The schismatic view of nationalism III

Horace B. Davis sees a division in the origins of nationalism within Europe; one referred to by him as ‘nationalism of the Enlightenment’, the other that of ‘Herder and Fichte’. A similar dualism is played out even with distinctions based on the nature of nationalism, such as political vs. cultural. Kohn, for example, associates political nationalism with the West: “Its purpose was to create a liberal and rational civil society… English and American nationalism was in its origin connected with the concepts of individual liberty and represented nations firmly constituted in their political life.” As against this the Eastern society developed: “in lands which were in political ideas and social structure less advanced than the modern West. There was only a weak middle class; the nation was split between a feudal aristocracy and a rural proletariat. Thus nationalism became… a cultural movement… to oppose the ‘alien’ example and its liberal and rational outlook.”

Various shades of such distinctions have come under criticism even within the European discourse on nationalism. For example Anthony Smith says: The pedagogical narrative of western democracies turns out to be every bit as demanding and rigorous – and in practice ethnically one-sided – as are those of non-western authoritarian state-nations, since it assumes the assimilation of ethnic minorities within the borders of the nation-state through acculturation to a hegemonic majority ethnic culture.

Another dualist approach refers to civic and ethnic nationalism. As Anthony Smith defines it, civic nationalism is characterised by “historic territory, legal-political community, legal-political equality of members, and common civic culture and ideology; these are the components of the standard Western model of the nation”. In contrast to this, ethnic nationalism is “first and foremost a community of common descent.”

Many commentators on nationalism have pointed out the schism in the self-perception of nationalism and its perceptions by observers. Anderson talks, for example, about the paradox of “the objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of the nationalists.” Gellner observes: “Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all not what it seems to itself.” This, too familiar trope of dualism, leads Homi Bhabha to comment: “What I want to emphasise in that large and liminal image of the nation… is a particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation, the language of those who write of it and the lives of those who live it.”

One of the dualisms in the definition of nation is what Hobsbawm terms as the objective and subjective approach. The objective attempt to define a nation may look for objective criteria such as language, territory, cultural traits, etc. Such a definition does not proceed far before encountering exceptions that contradict the rule. This is so because, as Hobsbawm observes: “the criteria used for this purpose – language, ethnicity or whatever – are themselves fuzzy, shifting and ambiguous.” Nevertheless, it is true that often nationalists employ such a vocabulary to mobilise support for nationalist programmes: something quite evident in a number of national anthems that combine references to territory, history, cultural traits, rivers, eco-systems and so on to evoke loyalty towards nationalist programmes.

Subjective definitions refer to collective will, common consent, voluntary choice, etc. That the will of a group of people to form a ‘nation’ does not necessarily engender one is indication enough that subjective definitions are inadequate to explain the concept of ‘nation’. Consciousness and choice as determinants of nation obscure the web of parameters that human beings employ in defining themselves. The partial explanations these two approaches provide and their inadequacies in defining nation are symptomatic. As Hobsbawm says, “Nor indeed is it possible to reduce even ‘nationality’ to a single dimension, whether political, cultural or otherwise”.

There has been a near consensus over the destructive power of nationalism, which is the context in which such classifications as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nationalism are made. The duality between good and bad nationalism is stated in various ways. As Partha Chatterjee observes: “Seen as part of the story of liberty, nationalism could be defined as a rational ideological framework for the realization of rational and highly laudable political ends. But that was not how nationalism has made its presence felt in much of recent history. It has been the cause of the most destructive wars ever seen; it has justified the brutality of Nazism and Fascism; it has become the ideology of racial hatred in the colonies and has given birth to some of the most irrational revivalist movements as also to the most oppressive political regimes in the contemporary world.

Timothy Brennan has suggested that nationalism in Europe was a project of unity on the basis of colonial conquests and economic and administrative units; but in the ‘third world’ nationalism is mainly a project of consolidation of territorial units established by the coloniser. However, there is also another way in which this duality is played out. The travails of a postcolonial nation are offered as a proof of the debilitating effects of nationalism (see the opening pages of Anderson, 1991, Hobsbawm, 1992, Chatterjee, 1993, Mondal, 2003, etc.). At the end of a nationalist struggle to establish political freedom, why do postcolonial nation-states offer examples of the destructive power of nationalism? The answer is mired in the politics of representation of the ‘third world’ in the ‘first world’ discourse of social sciences. But that apart, it should be noted that what now appears to be skirmishes between the various groups within a nation-state need not necessarily be new, and that it is possible to see their origins in the nationalist struggle of those nation-states. That various conflicts are coming into view now is no reason to believe that they have their origin in the present. The conflicts are not necessarily the negative effects of nationalism that has a distinct positive effect in its emancipatory project.

