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)

 

Links to good books from India

I wish to share some links here. These are publications that are off beat hence it is likely that books published by these publishers are not easily found. While Flipkart and other such online stores have the titles, good old book shops are not likely to keep too many of the titles brought out by these publishers. But they publish some of the best work being done in India.You can find a lot of well researched books with honest scholarship. The range of books published covers virtually all fields of contemporary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Some of the best translations of books from Indian languages into English are available with these publishers, esp Seagull. Film scripts, plays, diaries, autobiographies, anthropology, cultural studies, fiction… list goes on. You can order books online or browse the catalogue. Happy hunting…

Please recommend links to your favorite  publishers.

navayana

seagullindi

permanent-black

tulikabooks

threeessays

womenunlimited

zubaanbooks

 

 

 

 

leftword

stree-samyabooks

The collective distributing set up some of the leftist publishers have:

ipda

Blog links

tulikapublishers

navayana

 

Namdeo Dhasal, ‘Kamatipura’

I think the most important 20th century poet of India has to be Namdeo Dhasal. I am nobody to make the judgment, but that is my gut feeling on the basis of the poets I have read and read about. No wonder that another poet whom we all want to turn to has translated him with so much love, Dilip Chitre. His book on Namdeo Dhasal is published by Navayana and is a must buy. It has several of Dhasal’s poems and photographs. A kind of a basic reader for Dhasal. Order it from navayana or flipkart.

from: literaturfestival.com

“Kamatipura”

(translation: Dilip Chitre)

The nocturnal porcupine reclines here
Like an alluring grey bouquet
Wearing the syphilitic sores of centuries
Pushing the calendar away
Forever lost in its own dreams

Man’s lost his speech
His god’s a shitting skeleton
Will this void ever find a voice, become a voice?

If you wish, keep an iron eye on it to watch
If there’s a tear in it, freeze it and save it too
Just looking at its alluring form, one goes berserk
The porcupine wakes up with a start
Attacks you with its sharp aroused bristles
Wounds you all over, through and through
As the night gets ready for its bridegroom, wounds begin to blossom
Unending oceans of flowers roll out
Peacocks continually dance and mate

This is hell
This is a swirling vortex
This is an ugly agony
This is pain wearing a dancer’s anklets

Shed your skin, shed your skin from its very roots
Skin yourself
Let these poisoned everlasting wombs become disembodied.
Let not this numbed ball of flesh sprout limbs
Taste this
Potassium cyanide!
As you die at the infinitesimal fraction of a second,
Write down the small ‘s’ that’s being forever lowered.

Here queue up they who want to taste
Poison’s sweet or salt flavour
Death gathers here, as do words,
In just a minute, it will start pouring here.

O Kamatipura,
Tucking all seasons under your armpit
You squat in the mud here
I go beyond all the pleasures and pains of whoring and wait
For your lotus to bloom.
— A lotus in the mud.

http://india.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=10554

The Marathi original:

 

Punjabi Novelist Dalip Kaur Tiwana’s Gone are the Rivers

Gone are the Rivers is a novel by the Punjabi novelist Dalip Kaur Tiwana.

from: sikhiwiki.org

Tiwana is considered as the leading prose writer in Punjabi. She has written novels, short stories, autobiography and literary criticism. She was a professor  of Punjabi. Her first novel is Agni Prikhy (The Ordeal of Fire) in the late sixties. One of her early works was the famous Eho Hamara Jivan. Her autobiographical work Travelling on Bare Feet is also much discussed. As these titles suggest her works are bent towards the metaphorically.

I have read only one of her works: Gone are the Rivers. It made an immediate impact on me. Primarily for two reasons: it revises the form of the novel. secondly, it has clear unmisty eyes about the past.

Gone are the Rivers uses two kinds of temporalities. The first refers to a feudal time while the second to a modern/democratic time. The narrative in the first part is cyclical, episodic, symptomatic and never linear. The second part is refers to the post-Independent time; the narrative is more linear, more realistic, more like the ‘novel’. This internal refraction about the genre seems to be alive to the burden of a postcolonial writer. This novel becomes important, I think, because of this experiment in relation to the novel form.

