wordswordswords

Around sixty writers from nine countries across the subcontinent, who looked like children from broken homes, flocked to the grand literary mela organized by the Foundation of Saarc Writers and Literature (FOSWAL) an apex body of the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation) in Agra from 13-16 Feb 2009 to debate and discuss the role of writers in the context of widespread political violence and instability in the region. It was obviously a very educative experience. One learnt, for example, that the youth in Afghanistan were crazy about Hindi films and television serials to an extent that one young Afghan poet recited a poem in Hindi, a language that he had picked up from Hindi cinema. Rab Ne Bana Dee Jodi, incidentally, was his favourite film.

 The most interesting thing was, however, that the jodis( made by the Rab himself) of countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan, India and Pakistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India, who are not exactly on friendly terms, shared the same cultural platform and did their best to show that they were langotia chums and it was their politicians and priests who generated hatred. The culture minister of Pakistan Mr Fakhar Zaman delivered a lively speech denouncing the mullas and maulvis and the military dictators who hijack Pakistan and urged Pakistani writers not to accept civilian honours given by the junta. He quoted Neruda and others and said that the writers who rebel against the establishment are the most important writers and so on. Most of the writers said that culture and literature can establish peace in the region tormented by hatred and religious fundamentalisms of all sorts. This obviously is official line. However, if by culture you mean the lifestyle, values, religions, institutions and so on then it precisely culture which is a divisive force.

 The official position was that literature and culture could abate terrorism and generate an atmosphere of peace. Like all official positions it only exhibits self-deception and certain ideological simple-mindedness. A much-needed reality check was offered by a provocative lecture by the noted folklorist Prof Jawaharlal Handoo. He pointed out that most of the discussion on terrorism is off mark because it separates terrorism from the question of violence. He demonstrated how violence pervades our day to day discourses, religious texts, films, televisions and literature. These discourses actually reinforce human violent instincts. He was in favour of discarding and forgetting all the religious texts (like the Mahabharata, for instance). He said that the source of violence was in the tenacious feudal structure of our society and it is the culture originating from the palaces and durbars which promote hatred of all kinds. This social structure generates all discourses of violence and deeply indoctrinates our psyches. Our psyches are feudal, in spite of our modernity.  He gave an illustration of the Sati system saying that killing a harmless broken hearted widow would not benefit anyone except the Palaces. If the woman has an affair with a sweeper that would bring disgrace to the Palace and if the woman demanded a share in property it would be a great loss. So it was convenient for the Palaces to promote this horrible tradition. This is how the feudal system (The Palace Paradigm in Handoo’s phrase) generates violence. The source of terrorisms of all forms lie in this Paradigm and the psyches steeped in these values and discourse they generate. This was the very subcontinent that had murdered Gandhi and banished Buddhism, he said.

 Some people from the audience protested saying that Prof Handoo was straying away from the topic. Actually, he had hit the nail on the head. A very young man stood up responding to Prof Handoo’s comments on Sita in the Ramayana. He said that by portraying the character of Sita in a particular way and by putting her in a particular situation, the composer of the Ramayana was actually glorifying Sita and raising her up in the eyes of people. Prof Handoo said that he wouldn’t want his daughter, mother or sister to be treated in the same way as Sita was.

Interacting personally with Prof Handoo was also fascinating. He believed that most of the writers on the subcontinent are neglected because they seek feudal patronages in various form and indulge in subtle and often not too subtle in sycophancy. Hence most of the cultural texts promote the vested interests of Palace Paradigm. That’s why writers spend most of their time writing about romantic love, a relatively harmless subject, praising ` woman’s nathni etc’ in Handoo’s words, to please their patrons. Prof Handoo also talked about how historians have done absolutely no research on what actually went on the palaces of kings in India. They limited themselves studying coins and ruins of the palaces. There are hardly any records of what went on in the palaces and the only place where you could find `history’ was in folklore and oral memories. But historians are not very interested in these texts, he complained. He also said that if the things like incest could be repressed by kinship systems, we can devise a social system which more or less successfully represses aggressive instincts.