I think such internal incommensurability cannot be distinguished from nationalism’s emancipatory energy (the good, the liberal nationalism, the positive effects and so on) and that they are integral constituents of the phenomena of nationalism. What it means is that nationalism in its programme of producing a nation is never a singular effort with a coherent end in sight but in its very structure it is constituted by conflictual projects. Howsoever small a community nationalism aims to produce through its identity politics, the nation produced is an ensemble of differing identity claims, which is why it is not a seamless singularity. This is also the reason why both nation and nationalism are plural and they do not escape the heteroglossia that characterises the interests they claim to represent.

 

The Schismatic View of Nationalism – II

Literature on nationalism is replete with the trope of duality. Somehow everyone seems to find one or the other schism in the nature or meaning of nationalism. Thus, we have good and bad nationalism, Western and Eastern nationalism, nationalisms of the oppressors and the oppressed, original and pirate, liberal and illiberal, civic and ethnic, etc. The grounds on which these classifications are made are different but in much of the scholarship on nationalism, an urge to employ a schismatic view is common. Even when some of the scholars go on to further sub-divisions, they begin with a duality.

Partha Chatterjee in the opening chapter of his book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial Word: A Derivative Discourse? refers to the two types of nationalism characterised by John Plamenatz. One type, according to Plamenatz, is ‘Western’ and has its origins in Western Europe and the second type is ‘Eastern’, which originated in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The strange mingling and division of continents for labelling the two types of nationalism is in itself noteworthy. Plamenatz was not alone in employing the vocabulary of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ types of nationalism. Hans Kohn also employs similar terms: ‘western’ and ‘non-western’, which are later termed as good and evil nationalisms. For Kohn, Western nationalism developed out of Enlightenment and suggests the bourgeois individuals’ attempt at rational pursuit of legitimate interest. Contrarily, Eastern nationalism for Kohn is primarily based on the Western model and is a reaction to it.

Marx and Engels, despite maintaining that ‘the working men have no country’, distinguish between ‘historic’ and ‘non- historic’ nations. They contrast the ‘large and well defined historical nations’ with the ‘ruins of peoples…’ which are ‘no longer capable of a national existence…’ This line of argument receives greater clarity in Lenin when he makes a distinction between oppressor and oppressed nations. Isolating Lenin’s comments which is related to his theory of imperialism may not be very useful but the tendency to divide nationalism is noteworthy. Attending to the ‘Janus face’ of nationalism, Anthony Smith says, “despite the capacity of nationalisms to generate widespread terror and destruction, the nation and nationalism provide the only realistic socio-cultural framework for a modern world order.”

Tom Nairn’s suggestion is that “all nationalism is both healthy and morbid. Both progress and regress are inscribed in its genetic code from the start.” Spencer and Wollman list thirteen contrasting distinctions to be found in the literature on nationalism, mostly along the lines of Western and Eastern nationalism. Generally, Western nationalism is seen as political, liberal, rational, historical, etc. and Eastern nationalism is seen as cultural, ethnic, illiberal, non-historic, etc. It is true that not everyone is totally Euro-centric in prescribing these definitive divisions, yet the propensity for finding dualism in nationalism itself speaks for the divergences in the phenomena. Ernest Gellner’s typology of zones also seems to suggest an East-West divide with his notion of the different nationalisms moving towards the western models.

The foregoing discussion has exemplified the schismatic view of nationalism in relation to its origins. Next post I will turn from the ‘where’ to the ‘when’ of the origins of nationalism.