The second feature I like is that it is least nostalgic. One of the irritating aspects of some novels is the nostalgia for the bygone lifestyle. A nostalgia that seems to express craving for the feudal social structure. While this novel narrates the passing of time and the transformation in society and culture, major reshuffling in social relations, at no pint this novel indicate a desire for the revival of what is past.

It begins with a graphic portrayal of the lifestyle of the courtiers of the state of Patiala. This depiction is not a chronological narrative. It follows in an episodic manner the various walks of life. The novel builds up a dense picture of the political economy, the social relations, the sexual domain, the familial relations, the  master-servant relations etc. The story line relates the changes in the life of a high ranking minister of the Patiala court.

The second part of the novel refers to contemporary India. Here, the feudal classes have been humbled, there is now the social relations are more flat.

More in the next blog.

 

Raja Rao, ‘Kanthapura’ – II

Here I continue a reading of that old favourite of some readers of Indian English novel, Kanthapura. My previous entry is here where I say that Raja Rao critiques the simple position that the discourse of colonialism instituted a notion of the natural superiority of the colonising race and this was internalised by the colonised.

Kantapura focuses on the barbarism of the British rulers in dealing with the non-violent agitation of the freedom fighters. To begin with, the Sahib of the Skeffington Coffee Estate is the nearest white man that the villagers come across. He is a depraved man who ‘will have this woman and that woman, this daughter and that wife, and every day a new one and never the same two within a week’ (p.59). He also eggs on the coolies of the coffee estate to drink toddy and makes them virtually bonded labourers. The government’s response to the non-violent movement of the villagers is the use of brutal force targeting even women, old men and children. The police, who become the immediate face of the British government, plunder the village after all the men have been arrested and attempts of rape are made. In contrasting Moorthy, the little Gandhi of Kanthapura, with the white owner of Skeffington Coffee Estate, the novel characterises the moral superiority of the colonised over the colonisers.

We do not need a novel written in 1938 to see how the coloniser’s claim of moral superiority is false as Indian nationalist thought had been making this point for some time by then (e.g. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj). But this manoeuvre is only a stepping-stone for us to attend to another interesting picture that emerges in the novel. While the nationalist thought focused on the detrimental effects of colonialism on the Indian society, there were those who saw colonial rule as providing freedom from the clutches of the orthodoxy of Brahminism. This sentiment can hardly be equated with what is called colonial consciousness. In Kantapura, Ratna is a widow who refuses to cut her hair, break her bangles, wear only white, and remain indoors. She questions the rules of the society that requires her to be a widow though she has seen her supposed husband only once and that too at the age of ten. She entertains some romantic hopes in her association with Moorthy. Her behaviour makes her an eyesore in the village with some women calling her ‘boyish’. Ratna’s mother is exasperated with her and attributes Ratna’s attitude to her school education. This education is of course the colonial education. Colonialism has had a liberating effect on Ratna.

Here one notices a conflict between the strongly nationalistic mood in the novel and the not so flattering characterisation of Indian society with its oppressive practices. The structures enabled by colonisation are seen as historically desirable from the point of view of a woman who otherwise would have been consigned to the dark corners of smoky kitchens and hazy interiors of the house. Ratna’s position also calls attention to individualism fostered by colonial modernity. Therefore Ratna’s involvement with the nationalist movement initiated by Moorthy becomes important. Ratna is an individual as she fights the collective to defend her sovereignty. Her liberation from the traditional practices has come about because of the colonial education system. Yet her involvement in nationalist struggle presents her not as a colonised subject but as a modern individual.  Ashish Nandy says in The Intimate Enemy : ‘Modern colonialism won its great victories not so much through its military and technological prowess as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order. These hierarchies opened up new vistas for many, particularly for those exploited or cornered within the traditional order.’ This insight has an important bearing on the historiography of colonialism when it is written from the point of view of the subalterns.