 Though I agreed with almost everything Prof Handoo said and I am grateful to him for his incisive insights, I find it difficult to agree on what he has to say on the violent literature of the past like the Mahabharata or the religious texts. What needs to be done is not to `forget them’, because one cannot do so, but to continue to read them in the way Prof Handoo reads them, without glorifying violence and injustice, by exposing the cruelty of the people who are considered great. Another problem was that his argument that the artists and writers should stop promoting and depicting violence in their texts could be read as if it was the holy duty of the writers to write escapists kind of `soft cosy’ texts. I don’t think he really meant that.  He did not have very clear opinion on the problem of the role of writers in such a predicament as ours on the subcontinent.

 My views on the subject of the role of writers or artists in the times of global violence and corruption are rather old fashioned, or rather Aristotelian in nature. Aristotle pointed out that the truth of creative writing, or imaginative writing, is superior to historical or philosophical writings because it is concrete, and microscopic in nature compared to generalized and abstract discourses of history. I only have to add to Aristotle’s views. The truth of poetry and all art is superior, not only to history, `theory’, philosophy but also to the truths of media and all forms of propaganda. Poetry, literature and arts have to remain loyal to this superior form of imaginative truth; the truth one finds in Kafka, Shakespeare, Kabir, Yeats, Ghalib or Manto. In contemporary context, it is superior to documentary realism or newspaper or television reports because it sees which these discourses cannot. Function of Art in the post-global era is to show what propaganda or sensationalist media cannot see or does not want to see. It should not entertain anything but doubts. The function of art is not to sing paeans to peace but to expose what lies beneath the peaceful exterior. Artists have to remain true to their imagination, because it is precisely the thing which can not merely see what does not exists but can also produce what does not exists. In our dreams, as the Irish prophet said, begin our responsibilities. I would again alter it a bit to suit my purpose: in our nightmares begin our responsibilities.

 Kanji Patel, a noted Gujarati poet, accompanied me and the gentleman who compeered the poetry reading session said that we are used to hearing unpleasant things from Gujarat, now lets have something pleasant. When my turn to read the poem came, I pointed out that the term metaphor in its etymological sense means `going across’. If an event becomes a metaphor, it is precisely because it can be grafted into another context. In this sense, what happened in Gujarat is a metaphor because it can happen anywhere in the world and that it has happened in so many other places. It would be unfair to single out Gujarat and demonize it.  The poem which I read at the festival was the poem I had written on 28 Feb 2002 when the news of what happened at Godhra had just started arriving.  The poem uses a metaphor of the Banyan tree of Hatred that is flourishing all over the world. The poem says that we, all of us, and not just our politicians and priests, have nourished it and its roots are to be found deep within us. I was merely echoing what Prof Handoo had said only that it was written seven years ago. I quote the poem in its full:

The Tree of Total Eclipse

(The Godhra carnage and the subsequent riots in Gujarat, Feb 2002)

Who knows how long

We have to live

Under the cyanide shade

Of the sky-high banyan tree of total eclipse

We have grown in our yard.

 No one has guts

To unravel the mystery

Of its source, spread and increase

As we nurtured it ourselves

With the manure

Of the crushed infant skulls.

 We have never looked at it

With the eyes

Of the tattered weeping vulvas.

 Under it

The dreadful stench

Of the incinerated skin

Spreads

And we typical orthodox onlookers

Flee plugging our nose.

 We will never get to its roots

Because while digging for them

We will find

Deep within our own chest

Its arsenic ariel-roots

Returned from the Kala Ghoda Festival yesterday evening, exhausted and contented. Listened to Lata heavenly rendering of Ghalib followed by Asha, the queen bee, crooning ` Meraj-e- Ghazal’ in her usual seductive and honeyed voice on my return flight. I used to listen her bewitching ` Heraito ke silsile’ when I used to commute to Navasari by the Ahmedabad Passenger on my walkman for years. The song still spoke for me. Has the song changed? Has the listener changed? From thousands of feet above sea level, the megacities of Mumbai, Surat and Vadodara looked like jewels studded necklace on an empress.

I flew after a long time. My earlier experience of flying was in 2000 when I visited the UK for a conference. The trip, of course, was fun and the sight of mountains slouching like herd of dinosaurs was exciting. The hateful venonmous clouds of pollutions hanging over the star studded cities was not exactly a pleasant site.

