itself within a crowded market of religious texts and sects in India.
The nature of the Lotus Sutra’s influence is taken up by the scholar of
Buddhism Donald S. Lopez Jr. in the latest in Princeton
University Press’s excellent series on the “lives of great religious books.”</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">As with so many religious works from antiquity, the Sutra has a history
shrouded in uncertainty. Even its authorship is a mystery. By the time it was
composed in Sanskrit early in the first millennium, the Buddha had been dead
for 500 years. His striking message, at once austere and compassionate, offered
a vision of liberation resolutely free of mythological content. The Buddha’s
eerily convincing diagnosis of the nature of human suffering and the way to
transcend it had achieved a wide currency in India and had extended to China
and Sri Lanka. But Buddhism had begun to break up into sects over divergent
interpretations of the teaching.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">The major schism was between the Hinayana and the Mahayana. The Hinayana
school stressed the importance of monastic life as the only real path to
liberation. Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand, was much more worldly even in
its quest for transcendence. Its hero was not the “arhat,” or the being who has
attained nirvana, but the “bodhisattva,” the enlightened person who perceives
the truth but stays behind in the world to help others across to the far shore
of peace.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">The Lotus Sutra is a classic—and cacophonous—Mahayana text. The book
unfolds as a series of dialogues between the Buddha and his followers, many of
them men of great spiritual prowess themselves. The text slowly and artfully
builds to a revelation: that of the “saddharma,” or true dharma. The Buddha
reveals to his interlocutors that the “threefold path” that he teaches in other
texts—a somewhat arcane theory of different streams of learning and
discipleship that open out paths to liberation—is actually something of a
deception.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">In truth, there is only a single Way. But “this Dharma is indescribable
/ Words must fall silent.” (A very lucid account of the possible nature of this
vision, which the Buddha says cannot be formulated in language, can be found
in Heinrich Zimmer’s 1952 book “Philosophies of India.) The Buddha is so
far gone, he explains, that had he taught such a difficult doctrine, he would
have made himself clear to precisely nobody. Instead, he used the path of
“skillful means” to set people off on the path to transcendence, preaching to
each person according to his estimate of their capacity for enlightenment.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">With this master stroke, the Lotus Sutra makes the goal of liberation at
once more mysterious and more practicable (and, conveniently, knocks out other
sutras competing for the attention of the faithful). The ultimate goal, so
elusive, seems almost unattainable, but this makes every teacher a student and
every student part of a great, throbbing chain of learning. Indeed, following
the Buddha, any teacher must think seriously not just about knowledge, but the
right way to transmit it. In this way, the Lotus Sutra makes itself
indispensable not just as a teaching, but as a tool of pedagogy. As Mr. Lopez writes:
“Perhaps the central teaching of the Lotus Sutra is to teach the Lotus Sutra.”</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">The allure of Buddhism eventually faded in the land of its birth, where
Hinduism was too vivid and well-established to give way to this more
introspective ideology. But the Lotus Sutra and other key texts gradually took
root in others lands and languages. To the raft of entertaining characters
found in the text itself—peasants and princes, initiates and religious masters,
the Buddha as both truth-teller and deceiver—Mr. Lopez’s book adds a cast
of historical figures across two millennia united only by their passion for the
book, including the 13th-century Japanese monk Nichiren, whose
fire-and-brimstone message declaring all other Buddhist texts but the Lotus
Sutra to be heretical earned him a long incarceration on a lonely island,
and Gustave Flaubert.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">The author focuses on two especially interesting figures, both of them
translators. The first, the Buddhist monk Kumarajiva, lived in eastern India in
the 4th century, and had the misfortune of being taken hostage by an invading
Chinese general. Over long years as a prisoner, he picked up enough Chinese to
translate the Lotus Sutra for the benefit of the Chinese emperor, already a
devout Buddhist. Thus the Sutra took root in China, and spread slowly through
the Far East.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">Just as fascinating is the story of how the book arrived in the West.
The Sutra was among a large cache of Buddhist manuscripts sent early in the
19th century to the French Sanskritist Eugène Burnouf by Brian
Hodgson, an enterprising young officer of the British East India Company.