If colonial modernity thus bestows individuality and offers avenues of escape from the oppression of orthodoxy, it does not therefore become an easily embraceable phenomenon. Modernity has arrived in Kantapura with capital, with colonial institutions of revenue and police. The tragedy of Kantapura, the village, in one sense begins with the arrival of modernity. Violence is a corollary to the insertion of modernity. Moorthy’s analysis of the economy of colonialism highlights the violence unleashed by the colonial modernity/capitalism. The self-contained, self-sufficient world of Kantapura encounters capitalism with the Skeffington Coffee estate, the imported clothes that impoverish the native weavers, and the mills that impoverish the peasants. In Moorthy’s analysis this is a sure way towards slavery and ultimate destruction of the social fabric of the village. Interestingly Moorthy’s analysis are echoed by Paul Baran in his work The Political Economy of Growth (1957): “By breaking up the age-old patterns of their agricultural economy and by forcing shifts to the production of exportable crops, western capitalism destroyed the self-sufficiency of their rural society that formed the basis of the pre-capitalist order in all countries of its penetration, and rapidly widened and deepened the scope of commodity circulation. By outright seizure of peasant-occupied land for plantation purposes and other uses by foreign enterprise and by exposing their rural handicrafts to the withering competition of its industrial exports, it created a vast pool of pauperised labour. Enlarging thus the area of capitalistic activities it advanced the evolution of legal and property relations attuned to the needs of a market economy and established administrative institutions required for their enforcement”. Every thing said here can be shown as having happened in the novel Kanthapura. Thus the novel problematizes viewing colonial modernity as having had a liberating impact on the Indian society.

 

Kannada Novel by Ashok Hegde

In this post I want to describe a novel by Ashok Hegde who writes stories and novels in Kannada. He is an important contemporary writer in Kannada. His story Darkness, translated here, is a very significant reflection over the IT urban culture. More about that in the next blog. Here goes Ashwamedha.

Ashok Hegde

Ashwamedha means the ‘Horse Ritual’ refering to an ancient custom of emperors. But in this novel there is a revival of this, not by a King but by a Head Priest of a Brahmin monastery. This transformation is symbolic. Again, it is being undertaken not to assert the secular power as in the ancient custom, but the power of brahmins and caste system. Stories of this kind sometime become blind to the abilities of the oppressed. But this novel presents the caste politics in an enabling optics. Below is a description.

Ashwamedha is a novel about transformation. A transformation willed by people tired of being the bearers of the burden of the society all their life. A transformation that is violent in its desire for change and the mechanism adopted for effecting that change. A transformation that is accompanied by violent resistance as well. The novel describes the conscious will of the people about this social transformation and the mobilization undertaken to bring it about. The focus of the novel is the everyday life of a village society united in its cohabitation of the same ecological sphere but stratified hierarchically into a caste-economy. In tracing the gradual emergence of an emancipatory energy in the feudal village, Valligadde, Ashwamedha, through the practice of dense description, builds up a culturally resonant narrative.

The social world of Ashwamedha, has roughly three layers reflecting the differentiated socio-economic life of the land-owning Brahmins, semi-independent Idigas, and the dependent ‘Harijans’. In order to reveal the friction within this village society, the novel employs two challengers to its orthodox life. The first is the arrival to land-ownership of a total outsider, Rajiv Gaitonde, whose ‘foreignness’ becomes the catalyst for the initial rumblings of change. The second challenge is from within and is gendered. Nirmala, the daughter of one of the Brahmin families of the village elopes with Krishna, a ‘Harijan’ labourer. Further, when Krishna fails to marry her, she returns only to live with his mother Devi, as a caste-transformed woman carrying the mark of caste-disruption through out.

These two challenges – external and internal – grow into serious subversion of the feudal caste-economy of the village primarily because of the Idiga community. This community, in this novel, indicates the fruits of the processes of democratization in the post-independent India as it reveals how far social energisation has taken place due to such state initiatives as land re-distribution. The Idiga community leader Rama Naik becomes the centre of the social transformation with active assistance from Rajiv Gaitonde. While the latter’s participation in the affairs of the village begins with a personal conflict, it acquires programmatic dimension with the coming together of Rajiv Gaitonde and Rama Naik.

The conflict among the caste communities of the village is represented through the conflict between individuals such as Subraya Hegde, Rajiv Gaitonde and Rama Naik. But that these conflicts are symptomatic of the larger malaise, that there are systemic structure engendering such conflicts, becomes clear with the involvement of the Brahmin ‘Math’ (monastery). From this point onwards the novel begins to focus on the manner in which caste, feudal economy and the religious orders are united in the perpetuation of a brutal and exploitative caste patriarchy.