The best thing about the weekend at the Kala Ghoda Festival on 13 and 14th Feb was meeting friends whom I met only on Orkut! I stumbled upon Prajakta, Alka Gadgil, Kiran Kendre and Vandana Khare on Orkut and met them in real life only on my last visit to Mumbai. I met Prajakta after almost 2 and half years of `online friendship'! That was indeed exciting.

That the Kala Ghoda Festival, organized by the Times of India, offered space for the regional languages is indeed welcome and the organizers ought to be congratulated and thanked for this. The crowd, which usually frequents this festival, is not the one that is really concerned with something as Page 30 –ish like regional languages. I don’t think the Gore Log who swarm Kala Ghoda Fest can be blamed for this state of affairs.  The people who hardly have any option other than the regional languages, too, are hardly concerned about their own languages.

 I conducted two workshops in Marathi on 14 Feb 2009. The first workshop on creative writing in Marathi was a pleasant experience. I don’t know of similar workshop on the subject in Marathi held before the one I conducted. Refreshingly, participants to the workshop were people of the age group as varied as a standard eight student to a sixty five year old woman who wanted to learn more about creative writing. There was a young Maharashtrian wrote the tasks in English and a well-known young Marathi poet friend of mine was curious about such a thing as a `creative writing in Marathi’. The widespread attitude among Marathi speaking people with whom I shared the idea before conducting the workshop was that you can’t really teach something like creative writing. My argument was that as creative writing is a form of art, it can be taught to a certain extent like other arts like dancing or music or painting. Though you can’t really substitute basic things like the natural gift, `riaz’ and study, you can indeed learn more about the craft of writing from such a workshop. I engaged with the nuts and bolts of writing techniques like literary devices of metaphor, point-of-view, plot, character, symbol, image and dictums like ` show-not-tell’. I gave warm up exercises and prompts. The participants were happy with the workshop and felt that it was necessary to have a daylong workshop on the topic.

 The second workshop on translating Marathi poetry was a different thing even though many participants were the same. Translation workshop is not a new thing in our country, unlike creative writing in regional languages. The reason for this is probably the secondary status of translation! People feel translation is a craft and can be learned by labour while creative writing comes ` naturally’ like a leaf to the Keatsian tree!! People seem to forget that literary translation is a creative activity too, and probably it requires a ` gift’ as well. On the other hand, creative writing too has a side where merely having a `gift’ wont suffice. You need labour, practice and extensive study. I emphasised this in my creative writing workshop. Art requires labour and scholarship and that a good writer has to be invariably a good reader. Some of the participants in Marathi poetry translation workshops were experienced translators and sharing experiences with them was interesting. I pointed out in the theoretical section of my workshop schedule that the contemporary translation studies does not see the original and the translation in a hierarchical way and that the idea of thinking about translation in a negative way is outdated. The idea that something is `lost’ is translation and the attitude of mourning attached to translation is erroneous. The idea of `loss’ or ` gain’ is actually a relative thing. The `loss’ is from the standpoint of a person who knows the source language and the target language. Such a person does not need translation. However, from the perspective of a reader who does not know the source language, any translation however bad, is always a gain because she has no other alternative. My statement did not go down well with some participants who felt I was supporting bad or mistranslations. Nevertheless, the workshop was significant.

 Two other events which featured yours truly were the Panel Discussion on ` Globalization and its Impact on Contemporary Marathi poetry’ and Poetry Reading Event. The panel discussion on globalization and its impact on Marathi poetry was very interesting. A well-known contemporary poet and critic Saleel Wagh began the discussion by converting into a debate. He said that globalization has no or little impact on contemporary poetry, as 95% of Marathi poetry is unaffected and the remaining is reactionary and superficially affected. I pointed out that if such was the case, Saleel’s own poetry belonged to the remaining 5%. Remaining panellist spent their time countering Saleel’s proposition. Probably that’s what he wanted. I argued that globalization has indeed affected life style, values, and political equations and so globalization is one of the most important contexts of contemporary Marathi poetry. What has happened is Marathi poetry has shed ` red tape’ mentality that it had previously. When we talk of contemporary Marathi poetry, we mean of serious and creative poetry and such kind of poetry is marginal in every period, hence to say that 95% poetry is unaffected is not valid. I also asked Saleel why he was underestimating his own poetry, which can be read only in the context of globalized metropolitan culture.