Burnouf immediately set to translating it, noting among other things the book’s
“discursive and very Socratic method of exposition.” His French version,
published posthumously in 1852, made its way across the Atlantic, where it was
picked up and circulated in translation by Ralph Waldo Emerson and
the Transcendentalists, who regularly published scriptures from Asia in their
magazine, the Dial.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">Mr. Lopez’s book shows us that translators are the unsung heroes of
religious, as much as literary, history. Here he has serviced the text with yet
another sort of translation—this one to a general audience.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">The Lotus Sutra is a rejection, observes Mr. Lopez, of the kind of
nirvana “that is a solitary and passive state of eternal peace.” Rather, we are
all travelers on a long road, even the enlightened ones among us; we cannot see
through to the end right from the start and must begin with small acts of
compassion and caring. The inspiring message of the Lotus Sutra is that
buddhahood is immanent in all of us.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-47557281483041028382015-12-16T18:08:00.001+05:302020-05-31T17:36:43.605+05:30On Amitav Ghosh's Flood of Fire <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-p-go5MM48Rw/VnFadBp3T1I/AAAAAAAACK8/gRtvTmKsHi0/s1600/Flood%2Bof%2BFire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-p-go5MM48Rw/VnFadBp3T1I/AAAAAAAACK8/gRtvTmKsHi0/s320/Flood%2Bof%2BFire.jpg" width="212" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Much like the ambitious speculators who appear so often in his <i>Ibis Trilogy</i>, Amitav Ghosh – or the narrator who answers to his name – resumes operations in <i>Flood of Fire</i>, the final book, having sunk all his narrative capital into a consignment that must now be carefully steered into a safe harbour. The reader knows that the panorama of characters from the first two
books – the dispossessed Indian prince Neel Rattan Halder, the young American
shipwright Zachary Reid, the wily Hindu accountant Baboo Nob Kissin Pander, the
grizzled opium merchants Benjamin Burnham and Bahram Modi, the peasants and
soldiers, the boatmen who rove the rivers of Calcutta and Canton and the
vagrant lascars who traverse the ports of the Indian Ocean – are connected by a
ship, the <i>Ibis</i>; a substance, opium;
and an institution, the English East India Company. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
And by a force. In <i>Sea
of Poppies </i>and <i>River of Smoke</i>, characters were repeatedly seen
straining to grasp the reasons for the moral and material upheavals of their
world, and the mystery of why they had come together. The <i>Ibis</i>, a former
slave ship now requisitioned by a British merchant attached to the East India
Company in Calcutta, became a microcosm of a rapidly changing world order: each
character on his grim voyage to the colony of Mauritius offered his own
interpretation of his destiny and ‘the delirium of the world’, but only the
powerful were able to understand it. Among the Indian cast members, only the
ambitious Parsi merchant from Bombay, Bahram Modi, could see through the tumult
wrought by the opium trade on England, India and China. <i>Flood of Fire</i>,
which draws the story out into the Chinese Opium War of 1840, brings the
trilogy’s grand subject clearly into focus: capitalism and colonialism as
invented, practised and justified across the ports and seaboards of the Indian
Ocean in the 19th century by ‘Britannia’s all-seeing eye and all-grasping hand’.