Rama Naik mobilizes his own people and with assistance from the state-level political class is able to set up a school. The idea for establishing a school comes from Rajiv Gaitonde as an alternative way of channelising social effort and money than celebrating the religious fair. The fair becomes a symbol in the novel for the tradition of exploitation of the lower caste communities. In rejecting to contribute to the fair, Rama Naik’s community stages the first successful subversion of the socio-cultural power of the Brahmins. The new school is not only an opportunity for the children to go to school, it also opens up a new mode of economic exchange in the village as cash becomes the mode of paying for labour rather than grains. Further, there is a symbolic suggestion of the new path charted out by the school as it is an English medium school. Thus, English becomes the counter to Sanskrit as the language of socio-cultural power.

The rest of the narrative focus in the telling of the story of transformation relates to a ritual. The novel risks imagining an unrealistic ritual in order to force a symbolic confrontation between the exploitative social structure sanctioned by religion and a democratic one. The ritual is puranic Ashwamedha, i.e. the procession of a horse demanding acquiescence. Aptly, this is undertaken by the religious ‘math’ in order to assert the continuing power of Brahmins in the society. But contrary to expectations, the horse is stopped by the Idiga community.

At the backdrop of this story of challenge and counter-challenge through the ritual of horse-procession, inhuman acts of retribution are planned by the religious head. The village, by the end of the novel is pulsating with violent energy. The novel stops at the eruption of the confrontation between the orthodoxy and the new social order.

Ashwamedha narrates in an uncomplicated manner a story of social developments under individual, communal and state initiatives. Through rich symbolism and detailed description of the everyday life, the novel builds up a story that is at once readable and is a serious social commentary. The social documentation that the novel offers is valuable as the historical juncture of 1980’s is narrativised here. The germination, growth and the explosion of social change in a small village is presented in the novel with utmost concentration to the temporal and spatial particularities.

 

Arundhati Roy “The God of Small Things” I

A few scattered ideas about this v. good novel. I hope to add more thoughts later may be. Had Arundhati Roy not angered the Indian middle class with her uncomfortably sharp pieces in magazines, had she been a goody goody writer writing her uncontaminated literary stuff in her sterilised novels, had she not taken pot shots at the icons of progress and the capital, I guess she would have been much less rejected writer.  What say?

Anyways, about The God of Small Things

by John O'Hara

One of the important episodes in The God of Small Things presents a scene of violence. The importance of this is created through a repetition of snatches of the scene throughout the novel. It accumulates through frequent reappearances as a memory, bits of descriptions, a vision, a detail, a small sound and so on, until we are forced by the sheer accumulation of small bits into a shocking recognition of the degree of inhumanity displayed in that scene of violence. The scene is not presented in full detail in one place anywhere in the novel. It is built up as emerging from various bits across the narrative, like an insistent memory, a prickly past.

This scene of violence depicts how the Kottayam police brutalise Velutha at the time of his arrest. At the time he is unarmed (he is not known to be armed anyway), asleep, caught unawares by the police. Yet they attack him and beat him up mortally (he succumbs to injuries the next day). In focusing on this scene I would like to pursue two related questions: the first relates to the number of actors present in this scene of violence. The scene of crime is split between the place of arrest, History House, and the police lock up. The second question relates to gender identity.

During the day, at the end of which Velutha is arrested, Rahel and Estha visit him as they often do. And as part of their play, they put paint on his nails. At the time of arrest and even after, Velutha, thus, has painted nails which prompts one of the police constables to exclaim: “What is this? AC- DC?” (190) The expression AC–DC of course is a derogatory reference to a bisexual. This production of bisexuality in Velutha at the moment of violence on him is entirely sudden. The novel has earlier portrayed him ambivalently in relation to his status in the labour economy. Velutha being a skilled worker has been indispensable for the Paradise Pickles and Preserves factory. Thus as labourer he is at once a dependent (he is unlikely to get a job elsewhere) as well as one on whom the factory depends. In relation to Ammu, he is seen as a receiver of gifts from her though in the past he has been the giver of gifts. These mild suggestions at Velutha’s ambivalent status in a quasi-feudal social setup are extended in the image of Velutha’s bisexuality at the instant of his brutalisation and death.