 My throat was in a bad shape by the time we came to reading our poems and croaked like a hoarse frog in the poetry reading session.

 It was with such a throat that I had a workshop with project fellows of Pukar, a renowned NGO working on urbanization and related issues on Sunday. The workshop was on the basics of writing blog.

Another interesting thing was GN Devy interviewed by Dilip Jhaveri. He does have a great knack for impressing people and I remember how awestruck we were when we were studying under him. He can be very intense and honest in his conviction and articulation. We all admire him for his work and for being who he is.

 It was a hectic but exciting weekend.

 Hemant Divate declared that he wished to discontinue Abhidhanantar and asked the gang of his friends what they thought of it. I said it was a good idea as the historical work that Abhidhanantar set out to do was almost done. Its function was to give a platform to new poetry produced in a new society transformed by globalization. I congratulated Hemant for knowing where to stop. The magazine is around from 1992 and has done a remarkable work of freeing Marathi poetry from ` red tapism’ and `licence raj’ mentality of the 80s. This was because Abhidha played a momentous role in `reprivatizing’ the `nationalized public sector poetry of the 80s, thus freeing it from bureaucratic outlook that had shackled Marathi poetry.  Whenever the history of 21^st century Marathi poetry will be written, it would be incomplete or dishonest without taking account of Abhidhanantar.

 It was Valentine Day when we were discussing these things in the Gokul Restaurant near Plaza in Fort area of Mumbai. In the bar, a handful of Pretty Young Thingies were having a boisterous time with their boyfriends. The PYTs however were drowned in their drinks and we had to raise our voices to drown theirs. The guys were not so noisy, they zhelofied all the slaps and claps with patience of the Padmapani Buddha. Conclusion: It is easier to salvage a bibulous guy than a gal who has drowned in her drink.

  The quest for an authentic cultural identity and negotiation of multiple cultural heritages were prominent preoccupations in his writings.  This theme is typical of the postcolonial generation of modernist poets. This quest was different from the quest for national identity of their precursors, the poets of colonial period like Sri Aurobindo, the Dutts and Sarojini Naidu in the sense that these post colonial poets looked beyond the high-textual Sanskritic traditions. They sought to identify and enter into a dialogue with the rebellious spirit of the Bhakti poetry and the marginal oral traditions which they saw as more authentic and true. In a sense they sought to discover or rather invent a native modernity which was non-colonial and non-Brahminical at the same time. In this process of identification and negotiation they sought to decolonize and debrahmanize themselves and the culture in which they wrote. Translation became a very important tool in their hands to achieve this purpose.

Today however, there are two reasons for remembering AKR:

 First is that he was one of the faculties in this Department. Before leaving for the United States in 1959, he worked in many Indian Universities, including the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara. In 1962, he became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he was affiliated throughout the rest of his career

  The second reason for remembering AKR is that the very idea of memory seems to be getting obsolete in contemporary times. The meaning of memory today seems to have changed.  The injunction of ` improve your memory’ seems to imply upgrading your RAM or cache memory of your motherboard. The whole idea of `quest for identity’ appears quaint and distanced.  The idea of search for identity is replaced by the idea of surfing for identity. We seem to be living in a perpetual present where the breaking news of this moment is forgotten with the next. History is what is telecast live and reality means reality show. In such a state of affairs, it is necessary to reread and rewrite figures like Ramanujan in much the same way they reread and rewrote the Bhaki poets. There is a need to translate these writers into a contemporary language. It is important to tell the younger generation that these poets were the ` breaking news’ once and that they were ` brand names’  in their times and they `hacked’ into multiple cultural codes and languages.

  GN Devy, another prominent faculties of this Dept, uses the phrase ` after amnesia’ to describe the post-colonial generation’s awakening to true identity. Amnesia is not exactly the term one can use today. It seems to be Alzheimer’s that we seem to be up against and in such a situation, re-membering Ramanujan, his legacy and his work is one way of remedying the premature memory loss.