 

IDENTITY AT THE MARGINS

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

FACULTY OF ARTS

THE MS UNIVERSITY OF BARODA

VADODARA-2

NATIONAL SEMINAR

IDENTITY AT THE MARGINS

Supported by the UGC SAP DRS-I

19-20 March 2010

The idea of identities in the margins has been in circulation for quite a while now, both in the popular domain and also in realm of mainstream academics. Movements catalyzed by a sense of a shared marginal identity have challenged dominant characterizations of the world across a range of disciplines and also in the fields of culture and politics. These rival definitions of what constitutes knowledge have unsettled the certainty of disciplines. Consequently, disciplines of the Social Sciences and the Humanities, perhaps more than most, have needed to rethink the status of the knowledge that they have legitimized with the value of ‘truth’. This would be a good time to rehearse the fact that a significant proportion of this challenge to the status of disciplinary knowledge came from experiences, narratives and strategies of understanding the world that were organized around identitarian collectives. Since then, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has demonstrated in ‘Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts’, academic disciplines have tended to confer an easy legitimacy on ‘minority histories’ without caring to examine the logic with which disciplines gather their own rationality.

This seminar seeks to explore the way marginal identities have been shaped in the popular domain as well as in academic disciplines and in both together, in texts, in performance, in the realm of culture, politics and history. We look towards a wide ranging understanding of identity: caste, class, community and gender, certainly, but also region, sexual orientation as well as more ephemeral identities such as slum dweller, under trial, rowdy sheeter and so on. The seminar proposes to examine the way identities have been constituted, rethought and modulated, the way new identities have come into play. In other words, we see the seminar as an opportunity to think through the question of identity, the ways it circulates and most importantly, the limits and possibilities that it offers.

We invite papers and presentations that critically engage with the seminar theme. Kindly send in abstracts of papers to deeptha.achar@gmail.com and rajanbarrett@gmail.com by 20 February 2010; we will respond to you by 22 February.

 

The Schismatic View of Nationalism – I

Bernard Shaw in Saint Joan sees the beginnings of nationalism in the legend of Joan. That would place its origins as far back as 14^th century. Notwithstanding how far back or in the recent past we place the origin of nationalism, theorisation on the subject has had a long history. It is therefore remarkable how often the complaint that it is an area under-theorised comes up. Walter Bagehot, who in his 1887 book Physics and Politics views the nineteenth century as an age of ‘nation building’, confesses to some perplexity about nation: “We know what it is when you do not ask us, but we cannot very quickly explain or define it.” This finds an echo in the frustration of Hugh Seton-Watson who said in 1977, “I am driven to the conclusion that no ‘scientific definition’ of the nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists.” Tom Nairn acidly observes, “The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s greatest historical failure.” Reviewing the field in 1990, Hobsbawm finds only eleven books on the subject worthy of consultation and hints at the clarity available from them when he comments, “Nation-watching would be simple if it could be like bird-watching.” Benedict Anderson observes, “In contrast to the immense influence that nationalism has exerted on the modern world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously meagre.” Partha Chatterjee calls nation “the one most untheorized concept of the modern world”. Even as late as 2003, Anshuman Mondal notes the “growing dissatisfaction with the theories or models of nationalism currently on offer.”

It is possible to find more thinkers who generally agree that nation and nationalism are inadequately theorised. Considering that the phenomenon is an everyday reality and has determined the social existence for the last few centuries, it is, to put it mildly, puzzling that theorisation of the subject should be found inadequate – that too when thinkers from a variety of ideological persuasions have written treatises on it. For all the diverse discussions, from sociological, political, economic, cultural and a host of other perspectives, there is very little coherent theorisation that is left unchallenged by some other, subsequent one. That is, there has been an amazing amount of scholarship that defines, describes and prescribes nationalism/ nation/ nation-state, most of which differ from the rest, though ever so slightly. Little concurrence can be observed across the spectrum on the origins, meaning, function and causes and effects of nationalism or nation. What is significant is that, here is an idea about which there is very little incomprehension, near nigh lack of experience and exposure, yet many feel that it remains inadequately defined. I disagree with the view that theorisation itself is lacking or that thinkers have generally failed to explain the phenomena of nations and nationalisms. Instead, the very dissatisfaction is to be seen as signifying something: nations and nationalisms are not universally similar entities though the phenomena are found all over the world. The implication of this common dissatisfaction is an important sign of their condition of being.

 

Kancha Ilaiah’s New Book

Kancha Ilaiah is a fascinating thinker and writer. He first made waves with his book Why I am not a Hindu. Parts of that book even appeared in the famed Subaltern Studies. He has to be credited for his concept of ‘dalitization’ which is a very useful sociological concept. He is often difficult to agree with, as his ideas take liberty with facts referred to. But, his works always will provide you insights that are uncommon. He is provocative. Ilaiah is a must read. Here is a review of his new book by Anand Teltumbde, which appeared in Tehelka. Although Teltumbde is critical of this book, you will notice he admits to Ilaiah’s strength of observation. Teltumbde is a fine thinker too. Check out the review.