A similar constituting of Ammu can also be seen in the novel. She is a single parent for the twins and she tells them repeatedly that she is their mother as well as father. In her relation to Rahel and Estha, she alternates between the tough disciplinarian and tender parent. Thus Ammu is also ambivalently portrayed in a combined image of father/mother.

Further, with the twins too, such a portrayal can be seen. The twins see themselves as ‘one’. Rahel laughs at Estha’s funny dream in the midnight. She experiences his sensations. They are seen as a single person with double, dually sexed bodies: “The twins, not rude, not polite, said nothing. They walked home together. He and She. We and Us.” (237)

These elements in the novel that suggest androgynous identity in some of the main characters raise the question of metaphorisation of the victim. In the case of Ammu, then, we can ask if her status as a victim of patriarchy is a metaphor for other kinds of power regimes. Also, whether Velutha is a metaphorical victim of power regimes. It has to be remembered here that in each of these instances in the novel the victimiser is not seen as occupying a singular frame of oppression. The regimes of power are always a combination of different power systems. Hence, Velutha’s and Ammu’s metaphorisation raises the question whether we could admit such a combinatory perspective of the victim. We are familiar with the dangers in seeing every oppression as a metaphor of other oppressions with reference to the use of class as a category of social relation.

Nevertheless, when regimes of power reproduce themselves as social control variously, the subject of power is rendered liminal. Velutha and Ammu in The God of Small Things attest to how the juncture, where the conjunction of regimes of power effects its control at once, is multiply produced – woman also becomes caste marked; dalit also comes to be gendered. Subjectivity of the objects of power is multiply constituted. The risk of metaphorisation of the space of victim need not detain us from attending to the multiply constituted and scripted bodies of the oppressed.

While the oppressive system is not a singular regime, one that operates only as a patriarchy or brahminism but works in collusion to make the victimiser a complex, so is the oppressed a liminal figure, opening up a reductionist metaphorisation. This makes literal the statement ‘oppressed have no gender, no caste, no class’ by which in each scene of domination, the division between the oppressor and the oppressed seem to repeatedly insert the vocabulary of binary. This insertion of binary leads us back to the play of similarities and differences. The danger in an analysis that works with duality, in a minimal articulation, is a serious one. However the same scene in The God of Small Things leads us now to another question: from liminality of identity to the issue of the pitfalls of binary.

 

“Booker Novels”

What is the significance of a literary award to the field of Indian English literature? Perhaps the question in itself appears rather presumptuous considering that a literary award, even a prestigious one, is a small affair compared to the goings on in a nation’s literary scene. But the fact that such a suggestion can be made indicates the forces that constitute canon and impact the field at large. The direction that Indian English novel took since the time Midnight’s Children got the Booker prize in 1981 is conditioned by the transnational capital of which the Booker Prize is emblematic.

There is an interesting ambivalence about the Booker. Several of the Booker winning novelists are non-British; so much so that the prize has come to be associated with the postcolonial literary productions. On the other hand, the endowment came from the Booker company which made its fortunes from the sugar factories in Guyana. The reference to Booker in the Caribbean poet David Dabydeen’s “Song of the Creole Gang Women” is revealing:

Wuk, nuttin bu wuk

Maan noon an night nuttin bu wuk

Booker own me patacake

Booker own me pickni.

Pain, nuttin bu pain

Waan million tous’ne acre cane

So this colonial history of Booker sits ambivalently with its above-mentioned association with postcolonialism. The ambivalent nature of Booker doesn’t end here. Pico Iyyer and Richard Todd have alluded to the proliferation of fiction from the former colonies that have won the Booker and have suggested it to be the ‘Empire writing back’. On the other hand, Booker has been a major figure in the commercialization of English-language literature in the global market. Thus, the Booker prize may also be seen as a colonial patron within whose premises the postcolonial carnival is underway. This ambivalence is very much present in the postcolonial literary productions too. The question that postcolonial theory so consciously and so eloquently has repeatedly dealt with concerns its production and circulation within the discursive locations put in place and maintained by colonial and neocolonial forces. The ambivalence that wraps Booker prize thus reveals that we have to be wary about the value-accumulation it enables. We have learnt from Bourdieu that literary prizes are part of the complex processes that produce cultural capital within the aesthetic field. Therefore, the starting point for this enquiry would be that the tag ‘Booker Winner’ is not an automatic signifier of the value of a novel.