Opium, Ghosh suggests, was the substance that created the modern world, and he
has set out to tell its epic story.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;">The dynamism and turbulence of the trade come
across in the language of the novels, which is clamorously and sonorously
inventive. Early in <i>Sea of Poppies</i>, Zachary, on his journey from America,
is forced to change his ‘usual sailor’s menu of lobscouse, dandyfunk and
chokedog, to a Laskari fare of karibat and kedgeree’: in these books characters
consume not only each other’s cuisine, but their languages too. Different
communities swap and transform elements of each other’s vocabulary. Many of the
characters are not native English speakers: they speak Hindustani, Bhojpuri,
Cantonese and lascar-lingo, and their attempts to communicate with the British,
and British attempts to communicate with them, create a rich, lively and
punning texture. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;">Power determines the new linguistic ‘normal’. The English of
the soldiers, sahibs and memsahibs (or Burra BeeBees) in the cities, factories
and garrisons of the East India Company reflects a desire to hold on to the
world they have left behind, and to make sense of – and prove their interest
in, or contempt for – the one they find themselves in. ‘Chuckmuckery’, they
say, after the Hindi word for ‘glittering’, <i>chakmak</i>; or ‘dumbcow’, from
the Hindi for ‘threaten’, <i>dhamkao</i>; or ‘tuncaw’, from the Hindi <i>tankha</i>
or salary. As they bend the strange world of India to their will, they attempt
to bend the Indian language into something that sounds like their own, without
seeing that they are also being shaped by it. One</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;">of the novel’s best puns, repeated so often that it becomes a leitmotif,
is uttered by Catherine Burnham, the wife of the <i>Ibis</i>’s owner: ‘Surely you can see,’ she tells her lover, Zachary,
‘that it would not suit me at all to be a mystery’s mistress?’ A <i>mistri</i>,
in Hindi, is a humble toolsman, which is how Zachary started out, but it’s the
homonym that proves to be the more pertinent characteristic.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="text-indent: 36pt;">During the first two books, Catherine seemed the
very incarnation of severe, corseted self-possession, BeeBee-style. Her
husband, Benjamin Burnham, is typical of the Englishmen who have arrived in
India with the East India Company. He is an agent not just of the Company’s
flourishing opium trade, but also of the larger ideology of free trade as a
whole, with its alluring new vocabulary of rivers of supply flowing towards
vessels of demand, and of markets no longer constrained by morals but creating
a new morality – even a new religion. ‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade,’ he insists,
‘and Free Trade is Jesus Christ.’ But now Burnham is in China, trying to break
the blockade imposed by the Chinese emperor on the import of opium. When
Zachary – the young, mixed-race American shipwright who appeared in </span><i style="text-indent: 36pt;">Sea of
Poppies</i><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> delivering the </span><i style="text-indent: 36pt;">Ibis</i><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> to Burnham from Baltimore – receives a
commission to repair another boat of Burnham’s, Mrs Burnham suddenly takes a
keen interest in reforming him. Her reproving letters and insistence on private
consultations soon reveal a pent-up passion of her own. Before they know it,
the two are lovers and Zachary has been introduced to a world of feminine
mystery and material wealth. When Burnham returns unexpectedly from Canton, the
mystery is abruptly discarded, as his mistress had warned he would be, but love
for Catherine has already led Zachary to covet a place in Mr Burnham’s world,
and, crucially, to realise that this need not be a fantasy. For once, the winds
of history are behind the sails of men like him.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;">One day, Zachary is taken by Mr Burnham’s generous
gomusta, or accountant, Baboo Nob Kissin, to an opium auction held by the East
India Company. (The Baboo, whose diligent caressing of ‘correct English’
recalls Hurree Babu in Kipling’s <i>Kim</i>, has his own agenda.) The spectacle is so grand, and the awe in
which big traders like Mr.Burnham are held so seductive, that Zachary decides
to invest the money bestowed on him by Mrs Burnham during their assignations in
a small consignment of opium, to be taken to China alongside Mr.Burnham’s vast
stock. Love’s labours have become a source of capital: Mrs Burnham has
shown him his place in the world and set him on the road, should he have the
nerve for it, to becoming a sahib. Zachary is no longer a mere mystery and an
exuberant free trader in language – he speaks more languages than anyone else
in the trilogy – but a Free Trader as Mr Burnham understands the term. Like Mr
Burnham, </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;">Zachary has crossed the divide – the distinction is made by Fernand
Braudel in his classic study, <i>The Wheels of Commerce</i> – from the market
economy to capitalism, from the routine material life of an economy to the
darker arts of speculation. It is almost like falling in love again. That
night,</span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Zachary experienced
spasms of anticipation that were no less intense than those that had seized him
before his assignations with Mrs Burnham. It was as if the money that she had
given him had suddenly taken on a new life: her coins were out there in the
world, forging their own destiny, making secret assignations, colliding with
others of their own kind – seducing, buying, spending, breeding, multiplying.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The hideous culmination of the cult of free trade
is the Opium War of 1840, which has been anticipated from at least halfway
through <i>River of Smoke</i>. Ghosh’s account is more or less faithful to
history. With tea all the rage in England, the East India Company required a
scarce and desirable commodity of its own in order to balance its trade with
China, so created a vast market in China for Indian opium. With more and more
Chinese men incapacitated by an addiction to ‘chasing the dragon’ (the
exquisite scenes of opium-smoking in Ghosh’s story elicit pleasures to rival
the narcotic ones), the authorities in Canton eventually declared the trade
illegal. The distress and debt generated by this move reverberated back up the distribution and production chains to
Calcutta and Bombay, and moved the powerful British merchants in Canton to
lobby the British government to intercede. The result was a war which the economist
Ha-Joon Chang describes in <i>Bad Samaritans</i>, his account of the deceits
and delusions behind the idea of free trade, as ‘particularly shameful . . .