KANCHA ILAIAH is known for books with explosive titles like Why I Am Not a Hindu and Buffalo Nationalism, but with spiritual content. This book, his latest, follows in the same tradition. At a time when many intellectuals are morbidly worried about the resurgence of Hindutva, Ilaiah boldly sees Hinduism on course of its death because of its “failure to mediate between scientific thought and spiritual thought”. The book is a reflective account of his own journey through castes and communities and highlights everyday clashes of caste cultures and conflict between “the productive ethic of Dalit-Bahujan castes and the anti-productive and anti-scientific ethic of Hindu Brahminism”.

The contents page would catch the fancy of any reader with its catchy phrases like ‘intellectual goondas”, “spiritual fascists”, used for Brahmins and “subaltern scientists”, “meat and milk economists” for the Dalit- Bahujans. The first thing that crossed my mind is that the marketing wing of any publication house will be simply overjoyed with brand ‘Kancha Ilaiah,’ with its potential appeal to the vast market spanning three out of four spiritual worlds (Christian, Islam and Buddhist, excluding Hindu), to make use of his phraseology. Indeed, with his passionate promotion of Dalit-Bahujan and outlandish interpretation of mundane details of life, he has created a unique place for himself among subaltern writers.

POST-HINDU INDIA: DALIT-BAHUJAN SOCIO-SPIRITUAL AND SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION Kancha Ilaiah Sage Publications 316 pp; Rs 295

Reading this book gives you a feel of travelling in a Maglev train — an illusion of running on rails but in fact levitates over a thin layer of air. While traversing through its arguments, the book creates an illusion of being based on truth but is distanced from it by a thin layer of prejudice. There is an overdose of culture and spirituality which could intoxicate readers without them realising it.

If one is not so ‘spiritually’ intoxicated, one suffers from mundane doubts nibbling at his intellect: is this conjoint term ‘Dalit-Bahujan’ sociologically viable, given the huge load of material contradictions between these two population groups that have been precipitating into most heinous caste atrocities? How and why did these worthy ‘spiritual democrats’ or ‘spiritual revolutionaries’ come to emulate the caste hierarchy of Brahmins, the spiritual fascists, within themselves and zealously preserve it? If the Dalit- Bahujans were so accomplished in terms of their scientific and technological prowess, how could they be enslaved by a handful of scheming and spiritually degenerate Brahmins for millennia? The book succeeds in establishing the superiority of Dalit-Bahujans, but doesn’t it essentially follow the very same Brahmanic ethos of superiority-inferiority?

The value of Kancha Iliah’s book lies not so much in its thesis but in the richness of its observations not only on the castes of India, but also on the many people and events in the world.

(Image of Ilaiah and the book are from Tehelka.com)

 

Dilip Chitre

Dilip Chitre is no more. His works are with us. Will be with us as they are so good. His voice, so intense about poetry and art. So sharp and unhesitating about the work of writing. His keen cultural mind will be with us. Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar, and a few others did work the significance of which is yet to be properly understood. Their entire movement within literary/cultural ’sub’culture (rather than the highway of official literature) is very intriguing. Slowly I hope we will make sense and learn from it. Preserve it too.

My friend Prasad writes this as a kind of obit.

Dear friends,

I’m in total shock after just receiving the terribly sad news that one of my heroes and friends, Dilip Chitre, passed away early this morning (Thursday) in Pune. He was 71 and had been struggling with cancer over the past year.

Below is a short piece, with a great photo of the man at his casual best:

http://www.ndtv.com/news/india/renowned_poet_dilip_chitre_passes_away.php

One of the hardest parts of getting this kind of news is of that its reminder that another generation is passing on. Dilip’s foremost peer, Arun Kolatkar, passed away in 2004, and this past year we lost two major Indian critics, Bhalachandra Rajan and Meenakshi Mukherjee. Others of Dilip’s millieu (like Namdeo Dhasal) are also not doing so well health-wise. This is also the generation of South Asian artists who did things purely for the love of it; there was no real money (let alone fame) to be made in this field when they started out in the sixties and seventies.