An assessment of the impact of Booker prize on Indian English fiction may proceed in different directions. For example we can start by remembering that Booker prize is endowed by the Booker plc which has rather unflattering colonial credentials. Such an approach might take us down a polemical path where we notice how Booker Prize as an institution has entrenched the colonial / neo-colonial conditioning of cultural production in our society. From this perspective, it might be illustrative to study the impact of Booker Prize and its widely visible commodification of cultural productions on the field of Indian fiction in other languages. If by 1997 a situation arises in which Salman Rushdie confidently declares that “the prose writing … by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced … in the so-called ‘vernacular languages’”, we may be justified in feeling that the neo-colonial mechanism has worked effectively to perpetuate a hierarchical structure. The production of cultural hierarchy through an institution like Booker prize plays an important role in engendering a situation which obtains the structure of feeling that a stronger body of work is being done in English language. This view which implicitly holds the Booker prize responsible for the continuation of active colonial structures in the field of culture is not unreasonable though it is a cynical approach, hence in need of revision.

Another approach to understand the impact of Booker Prize might take us through the processes of the media, the market and all the manoeuvre surrounding it. We begin to notice that Booker Prize is not merely a recognition of literary merit. It drags the literary practice into the market jugglery in which culture becomes a decked up product. In the process the celebrated postcolonial novels, their oppositional thematic notwithstanding, simply become fodder to the market grind. In fact in his persuasive book The Postcolonial Exotic Graham Huggan develops the argument that Booker Prize is one of the means by which postcolonialism is marketed in the West. Despite being convincing, this approach is also rather cynical. Because, here again we consider with finality the determining power of the market forces over cultural production. That is, rather than recuperating the cultural products from the absolute hold of the market, we are thus resubmitting it. I think we can benefit from the awareness that institutions like Booker Prize are not natural arbitrators of value; that the entire process of conferring prizes includes the generation of a value that furthers the marketing needs and then legitimising such a value. We might in our critiques expose the structures that confer transnational significance to postcolonial cultural products under the aegis of institutions like Booker Prize. Even as we thus refuse to attach the value-conferring authority to the Booker, we might yet not want to dismiss the cultural products. We should insist on enquiring into the values these postcolonial cultural products generate.  My contention is that in Indian English fiction one may find a distinct type of novel writing which  may be ironically called ‘Booker novels’.

The category ‘Booker novels’ includes those that have received the Booker prize and many others that haven’t. The characterising features of a ‘Booker novel’ in Indian English fiction are: they are produced by authors who acquire a certain transnational purchase; they are published by international publishing houses for the global market; they are read by a transnational readership; they are commented upon by international scholars; they are prescribed for study in colleges and universities in different parts of the world; they have an implicit or explicit subversion of the nation-state. These characteristics might tempt us to pursue the earlier mentioned polemics and see these novels as interpellating their readers as the subjects of the transnational capital.

I must admit that irony should consume this view and we must argue that if we use the word Booker novels to refer to a type of Indian English novels, then there is a privileging of the Booker prize as a legitimising force that indexes value. I will move on to another view and suggest that may be we can talk about polemical novels in another post.

 

Law of the threshold

In 1980s in Mysore there was a controversy over a book written by Polanki Rammurty. Polanki, as he was popularly known, was a Professor in the Department of English of University of Mysore. It was a book of literary criticism that ignited controversy and it was titled Sitayana. It presented a daringly unconventional interpretation of Ramayana. Polanki claimed he was offering a Freudian reading and opined that Sita purposely sends off Ram to chase the golden deer because, he suggests, Sita had a crush on Laxman and wanted Ram’s absence. There is much more in that book and I remember very little of it now. I faintly remember that he had something interesting to say on Laxmanrekha too. Sadly, it was a long time back that I read it and my memory is not much to crow about.