even by the standards of 19th-century imperialism’.<i> </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;">By the time we reach
the final act in <i>Flood</i></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;"> </span><i style="text-indent: 36pt;"><span lang="EN-GB">of Fire</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;">, Ghosh has laid the ground painstakingly for a
sophisticated analysis of the politics of the war. Details of nautical and military manoeuvres are relayed with panache
and present an unforgettable picture of the tumult of military order (“The
noise too was overpowering, the sheer volume of it: the thudding of feet, the
pounding of drums, the ‘Har-har-Mahadev’ battle-cry of the sepoys, and above
all that, the whistle and shriek of shots passing overhead”). And there’s
a sombre beauty to the British and Chinese descriptions of the war’s
devastation (“All around them metal was clanging on metal, drowning out the
cries of dying men”), as also to the narrator’s attention to his favoured
few (“An unnameable grief came upon him then; falling to his knees he reached
out to close the dead man’s eyes.”)</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">As in the previous books, some of the most </span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">dramatic</span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> moments involve characters
who, having taken up the challenge posed by circumstances not accounted for by convention, realise that
their very identity is being devastated in the process. We see Shireen, the
widow of Bahram Modi and a woman who has never even left her house in Bombay
without an escort, taking a ship out to Canton to try and recover her husband’s
fortune. Soon she realises, with both alarm and pleasure, that ‘the journey
ahead would entail much more than just a change of location: in order to arrive
at her destination she would have to become a different person.’ (Her actions
are also being determined by a principle which the </span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">feminist</span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">critic Malashri Lal calls ‘the law of the threshold’,
according to which the lives of women in Indian novels change irreversibly when
they cross </span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">the safe, but suffocating,</span><span style="text-indent: 36pt;">
threshold of their houses, and by implication their gender-defined roles, for
the first time.) </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 36pt;">And midway through the war, the reader also realises that
Zachary’s amiable and empathetic nature has coarsened irredeemably, as power
becomes more important to him than justice. ‘I am a man who wants more and more
and more,’ he declares towards the close of the book, ‘a man who does not know
the meaning of “enough”. Anyone who tries to thwart my desires is the enemy of
my liberty and must expect to be treated as such.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;">Over the course of the three books, one character
stands out as possessing a level of intelligence and detachment on a par with
the narrator’s, and it is to him that the trilogy’s greatest meditation on
history is handed. He is Neel Rattan Halder, the Raja of Raskhali, a somewhat
introverted sensualist, heir to the revenues from his family’s feudal estate
and the profits from his father’s investment in Mr Burnham’s enterprise. In <i>Sea
of Poppies</i> his wealth was confiscated by a British court in Calcutta and he
was sentenced to several years in the penal colony of Mauritius. On his way, on
board the <i>Ibis</i>, Neel jumped ship and eventually ended up in Canton under
an assumed name, his truculent nature shaken by adventures he would never have
sought out himself. In <i>Flood of Fire</i>, he is settled in Canton and works
as a translator of English documents into Chinese. But he fears that the
Chinese aren’t taking the British threat of war seriously enough, and believes
that they will come to regret their assurance that a vast country can’t be
shaken by a few foreign battleships. When</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="text-indent: 36pt;">the two sides finally meet in battle, it’s as if two ages are clashing,
and Neel becomes both elegist of the old order and a chronicler of the energies
of a new force in history:</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">He had never
witnessed a battle before and was profoundly affected by what he saw. Thinking
about it later he understood that a battle was a distillation of time: many
years of preparation and decades of innovation and chance were squeezed into a
clash of very short duration. And when it was over the impact radiated
backwards and forwards through time, determining the future and even, in a