I am more shocked, than sad. I was just talking about him yesterday with a friend, advising that she meet him while she’s in India. I was also planning to purchase his most recent two books online, and have been thinking of him and his family while reading Dom Delillo’s White Noise, which references the Bhopal tragedy that happened 25 years ago; I believe Dilip and his family were in Bhopal at time, and a few years back they lost their son (who’s probably age) due to health issues that  they fear were related to that horrible event.

In fact, he was on my mind this morning, and I was thinking about how nice it would be meet him again on my next trip to India, after I am done my PhD and with both Soumil and Sheila this time. All such hopes will remain unfulfilled, and so be it.
Dilip left us all a great legacy of poetry (English and Marathi), translations, film and paintings. I am also fortunate to have two cassettes of a recorded conversation that he and I had when I met him last time in 2006, and in  which he expressed many ideas that I would have otherwise not seen in print. The  urgency of going through this material feels that much stronger now than ever.

I didn’t mean to turn this into an obituary, but now that I have, I’ll just say this: the work of Dilip Chitre (to which I would never have known about were it not for  my dear friend and mentor, Jayant Deshpande, in Pune) is single-handedly responsible for providing me with a perspective on my Maharashtrian heritage, one that I would never have known about from family or community peers, here or back home. It was  a perspective devoid of nostalgia or sentimentality, and though often drenched in irony, skepticism and profanity, it was also one of deep humanism. I rediscovered
Marathi culture through Dilip’s work, and it’s led me to rediscover other aspects of India and South Asian culture. In short, the work that I do as a student of literary criticsm and postcolonial theory would not be the same were it not for this set of influences.

For those of us who knew Dilip, let us all pray (however we may) for the journey of his soul, and the peaceful mourning of his widow, Viju.

And for those who did not, I highly suggest you put one of  Dilip Chitre’s books or translations on your reading list.

peace,
Prasad

 

Dilip Chitre, RIP

We will miss you, passionate poet, tuka’s friend.

 

Religion, Ideology and violence

A comment at 3quarks daily about the simplistic notion of ‘individuals as destiny makers’ in a general way. It must not be forgotten that the production of this simple belief is itself an ideological work. Also that creating monsters out of individuals leaves the system blameless.

I’m really tired of this “Hitler, Stalin, and Mao killed millions” line.

These three men did not kill millions of people. I have news for all those folks on the Internet-tubes who are intensely interested in this topic: even if those guys had tried, they could not have physically done it. (Even if they had been able to push the button setting off nuclear Armageddon, they would not have built the bombs and missiles and put together the control systems themselves.)

Yes, they were at the heads of governmental hierarchies which organized mass murder and commission of all sorts of atrocities, but the actual killing was done by large numbers of people who were emotionally committed to ideologies according to which such killing sprees were the order of the day. These ideologies were very analogous in many ways to religions (at least to some religions — the kind of religions which themselves motivate crusades, etc., and needless to say mass cruelty is not all that religions have been about in history. Or maybe it needs to be said, since a lot of people don’t seem to realize this.)

From here.

 

Amitav Ghosh, Sundarbans and capital

It appears to me that Mr. Capital is sometimes rendered incapacitated. The plans to turn Sundarbans into a money spinner perhaps met with this fate. In 2004 Amitav Ghosh, whose The Hungry Tide is located in this region, wrote a piece on the issue.

The Ganges-Brahmaputra river system carries eight times as much silt as the Amazon and the waters of this region are thick with suspended particulate matter. This is not an environment that is appropriate for snorkeling or scuba diving. In the water visibility is so low that snorkelers and scuba divers would scarcely be able to see beyond their masks. What is more, these waters are populated by estuarine sharks and marine crocodiles. A substantial number of villagers and fishermen fall prey to these animals every year. Snorkelers and divers would face many dangers.

Even swimming is extremely hazardous in the Sundarbans. The collision of river and sea in this region creates powerful currents, undertows and whirlpools. Drownings are commonplace and boats are often swamped by the swirling water.

Swimmers who accidentally ingest water would face another kind of hazard. Consider for example the experience of an American woman who visited the Sundarbans in the 1970s: she dipped her finger in a river and touched it briefly to her tongue, to test its salinity. Within a short while she developed crippling intestinal convulsions and had to be rushed to hospital. Bacteria and parasites are not least among the many life forms that flourish in the waters of the Sundarbans.