I remembered this when I recently read Malashri Lal’s book on Indian Women writers who write in English. Her book is titled The Law of the Threshold. It is admittedly a take on laxmanrekha. But I think it is an evocative phrase to describe Indian women writers. The law refers to not only the patriarchal law, the Freudian law; it also invokes the laws of Manu, and a host of other smritis, legends, myths that in the conventional Indian society produced a lasting male bastion. Patriarchy’s deployment of tradition is forever in the name of ancient laws and law books (samhitas). In Lal’s book there is this additional law coming from the interaction between the traditional ascriptive society and the colonizing culture. Threshold too is evocative as it marks the line that keeps in as well as the one that determines where one has broken the law. It is useful to refer to both the internalization as well as the subversion of patriarchy by women writers. Further it refers also to the different zones accessed by women in novels.

I have some questions about her conclusions, but that will be in another posting. But it surely is a useful framework that Malashri Lal offers in this book. It is therefore sad that the publishers, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, are so bad in distribution. I haven’t found this book in too many libraries in
India. Few bookstores keep it. It is definitely a study that deserves better attention.

If you find a copy, happy reading.        

 

Secular Sanskrit Poetry

Read this old book Poems from the Sanskrit. With its musty smell and brittle pages, it was a pleasant experience reading it: a book bought in a second hand bookstall, with the firm knowledge it wouldn’t be available in fresh stocks, marks of age all over it, signs of previous use too making you share with all those earlier readers the thrill of reading anachronistically together.

This book of translated Sanskrit poems caught my attention when I picked it up ‘coz it was a collection of secular Sanskrit verse. Published by Penguin in 1968, it has translations and an intro by John Brough. As Brough points out secular verse in Sanskrit is not exactly well known. Most today would think Sanskrit has only sacred hymns, chants, Upanishads, Bhagavad-Gita and so on (some would want it to have only those). It will surprise at least some to come across a verse such as this:

            Your breasts are like two kings at war, my dear;

            Each striving to invade the other’s sphere.

Or:

Sweet girl, your dress has come apart

While you lie in the heather;

And here am I, with lonely heart:

Why don’t we sleep together?

Or this one:

            They are firm, and you are tender,

            Full and round, while you are slender;

            Bold your breasts, while you are shy

            – Since so near your heart they lie.

There are many types of poems in this. There are love poems, erotic poetry, descriptive poems, wisecracks, and what I usually like best – the clever word plays:

            When we have loved, my love,

            Panting and pale from love,

            Then from your cheeks, my love,

            Scent of the sweat I love;

            And when our bodies love

            Now to relax in love,

            After the stress of love,

            Ever still more I love

            Our mingled breath of love.

This is hardly a love poem. This is nothing but an exercise in language; some of the best poems are actually about such linguistic acrobatics. As far as I know Sanskrit poetry had a lot of such stuff where a variety of refinements are aimed at. Complex rhythms, strict metrical lines, complex alliteration and repetitions etc.

But how about the original of the above? Has the translator done such a good job that we can see the clever play on the words? Surely it must have had a meter that is untranslatable, compound words that cannot be translated etc. Now, translation is always a hard job. Brough says about his enterprise: “The attempt often involves what seems to the translator to be a complete dismemberment of the original verse into constituents of sense, and the subsequent creation of a new poem, where these constituents are rebuilt and constrained, with much labor, into a new formal pattern of words.” More or less what most translators say, especially of poetry.

More bits from this eminently readable book:

A hundred times they kiss, and then

A thousand times embrace,

And stop only to start again:

There is no tautology in such a case.

On sacred cow:

            Unfit to bear a burden

            Unskilled to pull a plough

            These temple oxen

            But one thing, you will allow –

They are pretty good at eating.

There are more. Some originals are in English transliteration. Let me offer one verse in English transliteration and its English translation. This would give us an idea of the distance that lies between the original and the English in some cases (it is possible in some cases that translation has become more effective than the original):

            Samesamasamomasassamemasasamasama

            Yoyatayatayayatiyayatyayatayataya.

In English:

            When you’re away,

            A day’s a year;

            But when you are here,

            A year’s a day.

Good try, but the clever arrangement of words and the bending and the twisting of sounds that we can make out is present in the Sanskrit version is lost in the translation. Mind you it is against such challenges that one translates from Sanskrit and I do think Brough has done a fairly good job.

Good read.