sense, changing the past, or at least the general understanding of it. It
astonished him that he had not recognised before the terrible power that was
contained within these wrinkles in time – a power that could mould the lives of
those who came afterwards for generation after generation . . . He understood
then why Shias commemorate the Battle of Kerbala every year: it was an
acknowledgement that just as the earth splits apart at certain moments, to
create momentous upheavals that forever change the terrain, so do time and
history.</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">How was it possible that a small number of men, in the span of a few
hours or minutes, could decide the fate of millions of people yet unborn? How
was it possible that the outcome of those brief moments could determine who
would rule whom, who would be rich or poor, master or servant, for generations
to come?</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">Nothing could be a greater injustice, yet such had been the reality ever
since human beings first walked the earth. </span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB">Those familiar with Ghosh’s work will hear echoes here of his previous
novels. From his very first book, Ghosh's characters always seem to know that they are sailing not just on the ship of Time, but – which is a different thing – of History. Even as they search for meaning and agency in their own lives, they compare their situations and civilizations to others distant or disappeared. Sometimes centuries pass in their mind’s eye as hours do in the lives of others. But as Ghosh has begun to withhold these meditations from his cerebral narrators and disperse them more freely among his characters, so his books have come to exude not the stillness of the library, of the mind responding to a text or map at leisure, but rather the bracing air, even flood of fire, of the mind taking itself by surprise during a moment’s respite from the body’s labours.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 36pt;">“Ben Yiju’s documents were mostly written in
an unusual, hybrid language:” declares the narrator of </span><i style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 36pt;">In An Antique Land</i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 36pt;"> (1992), describing his twelfth-century Jewish
merchant who is his subject, “one that has such an arcane sound to it that it
might well be an entry in a book of Amazing Facts.” “Nobody knows, nobody can
ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not </span><i style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 36pt;">knowable</i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 36pt;">:” declares the equally studious
narrator of </span><i style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 36pt;">The Shadow Lines</i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 36pt;"> (1986),
“nobody can ever know what it was like to be young and intelligent in the
summer of 1939 in London or Berlin.” Compare these to the music of the spheres
produced by the (in this case disembodied) narrator watching the Bihari peasant
woman (and reluctant poppy-cultivator) Deeti in </span><i style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 36pt;">The Sea of Poppies</i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-indent: 36pt;"> as she undertakes the long voyage to Mauritius
on board the Ibis:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">As she was listening to the sighing
of the sails, she became aware that there was a grain lodged under her
thumbnail. It was a single poppy seed: prising it out, she rolled it between
her fingers and raised her eyes, past the straining sails, to the star-filled
vault above. On any other night she would have scanned the sky for the planet
she had always thought to be the arbiter of her fate – but tonight her eyes
dropped instead to the tiny sphere she was holding between her thumb and
forefinger. <b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-62643580063867902232015-09-29T19:40:00.000+05:302015-09-29T20:34:34.974+05:30The Indian Novel As An Agent of History<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZnJ5vu3jBAo/Vgqal2EehgI/AAAAAAAACII/fV_rUhrg3lY/s1600/IMG_20150911_152928037.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZnJ5vu3jBAo/Vgqal2EehgI/AAAAAAAACII/fV_rUhrg3lY/s400/IMG_20150911_152928037.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i>This essay was published earlier this month <a href="https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/chandrahaschoudhury">at India in Transition</a>, a website run by the Center for Advanced Study on India at the University of Pennsylvania.</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 15pt;"><b>It is a universally-acknowledged truth that </b>human beings experience