Read more here.

 

Some are more Google than others

Following is an interesting post at techgross.com about the discriminatory awards by google. Check out.

Are we children of a lesser Google? Or is the Indian market less important? Perhaps Bing has the answer.

Google: Less value prizes for Indians
By Shalini Singh

Google has done much to democratize our world and improve our quality of life.  It has even donated tens of millions of dollars to charitable causes.  Google pays and treats its employees well.  That is why it is difficult to understand why the same Google contest offers winners in USA and UK substantially more than kids in India.

Google India had launched a ‘Doodle 4 Google – My India’ contest in August. The Doodle is the logo design you see on the Google homepage. The theme of this competition was ‘My India’.  On November 12, Google India announced at Taj Ambassador Hotel that tech hub Gurgaon based 4th standard school kid Puru Pratap has won the competition.  Puru’s doodle ‘My India – Full of Life’ was absolutely brilliant and featured on Google’s home page on Nov 14, 2009 (pictured above).  Everyone loved it.

Apart from the satisfaction of seeing his brilliant creation on the Google home page and of getting a gold star on his resume, young whiz kid Puru Pratap won a laptop computer for himself,  a t-shirt with his doodle and Rs. 1 lakh (approx 2100 US dollars) for his school.

But his counterparts in USA and UK won substantially more. According to Google their US winner “will win a $15,000 college scholarship to be used at the school of their choice, a trip to the Google New York Office, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle. We’ll also award the winner’s school a $25,000 technology grant towards the establishment/improvement of a computer lab.”

Admittedly, an Indian rupee will buy more in India than the dollar in USA.  But if the American child can get $15,000 towards their college education, why should not the Indian child also get a minimum of $2000 towards their education?  Why $2100 for the winner’s school in India and $25000 for the same school in USA?

It is too idealistic too expect total parity.  But perhaps some kind of pro rata would be fairer.

But there are many competitions run by American and European companies that offer equal prizes wherever you live in the world.  American software testing company uTest has a community of 14000 professional testers in 151 countries.  The uTest Bug Battle offers the same prize whether you live in America or India.

Vodafone Europe has just announced an Appstar competition with prizes worth 1 million Euros.  Indians can participate and Vodafone will give them the same prize what they offer contestants from UK and Germany.

The US Department of Defense has announced $40,000 prize to anyone in any part of the world who can detect their 10 balloons moored in ten fixed locations in US.  This competition will take place on Dec 5, 2009. If an Indian scientist wins this he will get the same prize as his counterpart in NASA searching for the 10 moored balloons.

Google owned YouTube has international competitions where the prizes are equal.

Perhaps I am overreacting and being oversensitive.  Perhaps we should happy with whatever prizes are given to us.

 

Lukacs, Tagore, Gandhi

Reading Lukacs’ reflections on Tagore one would be reminded of the harm that a colonial atmosphere could bring upon a mind irrespective of ideological alignments. It is silly simply to say Lukacs is blinded by colonial optics. What however is significant is the intellectual apparatus available to Lukacs, or better still, that Lukacs chose to avail himself, is incapable of cognising significance beyond certain European structures of views and feelings.

It would be interesting to read Amartya Sen on Tagore after reading Lukacs. Here is Sen, a fellow Bengali, who finds in Tagore a vision of multiculturalism. Both are good reads.

George Lukacs on Tagore:

Tagore himself is — as imaginative writer and as thinker — a wholly insignificant figure. His creative powers are non-existent; his characters pale stereotypes; his stories threadbare and uninteresting; and his sensibility is meagre, insubstantial. He survives by stirring scraps of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita into his works amid the sluggish flow of his own tediousness.

Read more.