 

Unheard Voices

Harsh Mander’s Unheard Voices (published in 2001 by Penguin India) is a collection of twenty case studies that he undertook during his tenure as an IAS officer and some as Head of Action Aid
India. These are real-life stories of people that rarely enter into the public arena and if they do, are read and forgotten fast. Here are accounts of humiliation, denial of justice, of access to constitutional provisions, violation of integrity – physical, emotional, religious. These are stories where human rights have been cruelly compromised.

            Harsh Mander has put together stories from different places of
India, written at different times. From Anantpur, Bhopal, Bundelkand, Bangalore, Bhagalpur, Delhi,
Hyderabad and many other places come accounts of oppression and exploitation. There are destitute children from impoverished broken homes, HIV affected women from closed-down brothels, dalit youth crushed by the collusion between the babus and Caste Hindus, tribal peasants dispossessed of their land … people in the clutches of a system that leaves no space for the disempowered. Predictably, the victims are Dalits, tribals and women. They are from the lowest rung of the economic ladder as well, hoping to be able to climb it one day. What makes this collection valuable is that it presents success stories along with the sad ones, thus not reducing the book to a cheap tearjerker.

Mr. Mander presents straightforward narratives with only names changed and claims that he has retained the ‘voices and experiences of the people’. His access to these stories is first hand, though in most cases there are intermediaries. Some of the cases, we are told, are ones in which he was involved as a government official. But he has largely been able to be self-effacing with the ‘I’ rarely entering the narration. While this keeps the focus firmly on the victims, the style of presentation is objective enough to provide it a ring of authenticity. The adherence to specificity of details with dates, years, place of occurrence, official designations of involved persons and identification of groups responsible for certain actions, prevent these from being ‘fictional’. A real-life account presented without specifics risks being equated with literary text.

            ‘After
Bhopal’ is the story of Sunil rendered orphan along with two siblings after the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. His travails with the callous Company, corrupt officials, and demonic state power move us to rage. While the average middle class looks up to judiciary as the only sane institution, ‘Hounded like Criminals’ brings out the insensitivity of the judiciary and its class prejudices. ‘TheLand of
Jagtu Gond’ chronicles the ravages modernity brings with it in the life of tribals whose land and livelihood are taken away from them by the outsiders arriving with ‘development’. As a counterpoint to the hopelessness of victimization, an intelligent and brave attempt to improve ones life is the story of Anand whose story starts with rags and though it does not reach riches yet, ends with new horizons opening up for him.

            Shyam Benegal’s 1998 film
Samar was based on two of the stories of this collection. ‘A Short lived Revolt’ and ‘The Obeisance’ are stories of Dalits that recur with unflinching regularity in every part of
India. The unholy nexus between the state machinery and the oppressive caste hierarchy pushing the marginalized Dalit populace to the very edges of society has by now become a type. But the cruelty of it is still jolting to any who read these accounts.

            Woven into the narratives of these victims are the stories of some committed individuals and organizations. Mohammad Ali and Sathyu in ‘After Bhopal’, Wilson Bezawada of ‘Scavenger Narayanamma’, George Kollashany of ‘A Home on the Streets’ and a score of others along with their organizations bring some humane help to the helpless. The efforts of such agencies and individuals focus on the available means of change within the system. The stories are thus also a road map for possible alternative approaches. 

Mr. Mander’s prose makes easy reading, while it leaves our conscience disturbed. The author deserves appreciation for conveying the tragedies of the people he is writing about without ever sentimentalizing the incidents. There is compactness even when a story spread over years is related. But the intensity of suffering is ably communicated.

 This well-produced book is a testimony to how constructive such attempts can be. While it might also raise questions about the agency of the oppressed and whether ‘Unheard’ voices can be voiced at all, they serve some purposes. They contribute to the mobilization of public opinion and sympathy against violation of human rights. The mediation by an educated, upper class, government representative voice does beg some questions about what is heard.

This book is a must read for anyone concerned with the nature of our society and the direction it is taking. It is such a book that might remind the historically inclined minds the forgotten story of our ‘tryst with destiny’. It is a collection of narratives that remind us that we are not yet become a nation. The victims of sagas chronicled here are the backs on which a growing nation is building its tall dreams.