their lives as embedded not just in time, but in history. To interpret history,
they employ a variety of instruments: personal experience and cultural memory,
political ideology and historiography, even (and sometimes especially) myths
and stories. Among these instruments, a somewhat late-arriving one in India –
only 150 years old – is the novel.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">What is so noteworthy about the novel? It can be argued that as a form
of story, let alone history, the novel does not enjoy great currency in India,
for it is neither an indigenous form nor a mass one. Cinema has far greater
popular appeal, and the stories and narrative conventions of epics like
the <i>Ramayana</i> inform everyday life and moral reasoning much
more than any novel (notwithstanding the apparent desire of nearly every Indian
to write a novel, ideally a bestseller).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">Yet if the novel is indispensable to any reading of modern Indian
history, that is because a preoccupation with Indian history is a thread
running through the work of some of the greatest Indian novelists, across more
than two dozen Indian languages and literary traditions. In the great diversity
of narrative forms and interpretative cruxes generated by the Indian novel,
there lies a wealth of wisdom about Indian history and, therefore, about how to
live in the present time as an Indian and a South Asian, a modern of the
twenty-first century and a third- or fourth-generation denizen of the often
disorienting age of democracy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">Consider Fakir Mohan Senapati’s enormously sly, satirical, and
light-footed novel <i><a href="http://middlestage.blogspot.in/2011/10/on-new-book-of-essays-on-fakir-mohan.html">Six Acres and a Third</a></i>, written in Odia in 1902
and only translated into English in 2006. The plot of Senapati’s novel revolves
around a village landowner’s plot to usurp the small landholding of some humble
weavers. But this is also the Indian village in the high noon of colonialism,
and the first readers of Senapati’s story would have delighted in the
narrator’s many potshots against new and perplexing British institutions, administered
by a new ruling class of English-educated Indians. “Ask a new babu his
grandfather’s father’s name, and he will hem and haw,” the narrator chirps.
“But the names of the ancestors of England’s Charles the Third will readily
roll off his tongue.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">The story appears to be generating, then, an argument about history and
political resistance. India must rid itself of its colonial masters because
they have delegitimized many of the traditional knowledge systems and truths of
Indian society, and in the process made the modern Indian self imitative and
inauthentic. The argument persists in India today in debates about
“westernization.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">But this raises a new question: was traditional Indian village society
itself very wise, just, or balanced? As the story progresses, we see that
anti-colonial sentiments have not blinded the narrator to the need to subject
his own side to the scrutiny of satire. When we hear that “the priest was very
highly regarded in the village, particularly by the women,” and that “the goddess
frequently appeared to him in his dreams and talked to him about everything,”
the complacency and mystifications of Brahmanical Hinduism are also laid bare,
as is the credulity about those who would place their faith in such an order.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">Senapati’s irony is effective not despite, but because of its
double-sidedness. It leads to a point useful as much in our time as his own:
criticism of a clearly marked-out “other” – to Indians in the early twentieth
century, the British; to Hindu nationalists today, Muslims and Christians –
often legitimizes a sweeping and complacent faith in one’s own worldview;the
search for truth or meaning in history must remain a charade if not accompanied
by the capacity for self-criticism. The novel’s implied argument is liberating
not because it is comforting or inspiring, but precisely because it is
disenchanted. Fiction itself shows us how human beings are fiction-making
creatures, and must therefore take special care to scrutinize what they believe
to be foundational truths.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">A different kind of novelistic irony – cosmic rather than comic –
radiates from <i>This Is Not That Dawn</i>, the recent English translation
of Hindi novelist Yashpal’s thousand-page magnum opus from the 1950s about
Partition, <i><a href="http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/this-is-not-that-dawn-india-and-pakistan-in-the-time-of-partition">Jhootha Sach</a> </i>(literally, <i>The False Truth</i>).