Amartya Sen on Tagore:

Rabindranath did come from a Hindu family—one of the landed gentry who owned estates mostly in what is now Bangladesh. But whatever wisdom there might be in Akhmatova’s invoking of Hinduism and the Ganges, it did not prevent the largely Muslim citizens of Bangladesh from having a deep sense of identity with Tagore and his ideas. Nor did it stop the newly independent Bangladesh from choosing one of Tagore’s songs—the “Amar Sonar Bangla” which means “my golden Bengal”—as its national anthem. This must be very confusing to those who see the contemporary world as a “clash of civilizations”—with “the Muslim civilization,” “the Hindu civilization,” and “the Western civilization,” each forcefully confronting the others. They would also be confused by Rabindranath Tagore’s own description of his Bengali family as the product of “a confluence of three cultures: Hindu, Mohammedan, and British”.¹

Rabindranath’s grandfather, Dwarkanath, was well known for his command of Arabic and Persian, and Rabindranath grew up in a family atmosphere in which a deep knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient Hindu texts was combined with an understanding of Islamic traditions as well as Persian literature. It is not so much that Rabindranath tried to produce—or had an interest in producing—a “synthesis” of the different religions (as the great Moghul emperor Akbar tried hard to achieve) as that his outlook was persistently non-sectarian, and his writings—some two hundred books—show the influence of different parts of the Indian cultural background as well as of the rest of the world.

Amartya Sen: “Tagore and His India”

Read more

Tagore links:

Free Tagore books at Project Gutenberg.

Tagore special issue of Parabaas journal.

Buy Gitanjali at Amazon.

Tagore on Gandhi buy from Flipkart

Ashis Nandy’s discussion of the divergence between the attitude toward nationalism in Tagore and Gandhi is interesting. His book on this is: “Illegitimacy of Nationalsim: Rabindranath Tagore and Politics of Self.”

 

Derek Walcott – Two Poems on Love

Bits of Derek Walcott here.

Love after Love

 

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread

 

Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

 

Another take on love:

Blues

 

Those five or six young guys
lunched on the stoop
that oven-hot summer night
whistled me over. Nice
and friendly. So, I stop.
MacDougal or Christopher
Street in chains of light.

A summer festival. Or some
saint’s. I wasn’t too far from
home, but not too bright
for a nigger, and not too dark.
I figured we were all
one, wop, nigger, jew,
besides, this wasn’t Central Park.
I’m coming on too strong? You figure
right! They beat this yellow nigger
black and blue.

Yeah. During all this, scared
on case one used a knife,
I hung my olive-green, just-bought
sports coat on a fire plug.
I did nothing. They fought
each other, really. Life
gives them a few kicks,
that’s all. The spades, the spicks.

My face smashed in, my bloddy mug
pouring, my olive-branch jacket saved
from cuts and tears,
I crawled four flights upstairs.
Sprawled in the gutter, I
remember a few watchers waved
loudly, and one kid’s mother shouting
like “Jackie” or “Terry,”
“now that’s enough!”
It’s nothing really.
They don’t get enough love.

You know they wouldn’t kill
you. Just playing rough,
like young Americans will.
Still it taught me somthing
about love. If it’s so tough,
forget it.

A fragment from ‘Fragments of Epic Memory’:

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.

And this is the exact process of the making of poetry, or what should be called not its “making” but its remaking, the fragmented memory, the armature that frames the god, even the rite that surrenders it to a final pyre; the god assembled cane by cane, reed by weaving reed, line by plaited line, as the artisans of Felicity would erect his holy echo.

Poetry, which is perfection’s sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue’s brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of dew or rain on the forehead of the past. There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main. The dialects of my archipelago seem as fresh to me as those raindrops on the statue’s forehead, not the sweat made from the classic exertion of frowning marble, but the condensations of a refreshing element, rain and salt.

Deprived of their original language, the captured and indentured tribes create their own, accreting and secreting fragments of an old, an epic vocabulary, from Asia and from Africa, but to an ancestral, an ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture, while nouns are renamed and the given names of places accepted like Felicity village or Choiseul. The original language dissolves from the exhaustion of distance like fog trying to cross an ocean, but this process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the same process that the poet faces every morning of his working day, making his own tools like Crusoe, assembling nouns from necessity, from Felicity, even renaming himself. The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong. They survived the Middle Passage and the Fatel Rozack, the ship that carried the first indentured Indians from the port of Madras to the cane fields of Felicity, that carried the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle.

The complete text and a link to the audio of the lecture here.

A few links to Walcott books:

Selected poetry By Derek Walcott (at google books)

Another life By Derek Walcott (at google books)

Derek Walcott By John Thieme (at google books)

Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics  Paula Burnett (at google books)

Conversations with Derek Walcott William Baer (at google books)

Nobody’s nation: Reading Derek Walcott by Paul Breslin (at google books)