Tracking the lives and loves of a brother and sister across the worlds of
Lahore and New Delhi in the years both before and after Partition, Yashpal’s
novel generates dozens of alternative views of that cataclysm from viewpoints
male and female, Hindu and Muslim, Indian and Pakistani (even as these new
identities come into being and crystallize), prospective and retrospective.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">Here is history on the grand scale – individual, national, human, all at
the same time. Each character’s position or dilemma carries its own distinctive
charge of hope, memory, conviction, doubt, faith, naïveté, prejudice, and
fatalism; a vast spectacle of human beings swimming valiantly with and against
the tides of history. If the narrator himself has something to say about the
logic or validity of the breaking up of India, it remains parcelled out among
the characters, and must be intuited by the reader.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">But in fact, the feeling we take away from Yashpal’s novel is not that
of an entirely tragic story. Of course, Partition destroyed a particular shared
and historically stable, if unconceptualized, sense of what it meant to be
Indian. But as we perceive from the quest of the protagonist, Jaidev Puri, to
start his own newspaper based on the idea of secular reason, what it means to
be Indian would, in a new democratic and secular republic, have entailed
building upon a new foundation in any case. At certain junctures in history,
tragedy and progress may be inseparably mingled.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">As these examples show, the work of novels is not confined to mere
representation of historical realities, although this is where they may start.
Rather, a novel may be a creative intervention in history in its own right – an
actual <i>agent</i> of history, passing on to the reader who passes
through its narrative field both its diagnostic and visionary powers. Indeed,
from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay to U. R. Ananthamurthy, Bankimchandra
Chatterjee to Kiran Nagarkar, Qurratulain Hyder to Salma, Phanishwarnath Renu
to Amitav Ghosh, novelists have generated some of the most layered and
sophisticated visions of Indian history produced in the last two centuries. Yet
as a group, they fall into no school or political camp. What unites them is
their ability to illuminate the particular historical crux on which they focus,
such as the tension in Ananthamurthy’s novels between the hierarchical
imperatives of Hinduism and the egalitarian urges of democracy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">The novel form possesses certain advantages over other forms of
discursive prose as a lens on history. There’s the persuasive power and
ambiguity of a story, which may be read in many ways and asks for the
partnership of the reader in the unpacking of its meanings. The freedom to rove
in spaces of the past that we cannot access by means other than that of the
imagination. The potential to think not in a straight line but dialectically in
exchanges between characters, or switches in perspective between the narrator
and the characters. All of these make the space of the novel a particularly
fertile ground for historical thinking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #575757; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-IN;">In fact, when they are themselves reinserted into the canvas of Indian
history, the projects of the Indian novel and that of Indian democracy – both
fairly new forms in Indian history – appear uncannily similar, and perhaps
similarly unfinished. As Indian democracy has, over the past seven decades,
sought to fashion a new social contract in a deeply hierarchical civilization,
so the great Indian novel has attempted to not just find but to also form a new
kind of reader/citizen, alive to both the iniquities and the redemptive
potential of Indian history.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9082470.post-84103810776160900992013-10-11T07:39:00.000+05:302013-10-11T07:39:32.717+05:30Arzee the Dwarf in America<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Aey7B8K-Omk/UldclC0S56I/AAAAAAAABxA/DHBKwv528cc/s1600/Arzee.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Aey7B8K-Omk/UldclC0S56I/AAAAAAAABxA/DHBKwv528cc/s1600/Arzee.png" /></a></div>
<i>Arzee the Dwarf</i> is published <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/nyrb-lit/arzee-the-dwarf/">in America this week</a> by the New York Review of Books as part of their new e-book imprint of contemporary novels from around the world, <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/nyrb-lit/">NYRBLit</a>.<br />
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If you'd like to buy it to read on your Kindle, you can do so off <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/nyrb-lit/arzee-the-dwarf/">the NYRB page</a> or at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Arzee-the-Dwarf-ebook/dp/B00D0O7AYW/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381307478&sr=1-1">Amazon</a>.<br />
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The book is also available <a href="http://www.dtv.de/buecher/der_kleine_koenig_von_bombay_24917.html">in German</a> and <a href="http://www.plataformaeditorial.com/ficha/287/0/3723/el-pequeno-rey-de-bombay.html">in Spanish</a>.</div>
Chandrahashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07483080477755487202noreply@blogger.com1